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Showing posts from 2020

Measuring video lights with a colorimeter

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After more than half a year of home office I decided to improve my setup by adding proper lights to my work space. Following a recommendation I bought 2 video lights off Amazon, and then at the recent Black Friday week I bought the same video lights in a set of 2 with tripods (because the set cost less than I paid previously for the 2 single units). To my dismay I discovered that the 4 video lights, same brand and same model, actually looked different and performed different! The question is, which video light is more "correct" and therefore better to keep? I wanted to keep two and return two because I don't need four lights. Two is more than enough. The lights can be adjusted for brightness and for color temperature, but all the four lights would look different at the same setting. So which light was correct? Which to keep? After breaking my head for a bit I suddenly remembered the old colorimeter I have in my cabinet. It actually does

Understanding Google Meet Permissions for Education

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With the increase in distance learning Google G Suite for Education has recently also added many important features to its video conferencing tool Google Meet. Over the last year the role of meeting host became more and more important, as it allows - among many other things - to kick or mute other participants which is a big invitation for mischief if a student get the host role in an online class. Google Meet only lets a single user be the meeting host and it can be confusing to understand who happens to be meeting host. Furthermore, Meet does not support assigning other users with the host role, a feature that most other video conferencing tools support for a long time. As a result it is very important to keep control of the meeting host role and to ensure that the person who runs the meeting actually gets the meeting host permission in the video call. This infographics serves as a summary to help understand how Google Meet assigns the meeting host role. Click on it to download

How to add an almost-GDPR-compliant print button to any website

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Update 30.11.2020: Explain why I removed the print buttons from my blog. Many websites look great on screen but don't support printing or don't look good on paper. Mostly this is because the website designer "forgot" to test and optimize for printing. To help with this problem, there are free services that can print any website. I know and use two such services: PrintFriendly and PrintWhatYouLike . Unfortunately no service works perfectly, usually one or the other produces better looking results. Both offer adding a "print" button on your website and generate some Javascript/HTML for that. Upon closer analysis it turns out that these buttons are very much not cool from a GDPR compliance perspective: The buttons load an image and additional Javascript when your  website loads so that the people running those print services get a very nice access log of your users reading your website! To solve this problem, I modified the print buttons to be more data priv
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