Todos and agenda with kitty 🔗
I’ve been using Todoist to stick stuff that I have to keep track of in a list: It’s got a decent web interface, you can do a card view, and it has clients for pretty much everything. It could be any of several online todo apps. I don’t care. I don’t love it, I am not passionate about it, it’s just there and it makes lists which means my preference for hand-written meeting notes doesn’t have to get in the way of keeping track of tasks.
I was happy to learn about this Rust-based CLI tool for Todoist called “tod”, which makes it easy to pull lists of todos, process todos, etc. all from the command line. I don’t mean to use it to process things, but I was looking for a way to print a list of today’s todos, and it can do that.
I was also happy to learn about gcalcli, which can pull your Google Calendar down from the command line, as well.
I made a couple of launch actions in kitty:
map kitty_mod+a launch --hold ruby ~/bin/agenda.rb
map kitty_mod+o launch --hold tod task list -f today
The ruby script in the first line is a wrapper around gcalcli because its agenda command takes a couple of ISO-8601 dates, and I got tired of trying to escape date and all its arguments in a config file.
So, mod+a to list today’s agenda in a kitty window, and mod+o to list my todos for the day.
Better Zoom audio 🔗
I have wanted to get rid of my Jabra headset because I look like a telemarketer in it. I had a few offers of loaned gear, neither of which I’d gotten around to collecting before I went digging around in the photography parts bin thinking I had, at some point in the past few years, bought a mic and maybe it’d do the trick. Sure enough, I found a RØDE VideoMic sitting at the bottom of the box. I bought it for a holiday project and never thought of it as a way to improve teleconferencing until Luke said “USB shotgun mic” as a possible solution.
I mounted it in the hot shoe of the Fujifilm X-T2 I use for Zoom video and plugged into my Linux desktop. It showed up as a source for Zoom, and that was about all there was to it. I did a few tests to make sure the positioning would work, then a few A/B tests with my Jabra headset to see how much of a change there’d be. There’s definitely a little less presence, but it’s not that much worse, I’m free of the headset, and the sound is much better than the mics that come on laptops. It seems to have an app for configuring some soft options if you plug it into a Mac or iPhone.
I’m using a pair of powered bookshelf speakers as “studio monitors” right now. They’re a little undefined and boomy with other peoples’ dinky laptop mics, so I’m not sure what to do there. A little preliminary fiddling with Easy Effects suggests I can probably squeeze something out in software.
But even in this sorta primitive state, I really like where I’m at: I can just sit down at my desk, start the call, and not have a thing stuck on my head, Bluetooth to worry about, etc. etc. The CamLink 4K/Fujifilm combo has been very consistent, and the 23mm/f2 “Fujicron” has been a great lens for this application. It crops tight enough to seem more intimate than the average super-wide web cam, but not so tight that I’m a giant looming head or unable to shift between “attentive and upright” and “listening but not hanging on every word.”
I need to improve my lighting situation a little. I have a Lume Cube Panel Mini but need to get a reliable power source and mount for it so I can quit using the overhead light in my office when the light coming in through the window gets too low: It makes the lens hunt unless I stop it down (and up goes the ISO) and the light coming off the monitor gives everything a super cold cast.
Roy Clark, Guitar God 🔗
My family watched Hee Haw growing up, and Roy Clark was always just the one who smiled a lot to me. I think I liked Buck Owens better for reasons lost to me. We also watched The Odd Couple, so here’s a crossing of the streams.