Automatic for the people
Tuesday, May 30, 2023Show Notes
In this episode:
- Alan announces RSS is alive and well, and powering Mastodon bots
- Mark finds the best mouse for desktop Linux. Possibly.
- Martin is using the Stream Deck to automate desktop Linux
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Transcript
Alan Pope 0:03
I am happy to report RSS is alive and well and powering my bots, your bots, my bots,
I’ve been creating bots. And I’ve made a few of them. And these bots are powered by RSS. So
back at the start of February, I was quite alone and lonely on the little Mastodon server that I set up
Ubuntu dot social, there weren’t many people there. And the home timeline was a bit sad, because
it was mostly just me. So to keep the company, I thought I’d create some bots to generate some
traffic. And I had some ideas of what what I wanted. Because it’s an Ubuntu, a junked Mastodon
server, I thought I could have some of them to related content, where would I get that content from? So
I could get it from RSS feeds. Because I know there are various places that publish a boon to related
stuff via RSS. And I thought I could turn that RSS into posts that would also drive traffic towards
those things and raise awareness of those things. But it would also mean the home timeline on that
Mastodon server wouldn’t just be me posting pictures of cats and food and stuff. So I started by
writing my own scraper thing as a shell script, of course, that goes off and visits these RSS feeds. And
then I realised this is a stupid idea, because somebody else must have done this already done that
normally, people had done this already. But someone has a guy called Leon Cal has created a thing in
Python called RSS. And then the number two, master, and it’s on GitHub, it’s open source.
And the goal of this thing is to take posts that are available via RSS, and then use the mastodon API to
post those as individual Toots or whatever you want to call them on a mastodon account. And so I grabbed
this code and created a mastodon account and put a URL in the script and ran it and sure enough, it
posted 20 or so entries onto that master account. It just immediately worked. It was super
straightforward, super easy to do. So there you end up by segment. That’s it job done.
Martin Wimpress 2:21
But what Okay, so other than feeling lonely? Which RSS feeds are your bots
monitoring?
Alan Pope 2:27
That’s a great question. So there is some utility to this. The one that I
predominantly use is the Ask Ubuntu bot. And so every time somebody posts a question to ask a boon to
the question and answer site, the RSS feed gets updated. And so I grab that question and post it to the
asker boon to Mastodon account on Ubuntu dot social. And that has a link to the question. So if
you’re looking at Mastodon, you might see that scroll by that says, How do I whatever fix my
Nvidia problem? And then a link directly to the question I asked him to you just click the link, you go
to the question, and it saves you going to the website. You can just see it straight in Mastodon and
then click through through so there is utility. So this Yes,
Mark Johnson 3:14
but this created another problem, because instead of the home timeline just being
you, it was then just ask Ubuntu. And I had to mute it because there’s so much content there. Yes,
that you never even saw the other bots, let alone the real people posting.
Alan Pope 3:28
So there are four of these bots. There’s Azkaban two which posts the question.
Then there’s the Ubuntu blog bots, which posts whenever they want to projects have an article on
the official blog. There’s a boon to Weekly News bot which every time the Ubuntu weekly news
magazine online thing comes out it posts to promote that. And then there’s another one called
Ubuntu bugs. And I think that’s probably the one that you probably muted first, because that one
posts every time someone files a bug against Ubuntu. And so that’s the one that’s posted the
most that one’s Well, actually, no, it’s it’s not you saying
Mark Johnson 4:07
Ubuntu has got a lot of bugs.
Alan Pope 4:08
I’m saying people report a lot of bugs. Whether they actually it’s not
the most, I thought it was but it’s it’s got 982 posts as I last checked, but the Ask Ubuntu
bot has over 2000 posts, so they’re actually more people asking questions than there are people
reporting bugs. That says a lot. I think
Martin Wimpress 4:27
we’ve just identified why your Mastodon server is running at an average
of 500 kilobits a second.
Alan Pope 4:34
These are pieces of text. The interesting thing about this script this RSS to master
that Leon made, it keeps a little SQL lite database where it’s running of posts that it’s
already sent to the mastodon server because you don’t want it to repost stuff every time it runs.
So keeps a little database and the database is made up of a hash of some of the parts of What it posts.
So I think the URL is in there and some text and stuff is in there, so it doesn’t post duplicates.
And I had a bit of fun when I was setting up because when I first set it up, and I got it working,
hurray, it posted 20 posts to Mastodon brilliant. But then I wanted to tweak the output. And the problem
is I run it again. And it’s cached. And so it knows not to post those 20 Again, and so I have to
wait for something to happen. So I ended up doing a bit of debugging. And I had to go and find a script
to delete all the posts from that Mastodon account, because actually, it’s quite hard to manually
delete every post. You can go through each one and go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, and then
the mastodon rate limiter kicks in and it stops you being able to delete any more posts. So I hit that
so I found a script that does it in the background, so and then I tweaked his script, so that it would
write to the database, but not posted to Mastodon so I would like make an exit before actually posted to
Mastodon, it would return Okay, and say, Yeah, I’ve done it, so that I could see the output on the
command line. I was in debug mode, then. I should have done that from the start. But hey, we learned
this. I made a few tweaks to it. And yeah, it’s been running ever since the sixth of February.
It’s running, posting Azkaban to questions, bugs. The bugs one is probably the least useful.
It’s only your eight followers.
Mark Johnson 6:24
Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask are people actually actively following
these bots as well? Or did they just get them passing by in the federated and home timelines?
Alan Pope 6:33
Yeah, it’s interesting, because the the inventory bugs is the least useful one
and we’re the least followed. It’s only got eight followers. The ability weekly news one has
55 followers. Oh, yeah. Okay, I can see that. That’s pretty good. And it’s got like 20
posts, which is as you’d expect, because they put out an issue once a week. Yeah. The Ubuntu blog
post has 73 followers, and 27 posts for each of the blog posts that they publish. They, they’re
quite prolific with their blog posts since the start of February. And the Ask Ubuntu bot has 108
followers and 2000 posts and interestingly, I logged on as the asker went to PA account, and some people
are favoriting them, some people are even replying to it. And some people are boosting them. Okay,
interesting. Yeah. Interesting that people are doing that. I personally just click through sometimes and
just answer a question. If I see something interesting go by. The fun part is I extract the tags, I
modified the script so it extracts the tags out of posts from masculine to and turns those into hashtags
on mastodon. So, there are there are some common ones like snap and 1404. And, you know, stuff like
that. And in other words, like Linux printing, and there’s certain tags that are quite popular and
those things get get used.
Martin Wimpress 7:55
Have you considered recreating the bot that Ben Nuttall formerly of the
Raspberry Pi foundation made for Ask Ubuntu on Twitter where he used a little bit of intuition in the
bot where it generated an appropriate Mimi image to go along with the Ask Ubuntu question.
Alan Pope 8:16
Yeah, maybe? Maybe I should ask Ben if he could bring his I don’t know if
he’s one is open source or not whether he’s put put on? I think it was Yeah, I think it was,
I think it’s called just called Ask Ubuntu memes or something like that. And sometimes they were
perfectly on the nose, it would randomly pick a picture, but sometimes it was pretty spot on. Yeah. And
they are quite funny. I do like them. And sometimes Ben would reshare them and tag me on them. Because
he knew I would find them funny. But yeah, since I don’t look at Twitter anymore. I don’t
see those. But yeah, I just thought I’d let people know about this RSS two master script, because
interestingly, it was the guy who made it Leon. It’s his first open source project. The first
thing is published on GitHub. And interestingly, in the issues, there’s only been a few issues. I
recognise some of the names of the people who’ve filed issues who are other people I know through
Ubuntu and through Mastodon and stuff. So I thought that was quite nice that people are giving him
suggestions on how to improve this stuff. And, you know, some kudos for for making it so it’s
clearly a useful thing. And I think maybe some of our listeners may find it interesting and may also
want to create their own RSS related bots. I’ll have a blog post, go live with this episode that
has all the details, links to everything and the changes that I made to the script because I’ve
made some changes or forked it and made some changes. Now put all that in there as well if anyone needs
it.
Martin Wimpress 9:40
I look forward to the Linux matters bot appearing on Mastodon instance
sometime soon.
Mark Johnson 9:48
I have the best computer mouse and I’m like to tell you why. So this is a
Logitech MX Master s three which I recently got to read replace an old Logitech mouse, I’d had my
must have had for something around 10 years. And I really like that I mean, Logitech do a couple of
different styles of mouse. But I really like their larger mountain mice, because they feel my hand. And
I found that before I was using the smaller mouse, which, if don’t have a mouse that feels my
hand, I find that it cramps up when I’m using it. So one of the things about it is if it’s
my hand nicely, which I realise is quite a personal thing. But there’s some other things, which I
think are absolutely brilliant features of this mouse. First of all, it’s got lots of buttons.
Always good with a higher end mouse, you’ve got your regular buttons, you’ve got a forward
and backwards button under your thumb. And then you’ve got a couple of other buttons, which
I’ll come back to later, which quite interesting. It’s got a scroll wheel under your thumb,
which is for defaults to left, right scrolling, which is sort of barrel shaped going down the length of
the mouse, so it sort of sits along the pad of your thumb. And it’s not clicky like a normal
scroll wheel, but it’s got a nice amount of resistance, and it’s a nice smooth scroll. And
it’s actually it works really well for scrolling left and right. But you could also do other
things with it. Does it scroll left and right, it does scroll left and right.
Alan Pope 11:07
Hmm. Interesting. Okay, you have me it scrolls left and right. Okay.
Mark Johnson 11:12
Yeah, right. So it scrolls left and right. But the really cool thing is the main
scroll wheel, which is in the normal place in between the left and right buttons. Now what this does is
you scroll normally, and it’s a normal clicky scroll wheel, nice tactile response, then you want
to scroll down a big page, you scroll fast, and it disengages the ratchet. And it just freewheels and
it’s silent and smooth, and it just spins away. And you it just flies down the page or up the page
depending on which way you go. And it’s just like really responsive to just you flicking your
finger on it. And I guess the centrifugal force of the spinning just makes it disengage. And it’s
absolutely amazing. I love it. I just sometimes I just sit there scrolling for fun,
Alan Pope 11:59
I’m getting the feeling of being on a push bike and either winding going down
a hill and either winding my pedals backwards or keeping them still that ratchet noise. Is that what
you’re talking about?
Mark Johnson 12:10
They call it the ratchet, you know that, you know, the click Enos of a scroll
wheel. That’s what you normally have when you’re scrolling. But then if you spin it fast, it
stops doing that entirely. It’s just using some sort of, I don’t know exactly how it works.
I always do with magnets, I think
Martin Wimpress 12:24
I’m curious which came first the Free Wheeling mouse to allow you to
scroll through lengthy web pages, or the massive monitor on which to display massive web pages.
Mark Johnson 12:37
Actually, they came around the same time I’m not sure Well, that’s
so my decision to get the mouse came long before the decision to get the monitor because I by chance
used one of my colleagues for about five minutes when we were in the office together. And as soon as I
discovered what that mouse wheel did, I thought I have to get this mouse. But I didn’t have a
reason to get a new mouse for quite a while after that. Is it wired or wireless? is wireless? I think it
does Bluetooth or the Logitech bolt dongle I think they call it which is their sort of current one for
doing multiple devices on a single dongle
Martin Wimpress 13:11
and how does it do charging and power.
Mark Johnson 13:13
It has a USB C port in the front is that USB C port? Yes it is. USB C port in
the front. I mean it lasts over a week of of daily usage. I just charge it when it looks like it needs
it rather than doing it on a regular basis. Which actually brings me on to how it fares on desktop
Linux. So Logitech, as is often the case with these sorts of things. They have an app for configuring
and customising their devices for Windows and Mac OS. But on Linux, there’s a third party open
source app called solaar, which provides this functionality for keyboards and mice. Basically things
that use the Logitech universal dongles. And I don’t think it actually officially supports this
particular mouse, but it has features in common with the other devices it supports, and they work. So it
lets you do standard things like fiddling with sensitivity, and you can set how clicky the scroll wheel
is when it’s Clicky. Or if it’s not clicking at all, you can switch the directions of the
scroll wheel and things like that. But it also has what it calls the rule editor, which lets you just
completely remap things and set button combinations and have different functions or different apps. So
while the thumb wheel usually scrolls left and right, you could for example have it where if
you’re in Audacity, it controls a volume slider or something like that. I think the idea is from
one of Logitech keyboards where they have just sort of knob on it. I think they call it the crown. And
you can use that in different applications. And so this is sort of the implementation of that but you
can use it for you could have it so that when you’ve got a button pressed on the mouse and you use
the thumb scroll wheel He does something different, or it does something different, but only in a
certain app and so on.
Alan Pope 15:05
When you first introduced this, I was thinking, there’s no possible way he
can be the mouse that I have. And the key thing that I love about the mouse that I have, it’s also
a Logitech. It’s also wireless. Yes, but it’s also wired. Ah, it does both. And the charging
cable you put in the end, makes it wired. And the mouse just transitions from wired to wireless, as soon
as you unplug it, if you want to, like move it across the room, or you want to unplug it to get a bit
more freedom, it moves across the room, which is why I asked whether this one was wired or wireless.
It’s a stupid thing. But I quite liked the fact that it is both.
Mark Johnson 15:46
I haven’t actually tried plugging it in to the computer via USB cable, I
just have a separate us guide charging cable by my desk, which I use. So it might do that. I’ve
never actually explored it I maybe I’ll update in a future future.
Martin Wimpress 16:03
As a left hander, I’m interested to know Is it a sort of an
ambidextrous or neutral arrangement? Or is it made for the 90%?
Mark Johnson 16:12
No, unfortunately, this this has a sort of a thumb shelf. On one side, I’m
not sure if they do a left, I think they might do a left handed version as well. But no, this is not an
ambidextrous mouse. But that brings me on to another interesting thing is that I said there were two
other buttons. One of them is on the top of the mouse sort of back from the scroll wheel, which by
default is for switching, you can completely switch the clicking. So the scroll wheel off basically, by
default by clicking that button, I actually have it remapped to the super key so that on GNOME, I can
click it and it gives me the sort of present windows or the switch workspaces view, which is quite nice.
And then you can scroll between workspaces using the thumb wheel, which is really sweet. But then the
thumb pad actually has a button in the base. So if you push your thumb down onto the base, there’s
actually a 10th button there, which by default is for gestures. So if you hold your thumb down on there
and do a gesture, like to move the mouse to the right or to the left or up and then right you can then
map that to something which can be a key combination, or you could launch a script or whatever you want.
I’ve not yet found something that that’s super useful for so I’m still exploring that
feature of it a bit.
Alan Pope 17:25
So in an update, there is not a left handed version. Oh, there is a petition on
change.org.
Mark Johnson 17:34
Ones Yes, I can see why people would be that passionate, because you love this
mouse. So much. You mean Exactly. If I was left handed, I would want a left handed version of this to
exist. The slight sadness I have found in this is all of this call remapping stuff on Wayland is a
complete non starter, it just doesn’t work. There’s some stuff on the solaar GitHub page
about how some things might work if you’ve got certain bits of x input libraries, and some things
might can be made to work and some things will just never work. There’s a conversation in an issue
about how having different functions for different applications could work if you had a gnome extension,
or someone wrote a gnome extension that enabled it. But then that would only work on GNOME, you’d
have to then have something else for KDE. So this led me having used since I upgraded to 2204.
I’ve been on Wayland because it was the default desktop. I know isn’t switch and this is now
actually switched me back to X Org. Interesting. Yes. So have I convinced you that this is the best
mouse?
Alan Pope 18:33
Well, interestingly, almost, because I do use for example mastered arm I use the
advanced interface which is very wide and too wide for my display. And so I do horizontally scroll
sometimes. And I find myself grabbing the horizontal scroll bar and sliding across which is just
ludicrous. When I’m on a laptop with a touch point, I can scroll left and right by putting my
thumb on the middle button and scrolling left and right. But I don’t have a mouse that scrolls
left and right and so I kinda like that thumb wheel thing, but it’s a bit I don’t know that
mouse is a bit ugly in my opinion. But I might like the the inertial scrolling wheel as well. And I
think even I’ve only just bought this one. I think I might move this to my gaming computer and
then get one of these there’ll be an excuse to get one of these. I’ll put it on my birthday
list with everything else.
Mark Johnson 19:23
If it helps you don’t have to look at it while you use it.
Alan Pope 19:27
Yeah, you’re right. Sold. Linux matters is part of the late night Linux
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Martin Wimpress 20:08
I’ve automated a load of repetitive tasks on my desktop using the
stream deck.
Alan Pope 20:14
This is the team together.
Martin Wimpress 20:17
It is such a close name collision, it drives me mad. It infuriated me at the
time, because I was like, How could valve do this? Right? The stream deck is a well known thing. And now
these days, I’ve got stream decks, but I type it and say it wrong all the time. And I’m sure
I’m going to trip over myself whilst we discuss this so well, that’s not what
Alan Pope 20:41
maybe you should say stream deck a few times in lots of different cadences. And
then Joe can like slot it in at the points where you say it wrong. So if you hear Marty go stream deck,
like partway through, he’s done it wrong. Anyway, let’s say What have you done?
Martin Wimpress 20:56
Well, I originally got the stream deck for streaming, obviously. So I live
stream on Twitch and places. And it’s a very useful tool for just being able to switch scenes and
transitions whilst you’re streaming without having to mess around with your mouse and your
keyboard. And that’s what it’s designed for. And I really love it for that. In fact, I love
it so much. I have four of these things now, because I bought different sizes at different price points,
because I bought the smallest cheapest one to see, do I think I’m going to like this. And I did.
So then I got the normal sized one then quickly found out because I was streaming I wanted the one with
all the buttons.
Alan Pope 21:32
There’s a third size, I didn’t know I thought I knew there was a small
one, I’ve got this one, there’s a like a 16 or 12, or whatever is is there an even bigger
one?
Martin Wimpress 21:40
Yeah, this one’s eight by four. So it’s an XL. And it’s
terrific. Anyway, the hardware is fabulous. They’ve got if you’re not familiar with these
things, they’re illuminated LCD type sort of buttons that you can put an image or text on and you
can push them. And then on Windows and Mac OS, it’s a very sort of app store experience, you have
an application that’s graphical. And you can say, connect it to my Twitter account and add
features. So when I push this button, it will send this pre composed, tweet or take what’s in my
clipboard and post it all sorts of stuff. But it’s all loads of vendors making plugins for the
stream deck. And, of course, that is not what the stream deck is on Linux. But I think it’s a good
thing. Because for those of us that are using Linux, you can actually get a lot more utility out of the
stream deck on Linux. And I’m going to talk a little bit about why I use it for not just
streaming. And in fact, I get most of my use out of this thing when I’m not streaming now. Because
like I say, I’ve automated loads of stuff. And this all started because I work and stream in two
different locations. I have my home office here and I have a smaller office in town, different
computers, different screen orientations, the whole setup is different. And getting ready to live stream
actually takes almost as much time to do the live stream itself because you have to open all of the
right applications and sign into everything and set your audio levels and get the camera sources
arrange. And the outset when I first started streaming that was a good comfortably if I did it fast a 30
minute process, like everything set up and ready to go.
Alan Pope 23:29
Is this why people have dedicated streaming setups that they don’t touch? And
they just sit down and start streaming?
Martin Wimpress 23:35
Exactly. Yeah. So I learned early on with the streaming, not just for the
stream deck. But generally, you want things to be as zero effort as possible, which is one of the
reasons why I got the fancy camera because it just always works. You never have to adjust its levels it
just turn it on and you go. So what I started doing is writing scripts to launch the applications and
things like that. And then it occurred to me when I could have this on my stream deck. So I now have a
button on my stream deck. And when I push that button, it knows which location I’m in. So
therefore it knows what the screen orientation is. And it starts up OBS Studio and all of the other
applications that I need, puts them on the right screens at the right resolutions. And then does things
like sets, audio levels, changes, default audio sources, and does all of this. And this is basically a
shell script that when I pushed the button on the stream deck, it executes. And so this is where it all
started. And then I started thinking, well, that’s kind of useful that saved me half an hour every
time I need to live stream because I push a button and I’m good to go.
Alan Pope 24:46
Could I put it to you that that button didn’t save you half an hour. It was
the shell script that saved you half an hour and you could have run that shells go and called it a.sh A
then press enter and you’d be in the same position as if you had this expensive set of buttons.
But you actually like having the expensive set of buttons on your desk. Yeah, I
Martin Wimpress 25:06
do like the the buttons are very colourful. And it’s, it’s kind
of satisfying, it feels a bit science fiction pushing a button, and then your computer dancing in front
of you, gets itself organised. So then I went off hunting, because the main way that you get all of this
going is you have a bunch of command line utilities that you effectively bind. So obviously, you need
some software in order to do that. So if you go googling for stream deck and Linux, you will inevitably
find stream deck UI. That’s where I started, I think that’s what most people use. It’s
a Python application, it’s perfectly fine. But the graphical application and the functionality of
driving the stream deck are combined into one things, you have to have the graphical application
running. And the Python dependencies are massive, and it’s a bit of a faff to actually set up and
get working. So some time ago, I moved to a thing called Unix stream deck, where it separates the user
interface, the thing you use to configure it from the back end that actually drives all of the hardware
and all the rest of it. And I use that for a couple of years. And I’m very happy with it, or was
very happy with it, except that it hasn’t seen much maintenance recently. And in fact, the last
commits were from myself, and yet, two years ago, and then recently, I found a tool called deck master.
And this is what I’m using now. And it’s brilliant, because it brings some of that useful
integration that you get from the official stream deck client to Linux, because this thing is Linux
aware. So it’s a go application, it’s on GitHub, it has no GUI. And that’s a good
thing. And I’ll explain why in a moment. And it supports multiple stream deck form factors
automatically. So it can tell if you’ve got multiple devices. And it will automatically pick a
configuration for the stream deck that you have that matches the form factor. So when I plug them in to
different computers, they just magically auto configure themselves based on the configurations that I
have. But what it’s really good as it knows about debuffs, it knows how to integrate with time
services, and whether it can monitor your system and CPU performance. And all of the buttons
automatically display graphs and stuff like this, you can even just ping an image at it. And it turns
the whole thing into like a picture display. So you can actually have it as like a picture postcard type
arrangement. But where it really gets powerful is when you run a command. And there’s a whole
bunch of tools. So I’ve got my stream deck now, running all of my OBS stuff, but also things like
my Hue lights, I have buttons on my stream deck to control my Hue lights as well. Because at the end of
the day, you just have to call a utility with some options in order to set things up. But most recently,
the thing that I love about this more than anything else, is I now have a button for my day to day work.
So when I sit down at my computer in the morning, I push a button a bit like when I live stream. And all
eight workspaces have all of the appropriate applications launched and correctly sized and aligned
across all of the eight workspaces. The way I use my desktop Linux is I have super one to eight as my
workspaces. And I have the same applications across those eight workspaces on every computer. So if I
want to web browser, it’s super one, if I want to do email, it’s super two. If I want to
live stream, it’s on six it always consistent. And I just love the fact that this automatically
starts that stuff up. But I have a button for when I do the shopping at the weekend. And I even have a
button for when we do this podcast now. So now I have a podcast button and all of the applications that
we use, auto start and again, audio levels and sources are all automatically configured. And it’s
just saving me a bunch of time.
Alan Pope 29:16
I thought when you said you pressed a button and it did all your work. I thought
you’re gonna say it launched chat GPT and like started programming for you. And that’s it
like you’re done. All you need is a button that launches that Hollywood programme with loads of
screens everywhere and you’re done.
Martin Wimpress 29:33
Yeah, maybe I should do something like that. I really love this. It’s
it’s turned out to be a really useful tool. And it’s also now my audio in my audio playback
tool. So I have a screen just for selecting playlists that I want to listen to and changing the volume,
skipping tracks, pausing, the music, all of that sort of stuff. If you’ve got a stream deck and
you haven’t been using it because you’re not live streaming, you can turn it into a really
nifty mod multimedia desktop automation device.
Alan Pope 30:02
I think actually, this is very helpful for me because I’ve got the little
ditty, one with only six buttons. But actually, that lends itself to media buttons. Yeah, I really like
that my keyboard has no media buttons. It’s got volume, and mute. And that’s it. I’ve
got no folder background many years ago, I sold it with a breadboard not sold it, but I met I
constructed with a breadboard, and a little Arduino, an external keyboard with three buttons on it
because my ThinkPad keyboard had no media control keys. And now I’ve got a pretty one with little
displays on it, I can totally do that. How hard is it to configure with this? What is it called deck
master?
Martin Wimpress 30:42
Its deck Master? Yes, it’s really easy. So the other tools I’ve
used can be configured using a text editor, of course, but they’re not designed to be configured
that way. So consequently, is a big fat mess of JSON, and it’s very difficult to actually unpick
things. Deck Master is designed to be hand edited configuration and the configuration file is for
humans. So it’s really, really easy to use. And the other advantage it has is that unlike the
other applications where you only get 10 pages of buttons, deck master can have a button that loads a
deck. So on your six button stream deck, you really only have five buttons because you always need one
to go somewhere. But you can have unlimited pages with deck master because a button can just be load a
whole new deck entirely. So that small one I struggled with but I have it using audio playback on the
other computer behind me just as you’ve described and it’s fantastic. Even puts the album
art on the button on the play button.
Alan Pope 31:47
Oh wow. Oh, I’m totally doing this thing because mine is just sat there. Not
even plugged in turned off on my desk because I didn’t realise there was a better tool. I’ve
tried that steam deck UI that you mentioned. And yeah, it was a bit lacking. But yeah, certainly give
that good

