A couple of weeks ago I was in an important company meeting. Everybody was quiet and listening to the CEO, everybody was focused on the slide deck the CEO was presenting and everybody had their mic and cam turned off. Well, everybody, but me 🤦♂️
While I was watching the stream, my Google account session expired for some reason. So I rushed to login again: username, password and then the phone for the 2FA code and then look for the stream link and finally
Good! I got the stream again!
A couple of minutes in and Slack started to notify me: half a dozen people telling me that my camera was on and I was messing with the CEO’s presentation:
D’OH!
I turned off the damn thing, I apologized and I moved on. It was a glitch, shit happens and nobody remembered it 5 minutes later. Nobody but me! So I looked for a solution to start every Google Meet call with my camera and my mic off.
A Google Search later, I found Hangremote by Marcelo Rossi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hangremote/naabbdmohmekdgecllphidjiaobnekcc
The extension is open source, so no surprises. The source code is on Github.
Now all my meetings start with no camera and no mic. I don’t freak out anymore and there is no chance for me to end up streaming my dog barking to all my company 😂
PS: My dog doesn’t bark, because he is a good boy 😍🐶