I swear to God that all of these CS labs at different unis look the same. I am getting flashbacks of labs in Toronto that looked exactly like pictures in the post
That's exactly what I thought! "Is that UofT?"
Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally, you cannot just record people without their consent; but this also largely depends on the jurisdiction/situation. Almost nowhere (or actually nowhere?) are you allowed to set up a surveillance device into a space that is not public and it is not owned by you.
Generally, in the United States, you can, in fact, just record people. Legally speaking, that is, which doesn't make it a polite or cool thing to do. Necessarily. If you're on someone else's property, they can of course set any number of rules, and trespass those who break those rules. But even there, recording people, if against the rules, is still not a crime. The crime is trespass, if this journalist we're speakin…
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Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#53My first thought was to put some motion sensors inside the room, along with a sensor for the door (open/closed), as well as some sensor for counting the people walking through the door. Maybe even some co2 sensor to detect changes.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#54Neat to see discord channel names being used as an information channel.
It's a common practice/trick in Discord communities (particularly gaming) to pin some status, but yeah, I always find it neat.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#55The University Computer Club at UWA also has a door sensor!
https://door-status.ucc.asn.au/ucc
Runs off a Raspberry Pi with a bodged-up version of https://github.com/ide/pico-door-sensor/tree/main
This is at least the third iteration; some previous iterations are documented here:
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#56Love to see the UPL on hacker news :)
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#57The University Computer Club at UWA also has a door sensor! https://door-status.ucc.asn.au/ucc Runs off a Raspberry Pi with a bodged-up version of https://github.com/ide/pico-door-sensor/tree/main This is at least the third iteration; some previous iterations are documented here: https://www.ucc.asn.au/services/door.ucc
Still works better than the uwa door card readers
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#58Point the camera at the door, use the camera to detect if the door is open.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#59Back in the 90's we used finger - IIRC it would tell you the last machine someone logged into, which could be in the lab Someone wrote a script to finger everyone in the entire CS department and tell when the lab was busy, by counting people logged in. This work fine, except for on intro courses where some labs had lots of non-CS majors in them.
I had finger running on login to `finger stacy` I was at SDSU on a very large SunOS system and she was at a private school and I assume that computer was a bit more limited. `Finger Stacy` would run every minute and typically be running for 15 minutes max... that is until I moved into the dorms and my machine was online all the time. A few weeks go by and I get an email from the SDSU admin requesting that I stop fing…
fdisk or mount?
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk). Obv. IANAL and…
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And thus they'd fall under the legal definition of public: "Under the authority of the government or belonging and available to the people."
or
"of or relating to a government"