THE CAT

I’ve purchased useless tech for as long as I can remember. I feel the NEEEEEED to have it. I justify the purchase, waste my money on something I don’t actually need, introduce waste to the planet, cost myself time selling it or giving it away…I am the problem. For the last five years or so I’ve tried to reduce the useless capitalistic totems that surround me especially on the tech side. Do I need it or do I think I need it?

Enter this little fucker. The Elgato Stream Deck Mini. I watch enough YouTube to see dweebs using the larger units often so I was curious what it could do. Quickly, my old habits of consuming useless garbage started flaring up. Then I had an idea…

A decent portion of my day to day as an editor is working whilst a room full of folks talk // discuss what the hell we’re doing // do whatever the hell they want. In the physical space I can put on headphones or toggle off the client speakers and work at the desk. In the new, brave, virtual world it’s harder to do that since the platform where we all meet is BLASTING your dumbass scrubbing audio back and forth. However you can toggle the OBS audio output if you have your audio routed properly via software and hardware. That way you can still hear everything but the clients are not getting the audio broadcasted to them. It’s a giant pain in the butt to toggle this manually so why not justify spending $60 to have a hot key for it?

It’s somewhat dumb but it saves a step or two. The graphical display for on // off makes it easy to know what is enabled and what is disabled. The only bummer is that you have to be toggled into OBS hence the orange button to tap into OBS, then hit the command you need. Then hitting back to Premiere or whatever application is feeding the video. I love the CPU monitor mostly for tasks that overload a CPU. Would REALLY love it if someone made a GPU monitor for mac.

I am still figuring out this device’s place in anything outside of virtual sessions. I have hotkeys for my homelab, a stupid timer for the 45 // 5 rule, more CPU monitoring and Spotify. Outside of that, it’s a glorified mute button but I love it.

Stay hydrated and stop buying shit you DON’T need!