Here's a clip from my 2024-01-21 Yay Emacs livestream about my goals for Yay Emacs and the built-in payoffs that I think will help me keep doing it.

I like adding chapters to my videos so that people can jump to sections. I can figure out the sections by reading the transcript, adding NOTE comments, and extracting the times for those with my-youtube-copy-chapters. It could be nice to capture the times on the fly. org-timer could let me insert relative timestamps, but I think it might need some tweaking to synchronize that with when the stream starts according to YouTube. I've set up a capture, too, so I can take notes with timestamps.

It turns out that I don't have a lot of mental bandwidth when I'm on stream, so it's hard to remember keyboard shortcuts. (Maybe if I practise using the hydra I set up…) Fortunately, Org Mode's elisp: link type makes it easy to set up executable shortcuts. For example, I can add links like [[elisp:my-stream-message-link][TODO]] to my livestream plans like this:

I can then click on the links or use C-c C-o (org-open-link-at-point) to run the function. When I follow the TODO link in the first item, Emacs displays a clock and a message based on the rest of the line after the link.

In the background, the code also sets the description of the link to the wall-clock time.

If I start the livestream with a clock displayed on screen, I can use that to translate wall-clock times to relative time offsets. I'll probably figure out some Elisp to translate the times automatically at some point, maybe based on something like org-timer-change-times-in-region.

I figured it might be fun to add a QR code automatically if we detect a URL, taking advantage of that qrencode package I started playing around with.

You can also use elisp: links for more complicated Emacs Lisp functions, like this: elisp:(progn ... ...).

Here's the code that makes it happen. It's based on emacsconf-stream.el.

(defvar my-stream-message-buffer "*Yay Emacs*")
(defvar my-stream-message-timer nil)

(defun my-stream-message-link ()
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (when (and (derived-mode-p 'org-mode)
               (eq (org-element-type (org-element-context)) 'link))
      (my-stream-update-todo-description-with-time)
      (goto-char (org-element-end (org-element-context)))
      (my-stream-message (org-export-string-as (buffer-substring (point) (line-end-position)) 'ascii t)))))
(defun my-stream-update-todo-description-with-time ()
  (when (and (derived-mode-p 'org-mode)
             (eq (org-element-type (org-element-context)) 'link))
    (my-org-update-link-description (format-time-string "%-I:%M:%S %p"))))

(defun my-stream-message (&optional message)
  (interactive "MMessage: ")
  ;; update the description of the link at point to be the current time, if any
  (switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create my-stream-message-buffer))
  (erase-buffer)
  (delete-other-windows)
  (when (string= message "") (setq message nil))
  (face-remap-add-relative 'default :height 200)
  (insert
   "Yay Emacs! - Sacha Chua (sacha@sachachua.com)\n"
   (propertize
    "date"
    'stream-time (lambda () (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z (%z)")))
   "\n\n"
   message)
  ;; has a URL? Let's QR encode it!
  (when-let ((url (save-excursion
                    (when (re-search-backward ffap-url-regexp nil t)
                      (thing-at-point-url-at-point)))))
    (insert (propertize (qrencode url) 'face '(:height 50)) "\n"))
  (insert  "\nYayEmacs.com\n")
  (when (timerp my-stream-message-timer) (cancel-timer my-stream-message-timer))
  (my-stream-update-time)
  (setq my-stream-message-timer (run-at-time t 1 #'my-stream-update-time))
  (goto-char (point-min)))

(defun my-stream-update-time ()
  "Update the displayed time."
  (if (get-buffer my-stream-message-buffer)
      (when (get-buffer-window my-stream-message-buffer)
        (with-current-buffer my-stream-message-buffer
          (save-excursion
            (goto-char (point-min))
            (let (match)
              (while (setq match (text-property-search-forward 'stream-time))
                (goto-char (prop-match-beginning match))
                (add-text-properties
                 (prop-match-beginning match)
                 (prop-match-end match)
                 (list 'display
                       (funcall (get-text-property
                                 (prop-match-beginning match)
                                 'stream-time))))
                (goto-char (prop-match-end match)))))))
    (when (timerp my-stream-message-timer)
      (cancel-timer my-stream-message-timer))))

Let's see if that makes it easy enough for me to remember to actually do it!

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!