[Speaker 0]: You can hear us. Can you perhaps do it for
me? Great. The little angels in the
background have done it for me.
So now finally that everything is ready.
Hi James, how are you doing?
Good morning. Hello. Well,
thank you for your talk and sorry for the
little hiccup at the middle we had to pull
out a fire with the audio going out in the
middle and sorry about this.
[Speaker 1]: It's no trouble.
[Speaker 0]: So James, you've obviously told us about your
very fancy setup with the green screen and
I'm sad to see that you haven't put out the
green screen for your BBB session right now.
Do you have it in the background just for
you? Right, okay, it wasn't that far.
Great. So I'm just going to ask,
so this is the first live Q&A that we have
for the session so things might be coming
into place so pardon us if we take a little
bit of time to put the questions on the
screen and all of this.
What I'm going to do, I'm just going to load
up the pad. I would invite James to also open
the pad on his hand. So yeah,
I've got people talking in my ears and it's
been a while since I've last had this.
And okay, so opening the talks right now,
opening the pad if I can find it.
Open up the pad. Okay.
So have you got a pad open on your end,
James? So I can read the question.
So, okay, great. Opening it on my end as
well. What I'm going to do,
folks, I see some of you have joined us.
I'm going to start doing is first taking
questions in the other part because it's a
little faster to ask questions like this.
And then as soon as we've finished,
feel free to unmute yourself and ask your
questions. All right so I've got some
reactions about OBS being cool and yes both
James and I will be able to tell you that
it's very cool we do very fancy stuff like
when I need to talk to production in the
background and all the stuff obviously that
James has been able to show you with a green
screen. So I don't see a whole lot of
questions so far. I see a lot of reactions on
publishing lectures book and of a classic
example is John Kitchens obviously.
Pedagogy first developments.
Macros are a cool idea.
Okay questions. So how do you overlap
yourself with a presentation.
It's so cool. It's quite simple.
[Speaker 1]: OBS provides filters for every...
You can have a separate filter for each video
feed and 1 of the filters that's available is
chroma key. You just choose a color to make
transparent and just make sure that the
webcam is at the top of the composition.
And the thing that surprised me the most was
how quickly my brain was able to mirror
everything and control my body from a
separate point of view like the way weather
broadcasts are done. It took seconds to be
able to do that. Well,
and now I have years of practice because that
set up that you saw that I used to record
this video. I used for years during the
pandemic for 4 or 5 semesters to because my
courses are all have 2,
3, 400 students, except for the English
class, which has, you know,
30 students. And so during the pandemic,
and even after lockdowns were no longer
mandated, I taught online just because I
didn't want to have so many students in the
room at the same time.
So I've yeah, I'm it. I have a lot of
practice doing that.
[Speaker 0]: But it pays off because it looks so natural,
you know, it feels like it's the same thing
with weathercasters, you know,
it sounds very it looks very easy to do,
but it also takes quite a bit of practice.
1 of the things that you also need to
remember if you're using a chroma key that
James has explained is that you need to have
very good lighting, basically for the color
to pop out in the background and for your
body to be easily highlightable.
Okay, were you finished with this question?
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, let's take another 1.
[Speaker 0]: Sure. So how do you deal with video in Beam?
I found it so hard to do that.
PPT on the other end is easier to achieve.
[Speaker 1]: Yeah, so remember that the slides get
produced from Org Mode as PDFs.
Well, and in fact, I even before when I was
using other software to produce slides,
I produced them as PDFs,
precisely because I wanted to be able to mark
them up on on the screen with the stylus.
And so I don't do video in the slides.
I use OBS to switch from static slides that I
mark up with the stylus over to some kind of
video viewer and then back.
And again, that's how I can use Firefox.
I use OBS to switch between Firefox and video
and the Shornell plus plus program where I
can mark up slides. So those functionalities
are that's why I use different software and
pull it all together with OBS so that I can
have lots of functional flexibility.
[Speaker 0]: Great. Do you ever use things like
org-present and stay for the PowerPoint
slides? I'm not sure exactly how to read this
particular question but at least we can focus
on org-present. Are you familiar with what it
is?
[Speaker 1]: I have played around with org-present and
again I guess you could use org-present to
show images and to show headings as slides.
But again, because I'm it's such a crucial
functionality to be able to mark them up with
stylus. I didn't really show this very much,
but I also highlight things the way I would
highlight using a laser pointer on the
screen. And again, I don't see Emacs being
able to do that for another couple of
generations. So really the only thing I use
Emacs for during presentations is to narrow
headings that we can focus on particular text
excerpts.
[Speaker 0]: Right. Yeah. A lot of our presentation at
EmacsConf are usually,
especially the Org Mode ones are done with
OrgPresent. And. Sorry,
I had again someone talk to me in a year.
You know, the problem with EmacsConf is that
every year, you know, you have to relearn a
lot of skills. And by the time we finished by
Sunday evening we are masters of it and then
we forget everything by the time the next
year comes around. What I was going to say is
that org-present is often used by people
inside Emacs conf presenting about org-mode
but yeah whenever you need to do something a
little more visual, it gets a little more
complicated. Some people have tried to do
fancy stuff with SVG, which is probably the
path forward for this type of stuff.
But yeah, if you need to draw,
if you need to highlight,
it is pretty complicated.
Perhaps something that you might want to be
interested, James, in checking out is PDF
tools, which is a way to open up a PDF in
Emacs. And this allows you to have basic PDF
annotations, like putting a little bit of a
Nikon on it. Perhaps you've already played
with it.
[Speaker 1]: I have used that. PDF tools is an incredible
package but until it allows me to make a mark
on the screen that shows up in a video
compositor. It's not going to replace
Shortenel.
[Speaker 0]: Definitely. All right.
Moving on to the next question.
Is the triple-accolade syntax an Org Mode
core feature that I missed so far or did you
program that and thank you for the great
talk.
[Speaker 1]: Thank you very much. No,
it's just part of all of the export backends.
Actually, I think the way it works is it
precedes all of the export backends.
When you export, the first thing that happens
is expansion of macros.
And that's a built-in org mode feature.
It's definitely beyond my Emacs Lisp powers
to be able to have made something that
powerful. That's right.
I have come a long way.
[Speaker 0]: For now. You know, we always,
you know, most of the people who show up to
Max Conf. Especially talking about stuff that
has to do with presentations or what they do
in academia. You know,
they always say, oh, but,
you know, I couldn't have done all this,
you know, it's just far away.
And then they come back 1 year or 2 years
later and then, oh, I've made my entire
library for presentation and stuff like this.
So Be hopeful about what the future holds for
you in terms of coming up with crazy new
features for the entire ecosystem.
[Speaker 1]: Well, let me tell you,
since the pandemic, I have written,
I wrote my first major mode.
It's trivial, but it provides functionality
that is very useful to me and it's it's going
to sound like I'm just trying to butter
everyone up but seeing a lot of the names in
the IRC channel people who have taught me so
much on their YouTube channels and in their
blog posts and on Reddit and on Mastodon.
Without many of the people who are here today
watching my talk, it's very fun to have
people who have helped me learn so much about
Emacs. So thanks to all of you.
[Speaker 0]: Well, and yeah, and now you're becoming part
of this crew of people inspiring others to do
very much the same. So thank you for joining
[Speaker 1]: Thank you very much.
[Speaker 0]: the crew. Great. Moving on to the 2 last
questions and then we'll open up the mic to
other people on Big Blue Button.
What kind of comparative feedback are
students giving you regarding your approach?
[Speaker 1]: Oh, my gosh. Students were ready to during
the pandemic especially when most of the
courses were just being taught over zoom by
people sharing their screen.
[Speaker 0]: Just a second. Sorry. Sorry for the
interruption. Very rude interruption.
We've got the intro for the next talk playing
and I'm not sure what's going on.
Give me just a second.
Sasha.
[Speaker 1]: Okay.
Yeah, I think it's started.
Okay so yeah I think it's not a
[Speaker 0]: sure 1 I got the times wrong apparently
because of the little delay we had getting
the audio fixed up. The good news is that
we're still recording the talk right now and
we still have James around.
Obviously James you're no longer on being
broadcast on General but if you want to keep
answering questions or if you want to anyone
in the room right now wants to ask you
questions feel free to do so.
I'm going to need to hop off because I need
to get other things ready for the next talks
[Speaker 1]: But James, thank you so much.
[Speaker 0]: sadly. Right and so sorry I'm a little tense
obviously because I was not expecting this to
happen and that led to a very abrupt end to
this discussion but people afterwards on
emacsmo.org slash 2023 slash talks will be
able to find all the content here.
So I'll have to leave now.
Thank you so much James for doing the
difficult task of opening up EmacsConf and
I'll probably see you later.
[Speaker 1]: Thank you, Leo. Bye bye.
[Speaker 2]: On your journal program.
Yes. You are using the tablet as a monitor,
right? Touch screen monitor with that?
[Speaker 1]: That's exactly right. So it's a tablet so you
know I can. It has a touch screen and so.
So basically the functionality that that
program provides is to be able to just mark
up PDFs with a stylus,
you know, in the way that you would use any
other tablet. And to be able to take that
video signal and put it into another machine.
That was the that was the key.
That's the killer app.
[Speaker 2]: I've thought about grabbing 1 for the purpose
of like changing my laptop into a tablet to
read manga, browse the web and kind of
curious if it works well like as a wireless
monitor with a tablet or how well it like you
can use Emacs with it in a tablet mode or
were you just
[Speaker 1]: or you just use the tablet that I use is this
is it it's just a Microsoft Surface and so it
comes with a keyboard so you can take the
keyboard off. Yeah, but I use it.
I use it with the keyboard as well.
And I just.
[Speaker 2]: You're cutting off right now
[Speaker 1]: Audio Your audio is cutting off right now.
I bumped the mute button on the mic.
Yeah. So again, this is,
[Speaker 2]: is the 16 mute buttons you use.
[Speaker 1]: this It's just the surface pro 3 that I got
used and it runs Emacs.
I mean it runs. You know Linux really well.
And the trouble is that the hard drive you
know the SSE drive is small and the RAM is
small, but it works for the purposes.
Basically, if I had a couple thousand
dollars, I could probably buy a touchscreen
machine where I could run everything on it
and do the streaming and do the video capture
and do the PDF markup.
But since both of these are so,
the hardware that I use is so old and cheap
and weak I have to split it across 2
machines.
[Speaker 2]: There's also a beauty in making the stuff
having specific purposes for specific things
where it's just not. Yeah it's like I don't
want a smart TV that plays Netflix I want a
smart TV that has all the smarts that I turn
my smart TV into a TV monitor I don't want to
yeah
[Speaker 1]: I totally feel that ethic I totally I totally
feel that ethic. Oh, on
[Speaker 2]: the some other things like if you want you to
do highlighting in an org mode document.
You can use org web tools.
I wrote this in the notes,
but you can use org web tools to download a
web page and then you can use org remark to
start highlighting in the org mode web page
and then because an org mode document now you
can just edit it directly.
If you want other people to join in on an
Emacs session you could use a package like
what's it called? CRDT.EL
that will allow 2 people with 2 different
Emacs configurations to edit the same buffer.
And you have a host that can host a buffer
too. It works with, and they have 1 optional
extension for org mode that will synchronize
the folding of the org drawers.
[Speaker 1]: Interesting. I will look into that.
Like
[Speaker 2]: having I don't like if you want students like
you have each highlight line mode these are
just some ideas like you can have like
highlight line mode so people can easily see
which line you're on cursor tracking and then
you can have other people join in students or
[Speaker 1]: yeah that's just a possible idea.
Is there anyone else in the in the big blue
button room who has a question?
All right, I'm going to go over to the pad
and see if there are any pending questions I
can address. Thanks, Plasma Strike.
[Speaker 3]: Yep. Which could be PDF,
could be Markdown, could be OpenOffice,
could be a notebook format.
This methodology was conceived by Donald
Knuth in 1984. The main purpose of literal
programming is not only to make code or
documentation or output more manageable,
but to allow humans to create a data story to
be used from a single source.
What you see on the slide on the left-hand
side is the story and code inside an org-mod
file. The file starts with some
documentation, then you write back down this
code, and at the bottom you see the output
file, which is not shown in the slide itself.
In the middle you have the source code,
which is the result of tangling or opening a
buffer inside offload.
On the very right hand side we have a PDF,
actually this HTML, very same file that you
see in memory language.
So the humans look at some of this code and
the machines look at other parts of the code.
I actually did all my programming in the
literary world even in the early 1990s,
not using Org Mode, which didn't exist yet,
but using Norman Ramsey's Norep preprocessor.
They still use it inside the Org-Mode today.
This preprocessor, Norep,
allows you to tangle code from within an
Org-Mode file that is self-standing file,
much like Org-mode's edit functions,
which export code blocks into buffers in
whatever language the code blocks.
In data science, these interactive notebooks,
in 1 of the interpreted languages like Julia,
Python, or R dominating?
The basic technology is that of Jupyter
notebooks, which take their name from Julia,
Python, and R. And these notebooks use a
spruce-dark shell, for example,
IPython, and an option to add SQL cells.
All good inside Emacs has a large number of
advantages. Some of them are listed here over
these notebooks. 2 of these stand out
particularly. Different languages can be
mixed as shown in the image.
While in Jupyter notebooks,
a notebook is limited to running a kernel in
1 language only. The content of the notebook,
its document code or output part can be
exported in a variety of forms.