It was me who had (still has!) the garden cam, although it's not running on a Raspberry Pi - it's on an old laptop running Windows XP & IIS!
But I did talk at some length of moving it over to a Pi, and even bought one (and a Camera module) and started tinkering, so you may well be remembering that.
I haven't progressed any further due to time constraints, but also because the garden has been a disaster for a 2nd year running, and I may turn the camera off this year. The earlier years with no camera, I've had wonderful displays of wild flowers. Since the camera, it's been dreadful.
I therefore blame the electric rays from the camera lens for wrecking my garden
I have however got another Raspberry Pi that I too use as a media centre. Since the last update it's been very fast, not only providing decent playback but also very nippy through the menus etc.
Looking at the changelog for RaspBMC, I noticed that a minor overclock was introduced, then removed a few days later.
I'd previously had trouble overclocking my Pi, but after all the updates I manually edited the config file
If it's of any interest, these are the settings I've found stable for me, on my early version 256MB Pi :
arm_freq=850 (default is 700, tho I think Raspbmc usually runs at 800)
core_freq=375 (default is 250)
force_turbo=1
I wonder how much difference is attained with the desktop environment by overclocking a little bit?
Ian