One thing after another throughout my life, I have needed to familiarise myself with matters that I had never considered before. Because of this excellent plague year, I now teach my course online for the rest of the semester. After a two-week break during a worldwide pandemic quarantine, the university found its bearings. Thus I was ordered to begin teaching week 7 onwards through the interwebs.
I taught my students from Irfan’s room in the back.
I’m an online teacher!
So far it has been good. I still wish that I had an audience to interact with. No, that’s not right. I do have one, but I wish I could meet their eyes to judge their growing understanding of the lesson.
In the meantime, I have set up my “studio” so to speak. I address my classes via Google Meet. However, the laptop which runs on 32-bit Linux Mint 18.3 has a slight defect. If the webcam is on, the desktop speaker would be inundated by an annoyingly loud low frequency interference. The interference is a constant throughout various programmes from Google Meet to Discord.
In order to overcome the complication, I log into Meet from two different accounts from the phone and the laptop respectively. Using the phone camera and disabling the laptop webcam, I was able to screenshare from the laptop and talk to the phone without generating the noise.
However, something is wrong with the laptop as a whole. It has been intermittently freezing up for three minutes or more, especially when Cinnamon or Nemo is being used heavily.
I have to engineer a fix before I am unable to use the laptop to teach.
