Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite writers, so I was totally stoked when I saw this post on Engadget describing how a clever programmer setup a script to take secret on the fly snapshots with the built in iSight camera.

In Cryptonomicon, Randy Waterhouse is at a meeting with some shady people he’d like to get pictures of, so he writes a script to take a snapshot with his laptop’s built in webcam every couple seconds and keep the results if there is a sufficient change in the picture.

Admittedly, getting secret pictures of the inside of a warehouse isn’t quite as cool, but maybe next time international spies will steal the laptop and we’ll get to see something really cool.