How are you doing? Hi Paul. Hi Michael. Great to see you as always. Do you know what? In this countdown I've just been on a bit of a mad rush to close everything down. I totally didn't go into this live stream. Oh hi Jeff. Great to see you as well. I didn't go into this live stream the way I normally do. So normally I do my one button press and it opens everything up and resizes everything but for some reason today I'd got things in a very similar position and so I thought I'd already done that but I hadn't. So I realized I'd got a whole load of applications open in the bottom, a whole load of background processes going so I've just been quickly shutting them all down. But anyway great to see you all and I managed to do it just in time. I also had my keyboard, my foot pedals mapped to something different as well so I had to go in and change that over to be my live stream mapping of my foot pedals. I don't know the things we have to deal with. Great to see you Jeff and Michael. Obviously I've got some comments that have come in before I started so I can't put them up. But yeah the Ecamm Fam Jam, I don't think there is one today. It was Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday was what was scheduled so so yeah that isn't happening today but we'll have to sort of iron out a proper regular schedule for that I think. So yeah and I'll be running some and I think you know the idea was that people in other time zones would be as well. And oh hi James. Well that's a lot of pressure now isn't it? What foot pedal am I using? Right I'll come on to that. I did do a video about this actually, surprisingly enough. It is just a generic one actually. Let me find out which one it is. Look at this. I'm getting derailed already. I'm terrible for this. I let myself be derailed. They are. Oh hey Todd how are you doing? Oh it's coming up to your season. I don't know if you know but I put my Christmas tree up before my last livestream so the kids absolutely love it so I know it's a little bit unorthodox but hey I'm sure I'll get your approval. Let me have a little look where my foot pedals are. They were somewhere around here but they're really good actually and it was a little experiment. I am thinking of getting another couple of sets of them actually and then doing a bit of a hack with them and changing the spacing and various different things like that. They're really really useful for a lot of things. So like for example if I just stick a... Did you indeed?  I never actually do the search function in the text but there you go. Well I will come back to it. I'll just be busy working away bringing it up in the background Paul but thank you for that. Well that's it they do and I mentioned this on the last stream so we had this unexpected bonus this year where Thailand which had been in not lockdown but they were making it really difficult for people to visit here. They sort of decided like literally a week's notice that as of the 1st of November they were going to open up for anybody to come as long as they had COVID test before they arrived and various different things like this. Whereas before there was like two week quarantine in you know not ideal quarantine locations and stuff like that. So anyway it meant that my parents can come over for Christmas so they come in for two months so the kids are just super excited about it. But anyway back to let me get back to the the Ecamm fam jam and I will come back to the foot pedals question. Thank you Paul for putting that in with a Q colon. Yeah so I think we're going to get a sort of regular schedule together and have them in different locations. I really love them. I mean you'll see them posted in the Ecamm group going forward and it's basically just a zoom call where we all get together and get some work done basically. The idea is it's to help those who are maybe feel like they don't have the time to do stuff and so it's sort of removing that excuse saying well let's just designate this particular time where you can come. I mean I don't know what the actual original scheduled time is for the calls but I mean the last one was about two and a half hours that I was on and then other people carried on for longer. The day before I think I was on for three and a half hours or something like that. So it's just basically focused work time really. I'm noticing a trend. I'm noticing a trend that although they are ostensibly set up to help people who who maybe have been making excuses and haven't been making the time and it's making that time for them. It is just still the sort of action takers in the group if you like that seems to be turning up so that probably will continue a little bit going forward but it is a great great way to just sort of I don't know there's something quite nice about just getting on with your work and I've been in the company of other great people. So so yeah I really really like it. He that's yes yes of course. Yeah yeah it's all it's all Christmas for me. So what about this week well it's it's another one of those weeks I'll just stick up my I've just realized I haven't got my little background board on never mind. It's not really an issue to be honest. There you go. So I've got my border. I might just drop the border altogether because I'm not sure it's entirely adding anything of value with just a picture of me in the screen in any case. But it does just screw up my linings and my little other overlays. So I'll think about that later. I'll probably have another redesign of my thing in the in the new year all of my overlays and stuff like that. And our agent is one of those as well. Does he is that like a does he do a zoom a zoom group? That's well that's well that's great. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about. I wonder what the time is. That's probably a bit more convenient for you as well Jeff in in the UK because the yeah the e-cam fam jam ones which docs coined that term for them. They are for me they're seven o'clock in the morning. So that would be obviously with the time change that would be is it one a.m. now or midnight midnight for you wouldn't it. So yeah probably not ideal. But the let's just have a quick look at my stats. Not a lot of movement since last week as you may have noticed. So only two more videos this week. So 158 and we're on day 193. So still 30 nearly 40 videos behind 35 videos behind. I'm not worried about it. I've got some little tricks at my sleeve for that though. So don't worry. And then yeah subscribers I actually had probably my slowest week in in this week. So I think only was it 20 some odd or something like that. Whereas a couple of weeks ago it was basically going up by 10 a day. So that's just down to my lack of lack of posting. I'm sure this last week but I've been busy in the background as I say working on a couple of things. So that's what I'm going to be talking about today. And yeah you can also blame Chris Tim for some of the videos and not been posted this week because he sent me down another rabbit hole. So yeah I won't go into all the all the stats and that because as I say they haven't really gone up much this week. So but what I have been doing is basically three things. So first of all I've been preparing for Vlogmas and I've had to go back to the drawing board a little bit with that. And oh hey doc great to see you here as always your friendly face. So yeah I got to go back to the oh by the way doc I'm also of the same opinion we should scrap day like saving time and we don't change it here in Thailand either. So yeah I'm with you on that one. This last couple of months has just confused me because nobody does it at the same time. Anyway if everyone just did it but did it at the same time that would be great but it's everyone seems to be doing it on different days depending on where they are. So yeah total total waste of time. So yeah in fact they call it day like saving don't they time but it's not it's not actually saving saving us time because it ends up screwing up all of our systems and things like that. But yeah Vlogmas. So I had I had got this idea because I've got this my new iPad mini that I'm really in love with to be honest with you I've had sort of fallen out of love with the iPad because since the since they weren't updating the mini for for so many years but this one is just I'm back to it again. It was the same sort of feeling I had when I got the original mini when that one first came out. I've noticed that in a few occasions but you're forgiven. So yeah I just really loved the mini with the pencil and by the way doc I got the the paper like covering for it it's at least just awesome it really does add that thing because I was I never really took to the pencil when I got the very first iPad Pro with the pencil. There was always that thing of the feeling was just a bit too slippy for me but the paper like really does make it feel a lot more like sort of writing on the the screen and somehow as well when you sort of palms moving across the screen as well it's got that sort of sound to it almost like pencil on paper and I always I always tend to write in pencil when I'm designing or notes or things like that in any case. So it's got that real sort of paper well paper like feel to it hasn't it. So I'm really enjoying it taking notes on the the iPad. But one other thing my plan basically for vlogmas was that I was going to film it all on the on the iPad and then edit videos on the iPad and then update it to upload it to work to YouTube to be sort of like all all iPad sort of thing. But then Ecamm announced that they're doing the the vlogmas this year and they're going to be you know people can post the videos in the group and stuff like that and there'll be a bit of involvement going on there. So I thought well you know you know how much I love Ecamm. I should definitely get involved in the Ecamm side of things and so it's kind of scoped my plans a little bit because obviously I'm not going to go into the Ecamm group and just post something that has not used Ecamm at all because there's no point filming videos on an iPad editing them in there. I was going to use Adobe Rush because I've got that as part of the Adobe Suite anyway. I don't worry Greg it's not for the channel it's just for just for vlogmas. It was just something to stretch me really because I need to do something that's a challenge and you know posting videos every day well that's what I've kind of been doing as part of this challenge. So I wanted to do something that was different and my whole thing is I hate editing. So I thought well if I do some editing then that's that's going to be a bit of a challenge for me. By the way I got this as part of the leap into live. I won this little iRig mic cast and it's a little microphone and you can either have it it's got two what is it called? I'm blanking now diaphragms is it excuse me one facing one way one facing the other. So you can clip it onto the top of a well it sticks onto the top of my iPad which is currently in a stand but it yeah basically you can either have it sort of directional so it's just taking from one side or it can be from both sides or from the you know the front or back basically. I'm really impressed with the sound quality of it. It actually feels quite waiting for the the tiny little side of it and it just basically magnetically clips onto your phone or your iPad or something like that as I say my iPad is in a stand. Let me just pop it off. Here we go. So it just basically snaps like that onto the back and then it's got a cable obviously that plugs into the USB-C but it's really really good quality sound to my mind compared to you know if I've done the side by side with just the sort of obviously the built-in mic it's not going to be too great on the iPad but it made me think that yeah I could actually use this for you know doing stuff a little bit more than just a little videos and stuff like that. So that was my plan but yeah with Ecamm now doing the the vlogmas I'm going to sort of change tack a little bit and I will try and because by the way so the point of my vlogmas videos was going to be I was going to do something that was a bit more kind of I suppose a bit more about my background and stuff like that other stuff that I use Ecamm for for example I suppose that would be Ecamm themed but and then also just sort of out and about so that I'm not just in my my little green screen studio and show some people some other aspects of yeah the sort of stuff that I do really and how I use these things that I talk about on my channel as well and so that was my yeah my thought process so what I'll probably do is I will probably do some filming on my iPad because I do want to give that a go I will probably do the editing on my iPad but I'll sort of use Ecamm as well to sort of to add some extra things to that as well so that's going to be my new my new vlogmas plan. So yeah this week I've been spending my my youtube time which is usually a couple of hours a day so that I've been using for that I've also gone down this rabbit hole that was sent down by Chris Tim as I mentioned and oh just quickly hey Dale I've always got to say to you say hello to you because you've got the same name as my son what a great name and so yeah so Notion is the little rabbit hole that I've gone down and just one second so I'll just answer this because I was on Vlogmas you don't have to you can stream into the Ecamm group you don't have to you can do it to your facebook page and then just post the videos as well so and it can be live or it can be recorded so I am actually going to do mine all recorded and then I'm going to post them to my youtube channel and then I will be posting links in the relevant thing I don't know how they're going to work in Ecamm whether there will be a specific post per day or something and everyone can post them in the comments or something like that I'm not entirely sure about that I'm sure we'll get some new some more information in due course but I'm I'm certainly going to just going to record mine rather than live I'm going to record them and I'm going to post them to my regular channel and yeah so be it so I know some people are talking about concerns about is it going to mess up your channel or anything like that but I'm not bothered I'm just going to post it there the idea is it is intended for people who watch my regular stuff anyway although it will be different it's just kind of I suppose it's just a way to sort of get to know me a little bit better really that's what I'm doing I'm sharing different aspects of what I do outside of the channel really so so yeah that's the that's the answer to that question but yeah so notion and there's another another couple of things as well with the iPad I've been I've gone down the yeah the note-taking apps on the iPad and I had a look at obviously Apple Notes because it's just built in there's loads of things that I don't really like about that in terms of as a just a general note-taking app with the pencil it is great for just being able to you know you can just tap on the screen even if the screen's locked you tap on the screen and a note just pops up straight away without even unlocking it or anything like that but then I looked at Notability which I know is a really popular one and the thing that's great about that is you can actually record while you're taking notes and then if you go back to your notes and you just sort of tap on a particular place on the written note it will play back what you are what was being said at the time so I can see how that's great for a few in meetings or in lectures or things like that then yeah it's great great for that but the reality is I don't actually do a lot of note-taking like that in situations where it would be picking up the sound I'm either these days on a zoom call with headphones in or I'm just taking notes where I'm not really fussed about having the the audio so although that isn't like a sort of killer feature as they say it's probably not that actual actually that valuable to me and so I looked at Notability and I downloaded that and I downloaded all of the some add-ons that you can get for it and stuff like that I did give it a good run for its money but then I also looked at the the other one was good notes that I looked at and basically good notes is hands down the winner for me there's just it just sort of seems to work better with my my workflow I like more of the the tools that you've got in it and it is cross-platform as well so oh hey rich always nice to see you here and so yeah it's it's it's I just think that good notes for me is definitely a better fit so I've just basically transitioned over to that now I've done a sort of rapid test over the past couple of weeks and yeah good notes is definitely the the winner out of all that and yeah there's loads of loads of great resources on it online in any case but I will be doing a little video comparison between the two because I think that they are generally sort of the you know the market leaders if you like in no taking apps there's loads of other ones by the way but yeah those are definitely the top two that people always seem to land on and I think part of it is just down to personal preference really the way it works with you and the way that your your thought processes work and things like that because there are there are a bit different in the way that they lay things out in terms of like organization of notes and stuff like that so yeah good notes is definitely my ipad note taking app because I do still like to do written notes as well I've got my little archive of my notebooks so I always use these these I've always got a few of them around these are a baron fig notebooks and yeah I've always always used these or ever since they came out and they're just really nice little dot note pages so all the pages have got dots rather than lines and so you can sort of replicate that actually on the the ipad mini the ipad mini by the way is exactly the same size as one of these in fact they made this the same size as the original ipad mini so in terms of space in my bag the ipad mini takes up just as much space as this but actually it's not quite as thick so so yeah I'm really enjoying getting back to taking written notes on my my my my ipad now and what's this do you take notes with pen and pencil or do you type notes into an app looks like a pile of books shows the answer yes so I am a I am a I do do some written notes but I'm a very uh yeah I like I like the tactile thing of writing notes and then I've got my whole sort of I've got my daily journal which is a Techo planner I've used these for years so here's my here's my journals going back over many years so I still do those and I write um I write my journal every morning basically so nothing's going to replace that I'm never going to go over to a an electronic journal I just prefer to the sort of yeah I prefer to just be writing and also not having everything is totally on a screen but you can't really beat the iPad for the iPad mini at least for the portability and as I say it's the same size as the notebook and about the same weight but half the width half the thickness rather and it's just it's just great because it's got everything there so where does notion fit into all of this so uh notability and um good notes are indeed written uh although you can type in them as well and they have got really good hand writing recognition as well so you can just write a whole blocks of text and then just convert it back over to uh to text instead of instead of hand writing which is which is really good and that seems to work really well as well there's lots of ways that you can add so you can add graphics and images and stuff like that into it and then add written notes around it as well which is really good for some of the stuff that I do so I can make little mock-ups of things and like one of the things I do with the marketing company is designing uh like sales funnels and stuff like that and so you can create little templates of little blocks uh and we can and just sort of drag them and drop them in uh and then just add on little notes and stuff like that so it's actually really good for uh designing stuff like that just a quick hello to uh hi Jerome and uh I don't think I've ever seen you on here before actually so great for you to stop by or at least uh pop into the chat uh pencil planner is a great combination of your calendars and written uh notes ah is it right well hang on a minute let me just make a quick note about that I've not actually heard of that one here we go this is this is how the rabbit holes get opened up and isn't it I'll definitely give that one a look uh and uh hey Albert great to see you as well um so uh so yeah the written the written notes with with good notes that one is definitely locked in now at the moment for my uh well we'll see what happens with this other one pencil planner as well but for the moment good notes is for my written handwriting handwritten notes on the iPad but um uh notion so this is the one that Chris mentioned last week and to be honest with you I was a little bit I think even on the you know the stream when he was talking about I said well I'm not really sure because I do use my omnifocus is my task planner I've been using omnifocus for like 15 years it was uh yeah I can't remember exactly but about something like 15 years and I don't think anything's going to replace omnifocus as my task planner because it is really a sort of like embedded in my whole workflow and it's it's based around David Allen's getting things done system which is definitely something that I use to get things done it's a great book if you haven't read it uh and um yeah when I read that it's just sort of totally worked with my my sort of mindset and thinking and so on so I was just all in on the getting things done system and omnifocus by the omnigroup is just sort of built all around that so yeah nothing's going to replace omnifocus then for my written text notes my sort of typed text notes rather I use text files just dot txt and then I use nvult which is a a fork of notational boss velocity written by Brett terpstra there's supposed to be an update to that coming out but that's been on the cards for I think about three or four five years now and it's still not common so he's obviously working on other stuff but for now nvult works fine for me and all my text files I've got about 40 50 000 of them I just sitting in Dropbox and the thing about text files is they are sort of ubiquitous you can open them on any platform on any device and also you're not in an ecosystem so I went down the the Evernote route at one point but yeah when you want to get stuff out then it's it's sort of it's not always the easiest whereas the thing about um text files is they are just there and if the company goes away well there's no company behind them they're basically going to be there for as certainly as long as I'm around anyway be readable very lightweight don't take up much space and there's lots of different apps that you can use to access them so I use nvult on the Mac and then I use writer on the iPad to just access those and I use that for basically um uh or bb edit is another great one by the way yeah I've used bb edit before um uh yeah barebone software another great company I use a lot of their stuff for when I was doing coding and stuff like that so but my text files it's it's kind of more I've been thinking a lot about this over the past week as like where does notion fit in and I'll come on to notion a bit in a bit I'm sort of rambling and waffling here but I was trying to figure out like where it would fit into my my workflow because as I say omnifocus for task management text files for all of my notes but my notes that I've got in text files are more kind of um things like reference files and running lists and stuff like that so um you know these little things where you want to figure out how to do something and you only need it like once every three years or something and you go and do a search on the internet and you find out how to do it maybe it's something that with the system on the Mac or something like that but it's not something that you keep doing over and over and over again but you do find yourself coming back to it like once every couple of years and thinking now how how did I do that thing um well every time I have to search for something like that where I think that there's a possibility it might come back later I just capture it in a text file so I've got loads of sort of reference files like that and then the next time that I have to do it then I just search my own text file system and it just pops up I've also got stuff like recipes and things like that cooking recipes in in text files as well and all these sorts of things yet coder so I have used coder before as well that's that is I think I'm thinking about the right one hang on yeah let me let me have a little look for this coder that is more for that is more for coding isn't it um there is a coding program called uh what have you done you've opened a wormhole it's not what the one I was thinking about uh um there is a there is a coding program called coder though I'm sure that is the one that I used to use for um for coding I think in the in the good old days I can't remember anyway I won't go I won't go down that rabbit hole just now I'll put it on my list though and if there's no more videos come out this week uh it's your fault this time instead of Chris's because I'll be down the code a rabbit hole so um so that's that yeah my text files are more sort of like reference things um so I've got basically my good notes my written notes I've got my omnifocus for my task management I've got text files for all of my reference material and stuff like that and then I've got my little techo uh journal here for my journaling but what I did find looking at Notion is it does actually go into um it does actually cover a lot more of the uh the stuff that I do around that so once I've planned a project and like at the moment one of the things I'm going to come on to later is uh is this course that I've been planning and uh I thought well what I'll do is I'll give it a go um I'll give Notion a go at um planning out this project and see uh see how uh how it goes and it's I really like it I mean Notion's it's it's hard to sort of explain it is you can do task planning in it which I won't really be doing as such except for uh it's good for sort of project planning and things like that it does have sort of small little database functionality I'm never going to use it as a full-blown database I've got databases I'm never going to use it as a spreadsheet because I use excel for you know all of that and it nothing could do what I do in excel uh better than excel could however there are times when you're doing stuff where you do just want a little table of data in amongst some other stuff or you do want to be able to track sort of milestones and so it can have um a bit like in Trello where you've got the sort of Kanban style Trello boards uh I think I might have murdered the pronunciation of that Kanban Kanban I'm waiting for Dr Jumping and uh correct me on that um but um yeah it's um it's really great and versatile the way you can just sort of flick between those things so you can just create a whole list but put dates in it and then you just switch over to be a calendar view so you can see how things are planned out or you can set it out into a sort of a project planning timeline and stuff like that it's just really versatile so I have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with it and um I do think that I'm going to be adapting it barring barring coder um then I do think I'm going to be adapting it for basically the bits that fit around my task planning my text notes and all this sort of stuff uh for project specific stuff I can see where the uh the the place for it in my workflow is so uh all of this is to say that's part of what I've been doing this week um is is just diving down into that rabbit hole so but it does look like I've got another couple pencil planner and coder right I'll I'll report back next week and like I say if you don't see any videos uh let me have a little quick catch up with these comments before because I'm going to be talking about this this course that I'm planning and uh we'll uh we'll see uh my penmanship well here's the thing in case you couldn't guess I do have like my writing pens but then I do obviously have different colors I think I do always have my highlighters to hand and things like that as well so yeah I am a bit of a yeah one of those ones who draw draw sort of like arty notes if you like uh and I've probably spent I do find though that things like that where rather than just scribbling it all out I do find that uh giving certain things emphasis and doing those sorts of things doc mentioned it in um uh in one of the live streams I can't remember which one it was or it might have been in class actually in there in uh office hours dot uh buy me a coffee dot com slash doc rock to join the office hours group but he was talking about it in there uh the what's he called Mike Rhodes sketch notes book and uh yeah I definitely read that as well and that's my sort of style where you sort of do little sketches and doodles around all of your notes and stuff like that but I find that that actually helps it to sort of embed the information into my uh into my little brain so so yeah uh let's have a little look um in the demos of notability there are immaculate notes uh yeah so that's that's kind of what I was just talking about really I'll be honest with you although I like to think that I make little arty notes I have seen some of the ones you're talking about and some of them are a different level I don't actually spend you know a whole uh I don't spend that much time crafting them and I don't have um yeah my my sort of handwriting and stuff like that is not as naturally just perfect as some of these people I've seen who do these uh these notability and um uh and notion videos as well oh sorry yes they're notability and good notes ones the written notes yeah I some of them just blow me away I've been diving into some of these over the past week um so uh it is it is that just them doing it yeah it's not an app that they're using that that actually does this for them obviously there is stuff that you can do hand notes and stuff like that but um yeah uh so a quick look bb edit uh oh must be catching up with myself here and uh right that's it there is a documentation coder plus another one for coding got it uh yet another wormhole has been opened up uh I have notes sections for you titled to caption notes for you your I can't just read this now what we're thinking switching to pages I'll let oh okay right yeah so I will be doing a few videos about um about notion there is it is it is very good for um for some some elements of my my note taking but anyway I'll I'll give you a full update when I've finished and yeah don't worry I'll be back I'll be back next week I will have looked at it uh have I looked at rocket book rocket book if I'm right is the one where you write the stuff on the page is it and then it all gets translated but then the notes have gone from your actual physical book is that is that correct it's just like a single single thing I think it I think if that's the one I'm thinking about um yeah so you write the notes down and it captures them all digitally sort of thing is that the that the one um so the thing about that is if that is the one that you're talking about and I'll obviously wait for the the response if that is the one that you're talking about the thing that I don't like about that is that once you've written the note it's gone from that thing and then you've got to transfer to another device to like flip back between pages and stuff like that I like having physical notebooks because you can write in them and then you obviously can just flip back and forth and then that translates for me over to good notes and stuff like that on the iPad because then I can still basically flip backwards through pages and stuff like that and it's all on that same device be it a physical book or an electronic device rocket book seems to break that for me because I can write a note on a on one page and then it's um it's it's saved somewhere but then if I'm in that sort of frame of mind of writing on that page how many pages can I go back and flick back and forth or do I then have to transfer to another device to go and say like all right well let me go back a few pages so that's why I've never really uh that it never really gelled with me that it did I used to have um a pen now what was the name of this I haven't used this for years I used to have a pen that was a um in fact I've actually still got here you go I've still got one of the actual books for it let me just quickly find the name of this because this was genius I don't know if anyone remembers live scribe let me get this up live scribe basically was a pen with a little camera in the front of it and then you had this special paper and if you look really closely I'll just get something that hasn't got notes all over it if you look closely at the paper it's got these minute little dots and it's a unique pattern of dots so basically the pen is always looking down at the paper and knows exactly where it is on the paper at any one time and what that means is and there's little uh little zones on the uh the the the paper as well and the thing had a uh a microphone in it so it would also do that thing where it would uh you could you could play the piano as well yeah uh you could draw a little piano keyboard on the page and then just sort of play it with the pen it was a bit gimmicky but it showed the point about how it worked that it always knew where it was on the page I use that for ages the thing about that was though the actual pen was crap the the the the it wasn't a pleasant experience to write with in the same way that another um another no other um pens were so the the the actual ballpoint pen inside it wasn't any good to my mind but it was a really great thing that you were writing with this pen it was recording everything and then just like with uh notability you could go back and just tap on the screen and it would uh it would record it back it would also digitize all the notes so then I was taking notes on physical paper I always wish this had been developed into something better than it ended up being to be honest it was still great and it felt kind of groundbreaking at the time this would have been about 10 15 years ago as well actually thinking about it um but yeah it was really really great and I've got a whole load of digitized notes that just came straight out of this at a little usb c in and not usb c usb mini micro usb in the end and yeah you just take all your notes plug it into your computer and then pages of notes just come into the uh into the uh the thing at the end it was just just brilliant so yeah notability did sort of take that thing of being able to record the um the audio just like live scribe did and then be able to play it back so that's uh yeah I think probably where they got that to that little trick from but yeah live scribe it's uh there's also the the thing about having to obviously with iPads and stuff like that um it's you know it's not the it's not the scribe pen it was the live live scribe I haven't seen them for years actually let me just pull it up I wonder if they are still about live scribe is the pen that's you have to the thing is you have to write on special paper as well with it but let me just have a little look at uh live scribe live scribe three uh so they do have actually they're still making them that's interesting let me have a little look at this oh no I've just sent myself down another rabbit hole here I think this is the original one let me just get this one up yeah this is the one that I add let me just stick this on the screen so this was the live scribe pen and it was as you can see it was quite big but that was to fit in it had a little camera in the end of it that would see exactly where it was on the um uh on the paper and so on ah yeah live scribe yet it was a great great idea but like I say it was just the pen was the actual writing experience with it apart from it being a quite a big large pen the writing experience of it on it wasn't it wasn't the best but now I'm just having a little look at this because I'm check this out for years live scribe have got a new one out by the look of it ah dear I've just sent myself down another rabbit hole look at this live scribe best smart pen for 2021 is the uh the article let me go back so it looks like they've made it quite a bit uh slimmer actually interesting right what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I'm gonna shut this down I'm gonna shut my browser down and I'm not gonna I'm gonna ignore that I'm gonna imagine that I've never seen that because that could send me down a hole another rabbit hole in any case so um uh I've just completely lost my my training thought there um so anyway so where was that where I was up to I was going to talk about what I was going to move on to after this I know I was just I was just uh I was just catching up with the the comments wasn't there there it was uh you could never use the live scribe because you always have to explain it yeah that was that was a point so I used to use it in my my architectural uh uh work when you know I'd have clients come in and would be writing notes down and it would always end up like dominating sort of the first 15 20 minutes of the conversation and yeah yeah it was uh you just have to keep it low key and not mention it but when you're there just saying I'm just going to turn on my pen it was always a bit of a giveaway really so oh I do use drafts I'd yeah I've got drafts on my on my iPhone and iPad as well so I know people use that like fully for all of their notes management so I don't actually use that I do use it more for creating blocks of text that I'm going to be sending somewhere else which was kind of its original purpose it's just kind of like if you got a thought or something and you just want to quickly jot it down and then you can just send it to whichever platform or service or whatever so yeah um so uh so yeah I do use use use drafts I'm going to do a full sort of video at some point about like how all of these things fit together but as you can see uh in the last uh last two weeks it's been a bit of a moving target especially so uh I use bear as well I tried bear I do I do prefer drafts I think just because I like uh I don't know I just sort of gels more with me but um uh oh hey Elaine that's uh great to see you here and uh also great to see Michael here as well yeah so it's too many that's the problem with tech there's too many rabbit holes to to go down and uh yeah I've just I've just been going down quite a few recently but in any case uh day one that's right you see there's another one that was one that I started and that was I was going to do my journaling in that but I've just uh I've just kept to my little uh uh Techo planners um they're uh or or journals rather they're uh yeah I just prefer the the um uh the physical writing experience for journaling somehow Google keep so that's another one I've never actually tried that one I've always just had these other other ones that are being my sort of frame of uh frame of reference I've never actually looked at google keep I have heard some good things about it but uh anyway that's that's enough I I'm officially closing the door on rabbit holes before I start writing any more off and down otherwise I won't get anything done next week etch a sketch that brings back memories just have a quick look at etch a sketch is that still going I'm sure it is because well I say I sure I'm sure it is now that is a bit of a blast from the past isn't it I'm getting totally sidetracked now it does look like they're still making those actually you can still buy etch a sketch there you go that's pretty impressive I never drew anything look quite like that on etch a sketch the uh the Taj Mahal that was a little bit better than my uh my efforts they were kind of like block men drawings yeah quite right quite right we have we have we have gone down a few rabbit holes here aren't we okay so let me move on to the next thing that I was going to talk about because it's sort of related to this which was well it's all related to why the let me just reframe all of this that I've been talking about all of these are excuses of why I didn't make time for my videos because I was making time for other things this week so my uh vlogmas stuff for my note taking and all these sorts of things a total rabbit holes that I chose to go down instead of actually creating my videos this week but I have done a lot of planning though so I do feel like it's been a really productive week this week actually so what I was going to talk about was I've mentioned it before but I'm going to be doing this zoom course which is uh extensively by like my channel although it will be a separate sort of paid course but I will be putting some zoom content I'll probably be looking for some beta testers actually of the course material so uh yeah I'll let you will know about that um but um yeah it's going to be a zoom course and I thought what I do is uh because I know that there are other people in certainly in uh doc's community in the uh you know the office hours community but then also in the ecamm community as well who are um uh you know looking at creating courses or they've got something that they want to create a course for so I thought maybe it might be a good idea to uh and correct me if I'm wrong or let me know if you think this is a good idea if I sort of document the process of making it and talk about my uh my process as I go through and make the the the course and the way I think about it and then how I plan to market it how I plan to you know make it available to everyone and stuff like that uh and so perhaps I could give a um I could perhaps do a uh that's right that's the that's the correct the correct emoji notation for a rabbit hole uh so yeah I thought it'd be useful for some people but like I say let me know if you think this is a good idea uh to just every week when I do my weekly update on the channel I'll also do a weekly update on where I'm up to with the course and sort of like the stage that I'm at and then I suppose my sort of creative process as well with it because I have done a few courses in the past I mean created them in the past I've also launched them we've got a a marketing company that you know builds sales funnels and things like that so I'll be talking about a little bit about that as well and how I had to do that aspect I'd always thought about keeping all of this sort of stuff totally separate from this channel but obviously the more I'm involved in the community and seeing the people things that other people are doing it is something that people are sort of talking about you know which is the best platform to do courses on like host courses on and all this sort of stuff or how do you actually get them out there so I thought perhaps it might be uh it might be a little bit useful so I thought what I'd do today then is just sort of give a little bit of an introduction to the course that I'm planning and kind of like my thought process and then also my creative process for it at this stage and sort of basically what I've been playing with for the past for the past week or so um so my starting point with any of these things is always thinking obviously about like the end user I mean that's pretty much the same with this this channel to a certain extent um although with the channel it's it did sort of evolve quite rapidly as a realized uh what you know viewers were interested in and all this sort of stuff but with the course I have got a specific target in mind um and it's going to be a course about zoom basically um but how to get better results from zoom meetings or how to improve the way that you look on zoom meetings so I've got to think about like who it's actually for uh and then also um you know where they are now in there presently and then what their aspirations are what their goals are and so on uh because you would think really after two years of uh everybody being on zoom all the time uh that people would have had it down by now uh but really there is very few uh zoom calls that I go on where there is anybody else on that zoom call who uh when I say looks better than me obviously they all look better than me but what I mean is where their their camera and image quality and lighting and sound are of a higher quality and it's not like I've got a brilliant studio or anything like that I'm using a 10-year-old Canon camera uh I bought a short MV7 to set up you know for this purposes of this channel and for my my meetings and stuff like that which isn't you know it's not a mic that breaks the banker anything like that and then I've just got two you know non-branded uh softboxes on either side of me so it's not like there's a whole load of expense or anything gone into it and I'm certainly not the uh the highest quality YouTuber out there uh but invariably on zoom meetings it always gets commented on and uh yeah everyone else is just it's just terrible looking really albeit they're the most beautiful handsome people in the world their picture quality and audio is is really terrible and it does make a massive difference to the way that you are perceived in meetings you are you instantly have this sort of air of authority if you are the one that looks and sounds the best and secondly if you can actually be heard it always does help to get your point across because your point is the thing that is being listened to rather than people being distracted I still don't understand why people have the uh uh you know use the green screen effect and have like a beach background behind them as there's some really really professional people that have really unprofessional uh video backgrounds going on behind them in zoom uh the keying of uh the green screen effect in zoom is not the best either so it actually becomes they probably they've put you know this background because maybe they're not in the an ideal environment maybe they don't want to show their home environment or something like that which I totally get um but um they end up doing something which distracts more from what they're trying to tell you uh than uh than the yeah then then it's having more of a negative impact than a positive impact because people are just getting distracted if people can't hear you properly or there's audio issues or uh you know people having to ask you can you say that again or these sorts of things it's just uh yeah it's not it's not good for business as a business owner uh and so yeah I mean I had an idea for a few a few other different courses but um it was really doc mentioning about you know doing a course specifically for architects a couple of uh months a month a couple of live streams ago that sort of um that prompted me to do the zoom one so I do plan to do one on zoom I plan to do one on uh basically mac productivity uh as well so a separate course on that and then on different things like the keyboard mice show I've got an idea for a full course to do on that although I will be just sort of I guess doing a lot of that on their channel as well and there's a few others that are related to my sort of content creation and related to ecam that I wanted to do as courses but anyway I've settled on for now the zoom being the first one um and so yeah just sort of thinking about um thinking about the person and what the issue that they've got is and what they want and the thing that is brilliant about the last last two years and everything being done on zoom is it is actually a great level in business because you are now judged on the uh uh oh hey Carly I've always got to say hello to you I'm talking about courses by the way and creating online courses so I'm glad you're here because you're actually doing it so that's always great um yeah zoom has been a sort of great leveler over the past two uh two years because you know big companies would spend millions on swanky offices and all these sorts of things and uh and to give an impression to to people and yet now we're all on zoom and people aren't actually seeing these these uh these little status symbols that people used to like to have when they were doing business and so now it's basically just comes down to basically how you look and sound on zoom and the message that you can give people and so that's really the the the the goal of this is to allow people to basically outshine the competition on zoom and they can do it with a very little investment really of of time and energy and so that's that's who the course is aimed for it's for people who want to basically just do more business and better business win more contracts I'm doing a project at the moment in another company that I'm a partner in and we're looking to raise funds for uh for this this particular software application that we're developing um and so being able to create videos that demonstrate it and exactly how all this stuff works um is brilliant we can just do all that in e-com I can create sort of video walkthroughs of this is the uh you know the mock-up the interface how it's all going to work things like that and it's a great way to um yeah to raise investment to get business and all these sorts of things so that's sort of like another sort of angle of the course as well it's just using the tool so having thought about the uh the outcomes that people want you don't want to think at this stage about like the actual the tool itself so you're thinking about where they are where they want to get to and then you sort of get the ideal avatar that you're sort of aiming for although it is for general business I will be targeting specific uh specific industries and things like that where I think there will be the potential uh highest return on ad spend because I'm going to be spending some money on ads for this uh to market it so I've been thinking and I'll I'll share all of this in due course as to exactly who I'm sort of targeting and how I'm going about that I'm also targeting different geographical areas as well um so the certain certain industries in certain areas where I think I will get the biggest bang for my buck in terms of what I'm spending on ads and things like that so that's always always a factor um but so once I've once I've sort of figured out like who the ideal client is if you like or ideal uh not client but there are people who are going to attend this course or do the course uh then I start thinking about obviously the structure and I've got a loose loose structure of the the course where it's actually quite a defined structure now but I had a loose structure which was um it's there's obviously lots of people online doing zoom tutorials there's lots of features to zoom that people aren't aware of so there's definitely a place for having a um uh as like a zoom a zoom course um to just learn all of the techniques but the thing about that is that doesn't give you that aspect of you know how to actually look good on zoom and so that's the sort of the next part of it really and so as well as the zoom tutorial there will also be like a studio and gear guide so basically how to just level up your your um your look basically and sound so it will just have the basics of like what you should do in terms of you know camera options uh mic options and lighting and things like that but just like I say not going into oh you've got to suddenly build a full blown studio uh but just to have those options of uh doing something I mean just literally buying a mic and using an old DSLR camera you'll instantly look better than that most people and getting some lighting set up so I'll be covering that sort of stuff in the course as well um and then there'll also be stuff about you know sort of uh the essential studio gear or the essential uh tech but then also the sort of bonus items so if you want to go down the stream deck route and all these sorts of things uh because you want to in zoom meetings as well make it so that the the whole platform disappears completely from the picture uh and people are focused on what you're delivering so many meetings you go into people are struggling with the tech they're all hang on let me just go and share my screen now how do I do this am I sharing the right one and all these sorts of things and it just totally ruins the flow of a meeting if you were in an in-person meeting where you've got all this stuff to handle you were showing something or demoing something you'd have it all there and the actual sort of physical act of you know picking up a book to show them something or you know taking them over to another area of the room to show them something else or to talk with them you know all of that stuff you would never actually think about it but suddenly with zoom people have got all these problems that like they're clicking around and that it's it becomes part of the meeting and just interferes with the whole flow of the meeting so it's this sort of the secret source really is basically how do you do all of this seamlessly where the other person is only ever focused on you on the message that you're giving to them and so that's that's kind of the other aspect of the the course really and of course the biggest part of the secret source for me in zoom meetings is ecam so there'll be a whole load of stuff in the course specifically about how to use ecam for zoom and i've just i've just noticed that you've mentioned this as well so yeah it is um it is a that this is basically going to be covered in it actually so it is a zoom camera gear guide and then also how to use ecam with it as well basically oh hey michelle great to see you here um and um so so that is basically in a nutshell what i'm going to be uh be covering in it and then talking as well about actual technique as well so once you've got the you know some equipment setup your studio setup or however however complex that might be for your zoom calls and then once you've got your tech so it would be things like the stream deck uh using the ipad for illustration writing on screen that is a great thing i use that all the time um and then um uh yeah other things like foot pedals i'll be talking talking for that um but then it will be going into more about sort of the techniques who actually covering some of the ways that people can use this technology because it's it sort of it opens up opportunities that perhaps weren't there previously or certainly weren't there previously on zoom um but also makes it you can do things that you wouldn't have even been able to do in an in-person event as well so i'll be covering all of that sort of stuff in the in the course as well and i'm going to sort of share some of this as i'm uh as i'm going through some of this i'll be sharing on the channel as well as i sort of build it all out um but then so that is that is the sort of structure of it now as it stands i've laid out this structure this is part of what i've been doing in in the little um e-cam fam jam sessions is just sort of laying all this out and figuring out how it's all going to fit together and so having got a you know those broad sections so basically the zoom tutorial telling you how to use zoom that's part of the part of it uh this the setup the gear and so on and then the sec the secret sources like the e-cam and then the actual technique stuff so having got those sort of four broad groupings have then just been adding in all the videos and things like that it need to be made for it so i'm still in that sort of stage of planning at the moment but by next week i should have like a really detailed outline of what all of those videos are and how they're all going how they're all going to fit together basically so i might even just actually share the the overall course structure at some point as well in the next week i would i would imagine so it just sort of gives people an idea of what's going to be included but in the in sort of parallel to this the way that my brain works i'm sure that you know there are other ways of doing this and maybe a totally linear structured approach but i can never separate the content from the aesthetic and i've always been that way it's kind of like i i'm an engineer but i'm also a designer as well so my sort of engineer by you know study but then i'm also a designer so it is you know i'm very into these the sort of aesthetic of things as well the way that things look so in my architecture i was always looking at the engineering and the architecture at the same time they always have this thing about engineers and architects clashing so the architect to design something that the engineer can't build but but i was always two in one really so i was always thinking about the two things at the same time and that sort of transfers over into everything that i do really i'm always thinking about the way things are looking and the sort of actual technicalities of them as well at the same time and that's the same with this this this course really so in parallel to thinking about the course content i'm constantly flicking back as a forward to how it's going to look and how things need to look so i've been thinking about the design aesthetic in terms of the sales funnels so how the website funnels are going to work it will that's i'll be doing my marketing on facebook marketing but then also potentially running some youtube video ads as well and they will go through to landing pages with different sales funnel designs i've noticed you mentioned sales funnels by the way carly and i can definitely do a few a few videos on those uh yeah i can i can definitely do a few videos on those so um and i'll probably actually share the funnels that i'm going to use to promote this course in fact um uh yeah i've i've got some queued up actually i haven't gone queued up i mean i've got them all that i could i do presentations about sales funnels to clients and stuff like that so i could easily actually just pull those up but i uh i probably won't do that today i'll come back to that though and i'll let you know about that but that um yeah in terms of the design aesthetic i'm always thinking about how that translates over you know what the branding of the whole thing should look like um but then obviously how the the course environment is so once people go in to start to do the the course what's that whole thing going to uh to look like um uh let me have a little look at what's doc mentioned here it's not just popped up it's popped up in my other little chat but i haven't seen it there louis solovan uh form of function i don't know if i've heard that is that a book let me just write that down oh it's as we talk about notes i've also got this little jotter that i was after with me as well to jot down those uh louis solovan all right okay i'll have a look at that as well um so yeah in terms of the sort of design aesthetic yeah i am thinking about the um the the course environment as well and then i'm always also thinking about like downloads and i often go down little sort of uh little rabbit holes when i'm thinking about um so for example the course material there'll be videos but there'll also be downloadable uh uh accompaniments to all of the uh the course uh modules if you like as well uh so then i start thinking about like how those are going to look and i start sort of mentally mapping out those and i'll i'll start thinking about a particular uh thing you know like one of them is going to be so i'm going to be doing some lead magnets for example oh frank Lloyd Wright's engineer i was thinking about a uh someone more modern day but yeah um so the um uh uh yeah the things like the the lead magnet so a lead magnet is something where you know you say do you want my free report or free this or free that and they go to it and they grab it from the uh you know give you the email and then they um uh you know then they're in your email sales funnel for example uh there's also things like uh trick wire funnels where basically uh you offer a product for you know a low price like less than ten dollars for example and then they'll go through and they'll buy that particular uh product but then you offer them you know up to the the course and things like that so when i'm actually coming up with these ideas of things i'm sort of thinking in my mind about the design of them as well so you know seven steps for uh you know more productive zoom meetings or whatever it happens to be i always think in in those in those terms um so that's like another part of the sort of the design process is thinking about that and thinking about how all these uh all these things fit together now let me just quickly stick up my uh join link if anybody fancies jumping on and having a having a chat and i'm just going to have a quick catch up with these things so uh i'm glad you like the idea carly and uh i'll uh i'll have to get you on as a a um definitely yes next weekend i got all the elbow i need help that stopped the meeting uh that was not my meeting yeah it's it's happened all the time in zoom meetings yeah fine line between artist and engineer um yeah i don't like where that comes from really as well but i've always been i've always been like that looking at like both sides of the equation from from the outset and uh the form follows function thing is uh is definitely um is definitely a thing um but i do sort of hold the two in my mind at the same time almost is a bit i totally get the point you know if you design something that is like a perfect perfectly engineered then it has a sort of natural beauty to it uh but there is an element of sort of sometimes i do get an idea of a form that comes first um but then i sort of flesh it out from the the design perspective and uh yeah uh oh hey victor i'm glad there will be more stream deck videos coming by the way there'll be more stream deck and more keyboard maestro videos as well they're on the cards uh i did the beginner's guide to stream deck and i have got a sort of intermediate and advanced guide to stream deck as well that is already pretty much planned out i've just got or i say planned out i've written down the titles so i know what i'm going to be covering in them and then same with uh with keyboard maestro because those two things really work well together and i did the beginner's guide to keyboard maestro one but i haven't done two three four and four and five yet and i've got the advanced ones to do on that as well but uh yeah uh so what i plan to do is then for it coming just back coming back to this uh this course idea is every week i will give a little bit of an update on uh on where where i'm up to with it and so this week i am literally just having uh created this sort of loose course outline i've got to go into a bit more detail into what will be what will be covered in those videos i'll probably still do them in the same sort of style as my videos i don't want me doing any editing that was my whole thing about starting this channel was to just get used to being able to sit down and make a video without editing um although there will be some stuff in the zoom course that is where i have actually got to demonstrate something which will require you know i'm going to show setups and things like that so it won't be necessarily all just uh just unlike this basically to my regular videos i should say um keyboard maestro and stream deck uh keep getting distracted by comments but create keyboard maestro and stream deck is just amazing i bought the stream deck to to use for you know doing e-cam and stuff like that with but when i figured this sort of link between keyboard maestro and in fact the the the app for stream deck is called kmlink that's the best one that i find to use with uh with stream deck i've got another video to make with stream deck by the way and uh keyboard maestro which is uh something that um rich asked about which was about using can controlling a second computer with uh stream deck and you can actually do it using keyboard maestro so i've got to make that video because keyboard maestro this is a just a bit of a diversion this is this is why on my videos i just do them and stick to a topic whereas on these live streams i always end up just veering totally of course uh keyboard maestro you can have a an action or rather a trigger a trigger which is triggered over the internet they've got a particular protocol it all goes through their servers and then on another machine you can have a keyboard maestro action that triggers that trigger so it triggers it on the other on the other computer so whereas before i thought that you couldn't use stream deck like and have it controlling two computers at the same time because it's obviously plugged into one using keyboard maestro you can actually do that so that's another video that's quite near the top of my my to make list the other video that i've got to make on keyboard maestro which i've been talking about for two weeks is basically my one button click which sets up all of my workspace and ecam and switches to the right profile in ecams which is my stream deck to the right profile for that ecam profile and this has been i've been given a bit of a nudge about it as well in the the group because um Michael Hayat asked the question in the group about you know what's the best way to work with profiles in ecam and stream deck and that video is basically the answer because i know that he's a keyboard maestro user and you can just have it like with one button press basically just switching to your ecam profile switching to the relevant stream deck profile and then arranging all of your windows so that's probably my next my next video on keyboard maestro at least but yeah right i've gone totally down a rabbit hole now totally off track but uh yeah i i just i'm totally in love with stream deck and keyboard maestro i tell you another thing that i haven't i haven't done yet so i've still got my um my loop deck i said this last week my loop deck is still sitting on my desk and i still haven't properly set it up to be honest i haven't gone through and set up all different profiles and stuff like that the one that i have been using it for is uh is photoshop i've been using the little volume knob on it as well but it's a bit expensive as a volume knob but i have been using it with that with photoshop i do like it with photoshop i like the the dials the the little knobs on it for adjusting you know brush size and all these sorts of different things and different parameters but i've not really got past using it for more than that at the moment so i think it was because that came at the same time as my iPad mini my iPad mini then it's caused me to sort of rethink a lot of things about my regular workflow and so it's just i can't believe i've had it on my desk for two weeks now and it isn't all set up because that's that's usually my MO is get something dive into it get it all set up and then move on from it but um yeah loop deck still needs to be needs to be set up but yeah stream deck and keyboard maestro for me is uh it's just a winner and that's why i can't see i can't see loop deck replacing that uh i wish there was a bit of a hybrid of the two to be honest because there's no issue with with touching the wrong key on loop deck at all uh although some people you know i i had the thought that it might be with it being just a screen uh you can tell where the buttons are there is dividers between them um so i do like it for that i wish there was a bit of a hybrid and i've thought about creating one i've thought about ripping them both apart and uh getting a a case made that's basically combines the loop deck knobs and some of the other functions with the stream deck and making like a yeah a bit of a franken deck there's a mix of the two of them i'd probably actually double the number of stream deck keys as well so it needs two stream deck excels and then the loop deck uh little dials and things like that and then just join them all together oh thank you very much victor that's very very kind of you uh much appreciated i've just realized i've cropped the edge of my uh i've cropped the edge of my buy me a coffee link off how's that happened i'll have to fix that but thank you very much victor that's much appreciated that's what fuels this channel i've got my this is my second coffee of the morning because it's yeah 10 past six in the morning here so uh yeah hey kevin great to see you and jerry great to see you too uh yeah kick start a project yeah i've got uh yeah i've got a list of things like this i will i get around to them i don't know i'm also going to uh hack my foot pedals together in fact let me just quickly come back to that because it was a question that was asked earlier by uh mr paul duncan moderated to the stars not that i am but he is uh let me have a little look what where it was because these uh i really love these foot pedals and i'd seen that you can get some quite expensive foot pedals really uh for usb foot pedals for the uh for your computer and there are some like professional ones for like page turning and stuff like that um but these ones were just sort of like non-branded generic sort of things i forget how much they were now i think they're about 20 dollars or something like that on amazon let me just quickly grab them up and they look something like this uh now i can't actually pull that up hang on a minute let me uh share my screen instead then i was going to try and grab the image straight off the amazon website but you can't actually do that very easily let me try there we go so they look something like that and it's just three little switches they're basically mapped to the keystrokes a b and c so then in keyboard maestro i've just remapped those and then i've set up little macros as well so that i can cycle between different uses so for example now i've got one of the foot pedals is uh takes the um last comment off the screen if i just press my foot pedal there you go it disappears i've got another one which goes back to my main scene like that i've got another one which flips back to the previous scene so i'm just doing that all with foot pedals so it means that uh i don't have to sort of be doing anything with stream deck i can still be looking at the the screen and just easily go back and forth between different things so uh that's true rich as rich is the uh the one with a wrench here he's the moderator um so um uh yeah i really do like these foot pedals but one thing about them is uh there could be more of them i'm realizing and the distance between them if you put your sort of let me just go back to that scene if you sort of put your the ball of your foot between the um like sort of at the the center of them they're just a little bit too far apart for me to easily sort of move my foot between each one if you want to just have your foot sort of stationary you know always where you are in relation to them so i'd actually like to move them a little bit closer together i've got them at the moment with basically two feet one on just next to either edge either side pedal and then i can obviously know where the middle one is but it would be quite good to just actually have more of these and have them mounted slightly close together and i would just adjust them all but it is relatively easy for me to just hack this up and rearrange them all so i was thinking of getting another couple and doing a little hack experiment you can get a single single foot pedal or you can get three so i'd just get three and just move more together with keyboard maestro you can map the keys from particular devices so although in theory the keys are still going to be abc on each one it does recognize them as different devices so i can just map them that way so jerry the the foot pedals do they work in ecamp they do effectively because what i'm doing is i'm using keyboard maestro and i'm just using keyboard maestro to map the keystrokes from the foot pedals to specific menu items in ecamp because with keyboard maestro you can map to a any application any money excuse me any menu item that you've got you can map to those those menu items or when i say map to them what i mean is you can activate a particular menu item even if the app isn't in the front so it's a great way i use that with keyboard maestro actually if i want to trigger things in the background so for example like i did a stream deck profile for in fact let me just bring it up shall i i did a stream deck profile for youtube so basically when you're watching youtube you can do all of the use all the keyboard shortcuts for youtube to like skip forward 10 seconds back 10 seconds all these sort of things pause play and all that sort of stuff but actually control it while it's in the background so i you i watch youtube for tutorials and stuff like that surprisingly enough and having keyboard having stream deck icons that allow me to pause it whilst i'm still doing what i'm working on is it's just really good and i do that all with keyboard maestro so yeah there is a the video that i did about youtube tells you how to do that with keyboard maestro to sort of set that all up but yeah i would just be able to do that with these these multiple pedals key i don't think there's anything that keyboard maestro can't do on the mac and with the latest update so that's why i also by the way another diversion here my keyboard maestro beginners guide i did video ages ago and then i was just about to start doing videos two to five last week and then they came out with keyboard maestro 10 and i forget what it was it was something like 160 like features when you when you install new software and you know you have the release notes it's like what's in this version what's new in this version and normally you've got like a little window on your screen it's got like you know 10 20 30 features or whatever this was like 170 so much it was just a massive big long list and they've done some amazing things and they've actually removed some of the things that i used to use automated for so there was one thing that you couldn't do with keyboard maestro before is you couldn't create those little apple services that sit up in the services menu so that you could do with automated but you couldn't do with keyboard maestro whereas now you can do it with keyboard maestro so there's a few things a few things like that that they've added in well not a few things there's 170 some of things that they've added in so yeah of course elaine you'd be used to the the the foot pedals with your musical background so that's there you go that was what i was thinking that's the 3d printed option kevin yeah that's one thing that i haven't got but is that i've been seriously considering getting is a 3d printer because there's loads of stuff that i am that i do with that i do that i could i could use that for i do use quite heavily i made a video about this one which is a bit little bit of a weird thing to have on my channel but i use this stuff all the time yeah it's not uh it's not a bag of cocaine it is polymorph which is little tiny plastic beads and they're basically they melt at basically just fill up something with boiling water stick a load of these things in and they go totally malleable but then when you take them out of the water after they've cooled they go like rock hard again just like solid plastic so i use that all the time to make little things little obviously nothing that's going to be temperature exposed to heat or anything like that but um yeah i use i use it all the time so a 3d printer is actually something that would definitely fit right into my mind my uh my little like new studio and whatever at some point and yeah i could definitely just print up a new case for the stream deck the uh the franken deck i'm going to call it there we go let me just register that the main while i talk talking about it the franken deck let me have uh no not this time not this time um do i have an affiliate link for keyboard my show do you know what i don't think that they even have an affiliate program i uh i'm pretty sure they don't have an affiliate program let me just have a quick look um but to be honest with you it's uh yeah it's just one of those things i don't know if they do have an affiliate program but just go for your life it's what is what is keyboard my show i think it's like 32 dollars something like that and it's one of these things where it's not a it's not another subscription i i like the subscription model i get it um but it's nice to just have something that's not like another little uh another little monthly leech isn't it once you know how much it is that's it you just sort of pay for it and the updates are pretty well they've just updated to 10 so uh you'd be pretty good 36 dollars it is uh for that let me just quickly drop the link in the chat while i'm here i suppose uh keyboard maestro dot com it is it's one of those pieces of software though keyboard maestro where a lot of people get put off by it because it can do so much and it seems like you know i'm not going to need all of this functionality or it's a bit overwhelming but the fact is it's actually really simple to create some really simple little things in fact let me just quickly just do one shall i because i'll show you how easy it is if you've got a use case for this then uh i mean it's one of these things as well that once you get it it's just so easy to uh to use you'll come up with the other ideas of things that you want to do with it so if i stick this up here now so this is my keyboard maestro in fact this is basically what i'm using what my pedals are being controlled by so i've basically got uh pedal one two and three it's just mapping from this particular uh pedal and then it's just what it's doing is it's going into my overlays section uh let me just get my promos with you oh it is there we go so this is basically just activating in ecamm live it's activating something from the menu overlays and it's activating the hide last comment overlay so i've just basically got uh up here we've got the uh the particular macro in fact let me just start from beginning shall i i know i've covered some of this on my channel but i'll just start quickly with a an introduction to keyboard maestro very quickly and uh it will take long the interface is like this you've basically got groups of macros macros are all these little actions you're going to take so it's just basically these are just folders containing lots of different macros and when you when you first start with keyboard maestro you'll have none of these it's just literally uh the the sample ones and maybe a couple of demos or something like that in each of those folders when you click on a folder it will show you the macros that you've got in that folder so here i've got my pedals for live stream i've got pedals for recording and i've also got pedals for zoom as well so those are my three different pedals you can also see that these ones are currently sort of they're a lighter color that means they're not active so i've only got this particular set at the moment so this is how i've basically created different uh sets of macros for the foot pedals and then i've got a macro that switches to make one of them active and deactivates the other one so pedal one this is where you've got your different macros so i created one for one two and three and then the the sort of format of this if i just create a completely new one as an example the way that this is formatted is you basically have the name of the macro then up here you have a trigger so there is whatever you are going to use to actually trigger this thing to happen the action that you want to happen and then down below here you've got this place where you can add in different actions to to actually happen once that trigger happens and the triggers can be all sorts of different things you can have a hotkey so that's basically where you're going to assign a keyboard shortcut so let's say that you wanted to assign a keyboard shortcut to the menu item of an application that's running in the background but you want it to be able to activate it whilst you are doing something in a different app which is basically what i've done here so let's say i wanted to hide the last comment for example from ecamm but i knew that i was going to be having some other you know application was going to be at the front and i didn't have a stream deck for example so i didn't want to have to go into ecamm to then go and hide the last comment so i could have a trigger which would be a keyboard trigger so let me just click on here and just click hotkey let's just say i'm going to put the hotkey trigger i don't know if we're using this for someone else like that so i've just created a trigger by just pressing the key strokes so control option shift command h is going to hide the the last comment and then down here we're going to create a new action so i'll click on a new action like this and it brings up this palette of actions and this is where people can get overwhelmed because they think there's so many there's so many different things that you can trigger and in each of these there are so many different levels of like adjustment that you can make to it so it can seem overwhelming but it needn't be because you just start with what you want to do so what do we want to do we want to do something with the menu items in an app so if i just type menu it's narrowed it down straight away so you can see that it says select or show a menu item so what that's what we want to do we want to basically select a menu item in ecamp so i'm going to just drag that over into there and by the way you can have a whole chain of of actions so i'll show you an example of some that i've done that i've just got you know a lot more actions in than this but for now we're just going to have a hotkey and an action now what we're going to do is we're going to select a menu item in now it could be the front application but that's not what we want we want to go into a specific application so i'm going to click that and i'm going to click on ecamp live beta and then we want the menu title and the menu item so if you think about the way menus are you've got the uh in the menu bar in in a mac you've got the menu title which is the one that actually appears in the menu bar and then you've got the items sort of underneath it listed out so here we would type in the uh the um i've just noticed that yes yes i shouldn't use the word overwhelming but some people are uh so the menu title would be actually the title that fits in the header of or in the the actual menu bar and then you would add the the menu item below that if you've got nested menu items so sort of you know where you drop down and go into a folder and then it's in a sub folder and so on you can just add like multiple different items in here like this however there is an easy way to do that he's an easy way to do it which is if you click on the little menu item here you can actually just come down here and select the particular app that you want so ecamm live beta this now lists all of the menu bar titles so we've got the apple menu the ecamm live menu the edit menu profile and so on and now if i go down into overlays we should have one here which is uh let me have a look at where's it gone hide last overlay this is where i'm not going to be able to see it isn't it and let me have a quick look let me have a little where is it can't see it in there it is uh it's not hide ah it's because it's not showing up i see let me uh just have a little i'll put a comment up i'll put a comment up and let's see if that appears or if it was just me i might have just been missing it before stranger things have happened so it is in overlays and it's down at the bottom ah there is hide last comment overlay so what we've just done there is we've just created a macro simple as that and we've created a macro i can close this down now we've created a macro and let's call this uh hide hide last comment obviously you can do this with a stream deck it's it's all built in but i'm just using this as an example uh hid hide last comment so now i've created this macro called hide last comment which is triggered by this keystroke control option command shift h and what that's going to do is hide the last comment so if i now actually press that uh that keystroke now you'll see that it should uh just hide that comment there we go so it's just hidden the comment so that is how you set up these macros but you can actually chain uh chain actions together so if i go to uh let me have a little look at an example uh let's have a little look so like this one for example i have um uh i have my my panels on ecamm live i don't want them all open at the same time so sometimes i want all of them like the the overlays the scenes the sound effects panel and stuff like that but like when i'm on a live stream for example i also want the comments the interview window and all these sorts of things so i've got this little toggle here uh and you'll notice that there's no work no well you might not notice i'll just tell you there's no trigger assigned to this uh this um keyboard maestro macro but what it's doing is it's basically it's activating ecamm live it's hiding uh all the windows that are not relevant to what i'm doing uh and then it's going to uh particular it's activating the scenes window the overlays window and so on sound effects window sound levels and camera effects so this little it's kind of like actually a little sub macro really because it's just doing this one component but then i've also got one for my live panels so when i want my live uh when i go live i want to have also the comments and reactions and stuff like that so it's also opening those ones and these are almost like little sub routines and then i've got another macro which basically is for uh let me have a little look so ecamm for live stream what this does is it actually calls these other macros so it's executing this macro of the ecamm live setup it's also pulling in the base windows and then my live windows so these uh these two macros here are to do with the the windows in ecamm live and then they are being called into this particular one for whether i'm doing live streaming or recording and that's that's how these little sub routines are working but even this one doesn't have a trigger because i'm then triggering all of these through um through stream deck there's a key a plugin for stream deck called kmlink and so i use that to just basically trigger all of these so there's loads that you could do with keyboard mystero and it can look quite complex but actually this is all just a series of simple similar sort of steps and once you get your head around the idea of building these things up uh there's loads of stuff that you can do with it there's loads of different triggers so you can do things like um uh you can trigger by different usb devices you can have like remote triggers so this remote trigger is the one that you use if you want to trigger a keyboard mystero action on another on another computer so uh this is the video that i've got make rich for you uh and so and i've got to try it for myself because i do use um i do use two computers sometimes when i'm making videos uh like i did one that was talking about how to bring a guest's slides into e-cam over interview mode so that basically they can just give their presentation and you could sort of manage it remotely uh and in that case and to make that particular demo video i just use two macs next to each other and so what i could have done is i could have a keyboard mystero running on one mac and one on the other and then actually use the stream deck to trigger keyboard mystero on the first mac to then go and trigger a macro on the second mac to do something on that mac uh and it's something that i didn't even realize you could do until uh yeah rich asset i can't remember that was i might have just been in a private chat wasn't it rich but anyway um yeah i'm making that video and i've got to figure out uh not figure out i can see i've got to set up a number of things that i can already see how to use it in my you know for what i do basically and so yeah solved a little problem for me that so um so yeah basically that's that's keyboard mystero that was another little rabbit hole and then in terms of the actually the things that you can do with it it's just uh yeah there's just an endless an endless uh an endless number of actions that you can perform and each one of them as well there's all stuff related to so there's stuff related to like images and stuff like that so i use it for image resizing and stuff like that as well or like batch downloading some images and then like with the push of a button i can have it basically uh resize images move some into some folders some into another so when i was doing web design back in the day i used to use this for um uh i'd have some images i'd have like i'd want to resize them all to a particular size to put on the website but then maybe i'd have little thumbnail images as well so it creates a whole another version of them resized and you could do that just with a single keyboard mystero action to do all of that the batch renaming and all these sorts of things it's just it's just really versatile but don't be put off by the potential for complexity because you can start like really simple with something just like we did there which was just basically activating a simple action in fact these are the ones to switch between those uh foot pedals but yeah but it can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it and you can just sort of build up the other the other mistake that some people make and by some people i mean me is when i first caught keyboard mystero i was just totally blown away by what it can do and then i decided to start like adding this into my workflow and so i thought about all the possible things i could want it to do and then spend ages going down a rabbit hole of actually programming it or to do those and then i promptly forgot all of the things that it was going to be doing for me so definitely the better approach i found is actually rather than just try and get everything set up first of all uh is actually just go through and uh sorry don't that it's just cracked me up um uh yeah it's definitely to um to to sort of build it up as you go along so when you get an issue that you think like oh how could i make this better it's a bit like that with text expander as well rather than try and think out all the different text snippets you want to expand is to sort of go through your day to day and then when something crops up you think oh i want to be able to do that oh i know i've got this tool that could do it and then sort of build it out slowly that way you don't end up with a whole load of uh wasted time on macros that you might not actually be using because there is there's so much cool stuff the temptation is there to think like right what can i do that's super cool with this uh that you don't actually end up using it and if it's not saving you more time than it takes to make it then you shouldn't be making it so i just i just noticed when something happens in my workflow where i think oh i need to do do this or i'm doing this repetitive task some of the stuff that i got in keyboard maestro i've had in there for years and i still use it all the time there's other stuff in keyboard maestro that i've just had a job that i was working on for like one day and i thought i need to do this and it's going to take me x amount of time if i have to do these repetitive tasks but with it with keyboard maestro i could just spend maybe 10 minutes writing a quick macro and it could cut the time you know in to 25 percent of the time that it would have taken to do it so some macros i have that all that i make are literally just one offs that i use to just save a whole bunch of time on a particular task and other ones are there for for you know years and years and uh our text expander yeah it's it's one of the the power apps really isn't it text expander keyboard maestro they they just uh i love that's the other thing i love about text expander as well is the fact that it tells you like and now in the original version you could always just go in and have a look at like how much time it had saved in the lifetime but now they'd actually just send you these little updates if you don't opt out of them that says you know you've saved this much time this week based on you know your typing speed and how many keystrokes you would have typed out and all this sort of stuff it's uh it's just a a lifesaver so uh yeah definitely a text expander fan i mean you can do some sort of text expansion on the mac anyway but it's just the it can't compare to what you can do with text expander and same with keyboard maestro you can do text expansion with that as well but and definitely i do all of my expansion it's done with text expander dear so uh yeah uh no problem victor great to uh go just catching up but thanks for stopping by and thanks again for the coffee much appreciated oh hey sammy i didn't notice you sneak in there let me have a little look at some of these uh comments indeed it is another rabbit hole so the thing about 3d printing is i'm quite good at the uh i'm quite good at the 3d uh the 3d modeling and stuff like that because obviously i've with the architecture stuff all that sort of stuff i do with um i'm quite used to working in those sorts of things you know creating 3d models of stuff so yeah the 3d printer i'd like to be honest with you i don't know i haven't got one sooner it's one of those things that has just been there but yeah i probably have got quite a lot of use cases for it uh i think it's also something that the kids would absolutely love certainly uh i'm a nine-year-old first of all i probably wouldn't let Dale on it i mean at uh two and a half he's probably a little bit young for it at the moment but uh jasmine is definitely a sort of creative uh type well they all are really but she's you know definitely sort of hands-on creative so i'm sure she would love it as well uh victor oh he's just he's just slipped out tell me but max sparky ah he's great i do uh i do love max sparky yeah he's of the um uh names completely slip slip me now mac power users is a podcast i've listened to for years uh since it's inception i think to be honest it's um yeah he's uh he's great and uh who is the other one there was someone else that doc mentioned last week who does great tutorials on all this sort of stuff i forgot his name uh another english chap who used to be on uh twit a lot uh can't remember his name but yeah another another great guy doing tutorial stuff uh i see i just noticed the last bit been going through to supplement my great videos oh well thank you very much uh or is it the other way around i'm i'm thinking max sparky might have more comprehensive stuff than i have on uh keyboard maestro so uh oh thank you very much rich that's always very kind of you to mention uh someone hasn't who is it come on i'm not i'm not moving any further until we get to the bottom of this who has not clicked the like button yet i'm not i'm not going to say anymore till everyone's hit the like button i've got to get my little daughter i've got to get jasmine in to uh come and do that part like she does with with her videos to her granny and granddad where she says smash that subscribe button uh even though they're just watching on a recorded video uh okay it's not he wasn't kevin come on then who was it must be someone else never mind let me have a little look where are we up to do you have many keyboard maestro routines for use with excel well it's funny you should say that because i didn't actually um however what i am doing is i'm creating a stream deck profile for um for use with excel and the way that i'm doing that is i am having keyboard maestro be the one that i'm using to map to a lot of the keys i'm finding i'm doing a lot of that now with keyboard maestro is using it to be the sort of link between stream deck and other applications uh where i want it to just sort of trigger things but i don't there's often no keyboard shortcut for a particular menu item in an app so i am doing a um a whole sort of pack for for that because there's some stuff that i find that even using keyboard shortcuts with excel some stuff is just difficult to do even with that and you'd think like your hands are just on it all the time but it is a bit difficult and certainly when i do um uh i do a lot of excel sheets that are really heavily formatted and stuff like that so a lot of the formatting things i'm not talking about data entry and data manipulation i'm still sort of fully you know hands on the keys for that um but for um yeah for actually formatting excel stuff uh stream decks really good for it so i'm in the process of just sort of building out that and i've got a load of those i used myself already but i want to make it like a proper excel pack that i can then make available on my uh on my site for the people as well um so uh yeah uh screencasts online that's it and that the name is still david uh david sparks obviously max sparky so what was screencasts online online it the name is just completely slipping my mind uh doc even mentioned him last week um yeah that sound sample of jasmine it is funny she's just a total natural on there on the camera with her and a little sister um yeah we're talking about getting her a little channel setup but i'm obviously obviously a little bit dubious about my uh young children being on on youtube but anyway i'll um i'll have to think about a way to do that because they would would love to do it hey kath great to see you here from uh from australia well actually it's quite funny isn't it uh kath you moved to australia i think was it 15 years ago 16 years ago something like that i moved to thailand about the same sort of time uh and we're on other sides of the world but actually we're from like i know 20 odd miles away from each other in the uk originally it's quite uh quite funny and miles great to see you here as well i was talking about you on the stream last week by the way uh i was saying what a handsome fellow you looked in your military uniform that you posted can't believe it real uh i can see where your little lad gets his looks from now it was a cute little video of him you posted on there where do you see that instagram facebook oh i remember now but uh yeah really cute little lad don mccallister thank you doc don mccallister screencast online yeah on the tip of my tongue yeah he's uh he's great great chap as well uh i've not seen him on uh twitter recently actually i suppose he's uh he's busy making his uh making all his screencasts now but uh yeah he's uh he's a great guy uh you're welcome you're welcome miles it's uh all all true i was talking about it just last week uh so so yeah that is about a rap for keyboard maestro because i could just go down a whole rabbit hole i probably will do i've been thinking about this really and like these these live streams they always start off with some some loose topic like the one that i you know said that this was about productivity tools and i suppose keyboard maestro is and and the course and stuff like that but i'm thinking about having a little bit more a bit more structured to the to the live streams or at least um or at least having a particular live stream as a topic or something like that where i do actually go through and although all my videos are obviously just recorded live perhaps i could do some of them live uh the reason why i haven't done that so much is because i do think i would probably be uh distracted because you can see what happens can't you i do go down there rabbit holes all the time so i figured if i started doing a video tutorial where i've i'm doing it live then it just too easy for me to go off the off the rail so yeah but i will think about doing some of that or maybe a specific q and a on different topics like you know keyboard maestro or something like that so still just figuring this all out uh venus productions hello nice to see you i don't think i know your name uh let me know your name and i can i can call you appropriately um but nice nice of you to stop by and uh you're on twit next weekend i'll have to look out for that uh i don't know if i mentioned this i'm sure i have mentioned it before but um yeah that's how i found ecamp was through your appearance on mac rake weekly uh whenever it was and it was just at the right time because i was just about pulling the last few remaining strands of hair out that i had going down the obs route and then you just mentioned it on mac rake weekly and i thought oh might as well check that out and never look back obviously from ecamp live since then so yeah it's definitely definitely you that got me into all of this and uh colleagues back hang on a minute you never asked permission to drop out what's going on here all right i'll forgive you yeah so i guess that is the thing isn't it um i mean a lot of my videos to be honest come about because of something that somebody's asked in the either the ecamp group or the let's get live group or something like that and so i do just sort of do the videos and it yeah it would actually be a you know a thing to basically say you know turn up with your uh problems or challenges related to ecamp keyboard maestro things like that and uh and then just sort of do them on the live stream because that's pretty much what i do anyway with the videos i don't i don't do like a lot of does it tell i don't do a lot of prep or anything for my videos i literally just sort of sit down and think right well you know how would answer this question and then just sort of launch into it so uh no problem jeff great for you to uh stop by i know it's very late there quarter to midnight i guess in the uk so uh yeah uh thank you as always for popping by um uh yeah so that's definitely um yeah i'll have to think about that might do it on a different day as well sort of have one that's my sort of regular live stream with the idea about this live stream was always that it was going to be sort of my progress as i try to get to my hundred videos in a hundred days and then that extended to 365 videos in 365 days so i might sort of keep this one the same uh and then yeah have a sort of separate q and a one or something like that i don't know i have to have to give it some thought uh oh so there you go how is the twitter 100 challenge going well to be honest with you i've fallen off it a little bit um the idea when i started that was for me to get more into posting on twitter and i just sort of in the same way that i've dropped my uh i've dropped the ball on my youtube videos for the uh the past uh it's actually i'd say it's six weeks now that i've not been posting consistently and i mentioned in um i mentioned in uh this in doc's group where i said what i wanted to work on by the end of the year was my consistency and everyone sort of laughed because i guess they figured that i was posting quite a lot but i've not been consistent at all for six weeks that is just the fact uh now i've had very good reasons for that in my mind um but um yeah and the twitter 100 kind of came just at the sort of almost the start of that process as well and so unfortunately for the past uh two weeks i haven't really been posting to twitter regularly certainly not every day either so um yeah and it's kind of like yeah that's no excuse for it really i just haven't made the i haven't made the effort to keep that up and to post consistently too for that so uh yeah unfortunately i've fallen off the bandwagon a little bit with that one um but uh yeah the videos will be getting back i've been like i say i've been doing quite a lot in the background working on that and i shall probably get back to twitter in fact i actually two days ago was it i turned off my twitter obviously you you track how many days in the in the tweet 100 challenge which the idea was for those who don't know is basically just to uh tweet every day for a hundred days with something meaningful i was always doing cross posting of stuff of my videos and stuff like that but that wasn't really engaging with people on twitter really was it it was just automated so the tweet 100 thing for me was about actually just becoming more active and actually i suppose embracing twitter as a platform um i used to use twitter 2000 whatever it was 2007 2008 uh and i went down a big twitter rabbit hole and i stopped using twitter after about 12 months but i came back to it for the channel to just sort of post videos and stuff and so i wanted to get back into using twitter but using it in a bit more of a manageable way than i did all those years ago um but yeah as i say i've just sort of fallen off it a little bit but the way that tweet tweet 100 worked is every day you should also change your uh handle to you know one slash a hundred on day one to a hundred slash a hundred on day a hundred and actually just remove that from my handle in fact was it two days ago or yesterday just because i haven't been keeping up with it and so i'd lost track of even what day i was on so i failed at that so people who think that i'm consistent at everything uh think again there's some things that i just i obviously haven't got the uh the full commitment to and so i didn't follow through with it but i have been i have been sort of getting more into the idea of using twitter and so even though i've been tweeting on every single day i am getting more of an idea into into my head as to what element of my voice i'm going to use on there so uh whereas just sort of blanket crossposting everything which i was doing originally from here to instagram to facebook to everything i'm just trying to figure out what is the the correct sort of way to communicate on these platforms and obviously instagram is more sort of uh photo related or image whereas text is more for twitter and things like that so i'm trying to think about ways to use them properly basically so i'm not just spamming everyone on everything with all of my stuff exactly the same everywhere um so i will be yet we'll be coming back to it i did actually also turn on thanks eileen by the way i know she's not here but uh eileen posted a really good video in the let's get live group about twitter and about the um twitter what's it called twitter for professionals is it something like that and uh where you've got some different things that you can do with it from from there but also you can turn on the tip jar now i haven't got many subscribers or followers i'm not even using the right terminology on on twitter um but you don't need to have any particular number it seems to turn it on so i have now got a tip jar open on twitter so we did set that up yesterday or the day before whenever eileen posted a video about it um not that that's a motivator because i'm not expecting you know these are all the all these things that are related to monetization they're all just you know they're all just there aren't they i even set up a patreon the other day just because i thought well there might be um i do like buy me a coffee i do you know i use buy me a coffee obviously and that's the one that put up but there are some people who are patreon users who um if they've already got a patreon account they might prefer to support creators through that avenue so i thought i should at least put one up it's a bit like people who have the option on buy me a coffee to have um you know multiple different payment options but don't use them all it's uh in fact i've said that i think i've gone both activated anyway it's just giving other people more options really isn't it so i did set up a patreon although i do prefer the payment terms on buy me a coffee one thing that i don't like on buy me a coffee though while we're talking about it is you can set different levels of membership obviously uh and then you can also give people discounts to different things so like for example if you go into my buy me a coffee all my website you can book a consultation call with me where i like talk about tech issues and stuff like that's about quite a few people where i've had calls with them to help me out with stuff and you can book that on the buy me a coffee or you can book it on my website but one of the sort of perks if you like of being a regular member on my buy me a coffee at the it's supposed to be at the the this five dollar level and a ten dollar level at the ten dollar level you get a discount so instead of being a hundred and fifty dollars an hour it's hundred and ten dollars an hour and the idea was that well it's you know that as a thank you to people who are a subscriber at that level but i'll tell you a little trick if you want to really use it is that there is no way that in buy me a coffee as the creator you can differentiate between those two levels so when i created the thing which is you know you can go and just book the zoom call all on there all the payments done through buy me a coffee and you book the call and the time and that's all scheduled to calendar and whatever it's a hundred and fifty dollars but if you also have the option then in buy me a coffee to say oh i want to offer this a discount to to members but they apply it to every single membership level so although on my two membership levels one of them says you get discounts and the other one doesn't the lower level doesn't get the discount and actually if you're on the lower level the discount codes automatically applied so that's a bit of a yet for an oversight on their part i've actually already emailed them about it but i haven't got an answer back from them and i don't know if that's because they haven't got an answer for me because they have been quite responsive with every other question that i've asked them so that's a little bit a bit of an issue really they need to work on their yeah on those those sorts of things but it is quite a young product really buy me a coffee so i guess there is you know they are adding new features all the time and stuff like that but that is one one thing about about buy me a coffee where patreon is a little bit better i suppose but yeah the the payment terms on buy me coffee i.e instant are definitely better than patreon where you have to actually wait till the next billing cycle and i think they pay you out within x number of days but anyway um let me have a little look through some of these uh uh comments uh i saw that i saw that comment in the let's get live group yeah uh paul said i'm like the ecam tooth fairy you think of a problem before you go to bed and i've got a video when you wake up that's one of the benefits of time zones i do actually love uh time zones can work really well they can be total pain in the the backside sometimes but they can also be really helpful and um some of the stuff that i'm working on outside of the the channel uh the the stock stock trading company that we we have then we're working with the us stock market but then we've got servers in the uk that are doing a lot of data processing and then i'm over here in thailand um and so it means that there's uh this data comes in like overnight and then it's all processed and then the next day we've got like the sort of whole day to take action before the stock market in the us open so it's uh it works really really well for that and it's also good when you've got like different people working in different time zones and you're sort of working in parallel but also there's some stuff that needs to get done before the next thing can get done sort of thing it works really well just having people you know where you know one person's just finishing their work when someone else is getting up so i have a lot of things where like i have a meeting at the moment every day uh where i'm here then we've got some developers in pakistan and then we've got our um uh database admin uh partner in the uk uh and so it's all just sort of works out well we have a call where it's three o'clock for me one o'clock for them and eight o'clock in the morning for uh the guy in the uk uh we have the meeting and then that's it everything just all gets sorted all on these different time zones so it can work really well at times but yeah i definitely have that advantage um uh paul uh been having the the uh the the hours when everyone else is asleep in the us uh oh about the ix i just wondered what the wonder what the context of that was that was about the uh yeah the the q and a well thank you very much miles i appreciate the uh the comment vlogmas start date is december the first um yeah the clue is in the name vlogmas christmas is uh december the first till december the 31st um am i streaming to twitter i am streaming to twitter actually as we speak i am streaming to twitter and let me say it says lost connection let me have a little look let's have a little look at this yeah we are streaming live to twitter and there is oh my god there is almost there is almost one person watching uh as in there are no people watching so that is the reach that i have on the reach and influence i have on uh on twitter um so yeah uh have i ever used prezi do you know what i haven't used prezi i've seen prezi i've seen demos of it uh and i've seen it with ecamm it um uh it just never appealed to me actually um yeah it didn't appeal with my sort of um my sort of style of uh i guess sort of my style of presentations and things like that so um yeah i i just use i just use keynote to be honest with you and the way that you can i get i do get the prezi you can um uh or michael's watching on there on twitter uh the thing about twitter is by the way just a bit of a digression again uh the thing about twitter is i understand there's been an issue with comments on twitter so if somebody typed something let me just type uh test on twitter test comment uh now it shouldn't actually come up on uh let's have a little look so let's see if it actually comes up um oh it's just said i've just seen that you've just joined on there so yeah it's the the the comments don't come up on uh on um on uh on in in ecamm or at least don't come through uh restream so yeah um so back to prezi though yeah i've never um uh i've never used it i've seen the demos but the style of things that you do with it just doesn't necessarily gel with me that doesn't mean that it's not good uh and it could well be because this thing has happened before that i've totally missed the point of it but i just find that i can do all of the stuff with um uh with ecamm and with powerpoint and not powerpoint although you can use powerpoint with a keynote then i can with that that that i want to do for presentation stuff like especially when i'm presenting to zoom or when i'm doing course material so with keynote i can just sort of bring things over the top of my screen or i can have stuff that seems like it's behind me as well and so that you can create these sort of like immersive experiences um so yeah not actually used prezi though uh doc was actually interviewed i think doc did a um i think doc did a whole interview with prezi like for for them um so i confess i didn't watch it actually but i should probably go back and watch it but no i didn't i didn't see that one but uh yeah anyway another digression uh oh that's right yeah vader so vader i tell you why the confusion might be because i know that the docs the the the documents that were linked in the lgl group were actually for vader weren't they and we'd said like oh you can actually use them for beach um you could use them for vlogmas i'm getting totally confused with myself then um for vlogmas are you going to do pre-records or live videos i'm going to pre-record them actually and i mentioned this earlier and that what i was planning on doing was recording them all on my ipad and editing them on my ipad so actually doing some editing and that was going to be my approach but then when ecamm announced that they're going to be doing ecamm vlogmas i figured i need to do something with ecamm so i've gone a little bit back to the drawing board on that i still might going to do the editing now i think just to uh just to challenge myself because i hate editing um let me have a little look where we're up to ever used mind mapping apps and presentation and mind mapping apps i have used mind mapping apps so there's mind node is uh is one that i used for ages although i've tended to now actually um with the sort of note taking apps on the on the ipad i've tend to sort of do things like that but yeah mind node was always the one that i uh i used i've actually used it for a while though thinking about it now you mentioned it but um yeah uh so have i ever used mind mapping apps and presentations so how like actually doing the mind mapping in a presentation do you mean or not uh not sure about that um look how do i set up my streams um is it just restream it is just restream yeah and i stream to facebook i i don't know why i'm doing this i stream to i stream to twitch and i still do this every week even though i'm not active on twitch i'm not building an audience on twitch the only people who follow me on twitch is uh two people who also follow me on youtube and watch on youtube so it's a bit pointless and i think i got i did it when i realized it was on those things when when i started the channel i realized oh you can stream to multiple places it just seemed to me at the time like oh well of course i might as well do that then and you could get a free restream account i think i actually i actually now pay for a restream account because i want to stream to my facebook page so this is streaming to my facebook page as well so it's streaming to my facebook page my twitter my uh twitch and to to youtube is there a point there's a there's a point to it being on my facebook page because i do want to have uh to build stuff on my facebook page but i could always post it after the fact there and i do get some people who come and watch on there but most of the people watching uh here are watching on on youtube there's not many sort of facebook comment comments coming in so um yeah it's uh it's basically all uh all youtube um so oh hey orbs always great to see you oh did i just cut off the uh hang on a minute i think i might have cut off great to see you orbry i just think i've missed the end of miles's question there uh oh i see right right so you wait for me i'm the guinea pig well i'm happy to be the guinea pig and test something out before uh before you take the plunge but yeah i do use restream so uh i don't know if that's what you're referring to actually restream so yeah there is it with the free version you can basically stream to uh most of the platforms the only thing that you have to pay for or that i needed to pay for was to be able to stream to my facebook page i could stream to my facebook profile my you know my regular profile um but i want it to stream into just my facebook page for take one tech so that's what i ended up paying for but you can do a lot with just the free version to be honest but i don't know why i am actually um i actually i am i don't know what i'm actually streaming to twitch for i'm not active on twitch i don't watch anybody else on twitch i'm not trying to build an audience i mean i probably just should just stop it as of next week in fact let's do that shall we because it's just pointless uh and the the streams on twitch stay up up there for i think seven days or something like that and then you have to you actually have to go in and there's there's work involved to keep them there like all the time so you have to go into the manager and then you sort of change it to be uh you do it as a what's it called a uh this is how this is how into it i always forget the terminology you have to do it like basically like a clipping but you can just sort of clip the whole thing and then just have it there so that you can on twitch go back and see all of my previous live streams uh nobody does because i'm not i'm not there i'm not active i'm not building a following there so uh and it's actually something that takes a little bit of time every week because i have to go in and do it and for what it's it's probably pointless so i should just take them down or just at least stop stop doing it basically as i say going to facebook i do think it's quite good to have these things there all the people can find it on i'm probably talking myself out of restream as we speak live on air uh streaming to twitter so why am i doing that well i was doing that because it was about the time that uh well it was it's as of the time that um twitter allowed you to start streaming back to it again and obviously ecam integrated it although i'm doing it through uh through restream and then it was when i was thinking well i'll be uh i'll be a bit more active on on twitter and so streaming it to there as well but as we've just proven uh there's nobody actually watching there and even if they are and they comment the comments don't come through to um uh don't come through through restream and i think that that is an issue with twitter as opposed to restream uh whereby it's uh it's just not mapping the comments over or something like that so uh what i should really do is if i'm going to be streaming to these other platforms and it's always kind of been in the back of my mind is do dedicated content specifically for them so the some like the the channel obviously the youtube channel is more kind of like uh well is obviously intended to be tutorials and stuff like that and then obviously the the live stream which is completely free for all um but there is a there is a you know an idea of doing like some other stuff that i could do to just twitter for example so uh maybe some more sort of uh i don't know rambling thinking stuff or something like that as opposed to specific tutorials i could have that going there or fleshing out ideas i could do that to the facebook page or something i'm still this is all just a total work in progress and i'm just doing it all in front of you so i'm still trying to figure out how everything all fits together and the best way to make it all fit together and also crucially the best way to make everything uh fit together into a workflow as well so it's all out having conceptually an idea of oh yeah well i'm going to do shorts to twitter and then copy or shorts to youtube and then also copy them over to uh to tiktok and stuff like that and then i'm going to use this tool for that but there's a load of different tools aren't there there are a load of tools and a load of platforms and you've also got to get them into a a workflow where they just become sort of second nature and that's the bit that i'm still sort of trying to find my feet with really um so so yeah that was a bit of a long answer to that question wasn't it but let me have a little look where we up to um what do i use for editing at the moment nothing i don't do any editing and that's how i started up this whole channel is uh is because i don't want to do any editing i am my own worst enemy at editing however for vlogmas i want you to just film and edit everything on my ipad and i know there's luma fusion which everyone talks about is a great video editor for the ipad but i'm already an adobe subscriber and as an adobe subscriber uh you get access to um uh like all the adobe suite so there's adobe adobe premiere on the mac which i don't really use i've used it a few times for a few little things but generally i don't use it um and then on the ipad there's adobe rush adobe premiere rush which is kind of i suppose like a little uh i was going to say lightweight version it's not actually lightweight it's pretty full featured actually for the sort of stuff that i would want to do it certainly would do everything that i needed to do to put together some vlogmas videos so that was my idea i was going to think about using adobe rush on the ipad uh but like i say i'm going to have to i'm going to have to work in some ecamm stuff here as well because i do want to do it as part of the ecamm thing so oh hey steve great to see you uh oh thank you i appreciate your compliments it's always uh always nice to see you around though uh so uh our re-stream that's what kills me besides uh facebook i look at it like i want to organize uh to where it's in one place yeah so i mean doc talks about this all the time you know about streaming to multiple platforms build your audience in in one place and uh and that's uh that's it and i mean mine's clearly on on youtube uh the facebook's just there though because here you go let me tell you another thing that i failed actually so on my website i've got a blog and part of the idea of the blog was that i was going to be doing written content to accompany all my videos because obviously all my videos there's lots of information in there that would be just as good in written form as in you know video form so the idea was i was going to be putting stuff like that on my blog and so my thinking for that was the written content for there would also work well as uh facebook posts as well on my take one tech facebook page for people who are you know everyone's got facebook these days haven't they so it would be a good resource for that then um but again i just didn't follow through with it so i haven't actually done the written content and what it is is i'm very good with things that uh and i suppose this is probably a bit the same with everyone really i'm very good with things that are frictionless that appear to take no effort i'm really good at those sort of things if something takes no effort i'm brilliant at it whereas if something i've got to work at uh and there's resistance i'm not so good at actually getting it done so sitting down and writing a well thought out well structured blog post for me is more difficult than sitting down in front of the computer with the camera on and just talking through something that i know about as if i'm talking to a friend like you so when somebody asked me a question or when i'm making one of my videos essentially i'm just sort of sitting down saying you know hey miles this is how to do x y and z and you know although i don't call out everyone's name all the time that's what i'm doing when i'm making my videos there's no effort involved in it as such because i'm just literally telling a friend how to do something and that's my sort of view of my youtube channel um whereas you know if i had to type a long letter to somebody telling people how to do something uh it would probably take me a little bit longer and so that was my