"I really wish that I could hear this presentation"

That’s what Jon Scott wrote to me on October 7, 2014, after I shared the slides from my shade talk at the Northwest Turfgrass Association conference. We’ve been having a back and forth about this ever since. Some elaboration at the end of this post.

I finally recorded some audio to go with those slides, and posted here.

Some elaboration on what took me so long. When Jon first requested this, I was using Keynote presentation software on a Macbook Pro, and it was straightforward to record an audio track with the .key files. I intended to do that, but my Macbook crashed on December 8 that year and I happily switched to the GNU/Linux machine that I had purchased a year earlier but hadn’t yet made my main computer. Once I did that, and wasn’t using Keynote anymore, I didn’t have an easy way to record the videos that Jon was requesting.

And since then, I’ve continued to share slides – see my Speakerdeck and Slideshare pages – and Jon has continued to remind me that it sure would be nice to have audio to go along with them. But I couldn’t figure out how to make a decent screen capture with audio. This week, I figured out how to capture the screen with ffmpeg, and after a few tests, I was able to produce something that Vimeo can display.

I’m intending to record a few more presentations going forward, for Jon Scott and for others who might also be interested in hearing what I had to say. And it will be good practice for me too. I’d like to reduce the “ums” and the misspeaking. In this first video, I meant to say the condominium towers were more than 50 stories high, and I described a par five 4^th hole as a par four 5^th hole.