takeo.news issue 7 – an entirely too long write up of how I replicated the Pee Wee's Playhouse phone booth in my office
Shit I'm…
Reading I just started reading The Untethered Soul. Seems kinda cheesy but it came as a recommendation. Not much to say just yet, but it’s pretty wild right off the bat. Starts off with stuff like this:
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it.
Should be an interesting read. I’m sure I’ll have some more to say in the next few weeks.
Using Not going to do much in the Obsidian series this week since I'm writing so much about another dorky thing below. Probably next week. Some of this issue was written on the iPhone app, though, which has gotten really good!
Wearing Since I've already covered jeans, my sweater, socks, and flannels, that doesn't leave too much. So, I think I'm going to do some t-shirts for a few issues.
Y'all probably know I love the band Yob. I have three of their shirts so far. They have pretty rad designs. Here's one of them:
Automating All right, strap in, this is a dorky one.
We all live in the New Normal™ where most of us likely work remotely still. As for myself and my team, we've been deemed "permanently remote" as part of a Digital First™ initiative. Basically, we still have offices, but they're only for collaboration and projects/meetings moving forward. Hardly anyone will have a desk to call their own. I'm actually pretty into it. Like I mentioned in the last issue, I have my dedicated office space at home and I love it. I can't really imagine going back to an office full time again.
As a result, of course, we all pretty much live in Slack and Zoom. Slack is slack. Whatever. Zoom, though, is how we actually see each other every once in a while. Yes, it gives us Zoom fatigue when you're on it too long, and it's still never going to be as good as being together in person, but it is what it is.
Over the last couple years I've slowly tried to dial in my Zoom game. I don't even have that many meetings or give tons of presentations compared to some folks, but it's something else to tweak and get some gear for, so why not. I've added a face light, a mic on a nice low profile arm, a stream deck, and I use my phone camera instead of a regular webcam to get a way sharper image. As you can see, much like Zoom, El Gato is a company that unexpectedly benefitted from a global pandemic where everyone had to start streaming.
Zoom has always had the ability to put a virtual background in, but it never worked very well for me. My background environment has always been way too noisy for it to do a very good job. I usually instead tried to make my actual background acceptable, but that's not super fun and can be kind of tedious. Lots of colleagues always have a background enabled for various reasons, but not many have ever looked all that great.
The other day I was chatting with the doggs in our group text and the discussion started to talk about how Zoom and the image we present on it has taken over for things like the way we dress to a normal office. I mentioned how I'd wanted to replicate the Pee Wee Herman phone booth in my office, and it occurred to me that I could probably rig something up pretty easily.
If you're a fellow old, you'll remember Pee Wee's Playhouse. Amongst all the other wonderful stuff, he had a magic phone booth for making video calls. Future shit. And the main thing with the magic phone booth was pulling down a backdrop and putting on a costume to make it more fun. How prescient.
So, we've all essentially been biting Pee Wee's style with the virtual background and Snapchat filters and all that stuff. Except it never looked as good as his setup. I’ve been thinking about giving this a go for a while, so I used the long Memorial Day weekend to finally get it going.
The first piece was getting a green screen, of course. I just ordered some shitty piece of green cloth off Amazon. It’s fine.
The real magic, though, was the automation part. In the past I’ve set up a bunch of motorized blackout shades, and I got the Ikea Fyrtur ones because they work with Homekit, which is how I do all my home automation stuff. They work really well, especially considering how much cheaper they are then ones from Lutron, etc.
By making sure they work with Homekit, it means I can make them part of scenes, which enables me to control a whole bunch of things in multiple configurations depending on what I need a the time. For example I already had a "Meeting" scene that does the following:
turns on my philips hue light strip that's along the back of my desk for some ambient light behind my monitor
turns on the hall light outside my office. It's also a hue light, and the main idea here was to make it turn red when I'm on a zoom call so folks know I'm busy, but I haven't gotten that working too consistently yet.
turn on my key light to get some warm diffused light on my face so people can actually see me and so i don't look like a zombie
pause my homepods if I have some music playing (which I usually do)
turn on a "do not disturb" virtual switch using Homebridge dummy switches… homebridge is a topic for another day, though.
Then, since Homekit is built into the Apple ecosystem, it lets me do some more cool stuff with Shortcuts. So, when I have a meeting, I use Raycast to run the "Meeting Time" shortcut that does the following:
turn the above Homekit scene on
send a key command (using BetterTouchTool's shortcut support) that activates the Meeter app's ability to autojoin the zoom call for the next meeting in my calendar
start the Camo Studio app to run my phone camera as the zoom camera
sets my mac to the "Zoom call" focus mode so I can control what notifications come in, and, as a bonus, set the same focus mode on all my other devices
And since my iPhone gets set to the same Zoom call focus mode, I use that as a trigger for a shortcut automation on it to start the corresponding Camo app on the phone so they can talk to each other and Zoom.
Are you still with me? If so, from there I plug a lightning cable on the back of my monitor into the phone to give it power and connect it to the computer, and then stick the phone to a Moment magsafe mount that firmly holds my phone right above my monitor where a regular webcam would be.
It sounds ridiculous, but once it was all set up it means I can join a meeting in just a few seconds by running that one shortcut command from Raycast and then plugging my phone in.
All right, so the green screen. Since I have all this stuff already working, adding the green screen to it was pretty easy. I of course had to mount the blind to the ceiling of my office in back of where I sit/stand in front of my desk. It took some dialing in to get the right placement for it so it would adequately fill the camera's viewport. The Fyrtur blinds max out at 48" wide, which isn't all that wide when it's behind you with a relatively wide angle phone camera lens. But it worked out ok.
Then, I figured out how far the blind had to lower to fill the viewport, then pinned the green screen cloth to it. I had to only put as much cloth on top of the blind as absolutely necessary since it makes the rolling of the blind a lot thicker and prone to get stuck. I chopped off a bunch of excess fabric, and of course did it all crooked and janky. But it's good enough.
Then, I added the blind to the Meeting Homekit scene and set it to lower as part of it. Now, whenever I run the shortcut, the green screen lowers behind me. I have another shortcut that runs when I exit the Camo app on my phone that basically does the opposit of all this to clean up. Fuck yeah.
But, there was still a missing piece. My initial trial of the built in Zoom green screen functionality was pretty shitty. There's a checkbox to let the app know you have a green screen and you can choose the color to knock out, but it's super basic and didn't work well at all for me. So, I had to add another piece to my contraption.
OBS is a free, cross platform, open source streaming app that lots of gamers and stuff use. It's pretty rough looking, of course, but it has a ton of features and does a whole bunch of stuff I didn't even know I was going to be able to do. Primarily, it provides better green screen support using a "chroma key" filter on the camera source that lets you dial in the green screen removal way better.
OBS also lets you make scenes that let you switch between setups for quickly changing backgrounds, camera positions, etc. I initially set up a scene to have my camera video in the iconic Queen II album cover:
This was a big success. Joining meetings like this blew people away, even though it was relatively basic. But now that I knew how to make scenes, it was time to kick it up a notch.
Like I mentioned, different scenes can have different backgrounds, but also different placement, sizing, and rotation of the camera's live video. Once I realized this, I made another scene:
Needless to say, this one got quite a bit of attention. I suppose it's probably a bit distracting to other participants when they're talking to me while chillin next to Lars Ulrich, but it seemed like everyone got used to it right away and all the meetings I had went just fine.
And since I already had the stream deck, I was able to set up buttons to quickly switch between scenes. So, now I have a button with the Queen image, and one with the Metallica image, and they each activate their respective scenes. I'm planning on making another scene that I can quickly switch to that will let me put a window with a presentation as my background so I can give presentations with my head in the lower left corner or whatever. It's gonna look pro.
Finally, one last thing that took me a while to figure out was how to get OBS to start with the virtual camera already going. By default, OBS is made to stream to services like Twitch, and if you want to use it in Zoom you have to make it a "virtual" camera. I'm already using Camo as a virtual camera feeding into OBS, and then the OBS virtual camera feeds into Zoom. Like I said, Rube Goldberg.
Anyways, I added the a shell script action to my shortcut to start OBS with the camera on by default by running this command:
Seeing Writing this section on my phone between bands!
First up was Glacial Fall. Two piece from here in Portland. Mostly two bases with heavy, droning sampled drums. Really good.
Then Lord Dying played. They made one my favorite albums of 2019, Mysterium Tremendum. They seemed a bit rusty, but were of course awesome. I picked up the double LP.
Then Zeke played a bunch of fast punk songs that all sounded the same. Pretty fun though.
Bongzilla is about to go on. I got their first album back in like 1998 or something. They’re still up to the same schtick ("did we mention we smoke lots of weed!?"). Hopefully they’re fun live.
Jen and I are going to see Tori Amos next week, so that’ll be in the next issue!
Drawing I’ve got a pretty special drawing in the works right now but it’s just getting started. In the meantime here’s another one from a few weeks ago:
Laughing at
Watching Finally started watching Severance on Apple TV and it’s pretty rad so far. Everyone said it’s great and so far it’s living up to the hype. Kinda reminds me of a Charlie Kaufman type of thing? Looking forward to seeing where it goes.
