Since retail and commercial supply chains are different I'd suggest reaching out to a restaurant you have good rapport with or contacting a local drygoods supplier.
Flour is out there it's just not making it to the shelves.
In the UK a few weeks ago commercial suppliers were complaining that they had all this stock they couldn't shift because it was packaged incorrectly - not flashily marketed or sized too large.
Now the ones that did open up to retail customers seem widely sold out of the desirable stuff...
I had this exact same issue, but if you're willing to buy "pizza-packs" or "bread-packs" or whatever marketing they put on it. It's just flour + sourdough for a markup.
most of it's out of stock as of right now, but they're updating their stock every day. I was able to order a 25 pound bag of flour from them yesterday. Take a look in the morning and you may have some luck.
in germany, getting kilo-packs of flour is hard. I have access to metro, which is a supermarket/distributor for businesses and they had tons of flour, but only 25kg packs for commercial buyers. It's even marked on the package "Nur zum gewerblichen Gebrauch".
So there's flour - it's just not in your distribution chain.
There's been an article floating around that posits that the same thing is happening with toilet paper: plenty of "institutional" product is available (since many businesses are closed), but not "home" product (since people are not only hoarding but also using the restroom at home more).
yes, you can see that in quite a few categories of products:
Canned Tomatoes, 2.5 kg cans available. 500g cans: out.
Pasta, 500g Spaghetti? Forget it. 5kg bulk: Available.
Yeast, regular cubes: no way. Ordering half a kilo of dry yeast: no problem.
It's just that as a regular normal family, 500g of yeast will get you through a year or two, depending on how much you bake (that's about the equivalent of 75 packets of dry yeast) But that stuff is also impossible to repackage into smaller quantities without exposing it to spoilage. There's a few supermarkets in Berlin that sell unpackaged stuff (basically you bring your own reusable container and they fill it for you) and they're well stocked in flour, pasta and stuff since they solve the repackaging issue at the point of sale.
First of all, consumer preferences remain different. And some products (such as bigger rolls designed for specific dispensers) aren't ideal. More importantly, the supply chain and delivery models are very different. Retailers don't have arrangements with institutional suppliers, packaging is different (quantities, SKUs, etc.), and—most importantly, I think—everyone is scrambling and operating at reduced organizational capacity, so it's just plain hard.
Institutional supply has different packaging, both in sizes and for example required customer information. For flour it’s often entirely different mills, resellers and delivery modes: most consumers cannot reasonably buy a 25kg bag of flour - let alone a delivery by truck intended to be pumped straight into your flour silo. What would you reasonably do with half a kilo of dried yeast?
Repacking is entirely infeasible for a lot of products - re-canning 2.5kg of canned tomato concentrate is a bit of a mess.
So supply chains will adapt, but that takes time. Some things may be out of stock for a while - I would not expect any substantial quantities of italian brand pasta to show up on the German market for quite a bit. We’ll probably have to rely on German pasta (different flour, often with egg unlike Italian)
We’ll not starve, but we’ll have to live without some stuff we’ve learned to expect as part of our regular diet.
And standing desks. I've been trying to source some for my business (to retail) and all of the cheaper models are sold out. The models we have been able to source are a harder sell at their price point.
I'm sure you could hack something together if you're not too worried about the design or long-term duribility. For us it's really just a side business right now to compensate for our main business not attracting many customers right now.
Hi,
I made my own standing desk using Ikea's LINNMON table (120x60)(cm) but you can pick your own tabletop and the adjustable OLOV legs (apologies for the caps). Total cost is around £€$75 (I am checking UK site). The annoying bit is that I cannot convert it easily. I need to remove everything from the table, turn it upside-down, change the length of the legs, and turn it back up.
IKEA also has three "proper" standing desks (that you can adjust their height without doing the aforementioned) but they cost x2 and x5 of my desk, and I don't really care to change the height that often/ever.
(I don't work for Ikea, I just don't want to pay $1000 for something I can make with $100 (and have a better pension when I retire).
The 'proper' IKEA standing desks you mention are all sold out here in Australia. I had a look at the OLOV legs but it looks like they only go up to 90cm.
The harder it is to switch between heights, the greater the risk the user will leave the desk in the sitting position 24/7 rather than alternating between standing and sitting.
Of course, if the user doesn't need to regularly change between sitting and standing, that might not matter.
The model I used had no crank at all, just levers to unlock hooks, and then you would move it to the desired height with the help of spring assistance. It was a Varidesk Pro Plus.
For what it's worth, I found Autonomous.ai to be fast shipping and high quality for the price of their standing desks (and chairs!). If you're in the US/Canada they're still shipping quickly.
It's has been like this for quite a while. I tried to buy a webcam for a project about 3-4 weeks ago and found they were all gone.
Funny enough, at that moment, I just thought it was because Amazon had problem on stocking and delivery. I didn't even realize it's because of the high demand for remote work etc.
though you have to admit that it's not a necessity for workplace conversations. We thought it nice to get one for our lectures recently and it's not only webcams (which are totally sold out), but also cheapish capture cards and mics... We ended up buying a GoPro and a 4k-capable capture card - now if we only had a capable local network (for streaming a 1000 4k streams)
Can confirm this is a global thing too, in Germany webcams sold out in online stores exactly three weeks ago. The few items left doubled or tripled their prices overnight.
I assume most people have webcams built into their computers and/or use their phones for these purposes. I have a highish-end external one but then I'm someone who was spending a couple hours a day on video conferences even before the current situation.
Wanted to have a light, cheap one from Sennheiser (one of those for 20 €) for homeoffice use. Sold out on Amazon. Estimated delivery mid or late May.
And it's like that for all the inexpensive "business headphones". If you want some shiny-blinky-bulky-"gamer headset", Amazon will be happy to send you a dozen till tomorrow morning.
I use a Sennheiser GAME ZERO for audio calls on a regular basis, including professionally, because the sound quality is quite good for voice. (I do also use it for gaming, and for music listening.) For audio calls they're not going to see it anyway, and I don't think most of the people I talk to would care if they saw it on a video call; the design doesn't scream “business”, but the red metal tracery is the only flashy thing about it, and that's kinda subtle.
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.
Same for me on the camera angle part: I have connected the work laptop to my private 4k display, but I'm not using the Logitech camera which sits on top of the 4k display (mostly because I would need to clean my "hobby desk" then, not really in the mood for that :-D), so I use the integrated one. This leads to me looking straight at the large display and the camera facing me from the lower right. Well... Could be worse.
Gaming headsets are actually pretty good for video conferencing. I got a pretty cheap one (£20) from a major UK chain as a test. Has worked wonders, even if ear fit is not perfect (bit heavy compared to what I normally would wear) and sound quality sucks for music. The alternatives would have been £70+ fancy sets, but I wasn't in the mood of experimenting with those kind of ticket prices.
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.
If only that's compatible with condo life and quarantine. Somewhat related to people complaining about flour, pet food / animal feed prices also skyrocketing. My gymless friends ended up buying sandbags.
I was trying to get a Oculus Quest around Christmas, and it simply could not be had (out of stock everywhere, and listed for over double the price on EBay - no pandemic needed).
I guess companies really are just making exactly the number of units they need to make, nothing more.
Switches have been out for a while. I had surgery at the beginning of March, figured it was a good excuse to finally play Legend of Zelda. Had to look a little bit, but I found one for online delivery from Best Buy for MSRP. Could have even bought an Animal Crossing special edition.
A week later, maybe the wife would like one: none to be found. You can still get a Switch Lite, though.
Here, your phone video will be streamed and made available to your PC applications via WiFi. This is the easiest and most flexible way to do it.
Requirement - both your computer and your android phone should be connected to the same network with android connected via WiFi. That means you can either -
Connect both your phone and computer to the Internet using a wireless router.
Or connect your Android to the pc internet using virtual router (Only for windows 7)
Or connect your Android to the PC with a shared wifi network (needs rooted phone with ad-hoc networking enabled).
Yeast. I haven’t needed yeast in years, recently I found a recipe with yeast I wanted to try and found out that, at least where I am in Germany, yeast is sold out.
I heard about the webcam thing from my boss, he asked me if he gave me a webcam years ago when I started remote working. He did, but it was in the attic and I had to go looking for it ;)
So the thing is, the recipe is for a nut-flour based pizza dough. I’m not sure if a sour dough starter works for that. And as I never made the recipe before, I wouldn’t even know if any problem is because of the recipe or some problem with the starter.
Fair enough, I would still just try anyway as that's the only way you'll know for sure. The yeast is pretty forgiving, all it does is eat sugars in the flour and convert into CO2.
You can always ask around in your friendly neighborhood forum for a starter culture, there's a lot of people that are willing to share.
If you have bakers yeast, you can just feed it and multiply the amount trivially: Half a cube (20g) or 7g dry yeast, mix with 15g sugar, 100g flour, 100g water, let rise for an hour or two in a warm place. Fill in icecube form, freeze. Each cube is about half as strong as a "regular" cube, so you may need to experiment a little with rising time for your dough.
You can do this and wait for days and pray you have not created some nasty poisonous culture. Or you can use human gut microbes to generate instant safe yeast.
Sourdough starter isn't some nasty poisonous culture lol. It's perfectly safe and every grocery store and bakery have huge tubs of it. If you're really concerned just go to your grocery store bakery, ask for some starter, and feed it.
Never even heard of "sourdough starter". I use them small dry-yeast packets from Lidl. The point is that human shit and saliva are the surest way start right kind of fermentation of moonshine and hooch if approved products are not available. E-coli and other critters die anyways in the anaerobic process or in the oven.
BTW. My "local bakery" is probably in Estonia. In another country that is. Wider Helsinki area is under lockdown and yeast may not be approved essential.
You can create your own sourdough just from wheat and water. Takes a few days till you have the first real dough, but from that on, you can keep the sourdough alive. There are plenty of YouTube videos about creating/using sourdough.
With sourdough you make the best breads and don't need any yeast. (sourdough itself contains yeast)
Starters from wild yeast has been how bread was made for thousands of years prior to the introduction of commercial yeast relatively recently. (And, of course, sourdough starters are still used to make sourdough bread.)
Your local bakery also will have cake yeast and instant yeast which is really good stuff that's annoyingly hard to find at grocery stores. Cake yeast I get because it's perishable but instant yeast has little excuse other than it has to be refrigerated after you open it.
They probably will also sell flour to you. At least here in Germany there seems to be the problem, that there isn't enough flour packaged in customer packages. Bakeries get their flour by huge sacks or even in silos, so there is no shortage of unpackaged flour.
Yup, same here in Canada - can't get yeast anywhere. Even flour is tough to come by despite the fact that Canada has tons of wheat - the flour mills are working overtime.
If you guys can post a good working tutorial for the Zero W, it would be very much appreciated and I'll definitely be placing an order for a camera with you.
Sold out couple weeks ago in Canada, asked hackernews about apps that turn android phone into webcam. Two that worked fine:
iriun
droidcam
Turns out your phone's selfie / front camera and microphone is vastly superior to most laptop webcams. Grab yourself selfie tripod. Lots of compliments about picture and sound quality. Coincidentally WSJ covered this topic yesterday.
After bars and restaurants closed down here, some 3 weeks ago, various alcoholic drinks have become very scarce. People are just hoarding wines and beers like never before - was going to pick up a couple of bottles of wine, but walked out with cheap vodka.
Do you have a citation to support that trend, please? I'd expect the reverse -- somewhat like, I gather, cinema use increases because people don't go on holidays but have staycations.
I've actually been a bit surprised that where I live in Massachusetts at any rate, the liquor stores look remarkably normal. The one nearby grocery store that carries beer and wine looked pretty well-stocked for at least that part of its inventory as well.
Maybe smaller stores in cities are shorter on inventory but out where I live any shortages are minimal. (Even though supermarkets are out of the usual items like paper goods.)
> People are just hoarding wines and beers like never before
Are they? Or are all the people who used to go to the now shutdown bars and restaurants, where their beers and wines were supplied by the bars/restaurants, and therefore, commercial supply houses, now drinking at home instead, and so there is much more purchasing on the retail side, resulting in shortages because the retail side was not ready for a substantial X% instant increase in consumption?
I.e., all the beer/wine that used to flow via the commercial supply houses now has to flow via the retail stores.
And if you take beer, that is delivered to bars and restaurants in barrels, while shops carry bottles. Same as with flour, the limitation isn't supply of the base but of packing/botteling.
This is what is occurring, and the transition isn't necessarily easy. For example, there's no easy to way to take say 30% of all beer consumed (from kegs) and just on-demand convert that to canned.
I just duck taped the selfie stick to the monitor's stand and use the phone with skype/zoom apps. Camera, mic are already there and you can use headsets with it.
I wanted to buy a new webcam; basically because I'm finding half my life is spent using one.
Ran into the problems mentioned in the article, and put a Logitech camera onto pre-order.
Cancelled that order last night though: possible to use an android phone as a webcam that's most likely better quality than the current generator of USB webcam. I chose this app [1], others are available.
How do you use the IP webcam address in programs like teams, zoom, skype?
I resorted to buying a magewell hdmi-2-usb converter. Better quality, I can focus and zoom from further away (no huge nose) and depending on your gear you have automatic background blurring (aperture+sensor size)
The couple apps I tried, there's a windows client + generic webcam driver and the android device just shows up in the device list for cam and audio. Works over wifi fine.
Is the driver signed? If not, you have to enable "test mode" and windows will drop a God-awful watermark in the bottom right of your desktop letting you know "test mode" is on. It's one of the seemingly-small things that bugs me the most about it.
I'm using a combo of OBS, NDI, and OBS-NDI plugin as per scott hanselman's guide.
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)
See the thread above about DroidCam (also on the Play Store). The Windows client loads a virtual camera driver that connects to the stream. You may be able to use it with other IP cameras, I haven't tried that yet.
It had never occurred to me that, during a shortage, the most expensive products would sell out last.
It makes sense now I've seen it happen, but I've always associated food shortages with austerity - instead I'm suddenly buying premium organic free range duck eggs.
This is because this is not an actual shortage. This is people panic-buying things they don't really need, and then of course they can't justify spending that much...
And the coronavirus was just a flu. And there's pent-up demand in out economy which will just explode when we get out of this.
No. This is not panic-buying or hoarding. There are actual supply chain disruptions, shifting demands, fewer workers going to work, and things just aren't keeping up with major disruptions to economic structures based on low margins, having just enough capacity, and doing everything just-in-time.
They're addressable, but we're not addressing them. Instead everyone tells themselves pretty stories about how the problems aren't real, and everyone else seems to believe it.
As far as I can tell, no one actually keeps an eye on these things either. We have no idea if we will have too much or not enough food in 6 months, and my guess is not enough (B2C producers aren't scaling up due to pretty stories, while B2B ones are shutting down due to lack-of-demand).
> As far as I can tell, no one actually keeps an eye on these things either.
Our current political system is invested in manipulating the truth to poke your political rivals in the eye; and there's no way you can keep an eye on things if you fire everyone who doesn't tell you what you want to hear...
It's not even panic buying; the demand mix literally shifted overnight across the entire economy. Instead of eating out every meal, I've been cooking just to give myself something to do. That means my food is coming from a grocery store rather than 50 lb bags from Sysco.
The more expensive options are just another form of demand lever: some people will be unwilling to buy a $5 carton of eggs even if it means walking away with no eggs. I suspect a lot of people are just buying the expensive eggs -- which is likely a huge boon for "premium" food vendors as they typically have to account for a larger % of unsold product loss.
Went to the computer shop to get a few wekcams for our remote workers. The guy said they had 30 cameras in that morning and had two left. I got those two. Its a computer shop I only use as a last resort because they are useless.
Seems to be the case across the board though, I bought some Microsoft LifeCam Studios because Microsoft had some in stock. But couldn't find much else anywhere else.
I can't speak for Paraesthetic, but in more normal circumstances in-person retail regularly has a smaller selection at higher prices, and the quality of help from shop assistants can be variable.
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 used to use Gopro this way. The problem was, that Gopro runs on battery when turned on (even when not recording, just in monitor mode), but charges it only when the camera is off.
With my old battery, the sessions were... short. So I managed to snatch a Brio last week, and I'm much more satisfied.
This isn't correct for, at least GoPro 6 and newer. I often times will run my GoPro with an external battery pack when doing extremely long running time lapse videos. The camera can definitely be run on external power and record - minimally a Hero 6 Black and a Hero 8 black both can be used in this manner from personal experience.
Supply chains really haven’t had a chance to react to the change in demand & won’t be able to until Chinese manufacturing has a chance to ramp up to meet demand I guess.
I bought it two weeks ago when the delivery delay was only a couple days, and I'm really happy of that purchase. For the price of the webcam I would have bought otherwise, I can enjoy the high quality of my photo gear and have a cool and versatile HDMI-to-USB adapter.
For instance, I've used it yesterday to install a Raspberry Pi in a Picture-in-Picture fashion – no messing around with my monitors to find a suitable port !
Even the Chinese HDMI-UVC adapters are out of stock, I ordered a decent looking one from Banggood ( https://www.banggood.com/1080P-HD-4K-60Hz-HDMI-to-USB3_1-Typ... ) that still showed a few in stock several weeks ago, it hasn't shipped and now shows they don't expect to have any for at least another week or two.
Super random question: I got a Razer Ripsaw HD (gaming capture card) and I tried capturing video from my Sony Alpha 7ii to use as a webcam and I keep getting weird banding. Doesn't happen when I try to record video on-camera. Anyone know what's happening?
Also since gamers don't care about color accuracy, I have a feeling they didn't give two shits about preservation of color accuracy in the Razer Ripsaw HD. The settings for color space is suepr whack.
I think it was covered previously but Wyze offered an image that makes their security / surveillance camera into a webcam. Requires a USB cable and sd card in addition to the camera. I see Wyze cameras available on Amazon at a markup and with some delay, but their website seems to have them in stock? I didn't go through the checkout process to verify.
Feels like Apple could boost their ecosystem by making great iPhone/macOS webcam integration. There's Kinoni's EpocCam and it seems to work, but it is a bit rough and requires installing their driver which I don't love.
I’ve been using CamTwist (http://camtwiststudio.com/) for it after checking the alternatives. Even if old-looking it works well (in Catalina and Mojave) and has converted my old iPhone into a good-quality webcam. OBS studio is getting virtual webcam support soon (see a recent post about OBS studio) and will allow for that as well (I have tried the proof of concept implementation)
Ah I didn’t know camtwist can use your iPhone as a cam.
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!
Oh, interesting, it works for me on Catalina. For some unknown reason I had to restart to make it work, _and_ only works on Chrome (for Meet) and some other selected programs. I guess it shows its age, I may have been lucky it works for me.
I reformatted a 2014 Mac Mini a family member was going to throw away :p. First by accident to Catalina. It was fine there in the hour I used it. Downgraded the Mini to 10.14 so it can actually run though.
My main driver already has other minor issues like too much cpu usage from certain Mac processes etc. I’m sure if I took the time, I’d be able to get Camtwist working.
But yeah if for you it works depending on browser and software. Yeah age is showing.
John Boiles has a proof of concept of the OBS virtual cam. I tried it out and it worked for me, although I had to build it and OBS from source. He has good instructions.
Yes, that's the proof of concept I have tried. It builds from source relatively straightforwardly (takes a short while), and indeed the instructions are very good.
How’s the cpu usage? I was looking at it. I have been hoping if I can use an iOS device as external cam and mic (mic not necessary I guess), that it would drop the computer’s cpu usage. Is that true for EpocCam?
I’m more worried because of the age of the Mac. Got it a bit over 5 years ago and likely avg 50+ hours every week for those 5+ years. I don’t want to upgrade until the MacBook 16 inch has another update or two if possible.
So I don’t like my main MacBook Pro to be 190 F temp and mid cpu usage all the time since I’m on video a lot
Or Apple could put a better cameras on their laptops. Video conferencing was already in wide use for businesses prior to covid19. While they are at it, they could put FaceID on it.
> You can get an external webcam—although top models are sold out across the web. ( Logitech says it’s increasing production and distribution to meet the new demand.)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadFlour is out there it's just not making it to the shelves.
Now the ones that did open up to retail customers seem widely sold out of the desirable stuff...
most of it's out of stock as of right now, but they're updating their stock every day. I was able to order a 25 pound bag of flour from them yesterday. Take a look in the morning and you may have some luck.
There also is no flour. Mmm, I mean « normal » flour.
Was in Tesco yesterday for the (now) weekly shop visit and they were putting bags and bags of flour.
But only self raising and plain ones. I wonder if the producers of the flour do this on purpose (those flours are way more expensive than basic ones)
So there's flour - it's just not in your distribution chain.
Canned Tomatoes, 2.5 kg cans available. 500g cans: out.
Pasta, 500g Spaghetti? Forget it. 5kg bulk: Available.
Yeast, regular cubes: no way. Ordering half a kilo of dry yeast: no problem.
It's just that as a regular normal family, 500g of yeast will get you through a year or two, depending on how much you bake (that's about the equivalent of 75 packets of dry yeast) But that stuff is also impossible to repackage into smaller quantities without exposing it to spoilage. There's a few supermarkets in Berlin that sell unpackaged stuff (basically you bring your own reusable container and they fill it for you) and they're well stocked in flour, pasta and stuff since they solve the repackaging issue at the point of sale.
Same question regarding all the food normally sold to restaurants and companies that are now closed.
Repacking is entirely infeasible for a lot of products - re-canning 2.5kg of canned tomato concentrate is a bit of a mess.
So supply chains will adapt, but that takes time. Some things may be out of stock for a while - I would not expect any substantial quantities of italian brand pasta to show up on the German market for quite a bit. We’ll probably have to rely on German pasta (different flour, often with egg unlike Italian)
We’ll not starve, but we’ll have to live without some stuff we’ve learned to expect as part of our regular diet.
https://www.elementrelocations.com.au/work-from-home
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)
IKEA also has three "proper" standing desks (that you can adjust their height without doing the aforementioned) but they cost x2 and x5 of my desk, and I don't really care to change the height that often/ever.
(I don't work for Ikea, I just don't want to pay $1000 for something I can make with $100 (and have a better pension when I retire).
Couldn't be happier with the dual motor I bought a few weeks ago.
I had an adjustable drafting table when I worked at Boeing and it never occurred to me that it needed a motor.
Of course, if the user doesn't need to regularly change between sitting and standing, that might not matter.
In those cases, you do not feel any weight.
This also goes for those irritating slow electric versions where you need to hold a button down for 30 sec.
This (referral) link provides a discount on all of their standing desks/chairs: https://www.autonomous.ai/?rid=f1ef57&utm_campaign=referrals...
Funny enough, at that moment, I just thought it was because Amazon had problem on stocking and delivery. I didn't even realize it's because of the high demand for remote work etc.
Wanted to have a light, cheap one from Sennheiser (one of those for 20 €) for homeoffice use. Sold out on Amazon. Estimated delivery mid or late May.
And it's like that for all the inexpensive "business headphones". If you want some shiny-blinky-bulky-"gamer headset", Amazon will be happy to send you a dozen till tomorrow morning.
It's crazy.
Headphones with mic from your old phone should do it too.
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.
I guess companies really are just making exactly the number of units they need to make, nothing more.
A week later, maybe the wife would like one: none to be found. You can still get a Switch Lite, though.
Requirement - both your computer and your android phone should be connected to the same network with android connected via WiFi. That means you can either -
Connect both your phone and computer to the Internet using a wireless router. Or connect your Android to the pc internet using virtual router (Only for windows 7) Or connect your Android to the PC with a shared wifi network (needs rooted phone with ad-hoc networking enabled).
Install IP webcam app.
I heard about the webcam thing from my boss, he asked me if he gave me a webcam years ago when I started remote working. He did, but it was in the attic and I had to go looking for it ;)
I did this last weekend and made a pretty good loaf (my first time).
You can always ask around in your friendly neighborhood forum for a starter culture, there's a lot of people that are willing to share.
If you have bakers yeast, you can just feed it and multiply the amount trivially: Half a cube (20g) or 7g dry yeast, mix with 15g sugar, 100g flour, 100g water, let rise for an hour or two in a warm place. Fill in icecube form, freeze. Each cube is about half as strong as a "regular" cube, so you may need to experiment a little with rising time for your dough.
BTW. My "local bakery" is probably in Estonia. In another country that is. Wider Helsinki area is under lockdown and yeast may not be approved essential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_bread
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/article-f...
I haven't tried this, but will ask one of our team to give it a go and confirm - that would make a more affordable option around £40 or so.
Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni (Raspberry Pi re-seller)
iriun
droidcam
Turns out your phone's selfie / front camera and microphone is vastly superior to most laptop webcams. Grab yourself selfie tripod. Lots of compliments about picture and sound quality. Coincidentally WSJ covered this topic yesterday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daqPLDDAntA
Maybe smaller stores in cities are shorter on inventory but out where I live any shortages are minimal. (Even though supermarkets are out of the usual items like paper goods.)
At the time, alcohol became currency.
Are they? Or are all the people who used to go to the now shutdown bars and restaurants, where their beers and wines were supplied by the bars/restaurants, and therefore, commercial supply houses, now drinking at home instead, and so there is much more purchasing on the retail side, resulting in shortages because the retail side was not ready for a substantial X% instant increase in consumption?
I.e., all the beer/wine that used to flow via the commercial supply houses now has to flow via the retail stores.
Ran into the problems mentioned in the article, and put a Logitech camera onto pre-order.
Cancelled that order last night though: possible to use an android phone as a webcam that's most likely better quality than the current generator of USB webcam. I chose this app [1], others are available.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pas.webcam...
I resorted to buying a magewell hdmi-2-usb converter. Better quality, I can focus and zoom from further away (no huge nose) and depending on your gear you have automatic background blurring (aperture+sensor size)
http://www.magewell.com/products/usb-capture-hdmi-gen-2
There's also a windows driver, but I haven't used that yet
Is the driver signed? If not, you have to enable "test mode" and windows will drop a God-awful watermark in the bottom right of your desktop letting you know "test mode" is on. It's one of the seemingly-small things that bugs me the most about it.
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)
It makes sense now I've seen it happen, but I've always associated food shortages with austerity - instead I'm suddenly buying premium organic free range duck eggs.
No. This is not panic-buying or hoarding. There are actual supply chain disruptions, shifting demands, fewer workers going to work, and things just aren't keeping up with major disruptions to economic structures based on low margins, having just enough capacity, and doing everything just-in-time.
They're addressable, but we're not addressing them. Instead everyone tells themselves pretty stories about how the problems aren't real, and everyone else seems to believe it.
As far as I can tell, no one actually keeps an eye on these things either. We have no idea if we will have too much or not enough food in 6 months, and my guess is not enough (B2C producers aren't scaling up due to pretty stories, while B2B ones are shutting down due to lack-of-demand).
Our current political system is invested in manipulating the truth to poke your political rivals in the eye; and there's no way you can keep an eye on things if you fire everyone who doesn't tell you what you want to hear...
The more expensive options are just another form of demand lever: some people will be unwilling to buy a $5 carton of eggs even if it means walking away with no eggs. I suspect a lot of people are just buying the expensive eggs -- which is likely a huge boon for "premium" food vendors as they typically have to account for a larger % of unsold product loss.
Seems to be the case across the board though, I bought some Microsoft LifeCam Studios because Microsoft had some in stock. But couldn't find much else anywhere else.
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.
Of course, using a 42.4 Megapixel sensor and a Carl Zeiss Sonnar lens it would.
https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/cam-link-4k
Turns a HDMI input into a USB web cam.
With my old battery, the sessions were... short. So I managed to snatch a Brio last week, and I'm much more satisfied.
Supply chains really haven’t had a chance to react to the change in demand & won’t be able to until Chinese manufacturing has a chance to ramp up to meet demand I guess.
Also since gamers don't care about color accuracy, I have a feeling they didn't give two shits about preservation of color accuracy in the Razer Ripsaw HD. The settings for color space is suepr whack.
https://wyze.com/wyze-in-response
https://brickseek.com/home-depot-inventory-checker/?sku=3081...
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!
My main driver already has other minor issues like too much cpu usage from certain Mac processes etc. I’m sure if I took the time, I’d be able to get Camtwist working.
But yeah if for you it works depending on browser and software. Yeah age is showing.
https://github.com/johnboiles/obs-mac-virtualcam
So I don’t like my main MacBook Pro to be 190 F temp and mid cpu usage all the time since I’m on video a lot
> You can get an external webcam—although top models are sold out across the web. ( Logitech says it’s increasing production and distribution to meet the new demand.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/living-the-coronavirus-work-fro...