Just showing you the tail end of a Google Charts Map integration with Squarespace. If you’re currently using Squarespace but there’s some extra functionality that you’re missing, let me know and maybe I can figure out a solution.



Some notes about this Google Maps <-> Squarespace integration:

– After the user submits the contact form, the new pin is appended to both the Google Sheet (via Squarespace) and the Javascript-generated map.

– It will automatically expand to fit the outermost pin, like if somebody signs up in New York, the map will zoom out to show Texas and New York. Likewise, if everyone has a Texas zipcode, it’ll zoom in to Texas. As the map fills up it will gradually zoom out over the whole US.

– The map is horizontally responsive and I tested it on mobile too.

– The Google Map maxes out at 200 pins, so what I do is reverse the zipcode pin data so that the newest 200 people are shown on the map.

– Google Maps are free for 25,000 loads/day.

…

What you’re also seeing here, I finally figured out how to do screencasting in Linux. On the backend this is recorded using ffmpeg, which is very fast and doesn’t use much CPU time.

Ffmpeg does have a “YouTube live” option, but I’m not exactly using ffmpeg directly. I’m using SimpleScreenRecorder to do this. It would be nice if SimpleScreenRecorder had a streaming option! I did find that Zoom.us has a YouTube live screencasting option, but only for the 4.x client. Sadly Zoom for Linux is still on version 2.

I was real concerned that my laptop would heat up, turning on the fan, and then my videos would be annoyingly loud. I solved that two ways. First, there is a pulseaudio plugin that eliminates background noise. It works amazingly well.

For future reference, I just added one line to /etc/pulse/default.pa

### Modules to allow autoloading of filters (such as echo cancellation)
### on demand. module-filter-heuristics tries to determine what filters
### make sense, and module-filter-apply does the heavy-lifting of
### loading modules and rerouting streams.
load-module module-filter-heuristics
load-module module-filter-apply
load-module module-echo-cancel

Then I found a $9 headset at a local shop that sounds better than my Bluetooth, Skullcandy, internal mic, etc. All I want to record is frequencies in the vocal range. This cheap headset doesn’t pick up sound from my refrigerator, for example. For recording your voice, microphone sensitivity is not really your friend.