taborj

"Okay, now hold your laptop's microphone to your chest. I'm going to use this stethoscope on my speaker; it'll be just like you're here."

I think what that means is, if you have a GSuite account, you can let anonymous users join your Meet. But if you just have an individual, personal account, you cannot.

So, if you are a G shop already, then it shouldn't prevent your customers from joining your meeting without having a Google account. But if you're trying to host that meeting via a personal Gmail account, you will run into a problem if a non-Google account tries to join.

I have a wife and a child who use Meet regularly, both via sub-$400 laptops. No issues that they've reported.

Anything more and it gets super tedious to maintain 6 feet of separation and still be able to hear each other.

I have a handful of friends who I chat with daily via Hangouts. Text only, though (though I did once do a video call with one while I was strolling through Disneyland, back when we could still stroll through Disneyland).

It's a great solution, and it'll be a shame if Google ever really gets rid of it.

I also just discovered that there's an HN gopher hole!

hngopher.com/1/

I loaded up the open source app Pocket Gopher (available on F-Droid), and while the formatting of ASCII graphics doesn't translate well to portrait mode, everything works.

Yet another not a website one: MUDs and talkers. MUDs are still around, but the talkers like Foothills are long gone. The Burbs was still around a few years ago, but there were only about 5 people on. Nothing like the heyday when there would be hundreds on.

Edit: Well, a bit of searching and I find Burbs and a few others still alive. Gonna have to check them out

Fun fact: gopher is still alive! It's not the same as back in the early 90s, but the protocol and some servers are alive and kicking.

Yes they did [0], but the current administration is "bad" so we can't bring up any of the good things they've done.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/04/03/us-government-will-cover-unins...

As a car guy and collector of classic cars, the last cash for clunkers program was terrible. Imagine a similar program for, say, paintings. Most paintings are nothing special, but then you get the guy who trades in a Monet (which he doesn't know is a Monet), and an irretrievable piece of history is destroyed.

The assumption in my comment is your boss is also acting in the best interest of the company. I thought that was clear, but perhaps not.

> We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.

I think I'm a bit old school. My outlook can be summed up like this: If you like your job, and you want to keep your job, you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.

So if my boss told me I had to work in an office, I'd weight that against the "if you want to keep your job" portion of the above, and decide if that's for me. If not, I quit and go find something where WFH is an option. If so, I go work in the office. Most likely I'd work in the office until I found something else or management realized that they were losing employees and changed the policy (I suppose in that way we can "force" the business to conform to our whims).

Perhaps that's a privileged point of view, or makes me a drone. But my life isn't work; I work to live, not live to work, so minor inconveniences at work don't derail my life; it's just a job, something I do to afford more important things.

For the record, I've worked from home for the last 9 years, and I have coworkers who had a really tough time adapting to WFH; they had to weigh if the trouble to change was worth it for them. Some felt it wasn't worth the trouble and left, many found it was and stayed.

It's interesting to see the different user preferences. For example, I can't stand the address bar at the bottom. But I find folks such as yourself who can't stand it at the top.

Very few browsers I've found let you choose.

If you haven't seen it, check out http://www.starringthecomputer.com/

Yet another article that uses an acronym and then doesn't bother cluing us in to what it stands for.

I build healthcare interfaces; ADT means demographics. What's it mean here?

> It's already been politicized, it's too late. The minute that politicians started advocating for a treatment before there was any scientific backing, that ship sailed.

In general, that doesn't mean we should simply abandon all attempts to de-politicize it. In fact, it means just the opposite - we should put aside any political aspects and focus on objective data.

I have several wrenches in my toolbox. But if someone is going to give me a new one, I'm gonna accept it.

That's the same idea here; sure, maybe the CIA and NSA already have the capability. But what's the harm in having it twice? There's actually benefits from the aspect of checking one against the other, not to mention one may reveal something the other doesn't.

I'm not saying this is what will happen. I'm simply saying that power seeks more power.

That's a false sense of security. Change often starts with a lateral move, but one closer to the slope being acceptable.

I think that was the point. This is useful for coronavirus patient tacking, yes, but it's also useful for people tracking in general, and malcontent (whomever defines that) tracking in particular.

To be fair, we were gonna do this anyway.

73

I am eagerly anticipating this. I use OBS and chromakey to have some fun on my MS Teams meetings, but it's a hassle to set up the green screen every time I want to be a bit cheeky.

Do you have a github/gitlab/something else link?

I've found the VirtualCam plugin for OBS works better, but YMMV

I agree, a plugin like this for OBS would be amazing.

I, too, have been playing with the chromakey in OBS, and like you tried a bunch of different sheets and blankets. The one that worked the best I discovered by accident; my wife was pulling out a puzzle, and with it she pulled out a green felt puzzle mat (really just a large rectangle of green felt). It was perfect. But I had to get it from her so I could use it on my meeting before she started her puzzle. After some brief, tense negotiating, I was able to snag it. All I have to do is the dishes for another month!

It works really well, but this would be way better and easier to set up.

My longest QSO on FT8 is a touch over 5100 miles on 5w. That was pretty fun, especially since my little Bitx40 is feeding a Z dipole in the attic of my single story house. Definitely not optimal.

We built a garden shed for my wife many years back. It started as a wood shed kit from Home Depot, then we re-designed some of the walls to put in some windows and French doors. We put a skylight in the roof, insulated it all, and put up chipboard for walls after I wired it for electricity. Some cupboards/counters from the local building recycling store, and the result is a nice space.

It was fairly straightforward, a lot of fun, and extremely useful.

This is a prime example of why letting prices go up to a certain degree on certain items is a good thing.

Case in point: you wanted to buy a new webcam, not because you needed one, but because you felt it was time to do so. You can't, because the prices are too high. But for someone for whom a webcam is essential (think a doctor providing televisits to patients), a high price isn't as much of a deterrent (within reason).

Because you couldn't/wouldn't buy at the higher price, there was stock available for the doctor who absolutely needed the device.

See the thread above about DroidCam (also on the Play Store). The Windows client loads a virtual camera driver that connects to the stream. You may be able to use it with other IP cameras, I haven't tried that yet.

Works quite well on my Debian box, as well as the Windows machine I use for work. I was able to use the virtual camera the Windows client creates to share with MS Teams.

Between that and OBS Studio [0] which makes it easy to do green screen work, I'm having some real fun with our team meetings. Just make sure you get the virtual camera driver [1].

[0] https://obsproject.com/

[1] https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/

It's a tricky spot. Letting the prices rise keeps the folks who don't need one, but merely want one, from buying one, thus leaving some supply for those who actually need one.

On the other hand, prices quickly get out of control if left to their own devices. Some say that's natural, and perhaps it is, but that doesn't mean it's good all the time.

As for increasing production, this is one thing where raising prices can actually decrease the incentive to increase production. For literally the same money that I was using to create 100 units per month, I'm now getting the same profit that 10000 units per month would have given me. Why would I spend money to increase production, thus increasing supply which reduces demand, which lowers prices, which lowers profits?

Excellent point