August, 2016 | Brady Moritz

How to be an Online Broadcaster

I casually asked TK today about online broadcasting, and he managed to deliver a lot of knowledge on the topic. I didn’t even know he was into that kinda thing 😉 I’d asked about twitch.tv after seeing an article able using twitch to control paintbrushes to create painting, in a strange crowd-sourced kind of artwork (article at intel.com). I’m logging all this here for my own future reference, or for any other lonely stranger who may come across it.

Most important thing I’ve seen that make for a great show is
-a good mic
-a compressor (so you don’t get too loud)
-good lighting
-an ability to talk to chat.

(The last item refers to the live chat in mediums such as twitch.tv provides. it can get distracting trying to do a show while also interacting with chats, especially when they come in a fast rate.)

I don’t even think having a great camera makes as much of a difference as the mic and compressor.

(doing ok in the mic department – see pic below!)

Blue Yeti mic on arm and vibration isolation mount

If you are loud with hissing and popping no one is watching you.

Info on sound compression, to smooth out the hiss/pop sounds: https://theproaudiofiles.com/voice-processing-eq-cuts-boosts/

Basically you want to do whatever you can to have that radio DJ sound, not annoying, just one even level of volume.

This link is the OBS Project – Open source casting software – https://obsproject.com/
It’s used by just about everyone, supports scenes / multi inputs.. supports youtube streaming as well as twitch and others.

Another trick is to use a dedicated monitor devoted to chat, put in portrait mode if possible. Twitch chat is built on IRC so you can use an irc client to connect to chat, makes it much easier to read and can fill this devoted screen easily.

Oh and get good moderators for chat. Even with good mods, I’ve seen streams come to a halt because the streamer happened to see an inappropriate message in chat before it could be deleted.
One streamer even recently talked about this, how that out of 1k people watching and having a good time, you just latch on to that one negative comment and your whole stream is ruined.

Will add more here as more is discovered. Still need to cover lighting topic a bit more.

I’m on hold song on uberconference.com

Called into an uberconference conference call today and was a little early. Noticed the hold music was a little different than what I’m used to.
Then I noticed the guy singing mentioned being “on hold, for a conference call” and “wonder where my friends are”. Awesome! A bit of googling found this is the song I heard on soundcloud

So far I’m impressed with uberconference.com, their basic service is free and their call quality has been adequate so far. I’d like to find out if they have an uberconference affiliate program so I can try sending some referrals their way (call me, guys).

Using GIT with Visual Studio and a Local project

Git usage with visual studio has become easier in recent times, but I always still have a bit of a headache remembering a few basic items. For instance, I use bitbucket.org for a lot of private repositories, and I often will have source code on my local machine that I’d like to add to git and then sycn with bitbucket. Visual studio seems to not like creating a new git repository in a folder that has files in it already, but I don’t usually want to move files into a new folder. Apparently I have to drop to the commandline and run:

cd <my project path>
git init

After this, you can go back into visual studio and add the newly initialized git repo to it, while you already have the solution open: go to Add, then navigate to the folder and add it.

Then, do a commit.

Then, you can go to sync, to sync it with bitbucket- but you’ll need to go to bitbucket and create the repo there first, then copy the url to the repo. Enter this in the visual studio prompt and then complete the sync.

PokeFind.com – Pokémon Go finder map app

A lot of these “pokemon finder” apps have popped up since the pokemon go app became such a big deal. Check out the http://pokefind.com app for a good example of a pokemon finder (aka pokefind).

A blog is going live soon on the site so you can keep up with both news about pokefind as well as the pokemon go game in general.

Updating here as more is available as well.

Pistol Gun Emoji in Apple iOS and Windows

Big news today was Apple replacing the “pistol” emoji with a water gun design, apparently in an effort to make fonts less violent? The old and new emoji’s look like this:

Pistol on Apple iOS 9.3 — Apple iOS original Pistol

But, what I didn’t see in the news is that the major “Windows 10 Anniversary Update” released today, does the exact opposite- Windows 10 (and maybe 8? 7?) has had a space-man style pew-pew gun instead of the typical revolver.. but the update today actually changed this back to a traditional revolver desgin.

Pistol on Microsoft Windows 10 — Windows 10 original “space man” pistol

Pistol on Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update — Windows 10 Anniversary Update pistol

I suspect this was accidental on Microsoft’s part, as they did a big overhaul of the emoji system in general and probably overlooked this. The timing of the two company’s swapping these designs is pretty funny/spooky though.