When words and photos won't cut it, I roll up my sleeves and record video. Because video is hard and bandwidth is expensive, I host my videos on my YouTube channel and will sometimes embed them for your postage-stamp-size viewing pleasure here.
It is finished. As mentioned elsewhere, I gave my final conference presentation at Rails World 2024 in Toronto back in September.
The tremendous organizers did me a solid by humoring my request to provide the audio and video feeds they recorded of my talk, which allowed me to create my own edit in the same basic style I've used since discovering screen recording. You can view it on YouTube if you want.
Why watch this one when the official video is also on YouTube? Well, here's what the very exclusive and deluxe and never-before-seen Searls Cut gets you:
- No obstruction, hiding, or movement of the slides themselves—they're the star of the show, not me
- Myself off to the side (where I belong), manually center-tracked with minimal movements to keep me in frame
- Composed in 4K, with slides upscaled to ~1440p
- Same great audio track. I kept in all the umm's and uhh's to humanize me and also because I'm too lazy to bother fixing them
- Native software capture of my slides using Screenflow (as opposed to the conference's HDMI capture)
- Manual removal of the dreaded macOS green dot
- Gently-blurred wide-angle shot as the background instead of cutting between the two video feeds
- Correction of a slide transition where I missed a click on the remote (you can guess, but I'll never tell you which one)
Anyway, if you haven't seen the talk yet, I hope you'll give it a watch. The presentation summarizes a year of my work but it also embeds countless little things life taught me over the 15 years since I started speaking at user groups and regional conferences.
But this chapter of my life has now concluded. I'm excited to be moving on to other things. In the meantime, you can stay tuned to my podcast and subscribe to my newsletter while I get to work.
Since starting Breaking Change earlier this year, I've wanted to start publishing stock-video-laden clips of my favorite little rants and flourishes. The trouble is, video is a huge time sink. At least for me, relative to the other things I do. So I pulled out a timer and ran an experiment to see if I could turn around a ~3 minute clip in under an hour.
And I succeeded! I think with some template setup work, I could get it down to even less time. Hopefully this means more video shenanigans in the future.
I made a video from the random live photos and video snippets I assembled after visiting the PayPay Dome in Fukuoka for a Softbank SeaHawks game on May 21st.
Enjoy.
(Also, before anyone writes in: users don't get to pick out the thumbnail images for their Shorts, because Youtube knows it can maximize engagement by just scanning your video for any stills of girls. Neat.)
All aboard the Persona Polar Express! Next stop, Uncanny Valley!
I love writing scripts against the ChatGPT API that are intentionally constrained to particular input and output formats. Here's one I wrote this morning to help me write spreadsheets with a REPL-like interface to continuously improve the output until I'm happy with it.
Shortcuts is an underappreciated way to wire up Apple products with third party APIs without writing custom code. I've found can muck with request headers and satisfy whatever authorization scheme most APIs expect, too.
Within 30 minutes of getting API access to GPT-4, I'd wired it up to the Action Button on my Apple Watch for Japanese language practice.
I started a screencast series last week, and I can call it a series now because there's a second one.