So I have a broadband connection, a few computers, a quickcam pro 5000 and the desire to keep an eye on what happens in front of my house when I am not there.. Crap neighbour and foxes amongst other things.. So set up a solution based around yawcam which does all the sorts of things you would expect it to for my favourite price, free.
Using no-ip.org to get a reliable fixed name reference to my home network for free then reserve a LAN ip address for one home computer and forward incoming ports 8181 and 8888 to that address on my wireless router.
Then setup yawcam so it does motion detection and streaming, the motion detection sends photos of movement via email when it occurs, and the live feed is always available via myname.no-ip.org:8181 which I can password protect
Tweaking the sensitivity and frequency is the tricky bit, I exceeded the smtp allowance of google apps already which I think is 2000 sends in 24 hours