Tell HN: Toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and now web cams

I assume in the first paragraph you mean a usb A cable with plugs on both ends

I don't use wyze normally, not sure what the type a female port is for.

It's a hack on top of a hack that functions reasonably, and helps with supply chain issues.

They are a great cheap option when using their custom RTSP firmware with synology surveillance stations. I throw them on their own SSID that is isolated from other local networks and does not have internet access. The SS can reach into their network but they can't initiate connections out.

Still they briefly need internet when setting up to enable RTSP but I'm more concerned about them being remotely accessible at anytime and having access to anything else on my network. Even my setup would allow my email and the isolated network's topo to leak bc of brief internet access.

Holy cow. And easy to do if you found their unsecured database.

So the risks are mitigated for the most part since it has no network connection.

PS. To make it work you need to install a driver on your PC, so it can be a no-go for many company owned computers.

Try cleaning your hands with paper instead of water some day, and see how that works out for you. It's the same thing.

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?

You see the problem?

For what it's worth, this isn't how "supply and demand" works in economics.

The idea is that a given firm is already producing as much as they can at that price. There's not usually a ton of slack just laying around that could respond to a spike in demand. For instance, my wife who works at a soap factory right now, has seen a ton of demand. They would love to increase production to accommodate but it's just not immediately possible, without retooling the factory. They're managing to increase supply a little, by not offering as many varieties of scents and such, but that's the extent of what they can do immediately.

The reason prices increase with an increase in demand, according to standard economics orthodoxy, is because that allows more firms to enter the market, as well as existing firms to do less efficient things (more workers, more expensive supply chain, etc), to meet that demand.

This assumes that you can actually scale production to 10,000 units (a plant that can produce 100 items a month is not necessarily one that can produce 1000), that your typical channels can absorb said production (if they need to hold inventory, they likely cannot), that you have enough packaging supplies for your increased inventory (a real problem being encountered at the moment), the list goes on. Supply chains are not linear. You can have valid issues with price gouging despite this fact, but simply saying "increase production, problem solved" is an extremely uninformed position.

Alas, the world is rather more complicated than that. Case in point, this Dallas surgical mask factory that is not running overtime, because the hospitals screwed him over last emergency, and he almost went out of business:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2020/04/03/if-you-i...

And more to the point: you have no idea. Prices are emergent from trillions of decisions, and are used to communicate a great deal of information. People want to act like it's an engineering problem where we can dial up and down one part without affecting other parts, but anyone who has worked even on a controlled marketplace knows this isn't true.

Go read "I, Pencil" https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/

Pivoting a factory on a dime to make something else is hard, but often doable by the experts for sufficiently loose definitions of “on a dime”.

Pivoting a factory on a dime to make something else that’s cost competitive with the factories designed and built to do that something else already is impossible. It’s like trying to build a car from junkyard parts to run in F1 races. And old prices will reflect the cost savings those old factories were achieving.

I don't even understand how that works.

Plus the government can act as a central buyer to back those who have the greatest needs. That and companies should be responsible for providing protection for employees

There's also a windows driver, but I haven't used that yet

You can download an "NDI" apk for your cell phone since the manufacturer removed the app from the play store, to provide the ability for an android phone to serve as a network display interface (of course it's your risk to download APKs from a random site)

https://www.baslerweb.com/en/products/cameras/

https://www.alliedvision.com/en/digital-industrial-camera-so...

These cameras most likely DO HAVE a NIR (near IR) filter on the sensors. You would need to check on specific models.

Basler provides some documentation for removing the filter from specific camera models.

https://www.baslerweb.com/en/sales-support/downloads/documen...

The camera is adequate (I've done a fair amount of computational photography work recently, overly opinionated to follow), it's not hitting anything like the advertised high frame rate/low res modes in guvcview, but is making the 30-60fps higher res modes that matter for webcam use. It's USB2 and enumerated as UVC 1.0 so I can't say I'm surprised. The crop changes in somewhat surprising ways among the modes, I think the readout does a mixture of crop and binning or line skipping. It's not a nice Basler module or anything, but it costs less than 20% what the nominally-comparable offering from "good brands" would.

The lens is ...eh, I have noticeable barrel distortion and vignetting, but its clear, doesn't have the annoying color corruption you sometimes see in cheap C/CS lenses, and the FoV is nice for webcam duty.

It's a damn slight better than the old PS3 eye I was getting by with until it showed up, and being able to easily manually manipulate zoom/focus/aperture instead of hoping the auto does something good is great.

Unfortunately it isn’t working anymore on one of my Catalina installs. Which is my primary daily driver. Luckily works on secondary older Mac that I use for Zoom frequently. Will try it out, thanks!

https://github.com/johnboiles/obs-mac-virtualcam

Not sure if it's still valid, but "handy" has a different meaning in slang:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=handy

Again, a native speaker might consider different, but as a german the usage of "handy" immediatley caught my eye. :D

Haven't sprung for the paid version though as I am hoping the back ordered webcam I purchased at the start of this comes in the next few weeks.

Remember to rebuild the kernel module if your kernel gets updated!

It's not the shops' fault, it's the economics of the industry. Economies of scale mean for some products, Amazon's retail price will be lower than the shop's wholesale price. Cashflow and volumes make it hard to stock a broad range of expensive items like CPUs and laptops. Competent help can often do better than retail wages and working conditions.

I even did a lightning talk on my Ikea standing desk once. It's fun and relatively easy to build.

(Don't forget a pad to stand on)

I had an adjustable drafting table when I worked at Boeing and it never occurred to me that it needed a motor.

Now the ones that did open up to retail customers seem widely sold out of the desirable stuff...

So there's flour - it's just not in your distribution chain.

What's more of a problem I might run into soon is that my setup was already out of date for video calls; this seems increasingly like a hard expectation rather than an optional plus; and the pseudo-docking way I use my primary laptop at my desk doesn't currently allow me to orient the builtin camera so that it catches my expression at a reasonable angle while also letting me leave the monitor in front of me. Putting the laptop where my monitor currently is might be workable, but it could also get squint-inducing at that distance… I might have to play around with this.

Others at the company have bought similar items over the past couple of weeks too, and they are an increasing presence at conference calls. I wouldn't be surprised if the non-blinkenlight variants were the next item to go on scalpers' hot list.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-...

Anecdotally, my local ISP has gone from everyone getting 10/1 to 100/5 in the base package in the last few years.

I've got 500/500 MBit/s at home. 10 years ago I had about 30, but even that is more than sufficient to stream high quality video.

And this is not a "first-world" country even.

This is a thing that definitely could and should be improved.

The resulting camera angle is just perfect [1], and the iPad's camera is excellent compared to a laptop's.

[1] Tom Ford's guide on how to look good on a video conference. Tip 1: camera should for top of head.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/style/tom-ford-video-chat...

Not to mention destructive hysterical hoarding. There is someone in this thread who noticed an extreme shortage in webcams so when only two were left in a shop, he bought both.