In 2016 there was a spy themed nerdy convention I was going to. As a way of getting into it. I ordered a lot of what I thought was fun spy gear. Camera sunglasses, camera wristwatches, camera pens, etc.

They worked (the pens… Their vest clip is the worst thing! I cannot put it anyway). They were low res. But I will say they this: they were 100% airgapped. No Bluetooth or WiFi. And you had to pull the data with a cable (it stored the stuff on a removable microSD card). Unhackable and private, basically.

I wish I kept a pair of camera sunglasses. I used them when on vacation to record things hand free (the camera was on the nose bridge, between the eyes) and I took some nice stuff going through the streets and in a museum (where we are allowed to film).

I also did people that they were camera glasses and pointed out where the lens was. Many were surprised but didn’t care too much. In 2016, same year I got them. I was in Chicago and I did film a cop with someone they arrested and had cuffed to a bench. The cop glared at me when he caught me looking at him. He was entirely unaware I was filming him.

The only other case I heard of at that time of someone using camera glasses was some guy in Australia who was being racially abused by his neighbors (he was Indian I think) and had camera glasses on all the time to record his neighbors when they were being assholes to him so he can report them.

I gave those glasses away a long time ago. I wish I hadn’t. All the new shit is unacceptable with a forced cloud upload and easily hackable.

He was never all right. Even when he was a kid people said that he had massive ego problems. When he was in high school playing poorly in sports people found the fact that he never admitted to losing or playing poorly to be intensely irritating.