Here’s my quick video review of the Plenom Busylight. It’s a small LED light that plugs into a USB port on your computer and changes color to reflect your presence status in Teams, Skype, Zoom, Jabber, or several other UC clients.
The executive summary: great device, well worth US$50 or so to help communicate your presence status to the partners, spouses, small children, and passers-by who may be in, around, or near your working-under-quarantine location.
Now, a couple of production notes. I wanted to record the video using my Logitech desktop webcam. It’s a C920, by no means the latest and greatest, but I didn’t want to fool around with finding a mount or tripod for my iPhone. My first thought was to use TechSmith’s Camtasia because it’s usually my go-to Windows tool for video work. I didn’t have it installed, though, so a little rummaging around led me to Logitech Capture, a surprisingly nice free utility that allows you to capture video from Logitech desktop webcams. It includes basic composition and exposure controls and the ability to simultaneously record with two cameras (which I didn’t test). For free, I was delighted with it; it did exactly what I wanted done with a very small learning curve. Pancake the cat, on the other hand, remains undecided.
Writing about a USB light doesn’t seem like the kind of thing serious book publishing people like the Office 365 for IT Pros team should be doing. But we have a lighthearted side too…
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