Categories
Maker Programming

Making a USB Mute Button for Online Meetings

Screenshot of the custom device mute in action, with a video call showing "microphone off" event.
And, like that, he's gone.

I use Google Meet every day for (potentially hours of) online meetings at work, so it’s very easy to notice when things change and for example new features are available. Recently I’ve found a new “Call Control” section in the settings that promised a lot of fun, connecting USB devices to control my calls.

Screenshot of the Google Meet Settings menu during calls, showing the call control menu and a call-out to connect my USB device.
Google Meet Settings menu during a call, witht the Call control section

As someone who enjoys (or drawn to, or sort-of obscessed with) hacking on hardware, this was a nice call of action: let’s cobble together a custom USB button that can do some kind of call control1: say muting myself in the call, showing mute status, hanging up, etc.

This kicked off such a deep rabbit hole that I barely made it back up to the top, but one that seeded a crazy amount of future opportunities.

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Categories
Programming

Doing the Easy Problems on Leetcode

Very early in the Leetcode progress.

Over the last decade I seem to have been working in environments, where many engineers and engineering minded people spend time with programming puzzles and coding challenges. Let it be Advent of Code, Project Euler, Exercism, TopCoder, or Leetcode. I’ve tried all of these before (and probably a few more that I no longer remember), though with various amount of time spent all fired up, and then fizzled out. Recently I’ve picked up Leetcode, since from the above list that’s why I’ve spent the least amount of time with and others mentioned using it a way to relax and learn on weekends (suspend judgement on the wisdom of that for now).

Thus in the last two weeks I was solving problems, though not just any problems, but went in mostly for the Easy ones. These few dozen problems and short amount of time doesn’t give me a deep impression, but from past experiences I can still distill some lessons that help shaping future experiments.

The purpose of using the Easy problems is different from e.g. going all in for puzzle-solving fun, which is likely in the Hard ones. Rather than that, I think easy problems can be used for learning some new techniques, looking for common patterns, and becoming more polygot.

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Categories
Admin

Mixing GitLab personal and work accounts: Enterprise Users

A corporate office
Just any old corporate office.

TL;DR: if you are about to become a GitLab enterprise user, time to split your work from passion.

I’m often asked by other team members just starting on their version control journey, when using the likes of GitHub and GitLab, whether to have separate accounts for work and personal projects, or have a single one for both?

So far my advice has been pretty much along the lines of: “use a single one“, for many reasons, like every service seems to handle email aliases, git+ssh is pain enough with a single account not even multiple, and people generally seem to build their professional and open source contributions under a single persona anyways.

This advice no longer stands, at least for GitLab. I received this email recently, and how their use of Enterprise Users (and SSO Login + domain verification) makes it absolutely necessary to separate work and personal accounts:

I’ve been looking for a blogpost or other announcement, but couldn’t find one, hence the reposting of it here. I definitely gonna scramble a bit to create some new accounts (and keep my preferred username for the personal one).

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Categories
Admin

When WordPress caching is not what it seems

Screenshot of the author info from the ActivityPub JSON endpoint
Screenshot of the author info from the ActivityPub JSON endpoint

When parts of a system are strongly interconnected, one can discover latent issues while debugging something completely different. This is what happened with this blog’s caching and integrating with the Fediverse.

Fediverse adventures

I was part of The Great Twitter Exodus of 2022, and like many I’ve landed on Mastodon (hey, hello, https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg). Mastodon and the whole Fediverse and its build around the ActivityPub protocol is technically very interesting and brings back a bit of retro-joy to me (which needs some reflections on why and how is retro joyful, but another time). This current blog is running WordPress, and soon found that there’s a plugin to turn a WordPress blog into a my own ActivityPub node. That seemed some excellent way to connect up tools and make a more inter-connected Internet (besides nerding out, if I’m fully honest).

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Categories
Life

A year in review: 2023

It feels stranger than usual to review things at the moment, as I’m starting to feel more “continuous” about the flow of time rather than discrete with jumps (as the new years and holidays and so on are happening). Thus it doesn’t feel like there’s a particular closure as the calendar year comes to the end. So it’s more of a work-in-progress, rather than anything else. Let’s see what stands out in this, and where are we going, in this year in review…

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