Have you ever been in the situation where you need to collaborate with someone on a task and you can't meet in person? If you don't have any software installed for this purpose a good old webcam works great.
Recently me and my friend Emil Backlund had a lab assignment in a course named Testing,Debugging and Verification. The assignment was about formal verfication using Hoare logic and also proving correctness with an application named KeY. It was a quite tricky subject and we decided we needed to work togheter instead of splitting the work as we usually do.
Normally we chat on MSN about the labs but now when it was harder I thought it would be better if we could look at the same thing and speak about it instead. Luckily I recently bought a Lifecam Cinema. With a little bit of improvisation I got the webcam lined up to record my 2nd monitor.
Now I only needed to start a video call over msn to Emil and he could now see exactly what I saw. The webcam didn't really manage to capture the whole screen so we had to work on a pretty small area(maybe 2/5 of the monitor) and that combined with the large font we needed to have to make the text visible in the video forced me to scroll quite a bit.
Still it was easy to set up and it worked for our task.
After a little research it turns out that Skype has this feature. http://www.skype.com/intl/en/allfeatures/screensharing/. There are probably more options out there and the next time I will probably try the Skype option. But if you are in a situation where you don't have any software installed for sharing you screen and don't feel like installing it but you have a webcam this can be usefull. It works and the only challenge is to get the webcam properly aligned.