Yeah i know. There's actually quite a bit of paraphernalia in the photo if you look hard enough :)
To be honest, I've never really worried much about my webcam. i never use it, and i'm not even sure how difficult it would be to set up in freebsd. I just checked https://webcamtoy.com/ and they can't find my webcam. I think it's currently disabled in the kernel perhaps.
All that said, throwing a piece of tape over it couldn't hurt anything
You're probably referencing my post. It's 28W. I'm not sure, what exactly is changed in power modes, but you can't just select CPU wattage. Even with Throttlestop and similar CPU tuning utilities you have to fiddle around to tune the CPU performance.
Silent mode did indeed make things sluggish for me. I was in webcamtoy.com to briefly check the webcam, and noticed that in normal mode it ran at ~20-25fps, but when I switched to silent mode, it immediately went to 1-2fps. That really caught me off guard. + things were opening much slower for me. Could be the drivers... but they were all updated, and I had 0 plans to wait for even newer ones with the hope that maybe they will improve something.
After having a noisy gaming laptop, I also finally wanted to get something quiet, reasonably light, and fast, and I thought that this model would do. Oh well...
I got it working, yes. The solution was ultimately to try a few different micro-USB cables.
I visited this site in Chrome (not Safari!) to test it: https://webcamtoy.com
Plug the USB cable into your camera and computer, turn the camera on, visit the above site. Tap the gear icon and choose Nikon Webcam Utility. Note that you may need to wait 1-2 minutes (!) for it to activate the first time. After that it only takes about 5 seconds.
If you use hangouts, you can take pictures with it. You can use tons of websites with camera access, like https://webcamtoy.com/, you can use vlc and open it at Media / Open Capture Device, install cheese (though it will pull lots of gnome dependencies) or guvcview (I like this one).