Ben's Tools and Setup

Howdy! Some folks have asked about my setup — especially my streaming setup — so I figured I'd outline the tools I'm using and how here. If you're curious about a part of my setup that isn't mentioned here, reach out to me on Twitter!

• My camera is the Logitech C922x Pro Stream Webcam.
• My microphone is the Samson Q2U.
  • Before the Samson Q2U, I used the Fifine K678 microphone, and was pretty happy with that as well!
• In addition to the Samson Q2U, I'm handling audio loopback using shinywhitebox's SWB Audio App.

• My streaming software of choice is OBS.
  • While there are forks and similar projects that are geared more specifically for streaming on Twitch, OBS is free and — especially crucial for an accessibility stream like Some Antics — supports closed captions.
• I'm using ratwithacompiler's Closed Captioning OBS Plugin for auto-generated caption support.

• Conversations with guests are pulled into OBS using Ping, which hosts the call with minimal latency, and which makes pulling in embeds of my guests' camera feeds into OBS really easy.
• The layout of my OBS scenes is powered by Eleventy sites which have been pulled into OBS as browser sources.
  • You can navigate to the scenes yourself, if you'd like, or peruse through the scenes' source code.
  • The onscreen Twitch chat display is part of that web tech, and was built with the ComfyJS Twitch chat library.
  • I've abstracted some of my learnings from building my own chat display into showmy.chat and eleventy-plugin-twitch-chat — go check them out if you need your own chat display!

• Guests are booked with Calendly.
• I use Descript to create vetted captions for the YouTube backlog.

• My editor of choice tends to be Visual Studio Code.
  • Currently, I'm using Dalton Menezes's Aura Dark (Soft Text) theme, in part because its colors aren't too washed out for streams.
• My terminal is iTerm with the Starship prompt.
  • I've loaded it up with a bunch of custom aliases.
• I use a variety of tools for testing websites for accessibility, but my two biggest tools are:
  • macOS's VoiceOver screenreader
  • Axe DevTools by Deque Systems

• This particular site is built with Eleventy.
• The site is hosted on Netlify.
• The brand font used in headings everywhere is Nexa.
• The body font is the Inter variable font — specifically, a subset created by Bryce Wray (archived).