Tong Family

OK, we have two of these Facebook Portals (and yes, I put a blanket over it when I’m not using it :-), but it has been a decent Zoom device and also for meetings because of the automatic zoom feature.

If you do have one of these though, beware that they do silent updates of the software and this morning when I tried it for the first time, suddenly Zoom stopped working. You can see the screens and things, but nothing happens when you hit start. Some spelunking reveals that in the preferences, it says, no camera, video or anything.

So, the issue is that there are now more permissions. And you have to uninstall and reinstall it and then accept the permission changes. Yuck, how confusing, but the audio is decent and you have to really get the privacy settings.

So word to the wise, when you do those silent updates, you should at least tell people about permission changes. And word to Zoom, when you have no cameras and things, at least throw an error message so someone can figure out the problem. Clicking on a button and having nothing happen doesn’t really help 🙂