Why blurred video over turning a camera off?

I've been pitching a similar idea to the company I work for to hold a http://zoom.us meeting all day every other week as opposed to trying to meet in person at busy coworking spaces. I wouldn't like working like that every day but at least you have privacy and quiet a button click away without losing the social proximity of in-person.

The most environmentally conscious thing one can do is walk out in the wilderness, die, and decompose, yes? I'm not going for that. Plus, what if the comparison is to driving into the office every day?

That argument is quite general and could be used against any form of attempt towards sobriety - so I suggest we don't take the discussion there as it would get out of scope and might not be super constructive. I'll come back with more precise figures some time soon, but I have reasons to believe it's much worse than you might suspect. Also, in addition to the absolute footprint, it might be relevant to consider the value gained relative to that footprint.

@U8WFYMFRU You can see that the guy is present and available. Moreover, you can overhear conversations and talk to everybody an any moment. Just don't forget to unmute your mic 🙂

@U06GS6P1N This thing actually consumes just 1% of 100 Mbps bandwidth network for a team of 5 ppl.

I think it is a great idea. I think people who evaluate a product like this (if they already work from home) might see it as intrusive - but if this delivers the ability to work from home... then it can be an enabler.... Lots of companies are suspicious about working from home... I think a product like this can strike a balance between being at the office and being at home. Although slack also partially fills that roll... facetime though is so much better... but it is tricky to make facetime easy and convenient

hmm, I don't think anything like this exists, but it would cool to have an audio codec where data is only emitted if it's above a certain threshold.

Because generally most of the clients in the chat are probably going to be silent for big chunks of time

It needs to filter out farts. People who are used to working from home are used to having the freedom to fart anytime.

I have some co-workers that have worked together remotely for the last 10 years. They keep an open phone call going all day and talk to each other throughout the day as if they were sitting in the same office.

It seems like this would serve a similar purpose. (They leave their phones on speakerphone)

@U0NCTKEV8 I think of it as of a continuous live video connection with privacy. In comparison with cubicle, nobody can invade your privacy or watch what exactly you're doing without your awareness.

Hmm it's an interesting idea. I would be more amenable to it as a standalone device that could serves as some sort of community blast room. everybody has their own mini alexa/googhome but can be broadcasting or not. i personally don't enjoy broadcasting the minutiae of daily life unless it's to close friends, but i suppose if your company is pretty intimate (?) and can work in good flow, and everyone is in the same timezone(?) then a software prototype is legit. it would be great to have a hard switch for PARTICIPATING/OBSERVING and make t super clear even with a change of the window border color or the user taskbar or something. imo BROADCAST/RECORD/LIVE needs to be as obvious a marker/light/signal/indicator as possible. for people into it, I think it could work,

Heh, that's neat.

I don't want to be have the concern in the back of my mind about being heard.> Turning it off before I chat with my wife and son would also be a ongoing concern. @UJVKWJTGE These are good points. Would a big and very visible indication whether your mic is (un)muted be helpful for you to make it less concerning?

> I don't want to hear random stuff going on on the other side. @UJVKWJTGE What if you could increase/decrease a voulme of sound coming from others?

the indicator wouldn't be much help because I don't think I'd have the window on screen most of the time

having others in a lower volume would help a lot

> the indicator wouldn't be much help because I don't think I'd have the window on screen most of the time @UJVKWJTGE I thought about what you saying and, well, the solution that I've come up with is a topmost window with large indicators that are pretty hard to miss. Not ideal one, but straightforward.

> having others in a lower volume would help a lot Thank you for your thoughs, Filipe!

an interesting, related domain to explore might be game voice chat

some of these problems are common there as well

some of the approaches taken in that domain include: selecting opt-in/opt-out based activity, push-to-talk settings, overlays showing speakers, overlays showing chat messages

I have not tried the parallels version but when you go to System Prefs > Sharing > Screen Sharing and enable it, it is creating a VNC server on port 5900.

Yes, I tried that and it works 🙂 I wonder how the Parallels version works, if you need to forward a port in your router or that it does some other trick.

I'm a little bit concerned about opening VNC on my router with only password access

Figured you knew but wasn't quite sure how to get at what you were expecting to get from Parallels in the first place 😄 Anyway, what about VNC behind a VPN?

Any tips on how to setup a VPN behind a Apple Airport router?

Unfortunately, it's been a while. At the time, we were using Mac OS X server edition to set that up. The good news is that is no longer required but the bad news is it's more of a secret incantation now. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312 does list alternatives. Trying to find better instructions though.

Looks like there's vpnd which is what built-in solutions are designed around.

Found https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/macOS-Server-Service-Migration-Guide.pdf which has instructions for configuring vpnd to replace the original OS X server VPN service.

If you do searches for "back to my mac replacement", you will find some couple-year-old articles with some suggestions, some of which involve spending money, and some of which implement features that do not require you to fiddle with home router settings, because they have their own public servers to be a go-between, at least for initiating the connection, I believe.

I have not used any of them, to recommend or anti-recommend any of them.