It’s a public holiday in Bavaria and the sun is shining, so I’m on the terrace dialling in to my Sydney knitting group. ❤️🧶☀️ @ Munich, Germany https://t.co/iav5HhPwQy
Blog post: My experience so far with duckyPad, the DIY mechanical macropad. (Who needs a Stream Deck?!) https://t.co/aF3cZWethN https://t.co/A9udYZEVvo
@bodil They’re pretty fun, and I really love the clickiness. I think I’ll probably finally take the plunge on a really nice mechanical keyboard this year…
OMG. Only if I can dress up as a shepherdess for the full Marie Antoinette experience… https://t.co/CWe5tR64I1
@bodil I loved the original! Though it did my head in to recognise Jane Bennet as the ill-fated reporter. 😳
Knitting with Kris – Back at the cabled vest, trying to get to the arm holes dividing point! https://t.co/YTHlokdD6L https://t.co/RAmEciApdF
I’ve been a Twitch streamer for six months now. Isn’t that weird? I’ve noticed that a lot of the really fancy streamers use an elgato Stream Deck as part of their setup. This is essentially a “macropad” – a little programmable keyboard that you can set up so that clicking a button kicks off a series of actions. People use them for adding sounds and graphics to their streams, replying to comments, even controlling lighting and cameras. They’re not cheap though, and as much as I coveted one, I didn’t think I’d use it enough to justify the expense.
Then somehow I found out about the duckyPad. This is an Open Source “do-it-yourself” mechanical macropad, and all up the components come to about half the cost of the Stream Deck. It has a very simple little scripting language you use to program each key, and it has a little screen that shows what each one does. You can have 32 different “profiles” (set of 15 keys), which means up to 480 different key actions. And it also lights up! I decided to order one and explore what I could do with it.
Here’s what it looks like straight from the box if you order the standard components:
Putting it together was actually very simple following the instructions in the Assembly Guide. Man, those tiny 2mm standoffs are awfully small though, even for my hands! The only difficulty I had was getting the keyboard switches inserted. They required a little more pressure than I expected, and I was really paranoid that I’d break one or bend one of the pins. As it turns out, when I had the thing together and turned it on, one of the keys was indeed dead. I pulled it off and saw that, yep, I’d bent one of the pins flat. Luckily the Snook whipped out a pair of pliers and managed to straighten it out, and once reinserted it worked fine. So yeah, the instructions say over and over to be careful for bent pins, and now I understand why!
The duckyPad comes pre-programmed with a couple different profiles, but most of them were Windows-specific. I installed the Configurator app and used the provided USB card reader to plug in the SD card. Then I was able to start creating new profiles and scripts.
The duckyPad is literally just sending off key presses, just like you’re typing on your normal keyboard. So anything you can do via keyboard shortcut, you can trigger with the duckyPad. The critical thing for Mac users is invoking Spotlight with “COMMAND SPACE”. That’s what you use to open apps and change focus. I also found that often the duckyPad is too fast and I needed to insert a DELAY before subsequent key presses (like between opening the browser and typing in a URL).
One annoyance is that some apps’ keyboard shortcuts only work while the app is in focus. If you’re using Windows, there’s an “Auto-switcher app” that will automatically switch profiles based on which app is foregrounded. There’s currently no Mac version (someone is working on it), so I’ve found it helpful to have a dedicated key that switches focus back to the desired app (especially when presenting or streaming).
I’ve spent a few weeks now tweaking and refining my setup, and I keep finding new things to automate. With some of these, I just cannot remember the keyboard shortcut so having a button helps. With others, I’m finding that I already have the muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut so I may not need the macro. The ones that get the most use by far are volume control (much better than the stupid Touchbar on my Mac) and the “mute” shortcut (used to invoke Mutify and turn on/off my microphone), so I’ve reproduced those as the bottom row of keys across multiple profiles. But read on to see what I’ve got so far…
And if you have any suggestions for things to add, please let me know!
RT @Refactor_Conf: A beautiful start of the day! Re:Factor live at 13:00 🔥 Interested? Direct link: https://t.co/6MRutjaY0n https://t.co/aF…
@LukeSleeman I’m really sorry to hear that, Luke. 🙁 But I’m sure in Oz there would be plenty of other people/places where you could use it. And if nothing else, learning any new language is good for your brain. (This is what I tell myself after 3hrs of German a week…)
A beautiful Spring day means lunch al fresco (“im Freien,” auf Deutsch)! @ Munich, Germany https://t.co/baL0s430mq
My session is about to kick off!! @Refactor_Conf https://t.co/2FKvN0FxHK
RT @anbarth: I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on over the past months, the new Practical Data Science specialization in col…
Excellent thread! Makes me want to see an entire conference of tech talks that aren’t actually about computers. ❤️🍫 https://t.co/LECtABFCQB
RT @catehstn: Super interesting – 1 in 5 Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout https://t.co/7qCxhnvMji
Ever heard of GPS art? I created a massive artwork in honour of next week’s AWS Summit EMEA. If you want to learn about cloud computing, AIML and more, you can register for free here: https://t.co/0m8Pf8uc51
And yes, I really did make the AWS logo! 😅🚴♀️ https://t.co/mDFmDSpDfm https://t.co/75sKfoEg02
@MichelePlayfair Hilariously, when I sent around my first cut of the video (without saying “GPS art” first), half the people I showed it to had no idea wtf I was doing. They thought it was just, like, a training montage. 🤣
For the curious, there doesn’t appear to be an app for automatically generating GPS art routes. I ended up just spending 45 min scrolling around Google Maps trying to fit it manually. So yeah, if somebody wants to solve that problem, that’d be awesome…
@vertis It’s one of things where once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it. It was driving me bonkers that some folks just couldn’t!
@vertis OH GOOD LORD yeah I’m glad we retired that one a few years back. That would’ve killed me. 😂
@vertis That was my fallback. We live near the Theriesenwiese (the big showgrounds where they hold Oktoberfest), so I figured in a pinch I could do it there. But riding through the city is a lot more fun!
@vertis But the effort was part of it! It’s performance art, Luke!! 😛
Blog post: My first ever GPS art! If you want to see how I planned out the @awscloud logo route, just head here: https://t.co/IdPFquKVEI https://t.co/2K9EFlPeVf
@Osterjour @Ryte_EN Congrats Markus!!
A positively Antipodean amount of salad on that cheeseburger… (but no beetroot.) 🍔 @ Café Westend https://t.co/997WMQVuyo
Ever heard of GPS art? I created a massive artwork in honour of next week’s AWS Summit EMEA. If you want to learn about cloud computing, AIML and more, you can register for free here: https://amzn.to/3fbS1wA
And yes, I really did make the AWS logo! 😅🚴♀️ https://www.strava.com/activities/5301283215
A positively Antipodean amount of salad on that cheeseburger… (but no beetroot.) 🍔
The AWS Summit EMEA is coming up next week, and a few of my colleagues created funny videos to drum up excitement. Seb documented his preparations, as did Darko, but a bit more retro. Isa did a super cute one with her pupper Jago, a “Solutions Barkitecht”. 😂
My first impulse was to do something similar for mine, but of course include myself surrounded by knitting projects. But the more I thought about it, the more boring that felt. I knew I really needed to raise the level of creativity.
And then I had a flash of inspiration – GPS art! This is where you run/walk/cycle a particular path and the GPS path in your tracking app draws a picture. What if I could cycle my way across the AWS logo?? I immediately started searching for an app, hoping there was a way to automatically plan out a route. But guess what? Tech has not cracked this particular problem yet. My only option was to do it the hard way.
I opened up Google Maps and realised immediately I was going to have a problem. Munich is an old city, and it doesn’t have a nice rectangular grid for its streets. It’s also got the Altstadt (the medieval city center) and a river running right through it, all of which really limited my options. I decided to focus on looking for something suitable for the smile part. It probably took me half an hour to find a nice big curving bit to the south-east. I used the drawing tools in Google’s “My Maps” to draw on the map and plot out the rest of the logo. Not too bad! All I needed then was to join it up into an actual cycling map that I could follow.
For that I used Strava, which I’ve been using to track my cycling for a few years. It has a feature where you can create your own Routes and it will help plot out the path. I ended up creating it as a “walking” route because that gave me finer-grained control over which streets I could take. (When you select “cycling,” it will push you towards cycleways – which is normally great, but for this I was willing to forego that.) It turns out this caused me one slight issue, which I’ll get to shortly. But pretty quickly I had my route, as well as an estimated distance – 21.8km. Yikes! And that didn’t even include getting from the start/finish to my house. I knew this was going to take me a couple hours to complete.
On the day of the ride, I had the Snook film me getting ready. I filled up my hydration backpack and wore my new padded cycling pants. Then I was off! I have a mount for my iPhone on the handlebars, which allows me to easily see the map as well as film footage of both the road and my face as I’m riding. Everything went pretty well, until…
Yeah. My route had me turning left… onto that bridge way above my head. There were stairs, but at that point I was in no state to drag my bike up there. This is the downside to using a walking route! So I had to improvise a bit, going down a side-street and walking my bike along a path to get back onto the route.
The only other mishap was a wrong turn at the base of the second point on the “w”, which I thankfully caught quickly. Unfortunately Strava doesn’t allow you to remove points afterwards, but it was small enough that it doesn’t really detract. On the upside, I also discovered that when you “pause” tracking on Strava and then “un-pause,” it will draw a straight line between those points. I realised I could use this strategically to create diagonals and smooth out some of the rougher bits along the “s”.
As I got back to the house, I messaged the Snook to come out and meet me so he could film one final bit of me arriving and saying “I’m getting ready for the AWS Summit. Are you?” I was pretty puffed at that point, and the hydration pack was completely empty. 😅
So here’s the final cycling workout!
Then I used iMovie to cut together all the footage I’d created, along with a final screenshot of the map. I was really pleased with it and sent it to a few folks. One of them loved it and was really enthusiastic, but the other reactions were muted. It was only when I probed them further that I realised they didn’t get it! They weren’t seeing the logo at all. Once I pointed it out they could see it, but without that context it just looked like I was riding around Munich aimlessly for no reason. 😂 So I had to do a lot of explaining, including for the lovely marketing folks who cut together the final version with music and graphics.
Anyway, here it is! My first ever attempt at GPS art. And if you’d like to attend the AWS Summit next week (it’s free!), you can register here: https://amzn.to/3fbS1wA.
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