I've been trying to set up a reliable lightweight solution for high quality, low-latency webcam (v4l2) streaming from Linux server to browsers, allowing for small (1-5) number of concurrent viewers.

The obvious choice here is WebRTC, which when used through browser APIs, works wonderfully. It has low latency and automatic quality adjustment depending on network performance.
I also checked out RTSP and RTMP, which are not supported without browser plugins. Next candidates were DASH and HLS, but while they provide high quality, they also have high latency.
For a while I used MPEG1 streaming through Websockets (using jsmpeg library), which worked and had low latency, but the video quality was bad.

Back to WebRTC - It seems like reliable, lightweight and maintained projects are really hard to find. So far I've found a few WebRTC media servers, but they're overkill for my use case:

• Janus
• MediaSoup
• Kurento (unmaintained)

I also tried implementing this functionality using low level Gstreamer elements in Python using PyGObject, but that's proving to be rather complicated with a ton of extremely low level implementation details.

If anyone has tried doing something similar, I'd really like to hear what (if any) problems you had and if you found any sane solutions. Next thing on my list is using headless Chromium in combination with Puppeteer, but I'd really prefer more lightweight solutions.

After watching Office Space for the first time a few weeks ago, I was struck by the scene where Peter is talking about his average working day, and it got me to wondering about how much actual work I do at my job. I'm pretty sure that even on a good day, I put in less than 2 hours of actual graft. The rest is just mindless internetting, chatting with my colleagues, and wishing I was elsewhere.
So I'm curious how much work other people actually do in a day, and how you pass the time when you're not doing anything at all?

it's apparently been awhile since we had a proper one of these on tildes (we've had a few mental health related topics but nothing direct like this), and seeing as the site has grown a bit (to say the least) since the last one there's probably some utility in a new one of these. share your experiences/whatever you've found helps/etc. i think this is pretty straightforward.

SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct, Signal, Wire, Wickr, Telegram, GroupMe, Viber, Threema, etc.

There are dozens of competing messenger services out there, each of which is either supported by or suffers from the network effect. Futhermore, each seems to come with its own pros and cons. I'm curious about not only people's current use, but where everyone thinks we are headed. As such, I have a few questions:

1. Which messengers do you currently use at the moment? What are their advantages and disadvantages?

2. If you could magically switch all of your contacts to be on one messaging service, which would it be and why?

3. Do you think we'll ever see a realistic convergence of messaging, or are people destined to use different platforms for different contacts?

I recently purchased Junji Ito's Shiver collection, which has nine of his self-descirbed "best" shorts inside:

• Used Record
• Shiver
• Fashion Model
• Hanging Blimp
• Marionette Mansion
• Painter
• The Long Dream
• Honored Ancestors
• Greased

And while overall I would say the collection was well worth the £16 it cost, I will say I was somewhat disappointed in the varying "shivers" delivered by each short.

For example, I found the Fashion Model short to be quite frustrating: compared to the creativity and build up of horror present in some of the other shorts such as Hanging Blimp, it was essentially "creepy looking lady is serial killer". Others such as Used Record seemed as though there was a lot of wasted story.

Meanwhile, some such as Marionette Mansion did a grand job of building a suspenseful atmosphere and The Long Dream was certainly scary to dwell on.

I understand variable impact on the reader is to be expected for so many different works, but for what Ito described as nine of his best I was a little disappointed.

Outside of this collection, the only work of Ito's I have seen is the one where people enter holes carved out for their bodies (which for the record I also enjoyed).

Are others familar with Junji Ito's work? Recommendations for his or similar artists work would be very welcome.

Edits: paragraphing.