I have been in an unbelievable amount of pain over the past 40 well 13 days and Counting 1313 lasting about pain last week note - yeah last week I kind of mentioned I don't know if it was during the show or just behind the scenes I think was behind the scenes maybe yeah just mentioned I don't listen behind the scenes but but the past week has been excruciating so I suffer from ulnar nerve entrapment which has flared up and those who are aware of what that means I've got a nerve and so do you that goes down your arm and if you go the the repetitive stress injury causes it to swell and when that happens the pain is unbelievable so I'm actually wearing a brace today and I may not be able to use my right arm quite as much as I normally would and and I might flinch a little bit as I do use my right arm but that's what I've been going through for the past 13 days mm-hmm and it's there it comes and goes but it comes in waves and it's been really really bad you do such a good job of not being in pain visually your thank you show I realize that you're so close to me that you probably see the little bit of a yeah I've got like a little bit of a like a like nerve painter like flinches and and spasms and my back has been spasming my my right pack has been like pulling a Terry Crews but unintentionally no control over that just but that's what I've been going through and and those of us who work in an office environment where you're sitting at a desk all the time now I'm not saying it's okay for me to work as hard as I have in the past few weeks that caused this injury that I'm learning to say I have to learn to say no yes we kind of have to learn to say no when when we've got those kinds of deadlines that are or at least say you know maybe next week I was facing a really strong deadline that I promised the customer and I really wanted to achieve that but other things happened a server went down on Monday that I had to deal with and other things took place throughout the course of the week and so I was behind schedule and I had to over the course of two weeks I put in 80 hours on this one project plus working full time plus doing everything else that I did that's a lot so it was really tough and I didn't realize that I was hurting myself and I did so so if you're that person who's sitting at your desk and thinking no I can I can just get through the pain for just a you might have to feel that pain for the next few weeks so so please be careful but my whole reason for explaining this to you is okay for one thing yeah Robbie's human too and so we we all go through the same kind of things that you go through in your office environment and with with life in general but but I had to figure out okay I still have to go to work everyday I still have to sit at my desk and I still have to program websites and do sales and do support and everything else and answer tickets and how can I do that it's been tough I'll admit the paint Voice automate some of that stuff I'm like a headset probably yeah yeah but you get into some expensive stuff the pain has also caused it to be really hard to focus and concentrate so if I seemed to drift during the show tonight just kind of hate take over for me well yeah I'm happening as well so you you ought to be really happy that it's me standing on your right side so I will not like poke you that it's like oh just the guy is gonna hurt Robbie yeah so so if I if I lose my train of thought just know that that's why that that's happening tonight what you mentioned you mentioned that maybe you could use a headset or maybe you could use a device or an accessibility device and yeah yeah absolutely and and on category five technology TV we have in in fact looked at some of some set devices oh cool one of them was a sensor that you put above your monitor and then you wear a special baseball cap and that baseball cap has a sensor dot that the sensor would read and would be a to track your movement of your head and things like that but they get expensive you can get like things that you put on your head that that have sensors that you know you can control that way and I'm by no means in the worst State uh you know there are people that are well worse off than I am and the state that I'm in right now but through trying to figure out how can I still continue to work I thought this would make a really good demonstration because of what I had to go through so as I mentioned we've looked at some technology in the past and the TLDR here's what we're getting into we looked at a program called e via cam a long time ago so enable via cam is what it stands for and it's a free tool for Linux that allows you to control your mouse cursor using your facial movements so in assuming that you you have the capability of moving your head right reasonably precisely so you know you can't it probably won't work for somebody who has mobility issues in their neck those kinds of things or certainly if you have pain in your neck it's probably not a good idea but as a free option for accessibility not necessarily to replace my mouse but to add some accessibility as an alternative to my mouse so with the mouse still on my desk I can forget about the mouse for a few minutes put my arm at my side and let it rest and control my mouse with my face okay imagine if that was possible but unfortunately that demonstration was so old like we're going back many many years here 2012 is when we did that particular demonstration and it was groundbreaking technology at the time but unfortunately it I tried to install it and it didn't work okay so shall we get into it yeah again TLDR I got it to work and I'm gonna show you how to do it tonight okay so let's let's jump right into it I'm gonna show you what happened so first of all the way that I normally would install this and I'm doing this on Linux Mint 19 is I bring up my package manager and just do a search for Evy acam and you'll see that the package comes up there and I can mark it for installation and apply so this is going to download this through the interwebs and install it on my on my Linux Mint system so keep in mind this is a modern Linux Mint system not something like a boon - from 2012 so this is the 2012 software this is the old software right now they've kept up development but let's see what happens so I'm gonna click it's finished installing I'm gonna click on my my applications menu and type in Avaya cam and click on it and I would expect that it would come up but it's not actually doing anything so you know maybe it's not loaded yet or something like that so let's try again and click on it I mean it looks like it installed but it's not actually doing a darn thing right which is not very helpful for me so one way we can find out what's going on with a program is to jump into our terminal and then type in the command that you would use to launch it which is e V ik a man do you see what happened there it's looking for GT k23 but it's got GT k two symbols installed on on this version of Linux Mint so what I actually need to do is install the proper drivers and it can be very very onerous it can be really tough to figure out what do I need to install now right so through this process I decided hey I'll write an installer so get it working for myself but then release this so that you can install this on your Linux Mint 19 system as well if this would be helpful for you and again this is not necessarily a replacement for your mouse but maybe you know somebody or maybe you sometimes need a break and you just need to be able to put your hands down and forget about the mouse for a little bit and this may be the answer for you so resuming there I'm going to jump into my terminal first before I do anything further I'm going to uninstall the version from the repository so again back into synaptic package manager' do a search and unmark it mark for complete removal and apply that so this is just going to rip out all of the stuff that installed before and clean things up I'm not gonna use a flat pack I'm not gonna use snaps I'm gonna use good old Bosch so we're gonna I've got get installed you're gonna need that apt install get but with that installed let's jump into slash temp and get clone my repository which is HTTP colon slash slash github.com slash cap 5 TV / e via cam and hit enter that's gonna clone the software that I created for you CD e bio cam and now just simply sudo dot slash install dot SH and I'm gonna let that run and explain to you what's happening here as I kind of speed that up for the sake of TV so it wouldn't run this fast it takes about 15 minutes to set up so but you can kind of get an impression as to how much junk is actually needed in order to make this go so you would have had to go through this process all by your lonesome there it is WX widgets is what we need to replace so we're actually compiling a new version of wxwidgets after removing the included version on mint 19 because we need to have that GT k3 extension included so and then we're downloading and installing a via cam this it compiles it like this is all a bunch of gibberish I know right this is intense so what the script does and if you look at the install dot SH file is it remove some of the stuff that is that is incompatible full disclosure or disclaimer it could technically break things it's probably not going to but understand what's happening here we're removing WX widgets and installing a new version that has GT k3 and apparently it's done so that it says the command to run a via cam is a via cam just like that right so let's try running the command so remember what it's done is it's removed a couple of things it's installed a whole bunch of dependencies things that are required by a Viacom in order to rate and by WX widgets in order to be compiled and then it's compiled a custom version just for you just for your Linux Mint system I'm going to jump back to my terminal window here just bring backup I'm just going to minimize a couple things there and jump back on to my laptop and if I type e via cam it says not found user slash bin slash via cam let's see if I can make that a little bit I can't make that a little bigger for you I'm gonna tell you verbally what I'm typing so I'm gonna type which evey acam which will show me the actual location of Avaya cam which is user local bin Avaya cam which is apparently not in my path but that's fine I can just I can just run that command and if all goes well so as soon as I hit enter we should see my web cam now keep in mind you do require having a webcam in order to do this but most of us like the laptop has one installed you may have one kicking around and if it's reasonably good quality it should work for you with a via cam running now you can see it's actually tracking my face see that see the box around my face and we've got some some green dots that are happening that are kind of tracking things there that is cool I want to take it to the next level and actually show you how this works but I think before we do that we got to take a break so right after that right after that stick around we're actually going to configure it with the wizard and then we're gonna give it a couple of tests and see like can this really help so that I don't have to put my hand on my mouse I think it's gonna work because nothing ever breaks when you do it when it's when we're on live TV applications we're taking two and now it shouldn't be possible yeah all right for a limited time get your hands on limited-edition shirts from the category 5 TV network these high quality shirts are manufactured by teespring a fundraising website and your purchase will help support the shows we produce get yours today and send us your pictures to be featured on the corresponding show visit cap 5 dot TV slash shirts to support us and get your official Network shirt today cap five dot TV slash shirts welcome back to category five technology TV we have been learning how to hack 2012 not quite we have time travel make it go on 2019 this for us know so we even talking about Evo cam yeah that was originally a 2012 software for Linux well it's been around for a long time first came we to clarify we did a demonstration of it back in package development remember yeah and it worked great back then but it didn't work on a modern Linux operating system right and so you had to make some tweaks download a bunch of yeah I just wrote an installer script just wrote a script that made it go right fair enough yeah now on the break there was two questions that popped up it ok shout room what one was more so of a comment but the one question was from uberaba says what is the application tracking is it the face in the eyes the nipples cuz on your screen you've got the the red box that picks up your face yes and there's the green dots for the okay so let's actually get in there and see what it's seeing do you see that so it's figuring out what is a face so it's putting dots around my nose it's putting dots on my eyes do you see the green dots yeah okay so it's tracking all kinds of stuff all right and now the other comment was from soul boo and so he was watching the compiling and he said the only thing he didn't like is that it was done in route is there another way to do it without being in route you could modify the install that Sh file so that just the make install process happens as route but there are a couple of things that have to be route obviously app install which you can change to sudo if you want within the script also apt remove to get rid of WX widgets it has to be sudo and of course make install so both of those tools WX widgets and Viacom are compiled which does not require route and it's done in a temp folder so it has it is able to access that even as your non root user but that final step the make install requires being able to access system components and of course that requires route right okay so you can modify that I see another issue that you know you know you do raise is that I am accidentally running his route I could no I'm not I'm actually not running his route I thought I was I don't know if you see that I'm running as Robby I had I had run the installer as sudo right sudo dot slash install I didn't do a sudo su so I'm actually running a via cam as a non root user so to answer your question yes you could hack that up feel free to do a PR if you prefer it's up to you but if you look at the script the only things that are happening that are as root that shouldn't necessarily be as root is compiling the software within a slash TMP folder so if there's no harm no foul you can look at the source code and see exactly what's happening there all right let's see it okay so you want to actually get in and see how this works okay so keeping in mind I want to deprecate the need for my mouse or at least supplement the need for my mouse I'm going to click Next and it says ok yeah it detected the integrated camera that's the built-in one and I also tested this with a Microsoft LifeCam and it worked flawlessly okay so locate face automatically yeah of course disable Avaya cam if no face is found I like to turn that on so that if I walk away from my desk it's going to turn off until I turn it back on again that's kind of cool that way if someone sits down at my desk it doesn't start moving to their face right okay next up perform assisted calibration yeah let's do that because I want it to be as accurate as possible move your head left and right so left right left right left right left right how long after my right I don't know Jeff I'm just doing what I'm told here come on okay laughs up and down up and down that hurts to look down this is what you don't want to have any neck problems yeah this is like a 19 oh okay now look look at what's happening now Oh sweetie okay Lincoln it says hover move your head to see how it works which I'm doing so if I move my head and then it disappeared and now I've lost control and I have to actually use my mouse again I was enjoying that that was fun so next Oh well enable pointer control let's set up our axis speed so this is all being controlled with my face so if I go to the left I'm going to zoom out a little bit so that you can see the full window here I'm gonna go to my right and I'm just moving my head here I feel like that's pretty natural like it's it's following but I don't like that I can't oh I can stay Oh neat I can kind of like stand up it might be because it's looking up at me right but that that could be a little bit faster so I'm going to increase that to 14 for looking up and down yeah that feels much nicer left and right feels pretty good that that I don't like having to look up like that so I can adjust that by just kind of adjusting my axis speed now the other thing to keep in mind is when I look at dead center of the screen and I'm not sure that don't worry about the little staticky things they're at what that is but when I look dead center of the screen I can use the touchpad on my laptop or your actual physical Mouse to Center the cursor while I'm looking dead center so now it's basically calibrated because if my mouse is over here and then I look at the screen and then I go left I'm gonna have to go left left left left left left right if I instead look dead center of the screen and then Center it with my mouse or with my cursor with the touchpad then I feel like hey this is much much more natural good I'm gonna hover over next and I'm not clicking anything I'm just hovering because it waits for a moment to see if I've welled see that well click default gesture click is also available though I've not figured it out and I'm getting some anomalies on the screen I don't I've never had that happen yet and so it may be just the laptop and the way that I've got that connected so just know that that anomaly that you see that flickering that is not something that I've encountered yet but this is the first time that I've plugged in the HDMI to the laptop could it also be because of the calibration that you're doing no I think it's like a video driver issue because I've got HDMI output going to our broadcast server so now I can hover over next and just wait and it clicked ok so now I can go run this wizard at startup click start a Viacom at user login click impossible to get permissions for file no such file or directory oh no because it doesn't have a launcher that's fine enable Avaya cam and startup good ok finish again I'm controlling that 100% exclusively with my face hands-free yeah hands-free so my hands are up here folks nobody is nobody's messing around this is not a gimmick so you know folks are aware know where your mouse is it's just a touchpad just a touchpad on the couch ok yeah so I'm going to with my hands-free I'm just gonna like try a couple of things oh I see like a window up here that allows me to change the click action which is kind of cool and I'm gonna probably try that I'm gonna go down and and click on the menu by just hovering my face and then let's go on to let's say the Internet Chrome so I've kind of gotten used to now you've lost me I wonder if I can get over can I with my face actually get over to the restore button and now I'm not sure if the window yeah I'm not sure how to move it so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna touch my mouse button and then move it and my face okay so I'm using the hovering the dwell to click which I don't particularly like myself so I'm gonna hover over pause there we go so now as I move around because what I find happens in that instance is that I'm clicking on stuff as I'm reading websites because when you're when you dwell to read something all of a sudden you start clicking with your face right so what I prefer now I have a trackpad at my desk so I actually turn it sideways and use my left hand to just tap the mouse button so I don't have to use the trackball or anything I just use my face and I control it with that way but then I click with my left hand this is great this instance so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to tap the mouse button on my laptop so again with my left hand which is not affected by the ulnar nerve entrapment I'm going to just put my hand over top of that mouse button so now I can look around and I can move the window see what I'm doing there with my head it's a very subtle gesture but I can you know go like that and let's let's actually do some stuff can I get rid of this window here yes I'm gonna hover my head right there click and that gets rid of that can I make a request you can absolutely can you quest type something can you pull up a keyboard and type something you could if you wanted to use an on-screen keyboard oh I don't I I I'm not at that point like I can still use my hands okay I just want to get away from using the mouse right and an on-screen keyboard could be pretty yeah the the scope of where you could take this technology oh yeah you all that stuff you if you have real issues with like that extend beyond I can still use my mouse it just really hurts so I try and and you know I'm told I really need to let this rest for three weeks so I try to stay away from the mouse if I can so this gives me an opportunity to only use my left hand and then I'll type with my left hand but sometimes I'll bring my right hand in and I'll start typing as well okay so no yes Jeff what if you throw a second face on the screen doesn't mess it up we could always try that Jeff I mean typically you're sitting at your desk with with yourself right so here's me controlling yeah does it pick you up no no so now if I get out of the rain org can you control it now oh yeah yep you're not calibrated see it was off to the right calibrated Soyuz so because this is your first time ever doing it Jeff use the mouse to put it in the center while you look into the center all right hold on so actually well you're moving your head at the same time as I'm saying okay all right all right Wow so that that switches to a different user very easily yeah now get out of here get out of here all right yeah and the calibration is pretty simple right so I'll just use my touchpad so let's say okay so I brought up Chrome let's bring up my website so oh I've probably already got it here so category five TV remember I'm just using my left hand my right hand is completely free okay so I'm just clicking oh that's the forum so do I have home yes beautiful see how how easy it was for me to actually point with my head to the home button and that's not a small like that's not a big button all right okay so we're live on the air let's let's actually use the search feature so I'm going to bring up search and I'm going to type a via cam on our website because that's how you can find this video once it goes live and let's actually use that scroll bar on the right hand side and see if I can actually manage and I'm looking down that is see this and there's that episode yeah that's the episode episode 259 from September 2000 2012 so Wow okay so I'm able to click around pretty accurately is that Sasha's for show says introducing Sasha yeah yeah your first show remember my first oh well now you know I account so and now you have the answer to that so I was impressed with the touch screen when you used your touch to click the X because that takes some precision the X is pretty small do you think I can click the X and close Chrome with my face now I'm gonna click with my finger my left hand but can I do this with my face so yes yes I can as I nod and the cursor goes all over the place that's another thing to to mention I'm gonna just show you this really really quickly let's say I look way up because oh there's a bird up oh right Reese entered actually yeah now with the calibrations a little bit off so what I can actually do is I can look up until it hits the edge of the screen look down till it hits the edge of the screen look left and look right and and it will basically send her itself as well so now when I look dead at the center of the screen the mouse cursor is basically in the center of the screen it's amazing when I move to the left it's moving with me and and it's actually it gives the sense that it's following my eyes because it's so incredibly accurate now if you go it's free if you go closer to your webcam would your face movements be smaller to impact the movement like a baby has limited neck mobility if they were fabulous right in here yeah so what is the mobility like here so it's much more sensitive but I could adjust that remember my sensitivity settings so I could adjust that and it is right now I've got it set for me standing back here right because that's how I calibrated it okay so you did have a webcam closer to your face you could do with limited movement oh yeah oh absolutely sure yeah and it's very it's very sensitive so I'm gonna just barely move my head watch the mouse cursor I'm gonna look I'm going to point to the number one there that's in green are you ready okay so watch how sensitive this is okay so I'm just barely moving there get down to that see that okay so let's click the X hello easy okay so let's bring up calc so where would I find that office LibreOffice calc okay this is similar to me wanting you to use it I keyboard you know sure yeah but here I am controlling this and I promise you I'm not touching the touchpad no gimmicks no tricks I am only controlling this with my face but clicking the mouse button on the laptop with my left hand so here I am in calc so and and this is being controlled with my face I'm just gonna calibrate by looking left and looking right looking up looking down and let's click on give me a cell number that's on the screen so like k10 i think that would be well here's kay and there's that's 9 10 no 11 there let's do one a little closer to here so I can see the edge so B what B 5 B 5 okay there you go so I'm doing that with my face so it's that simple I can I can click with my left finger and drag click around and I'm not having any trouble getting my you know no pun intended but my head around this I'm not having any trouble with the controls mm-hmm I did turn off the dwell clicking because I find that it's easier to just use my left hand to click right but other than that beautiful there you have it folks I cannot believe that it was my first show there you go now you know right this is not gonna be my last show yeah I lost there we are now I mean obviously we're not set up for this but it makes me wonder could you use this for you know other purposes like yes like I don't know like some sort of you know simple gaming or something like as a first practice shooter like I don't that's it I don't know - Christmas points and click games yes yeah I don't see why not but realistically this is just like controls for your computer to help with your day-to-day yeah ok can you click by winking no so what you can do is a left click is a tap your head to the left a right click is a tap your head to the right double-click is a tap up/down is um I don't know I never got that working personally I but I didn't I didn't need it right is there let's let's actually bring that up and I clicked on the run now in my new line of work I have encountered people with very significant dwell mobility issues and now I'm just gonna be talking this up all the time you you get into the to the documentation for that there is that capability but I didn't I can like it or why it's helpful in my case because I'm using the click button but there is the feature to use that like quick look to the left - left click for example so there you have it that is a via cam is running on Linux Mint 19 in 2019 so my system if I did an apt upgrade an apt up dist upgrade everything's current I'm running the current kernel and it's up to date and we're now running a via cam on this system using it all install script nana's and just so I'm clear I didn't create a via cam I didn't do anything more than look through some of the issues that were posted on their github see what how other people have fixed this and then just made it easier for you so that if you want to use this you don't have to do the same process and maybe there's somebody out there who wants to use this and is not quite as technically savvy to follow those kinds of things so so it really helps now thinking about what you said about you know this is your Linux Mint 19 yeah if you did a because something had to change in order to make this happen if two weeks down the road you do an update and an upgrade is that going to undo that stuff no so it should all still be in place crypt moves the stuff that affects its functionality and replaces it with a pre compiled version right get overwritten no no no it'd be good to go only a final note is that it's for Linux as you're probably aware so way to go Linux yeah you win again that won't be a problem for any of us or remember it's Linux updates don't generally break things Jeff that's true dude give a warning all the links are below yeah that's just a caveat there a protection for myself breaks if it breaks your system don't come runnin to me yeah but it links are below you can click click around to to find your way to Eve I account enjoy [Music] [Applause]