My experiment with OBS at the Silver Tongued Cats was a success, with no technical glitches, much to my amazement. Some of the attendees liked the way I swapped between showing a slide or showing myself; others said they would have preferred the Zoom way of putting the slide in the background.

I’ll probably experiment some more in future speeches; putting myself side-by-side with the slide might be interesting; so might putting an inset of myself on the slide.

I also basically finished our taxes; tomorrow, we’ll go through them together in detail so Diane can make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes.

I’m giving a talk at the Silver Tongued Cats tomorrow morning with tips about how to avoid getting stalled. I’d written most of it already, but I needed to add a couple of more photos to the talk, set it up so I could use OBS instead of PowerPoint to do the presenting, and test to make sure everything would work right on Zoom.

So, of course, I spent much of the afternoon trying (and failing) to figure out how to use a Linux machine to play Blu-ray discs and be able to see the menus on the disc. Playing a disc was pretty easy – all I had to do was install MakeMKV (for Blu-Ray access) and VLC (to actually play the media), which I’ve done many times. But when I told VLC to show me the menus, I got error messages claiming that Java was not available, even though I had installed it. And when I was finally able to persuade the system that Java was indeed there, VLC crashed.

I updated the Linux system. No improvement. I downloaded the source code for the failing component (libbluray2) and tried to compile it, only to discover I was missing a lot of pre-requisite tools. I downloaded them and got yet more error messages during compilation – something about the compiler no longer supporting old syntax for the Java programs.

I finally gave up, which was the smartest thing I’d done all afternoon.

Then I added the missing photos to the presentation and tested everything. It took all of 20 minutes.

I have another tip to add to the presentation.