For the last few years, I have been doing my annual pilgrimage to the gadgets gallery looking for a gadget that will take a URL of a webcam generated image, and will display it on my desktop, refreshing it on some schedule.  You wouldn’t think this would be a difficult thing, would you?  Every single one of these I have downloaded and tested seems to work, after a fashion, but has issues.

My goal is this: As you know, I live in the mountains.  In the winter, this means snow.  So, I want to keep a couple of the local road condition webcams in little windows on my desk so I can watch conditions, and if they are deteriorating fast then maybe I’d leave work early before things get bad and congested.

Finally, I found one that seems decent!  Click here

This is called “Twiv” (Timed Web Image Viewer).  You give it the URL for an image out on the web, and it displays it for you in a 320×240 window – a good size.  You can set the refresh time in seconds, and that’s it.  Very simple, no goofy features, and who knows, maybe this one will actually run without causing horrible system performance problems like the others I have tried.  I now have 3 webcams on my desktop, which is ideal.  I set them to refresh every 5 minutes which should keep my system load at a minimal level, and that’s more than frequent enough for road conditions.

Update: Cyber-D has released a new version so now you can have multiple webcams and they will persist through a reboot – Thanks, Dario!