streaming. Yeah, we're streaming. Okay. I don't know why people watch sad people. All right, sad. Pirro. So sad. So sad. The thing. No, that's not what it is. He said Pirro, right? Was he thought he sucked, right? And he thought he wasn't any good at art when he was better than most people at least. I mean, he's not great, but it's like, I know you're better at podcasting than most people, but most podcasts are real.  Right? Like you disagree with me that most. The difference is I don't think I suck. I think I think it's just a waste of time for someone to listen to what I have to say. And you should go do something better with your time. Like like support us on Patreon, which actually we're rising again. Right. You should give money to someone who doesn't have money and money's going into a con. You should spend your time listening to a convention con, not a con con. You mean both? You should, you know, actually that money's all paying for the designer. So you should, uh, you know, spend your time paying attention to what someone intelligent has to say like me. Like not you. All right. Let's start this. Um, Rance is good. Press is good. I changed the volume stuff. Someone worth listening to is actually, you know, meaning actually enough people listen to the YouTube stream that we have this weird thing going on. So because my, uh, Brexit video, like Russian bot, like it got a bunch of views recently, like a lot of them.  Who are these people? Why am I seeing this? And they don't understand what's happening because most people have a YouTube channel. Yep. They put one kind of thing in it. Yep. Or so there's two. There's one set of people who see our lectures and don't know it to a podcast. There's this other kind of people who subscribe to YouTube channels commonly, but none of the channels they subscribe to live stream. So when we live stream, it pops up in their feed and they don't understand because that's never happened before because they don't watch live streams. These aren't like Twitch people. These are like, yeah, they're just on Twitch people. Right. It's weird. A dockless back. You're already facing problems. You don't say. Oh, I called that one. Did someone take all the bikes and park them in front of one guy's house? Cause that's what I would do. I saw them along that path up to Brewster. They were in the Bronx. Yeah. Uh, well, you saw someone stole like all of them in Rochester, like every single one. Good job. Cause there was a Bluetooth there. You could basically dock the bike, but not actually put it in the dock. If the bike was thought it's dockless. Uh, no, so there's the dock to ones all got stolen in Rochester. I did not even ahead. They took the bike up next to the docks and then they said, I'm done. And the dock detected the bike was right there. And you don't have to slam and jam it in. You don't have to slam and jam it apparently.  Granted, I don't know what you do with one of those bikes. How are you going to fence a 55 pound brand? I don't think you fence it. I think you just ride it, but then you're just, you know, no one's going to think it's stolen. No one's going to chase. Well, they will. If you stole all of them, maybe just going to recycle them for scrap. Those are worth maybe a dollar of scrap tops. I don't know. Maybe someone knows. Yeah. Plus who are you going to take it to? What scrap yard are you going to roll up with? 500 obviously stolen by 500 stolen bikes is worth more than zero dollars. Yeah, it's probably you could.  I mean, it's not like people lock him up that tight, but nobody will get mad about you stealing one of these because it's not owned by anyone. It doesn't matter. No one will chase you down. The last time a cop did something about a stolen bike. No, but owners chase you down. No, they don't. Yeah, steal a real bike owner. There's a lot of stories online.  What sometimes people take things into their own hands.  No one's following you. No one's trying to find you on Craigslist. No, right? You just it's like a right. You're just stealing from the public. No one cares. Right. If I steal a lawn gnome from your yard, you might try to track you down. You might try to find out who stole your lawn gnome. But if I steal a lawn gnome that was in like the public park, someone might notice. Hey, where'd the lawn gnome go?  But the note, right? Unless the cops care, no one finds out who ruined public things. That's how come everyone, all the rich people get away with fleecing the public. All right. I think we can start the show. We got people watching now. Go away, people. Do do go fleece the public. But like in our community. All right, it is six. It's Monday, August 6, 2018. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights tonight. Keyboard shortcuts. Do I have a meta? I have any meta? Anything that happened in my life? One day. Interesting. Oh, Mr. D. We can talk about how it's warm, I guess. Even warmer today. I got nobody there. So I'm not one to complain about the heat. I'm the opposite of that. I'm pretty much always complaining that it's not hot enough. Yeah, I don't complain about it to be really hot. See, I don't ever complain about heat or humidity because even if it does get a point where it's even slightly uncomfortable, but I just I just I just imagine it being cold again. And I'm like, well, I'll take this. Yeah, no question. It's like even a hundred something degrees is more comfortable than like 40. Right. Yeah. In fact, 40 is the worst because if it's like zero, I can go skiing.  If it's 100, I can enjoy the heat. But if it's like 40, I both can't ski and can go outside.  The bright sun is the like that is literally the primary aspect of why I like the heat. I want it to be dark and 100 degrees. I do enjoy that. One of my favorite things on earth is to go for a long run or a long bike ride in the middle of the night when it's really hot at night. The point is today was one of those situations where it was nice and super toasty everywhere to the point at which most people were uncomfortable. I was very comfortable. But in the sun, you could feel it like burning you. You probably could have cooked food outside today. Yeah, but I like that I like that I like to run shorts. No shirt. I like that it was I like that it was warm. But then I had to go in the shade and I was disappointed in the shade because that it was colder. But I was happy in the shade that it was less bright and it was I had to basically couldn't it was either too bright and warm enough or slightly cold and but not bright. But so I've been trying to run half marathons like every weekend. I'm trying to get my times down. Is that healthy? Yeah. There's a full marathon. Like there's some evidence that if you do that a lot, it'll cause joint damage. All right. Well, how far can I bike before it counts as a marathon? Biking so far, you'll be worried more about things like incontinence and evidence. I mean, that's just gonna happen when I'm old anyway. Biking can cause specific issues there, especially if you use the fancy narrow as bike seat, but I digress. So I started my run on Saturday like I usually do. But it was hot. And more importantly, I thought the rain ended like the air quality to be good. The air quality was actually really bad. Our quality is real bad. Yeah. And I hit about the 10 mile mark. And my lungs were just like, Hey, rim. Yeah, now you should stop. You're gonna not have a good time if you don't stop. And I did stop. And then I was just exhausted and tired for the entire rest of the day. Probably because of the ozone in the air. Well, you were all getting drinking poison. I went to that. I just went to bike around and I just went to the park because whatever. There's nowhere to go. We actually between all of us drank relatively little poison. More than zero poisons. We all had like one beer. A couple of people had two. One whole giant mug of poison. Yeah. Giant gypsy toast covered in fruit and jam. And it was amazing. Anyway, and also, but I biked around the park and I'm just whooshing around in a circle.  I will not use fair Celsius Fahrenheit is superior. And I'll fight you that's the hell. Anyway, my and but like every time I went up the hill, my my lung was like, ow, my leg was like, long with the books wrong with you. Not is isn't even barely a hill. I'm not. I got, you know, how many gears we can go lower than this to quote a legendary comedian. Don't breathe no more. He had that was when he was talking about having a heart attack. Yeah. But there's there's the point when your body instead of because pain is normally a suggestion like, Hey, you should probably knock this out. Like stop this. Like this is this is not good. But then there's when the body instead of saying, Hey, stop it. The body gives a directive. There's one guy who was biking and I passed him on the way into the park. Yeah. And he was playing some really awful like 2000s pop song. And then I didn't see him again. But then I kept going around and I did. I caught up to him and he was playing staying alive. And then so I tried to like bike next to him so I could listen and groove to the staying alive. And then we got to the hill. And then he was way slower. And I like I tried to slow down to hear more music, but I couldn't slow down that much. So a real sad thing. That would be weird. Like if I hit the brakes, just this guy, catch up to me. So this dude was biking. He was like our age and like, he seemed fit and he was on it like a kind of normal bike. But I beat him over the RFK bridge on foot and he was biking the entire time. All right. Both up and downhill on the uphill. He was clearly in the wrong gear and didn't know how bikes work. So he was he was like jumping into there's so many wrong gear people and I don't know how to help them. And if they're not even like you only had one gear, he had. Oh yeah. No, I don't stop. I don't even think about helping someone if they don't have a gear. But the other thing is that if I see someone in a bad gear and I want to help them, like even if I try to help them, like they don't listen. And even if and if I'm afraid, especially if they're not a man, that it'll be mansplaining. So I don't. So I don't explain. It's like, how do you balance that not wanting to mansplain, but also want genuinely wanting to help people?  Yeah, I gave up on helping people. I only talk to people if I'm making fun of them for the fact that they only have one gear. Usually my advice will be, you know, you could go a lot faster uphill if you had more than one gear and they get really mad. And then I bike away. They can't catch me because they only have one year. But usually when I'm running, Fixie dudes will go real slow. Like I'll pass them because they can't bike faster than I can run uphill. But then they'll pass me on the downhill because on a bike, this dude not only couldn't get up the hill because he was in the wrong gear, but then he couldn't go down the hill at speed. I think he was breaking the whole time. So I basically ran down the RFK faster than him. Was he just not afraid to pass it because it's too narrow? Oh, no, he I left him in the dust. Okay, I actually stopped at the bottom of the bridge, partly because the ozone that's when I hit the 10 mile mark and I was running out of steam. So I waited at the bottom of the bridge like catching my breath and drinking water and he came down like four minutes after. Well, so if he has to go down the stairs, maybe he was clumsy with the bike on the stairs. He might have been. He might have been. But he even on the downhill before the stairs never got up with me. It was the first time in my life. I passed a biker on the uphill on foot and then they did not catch up to me on the downhill. You know, someone's slow when I'm coasting, not even pedaling uphill and I'm passing them. Yeah, that happens. That happens more than you think. How can I somebody's peddling a bike next to me, but they don't know how to bike and they don't know how to use gears, even to their fit. And I stopped pedaling and I'm still my velocity remains greater than theirs and I just keep going past them without peddling. All of this is that the most assured way to enrage a New Yorker or at least to get our interest in a negative fashion to get in the way is to be slow in any capacity. Get moving slowly and on foot or on a bicycle. Yeah, that is a problem. Get out of the way. Just get out of the way. So there's actually a lot of tech news. I don't think we'll go into these too deep, but I'll start with Scott's this vanity fair article. Right. So basically, I think Steve Jobs, daughter Lisa, the one that the Lisa computer was or was not named after. I think she wrote a memoir. But does the X does the excerpt of it, which is mostly the parts about Steve Jobs. That's on vanity fair. And that's the only part you're going to be interested in for tech news. Right? Yeah. But it's you can see what you can like this is the most learn what Steve Jobs is really like kind of thing. And this really matches my basically existing assumptions based on his like public persona. Yeah. And also my assumptions about all Silicon Valley.  You know, I think there should be a maximum wage. I think there should be a lot of things. Yeah. But yeah, if you're interested, you know, if you're interested in all and you know, Steve Jobs, although I do not like him, was a very important person in the history of technology. And was the, you know, primary reason that Apple computer is the first trillion dollar corporation to ever exist. Yeah. And is now basically evil cyberpunk code number one. They're like number three, I think the biggest. Anyway, well, no, they have the they have the largest point is half. That does not mean you're actually the biggest. Well, important person, regardless.  And this is about as close as you're going to learn about his personality. You know, someone who was half shared half his DNA is or whatever. Oh yeah. Right in the summer here, it describes him as mercurial. And that sounds about right. I'm sure I read this mercurial things will happen. So there's some other news. If you're paying attention today, you might have seen a lot of articles that all said leak says Microsoft's going to charge a monthly fee for Windows. I didn't see that. This was all over the Internet like a little while ago. Okay. I guess I actually did some work today. Oh yeah. We both have newest jobs and we're both actually doing work, whatever. I read plenty Internet. Yeah. But so one, that is not true. And I mean, if it was, I definitely would find a way every time there have been throughout Microsoft Windows history, there have always been like, Oh, no, Windows is going to be even eviler now. Oh, no, no. And in the Oh, no, never happened really. Yeah. Or some of the things that a lot of people say, Oh, they'll do this evil thing where things they should do like forcing people to upgrade. Like I think they should force people to take their patches.  I think so. So the actual story here and it really is funny how many scaremongering articles really had no idea what the deal was. It's pretty straightforward. You got to get clicks. You're not going to clicks with the real story. So Microsoft is probably going to offer a managed service for Windows PCs aimed at companies.  This is aimed at a company that's big enough. I mean, Windows is already dying in the people's houses because everyone just uses their phone and tablet. Yeah. So even if they did this, people would just like stop using the desktops all together. They would just all go to. So why would they do?  Yeah. Cause the only reason to run Windows is that new surface tablet that's smaller. That's supposed to be way good. Like surface go or something like that. If you don't need the like high performance of a regular surface device, this thing's great. It actually seems pretty good from what people are saying. I haven't seen one though. I would consider getting it when my laptop dies because it could do everything my current laptop does better. It's actually way faster than my current laptop. I'm sure it is. But I'll probably get the one with like the video card, like the real surface. But anyway, so the only people who use Windows at home are gamers because it's really the only PC gaming platform. There's no other way to play PC games or people who are making content and don't want to run a Mac. And frankly, if you're making content, you probably want to use Windows because you can get real hardware. Like a lot of people these days they're using like Hackintosh, which is a PC, but you install OS X on it or they're some getting like some external GPU nonsense or their who knows. Yeah. But anyway, the real story is managed services or dealing with the slow beginning, the most expensive Mac and dealing with it. So a company could basically pay Microsoft a monthly fee like per desk and have a Windows desktop that Microsoft will manage for you, meaning group policies and patches and updates. And if an update breaks something, they'll take care of it. I think a lot of companies will jump on this because a lot of companies has to be cheaper than your IT guy or or better enough that it's worth paying the extra or, you know, the math just has to work out and you'll switch to it. Because a giant company and even if you have an IT guy, you might even keep the IT guy on and pay for this because now your IT guy can spend all their time doing something else. Yep. Because a lot of companies will not pay for an IT person like dealing with the shitty phones or shitty network to administer like their internal active director or the internal desktop PCs like a lot of companies struggle with this. And this is, I think, a really good thing for Microsoft to offer because a lot of companies offer the service on top of Microsoft. They'll basically come into a company and provide managed IT services. And I suspect a lot of those companies do a bad job. So Microsoft can both take the VIG and cut these middlemen out of the equation and provide the service directly. Well, I mean, this is the thing that's always right. Anytime your business is based on someone else's platform, right? If you sell accessories for a Toyota car, right? Toyota might start selling this thing. Toyota A might include that accessory as a feature in the cars to begin with, right? V, they might offer it as an add-on. And now no one's going to buy your third-party one. Or they just might buy your whole company. That's what you want. And this happens all the time. I remember the one I remember the most is some fancy Visual Studio plugin back in the day. And it was like Microsoft is going to threaten to add the feature to Visual Studio. And then basically they worked it out and Microsoft bought the plug-in company instead and then added the feature to Visual Studio, right? So it's just, you know, it's not necessarily a software feature, but it's still a service for a particular product. And it's like, well, we'll just offer the service with the product. So that's all this news is. There's nothing to be afraid of. If you somehow heard that Microsoft is going to charge a monthly fee for Windows, click even one article. Get one sentence into any article and you could have figured out what the real story is. In some other news, Google, according to a bunch of links. So we got Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Google, all right. Covering all the bases here. They basically were going to launch a censored search in China.  And Google said, no, we're just going to stop putting Google in China. And that's why Chinese people use Baidu or QQ or whatever the other alternative things are. So I think it's Baidu, right? The confidential project Dragonfly was leaked to a group of Google employees wider than the tiny group of Google employees who were working on. So there was a tiny group of people at Google who suddenly had changed the previous Google policy and were now willing to do this. We're willing to make a censored search. But other Google employees who are the ones not willing to do this found out that other Google people were evil and were doing this. It seems that a lot of Google employees freaked out, demanded the project to be canceled.  There's a lot of, like there's a lot of interesting stories about what's going on. This is like developing news. This is still ongoing. So this article will sort of cover the baseline of where we are. But I mean, even if they managed to complete it with the team of people who had no ethical more qualms and then they deployed it, then everyone would find out and quit and you'd have the same problem later. Wouldn't it be just we better right? It's like, come on. Yep. So there's all sorts of drama about this. And this is a good thing. I'm actually very happy that people inside Google are both willing to leak this to the public and actually quit their jobs or threatened to quit their jobs over. Well, you got a company is big enough. There's always going to be Pete, right? It's like in a small company like mine. I don't think there's any people at my company who have any disagreements on things. All right. Well, you don't hire someone who disagrees with your business model. Right. But when your company is massive, you're going to have all kinds of people, right? That was that, you know, the what's it called guy worked at Google, right? The whole. What was his name? But we were. That could be any number of people. No, the whole the guy who wrote the sexist thing. And then all the and all the Google people fought each other. Yep. It's like they were all Google employees. It's just so big, right?  This is the second time. And that would be like my only job and I wouldn't even get to it. That this happened to Google because a couple months ago, a bunch of good. So a bunch of other Google employees working on Project Maven and Maven was the project to make AI for drone killbots. Yep. And Google employees were like, yeah, we'll quit. This is fucked. We do not want to do this. And as best I can tell, Google actually is letting the contract with the Pentagon. I think it was the Pentagon with the US government run out and they're not going to continue the project. Tons of employees threatened to quit, petitioned. So these two stories. The only thing, right?  There's a subtle point there. I think a big part of why. Or if you have enough employees that you can threaten to quit. A big part of why I think Google employees in particular. And this is just a thing.  It's not just that they have a ton of money. It's that people with these sets of skills are in desperate demand right now. Across industries. These people can all snap their fingers and work for any other company in the second. I think a better thing to do than quit though, right? Sabotage. Why did you figure me out?  Well, some people say quit. You shouldn't be working for an evil system. I say stay in the system. It's have a touch. Well, wasn't that the plot of Rogue One? Yes. I mean, yeah. I would say there is a time and a place for that. Neither one of these stories are at the line where I would directly advocate sabotage. No, if they but if they had actually launched the Chinese Google. Yeah. And then that's the first I heard of it. So what my the real like awesome thing if Google were the company it was 15 years ago, the awesome thing to do would be to have the secret project launch their sensor search engine in China get adopt like make it the biggest search engine in China. And then three years down the line, open the goddamn flood gates and spill the beans on everything inside China. China just turned the side off. Yeah. But they could get the data out pretty quick like set it up such that they could blow their load and leak information all over China. I think what's more likely what they would do is if they had managed to secretly develop this, they would put it out in China and no brand it and put it on infrastructure such that nobody would know Google had made it. Yeah. I wouldn't be branded as Google to be called something else. It would just be a suspiciously good Chinese search engine. But if you work in technology and a lot of the people listen to Monday Geek Nights do, my only advice to you is if your company is doing something that is unethical and it's a beyond a certain line of unethical, you have a responsibility to not do the thing. Right. Even though, you know, whistle blowing is technically supposed to have protections, but in reality, you're going to take a huge person in reality.  But I'll do it anyway. Yep. Like if your company's doing stuff with ice, you should make a big deal about that and threaten to quit. In some other. Let's see. That's been 20 minutes. Do we really need to do more news? Not really. I think we can leave all these two newses for next time. All right.  They've all just said high, except except Dazzle, who's mad that we're talking in Fahrenheit. Go away. Yeah. All I'm going to say one one degree Fahrenheit is perceptual to a human. How come with Celsius, you're always being like, yeah, it's 23.5 out right now. Don't tell me you need three digits to express your temperature. Yep. Yep.  Yes. If I couldn't, if my thermostat had 19. But what can you tell the difference between 70 and 70.5 Fahrenheit? No, it's more great. So it's like, yeah, you could Celsius means more in a scientific way in that the difference to, you know, it's one degree Celsius is the amount to heat one cubic centimeter, one milliliter of water by one degree Celsius. But Fahrenheit zero is too cold and 100 is too hot. Right. That doesn't that doesn't mean anything. 50 is eh. If you could you could take Celsius and perhaps divide it by a hundredth and call it like a millis Celsius. And then it would be still you still have the too many. It would then be granular enough to, you know, express human. It's really telling like feelings. People will say things like, oh yeah, it's like 76 degrees out. And it is nice with Celsius that zero is freezing. Yeah. Freezing of water. You could zero is also freezing of a different kind of water.  So subtract 32. So that way freezing is zero. But I want argument I would make is that hitting 32 isn't really that much of a problem. But hitting zero is the point where it's dangerous. But water freezes it. So water freezes at zero. And salt water freezing is like when the danger of frostbite gets real bad. And also salting the roads doesn't do anything anymore. All right. Anyway, but anyway, things of the day. So a long time ago, I did a thing today about this marble machine. You've seen it around the Internet. It's rooms paying big attention to this. Yeah, because I've been following this guy. So the marble machine was this amazing YouTube video. And it was made by this dude who has this band called Wintergatan. And they do like cool concerts and everything. Oh, Wintergatan, not Winter Garden. Not Wintergarden, Wintergatan. Oh, Wintergarden is a theater. Yeah. So Wintergatan. And basically the dude has been continuously making YouTube videos every week for a long time.  On he's made basically the problem with that original marble machine as amazing as that video was is that it was basically a glass cannon. That thing could run once and it barely ran. Like it is so cobbled together. It couldn't go on tour. It's in a museum now and it's retired. Like it can't be used again. I'm sure you could reset it with enough effort, but it wouldn't be easy. Yeah. And it's hard to make it go and you can't travel with it. So his goal was to learn all the skills necessary to make a new marble machine that is robust and can go in a world tour. And he's been like I've watched videos in this channel where he like learned how to weld from scratch and then welded the part. He learned CNC. He learned 3D printing. He learned modeling. And if you watch all these videos, they're so meditative and so fascinating. And now is a good time to start watching them because the machine is starting to come together. And unlike a lot of the series where you might watch like someone building a machine, usually those series are retrospective on something that already succeeded. We don't actually know if this will work. It's going to work eventually. He's not going to stop he's not going to stop until it works. And he's making someone who's this determined is going to keep going until it works. It will happen eventually. It's just a matter of when will it be this year next year. Also some of the videos he fails like he fucks up. Yeah. That's what happens when you work on something.  And he learned stuff along the way. And if you watch them like you could learn these same skills because he goes from nothing. And he asks people and looks on the Internet and like, oh, this is how you weld. And now I'll try to weld. And that was a really good weld. Or you could just go on YouTube and learn the weld. Yeah. Or go to welding school which is probably a better idea. So this is so I'm linking to this because this is the video where he makes the flywheel. It's really, I like flywheels. Like, all right. I specifically like flywheels. The very end he holds the clock up and he gets the flywheel spinning and he sees how long it'll spin. A long time. When this has a world tour it's definitely coming to New York and I'm actually keeping my eye out. You want to go see it really? I am definitely going to see it. You're this guy's number one fan. You're going to get his autograph. Kiss his foot. He's got over a million subscribers. He's pretty big now. Kiss his foot. Yeah. I'm a big fan of this guy. And I will go see this in concert. Anyway. So what's your thing of the day? So last week I had a thing of the day where it was like some jousting on the front of boats. Everyone I have showed that video to three seconds in goes. Oh yeah. That's real good. Here is in Germany a place where they I guess they do play some ice hockey in Germany but not much. Yeah. So they have ice rinks in Germany but in Germany they play soccer. That's their sport. Yeah. They didn't do too well this World Cup but they usually do much better. They're pretty good at soccer. I think I read somewhere that like if you add up all the soccer leagues in Germany I think was it called like the Bundesliga or something that there's like thousands of soccer teams all in these leagues would like it. They have more soccer teams like than God. Anyway. And that's just in Germany. But here is people playing. You know I mean they don't play ice hockey but here they are with with an ice rink. Well a lot of hockey fans will describe soccer as slow grass hockey. Yeah. But here they are playing foot soccer on ice. Yeah. And it's awesome. Yeah. It's awesome because it is based on watching this video as dangerous as you could imagine. Ice hockey is as dangerous as you could imagine. This looks more dangerous. The only reason ice hockey looks less dangerous is because the people doing it are professionals who practiced not stabbing each other with skates. Yeah.   They would be blood on the ice very quickly. This basically has all the ridiculousness of ice hockey but what it does not have is the grace of ice hockey because ice hockey is a clever balance of brutality and grace. This is just the brutality and people falling over over and over and over again. Mostly the second part. Yeah. But also this short clip Scott linked to I mean your thing today is basically an animated gif. Yeah. But I couldn't find I mean I'm sure if you knew what to search for you could find a full video but this is all spoilers they score a goal and someone falls over. This is all I could find. Yeah. In the middle of a moment with my minimal effort the new Geek Nights book club is going to be the Odyssey to another Odyssey. We'll do all Odyssey space. We went from the Greek Odyssey to the space Odyssey. Lots and lots of Odysseys. So just yesterday I went to the theater to see 2001 a space Odyssey in 70 millimeter. How was that? I hadn't seen it.  I couldn't even believe it's been playing all week and like it wasn't 100% full but it was very full. Yeah. Nothing looks as good as I mean no no current HD screen of digitalness is as good as 70 millimeter film because the film is enormous.   I haven't seen that movie in a long time. I hadn't seen it in a long time but I saw it again. And knowing what I I've been learning more and more about it recently because I read like the first forward in the first two chapters of the book. I guess I should buy a kindle copy of the book. Yeah I think a paper version is actually a few cents cheaper. Yeah but anyway but so I didn't realize right that this movie was actually made in the mid 60s and it came out in 68 before anyone landed on the moon. Right. It came out before Star Wars. And I'm sure I mean it's not I can't really spoil. I mean I've seen the movie is not spoilers. Right. There's no way you can spoil something. The the the statue of limitations is far gone on this one. Right. Oh this is makes it home and murders all the suitors. Right. Yeah. But yeah the ending of the movie is obviously very evangelical in Esk. But I cannot think of anything older that has that kind of psychedelic messed up non-concrete ending. Maybe maybe like some Stanislaw Lem short story might or something. I mean short stories maybe but like not movies or TV or anything like that. Not like a full like a movie. So it makes me wonder we'll talk about this more in the book live episode. Is this the original terrible secret of space. Maybe. If you know any older previous terrible secrets of space let me know. Otherwise we are going to be live. The PAX West schedule just went up and the PAX website went down like immediately. So we will be there all weekend like the whole con just doing stuff playing games. We will not be a PAX dev this year. We're skipping it. I want to go even though Ben Brode is doing the keynote. It's going to be a good one. I really want to read it. I read a preview of his keynote where he asked he basically interviewed with him asking about the stuff he's going to talk about. And it seemed way good. Yep. But sometimes they put the keynotes from Dev online so they're not privileged. Oh I've never seen one. It depends. Some panels at PAX dev that people who run them agree that it can be made public. I don't think he's going to reveal any secrets or anything. Probably not. It doesn't seem like he's going to talk about that kind of stuff. So let's see. If it is public I will definitely make it a thing of the day. Yeah for sure. Or I'll just link to it as a news or whatever. We'll do a whole show on it if it's real good. It needs to be that good. But on Monday at 10 a.m. we will be 10 a.m. Pacific time. Our panel the 40 table to top games Monday Labor Day United States Labor Day will be live streamed on either PAX two or PAX three. One of the two non main theater PAX Twitch streams. We will probably not take questions from the audience meaning we'll definitely not take questions from the Twitch stream. Why would we take questions from the Twitch stream. Good God. I used to take questions from the Twitch stream on behalf of like for the panels back when I did that. You want to answer if you want to ask questions while Twitch streaming wait for me to just Twitch stream something on my own.  I mean even so yeah. Otherwise yeah that the next kind we get after that is like PAX unplugged and then MagFest which we will be at pretty sure MagFest is going to announce its dates imminently. So if you want to go to MagFest MagFest has traditionally been around in New Year's. It's not hard to guess the dates of MagFest if you were to bet on them Vegas would not take your money because the odds of you being right are so good. It's going to be within two. It's going to be a Thursday through a Sunday. It's going to be early in January. It's going to be between. You only got like three weekends to choose from. It'll be at earliest the very end of December and at latest probably like the first weekend in February like that is the latest. It would never go to February.  So they're probably going to announce it real soon. So if you want to go to MagFest jump on that because they do sell out of badges now. I think well they think they saw it a hotel rooms now. Well they definitely sell out of hotel rooms.   You don't want to be doing that. I think they just announced the dates really just now. Pat just pointed out that they just announced the dates like just this second while we're recording the podcast to find out. I'm going to their Twitter. Meg fast. What's the time on the tweet. Let's see. Three hours ago. Meg Fest is January 3rd through 6. Oh it looks like I bet wisely. Yes. If you do not have a hotel for Meg Fest go get one right now. If you're not watching the stream which you shouldn't be. If you're watching the stream go there right now. Yeah. Don't don't pay attention to the rest of the stream. If I got me to retweet this right now because they don't sell out as fast as Paxies but they sell out. All right. All right. So a long long time ago August 7th 2007. We did a Geek Nights episode 11 years ago on FPS key bindings.  In the news of that episode we announced that like Valve was releasing 24 old games on Steam and we're really excited about it and Best Buy did what did Best Buy do Best Buy. Oh that does not link to the article so I don't know what Best Buy did something and there's literally no way to know what it was. All right. We can listen to the episode. Yeah. And in January 21st 2008 we did an episode on keyboards but when we have never talked about our keyboard shortcuts and we realized we actually have a lot to say about keyboard shortcuts. Yeah. Well I mean the thing with keyboard shortcuts right is like there's sort of this thing that's like people who could use them to greatly improve their computing efficiency seem to refuse to don't or whatever and then also simultaneous to that there's a lot of people more and more who can't right. Young people don't even use a keyboard a computer with a keyboard anymore. They got a phone or a tablet or a gaming console or whatever. There aren't keyboard shortcuts on tablets. Right. There are gestures but I find that most people don't use gestures either.  I'm going to try it out.  Yeah.  Young young people do not use keyboards at all really. And even if they do not a lot of them can type properly. Right. There's only the ones who got into PC gaming somehow. Usually the ones who don't live in America would be more likely to be properly. I don't even care if you type like the proper proper way. It's just can you type fast. Yep. Without looking. Yep. Well all these kids can type pretty fast on their phones. They cannot type as fast as me on a keyboard. Also old people. Right. Some of them can type especially if they were even if they were typewriter people. Right. And they but they don't use keyboard shortcuts like they're not you know right. Is they do you know only the ones who would be like Unix Santas. Those are the only kind of old people who use keyboard shortcuts. There's another kind of old person who's keyboard shortcuts. These are the people who are very good at the most basic nonsense on computers. And I say very good making air quotes. The kind of person whose job is to mess with Excel spreadsheets and type documents in Word. Even those people are very mousy. Those people are very mousy. But I've noticed that a lot of them tend to be told a set of keyboard shortcuts that they memorize. And if those keyboard shortcuts ever change or don't work.  I think people know control C control V. Yeah. But they'll learn like control I R.  And they won't know how to do the thing unless the exact menu that they were taught is still there or the keyboard shortcut that someone told them still works. So the people who use keyboard shortcuts a lot is this narrow group of people actually even it's not it's still a large group but percentage wise it's a small group of people who A are in an age where they use computers with keyboards often. They can type properly or well well enough and also our computer savvy enough and interested in computing efficiency enough that they bother to learn and muscle memorize shortcuts so that they don't have to touch the mouse and they could do computing things faster. Now I think most of the people who do this are honestly professional the kind of person who needs a PC to be a workstation. Like artists who are making art. Yeah. Photoshop people they know all these crazy shortcuts and Photoshop right. Audition programmers they know whatever their text editor is they know mad shortcuts. Yep. But what's interesting is that for a lot of those use cases like especially like video heavy video editing a lot of times people have specialty input devices like I have my shuttle that I use my edit video but all that shuttle is doing while it has like the shuttle and like all the like fancy dial type things the rest of it is just a bunch of keyboard buttons that I've bound to do keyboard shortcuts. I mean pretty much everything is just a keyboard right. Yeah. But yeah so the thing with keyboard shortcuts right is that they increase you don't even realize how much they increase your computing efficiency right. If you want to have a race right and it's like okay accomplish pretty much pick any computing task right and it's someone who actually knows how to use keyboard shortcuts and someone who has to use the mouse all the time. The mouse person is going to lose pretty much everything all the time keyboards are just faster just about everything. So I mean even think of the keyboard shortcut I probably use the most is control L why because you're in a browser the most. So the key word shortcuts in the browser this three that I use more than anything control L highlights all the text in the location bars you press control L and start typing URL. You really think you're going to beat me by going up to with a mouse to the location bar and like clicking on it. I've already typed the URL and press enter right even if you can type as fast as me if you don't press control L and you click there instead you've already lost right. So the keyboard shortcuts I use more than anything are control Z. Undo and control Y though can redo redo though actually in a lot of Adobe software redo will only work once or undo will only work once. It depends. You'll have like a separate like control shift Z to step backward. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But again already that's getting into professional expert use cases and specialized. Right.  Yep. Back space. You guys realize if you close a browser window and have another browser window open and in control shift T it'll reopen that browser window and you keep hitting control shift T it keeps opening old tabs you had that you closed in the order you close them. Yep. You could do control N for a new window. You could do all right and all left will go forward and back but back space is also back back space is a really convenient back button. I want that the hill I will die on in UX the backspace key should never have done anything in a web browser ever well it does other than backspace a character that was the most bullshit UX design decision anyone has ever made other than making the stairs steeper on the eighth floor of my building and the shortcuts between Chrome Firefox whatever it's all slightly different but yeah like control L works in just about every browser like there's there's three categories of keyboard shortcuts like really put a fine point on this there's the completely generic effectively universal control S saves on every piece of software ever. Yep. There's the ones that are common to the applications that normal people use regularly like web browsers and then there's the specialized shortcuts for professional workflows which is actually the most interesting use case that really only professionals do and like normal people seem to be incapable of so like it's interesting watching people fumble through like adobe software like when I first started learning an edit video I would do everything with the keyboard because I didn't really know the best way to approach my task like what kind of insert do I want to do so the fact that there's a visual UI is very good for tasks that are new to you or tasks that are not commonly done by you well also it's very convenient you hover your mouse over an icon and it shows you oh you know you could press this key instead of pressing this button with the mouse and it's like you go into a menu to like your file menu and it's just all the shortcuts are listed in the menu so now you can learn if you keep clicking on the same menu option it's like oh there's a shortcut for this I'm not going to go up here anymore and there's always that one really disappointing menu option that has no text next to it yep it's like well I guess I have to go to the menu for this but it's good because it allows discovery like it allows the person to learn the interface and frankly while there are like Adobe Audition and Premiere are good examples there are I could literally bind keys to do goddamn anything I could bind macros look like a macros later and like really complex stuff but the reality is most super complex workflows I don't do often or maybe I'll do once in the course of a project I don't need a dedicated button there I think it's it's very rare that you need anything that's not the default right it's like unless you're have a job where you've you know have some complicated thing and even have a complicated thing it's like you should probably just have a piece of software that does it not need to program a macro yeah well like for example I like my I have this shuttle device there's basically just a keyboard with labels on it and some fancy controls and the key bindings I have are the things I do all the time and every project things like insert video from the preview area into the sequence I'm working on or like set an end point or set an out point or remove an end point or an out point like really out basic stuff that otherwise I would be clicking constantly to do or you could just use the keyboard uh like me well because most of what I'm doing also is scrubbing and navigating back and forth through the timeline I can just scrub with the mouse wheel but I still use the keyboard for all the other buttons mouse wheel scrubbing isn't frame by frame if you want to do certain things my mouse wheel is very very good it's not for my non broken mouse also you hold also you hold down some various buttons in the keyboard to adjust the speed of the scroll or I just twist the shuttle and the further I twist it the faster I don't need to have some weird device for no reason yeah because you basically don't do any complicated video editing but the point is that you just like to buy fancy shit I have keyboard bindings break shit to buy new shit fancy shit this was like $40 I'm just saying you just like to buy nonsense stuff my keyboard costs way more than this thing mine too but I also have keyboards but basically the things that I do semi commonly I do have keyboard bindings too but these are all like professional use cases and when I want to undo I still just hit control z why wouldn't you on my tablet I hit I the top left button is undo and the top the bottom left button is redo because I draw something and it's wrong and I undo draw it again wrong draw it again wrong draw it again now it's good and so one thing that I do right is is in most keyboard shortcuts and you know because you press keys in the keyboard and unless you have a piece of software like Vim I think Vim is the only one that's modal yeah right the most of the buttons on the keyboard have a automatic function like you press L it types the letter L yep you always need to combine it with alt or control or window key or something you know to to have a shortcut happen right and what really shocks me to this day is that they still make keyboards where the easiest button to hit that doesn't do anything is caps lock yeah right I always change caps lock into control with the defaults why are you changing from a default as Scott spent like 20 minutes telling me you should never customize anything I don't because what I do is I just buy a keyboard where the keyboard has a control there instead of a cap so rather than just making a simple software change to remaps it's actually not a simple software change fucking if you in windows if you want to change caps lock into control you need to edit the goddamn registry mr fancy pants needs his custom fucking keyboard to move how often do you use caps lock uh more often than you would why are you using caps lock what's wrong with you for this for the dumbest possible reason right the reason is control is a button you're hitting all the goddamn time I work in finance and I am typing ticker names into case sensitive systems sometimes also I'm way bad at typing I never use right shift I use left shift all the time I never use shifts equally I never use the right shift I probably never I use right I use left shift way more often than right shift I probably have never pressed the right shift I always I think it's a completely unused button on my keyboard you might like if you look at the number of times been pressed it might be zero I think I've hit pause fewer times than I've hit right maybe I should like consciously try to start using the right shift key to capitalize letters on the left side of the keyboard like you're supposed to pause and scroll the point is caps lock is useless you should if you're on a mac it's actually way easy to turn this caps lock into control or command and that brings me to something else which on windows you've got control and you got window key but window key is used for like lock the computer with window l yeah you don't really use it in a piece of software right so you got control you use control for and all is to usually to go into the menu or to type funny characters in unicode so what's fun is in all the professional software I have you basically can make any combination of control alt shift yeah you have to all is a lot of times used with control but usually you're going to combine control and shift before you combine control and all all is like the last one uh and but on mac they give you command and option and all are the same thing base right but they give you command in addition to control and what really sucks on a mac even though you get used to it eventually is that in mac apps like if you're in your browser it's not control t is command t it's not control w it's command w it's like okay I'll just replace control with command right but then you open up say a terminal on a mac and in bash right you want to go to the end of the line with you know control e well guess what it's not command e is control e why don't use a mac yeah well it's one reason right but it's like so when you're on a mac I sort of have it in muscle memory now even though I rarely use a mac that you know in which apps are command which apps are control but it's like well what do you change caps like into command or control right because if you you know it's like I change it into command use usually but that means anytime I open an app where I got to use control I got to move my finger way further and find this other weird as button you just use the defaults and just learn to live with them but that's what I'm saying is that even if you didn't change caps like in anything on a mac yeah in a browser you're going to be pressing command it's kind of amazing and in a terminal you can be pressing control it's both sad and amazing to me that windows and mac diverged on this sort of fundamental thing and stayed that way forever right and while mac had the open apple button which they got rid of and then windows added the windows key so I would argue that way more people use PCs and way more people like were used to the windows the way of doing things and meanwhile mac early days probably had a vested interest in keeping it weird because once someone was used to a mac you didn't want it to be easy for them to go back to a pc you want them to try to use a pc get annoyed by it and stay in mac land forever well that's the thing so few people use keyboard shark us that this is no longer a thing that people are annoyed by keeping them in one zone or the other yeah now one thing that's really sad that I see a lot among older people is that older people really seem to love macros I don't know about this I see the business analysts tend to do this all the time they will they will literally like forget I'm not talking about excel that doesn't sound like a keyboard shortcut problem that sounds just like a hammer to have a hammer everything it looks like nails problem so people will make complex macros sometimes with custom software the luckily that's just the only kind of programming they know how to do what does I do keyboard shortcuts this did seem to be a dying thing but it seems like it's coming back a lot of gamers will use software to bind macros to their mouse and keyboard buttons to do things in games when the game does not provide a single button that you could bind to do that thing and gamers seem to be the only good use case for this but usually seem people seem to only use macros when they have a repetitive task and they don't know how to script or automate it so they script or automate hitting a keyboard shortcut a bunch of times in a row things like that it's usually the wrong solution to a problem a lot of times in the office you're going to hear someone like typing like chicken chicken chicken oh my god that like they might be doing they might be pressing like something like down control v down control v down control v down control v or make like ten lines in turn like typing detected right and it's like you can hear that and you can tell this person knows enough that they can do it they've improved the efficiency a little bit but they don't really know how they could do this with literally like what pressing two keys it's like getting really good at chopping down a tree with an axe you're still not going to be faster than a chainsaw yeah they like you don't know a chainsaw exists so you master the axe yep no i can't no again like i have done that sometimes like if you just have like a thing and you want a really quick lick oh i gotta like space well yeah sometimes it's faster to just control v five times but sometimes is not there's a line well there's a line that you hear chichiga chichiga chichiga chichiga chichiga if you hear one more after that someone's going about something the wrong way yeah but it is it's weird how i see a lot of people not knowing these shortcuts but simultaneously like especially browsers especially control shift if nothing else you need to learn the basic keyboard shortcuts of the browser you should be able to browse the web without ever touching the mouse except maybe to click on a link and even then it's not necessary it's not necessary but there's some websites where you pretty much i only click all use the mouse for a browser clicking on links nothing else anything else i do the keyboard and that means i can browse that's how i can read so much internet so fast it's a big part of it is i scroll with the keyboard right i search the page with the keyboard i go to different pages with the keyboard now what i don't do is i never like it's a complex software like uh audition all these adobe things like photoshop type stuff i never change what the keyboard shortcuts are i learn what the keyboard shortcuts are and just use them that's right and if i want if i want a key to do something special it's not it's never because i want to change the key binding to like insert from a to q it's always i want to bind a key to something very complex like basically one step short of a macro or you want to bind a key to something that does not have a default binding because a lot of professional software will let you bind keys to things it does not have a default for because by the time you even know that thing exists you're already a very advanced user and you're gonna like you're doing something weird or something custom there's a lot of things that don't have default binding usually i feel like if you ever encounter a situation like you have to customize something that's probably a sign that like hey this is not the way that everyone does this is you know either a the thing you're trying to do is not a thing people do you shouldn't even be doing it there's probably something else you can do to accomplish your goal or b the way you are trying to accomplish your goal is is actually some other way that's way better you just don't know it right but like here's an example i could bind like there's all like there's a billion billion bindings in audition only some of them are defaults and there's actually different sets of defaults like you can set it to act like other software yeah which is a common thing yeah it's like okay we want to get people to use this software who are used to something like i want excel to act like quattro pro which just set my age it's like i got you i got used to quattro express or whatever it's like well i don't want to have to get used to excel now it's like all right well the excel people added a feature so you can do that but yep you shouldn't just get used to excel instead i'm looking for an example like there is a keyboard shortcut a default one for in audition decrease brush opacity isn't that for photoshop uh you realize you can draw on waveforms and on spectrels and do things with them in audition right okay what is opacity translate to like amplitude or what uh it depends on what you're doing you can you can select with a degree of equivalent opacity areas of a spectral display and then apply transformations to just that area uh-huh but there is no default binding to razor all clips uh-huh but you could just decide to bind a key that doesn't have a default selection to that if that's a thing you do commonly but normally that's a thing that someone who doesn't do that commonly would click on something in the ui to do the point is is that the number of people who learn keyboard shortcuts use them commonly and use them well is not enough they the advantage of you if you mess if you get keyboard shortcuts for the applications you use the most into your muscle memory your computing experience will be insanely improved you don't even realize like it's insane how much faster you will get shit done if you just learn the goddamn shortcuts and stop resisting so if you ever find yourself doing the same thing more than like three times in a row it's it's possible to do everything on a computer no matter what with keyword only except interact with a flash website maybe uh through i recommend if you can just unplug your mouse don't use any mice and try to see if you can bro just try that's a fun idea just browse try to browse the web and do your daily browsing without the mouse at all just unplug it this gave me an idea for a game that we could make a game shot of in live stream by me but i would i can browse the web with oh no no we would be the arbiters we have other people do it mouseless horse you know the game of horse and basketball where you make a shot and then the other part of the game is a game called vim horse it's probably older than you yeah so i'm saying we could apply this to for people who are not computer experts because it's way more fun that way you put them in front of a computer no applications are open and you give them increasingly complex tasks and they have to solve they have to do them without using a mouse and you see who fails first right and obviously those people are going to take forever but if you're good at it it would take you you can actually beat someone who's got a mouse easily yep if you knew them so learn them i think it was a fine show see you guys on the flip side flip side of this pod


A new Ecamm Live beta has just been released and it's got an awesome feature that I know you're going to love Hello, welcome to Take One Tech. My name is Alec and in this video we're we are talking about the latest beta release of Ecamm Live version 3.10 and it is beta 7. Now if you are a regular Ecamm user and you're not on the beta program then there's nothing to do in terms of application or anything like that. It is a public beta and you can get it simply by going over to ecamm.com slash beta and that'll take you to this website where you can download the beta here and install it. It does run in parallel with the regular program, so you don't need to worry about that. You're not making a choice between one or the other and you can do things in one, close it down and then open the other one up and just work in that one just as you had been used to. So definitely worth giving it a try because we do get access to some great new features by trying out the beta. I use it exclusively really. I rarely open up the regular version so I do find that the beta, although the point of a beta is that it is for testing, I do find that they're generally pretty stable. So there is that then also if you are using the beta then definitely head over to the Facebook group as well. So that is facebook.com slash groups slash Ecamm Live beta and there you will see lots of great information and conversation all about the beta and you can add your comments and feedback relating to the beta in there. So that is just another point actually if you are using the Ecamm Live beta then do keep conversations related to it and its features in that Facebook group rather than the regular Ecamm group so that we don't confuse people who aren't using the regular beta. Anyway with that out of the way then let's get into this awesome new feature that I've been telling you about. I don't want to keep you in suspense anymore so I won't. Let's just get up the features that came out from the release. Oh actually I should say if you are using the Ecamm beta and you want to update then if you've just opened it up it should prompt you but if not then go to the Ecamm beta menu in the menu bar and then select check for updates and just go through the update process. So that should hopefully be relatively straightforward. So then once you have done that you will get these release notes that tell you what has been added into this particular version and the three ones you want to pay attention to are the top three. Well the others are fixes down below but the first three are the three new features. The top one is the one that you're going to be really crazy about I'm sure adds a virtual mic feature to the outputs menu. I'm going to come on to explaining what that is and why it's important in a moment but the other two features are related to playback in playlists in your sound effects panel and I'll explain those as well so there's two extra bits of functionality that have been added in there but what is the virtual mic and why is it important? For a long time now we've had a virtual camera in Ecamm Live and what that enables you to do is then feed your output from Ecamm Live into another application such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Discord or wherever you happen to be wanting to use video so that then basically when you are in those applications and selecting your camera you are selecting the Ecamm Live virtual camera. The point of that is it brings all of the amazing production values that you can create with Ecamm Live and feeds those into your otherwise dull and boring Zoom meetings. Sorry for the assumption there so that is what that is used for. Now up until now we haven't had the way to get all of the audio out of Ecamm Live directly into those applications so we've had to use third-party applications such as loopback, black hole or other options were available and what do I mean by that? Well it means that when you're in Zoom then we could have selected our regular microphone as the microphone in Zoom but then we wouldn't get any of the audio that was being passed through Ecamm Live such as if you were playing a video or had sound effects or anything like that then those wouldn't be fed into the meeting and so in order to do that we needed third-party software like loopback which basically allows you to sort of merge different audio sources on your computer so merging the mic with the Ecamm Live sound effects and bringing those into Zoom instead and so there was always this third-party application that we needed in the middle and Ecamm Live, very user friendly, easy to get your head around, loopback often not so much for a lot of people. I know that I was often getting questions about loopback and how to set it up and various other different things and whether people even needed it because it wasn't something that people needed in all instances. Well all of that is a thing of the past thank you Ecamm for this release because now we just have a simple virtual mic in exactly the same way that we had virtual camera before we can toggle it on and then Zoom or Discord or Teams will then see this as the microphone input but let me not just keep talking about it let me actually show you because it's really easy to install and use as well. So the way that we're going to install this is if we come up to menu at the top and what you want to do is go into the output menu so it's in the same place before as we had our virtual camera so if we go into there you'll see now just underneath the virtual camera in fact down here you'll see that there's the virtual camera and then also we've got the virtual mic and then now if you go into that one that little sub-menu you can see that you've got the option here where is it there to install the virtual mic. Now once you install the virtual mic it's click on that button it will prompt you to input your password for your Mac and then once you've done that then you'll get this little pop-up saying that the virtual mic has been installed. So then what we do is we basically come back into that menu and you can see that now next to the virtual mic where is it there it's saying that it's on if ever you do need to uninstall it you can just uninstall it from that menu as well you can see that we've also got a keyboard shortcut to toggle it on which is command shift k or command option shift k just bear in mind that some of these keyboard shortcuts may potentially be slightly different depending on which country you're in or if you've got anything else set up with them but so those are the defaults built in keyboard shortcuts that you can assign to toggle this thing on and off and when I say toggling on and off what you'll see is when it is on if you are looking at your ECAM window so imagine this is your ECAM window with all of the different buttons and things like that around the outside of it and then you'll see this thing over on this side which tells you here I've got my video monitor out I've got my virtual camera on and you've now got this one which says mic out so that just illustrates that the or indicates rather that the virtual mic is on. So what do we do with it then well then we come over to our other application of choice zoom discord whichever it is and so I've got my settings for zoom open here and you can see that what I'm doing here is I'm using my virtual mic and sorry I'm using my regular mic my short mv7 coming into zoom and so you can see the levels jumping up and down as I'm speaking but now if I were to play a sound effect in in ECAM live uh oh I didn't do something stupid uh oh I didn't do something so that has played in ECAM but you'll notice that there was no levels jumping up and down when it was playing because although you could hear it it was in ECAM it was not being brought into zoom and that is exactly the issue that the virtual mic solves so now if I come into my zoom and I can come down here you'll see that we've got ECAM live virtual mic uh so I just click on that one and now my audio is still coming through because instead of it coming directly from my mic it's rooting basically through ECAM so you can still see in zoom that the little levels are popping up and down but then if I were to play a sound effect in ECAM uh oh I didn't do something stupid uh oh you can see the levels are still jumping up and down indicating that uh the audio is then coming through so problem solved no need for loop back simple as that uh you may obviously be using this for other purposes but uh certainly for ECAM into zoom and the like it's no longer necessary so that is the virtual mic feature and I think a lot of people are going to be very happy as I say but what are the other two features that I mentioned well they're related to playlists in the sound effects window so the sound effects menu you can access in ECAM live by coming over to the little menu here and pressing this button that will bring up the sound effects panel and when we're talking about playlists we're talking about groups of sound effects so in the sound effects panel as well as having all of your different sound effects you can as you can see I've done here group them as well and so what that means is and by the way you do that just by clicking here to add a new group name it whatever you want and add in the sound effects the thing about groups of sound effects is it means that as well as actually playing the individual tracks just by clicking on them like this what you can also do is you can play the group or playlist as a whole by clicking on the play button that is here next to the folder instead if you do that then using this little cogwheel here you can then also loop these tracks if I have that one toggled on basically what that's going to do is just play through and loop through all of these tracks so that's great if you want to have some constant background music of a series of looping tracks or whatever so that is all nothing new what is new is they've now added the forward and backward skip buttons so you can use this to skip between different tracks by clicking like that and then what you can also do though is now it does work with apples built-in media keys so where on your keyboard you've got the the play pause things like that and the skip forward and backwards track those now work with ecam so if I press the pause which is f8 on my keyboard it pauses the music and if I press play again it will play the playlist and then if I use the skip forwards and backwards then it will actually go forwards and backwards through those tracks so that is the other functionality that was added in if I just pause this music that was the other functionality that was added in apart from the virtual camera sorry virtual mic but the virtual mic is a biggie so I hope you found that useful if you did as always don't forget to like and subscribe let me know what you like about the beta in general and any feature requests that you've got and don't forget to drop those in the ecam live beta group as well so that's all for now and if you've really enjoyed this then there is always my buy me a coffee page to support the channel on a one-off or ongoing basis now I'm going to leave a link to some of my other ecam live videos over on the right hand side so don't go anywhere and youtube is going to pick another great video for you just up at the top there as well so until the next time have a great day