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

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271–280 of 410 posts

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

#271

Why shouldn’t the price increase with a supply chain disruption and demand boom? Would you prefer a shortage with no incentive to increase production?

During a crisis the primary goal is maintaining societal stability. Exploiting the rich and the desperate deteriorates that stability. People would rather have a lottery than an auction in these scenarios.

"Exploiting the rich"

I don't even understand how that works.

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

#272
post #129

Similarly, I felt that I outgrew my kettlebell and tried to order a new one - absolutely impossible right now, like most other home exercise equipment. At least it's something completely non-essential. I'm just grateful that we have food in the stores at the moment.

This is a prime example of why letting prices go up to a certain degree on certain items is a good thing.

Case in point: you wanted to buy a new webcam, not because you needed one, but because you felt it was time to do so. You can't, because the prices are too high. But for someone for whom a webcam is essential (think a doctor providing televisits to patients), a high price isn't as much of a deterrent (within reason).

Because you couldn't/wouldn't buy at the higher price, there was stock available for the doctor who absolutely needed the device.

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

#274
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find bidets as or more useful if it's not that bad. You're often talking about just one or two square of toilet paper (literally, not figuratively). Try cleaning your hands with paper instead of water some day, and see how that works out for you. It's the same thing.

Feces comes in all manner of consistencies and textures. There is a range of consistencies for which bidets are wholly useless. Specifically, sticky ones. For these, you need friction from a solid, high-surface-area object. I'm sure you've had brown streaks inside the bowl that could not be removed in N flushes, but a simple toilet brush made quick work of the matter. To use your handwashing analogy, try removing cri…

If your bidet can't wash off some sticky feces, you simply have a weak bidet. That's one of the main instances where bidets are so nice instead of wiping and wiping.

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

#275
post #63

I bought an Elgato CamLink instead... hooked it up to a DSLR I already owned, and it makes for a stunningly crisp and clear, high quality, webcam. 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.

This looks incredible but as other posters have noted, is sold out everywhere. Any recommendations for similar products that might be available?

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.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP's usage is correct. Handy means "at hand", or convenient.

I know what "handy" means in English. So if I ask an American to show me his "Handy", he knows that I want to see his "mobile phone"? Because that's what "Handy" means in Germany. It's actually "mobile phone", hence the confusion. I learned that "Handy" is almost exclusively used in Germany.

The German usage of "handy" as a noun does not exist in English. "My handy camera" doesn't mean "my mobile camera", it means "my camera that is conveniently at hand".

("Mobile phone" isn't very common in the US either. Common usage used to be "cell phone" or "smart phone", but is now simply "phone".)

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

#277
post #151

It's incredibly annoying that you can't use your APPLE iPhone camera as a webcam for your APPLE Macbook, but instead are forced to use the atrociously terrible cam that comes with the Macbook. I've tried workarounds using the excellent OSB, but there's currently no software that let's you reroute video on a Mac (like Loopback does for audio) EDIT: I stand corrected, as user wolfhumble points out below, EpocCam seems…

Zoom/slack/skype do have iOS clients. I've just been using a plugged in iPhone instead of a webcam.

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

#278

Wyze cheap security cameras released a firmware that turns them into a webcam. Still in stock. You will also need a USB a-a cable that I didn't know existed or was legal. And a 32gb microsd. I did this last week, came in one day on Amazon prime. Under $50 for everything. Setup went okay, although the 3-4 minutes for firmware write was under a minute for me with their branded microsd. Quality is passable, lens is more…

I would not touch a Wyze camera with a 10 foot pole. Given the recent enormous security breaches, the likely connections to the Chinese government, and the incredibly low price point, there are red flags waving everywhere.

Read this blog series about Wyze, and then make up you mind if you are comfortable having that piece of hardware in your home. I think it is pretty clear the risks are not trivial.

https://blog.12security.com/tag/wyze/

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upload bandwidth for 95% of homes in the US is the same as it was almost 20 years ago. It’s so bad it’s not even advertised. If you have access to fiber, then you’re very lucky in the US. I would also say 5mbps upload is hardly an upgrade. A single FaceTime call uses a couple mbps, so it’s probably just enough for that, assuming everyone in the neighborhood isn’t uploading too, which they are nowadays.

They say 95% of statistics people quote are made up (including mine here). So to quote a source, that is not my brain: from 2017 to 2018 upload speeds went up 22% https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f...

Non fiber upload speed is a farce. I assume it’s just something like 20mbps shared in a neighborhood of 50 or 100 homes, and the ISP lets it burst to 10mbps or something for a couple minutes and then throttles you down again.

There’s a reason it’s never advertised by cable ISPs.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes about upload, but I want to say as well that Netflix is a special subject anyway. A 1080p video on Netflix today has lower quality (bitrate) than a 720p video on Youtube 5 years ago. The only reason Netflix HD works for so many people is because Netflix has lowered the standard of what was considered HD.

The video on YouTube five years ago was encoded with a far less effective codec. H265 uses half the bandwidth of H264 for the same quality of video, for example; raw bitrate isn't a useful indicator of quality if the codecs differ.

Bitrate is a useful indicator. It's the amount of information that is directly linked to maximum quality, there are bounds on what can be compressed by how much.

Fact is, x265 can do 25-33% smaller size than x264 for equivalent visual quality. The higher gain at higher resolutions (2k, 4k) that were not well supported by older codecs anyway. You can refer to Netflix own papers on that.

Services doing half the bandwidth have reduced quality. The improvement in codec can only explain half the reduction, the other half is grossly lowering quality (to reduce costs and work with mediocre home connections). That's not necessarily bad for customers, better have a pseudo HD stream than no stream.

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