NC_2024_07_28
Episode covers podcast organization, home automation challenges, physics video creation using Feeder, WordPress, TextExpander. Insights on content creation, distribution & valuable podcast production tips shared.
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Long Summary
This episode covers a wide range of topics, starting with a discussion about the process of organizing and preparing content for podcasts while the main speaker and their team prepare for a vacation. It moves on to a conversation with Richard Gunther about the problematic side of home automation, focusing on least favorite IoT devices and automation challenges. The episode continues with Physics Nerd Graham explaining his process for creating physics videos using Keynote, emphasizing the importance of templates, color schemes, animations, and efficiency in video production.
Additionally, the episode delves into the details of updating podcast feeds, website layouts, and text snippets using tools like Feeder, WordPress, and TextExpander. The speaker shares insights into the complexities of managing various podcasts, implementing changes, and ensuring a smooth workflow. The episode also includes an interview with Michael from Index Braille discussing Braille embossers, their functionality, production speeds, and applications in schools, universities, and for private use.
Overall, the episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous work involved in managing podcasts, optimizing production processes, and the intricacies of using tools and software to streamline content creation and distribution. The speaker's enthusiasm and attention to detail shine through as they share their experiences and interactions with various guests, providing valuable insights and practical tips for podcast production.
Additionally, the episode delves into the details of updating podcast feeds, website layouts, and text snippets using tools like Feeder, WordPress, and TextExpander. The speaker shares insights into the complexities of managing various podcasts, implementing changes, and ensuring a smooth workflow. The episode also includes an interview with Michael from Index Braille discussing Braille embossers, their functionality, production speeds, and applications in schools, universities, and for private use.
Overall, the episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous work involved in managing podcasts, optimizing production processes, and the intricacies of using tools and software to streamline content creation and distribution. The speaker's enthusiasm and attention to detail shine through as they share their experiences and interactions with various guests, providing valuable insights and practical tips for podcast production.
Brief Summary
In this episode, we cover various topics from organizing podcast content to home automation challenges and creating physics videos. The speaker discusses updating podcast feeds, website layouts, and text snippets using tools like Feeder, WordPress, and TextExpander. Insights into managing podcasts, implementing changes, and interviewing Michael from Index Braille about Braille embossers are shared, highlighting the meticulous work involved in content creation and distribution. Overall, the episode offers valuable insights and practical tips for podcast production processes.
Tags
podcast
content organization
home automation
physics videos
Feeder
WordPress
TextExpander
managing podcasts
Braille embossers
content creation
distribution
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_07_28
[0:00]Music.
[0:05]Technology Geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, July 28th, 2024, and this is show number 1003. Well, you really should have been in the live chat room this week because Sienna and Forbes were here to join us. In fact, they started off the show. Yeah, it's my microphone. I can put anybody in front of it I want to. Before we get started, it's time for my annual call for content because Steve and I are going on vacation. This time we will be gone for three episodes. We're going to Africa this year. In addition to Alistair and Bart each taking a show, Jill from the Northwoods will make her debut taking on one show. I secretly think this is all part of her master plan to build her podcast empire. You do not have a lot of time to get these done. The first episode will be July 18th by Alistair Jenks. Then Bart will do the show for August 25th with Jill playing clean up on September 1st. I think the latest I can get the audio and text files for blog posts is August 6th. I don't think I'm going to be able to do too much technical work while in a tent on a safari in Zimbabwe, so that really is a drop-dead date, August 6th. You can share the files with me via Dropbox or whatever file sharing tool you like to allison at podfeet.com.
[1:19]Please keep them crisp and to the point, and if you want them to sound as good as possible, save them as AIFF or WAV or even an M4A file. If you can only do MP3, that's fine. I really appreciate these folks taking standing in for me so we keep our streak alive so please think up something to review and ship it on over.
[1:39]
Appearance on Home On
[1:39]Richard Gunther host of the Home On podcast about home automation and I have known each other for years and years and when we first met we said wow we get along so great we really should record something fun together. Well it took a long time coming I mean it's probably been I don't know eight ten years since we said we were going to do it, but we finally recorded together. Richard invited me to join him for episode 158 of the Home On podcast at the Digital Media Zone. Everyone seems to enjoy talking about the joys of home automation and how wonderful it is when you walk into a room at a certain time of the day and music comes on, the lights come on low, and the alarm system locks your house down for the evening. That's what it's supposed to be like, but that's not what we talked about. Richard had me on to discuss the more problematic side of home automation. We talked about our least favorite IOT devices. We talked about automations that continuously give us fits. It was very cathartic to talk about the hard parts and not pretend that it's all happy, happy, joy, joy. You can find this episode of Home On with Richard Gunther at thedigitalmediazone.com or in your podcatcher of choice.
[2:41]
Physics Shorts 5 — Keynote for Video Creation by Physics Nerd Graeme
[2:41]Physics Nerd Graham is back with the final installment of his series explaining how he creates his physics shorts videos for social media. Now, I've enjoyed every single one of these, from how he uses Typora to the audio hijack settings to the advanced tool iZotope RX11. But of all of them, this one you're about to hear is my favorite. It's Physics Nerd Graham here with the final part of my mini-series on my mega-project creating A-level, or high school, physics videos for my students. This is where I put it all together to create beautiful YouTube content using Keynote. Now, Keynote is a wonderful app that creates beautiful presentations, but it also has an amazing ability to make high quality videos for whatever occasion. The obvious use case is recording your presentation in the event you cannot do it live, but I'm using it to make YouTube and TikTok videos for my channel, Physics Shorts with Dr. Shepard. Let's look at what it has to offer.
[3:42]First things first, I want to have a template so that I can make tons of videos with the same look and feel. A good template is going to have a few parts to it. It should have a fixed aspect ratio and resolution, a consistent title page and headings, consistent fonts and text sizes, and the colour scheme. To start then, I open a new file and go to the document options on the far right and near the bottom of the side panel is a section for slide size which is currently likely to show an aspect ratio such as widescreen 16.9. Clicking on it, I can select custom and enter my preferred resolution. Since I've chosen to do portrait videos, I type in 1080 for the width and 1920 for the height. It's possible to handle theme colours as well in Keynote but I want my themes to be available system wide so instead I use the wonderful macOS colour picker that comes with the operating system. To use it simply go to somewhere that lets you choose the colour and instead of picking a predefined one look for the colour wheel icon and click on it to bring up the color picker.
[4:57]The great thing about this tool is that you can save your own palettes and name them what you like. So your choice of colors is available in any app on the system. I named the palette Physics Shorts and named the colors as well with sensible names such as background, primary, secondary, and even one called transparent that is simply a color set to zero opacity.
[5:22]Now, when I have an object selected in Keynote and go to change its fill colour, or line colour, or text colour, I can click on the colour wheel icon and this window pops up to let me select the one I want. For the titles and headings, I've been a bit creative. I start with a pink horizontal line near the top and my channel's logo laying across it on the right. Superimposed on that are two transparent horizontal lines taking up slightly different widths across the screen superimposed on those is another horizontal line the width of the title text with the color of the background and finally on top is the title of the video below that is a box that contains the first subheading now this complexity is to create a subtle but neat looking animation.
[6:14]I added a lens flare animation to both of the two invisible lines going in opposite directions and slightly offset to give a dynamic glow to the title. The layered lines means the lens flare does not get hidden by anything and it also does not seem connected to a line appearing. It's a small effect but brings a little bling to the video. As soon as the lens flare ends, the subtitles box line draws itself as the text appears and this is all set in my template so by simply changing the title and subtitle and then adjusting those two text elements to be the desired width I have a standard format that looks cool and gives my final videos a professional feel all from Keynote. Now I talk about having a template but I don't actually have one per se What I do is create an empty Keynote presentation and name it Keynote Template, then duplicate that each time by selecting it in the Finder, pressing Command-D to duplicate, and then press Return to edit the file name. This has the advantage of letting me make adjustments to it simply, with the disadvantage being I can make adjustments to it.
[7:32]Another accommodation I make is adding a few common features for the content, such as text box set to the desired font, font size and color. I add some graph axes and that sort of thing. And then I just delete the ones I don't need.
[7:48]Let's move on now to how I get content into Keynote. The first thing is to bring in my notes from TypeAura. Often, I could copy and paste, but I have made myself a more elaborate method to help with equations. This involves exporting the text from TypeAura to a Word document, which preserves the equations. I open that in Pages, since that honours the Word template settings for things like font sizes and colours, and then copy and paste it all into Keynote. I end up with text in a standard format and a bunch of equations in MathML format. I then edit this down, separating text into shorter chunks and positioning everything neatly around on the screen where I want them. I can also change the colour of some text as wanted, though I'd usually look at this later when everything is laid out.
[8:40]For subheadings, I duplicate the one that is already there from my template, which preserves its animations. I put the new text in, resize it and position it on the screen. Now for the equations, if they all came across nicely then I'm done here as they already have the font size and colour I want. Very often though something will have gone a bit wrong. If it's minor I can fix it or maybe ask ChatGPT to fix it for me. Double clicking on the equation opens up a MathML editor window and it can be adjusted in here. I tend to select all and copy it over to AskChatTPT to make adjustments for me. If it's an alignment problem, I go a different route. The equation editor in Keynote will accept LaTeX as well, which is a much cleaner way to write formulas. So I can double click on the equation and change it to LaTeX using its powerful typesetting. If I don't know the way to write it in Latex, ChatGPT does.
[9:41]For images, these days Keynote has a host of image shapes, but I typically only need the basics, rectangles, circles and lines. Many more complex images can be built with these components as long as you're happy with a graphic art style. So to draw an electrical circuit, I need a cell, some wires, an ammeter and a resistor. The wires are all lines and I have options of a line, line arrow, connection line which gives a handle in the middle which you can move to create a curve and my personal favourite the pen tool. This last one lets you draw a free line by clicking at each position you want to change direction. Click on the first point completes the line to turn it into a fillable shape or you can press return at any time to exit the drawing mode and keep the line you have drawn so far. The best thing about this is that those points that you made can be moved around independently letting you refine the shape. The other best thing is that if you hover your cursor halfway between any two points a circle appears. Clicking on that circle turns it into a new point you can drag around.
[10:58]Finally, double clicking on a point toggles between curved and straight lines. The possibilities with this are extensive and if it seems tricky, be cheered by the fact that Apple provides on-screen help to remind you what you can do. Now back to my circuit. I'll use the pen tool to draw the wires. Then for the cell, which is a long line parallel to a short line, I actually use three lines. The extra one is placed between the other two and made the color of the background and this provides a gap even if I place the cell on top of the wires that I drew earlier. An ammeter is a circle with an A in it, which is simple, and a resistor is a rectangle. Both of these should be line drawings, but it looks so pretty to have them as filled in shapes, I go the artistic route instead. So the circuit is quite simple to draw in Keynote, and I can even animate it to appear as I describe the components.
[12:00]Now for the animations, I don't want fancy animations with things whizzing around all over the place but I do want movement on the screen to help draw the viewer's eyes to where the action is. To keep it simple and unified I use just a few of the animations available but not the same thing over and over to try and keep a little bit of visual variety. For text I use the keyboard animation which shows an insertion point and then types each letter. The default time is always three seconds so I adjust this down usually to get the words typed out a bit more quickly. For the equations, I use a simple one second wipe from left to right. For large images, I tend to group things and use a dissolve to bring them in early. If it's circular, I might choose to use iris, which reveals it from the center. For lines and arrows, I like the line draw animation that draws the image out, giving a lovely dynamic feel as the line or the box appears.
[13:03]And if I want to highlight something, I might choose the pop animation, which is not too in your face and has more movement to it. To set them up, I go through the objects in order, adding the animation, which will default to being activated on click. I then go and combine some of them together, setting them to run with the previous animation or after the previous animation. If I don't want this automatic immediate behaviour, I leave it on, on click.
[13:34]When I first started, I chained animations together using delays to get the timing perfectly synced to the audio, but I've since learned that for my 2 minute videos, it's far far less time consuming overall to do it manually when I record. Any way you want to do it, there are two parts to controlling animations. First is to select the object and open the animate side window at the top there are three tabs for build in action and build out each object can have one build in animation many actions and one build out animation beyond that you can change the chosen animation preview it set the duration set some animation specific options and choose its order in relation to all the other objects.
[14:28]But there's a better way to do the last bit. At the bottom of the sidebar and easily overlooked, there's a build order button. This brings up a new window that lets you select individual or groups of animations.
[14:42]Drag them to change the order and change whether or not they have a delay before starting and animate automatically or on click. It's really quite intuitive and easy. For the audio, well I recorded that already and process it just how I want so I just drag that file into Keynote and it shows up as a circle with a sound icon in it. It already has a build in animation set for it to start playing so I use the build order window to drag that to the top just after the title's sun flare animations and I set it to start playing after those. Note that video can also be added but Keynote only has rudimentary tools for clipping the start and end. There's no crop or other advanced things. Now for recording it. The recording process is also quite simple at least for shortish videos. Under the play menu there's record slideshow which brings up a full screen view with rudimentary controls. You can rewind back to the start, pause and hit record. There's also a scrubber to select a point in the current recording and a mute button. The scrubber means you can record sections but I haven't played with that.
[16:00]Since I have audio inserted as a file, I mute the microphone and press record. The screen counts down from three in big glowing figures and the recording starts. I wait a second or so and then press the spacebar to start the animations running. I get a view of the current slide and the result of the next animation. So by listening to the audio, I know when to press the spacebar for the next animation to play. By doing this, I can record the whole slideshow with nicely timed animations.
[16:30]If I get something wrong, well, I start again because it's only a two minute video. I don't tend to make too many blunders, so the time it takes to redo the recording is way less than the time it would have taken to set all the timings individually using the delay option in the animation window. For one of my complex ones with an animated spring oscillating that I did early on before I had this technique nailed down, it must have taken me over an hour to get all the timings just right. Doing it with my new method that I just described, it would have been well under 10 minutes. Now that I have a recording of the slideshow, I can go to export to movie. And instead of exporting the default self-playing option in the playback options, I can use the drop down to select slideshow recording. Making sure I have my preferred settings, most notably my output resolution and 60 frames per second to get smooth animations, I click save and in under a minute I get a high quality video that can be used wherever I want.
[17:37]So Keynote can be an amazing tool for creating high quality video content for YouTube, TikTok or wherever. Even though I own Final Cut Pro and ScreenFlow, I choose Keynote for this because it is the best tool for the job. Text is crisp, objects are uniform and align nicely, animations are smooth and well thought out and the tools are easy to use.
[18:02]It can be more of a challenge for more complex animation needs, especially if timing is critical, but for most needs, it may just be the perfect tool. And that concludes my series for the Nocilla cast. If you want to know more about what I'm doing, you can always find me with the other lovely Nocilla castaways on Slack. So head over to podfeet.com slash slack and say hi.
[18:25]Okay, I told you guys that one was fantastic, didn't I? I learned so much from this very practical example example, things that I never knew Keynote could do. Doing animations in Keynote has always been kind of a bit of a mystery to me, I should say, but with some of Graham's tips, I finally was able to do a tiny bit of it for my MacStock presentation. The single tip that helps the most is noticing that build order button on the bottom of the pane. I knew it was there, but I always forget about it because it's in such a weird spot down at the bottom. The biggest thing that blew my my mind was that you can create your own colors with the color picker color wheel thingy? How long has that been possible? I'm going to make a Mac tiny tip out of just that one little bit. I showed it off at MacStock. I was so excited. Not only did Graham do a great job organizing this and explaining it in audio, but his show notes are best in class. Nobody has ever sent me notes that took so little work on my part to publish, and no one, including me, has ever created better alt text for screen readers to speak the images. I'm thinking you should be a professional teacher, your gram?
[19:26]
Support the Show
[19:27]This week's show is brought to you by the folks who support the show, whether it's by creating content for the show, like Physics Nerd Graham, or by giving me moral support in the live chat room, or by donating financially to the podcast by going to podfeed.com slash Patreon. I thank all of you for your support of the Podfeed podcast.
[19:46]
Cleanup After the Great Podcast Migration of 2024
[19:46]When I made the decision to clean up my sprawling podcast empire, I didn't really think about how intertwined my processes were for creating the shows. I thought it'd be kind of fun to talk about the cleanup I had to do on the back end after the great podcast migration of 2024. To recap so we're all on the same page, Chit Chat Across the Pond used to have Chit Chat Lite and Programming by Stealth within it. Chit Chat Lite and Programming by Stealth were also standalone podcasts. So my changes were to, first, strip Programming by Stealth out of Chit Chat Across the Pond. Chit Chat Across the Pond would only be the light content then, and Chit Chat Across the Pond light would cease to exist. Finally, Chit Chat Across the Pond would also be inside the NoCillaCast. I knew that these changes meant changing the feeds, and I won't relive the debacle of that experience, but there were a lot more moving parts that I didn't anticipate. Let's go through those.
[20:41]After the migration, when I went into Feeder, the awesome app from Reinvented Software that I used to create the podcast feeds, I went to post the first vanilla Chit Chat Across the Pond episode. I realized that even though I wouldn't post new Programming by Stealth content, all of the old episodes were still in the feed. The first thing I did was download a copy of the XML file for the Chit Chat Across the Pond feed for safekeeping. So the XML file is just a text file, and that's what creates all the magic of the podcast.
[21:08]Then back in Feeder, I selected this Chit Chat Across the Pond feed, I did a search for Programming by Stealth, select all, and I hit delete. Then I pushed the feed, refreshed it in Overcast, and I was done. That's another reason I love Feeder, being able to do something like that where I was able to select all of those episodes and they were simply removed instantly from the feed. Now even though the Chit Chat Across the Upon Light feed no longer exists online, I still had it in Feeder. I could have deleted it in Feeder, but being a self-proclaimed digital pack rat, I simply dragged it into my archive folder within Feeder just in case. I very rarely edit the homepage of podfeed.com. It's purposely designed to give you a landing page where you can quickly get to the content you desire. There are five big buttons to take you to the blog post for each of the different podcasts, but with the elimination a chitchat across the pond light from the lineup, I needed to modify things. My homepage is created using tools from my theme vendor, SiteOrigin. My theme is SiteOrigin North. I can create a custom homepage using these little building blocks. I don't have a terribly sophisticated homepage compared to what SiteOrigin lets you do, but it does make it a little bit simpler than coding the page by hand. Using this tool does reduce my flexibility, but the lack of complexity wins me over every time. To manage the custom home page, you plop in these little widgets that look like rectangular boxes and you modify them with the wrench or spanner as the Brits like to say.
[22:34]One of the widgets is called Layout Builder, and it's an easy way to make kind of a table of elements on a page. You can easily add rows and then drop in widgets for the images for the different podcasts and the text below the image I want to have on each podcast. It was a little scary to eliminate an entire column, but I managed to remove Chitchat Across the Pond light. Then I realized the text under Chitchat Across the Pond needed to change to reflect the new model. Like I it's scary to edit my homepage like this, but now it looks good. I mentioned this briefly during last week's show, but I made another huge change to the homepage last week. While sitting with Kaylee at MaxDoc, she berated me for how hard I make it for someone to figure out how to subscribe to my podcast.
[23:16]Seems like it should have been obvious to me, but it took somebody, I don't know, a thousand shows before somebody pointed it out. While you can see the artwork for the four podcasts and follow the links to the blog post, that doesn't give you a way to subscribe. When I designed the homepage layout years ago, I put a link in the text menus across the top to get to a few things, one of which says subscribe to the podcast. This link takes you to a static HTML page that I made that has a row for each podcast and how to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Overcasts, Pocketcasts, and using the RSS feed if you use a different podcatcher. With all of the colorful buttons and icons to do other things on the homepage, though, that little text link at the the top to subscribe isn't really very eye-catching. Worse yet, as Kaylee pointed out to me, on mobile the text is collapsed into a hamburger menu, so it's even less discoverable. While sitting at the table during the conference, I went into this custom homepage builder tool, and this time I edited a widget called Site Origin Hero. A hero image is the big banner or background type image you see on some websites. Mine is a photo of a Mac laptop I used to have that I had a cool old-timey microphone on. The red buttons you see across that image are part of the Site Origin Hero widget.
[24:27]I looked through the buttons and realized that tutorials had gotten quite stale, as I don't seem to do many of those anymore. I removed that button, and I added one that says Subscribe. I set the Subscribe button to link to the static page that I just finished describing, and then I chose a little mic icon for the button. Now that Kaylee had pointed out to me how silly it has been of me to not have this button, I was committed to having this button be obvious, is. So instead of red to match all of the other buttons, I made it blue. Wild of me, right? I'm so happy with how this looks now and how it's impossible to miss that subscribe button now. Now Kaylee, in a moment of channeling her inner John Syracuse, pointed out to me that the blue and red buttons aren't all the same height. So if you pixel peep up really close, they're ever so slightly misaligned vertically. I can't easily fix it because I think it's caused by which icons I I choose for each button. But hey, thanks, Kaylee. I really appreciate you pointing that out.
[25:20]Now, one of the last pages I remembered to edit was this static subscribe to the podcast page. It still had Chitchat Across the Pond Light and the old descriptions for the shows. I knew this page was out of date, but I procrastinated working on it because it was a static page. In WordPress, the page is a simple iframe tag that points to that static HTML page. In order to edit this, I needed to use my FTP client of choice, Transmit from Panic, and edit the page. The first thing I did was to download a copy and put it away for safekeeping in case I borked the page. I wrote this HTML page after Bart taught us all about Bootstrap and responsive design in Programming by Stealth, so it works great on mobile and on the desktop. But it's been a very long time since we learned about Bootstrap, so I was a bit trepidatious about editing this file. I put a screenshot into the show notes so that you are not intended to be able to read, but gives you an idea of how much coding glop goes into making just one row of that cute table of podcasts. The reason I didn't work this page is because Bart taught us to write comments for future us when we need to edit our own code. I'd clearly listened to this part of his instructions because I could see comments that told me, here's the beginning of one section for this podcast, and here's where it ends. That made it trivially easy for me to grab all of Chit Chat Across the Pond Light and hit the delete to delete the entire row. Then it was a a quick effort to edit the text describing the shows. I added Adam Anks to the Chitchat Across the Pond description, including a link to tidbits.
[26:49]Now last year I wrote up a lengthy article for you about how I use Auphonic's web service to suite my audio, convert my audio files to mp3, add the album artwork for the podcast, and send the file to the server for you to download. I had specific presets created for the Nocillicast, Chitchat Across the Pond Lite, and Programming by Stealth. It wasn't a lot of work, but I needed to change the Chit Chat Across the Pond light preset to be Chit Chat Across the Pond with the correct logo and make sure the description now matched the show. If I hadn't done this work, you'd be getting Chit Chat Across the Pond episodes with artwork that said it was a light episode. Now, the last time I worked on presets, the developer, George, hadn't given us a capability to edit a preset, or at least I hadn't figured out how to do it, so I was worried I'd have to delete and recreate the presets. Presets, but now there's a very obvious edit button and you can even duplicate a preset and just change what you need to modify. Auphonic constantly gets better and better, so now I have my nice little presets all ready to go.
[27:48]Now, one of the ways I'm able to create my podcast so quickly after I record is because I'm a heavy TextExpander user. Every episode means writing titles, adding links, and putting in standard text. These go into the blog posts as well as into the feed file, so you get nice links and text in your podcatcher of choice. Changing up the shows the way I did necessitated doing more modification of my TextExpander snippets than I had anticipated.
[28:11]The most challenging change is with programming by stealth. In the past, you'll remember that I would create a blog post on podfeed.com for the episode, which would give a summary of what we talked about, then the player to listen to the show from the blog post, and then a link to Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes over at pbs.bartofisser.net. With the exception of the player, that same content then gets plopped into the feed file as well. Over on Bart's side, each installment's show notes include an intro, then a player to listen to the episode, and wait for it, a link to go back to podfeed.com where I'd written the summary and put the player to listen to, and directions to get back to the PBS show notes.
[28:48]I put screenshots of the original version of my snippet for this work and the new and simplified version. You can see in both that I make heavy use of embedded snippets, so if there's a change that's isolated to just one piece of a snippet that's actually used in multiple places, I only need to fix it in one place. For example, the original PBS matching podcast episode snippet for the PBS show notes includes the snippet CCATP EP semicolon. That stands for Chit Chat Across the Pond episode. And that plops in the text with the form CCATP underscore year year year year MMDD. So it gives us a year, month, and date, and it's actually calculated by TextExpander for me. This snippet gets used everywhere that I point to the audio file, and it's used in the link and in the title of the transcripts. In the new and improved version of the snippet, I replaced all of the references using the CCATP snippet and swapped in the PBS equivalent, which is PBS EP semicolon, which plops in the text in the form of PBS and then year, month, date.
[29:51]Some of you may think this is an excessive bit of automation, but realize I've already had to type this text 169 times for Programming by Stealth, and this is the podcast with the fewest number of episodes. Now how silly does this automation sound?
[30:05]Well, I've told you before that my brain has like a dead spot where the next episode number should be able to be calculated. I don't know why this is true, but I've proven myself incapable of looking at any source data it for a podcast and adding the number one to the episode number and then saying it correctly out loud and even typing it into the show notes. Years ago, I mentioned this failing to Rosemary Orchard, the queen of Apple shortcuts, and she wrote me one that lets me simply ask the S lady next no silicast or next chit chat across the pond, and it will be either hollered out on my home pod or displayed on my screen for me. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I use it every single week before I record. I never had one for Programming by Stealth because it was in its own episode number. But now, since I would need to say it at the beginning of every episode, instead of saying Chit Chat Across the Pond's number, I needed to figure out how she did it for those other shows. I duplicated one of the shortcuts and then I tried to decipher it. I never could have been able to write this on my own, but it's actually pretty easy to understand. The steps are, get one item for the feed file, that's the RSS XML file I talked about on my website. Match the number using a regular expression from the title, get the group at index 1 in all matches, add 1 to that number, copy this incredibly complex calculation to the.
[31:21]Clipboard, and then show the text, the next episode of the show is, followed by the calculation. In the duplicate file, I changed the feed to the RSS XML file for Programming by Stealth instead of Chit Chat Across the Pond, and I tried it. It failed, just like every single Apple shortcut I have ever written. I dropped a screenshot into Slack and I asked for help. Physics nerd Graham immediately came to my rescue.
[31:46]I told you that she used regular expressions to grab the number of the latest episode, and regular expressions look basically like a cat walked across your keyboard. They're just complete gibberish. So I hadn't really inspected how Rosemary had used it to match the number in the title of the Nocella cast in Chit Chat Across the Pond. Graham pointed out that the regular expression she'd written started with a hash mark, because the original two shows start with NC hash and then the number, and CCATP hash and the number. So like whatever this is, NC number 1003, right? But I don't use hash marks before the number in the PBS title. As soon as I remove the hash mark from the regular expression shortcuts, it worked a champ. Now, with any luck, you'll always hear the intro to programming by stealth with the right number. It's not guaranteed, of course. I said the wrong number for the NoSilicast just a month ago, in spite of No Rosemary's hard work. The bottom line is there was a lot more cleanup than I'd realized I'd be dealing with when I made the changes a few weeks ago, but I think I've got a good handle on most of it. I hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes nerdery on the machinery behind getting the shows posted for you.
[32:55]
CSUN 2024: Index Braille High-Speed Embossers
[32:55]We have our final interview from the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, and it's actually one of our favorites. The product you hear about isn't something you'd buy for your home, you might buy it for your business, but Michael Vickmansuna was just delightful and funny, and we just had a blast talking to this guy and we actually made plans if we ever get to Sweden we are totally looking this guy up and maybe taking him out for dinner or something because he was just such a blast to talk to. Anyway let's hear about Index Braille high-speed embossers from Michael.
[33:26]So I just walked up to Michael Vikmanssona and I said I have never seen a Braille printer and he represents Index Braille and you said this is the one to see right? Yeah Yeah, for sure. I'm glad you stopped by here, since we've been coming a long way, starting our journey from way up in the northern parts of Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle, where we are building these kind of Braille embossers for 42 years now, nearly 43. So Braille is little dots that stick up, and so embossing is what these printers do? Yes, we actually produce the embossers, and with the embossers you can...
[34:06]Print your Braille documents. So for the listening audience, he's holding up, it looks like a blank sheet of paper. But if you look closely, it's got little dots all over it. I saw that at lunch. Somebody read a Braille menu. It's crazy. Yeah, this is actually one of those Braille manuals. And we print Interpoint. That means it's printed double-sided. So we've actually...
[34:27]Print on both sides of the paper oh that's crazy yeah and we do that at the same time so this document is printed like with have shipped the file over to the embosser which prints the document and you just bring it out you staple it and you got a folding line in the center of the paper you just fold it and voila you got a braille book now it's not printing the same thing on both sides they've got to be it gaps in in opposite places it's all calculated in a very very smart way we can also print like business cards with this machine okay and these sheets are printed with this embosser which is the index everest the v5 okay so the index of everest v5 i'm looking at standing well it sort of looks like a printer stood up on end yeah so the paper is going in the top and it's got all it's got braille buttons yeah it's got also speech feedback and it can talk to multiple languages like 16 different languages and so on so this one uh what the difference all the models is that this one which prints on sheet paper prints about 300 pages an hour.
[35:42]And if you look at the smaller one it's the same speed but the smaller one which is called basic d the V5 prints on continuous paper, tractor-fed paper. So that's one of the big differences. So this is if you want to print something a lot larger, you would print it on the basic? Longer, and if you need the stability of printing like a whole box of paper, you can put it in there and let it run.
[36:09]This sheet feeder holds about approximately 100 pages, something like that. Then you have to fill it again. Okay. So basic is not that basic. That's actually the fancier one. All of our embossers are quite advanced, actually. Basic is an old name, started back in the early 80s, which have been refined through the years and now looks like this. Okay. Now we've got something that looks like a 3D printer. This thing is massive. This looks bigger than the ExoBrew we saw at CES. This one is actually one of the, we got two bigger production machines. This is one of them. It's called the Braille Box. As the name says, it actually looks like a box.
[36:55]And it's the same technique in all of these. The big difference is that this one prints also on cut sheet paper, but three times faster. So this one prints 900 pages an hour. So this is if you're like a book printer, you would buy something this huge, right? Yeah, for large-scale production, for books. Is there any way for us to see what it looks like inside? What's pressing, doing the embossing? We can have a, yeah, we can do that. We can have a look at... One of these? Yeah. I'm just curious, what makes those little dots stand up is going to be the question. This is actually an acoustic cabinet which enclosures the sound because making braille produces a lot of noise, as you can hear. Oh my gosh, so this is now what you're listening to is the is the Everest V5.
[37:47]Inside a box, It's much more convenient the sound now so that was the same as the first unit we saw but it's inside of a giant Sound isolation booth. Yeah for sure and I can press house on this and then you see it so this is actually the paper goes down and through and, This bar here is actually the embossing head. So inside this, all the dots are being produced. And then the paper goes underneath and falls down like this. So is it just little pins going in and out? It's small hammers. It's 13 small hammers producing the dots. Okay, because you've got to really smack it to make that thing sit. Okay. But one of the advantages with that technique is that you can print on really thick paper. We can, yeah, you can say that if the paper is really, really thick, like for instance, my business cards, then you can do multiple impacts on each dot, so in order to really penetrate to make a perfect shape dot, you can make one, two, three, four, or five, even up to five dashes on the same spot. I got to get Braille business cards. I can't believe I don't have Braille on my cards yet. I really do. Yeah, you should. And now you've got one more box behind us. Yeah, this is the biggest one. This is also for continuous paper.
[39:11]Now we're like a large cooler. Yeah, it is. And it's actually the same technique as you saw in the others. The same embossing head. But this one's got three of them with pickup rollers in between. So you feed in the paper in these tractors, and the paper will be fed through all this printing mechanism and goes down. And falls out, so you can pick the document out here. Okay. So you actually put a whole box of paper here if you want to. So this is fan-fold. What's the old terminology for this? Like, well, the original computer paper was like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Fan-fold with the little holes in the side. Yeah, holes in the sides. Yeah, I'm missing the name. Like, green bar reports were printed on that, right? Yeah, for sure. Okay. Same technique. And now what's the use case for this giant one? Yeah, yeah. It's the same as the Braille box. It's large-scale production of brand.
[40:06]Now, it's up to you which paper you prefer. If you like to use the continuous paper, then this is the one for you if you got large-scale production. If you like the cut paper, the sheet, the BrailleBox is perfect for the large-scale production. I got you. I don't know. I think I'm more of a V5 Everest D person myself. Yeah, me too, actually. That's the cute one. This is the best. Actually, the best one that we got. Who do you sell to? We sell mostly to... So we got a worldwide dealer network. So we're based in the northern part of Sweden, but we sell all our products throughout the whole world through dealers. So basically, most of the equipment is sold to schools and universities and so on, which produces, for instance, school books and so on. Okay, great. But even private persons have the smaller ones for home use. Do I dare ask how much one of these costs? Yeah, if you're looking at the Everest, it's something like $4,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, between $4,500 and $5,000. That's actually a lot less than I thought it was. You know, sticker shock when you're talking accessibility tools. That's amazing.
[41:23]But for the XX prices, you have to contact the dealers, the local dealers. So again, the company is Index Braille. If people wanted to see this, where would they go? They would go actually here if they are available. No, I mean on the web. On the web, indexbraille.com. Indexbraille.com. Yeah, they find all our equipment there and I'll meet all the stuff and so on. Great. Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you. Thank you.
[41:48]Well, I told you that guy was fun, right? We had such a great time with him. But that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfee.com anytime you like? If you have a question or suggestion, just send it on over. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash mastodon. If you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeed.com slash YouTube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me in all of the other lovely NoCillaCast ways. You can go in and tell physics nerd Graham how awesome those tutorials were that he taught us how he does his physics shorts videos. You can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon, on or with a one-time donation like George did this week at podfee.com slash PayPal. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfee.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NoCillaCast.
[42:42]Music.