colinodell.com - Blog

DIY "On Air" light automation for Google Meet

Colin O'Dell — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 21:57:31 -0400

Like any good project, this one started with a problem: how do I let my wife know I'm in a meeting so she doesn't let the dog barge in? (I work remotely and my office is the only way to get to the backyard.)

The solution: build my own "On Air" light that turns on/off automatically when I'm in a meeting! Sure, there are commercially-available products that do exactly this, but where's the fun in buying something when I have the skills and equipment to build my own? Just how hard could it be? (famous last words)

False Starts

My first idea was to detect whether the camera or microphone was in use so my solution would work with any conferencing software. It turns out this isn't easy to do with MacOS. The closest I got was using this Golang library - it gives the correct state of the hardware at first, but subsequent checks within the same process fail to detect state changes, and I don't know enough Objective C and MacOS API internals to figure out the solution.

So ultimately I gave up on that approach and settled on a more naive solution - create a Chrome extension that detects whether a meeting is active. Sounds easy enough, right? Extensions even have a nice feature allowing you to run code whenever a page matches a certain URL pattern! This works great for knowing that I'm in a meeting, but then how do I detect if I've left? window.onunload seems useful on the surface but isn't reliable enough. I also considered sending periodic still-in-a-meeting messages from the content script to the background script and waiting for a timeout to indicate that I've left, but that doesn't allow for instantaneous updates, and it also fails to reset the state if Chrome is closed before the timeout occurs.

A Solution Appears!

I ultimately settled on using just a service worker in a Chrome extension to listen to tab state changes. Any time a tab is opened, removed, or navigates to a new URL, I check whether any tab contains a URL that looks like an active Google Meet; for example:

https://meet.google.com/xxx-xxxx-xxx
https://meet.google.com/_meet/xxx-xxxx-xxx

The logic ends up being really simple:

const tabs = await chrome.tabs.query({
    url: "https://meet.google.com/*-*-*",
});
const isInMeeting = tabs.length > 0;

I then check it against the previous state (to avoid sending redundant "not-in-a-meeting" messages when I'm opening/closing/navigating other non-Meet tabs). The last step was building out a configuration page to tell the extension how to update this state in Home Assistant:

And then created a virtual toggle switch in Home Assistant that my extension could toggle remotely:

And that's it! I now had a working Chrome extension that would detect my meeting presence and allow me to automate based on this in Home Assistant.

The Light

I briefly considered building a true "On Air" light like this one but decided against it because 3D prints take forever. I ended up flashing my previously-built (and unused) Weather Lamp with WLED so I could control it via Home Assistant.

Once I had both the extension data and WLED connected in Home Assistant, it was just a matter of creating an automation between the two!

(I used Node-RED for this, but HA's built-in automation system would work just fine.)

And here's the final result! When I'm not in a meeting, the light is green:

And it turns red when I'm in a meeting:

(I mounted this down low simply because it was closer to the outlet in the closet and would minimize the length of exposed USB cable)

And after documenting this project I later made a few tweaks:

Animated the red in-meeting state to flash and spin the LEDs
Improved the automation to turn the light off when I'm not in the office
Rewrote the extension using Typescript, React, and async/await to practice my burgeoning frontend skills

Build Your Own!

You can build your own DIY "On Air" light using the same basic building blocks like the Chrome extension, tweaking them as needed.

For example, you can build or use any type of light you want - just integrate it with Home Assistant! Or you could fork my extension and add support for some other type of meeting software. The nice thing about DIY open-source solutions is the ability to customize it to fit your needs exactly!

league/commonmark 2.0.0 Released!

Colin O'Dell — Sat, 24 Jul 2021 13:33:06 -0400

After 96 releases, 368 pull requests, and over 48 million downloads, I'm pleased to share that the next major version of league/commonmark 2.0.0 stable is now generally available! 🎉🎉

You can install the latest version via Composer:

composer require league/commonmark:^2.0

What's new in 2.0?

There's so much to cover, but here are the key improvements and changes:

Up to 50% faster and 21% less memory usage, especially when dealing with larger Markdown documents
Three new extensions for Front Matter, Description Lists, and Default HTML Attributes
A new XML renderer to simplify AST debugging
Completely revamped parsing engine for faster speed and more precise parsing control (for blocks, inlines, and delimiters)
A unified rendering approach for both blocks and inlines
Compatibility with PSR-14 event dispatcher libraries
Psalm purity markers throughout the codebase
Minimal BC-breaks for most users
Tons more!

Upgrading from 1.x

The upgrade process will vary based on whether you have custom functionality or are simply using the library as-is. I've therefore split the upgrading guide into three parts to help you understand the changes that impact you:

For Consumers - you use the library as-is and maybe even enable some additional extensions
For Integrators - you maintain an integration between this library and something else, like a CMS or framework
For Developers - you write custom extensions and like to tinker under-the-hood

The Future of 1.x

Per the usual policies, the 1.6 branch will continue to receive bug fixes for at least 3 months and security updates for 6 months, if not longer, depending on the severity of any issues. No further minor releases (like 1.7.0) will be made, meaning that all new features and spec compliance updates will only be added to 2.0 and higher. You are therefore strongly encouraged to upgrade to the new version if/when you can.

If for any reason you can't upgrade immediately, that's alright - 1.6 is very stable and should work just fine until you're able to upgrade. And of course, if you're stuck on an older version of PHP you can keep using 1.6 too.

If you're using Laravel, note that support for league/commonmark v1 is being dropped in Larvel 9. Other frameworks and integrations will also like drop 1.x support from new major releases over the rest of this year.

Roadmap for 2.1 and 3.0

You didn't think development was over now that 2.0.0 is released, did you? We're already planning some exciting new features for future versions:

Coming in 2.1

Coming in 3.0

Two-way conversion from Markdown/HTML/XML to Markdown/HTML/XML, including pretty-printing Markdown
The ability to programmatically toggle task list items and save the updated Markdown

(The features above are subject to change)

Thank You

I owe a huge debt of thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, including (in no particular order):

Every developer who has installed, used, shared, or contributed to this project
Everyone in the PHP League for their mentorship and assistance over the years
John MacFarlane, GitHub, Atlassian, and others for working on the CommonMark spec, GFM spec, and reference parsers that this project is based on
Everyone who sponsors my open-source welcome, especially Geoff Thompson, Taylor Otwell, Dan Brown, Josh Bruce, and Spatie
The entire PHP community

Auto-Updating Twitter Banners

Colin O'Dell — Sat, 03 Jul 2021 09:17:44 -0400

If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed a fancy new banner image:

This is powered by dynacover - a really nifty tool created by Erika Heidi that automagically generates and uploads dynamic Twitter banner images! I'm running a slightly modified instance with a custom template that updates every 10 minutes via cron. Currently, my banner is showing my recent Twitter followers as well as my GitHub sponsors, though I'm thinking of some other interesting things I can pull into it in the near future.

Try it out

Want to see it in action by having your avatar appear in my banner?

Follow me on Twitter or sponsor me on GitHub
Wait up to 10 minutes
Reload my Twitter profile and see yourself in my banner!

A huge thanks to Erika for releasing this awesome project!

Follow me on Polywork

Colin O'Dell — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 17:37:17 -0400

If you follow me on Twitter you've probably seen that I've recently joined Polywork - a new social network unlike any others.

Polywork has a unique concept - instead of focusing on just your personal or professional life, your profile focuses on highlighting you as a multi-faceted individual. There's no commenting, no competing for likes, no recruiters, no politics - just you and your story:

I love how it presents my profile as a multi-faceted story with a timeline showing my personal growth and evolution over time. I've been busy adding different role changes, open-source releases, conference engagements, and more to my timeline. (Although no automated import tools exist yet, I've heard they're working on some features, so fingers-crossed we'll get things like RSS feed imports soon!)

The platform is still invite-only, but they've graciously provided me with 50 VIP invite codes to share so you can join too! To join, simply:

Visit https://www.polywork.com/users/sign_up_vip to create your account
Enter code colinodell when prompted
Follow me once you're on and I'll follow you back 😉

See you there!

(And no, this is not a paid advertisement - I've genuinely enjoyed exploring the platform and wanted to share it with everyone!)

league/commonmark 2.0.0-beta2 now available for testing

Colin O'Dell — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:30:54 -0400

With the 2.0.0 stable release of league/commonmark scheduled for next month, I'm pleased to share that the first 2.0 beta releases are now available! Current users of this library are highly encouraged to test this new branch and provide feedback.

You can install the beta release via Composer:

composer require league/commonmark:^2.0@beta

What's new in 2.0?

There's so much to cover - I'll likely need to write a separate blog post about that. But here are the key improvements and changes:

Up to 50% faster and 21% less memory usage, especially when dealing with larger Markdown documents
Three new extensions for Front Matter, Description Lists, and Default HTML Attributes
A new XML renderer to simplify AST debugging
Completely revamped parsing engine for faster speed and more precise parsing control (for blocks, inlines, and delimiters)
A unified rendering approach for both blocks and inlines
Compatibility with PSR-14 event dispatcher libraries
Psalm purity markers throughout the codebase
Tons more!

I'll share more details on this, including the new benchmarks, closer to the 2.0.0 stable release. In the meantime, I'd highly recommend reviewing the upgrading guide and CHANGELOG for additional details on what's changed and how you can start testing 2.0 today.

This is going to be the most exciting release and I can't wait to share it with all of you!

Correction: A previous revision of this post claimed "up to 70%" performance improvement. I divided by the wrong number - it's actually 50%.

Fixing Broken Squad Chat Audio Issues in Battlefield V

Colin O'Dell — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 19:27:15 -0400

I know this isn't a normal topic for this blog, but after helping a fellow player on a private Battlefield 5 forum I wanted to share the fix with the broader internet.

Basically, if you have any of these in-game issues with in-squad VoIP:

No sound at all
Lots of static
Low volume
Sound coming from the wrong speakers

There's a strong chance the issue is that your default communications device is not set to the right device in Windows' audio settings:

I can't guarantee this will fix all squad chat problems in BF5, but hopefully it helps you 😉

(Teaser image from Unsplash)

league/commonmark 1.6.0 Released!

Colin O'Dell — Sat, 01 May 2021 15:24:28 -0400

I'm excited to share that version 1.6.0 of league/commonmark has been released! This will be the last minor release of the 1.x branch - all efforts will now be focused on wrapping up development of 2.0.0!

Please see https://commonmark.thephpleague.com/1.6/upgrading/ for important information about this release and the upcoming 2.0.0 version.

If you'd like to help fund development of this library, please check out my Sponsor page. We also have some Markdown t-shirts and mugs on ModernGeekware.com:

All proceeds go towards helping with the development and maintenance of this library.

Hope you enjoy this new release and I look forward to releasing 2.0.0 very soon. Cheers!

PHP 8.1 is Getting Enumerations!

Colin O'Dell — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 15:08:30 -0500

The PHP RFC for enumerations just passed a 44-7 vote to be accepted as a new feature in the upcoming PHP 8.1 release!

Enumerations, also known as "enums", are a special data type that can only contain specific, predefined (or "enumerated") values. They behave somewhat similar to constants, in that their names can be referenced in code, but they allow for stronger typing.

The classic use case illustrated by the RFC is of an enum that defines different suits of playing cards:

enum Suit {
  case Hearts;
  case Diamonds;
  case Clubs;
  case Spades;
}

From the RFC:

This declaration creates a new enumerated type named Suit, which has four and only four legal values: Suit::Hearts, Suit::Diamonds, Suit::Clubs, and Suit::Spades. Variables may be assigned to one of those legal values. A function may be type checked against an enumerated type, in which case only values of that type may be passed.

function pick_a_card(Suit $suit) { ... }
 
$val = Suit::Diamonds;
 
pick_a_card($val);        // OK
pick_a_card(Suit::Clubs); // OK
pick_a_card('Spades');    // TypeError: pick_a_card(): Argument #1 ($suit)
                          // must be of type Suit, string given

Enums can do more than just that - check out the RFC for a list of examples and capabilities.

I'm personally super excited about this feature and can't wait to start using them in my projects!

Introducing ModernGeekware.com - Tees, Mugs, and more for Developers and Geeks

Colin O'Dell — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 14:38:46 -0500

As a developer, I LOVE my geeky t-shirts and mugs, but it's hard to find quality products with designs I like. I've therefore been hard at work these last few weekends putting together my new project: www.moderngeekware.com

I'm excited to share that ModernGeekware.com just launched this Sunday! There are currently 28 products in the store and I hope to add more in the coming days and weeks. Everything here was designed by me mostly because they're all things I'd want to buy and wear myself. (In fact, I'm my own first customer!) I figured perhaps others might like them too, thus this store was born.

This is my first personal ecommerce site so I would really love to hear what you think about it! Do I have a good mix of products? Anything that I'm missing?

And if you see something you like, check out https://www.moderngeekware.com/pages/promotions for a coupon code and a contest form to win anything from the store for free!

How To Install PHP 8.0

Colin O'Dell — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 08:19:05 -0500

PHP 8.0 has just been released! This new major version adds several significant features and improvements to the language like attributes, match expressions, Just-In-Time compilation (JIT), and much more!

Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 8.0 on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X:

Ubuntu

PHP 8.0 and commonly-used extensions can be installed by adding Ondřej Surý's PPA:

sudo apt install -y software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update

You can then install PHP 8.0 with all common extensions and SAPIs like so:

sudo apt install php8.0

Or you can specify individual packages like this instead:

sudo apt install php8.0-cli php8.0-fpm php8.0-bcmath php8.0-curl php8.0-gd php8.0-intl php8.0-mbstring php8.0-mysql php8.0-opcache php8.0-sqlite3 php8.0-xml php8.0-zip

This method is supported on:

Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)
Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic)
Ubuntu 20.01 (Focal)
Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy)

Debian

Ondřej Surý also provides PHP 8.0 packages for Debian. Add the repository with these commands:

sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https lsb-release ca-certificates wget
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/php.gpg https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg
echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list
sudo apt update

And then either install PHP 8.0 with all the defaults like this:

sudo apt install php8.0

Or list the exact packages you want instead:

sudo apt install php8.0-cli php8.0-fpm php8.0-bcmath php8.0-curl php8.0-gd php8.0-intl php8.0-mbstring php8.0-mysql php8.0-opcache php8.0-sqlite3 php8.0-xml php8.0-zip

This method is supported on:

Debian 9 (Stretch)
Debian 10 (Buster)

CentOS / RHEL & Fedora

Remi's RPM repository has RPMs for the latest PHP 8.0 builds.

RHEL/Centos 8 or Fedora modular:

dnf module reset php
dnf module install php:remi-8.0

RHEL/Centos 7 or Fedora:

yum-config-manager --enable remi-php80
yum update php\*

Or for parallel installation as a software collection, if you prefer to keep existing versions:

yum install php80

Refer to Remi's blog post for additional information on how to install this depending on which OS version you're running.

Mac OS X

Shivam Mathur has a Homebrew tap for easily installing PHP 8.0:

# Update homebrew
brew update

# Add the tap
brew tap shivammathur/php

# Install PHP 8.0
brew install shivammathur/php/[email protected]

Windows

Windows users can find the PHP 8.0 distributions on the windows.php.net website.

Docker

Official PHP images can be found on Docker Hub.

As of PHP 8.0's release date, the php:8.0 image hasn't been tagged yet; once it is, you can use that for your base images.

Docker is also a great way to tinker with PHP 8.0 in a local interactive shell without installing it first! Simply run this in your terminal:

docker run -it --rm php:8.0