It has happened twice recently that my iSight camera was stuck.<\/p>\n
First, I tried to use video-chat in Skype and got nothing, just a big black square. Confirmed it with PhotoBooth; camera light turned green like it thought<\/em> it was working, but did not. I confirmed that About This Mac -> More Info could still really see the hardware.<\/p>\n The second time, I was cold-booting (a rare event — except for the Ethernet problem that I’ll post later) and the green light came on and nothing I did would make it turn off. It was like when Peter claims that The Man is ALWAYS WATCHING (or listening through powered-off cell phones).<\/p>\n So I covered up the lens to keep The Man from watching me eat my cereal and debug my computer…Google found several suggestions which I tried all at once and both times, the problem was fixed:<\/p>\n 1. First shut down, unplug, take out battery, and Wait A Little While.<\/p>\n 2. Turn it on.<\/p>\n (Optional:\u00a0Hold down power for a long time when it is off, it should make\u00a0a curious \u00a0long boot sound, but this did not seem to work either time, so it is safe to ignore. Maybe for older computers.)<\/p>\n 3. Immediately after boot-sound, reset PRAM by holding command-option-P-R all at the same time.<\/p>\n Voila.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has happened twice recently that my iSight camera was stuck. First, I tried to use video-chat in Skype and got nothing, just a big black square. Confirmed it with PhotoBooth; camera light turned green like it thought it was working, but did not. I confirmed that About This Mac -> More Info could still … <\/p>\n