Yay Emacs 2024-01-12: EmacsConf 2023 report, SVG animation, Embark, Org Mode links
| yay-emacs, emacs
For this livestream, I experimented with scheduling it for 8:00 AM EST instead of just starting it whenever I could squeeze in the time.1 People dropped by! And asked questions! And suggested interesting things! Wow. This could be fun.
I wrote a bunch of blog posts throughout the week and added lots of little videos to them. It was easy to walk through my recent posts and demonstrate things without worrying about (a) accidentally leaking personal information or (b) flubbing things on camera, since apparently my multitasking abilities are on the way down.2 It felt good to go through them and add some more commentary and highlights while knowing that all the details are there in case people want to do a deeper dive.
Here are the links:
- EmacsConf 2023 report
- Animating SVG topic maps with Inkscape, Emacs, FFmpeg, and Reveal.js
- Using Embark and qrencode to show a QR code for the Org Mode link at point
- Using an Emacs Lisp macro to define quick custom Org Mode links to project files; plus URLs and search
I roughly edited the transcript from Deepgram and I uploaded it to YouTube, fixing some bugs in my Deepgram VTT conversion along the way. I think I like having proper transcripts even for ephemeral stuff like this, since it costs roughly USD 0.21 for the 43-minute video and I can probably figure out how to make editing even faster..
New projects are easier to keep working on when they have immediate personal benefits. It's easy for me to keep doing Emacs News every week because I have so much fun learning about the cool things people are doing with Emacs. I think it'll be easy for me to keep doing Yay Emacs livestreams because not only do I get to capture some workflows and ideas in videos, but other people might even tell me about interesting things that could save me time or open up new possibilities. Also, it's worth building up things I love.
I'm going to try scheduling another stream for next Sunday (Jan 21) at 7:30 AM EST. Maybe I can experiment with sharing my screen with the Surface Book or the W530 and then using that computer to stream. We'll see what that's like!
Footnotes:
Thanks to the unpredictability of life with a kiddo, scheduling things has been one of my life goals for a while! <laugh> When I created the event, the kiddo was still in her winter-break habit of sleeping in until 10 or 11, so I figured that I had a little time before I needed to call in for her virtual school at 8:45 AM. Of course, that week she decided to start setting her alarm for 7:59 AM so that she could wake up early and have watching time, and she actually started waking up around that time. So for Friday, I woke up earlier (well, the cat woke got me up even earlier) and packed a little breakfast she could have in the living room (since my computer's on a kitchen cabinet)… and that was the one day she snoozed her alarm clock and sleep in. I've scheduled the next stream for 7:30 AM… and she has announced that she wants to set her alarm for 7:30ish. Hmm.
I notice that it can be a little challenging for me to talk and do things at the same time. This is particularly obvious when I'm cubing (brain hiccup at the last step, gotta solve the whole Rubik's cube all over again). It's also why I prefer to record the audio for my presentations separately instead of winging it. =) It could be verbal interference, (very mild, totally expected) age-related cognitive decline (which is a topic I've been meaning to write up my notes on), or my squirrel brain could just have been pretty bad at this all along. Anyway, words or code, sometimes I just gotta pick one. Never mind my laptop's CPU not handling ffmpeg well, my brain's CPU gets high utilization too. That's good, though!