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When the online classes started 8 months ago, I used to greet my
students with... nothing. Yes, nothing, just the Zoom boxes indicating
that I had my camera off until the class start time, but as the weeks
went by I started to feel that I had to change something about
that. It's true that only about 7 students were waiting before 8am, the
rest were arriving at 8am or later, but for those who are punctual,
seeing my camera off must not be the warmest welcome.
In early November or so, I saw my brother waiting for one of his college
classes to start. The professor had a picture with the theme of the day
and some music playing in the background, and believe it or not, it
hadn't occurred to me to do that. So that same day I opened a text
editor, wrote what we would see that day and projected the window as a
"waiting room".
The idea escalated quickly, and I began to spend time adding events I
remembered, decorating it with the help of `cowsay' and even downloaded
a pack of cows for `cowsay' with cartoon and movie themes to choose
from. In December, for Christmas, I decided to go from a simple terminal
I was preparing minutes before, to an image edited in GIMP from the
night before. The image simulated a Christmas card with the date and the
themes of the day, all accompanied with Christmas music at a healthy 50%
volume, because some children have their devices with the volume at 100%
and could be bothered by my music.
January 2021 arrived and the idea of a "waiting room" had become well
entrenched and it was time to take it to its fullest expression. From
this month on I started to add events, famous phrases (thank you
`fortune') and the weather forecast, in addition to making the images
allusive to the month in question: in January I simulated a classroom,
in February it was a heart, and in March a flower being born with a
/low-poly/ art. Always, or almost always, accompanied by calm music,
mainly lo-fi hip-hop or Yiruma-style piano.
I like to believe that it was my idea that was taken up, although it
is also very likely that it was not. Be that as it may, starting in
April, after spring break, the school management asked us, as an
institutional activity that we all had to do, to project a "waiting
room" before the arrival of the students. Yes, what I had been doing
since November. The difference is that now we were asked to make it
"interactive". Contrary to what you might expect, this does not mean
that the children must necessarily interact with the image (although a
couple of ideas come to my mind on how to implement it), but it must
be "fun", with emojis or some game like the ones we see on facebook of
finding differences and similar things.
To help us with this new task, the school recommended an online
platform called `classroomscreen ` that allows us to create
interactive whiteboards. Personally I have several problems with that
platform, from its obviously proprietary license, or that it doesn't
allow to save the whiteboards so I have to design it minutes before
the class, but my biggest problem is that, I think at least, I can get
better results using the tools at my disposal in GNU/Linux natively.
To be honest, the only "interactivity" part requested was a timer (I
don't get it), everything else I was already doing. But since January
I was experiencing annoyances that I wanted to fix and couldn't find
how using only one image in GIMP. For example, the space for all the
information I wanted was sometimes too little, and I was already
starting to get annoyed of every day changing the date and
weather. Also, I always wanted to show information about the music
that was playing, but you can't do that with static images. I was
thinking of trying something like android widgets... and then I
remembered Plasma 5 plasmoids.
I'm not a Plasma 5 user, in fact I'm currently using herbsluftwm, but
it was worth installing it if it allowed me to display the information
as I wanted. And indeed it did, I got quite satisfactory results using
the calendar, the weather widget, and some widgets I downloaded from
the store. The only thing I couldn't solve was the text part, because
there was no way to include all the information (topic of the day,
events, the word of the day according to the RAE, a puzzle and a
literary recommendation) in so little space without looking too
overloaded. So I had to solve this part by creating all the text in
images without background, and use the image widget to display them as
slides.
The result was pretty good in my opinion. If we add Plasma's
"Activities", logic says that I would have a quite productive and
useful workflow. At least I thought so, but Plasma soon started to
give me problems. My widgets would sometimes disappear, the two
screens would decide to swap as they pleased, and some shortcuts and
extensions wouldn't activate properly. But the worst was in me, and it
was my muscle memory and my habit of using Tiling Window Managers,
that even using `Khronkite' and other extensions, the use of the mouse
and visual menus was impossible to avoid. A couple of days later I was
back in herbstluftwm, but I couldn't get back to the images I used to
do.
Without Plasma 5, my only alternative to have widgets on the desktop
is conky. Conky was my first choice, but setting it up can be a pain
in the ass, that's without considering that it's not too popular
anymore and most widgets date back to 2015, so I would most likely
have to start from scratch. And so it was, but the truth is that it
was not so bad, the widgets I have made are, to tell the truth, quite
simple, but I think they replace Plasma without problems. Again for
the text portions I had to make use of transparent images, and thanks
to the image viewer `pqiv' I can show them in `slideshow' mode with
the background of the window completely transparent. This is the model
I'm currently working on, a pretty crazy journey eh? Nothing to do
with the terminal with `cowsay' of a few months ago.
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering, is it worth all
this effort? Honestly, I'm not sure! I will mention what I am sure of:
many children are unaware of what I project. What's more, many come to
class after the start time and don't even know that I planned
something in the morning. So, given that it doesn't give any apparent
result, why keep doing it? Well... apart from the fact that it's been
mandatory for a couple of months now, because I want to, there's not
much more to it than that, besides, just as I'm sure many don't notice
the images, I'm equally sure that some do. Knowing that motivates me
every night to dig into the wikipedia of the day to look for relevant
events and to look for ways to reinvent it, no matter that it's only
shown 10 minutes a day to 5 people on average.