- Glad we did all the work in the courtyard yesterday (including a couple of loads of washing); lots of rain overnight. By the time we got up this had eased, just leaving a typical overcast Melbourne autumn day. Perfect! Having not been beyond the gates yesterday, I ventured out for a walk mid-morning.
- Home for a second coffee, a look at the rest of The Age, and attending to some business. A friend is trying to learn Zoom; she has the disadvantage in this of not having a webcam. Is it even possible to use Zoom without one? Apparently it is; people lacking this bit of kit (or a camera built into their device) can view video from other participants, just not transmit it themselves. So they can be heard but not seen. Anyway, I sent her an invitation to a Zoom meeting with this information appended to it.
- Of course it is possible to use Zoom on a smart phone, and transmit video via its built-in “selfie” (front facing) camera. However, that has the drawback of only giving the phone user a fairly small screen to look at. I imagine this is more of a drawback the more participants there are in a meeting.
- I joined up for my next lot of exercise physiology classes. I could have just done this over the phone with a credit card. The practice, however, had sent me an invoice at my request. (I like to have a bit of an audit trail in case a payment doesn’t come through, goes to the wrong account, etc.) So I paid the invoice via bank transfer, and sent the practice a notice of the payment via email. This is not a remarkable thing to do at all, of course, but I still marvel at how technology enables transactions like this.
- On the subject of everyday technology, one device that has been getting a bit of a workout recently is our Epson inkjet printer. This has been invaluable just recently for printing invoices, drafts of things I am working on, transcripts of chat sessions, and so on. My beloved had to print out a 10 page document (or so) for her work recently. Like all such things, the device is pretty cheap, the cartridges outrageously expensive. Third party ones work perfectly well, in spite of the nagging screens they generate, reminding you that you’re not using genuine Epson products, and so on. It is also a scanner, which has also come in handy recently.
- Some of the things this technology can do are pretty nifty. I had heard some excerpts from Tosca a while ago, which I had enjoyed. So I found a recording of excerpts from this opera on Google Play Music, started playing this in the living room, then was able to send this audio stream to the kitchen when I had to go out there to make dinner. It just picked up where I had left off. All via the magic of the Chromecast.
- The same device casts video to the TV from Stan in a particularly seamless way. Of course it works also with the ABC iView, Kanopy, and SBS On Demand apps, to name but a few — just not quite as elegantly as with Stan. (I’m not getting any commission for these various endorsements, unfortunately.) We are nearly at the end of Deutschland 86.
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