[Speaker 0]: And he 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?
[Speaker 1]: Good morning. Hello.
[Speaker 0]: Well, thank you for your talk.
And sorry for the little hiccup at the middle
we had to put 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. No. So, I'm just going to ask.
So, this is the first live Q&A that we have
for this 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 gonna do, I'm just gonna load up the
pad. I would invite James to also open the
pad on his hand. Sorry,
I've got people talking in my ears and it's
been a while since I've last had this.
Okay, so opening the talks right now.
Opening the pad, if I can find it.
Open the pad. Okay. Have you got the pad open
[Speaker 1]: So I can read the question.
[Speaker 0]: on your end, James? Okay,
great. Opening it on my end as well.
What I'm going to do, folks,
I see some of you have joined us on,
if I show you, some of the people that have
joined us in the BBB room.
You can join us as well,
all the links are on the talk page or on ISE,
you can find it very easily.
But what I'm going to start doing is first
taking questions in the other pad 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 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.
[Speaker 1]: It's quite simple OBS provides filters for
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
setup 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 weather casters 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, 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 Shornal++ 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've played around with org-present,
And again, I guess you could use OrgPresent
to show images and to show headings as
slides. But again, Because it's such a
crucial functionality to be able to mark them
up with a 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 presentations at
EmacsConf are usually,
especially the Org Mode ones,
are done with Org Present.
Sorry, I had someone talk to me in the ear.
You know the problem with EmacsConf is that
every year, you have to relearn a lot of
skills, and by the time we finish,
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
Shornal.
[Speaker 0]: Definitely. Alright, moving on to the next
question. Is the triple-accolade syntax an
[Speaker 2]: Org Mode core feature that I missed so
[Speaker 0]: 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, for now. You know,
we always, you know, most of the people who
show up to Emacs, 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 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 BigBlueButton.
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
screens.
[Speaker 0]: Just a second, sorry, sorry for the
interruption, very rude interruption,
but I've got the intro for the next talk
playing and I'm not sure what's going on.
Give me just a second.
Sasha?
So... Yeah, I think it's started.
Sure. 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,
[Speaker 0]: sadly. great. And 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
emacs-conf, And I'll probably see you later.
[Speaker 1]: Thank you, Leo. Bye-bye.
[Speaker 3]: On your, the external,
the journal You were, you,
you were using the tablet as a monitor,
right? Touchscreen monitor,
what's that?
[Speaker 1]: program. Yes. That's exactly right.
So it's a tablet, so it has a touchscreen.
And 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 3]: I've thought about grabbing 1 for the purpose
of like changing my laptop into a tablet to
read manga, browse the web,
and I'm 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 or you
just use
[Speaker 1]: the tablet that I use is this is it it's just
the Microsoft Surface and so it comes with a
keyboard So you can take the keyboard off.
But I use it with the keyboard as well.
And I just.
[Speaker 3]: You're cutting off right now.
Audio.
Your audio is cutting off right now.
How about now? Now I can hear you.
[Speaker 1]: How about now? I bumped the mute button on
the mic. Yeah, so again,
this is... I'm trying to figure out which
[Speaker 3]: of the 16 mute buttons you used.
[Speaker 1]: It's just the Surface Pro 3 that I got used.
And it runs Emacs, I mean it runs GNU Linux
really well. And the trouble is that the hard
drive, you know, the SSD 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
touch screen machine or 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'd have to split it across 2
machines.
[Speaker 3]: 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
[Speaker 1]: Don't want to yeah Really?
I I totally feel that ethic I totally feel
that ethic.
[Speaker 3]: Oh, on 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 it's
an org mode document now,
[Speaker 1]: right
[Speaker 3]: you can just edit it directly If you have 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.
What? And you have a host that can host a
[Speaker 1]: Interesting.
[Speaker 3]: buffer too. 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.
[Speaker 3]: Like having I don't like if you want students
like you have H highlight line mode.
These are just some ideas.
It's 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 yeah, that's just a possible
idea.
[Speaker 1]: Is there anyone else 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 PlasmaStrike.
Yep.
[Speaker 2]: To be tangled into source code or woven into
a documentation file, 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 pieced 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 the
code, and at the bottom you see an 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 is HTML, random.org.
The very same file that you see in the 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 literate way even in the early 1990s,
not using OrgMode, which didn't exist yet,
but using Norman Ramsey's NoWeb preprocessor.
They still use it inside Org Mode today.
This preprocessor, NoWeb,
allows you to tangle code from within an Org
Mode file that is a 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,
dominate. The basic technology is that of
Jupyter notebooks, which take their name from
Julia, Python, and R. And these notebooks use
a spruce-stuffed shell,
for example, IPython, and an option to add
SQL cells. Alt mode 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.
[Speaker 3]: We are
[Speaker 2]: currently the only person in this
conference... ...To share with others,
to use one's work in different reports...