Video chat applications

My mother likes to be able to do video chat with me but my parents' ADSL broadband connection perhaps isn't great and she is challenged by learning a new non-trivial interaction with the computer.

Years ago I had installed Ekiga for her but we had ongoing connection issues that the developers didn't. Mostly it would somewhat work but not reliably. At my end I also experimented with other SIP/H.323 clients like Linphone. We have had some success with Google Hangouts but I don't like the idea of closed source solutions (I'd especially like to avoid Skype, Zoom, etc.) and as Google distribute the Hangouts plugin as deb/rpm packages rather than as an xpi or suchlike it would be a pain to install on Void Linux anyway. So, I thought I'd try something WebRTC-based, but an attempt using appear.in seems to have foundered: after a minute or so one of us freezes and drops out, it's again unreliable. If that means I should expect the same of other WebRTC-based sites I don't know.

I never have such issues when using various means to videochat with work colleagues so I am guessing that the problem's at my parents' end. While I suppose my parents' BT HomeHub might be doing something bad to the traffic, my guess is simply that, of the people I speak to like this, my mother's the one whose Internet connectivity most resembles a piece of wet string and that what I need is some software that's rather robust in the face of that.

It's all rather disappointing anyway. This kind of software has been widely available for many years now, it should just work at this point. Annoyingly, if I used untrustworthy closed-source stuff, I expect that it indeed would work just fine.

Computer keyboard layout

As one might expect my new laptop computer has the two Windows keys on each side next to the two ALT keys and is UK layout. Getting used to a UK keyboard is weird. I used to set the Windows keys to produce useful symbols for me like £, ¢, °, →, that kind of thing. I am not sure that my thumbs are enjoying the buttons at the bottom of the touchpad though so right now I am quite liking having mapped the left key to the left mouse button and the right key to the middle mouse button.

Void Linux offers fewer packages than Debian but typically still ones that do what I want. In this case I have replaced xmacroplay with xdotool. Or, as another example, ssvnc isn't offered so I simply grabbed the tightvnc JAR.