Welcome to episode 299 of the Microsoft cloud. It pro podcast recorded live on September 9th, 2022. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you today. Scott gives us a heads up about some end point changes coming to key management in Azure. Then we dive into automating things first with some conversation around automation and flow and logic apps.
And then how Scott and I have automated some of our day to day tasks with the El Gato stream deck. You know what the biggest disappointment of rainy Friday is in Jacksonville when it results in the food truck, not showing up in. It's still very hot. Well that too, but it's that the food truck may not show up in front of our house tonight. . Sounds like a first world problem. It is.
I was chatting with some of my coworkers in Seattle and it's been down in the forties, but like 40 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm like, oh, that must be nice. Haven't seen that a long time. Oh man, that sounds wonderful. I was up in Michigan Thursday and Friday of last week. A week ago. Yeah. I was up in Michigan a week ago and I was looking forward to some weather like that too. I was like, oh, it's Michigan. It's September. Maybe I'll get like some mid seventies, um,
fifties and sixties at night. No, it was like 90. During the day. I was like, this is disappointing. My family just told me I brought all the heat from Florida to Michigan. They blamed it all on me. . You might have, that is a thing that happens. Sometimes. I may have, my mom brings hurricanes to Florida whenever she comes, visit and visits, we get a hurricane. So I've had to tell her to stop coming during hurricane season. Wow. That's a harsh way to keep your mom away. like,
I guess you gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah. I don't know. It's been ironically enough. Like I think she was here for Matthew and there was one other hurricane she was here for, she has seen her pool overflow more almost than I have, or just as many times as I have due to hurricanes. So anyways, that is the weather update from Ben and Scott on the cloud podcast. Look at that. We're talking about clouds, just the wrong kind.
yeah, you made it all happen. You know, before we get into this week's topic, speaking of cloud stuff, we talked a little bit in the past about, you know, potential issues that you can run into with KMS activation in Azure. Yep. And just a note for folks that are out there, you might want to watch, cuz there's a couple new KMS servers that are coming online and you know, you generally wanna be prepared for those things.
Like if you're not white listing or allow listing those IP addresses, you could potentially start to see virtual machine activation failures. If you go beyond your grace period. Interesting. That's good insight. I would say overall with the cloud is keeping an eye on endpoint and endpoint changes. Four things like that. Key management servers.
I know I've run into it with office 365 and people wanting to like whitelist all the office 365 endpoints and all those IP addresses and they're all published. You can absolutely go whitelist all the IP addresses for all the endpoints for these different things. But you most definitely need to pay attention for changes, new IP addresses being added, potentially IP addresses being removed, all of those types of things. Yeah.
And these are coming online in early October. So coming up. Okay. Kind of. Quick. Yeah. There's an interesting new service. I know this was not our main topic, but there's a couple new, interesting blog articles. I don't think we talked about 'em where you can use logic apps now within Azure firewall, if you wanna automatically whitelist and keep your Azure firewall updated with all of the end points from office 365.
So if you wanna like set up some of that trusted connection ish, between your Azure tenant and office 365, going through an Azure firewall and keep all those end points automatically updated. There's a nifty couple blog articles out there now about how you can do that. You've been able to do things like that. It's nice to see like published guidance around it.
But if you're interested in automating your environment and the way like that, like good example might be, you want to whitelist, maybe some Cedar ranges within a network security role on a network security group. You, you can do things like that too. Cuz logic apps are so flexible. So you can do things like just go download the XML or the JS O N file for that contains the list of say like all the M 365 service
IPS or all the Azure IPS. And then, you know, you have access to filter and sort and do whatever you want within that JS O or XML. And you can affect change all over the place. Got. It. I have not played with us before. So this is something on my list to play with. I actually have a client that may be interested in this. So we should do a YouTube video on this one. This would be kind of fun except that Azure firewalls are expensive.
Yes. But like you can see that this one's doing a similar thing. Like it's using a runbook to go and comb the list of IPS. And then that logic app is triggering that runbook Hey, go and collect this for me and then make those changes within my environment.
But if you think about like, uh, just Azure IP ranges, for example, and all the so IPS per region per service, like if you wanted to know the IP address range for storage in east us, you could totally figure that out based on just the published ranges that are put out through the download center. So if you can execute an HCP download, like you can connect, download store that file someplace. Even if it's in memory temporarily in like an Azure function or a logic app,
something like that. And you have a way to filter over it, then you can and enumerate it. You can totally push that back out in any, any way you want to. And then I think that's the cool thing about logic apps, right? It's just an HGP action to go ahead and download it. And then you could even make it to the point where it was just an HGB action with like say a patch event to your firewall or to your NSG or whatever it happens to be to make it all work and get it lined up.
Right. And the other thing, I think a lot of people forget about logic apps because well, for me too, coming from the Microsoft 365 space, everybody is like flow flow. We gotta do it in flow use flow. And then they run into this on HTTP request is a premium connector. Guess what happens if you go over to logic apps, there are no premium connectors. It's all just connectors. And yes, you have to pay for actions and for runs and for certain connectors, but it's like fractions of ascent.
There's a lot of times I found where you can go build a logic app and run it much cheaper as a logic app in Azure than you can. If you were to do it in flow and pay for premium connectors for all the users that technically need that premiering connector license, those of you coming from the Microsoft office, 365 set of things too. Don't forget about logic apps. If you run into something that needs a premium connector, go see if you can build it over logic apps and save yourself potentially a
significant amount of money. Cause logic apps are cheap. Well, the nice thing is , if you've been doing power automate and flow, it is all directly translatable to logic apps as well. Uh, I tend to think of logic apps in the back of my head as a, rather than being the multi-tenant power automate service. It's spun up in your own unit of compute, albeit still as like APA service delivered that way.
Yeah, for sure. And like you said, you can go export flows, import 'em into logic apps and you may need to make a few tweaks, but it is something that I tell all of my clients to one be aware of. And two don't be afraid of logic apps. Well, so. You should fear anything of the cloud. We should not fear anything but fear itself. Sure. We, we can build that. But I think in general, like it's a good rule.
Like a lot of people forget about automation in general and the things that are out there and available to them and particularly how things can be chained together for automation, which kind of takes us into today's topic, which is a little bit of a, a side thing, but kind of involves the cloud. Like you said. Right? This was kind of a nifty segue into automating other things. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your office 365 environment?
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So what other things do you like to automate Scott outside of logic apps and power automate flows, they still need to switch the flows to automations power marketing rename flows to automations for me. So power automate has automations power automate does not need flows since it's no longer called flow side note. What else do you like to automate Scott? You. Know, today? I thought it would be fun to talk about desktop automation.
So we we've talked in the past about things like maybe sit at our desks for microphones and doing remote meetings and things like that. But I thought it'd be fun to talk about how you can make your remote life a lot easier through desktop automation and picking up maybe some simple devices or applications where you can automate actions on and activities on your PC or your Mac, whatever it happens to.
Be. Yeah. And to preface this, you have taken this to a level, even beyond what I have done with automations, with desktop tap devices. So this will be interesting. I know you've sent me some stuff and there's definitely things that you have sent me that I need to go in and try that's on my list that never ending list, you know, that just keeps growing and growing. . But. Yeah, there's. Lots of OUS. List. It is a list there's lots of automations.
And I would say even kind of along with automations, but just lots of different things that you can do with different desktop devices and the one in particular that I know you have automated a bunch of stuff on. I have been kind of diving into even more recently and reconfiguring a bunch of stuff and have some other thoughts is the capabilities that you have with something like a stream deck sitting on your desk. Yes. So this is gonna be Scott's owed to the stream deck and oh, this is.
Everyone absolutely. Who, even if don't get put off by the name, but you know, you don't have to be a streamer to use a stream deck. And I think everything we're gonna talk about today doesn't require a stream deck either. So a stream deck is a hardware device. It's USB plugs into your laptop, your computer, whatever it happens to be. And it's just got a bunch of L E D buttons, programmable buttons on top of it. And it comes in different sizes.
I think there's like a six button version. There's a 15 button, there's a 32 button. If you wanted two banks of 32 buttons, you could absolutely buy two of these devices and put 'em together, but you don't need a stream deck to do all this stuff. There's all sorts of software available. If you keep maybe like your phone by your computer, there's things like touch portal El happens to make the stream deck they're, they're the hardware manufacturer for it.
They also make a piece of software that's offered in. I believe it's definitely the iOS app store. I believe it's also offered on Google play where you can just virtualize your stream deck and, and have it all in front of you. But you can do all sorts of fun things with these devices as a, particularly like as a remote worker. So I don't really use my stream deck for streaming. I use it as a productivity device for day to day activities. So. What types of day to day activities Scott,
do you use yours for? I can talk about some of mine, but I'm curious about yours. So like right outta the gate, I work on a, a team that is global. So I have members of my team and my peers who are in Redmond. We've got San Antonio, we've got some folks in Colorado and I've got about 50% of my, uh, teammates are over in Europe. So we all, we all work in various time zones and I'm always trying to schedule meetings
across different time zones or figure out who's available right now. So, uh, like when I look at like my default view for my stream deck, it's got a row of buttons in the middle that are all lit up with all the major time zones that I interact with. So I can just look down and I can say, okay, I, I know now that for instance, it's 3:30 PM EDT where that's great. So that means that it's two 30 CDT, it's one 30 MST.
It's 1230 PST that I can do that like quick calculation for all of that in my head and, and just make it nice and easy. Yeah. I actually do the same thing and I've even labeled some of mine based on the people that are in that time zone, cuz there's certain people that I know their names and I know they're in a different time zone, but I can never remember, especially when you get some of the European time zones or time zones in Asia, I can never remember who's in what time zone.
So I like put this person's it's this time, this person it's this time. And I actually have a whole profile of mine so I can go hit clocks and I have the four by eight. So I can actually put up to 24 different clocks with all different people's names and time zones. So I do the same thing quickly, look, see who's in what time zone so I can more easily schedule or at least know, you know what, I probably shouldn't send this person a message on teams because it's 8:30 PM there right now.
yeah. Yeah. So I do things like that. I also tend to keep default actions like I'm on my default profile screen. So when I'm on my Mac, I do, I I'm a big user of spaces and mission control and expose and things like that. So I keep like a dedicated bank of buttons to flip between desktops, to go into those various views. And I actually, I run my stream deck through a little USB switcher. So it's connected to both like my personal computer and my work computer.
So when I'm on my work computer, which is windows, I'm running a different profile over there, I keep the same bank of buttons and it lets me do things like switch between virtual desktops on windows very quickly go into the task view, have a quick button to close or hide an app. Like I don't need to worry about ever finding the minimize button on the Mac, which is on the left versus on the right on windows. I just have the same button that I always go to on my stream deck right in front of me.
Yeah. One of those. So this is another one I use that's along those same lines. Do you have your music on there too? Your play pause button for whether it's apple music or Spotify or any of those? I have that on mind because I always have this problem of I'm listening to music, the phone rings or teams rings and I have to answer it, but I have completely lost my window playing my
music. And I want to quickly pause it, having that play pause button on the stream deck to just pause the music, answer the phone without having to hunt for the app or any of that has been very handy for me. Yeah. So I do a similar thing. I keep, uh, dedicated profile. So,
uh, maybe take a step back. So the stream deck, like you think about it as this series of buttons, the buttons are dynamic and you can have multiple folders or, and, or profiles that exist on, on the stream deck to swap between. So like you have 32 buttons on yours. I happen to have the 15 button version, but even though I have 15 buttons, I have basically six, seven pages of buttons that I can cycle through to do different things so that
you can kind of have all these activities. It's not like, oh, I'm limited to just 15 actions or just six actions or whatever it happens to be. I keep a similar one. And again, cuz I'm doing like the weird multi OS thing and potentially flipping back and forth. I keep a row for iTunes, apple music, and I keep a row for Spotify depending on, on which device I'm on.
And then I just kind of let the stream deck configuration application, figure out, you know, which device and what it's going to push through there. So, uh, on my audio screen, I guess you could call it, I keep a quick, a couple of other buttons there that are multi actions. So one is a multi action to in the case of the podcast, turn on my microphone and start recording automatically. So there's some software that you and I use to record all this.
So I click one button and it automatically switches the input on my computer to the microphone. I want to use to record with for, you know, this given instance. And it just boom, starts the recording for me and gets all of that going. And then I have like a dedicated start, stop recording button. There's all these actions, right? Like all these things are doing different actions. Like if I wanna do multi things, that's a multi action.
If I want to control apple music, that's the apple music built in controls. Spotify has a, uh, built in set of controls in its store. Things like that. I don't know if you use this one, but another handy one that I use is called audio devices. So you can just go into the stream deck store and pick up audio devices and what audio devices lets you do is it, it has two, two actions in it. One is called toggle audio device and the other is called set audio device.
So I have two toggles on my stream deck. So one is, I have two microphones. I have the microphone I'm recording with now. And then I have the little Jabra hook that we've talked about in the past. So depending on what I'm doing, I can just hit a button and I can toggle between both those microphones quickly. Like if I'm going from say, like recording the podcast like today, you know, this Friday afternoon, I'll go into a meeting after this.
I typically don't do most of my meetings on this microphone. I just do 'em on the puck. So it's just a quick little button for me to do. And then I also have multiple speakers cuz I also sometimes use the puck as a speaker depending on like what's going on or what I'm listening to, you know, music. I probably wanna do over my stereo if it's just spoken audio stuff like I'm used to hearing it out of the puck, that's fine.
So I use this little toggle audio button that can take me back and forth and it's just got different icons for it. So I effectively have an icon at the job rep puck. So I know that I'm on the job rep puck and then I clicked the little button and it toggles and it changes the view to either a microphone or, or to, uh, set of speakers, things like that, which is super handy. Yeah. I.
Have not done that one yet. I've played with the audio in a little bit, but I've ended up with too many audio devices and it, yeah. I need to spend some more time and see if I can get that one tuned in I'm down to pretty much. Well, I update did part of my desktop setup. So most I really just use one audio device. That's actually connected to my computer, but can control a bunch through this road protester here now. So I have not played with that one. One of the biggest ones I still use.
I'm looking through my stream deck. I use it a lot for lights is one of the ones I like. So I have like a couple lights that I use for video my ceiling light in here. I actually have some hue, light bulbs. I have some other lights. I have some go V lights in here. I have just different lights, kind of scattered around the room based on what type of mood I'm in, what type of lighting I want.
So I have a bunch of different light controls to set the brightness of different lights, to turn various lights on and off. Some of them will change the colors of different lights and I've even used the multi action. One that you talked about to go in and essentially for videos, especially when I wanna use the two, I got OQ lights to go in, turn both lights on set the color temperature, set the brightness. I have like seven or eight different actions in there that I have.
This is my default video lighting that I want. So go turn on all these lights, set them all accordingly. So I can always go back to that default state of this is how I want my lighting configured. Yeah. So, so you can get into this kind of fun space depending on the ecosystem of stuff you're in. So I use El Gato key lights as well. So for lighting, I just do a dedicated kind of profile for lighting.
So I do on and off for the key light, I have brightness up and down like, you know, just turn me up or turn me down. But the key lights also have various color temperatures. So they do I think 28, 2900 Kelvin all the way up to 7,000. So I keep dedicated buttons there too. So if I want to go to say natural daylight, like 4,800 Kelvin, I just have a 4,800 button. I click that.
It'll turn the key light on if it's off and it will set the right color temperature set, the kind of default brightness, all those kinds of things. And then I have another multi action button. Like if I wanna turn on all the lights in the room I'm in, I just hit one button. It turns on the can lights sets them to the right temperature, right. Brightness and turns the key light on and, and does all that kind of stuff.
So it's super nice. Like if you're in, you know, in my case, like if you're in a meeting and you turn things on and you notice it's all outta whack, you don't have to fumble and say like, okay, hold on. I gotta get up. I gotta go turn the lights on. I gotta do this. I gotta find this button, go find this thing in my menu bar or my task tray, whatever. There's just a nice little button there. And then you can tweak it kind of as you need to from.
There. Yeah. And that's one nice thing about it is again, I think people see stream deck, they think streaming, but it has those built in plugins. And I don't know which ones you use. I use home assistant for all my smart home stuff here and home assistant has a plugin for the stream deck and then Phillips hu actually has a native one. So those are the two I use to really control all of my different lights. Well, and then Elga that make this a, the same lights on the stream deck.
So they have all their stuff, but there's a lot of these different plugins for various products that aren't necessarily streaming related. They could be smart home related music related. One of 'em, I haven't used this one, PowerPoint there's even a PowerPoint plugin.
So if you're in this scenario where you would even wanna use the stream deck, like to toggle through your PowerPoint presentation, or I think they have one to load presentations, jump between slides, jump to the first slide, jump to the last slide. I tend to use keyboard shortcuts for that. But if you wanted to, they have stream deck plugins for controlling your PowerPoint presentations.
Yeah. So for some of that stuff, I tend not to use plugins. And like you said, I'll just use straight hot keys. So you can program buttons to execute hot keys as well for consistency, cuz sometimes plugins don't work the same across platforms. So maybe I, maybe I'm a little nitpicky there in that. I want actions to be consistent, whether I'm on a Mac or, or windows.
So like things like that start to kind of come together. But what you can do is, I don't know if you play around with this, but you know, if you wanna talk like applications, specific context kinds of things, you can create it and make it so that if you're using profiles instead of folders and you should totally use profiles if you're on a stream deck folders or evil. But if you're using profiles, you can have a, you can have profiles activate automatically.
So one of the things that comes up is admittedly, I use my stream deck a lot in the context of meetings like, Hey, let's turn lights on. I actually use it J my camera on and off or control like which cameras input to my computer, but I can be in any number of meeting applications. So that could be something like teams, like a, you know, I, I work at Microsoft, we use teams for a lot of things, but I work with customers who use WebEx and zoom and all that kind
of stuff too. So I have kind of a, a dedicated bank of buttons just for audio or for meeting applications. And okay. What I did was I created a profile that has the buttons that I want on it. So, uh, common buttons for each application, whether it's zoom teams, WebEx would be, uh, turn my camera on and off, like just within the software and give me a mute button and give me a leave the meeting button. Like I, I, I need those three buttons for basically every single thing I do.
But one of the things you run into is most of the buttons, the way they work is like the application needs to be in the foreground to get it to come up. So you can program multi actions that actually run like a, Hey open this app, which will bring it to the foreground on just about every platform. Or you can also put your just profiles in place.
So like my team's profile, anytime I click away from teams, I can go to like any other profile on the stream deck click, I wanna hop over my lighting page, things like that. As soon as I click back to teams, the team's profile activates and it automatically brings up that page on the stream deck. So I'm always like right back in teams mode, it makes it super easy to click the mute button really quick,
turn camera on and off things like that. That it's, it's where profiles just kind of become way better than folders. Yeah. See, and this is where we're a little different. So I still agree. 100% use profiles. Don't use folders, don't use pages. You can do both of those things in the stream deck where a folder it's like folder structure, you're drilling down pages. You can, it's like scrolling, think scrolling through pages of buttons, but profiles. So you use profiles a lot for auto switching.
I don't have a single profile on mine that auto where the stream deck auto switches to a profile based on the application. Maybe it's because I end up multitasking too much during meetings or doing during anything. But that actually annoyed me in terms of, I am, maybe I'm adjusting my lights and I click over on teams. Then all of a sudden, I end up back in my team's profile and didn't have light buttons over there, or I would be working on something and pop open another application and I'd
forget that it auto switched to profiles. So all of my profiles, none of 'em auto switch, I navigate through all my profiles manually based on what I wanna do. But I use profiles all the time instead of folders, because for instance, lights, I have a profile just for my lighting. I don't, if you do it in a folder, you have to recreate that layout if you want to get to it from someplace else. So maybe I have a meeting profile, but on the meeting profile,
I have a button to open up my lights profile. Cause if I'm in a meeting, I wanna adjust my lights. I can quickly jump to the lights profile, but also I have a profile for when we're doing YouTube videos or when we're doing the podcast and maybe I wanna adjust lights.
I can also have a button on those profiles to jump to lights. So it makes it, so you only have to create like a lights profile once or, or lay out your lights button once or lay out your meaning buttons once or whatever that set of actions are that you want. You create it once, but then you can quickly link essentially link to it from any other profile. So it makes it really easy to hop around between all these different profiles without having to recreate a bunch of stuff.
I do this similar thing. So I put some screenshots in the discord for you. So if you look at like the first screenshot is my team's profile, so you can see it's got like the mute camera screen share and leave button. And then I leave a button just down in the bottom to get back to my lights profile. I kind of use a two level hierarchy. So I always have my home profile or my default profile, which is the one with the clocks on it. And then everything else I click into,
I always put that little up arrow on it. So I can always go back to home too, cuz I, I always know that once I'm home I can get some place. So that's why I don't mind those screens switching so much like when I click into teams and it automatically brings up the teams profile, I really don't care cuz I can get back over to my lights if I need to, like they're, they're just a button click away and, and ready to go. Kind of thing.
The other thing that you should do if you're playing around with like, you know, any of this is you've got all these individual actions and I mentioned multi actions a couple times. Like you should totally play around with multi actions, which are single button impresses that can execute multiple actions, right? Just what it says on the tin.
But all these things that I'm talking about, like, Hey, I wanna have a button that turns on my lights turns on my microphone, turns on my camera and opens teams for me. That's one button that I click. That's already running kind of all these actions or hot keys or things that I've already configured over on the side and are, and, and are ready to go. So it just makes everything like super easy.
Like when I come into my office in the morning, I hit one button and it turns my monitor on cuz my monitor and my camera are on uh, smart plugs. So it just turns on those smart plugs does all that and turns my monitor on and you know, just runs a quick hockey to, to wake up my computer and I'm, I'm all good and ready to go. So I don't need to go through this whole thing of like, well, did I flip the switch over in the corner? Did I remember to turn that thing on off whatever it was last night?
Like it's just nice and consistent and ready to go. Yeah. One of the ones you were telling me about too, that this is a button I have not used yet, but I think you've used it some even for the podcast is this multi action switch. So the multi action is you push it once and it just does a whole bunch of things. Multi action switch. You essentially set up steps. So you push it the first time and it runs one set of actions.
Then you can push it a second time and it runs a second set of actions and you can push it a third time and it runs a third set of actions. So I think the way you use this as the podcast, you hit it the first time and it opens up everything we do for the podcast. Then when you hit it the second time it starts recording for the podcast. And then when you hit it, the third time, it stops recording for the podcast. And then maybe if you hit it the fourth time, it goes and turns off all of 'em.
So you can do sequences, but those sequences only run. They run in a consecutive order each time you push the button again. So as far as like states from multi action switches, at least on the stream deck, you have two. So you kinda have like button, press one. Does this when I press it a second time, do this. And then when I press it a third time, it basically flips back over to one. So it's not like a 1, 2, 3, 4 first. Okay. So it's like a 1, 2, 1, 2 kind of thing. But got it.
I work around that in a couple of different ways. So one of the nifty things about the stream deck and kind of all these automation, things like whether you're using touch portals, stream, deck, whatever it is, they all, almost all of them have a built in button for running hot keys or opening applications. So you can get really creative here.
So what I do on my Mac is I tend to build lots of things in apple shortcuts and then I'll have the shortcut control, everything that I needed to control and just run the shortcut as part of the multi action thing. Cuz I, I really, the multi action is I'm looking for the icon to switch state. So I can say like, oh, I'm in this state or that state kind of thing. So like a good example would be I have a, I, I have a ceiling fan in my office. So as a ceiling fan it's,
it's hooked up to Lutron and it's smart. So I can set the speed of the fan, like turn it on, turn it off and set the speed. So I can say, Hey, run it a hundred percent, run it 75%, run it 50%, whatever that is. So I built an apple shortcut that, and then I just save that shortcut as an application. So from the button I say, Hey, go run this application. And each time I press the button, all it's doing is running the same shortcut and the shortcuts maintaining state
within it. So I have a button that turns my fan on starts. It says, all right, turn it onto 100%. The next time I hit the button, turns it to 75%. The next time I hit the button 50 next time 25 and then the next time off kind of thing. And then at windows, I just use auto hockey instead of shortcuts to do the same kind of thing. Like just configure an auto hockey script and then have it run that auto hockey script and go through and, and do what it needs to do.
Got it. Scott, I have one comment. If nothing else, I feel like we have as thoroughly established on this episode that we're nerds. might have could, could be there. Yeah. It's kind of fun. And one other, another thing we haven't mentioned, and this is, I can't remember which version of stream deck this came out in one of the versions. They added the ability now where there's also a whole bunch of icon packs.
So it used to be that you'd have to go like create all your own icons or upload images and you can still do that. But now in addition to adding in all these different third party addins you can also go install icon packs. So I've gotten used a few of these where if you're building stuff into, based on what automations you wanna do, when you want to go grab certain packs of icons to help make it nicer for you, give you some new looks, you can do that.
And I think there's one out here, like there's icon packs. If you're doing final cap pro, if you do affinity on the Mac, I thought there was one for, I think there's a visual studio. Is there a visual studio code icon pack? Yes. I saw it there there's a visual studio code icon pack. So if you wanna automate things, there's some ways you can automate stuff with DevOps, with visual studio via the stream deck. And you want to go have icons from visual studio.
There's a whole bunch of different icon packs out there now that you can add and update these various buttons and automations to give maybe the image on 'em a little bit more meaning behind what it does as well. Yeah. So I think you can see from like the screenshots in the chat. Absolutely. Uh, I, I do a similar thing there. So when it comes to eye compacts, there's a default eye compact that you can pick up and
you can also go grab a bunch of free one. So I'll put some links in there, like nerd or die has a pretty cool set of eye packs. Some of them are paid, but they have a really decent free one. Like it's got most of the major like application icons. So I'll throw a screenshot in the chat of just like my application launcher, which is, you know, like open edge, open one password, open teams, things like that. Like the they're nice. They're pleasing. Yeah. The colors pop pretty well. The,
the other thing that you can do is go grab the you'll notice. I have some, what kind of look like maybe just PowerPoint art packs. So like if you've ever seen like the, the fluent UI stuff from Microsoft, so like those big icon packs, there's an icon pack out there. There's actually two different ones that you can go pick up. So one is, there's the fluent UI systems icon regular, and then there's a filled set of those as well. And those are both just out on GitHub.
Like you go download 'em and they're super, super easy to install you put on the right on your hard drive and you're all good. To go. I'm gonna have to go grab the fluent one more icon packs, more icons, more fun. I tend to use the fluent ones quite a bit. So here, let me grab a screenshot real quick. I use the fluent ones, like half, like most of my home screen, you know, where I have to clock and everything. That's all just the, the fluent icon kinds of things the ones got.
And the got nice thing with icon packs is they're cross platform. So again, you just install 'em on each system, you're gonna use it on. And if you happen to be like me and switch, maybe between devices with the same stream deck, like you have consistency and icons across them. Sweet. So most of those are just stream deck specific. If you go to the nerd or die site, they have a free pack, which they have one it's the same set of icons, but it's compatible with,
they give you the download for stream deck and for touch portal. Got. It. Do they loop? You wanna go down that I know there's a loop deck. I posted this one out there too. That's kind of another stream deck alternative, at least from the hardware side of things. And I know initial reviews where it's not as good. It seems like it's gotten a little better. Maybe someday Scott will have to try a loop deck with our stream deck. I.
Don't think so. Like I'm, I'm pretty firmly entrenched in this ecosystem. Like if, if any of this sounds interesting and you're like, all right, I need to go spend some time, you know, geeking out, figuring it out and seeing what's going on. Like maybe this whole desktop automation thing, I'm not a streamer, but I just wanna make my life a little bit easier as a remote worker is at all interesting to you.
I would when a hundred percent advocate that you go and pick up the free version of touch portal, 100% free to get started. You'll do everything from your phone or your tablet. So it's not as tactile as the stream deck. Like frankly, one of the things I like about it is that it's tactile and it's button and it's ever so slightly cliquey, but not clicky. Like it's got a good like action to it and. It stays on, you don't need to turn it on, like you do a phone that goes to.
Sleep. Yeah. Uh, but if you're looking to just get started and say like, Hey, is this something I could use in my day to day workflow, I would totally advocate for go grab touch portal, get that spun up, start doing that. And then you can look at like a hardware device after that. Cuz there is like the, the stream decks cost, you know, they, they range in price, I think from like a hundred dollars all the way up to 200 plus depending on the
size of, of the stream deck you're going for yeah. Yeah. The six key one is $80. The 15 key one is 130 us and the 32 key as of today is 2 0 9. So it is, it is like an investment if you wanna go that way. Right. And if you can afford it, just get the 32 key one to start because you'll figure out a way to fill it up. I would not recommend the six key one. I've been absolutely fine with the 15 key one. Like I, I do feel limited sometimes, but I don't feel like I'm totally missing out.
I need to run out and buy the 32 key one, the. 32. All right. Sounds good. Well, thanks Scott. I think that covers it all. And for those of you that are listening, Scott mentioned a few times throwing screenshots and we've been throwing some links and all of that type of stuff in the discord chat. So if you do want to join us as we're recording this and see all of these live and get access to discord, you can go send up for a membership.
And initially we just had monthly membership. Scott, we just updated the website and we also have either a monthly or a yearly membership option available now, exact same access to everything. The yearly one, you just get two months free and that gives you access to discord to listen to us. As we record it, see all the chats while we're, while we're recording.
And even during the week, as people are conversing, uh, you also get access to all the two, the cloud streams that we've been doing on YouTube, where we get a little bit more visual dive into stuff. So if you're interested in the membership side of it, head over to Ms. Cloud it pro.com/membership and check out the options there. So as always, thanks for joining us, enjoy your weekend, enjoy your week. And we'll talk to everybody later.
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