End-user perspective on small office tools & technology

Halloween on the 3300 Block of Beauchamp

Since 2002, we’ve put a vast effort into Halloween. It started one day when Stella came home with an 8-foot, purple, inflatable spider. I could not just plop this guy down in the yard. That lacked context. So, I dyed some sisal rope and built him a home, in the form of a 20 foot tall, illuminated spider web. A nice backdrop against which to give out candy to the kiddos.

Every year we’d tweak the presentation a bit. We added fog machines and lights. More fog machines. More lights. Better fog machines. Still more lights.

We added music! Loud, but not too loud. Enough skeletons to have our own baseball team. Bigger, badder fog machines with built-in dry ice chambers!

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Welcoming the Ubiquit Unifi 24 Port Gen2 Switch

Late last year I replaced my core network switch with a 24 port Ubiquiti Unifi (US-24-250W) managed switch. The Unifi switch was offered on E-bay at an attractive price. It fit into our existing Unifi cloud-key managed Wi-Fi arrangement, so I splurged.

Unifi-Stuff

In general, the Unifi switch was a good upgrade. It let me make greater use of POE. It made Wiresharking SIP traffic more convenient.

Alas, I stumbled upon an issue that I had not expected. It was noisy. The noise was the result of a pair of cooling fans.

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Dicaffeine: Using a Raspberry Pi 4 to Display an NDI Stream

The past couple of years I made a lot of use of an NDI-based video-over-IP strategy in producing the live stream and archival sessions for Cluecon in 2018 & 2019. One of the things involved in that production was displaying an NDI stream, produced in vMix, to a pair of local projectors.

Given budget constraints, I opted to use a pair of SFF Windows PCs running Newtek’s NDI Studio Monitor. I selected some used Lenovo M73 Tiny, which cost me about $200 each on Ebay. With an i5-4570 CPU and Intel HD Graphics 4600, they did the job well enough, each delivering 1080p30 to its associated projector without issue.

Lenovo M73 Tiny

Given additional budget, I’d have opted for BirdDog Mini NDI adapters over the little PC’s. These little FPGA-based devices can be set to decode or encode. Also, they can be powered over Ethernet, giving added flexibility, but at a cost of $500 each.

At the time, there was no way to decode NDI on an device with an ARM CPU, like the Raspberry Pi. That has recently changed. Dicaffeine is a new NDI player for Raspberry Pi. The basic version is free and I’ve been tinkering with it for a couple of weeks.

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It seems that webcams are important after all

For quite a few years I’ve believed that webcams are an important tool in the arsenal of personal communications. I’ve also wondered openly when they would evolve beyond a relatively simplistic state. For example, it took a long time for a USB 3 connected webcam to arrive.

This morning my wife was researching webcams for some of her staff. While she has a long history in broadcast production, she’s currently a public relations and corporate communications professional. Her staff are fielding requests from TV stations seeking to do remote interviews using tools like Skype, Zoom, Webex, etc.

Logitech Streamcam frontal

Since they have existing desktops, they don’t have built-in webcams. She was looking for webcams to add to these existing computers. Off the top of my head I recommended Logitech’s latest, which is known as the StreamCam.

Introduced in February of this year, the StreamCam is a brand new product. Unlike the Brio 4K webcam, reviewed here a while back, it’s USB 3.1 Type-C connected, delivering 1080p60. It’s likely a better solution than Brio 4K for most people.

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