A few weeks ago, we bought a webcam at work, and got the wrong model. The model that we wanted has an extra A on the end of it.

The extra A made all the difference. I plugged it in, pointed a browser at it, and got streaming video, immediately. There’s a web-based admin tool that doesn’t require any special installation, or IE, or Windows, or ActiveX.

There *is* a Windows-only management tool, which I couldn’t get to work under Parallels. The reason for this was that it searched its own subnet for the device, and the way that parallels works, it’s not on the same subnet as the device, but rather on a private subnet hidden in the bowels of the virtual machine.

So, I’m very pleased with the new camera, and hope to have a webcam up on the Asbury website shortly. It’s more than a little weird to me that two almost-indistinguishable devices would be so very different.