This evening was lecture 3 of the image processing course that I am tutoring, dealing with some more basic image operations such as edge detection and binary morphological operations. By combining these you can do quite a lot of interesting things, such as image segmentation – identifying the shapes of objects and structures in an image.
The lecturer tried a workaround for the problem I had last week with unmuting my audio. During the tutorial time, he set Zoom so that nobody could unmute themselves. It turned out that this was a useful workaround – because when I joined a team chat on MS Teams, and unmuted myself, Zoom popped up an error dialogue telling me that it couldn’t unmute me because the host had disabled it. So I could talk on Teams without also talking on Zoom, like happened last week. But it does definitely indicate that clicking the unmute button on Teams is – for some reason – attempting to unmute me on Zoom as well.
I discussed this with some friends and they seemed to think this must be because the mute functions in both Teams and Zoom are implemented by accessing the global audio settings of my computer, rather than settings local to each program. So seemingly I can’t unmute just one program – both programs actually tell the system to unmute the whole computer. Which seems a completely daft way to implement things. And also – why do only I seem to have this problem? Why isn’t the net full of people making the same complaint??
Anyway, technical problems aside, today’s lesson went more smoothly than last week. I joined several student team chats and helped the students with various problems and questions. It’s good doing useful work and having students appreciate the assistance.
Other things I did today included the final lesson of the ethics of machines and robots with my Monday morning group. And going out for a walk at lunch to get some fish & chips and eat with Scully in the park overlooking the harbour.
The weather by the way is very spring-like. Warm and sunny, and many trees are starting to put out new green shoots and foliage. It’s definitely the start of the new season already… a very early end to winter. August is usually cold and very windy here in Sydney, but no sign of that at all yet. Temperatures for the next week will be 20-24°C.
New content today:
Teams “Mute” does not mute the system. The two functions are totally separate, at least in Windows 10 and Linux clients.
“Clocking” the mute button (your typo), in both American and (I believe) Cockney slang, would mean to knock it unconscious.
Falling into my IT personality: if you are the only person experiencing this issue, it’s likely something unique to your system. Do you have any sort of audio add-ons? Are you using the Windows clients, or the web browser clients?
I’m using MacOS, with no audio add-ons that I’m aware of. I seldom use audio for anything. Using stand-alone Zoom and Teams client apps.
Unfortunately, I have no experience with Team or Zoom on a Mac. I haven’t supported them since 2005.