monthly chat next week (Sunday Sep 9)

[Chris Watkins]

Our second monthly chat‎ is coming up.

We did the first on IRC - I'd like us to try this one as a Google Hangout (in Google Plus). I've been hearing good things about Google Hangouts, and it lets us have video and voice.

We can decide later if we want to do it again. Now I need to work out how to set up a Hangout.

Cheers
--
Chris Watkins

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

I tested Hangouts a couple of times last week. Worked fine on my
girlfriends Mac, once I installed the plug-in and did a bit of
re-opening the browser etc. To start a hangout, you just click the
little video camera icon next to a persons name. That opens a hangout
room, and invites them into it. Then you can invite anyone else on
your GChat roster.

Only problem is there is a limit of 10 people you can have in a
hangout at a time. Also, I wouldn't bother with video, as it chews up
many times the bandwidth that the voice chat does. It really adds very
little to the experience once you have 3 or more people in the
Hangout, because the constant flicking between the video of whoever is
talking, while clever, is just distracting. just make sure there is a
nice photo of your in your Google profile, so there is a face to the
name (and voice).

I would seriously look at using Mumble/Murmur instead.
http://www.mumble.sourceforge.net

Ma te wā
Strypey

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--
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193

"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407

[Chris Watkins]

Thanks Strypey,

That's all very helpful info.

I've decided to go with IRC again this week. I haven't had time to try out Hangouts, and I wasn't aware that people might have to install something and restart their browser. Many of us are either busy or just not patient enough to install things :-). Maybe we could try Skype next time - that's more mature tech, and many people already have it.

On 3 September 2012 00:48, Danyl Strype <str...@disintermedia.net.nz> wrote:

I tested Hangouts a couple of times last week. Worked fine on my
girlfriends Mac, once I installed the plug-in and did a bit of
re-opening the browser etc. To start a hangout, you just click the
little video camera icon next to a persons name. That opens a hangout
room, and invites them into it. Then you can invite anyone else on
your GChat roster.

Only problem is there is a limit of 10 people you can have in a
hangout at a time. Also, I wouldn't bother with video, as it chews up
many times the bandwidth that the voice chat does. It really adds very
little to the experience once you have 3 or more people in the
Hangout, because the constant flicking between the video of whoever is
talking, while clever, is just distracting.  just make sure there is a
nice photo of your in your Google profile, so there is a face to the
name (and voice).

I would seriously look at using Mumble/Murmur instead.
http://www.mumble.sourceforge.net

Very interesting. I think we'd best leave it for the early adopters, though. I've learnt that just because I'd be happy to use something new right now, doesn't mean the rest of the community will feel the same. We have to pick our battles.

Glad to learn about it, though. Thanks again,
Chris

Ma te wā
Strypey

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

I wrote:
>>>> I would seriously look at using Mumble/Murmur instead.
http://www.mumble.sourceforge.net <<<<

Chris replied:

>> Very interesting. I think we'd best leave it for the early adopters, though. I've learnt that just because I'd be happy to use something new right now, doesn't mean the rest of the community will feel the same. We have to pick our battles. <<

Chris, Mumble has been widely adopted by the Occupy movement as a
replacement for Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft. Prior to that
it has been in regular use for a few years by network gamers, for whom
it was designed (as a free code replacement to proprietary systems
like TeamSpeak). Nobody demands robust, stable, user-friendly tech
more than competitive gamers, so it's already well beyond "early
adopters".

Mumble is a very similar user experience to IRC. You join a "channel"
(like a chat room), and you can talk to everyone in the room by text
chat (like IRC). If all goes well, you can also "click-to-talk" and
say something, which everyone in the channel can hear through their
speakers/headphones.

A Mumble client uses a lot less system resources on your computer than
a Skype client, because the Murmur server at the other end is doing
some of the heavy lifting. Running a Mumble client also uses a lot
less bandwidth for the user, because Skype is a proprietary
peer-to-peer system, which routes other people's calls through the
back-end of the client, as a constant encrypted stream.

I will try to make the IRC this week. If anybody wants to download a
Mumble client and tinker with it in parallel to that, go for it:
http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

Ma te wa
Strypey

[Chris Watkins]

Thanks for the info on Mumble, Danyl - I'll give it a try.

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