hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2535.txt

Episode: 2535
Title: HPR2535: 2017-2018 New Years Eve show part 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2535/hpr2535.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 05:13:58

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This is HBR Episode 2535 entitled HBR 2017 New Year's Eve Show Part 4.
It is hosted by Maria Stost and is about 206 minutes long and can remain a explicit flag.
The summary is Part 4 on the 6th annual HBR New Year show.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
And not leave anyone out, but since I only talked to you guys usually once a year,
I've been listening for a while since I wasn't going to launch it, but I didn't get
on until like I explained earlier I picked up an awful bad cough here last few days, so jump
in 5 a.m. just did not seem like a good idea when I've been short on sleep the last couple
days.
Yeah, I hear you.
How's the new house?
Still still loving it?
Oh yeah, very much.
This is actually the first year I've made it onto the group New Year's Eve Chat, so
it's always off doing something else.
Well welcome then.
Yeah, it's very cool glad to have you.
Good to follow us on the new year or on the weekend sometimes.
Yeah, and not during my honeymoon.
And it's worth mentioning giving a shout out to Pokey for inviting this whole thing.
Oh, I guess that was Adam Curry.
But as long as no one ends up in the Pokey.
Yeah, that could be uncomfortable for both of us.
I mean, this is one of those bands.
It's looked forward to by many people every year, me included, because I only got enough
to say for one evening the rest of the year, I don't have anything to say.
Get it all out.
Shout, shout.
So I'm assembling a component tester here, and in order to do it, I need a component
tester to figure out what polarity is of the components and putting on my component
tester.
Positive or negative?
Thanks.
That is super helpful.
Fifty-fifty shot.
With the voltage just low enough, Ken, you just tongue-tested.
You can taste positive and negative.
These things, guys, are tiny.
Literally, I've had doogers bigger than these things.
That's probably an image you don't want.
But there you go.
Hamlin and Buggers are big.
Ken, do they have any riding on?
No, they...
Well, one I think is capacitor.
So that shouldn't matter.
The other is a Zener.
I'm not sure what the polarity is on us and no writing, no nothing.
That's the capacitor.
The Zener, you can look up what the polarity is of a Zener.
I can't remember.
I should.
I have a degree in electronics, but I forget.
What is it that you're constructing?
It's a component tester.
It's based on a sort of Arduino chip, and you can put in, like, resistors capacitors
and various different things, I don't tell you what they are, because I've got boxes
of stuff here from my folder, and I just want to go through and see what's exactly
there.
I don't feel free to post the instructions in one of the chats, and I'll get it over
on the show notes.
Well, there you go.
There are no instructions.
That's kind of the whole point.
Okay.
I just got a bag.
I've got it if you want it.
This feels like an airplane movie or something.
Cut the riddle.
Okay.
A Zener diode, a current flows in one direction only from the anode, the positive side,
to the cathode.
So the line, the negative side, is marked with a stripe.
There is absolutely nothing marked on this.
It's a surface-mounted component.
Absolutely.
And that makes it R0.
Hey, Ken, does it still record if I'm muted in deafened or no?
I don't know, but don't know about it going ahead.
Okay.
Not if you're deaf, but I don't say.
How would you know if you're deaf?
You wouldn't be able to hear anything?
So you wouldn't know.
As long as you just mute your mic, you'll be fine.
Okay.
Well, seven hours in my recording here.
No.
Well, you can actually tell, because if you look at the file size, if there's nothing
going through, a mumble won't record anything.
It just puts in a timestamp.
So if you see the file size increase, then you know it's recording still.
Yeah, it was all zero until I came back in here.
Oh dear.
Oh, so it was seven and a half hours of silence.
That is good to know.
I'm running a, I'm recording the stream and three hour chunks.
All right.
We'll put it on the blockchain and patch it all together.
If you need my copies for me, give me a shout-out, yeah?
I was just doing it to help you guys out, but I'll go and mute myself and start recording
it again.
Ken, I just, I just put something in the chat that give you a little info.
Man, this thing is even tinier than I thought.
Seriously, it's one millimeter wide.
My, huh.
That's absurd.
All right.
I'll be back.
I guess if I can solder this, then I can say to myself, I'm so hard to solder.
See you guys.
Good luck.
Do you have anything?
Do you have anything?
Do you have anything?
Ken?
No, I've got a, I've got a tiny soldier in there and I have, I've seen a guy who's
done a video on that.
So it's doable.
It's just be patient, something that I'm not very good at.
But I reckon the capacitor should, it looks like a capacitor.
So I reckon it should be okay, either way.
You could build a, a, and Reno powered bi-polar bear to do this testing for you.
Yeah, not very helpful, Cusper, thank you.
Does anyone know how to check with a multimeter if a capacitor is a capacitor?
This sounds like an animal, if I build a question, you know, it doesn't look like we have
a net in my bill.
Oh, Lord.
I forgot.
Almost.
Let me see.
Microfares?
I guess.
Microfares is capacitor.
Yeah.
But I don't have that.
I got, no, this is DC volts.
220, 10, and then we got ACNs.
ACNs.
H, F, E, Henry.
Not helpful.
Okay.
But I'll go do some research.
Talk to you later.
Okay.
Sorry.
Couldn't help more.
I don't build stuff.
I break stuff.
Yes.
Yes.
Join the club.
You can take it apart.
That's the easy part.
It's true, it's true.
Okay.
I'll be back in a while.
Well, I was about to talk to you later.
Sorry.
I couldn't help more.
I don't build stuff.
I break stuff.
Yes.
Yes.
Join the club.
You can take it apart.
That's the easy part.
It's just true.
It's just true.
Okay.
I'll be back in a while.
Okay.
Well, as Douglas Adams says,
if you take apart a cut,
the thing that it works,
all you have is one non-working cut.
But then you can attach the,
the nitrous to the cart,
make it go to light speed.
Join us in the galaxy above.
And Casper, you were asking about the
you random podcast earlier this afternoon.
And as all three of the cast members are here in the room,
I figured they could probably tell you more about it.
No.
No, we can't.
Sorry.
Oh, this.
Okay.
That's one of these fake club things.
No one talks about it.
That's the first rule.
And the second rule.
You have to listen.
If you don't listen,
you can't talk about it.
The first rule of you random
is nobody listens to you random.
So not even the people who make it.
I know.
Now, that's a scariest lie.
I'm certainly do listen to it.
Does anybody do jokes for random?
They do excellent show notes.
So somebody's listening.
No, Lyle does excellent show notes.
I just make the shows.
Okay.
Mostly I make show notes so that when I say,
hey, we talked about that thing like three months ago.
Where was the link to it?
I can go look it up on the page.
Well, Reddiger will be joining in this.
This galactic empire here and.
And we'll have the team.
The alien brothers team full stream.
Just an FYI for those using the etherpad show notes.
If you click on the far right of the page
where you see the colored icon at the top of the page
and it's very far right on the toolbar there,
you'll get a drop down.
And you can actually input your name and change your color.
And that way that's kind of helpful.
Sorry guys.
Sorry Kevin for interrupting.
You're fine.
It's a two-way diac.
Would that be bipolar I think?
And I've had my builds screaming at this.
No!
We'll just tell in my bill
he owes you a show on explaining all this.
That's his bloody fault I'm doing this.
Yeah, it's a bi-directional can.
Okay.
What a hell.
Your budget cabbages.
So it shouldn't matter.
And the capacitor.
I don't think this capacitor minds either.
But it looks good.
Okay.
Carry on talking.
Don't mind me.
Well, we have another wall here.
I'd like to give a big shout out to K5 Tux Russ Woodman
from Lennox and the Hampshire.
We were scrambling just yesterday.
Claudio M.
Claudio M.
Turn his headphones down.
Turn his headphones down.
So anyway, we were scrambling for the etherpad layout
that we've used for years.
And nobody seems to bother to back it up
and make a copy every year.
So K5 Tux was, he had hosted the etherpad a couple of years.
I think it was 2013 and 2014.
He happily begrudgingly did some magic
with uploading his etherpad server
back to a digital ocean droplet
and had to rebuild the database to retrieve.
Oh, my God.
To etherpad for us.
And I just want to thank him for doing that.
I have since then went through it,
cleaned out the previous content, got it back to, you know,
updated the dates for this year's show.
And before, you know,
maybe I entered anything made from the etherpad light.
You can actually export in three different formats
that that and zip them up
and email them to Honky Magoo and others
so that we have those for our future.
Okay.
But send them to me.
And I really, of all the people here,
I understand how much work that is.
Big thanks to you, all of you guys.
Casper's got to go pick up some things
in preparations for Rutiger to arrive.
So I will be back in 10 to 5.
Cheerio.
So I got a topic I'd like to propose.
I don't care when we do it.
I like to have everybody take an inventory
of their pies or other small board computer inventory.
I don't know, 50, 150, that may be impossible for you.
And kind of go through what your,
what purpose they are serving on your,
in your household or work or whatever.
Excellent.
Want me to start?
Sure.
I have one pie,
I have several pies down stairs,
Holstein, sites for people with tattoos.
And I've got one that does my main IMAP stuff.
So I terminate a BBN connection to it.
And then I do my personal email through that.
And have a local copy there.
It acts as a termination point for basically everything coming in.
And then in between I have a little G-neck gear router
that runs DDWRT.
It's 25 bucks.
And it's got a one port and a LAN port.
And that filters traffic from the, from the front to the back end.
On the back end, all the kids have their own Raspberry Pi,
which they use for doing scratch.
And it's connected up to the nose.
And again, they basically drop to a console.
And then navigate over to whatever program they want to watch.
And then call up an OXM player in place like that.
And then I have one here that monitors temperature.
I have a few others I'm working on that is going to do some lighting control outside.
In work, I have one similar setup that is connected to the network.
And the network goes through one of those little routers.
I got a stack of Raspberry Pi behind it.
One was got a board on it that controls the traffic light.
And when Jenkins won the sanity check jobs.
And when the sanity check jobs fail, the traffic light turns red.
And if it's green, you know everything's working.
And that's the lab is working.
And then it, there are four others in the stack that power displays,
which I need to self as web he asks.
And that's about it.
You mentioned one taking temperature.
Are you actually gathering the data from that?
Anyway, yeah, just don't put it to a text file and an internal temperature sensor.
These, these, it's the same one that I think was Kevin.
Somebody did a run down on it.
So it's like it uses a Dallas protocol, one wire protocol.
And you put a resistor on and then you can change as many as you like.
And one is, is in shrink.
You know, it's it's in shrink in a little case.
And I just have it outside hanging out of an air intake vent.
And the other one is right in here.
So I can compare the inside and outside temperatures.
It's just more handy than anything else.
Not really platinum or anything.
It's just for my own playing.
I'm, I'm doing the same.
I've got a lot pretty much like you.
I've got one inside and one outside.
There are two different types of sensors,
ones like a little board that you plug into a breadboard.
And then jumper it and it uses the IC bus.
And the other, and the other one is uses four wires
with a resistor in line.
And it does temperature and humidity.
And I'm gathering, I'm having it right to a, you know, CSV text file.
But I'd like to get suggestions on how to, you know,
display that data, you know, web interface of some kind, you know,
or somehow to just instead of looking at the raw data
and using spreadsheets to, you know,
manipulate the data.
I'd like to build a, get it to where it's inputting into a database
or something or another to, so you have a web GUI to see it.
And I also have a tipping bucket to measure rain,
rainfall. That's pretty neat.
Yeah. Cool. How does that work? Have you that hooked up?
I 3D printed the parts after, you know,
looking at others on the internet.
So I did my own 3D printing and printed the parts
and did my own calibrations and everything with it
and with the help of finding, you know, some raw code,
Python code, through the inner webs, you know,
and then with a lot of help from Jay Lindsay through, you know,
on the, on the outcast planet IRC, he's helping me debug it.
And it works pretty well.
That would be a show if he was a monk.
I personally would be very interested in that.
I know I'm looking always looking for shows
but I'm genuinely interested in that one.
But it's, it writes, it writes to CSV every minute.
That way you can actually go through and see the amount of rainfall,
you know, per minute and calculate out, you know, per hour
or whatever time frame you want.
But it, it's, I've checked it with a, you know,
it's the standard, standard rain gauge that we have here at the house.
And it's, it's down to, and pretty accurate, I think.
So I'll just go through all my pies.
I have five Raspberry pies.
Uh, two of them are the Model B's,
not the B plus is just the Model B's.
Uh, one of them is running Arch Linux
and is doing this stream.
And a couple of podcasts use it, the Mintcast guys use it
and the Linux Logcast guys use it to live stream podcasts from.
Um, the second one, the Model is running an IRC bot,
which is botly in the all-cast planet channel.
Uh, my third pie is a pie two.
And it's currently running ZoneMinder with,
and it's running a boat to 1604.
And it's got ZoneMinder installed on it with two web cams connected to it in my garage area.
I could have got one pointed at my monitor out there,
so that when I work on, I have a side business to down PC repair,
so if I have somebody's desktop computer out there running along scan,
I can just peer in from my desk and the house to that webcam
and look at this monitor to tell when the process is done, what have you.
And that one is also, nope, then the fourth pie is running my garage door opener.
So it's got a web interface that I can open and close my garage door monitor,
whether it's open or closed through my, through a web page that I can access on my phone,
so I can open and close my garage door remotely,
and our monitor fits open or closed at any time.
So if I happen to get to work and somebody leaves and says,
I can't remember if I shut the garage door or not,
I can check on it and close it.
And the fifth raspberry pie is doing all my weather monitoring my temperature and rainfall monitoring.
Sorry, I couldn't press push to talk because I was soldering.
That is impressive.
I really like the garage door thing you did to show them that.
Yeah, I talked about it on one of the logcast episodes.
Oh, and that one also controls a doorbell
because at the time we built this house 27 years ago,
the third car garage I called my man cave where I work on computers and whatnot.
I didn't think far enough ahead.
I didn't think we'd ever need a garage door outside the service entrance outside there.
So I got the broad idea of wiring up a button outside the door,
running it to the pie, and when somebody presses it,
at SAP's commands to my home stereo media center,
which is on most of the times,
and it plays a chime through the house speakers,
and also in my office computer.
So I can tell when somebody's at the side door.
Hey, everyone, can you hear me?
I'm clear, man.
Ah, perfect.
This is Claudio.
Hi, Claudio.
Hi, everyone doing.
Happy New Year, Claudio.
Happy New Year, Claudio.
Very impressive, Kevin.
Happy New Year to all of you.
Still waiting for 2018 to roll on.
I've got a half an hour left.
I'm just here putting the finishing touches on tonight's dinner,
and then just kind of waiting it out.
Now, the moral of the story is,
I've got a tombstone component here that is connecting.
Should I spend three hours messing with it, or is it good enough?
Where do you solder in there, Kevin?
It's a component tester, and I put in a tiny, tiny, tiny,
little capacitor, and it's fine.
It's making a connection, but it looks crap under a microscope.
Do you plan on getting under a microscope frequently?
Yeah, but I know.
That's the thing.
There's ugly and solid, and then there's pretty and no connection.
Yeah, and there's bugging me for the rest of my life
because I know what can be tombstone.
Okay, I think we just got an answer there.
I believe so.
So there was talk about people doing stuff with their pies.
Yeah, I think at the time we're just taking inventory.
Got it.
I'm not doing anything too fancy.
I'm not doing anything fancy, really.
I've got my old Model 1B,
which I'm using just for Libra-Elect to run Cody.
Just some stuff here in the living room.
And then my son's Raspberry Pi 2 is here.
He doesn't use a much, but we use it mainly for Retro Pi.
Yeah, you guys are making me feel like a slacker.
All I have is my Pi 3 setup,
also running Libra-Elect and Cody on my TV
so I can stream some media.
Sorry.
Claudio.
Push the talk up.
Who's there? Bring them on.
I don't know about anybody else,
but all this home automation stuff you hear about
with products that you hear about, you know, on podcaster
or see on TV or whatever, every time I see one,
I think, well, can I do that with a pie?
I don't have to rely on a subscription to some service
and that's how I get all my ideas.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think the very same thing.
Well, you know, what I like about the Pi
and well, I have some others is people tell me,
well, you can't do that with a pie
or with, I have an old Android XU4.
That is the most surprising little board
that I've ever played around with.
Well, I mentioned earlier today,
I took the opportunity, Black Friday,
to get a couple of the Google Home minis
for 25 bucks at Walmart
because I can't build anything that cheap,
but you're right, as far as a trust issue.
Of course, I guess the Google Home component software
is open source since they released it.
Well, somebody remind me,
I know you could download it, put it on.
I don't know if they open source,
I thought I was thinking they did.
And, but of course,
you get the thing from Google,
are there binary blobs on there,
almost certainly?
If the NSA comes to them and says,
we want to record everybody
and you can't tell anybody about it,
whether they use a keyword or not.
Yeah, they're going to get stuck that way,
whereas if you build your own,
and assuming the code is open source,
and I think the Google is,
and the Alexa is not,
yeah, then I guess you can be a little more sure,
but again, it's the novelty of it for,
and maybe the convenience,
I haven't really found a really solid use case for it yet.
First is how paranoid you want to be,
especially considering you're carrying a spy device around
in your pocket all day long anyway.
So, there was a Reddit post
where some guy who was trying to be an Alexa engineer
was talking about how they had done theirs,
and basically it was,
there's like 50 or 60 K of memory,
which is just enough to pick up Alexa,
and then the couple of seconds
that it takes from the rest of the device to boot,
to then have the actual voice recognition,
which is then piped through,
I think they said Amazon servers,
and they said you can prove this,
but basically disconnecting the internet,
it wakes up to Alexa,
but doesn't recognize anything else.
And they said it was wired up,
the rest of the device is hard wired
through the blue light,
so again, according to them,
they said there is no way they could activate something
without people notifying it,
knowing because it would light up.
Now, again, this is like some random guy
and Reddit claimed it,
so read into that what you will,
but supposedly,
if the guy is actually knows what he's talking about,
they supposedly, there's no way of doing it,
but they also claim you can check.
Yeah, I have a good friend that works here as on,
and from everything he tells me,
they do as much work as they have to,
to attempt to be aware of how much data
they have about people,
and steward it well,
but whether or not they actually see it,
they do make big strides at not being creepy.
You're in a way, I kind of trust Google
in a certain extent, Amazon,
because if they got caught being creepy,
you know,
then all of a sudden,
all these things you're going to get tossed in a bin,
or well, maybe not,
but at least some of them would be there,
it'd be a big scandal for them.
Yeah, I just don't trust our government organizations
behind them to not be creepy.
And did you throw all your computers in the bin
that have that Intel Linux operating system
running on the ring zero?
No, and in fact,
I won't give any details.
I think I know somebody who is on that team,
so I trust him fairly well not to do creepy things.
It's the other big difference,
the other big difference I see in Amazon and Google,
is Google only makes money by selling the ads.
Amazon makes money from me buying things from them.
Their motivations are slightly different.
The thing there though,
is yeah, you're right,
they make money from the adverts,
so that means the quality of the targeting needs to be,
that's where their value is,
that's where the maximize the potential of one advert,
is to how many relevant people's eyeballs see it,
so therefore data collection,
as at the very heart of that,
that determines who you target.
The real difference is,
Google knows how to use the data that they collect.
Amazon doesn't.
Amazon shows me stuff I've already bought.
It says, you might be interested in this
based on your recent purchases.
That's, they don't do a very good job of it.
I have been led to believe that is deliberate.
Why?
Why would you do that deliberately?
Because doing a better job would be repeat.
How would you feel if you bought a clock for the wall
that took two AA batteries?
Amazon knows.
Hmm, you bought a clock for a wall.
The AA batteries in that clock last,
about six months,
and then five and a half months later,
you got an email and say,
hey, we're guessing the batteries in your clock
are about to run out.
You want some more?
You know what?
People would be a lot more,
that would be useful,
but creepy as hell.
I wouldn't find that,
if I knew when I was buying the thing,
there was an option to say,
remind me to, you know,
remind me of schedule and maintenance.
And just reading it will be,
we'll remind you of when the guarantee goes,
we'll remind you to,
I don't know,
that you need to change your car.
You need to change the oil,
we'll start,
are you interested in this sort of stuff?
If there were upfront about it,
I wouldn't have a problem with that,
because I know where the data is coming from,
and I know how they're using it.
Oh, yeah, if they were upfront about it,
I think the coolest thing would be,
oh, we see that you're buying a wall clock
that takes AA batteries.
Would you like to subscribe and save to AA batteries?
So you don't cry out.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
That's in a few months.
But the other,
but the other,
where they don't tell you they're doing it,
and then for the batteries you're in out,
you get an advert saying,
hey, would you like,
at least for that clock,
we know that you bought?
Yeah, that would be creepy, yeah.
So it's all a matter of tation.
Yeah, sorry.
Sorry, the key here, though,
is whether it's about something that's of use
to you as the consumer,
or whether it's,
or who's it serving?
If you're talking about selling batteries,
then that's a legitimate thing,
but it benefits the battery sales version.
If you're talking about reminding someone
of the right,
they're wanting it's going to run out,
that's a value to the end user.
They now know that.
That's what I'm saying.
Who's on benefit, too?
Well, but telling me that,
telling me that the device I bought
is about to run out of batteries,
and I should probably get some more,
is a value to me.
It's also a value to the person selling the batteries.
My clock is going to run out of batteries,
and I should probably buy more.
It does provide me value.
It also provides them value.
It would be nice if there was an opt-in,
or opt-out of what services you wanted
from Google or Amazon.
Absolutely.
And you know what else would be useful is,
don't show me this ads anymore,
because if you're getting any of these recommended ads,
because of you,
there should always be the option,
don't show me this again,
and here's the reason why.
They've got that in Gmail to a certain degree.
Actually, what did that wrong on hindsight?
It's not about what's useful to me as the consumer.
It's about the things,
the assumption as everything you tell me,
as of used to you,
thing as also maker of used to me.
And I don't think the battery thing would be all that creepy,
if it were done the right way.
If, for instance,
they knew that the batteries were going to run out in six months,
if they just sent me a coupon in six months' time,
or that's what they showed me down the bottom of the screen
and the suggestion part,
that would make sense.
The thing that doesn't make sense is,
if I go and buy a mouse,
for the next three weeks,
it says,
based on your recent purchases,
and they'll show me mice for three weeks.
I'm not interested in mice, I've just bought one.
And better yet,
they'll show you the mouse you just bought.
Hey, you bought this mouse,
do you want another one?
I wonder if that kind of thinking,
if that kind of algorithm was created essentially
by people who were visualizing,
quote, shopping on quote,
as grocery shopping,
as you buy this brand of conflicts,
you buy this brand of milk,
it's an ongoing consumable,
that if you've bought it once,
then there's a good chance you've bought it before,
and there's a good chance you'll buy it again.
So it's more of a grocery type thing
that's been applied to one-off purchases.
Maybe, but up until very recently,
Amazon has insult groceries.
They've only sold durable goods.
And the implication there is that they're durable
and they're last,
and you won't have to buy another one anytime.
Soon, unless they send out their little drones
to steal them when you're not looking.
You mean the grab mode, clearly?
Yeah, that could happen too,
since it was just Christmas.
Well, what bothers me more is the co-mingling
of things like Amazon and your social media sites,
because you look at something on Amazon
whether you buy it or not,
you see it on Facebook for the next three weeks.
The other thing being that they're, you know,
you have things pop up into both G+.
And Facebook, would you like to follow this person?
And the only way,
you know, the only way that they could associate this person
with you is if Facebook and Google
were sharing their contact,
your personal contact lists with each other.
And, you know, I prefer to keep those worlds separate.
I mean, I'm on Facebook as the name,
it's on my birth certificate.
And I'm on Google Plus as 5150.
And there are people on one side of that, you know,
that if they saw a post I made on one or the other,
they would have, you know,
it would be confusing to them what, you know,
you know, so I would much rather keep those two worlds separate.
And I do not like to see them being co-mingled.
Saul.
I just stay off of social media all together.
Dude, do you want me to talk to you in a while?
Well, I think that's a good point there,
as far as the co-mingling of the data,
because as we know from this recent credit debacle,
there is total co-mingling of the data.
And when Google drove around to make its map data with its cars,
it was sucking up everything it could in violation of lots of federal laws,
to the point where our attorney general went before Congress
and said they were to quote him too big to jail.
They have a blanket right to do whatever they want with our data.
Are you cycling your MAC addresses when you're on these different social media platforms?
Well, I'm not on any of those social media platforms,
but it doesn't matter if I'm on the internet,
and they can suck up whatever they want,
and they can sell it to any partner they want,
then they can do that, and we give them the right to,
because we won't file charges.
We assume that they're operating within some sort of rules,
but there are none.
Yeah, I was just getting to the point that there,
you can't run, you can't hide,
all the internet's belong to you're earthly overlords.
Yes.
Is now a good time for me to jump in and say hi?
Greetings.
Hello.
Happy New Year.
I haven't talked to any of you in forever.
We're always here this same time every year.
I was capped in other tanks doing it.
I'm actually using his headset,
because I left mine at work like a dodo.
It's for the birds.
Yeah, Minnie's oak is not so many anymore.
He has six foot five.
Holy smokes.
That doesn't count as many anymore.
No, and we're struggling to figure out what to call our other little one
who just turned four.
Six five is probably a mini shack.
Yeah, I'll give you that one, Pokey.
Folks, I've got to jump off, so happy New Year, everyone.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, all.
Glad we got to say hi.
Yes.
Yes, I am.
So what five minutes for you to go?
Hey, Cloud 2, are you still by the computer?
Or are you just recording in a way?
Cloud 2 never goes AFK.
He needs to get AFK more.
Hopefully he is.
As I say, I think we'd be hearing from
if he was anywhere here in the mic.
I figured he'd keep up earlier by an hour or so ago.
He also keyed up at the beginning, at the start, starting line.
He was off the block.
Quick.
Did the multiplayer game ever happen?
That's why I was wondering I was going to ask.
That's probably what he's doing.
Zero interface RPG.
I heard him sign off and he made a comment about poor organization
and perhaps we'll do it another time.
Poor organization regarding...
The skin.
The skin.
Ah.
Sorry, Brian.
He keeps everything in his head too.
Apparently he had double booked.
I tried to book a Casper in Cloud 2 podcast of sorts.
And he's like, oh, I might have double booked it.
So he's a man and high demand.
Yeah, he had to run to New Zealand just to get some breathing room.
Just to get that sweet, sweet fresh air.
Smoke with the wizards.
You first caught my attention with his car camping episodes.
Yeah, urban camping.
Oh, my.
What's that all about?
I haven't heard this.
Cloud 2 spent a couple of years choosing to be homeless.
And he did a long series on how you can make that work and it's beneficial.
It was fascinating.
Life hacks.
Yeah, it was life hacks to an extreme.
I mean, I think it was a six part.
Was it three or six parts?
Does anybody remember?
No, I don't recall.
But I don't remember what I had for dinner last night.
So, oh well.
Yeah, if memory serves, it was like six one-hour episodes.
And I don't believe he tried upon the same ground twice.
It was all new stuff every time.
It was fast.
It made it look really appealing.
I wanted to give it a try.
It's popular where I live.
A lot of my friends were living out of their vans out in the woods.
It gets rough occasionally, but the weather is just so pleasant.
Yeah, I actually read something where somebody did an extreme life hacks,
research, live documentary kind of thing.
They wrote a book about it, but what they did was they did not use money for,
I think it was two years.
So, everything they did, they could not use cash.
And they found that they were much happier.
Well, happiness is just a state of mind.
Indeed.
Very true.
And speaking of which.
My happiness entails me having a house, a shower, and a flushing toilet.
All important things.
It's time for another happy new year.
Happy new year to the Euros.
The some would say are arguably the inventors of the the EDM movements.
You guys have no idea how much electronic stuff wires and crap my son is pulling out of his bedroom.
I don't want to speak out of the year.
There's wires and there's spaghetti monsters all over the place.
Not actually pulling the wires out of the walls.
Just in the abandoned the abandoned buildings.
These were wires not connected to the house at all.
These are wires spun by the electric spider.
The electric spider sounds like a new band.
Let's start it.
Well, folks, I'm going to step away for a few minutes.
There's an errand in town.
I need to run for the place closes.
So, see you back here an hour, hour and a half.
And I'll be monitoring on the stream in the meantime.
Did the pack E50?
The what?
The pack E, the package store.
Ah, you caught me.
Yeah, I didn't get in town there enough yesterday evening.
So I'd like to not cut enough for the night.
But, you know, they'll be closed tomorrow all day.
Got to stack up.
Yeah, I made a booze run myself earlier today.
I made a non booze run just a little while ago.
Happy new year, everybody.
Welcome from the future.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow.
That future is now in the off-world colonies.
All right, guys.
I'm going out too.
Happy new year.
Can I have some fireworks?
Talk to you later, bye.
It can't happen to your, hey, Claudio.
I didn't even, I didn't notice you key up before.
Happy new year, bud.
Happy new year, man.
Long time.
Yeah, it's been quite a while.
How are you doing?
Doing okay.
Just trying to get used to this horrible client on Android.
I had to send my phone to stop auto switching from port to landscape,
because it would keep the push the talk activated.
Oh, yeah.
You still like the keys on fire?
When I have the chance, I, you know, I'll sit there and I'll sit down and work on some stuff.
But lately it's just been just been really busy with work and just like in general.
Yeah, same here.
I know what you mean.
Yeah, we're just putting the finishing touches on the main course for tonight.
And then soon enough everybody should be coming over.
Oh, cool.
You're having family over or friends or?
Well, just my dad and my sons are here and then my stepson and his girlfriend and the two of us here.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, I think last time you and I spoke all your kids were still at home.
Yeah, they were last time.
Well, they may have been at their mom's house, but they're with us this year.
So so we're having we've got this table of assets.
We've got all the food ready.
So now it's just a matter of everybody showing up outstanding.
I became a father-in-law and a grandpa this year.
Oh, congratulations.
Yeah, thank you.
Not necessarily in that order, actually, but still.
So can I are going to have a daughter-in-law in a couple of years?
The proposal has been made.
Oh, very nice. Congratulations.
What? Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
Many smokers and so many anymore as I heard and seen.
No, he is absolutely ginormous.
And he's still the biggest pain in my butt in the planet.
He can still infuriate me in two seconds.
But he's one of the few that can then make me laugh three seconds after that.
So I guess there's an upside there.
Yeah, I hear you three times over.
We absolutely adore our future daughter-in-law.
She's one hell of a cake maker.
She's going to have her own business.
I think she already does really.
She's an amazing cake decorator.
So it's been very, very fun to have birthday parties around here since he met her.
So she's doing her own bad and cake thing?
She might be.
I don't know.
She might have enough other planning to do on her own.
But we'll see.
It's very cool.
My wife has been decorating cakes for a few years now, just for family and stuff.
And it's incredible how much equipment you need for that.
And the shaped tins that you bake the cake in, unbelievable how much those things cost.
It really is amazing.
And then you start getting into fondant and all the little cutters for the fondant.
And all the little molds for the fondant.
And it just gets extravagant and expensive.
She really does such a good job with all of it.
I have no issues, you know, supplying her with those things when her birthday comes around.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a great, great gift.
She's made some just awesome cakes for this family and and other people too.
If you guys ever get a chance, look her up on Facebook under the angry cupcake.
My wife, you know, buys the cake pans, whatever the kid, you know, nephews and nieces and stuff,
whatever they want for their birthday.
She'll try to, you know, make that cake.
So she's done no lightning with queen and a bunch of others.
And one of the nephews asked for Mickey Mouse this most recently.
And the Mickey Mouse cake that she liked, the pan that she liked is discontinued.
And they're selling on eBay used for like 60 bucks.
And it's incredible.
Yeah.
Um, our littlest, our youngest just had her fourth birthday party and she had an octonauts cake made.
And then the year before that she had a Minnie Mouse complete with big fondant bow and everything.
Um, I've had a cow for one of my birthday cakes.
I'm trying to think of some of the other ones she's done, but she's just done some amazing work.
Is that a cow from Cohen chicken?
From cow and chicken.
I don't know if it's from cow and chicken, but as in the cows, you milk on the farm.
Yes.
How did the carbtun sure from the 90s or the 2000s, maybe Cohen chicken?
I'm keeping my mouth shut.
Oh, see you know, then, though, I don't.
Mama had a chicken.
Mama had a cow.
That was proud.
He didn't care how knowing you guys are talking about.
It's exactly what you're talking about.
I've used to watch it.
I was the kid that watched full-tron.
In fact, I had a full-tron birthday cake glass.
It's just this year.
Oh, where's Taj when you needed me?
I got a special message from my sons.
Ready?
Go for it.
Happy New Year!
Of course, my youngest has to be funny.
Well, Merry Christmas to him and happy New Year to the rest.
Yep.
Got it.
Christmas is better than New Year's in my opinion, too.
Well, happy Easter.
So you don't say on my head that I'm not ahead of these things.
This is like four months away.
You can't even have them that surely.
They can keep Valentine's Day, though, right?
But Mrs. Zulke, we don't have a 24-hour Christmas show.
I was going to say why not?
We need one.
Hurry up.
Get on the ball.
Oh, this one shows enough.
Believe me.
Get on the cron job.
I was in Walmart.
They have stuff out for Valentine's Day already.
This is why people hate going to Walmart.
Okay.
Everyone's IQ drops 10 points.
The minute they pull into the parking lot.
I don't know, but at least you can go into Walmart.
I don't hate going to Walmart anymore.
I just don't go at all.
Me either.
I make Zulke go.
Yeah, but it makes me feel so much better about myself
walking around seeing these other weirdos.
The last time I went into Walmart,
there was almost bloodshed.
So I was going to Walmart one time.
And I pushed my car on the left side of the aisle.
Guys coming towards me and he looks.
It sees me going on.
He's like, what are you doing?
You English or something?
He's like, uh, yeah.
What really?
Yeah.
Ended up having this whole five-minute discussion about the fact that I was English
and he thought it was really cool.
What's funny is about this story.
I was actually with you that time where I heard about it.
But what's funny is that this whole thing is we ran into the guy a couple weeks later.
And all the two of them could do as they walked past each other was laugh.
But what was hysterical was that the guy was just saying it in just because
of course Zulke was driving on the wrong side of the road, the wrong side of the aisle.
And he was just being silly as he walked by him,
fully not expecting him to be at all English.
This reminds me of a Douglas Adams thing where if anyone who's read the
salmon of doubt or more of this, it's where they had the same exact same experience
with someone else at a train station in England.
The Douglas Adams author of Hitchhaker's Guide to the Galaxy,
he learned half his life in America and half his life in England.
And he came back to England and there was that train station waiting on a train
and trains up while we say thanks, right?
I'll go and have a coffee.
I'll get some jaffa cakes.
So it does that and he sits down and he reads his paper.
And another guy sits down and he's in the same table as him,
shows the same table and starts reading his paper.
And then this other dude opens the jaffa cakes
and has one of the jaffa cakes, eats one of the jaffa cakes.
And I was like, what?
Right, did he just say anything?
Right, so being English, I'm not going to say anything.
I'm just going to pretend it didn't harm.
And then I'm going to open, I'm going to take my packet of jaffa cakes
and then take the second one and pretend to ignore the fact
that they haven't, that they've been opened.
So I did that and I big smile on at the same time with this guy
and he never batting an eyelid.
And then on back and forth, he heard one, I heard one,
he heard one, I heard one.
And then the packet were both clearly each other.
And then the announcer came and his train was arriving.
So he gets up and leaves and he loves his newspaper.
What's underneath it?
That's news paper.
My packet of jaffa cakes, totally unopened.
So somewhere else, and I mean,
it has got the exact same experience as me.
That's pretty awesome.
As far as Walmart goes, there's only like two or three things
that I still prefer to get there over online.
Actually, some of them, like the pocket knives,
they're there to try them out and hold them if they have them there.
But I don't buy them there.
But pants, because I can try them on and ammunition.
And that's it.
Everything else I buy online now.
Most places make clothing purchases so easy to return these days
that even if you buy them, try them on and they don't fit.
I just return them when they don't fit.
I do not shop for clothes in the store anymore.
I hate going to them all.
I never liked them all.
And Walmart's not a whole lot better.
I mean, I almost got into a knockdown dragout fight with a lady
and one of those little handicapped carts
because she was yelling at someone else's teenager
for talking over the top of her head.
I don't know why, but it just infuriated me
that she would think that this kid was being rude to her on purpose.
And then she told me to buy my own business
and I'm like, then why are you carrying it out in Walmart?
Anyway, I don't go to Walmart.
Yeah, I try to stay out now.
Zook's a much nicer person than me.
But when I do have to go to Walmart,
I always start by the auto center
because that register has no lines
and you can get in and out of there real quick.
Well, that was a conversation.
Come off.
Hey, Pokey.
You were asking about Colatou's episodes on Interface 0?
No, I had asked if he had run his RPG that he wanted to do
and I was also wondering about his urban camping episodes
how many of those were.
I should have brought just this one.
I got you.
Yeah, I saw that the last in the Interface 0 series
was posted, looking forward to listening to that.
Speaking of conversation, killers,
what happened is I completely lost my mumble screen.
I had to get, so can you help me find it?
Yeah, sometimes when mumble minimizes it,
it minimizes to the notification area.
That's exactly where it was.
He knew where to find it though.
That's what they all say.
Hi, oh.
No, I was wrong.
There are not six episodes or seven episodes of urban camping.
Ah, I tuned right back in at the right time.
So what's going down?
Got some dead air berries.
It'll happen.
Just enjoy the moment.
The sound of silence.
Are we waiting for something?
No, I think that my boys are actually playing an online game
while on here, which is why they're distracted.
They're playing with Colatou.
Oh, here's something strange I've never seen before.
My chat window in mumble has no input box.
Oh, great.
So it's going to pull that on me next.
Could be.
I think I'm going to have to restart it very back.
I'm going to play a little bit if nobody's got topics or things discussed.
Well, I was just going to say I got a lot of technology.
I mean, I was doing more of a super user role at my job until recently.
And then I was promoted to finance analyst.
And after having to deal with the whole financial end of the business on more extreme levels,
I think I'd rather go back to technology.
We were talking, Ken and I were talking with the pirate at the beginning of the podcast.
And it seemed like he was a little turned off by the technology.
And that's why he decided to work on his steam engine powered boat,
which may or may not be a yellow summary.
You know, I don't know if this is relevant or not, but I'd have some,
I don't know who it was that said it, but it sort of resonated with what I've seen.
As generally speaking, obviously, there's always exceptions to the role.
But generally speaking, what this was saying was women tend to like technology for what it enables them to do.
Whereas men tend to like the technology for the technology,
or the care of it, the megapixels, the gigaherch, all that kind of stuff.
Whereas women are more concerned about this helps me,
this allows me to send photographs to my sister.
That's a human connection.
It's like, what does this enable me to do rather than what it actually is?
That's because women get shit done.
We don't have time to do it any other way, too.
I mean, I get both aspects.
I really like the whole new gadget.
Ooh, let me try this so that's new and shiny.
Let's play with it for a while.
I'd rather do.
I totally get that.
But I also don't keep anything around if it's not functional,
typically, because I just don't have time to just sit and play.
I work more than 40 hours a week.
I have a toddler and a teenager in the same house.
I just free time is not something I have a lot of,
which is why I quit doing my silly little podcast I was doing.
But yeah, I like my technology aspect to job better,
because there was a finite set of rules.
It was always one way.
It was this way, or it just didn't work.
Those are the only two options.
You did it right, or you did it wrong, with finance.
And what I'm doing in finance right now,
it's oftentimes your best educated guess.
And I just prefer to have set rules.
Until in finance, a lot of times you've got to look the other way
when you sign it, and that's the best way to do it.
Well, I haven't had a whole lot of that,
but I know what you mean by that,
because they want you to project what you're going to make.
But they don't want you to overshoot it too far,
and they don't want you to come in too low.
And you're looking at them going,
and I'm supposed to guess what I was supposed to do this time next year,
when I don't know who's moving in, who's moving out.
You know, it just gets complicated,
and you're like, how do you best guess that?
Aliens understand in your earthly battles,
that the same kind of thing happens in body counts.
In, say, Vietnam, for example,
they're success in the way they'd report it back to the states.
They'd say, oh, well, how many did you kill?
They'd say, I don't know, like, 20.
They'd be like, yeah, I know that's what you write.
That's my good 17, no round numbers.
That's exactly how I feel these days,
when I have to go through all the things I'm doing at work.
And I don't mind, I'm getting used to it.
I'm learning how to do it better.
But you take me out of a situation where there were finite rules,
where I was either winning, or I was losing.
And if I was losing, I knew why, and how,
I could be winning again.
With what I'm doing now, I don't have that luxury,
and I don't know that I like being out of that comfort zone.
It's good to hear that you have options.
And you should make the most of those options.
I want to break it here, live and direct.
I was in a environment, which was not conducive to anything.
It was a very dysfunctional environment.
And I can only best describe it to my friends and family aliens
that it was like being in a fishbowl.
You don't really know until you're out.
And I had the blessing in disguise of being a let go
under extremely suspicious circumstances.
Things were going out, things were going down.
Internet was going down for the entire alien empire
that we were supporting.
And email was going down for a long time.
And I was like, oh, man, people are really messing up.
I wasn't involved.
I was just a little alien, little speck of dust that kick around.
So even though the little speck of dust was doing probably five jobs.
And then come back from alien Thanksgiving.
And got let go.
And it was very, very strange.
And I even asked the alien HR.
I said, wait, did I do something?
What was going on?
Fortunately, up here in the stratosphere,
there's this thing called unemployment benefits.
And I filed for that just to find out what they could find out
because I couldn't find out anything.
And I just went to my galactic post office box.
And what did I see in the mail?
I saw some alien cash money.
Alien cash money got it.
So that just confirmed that I was let go.
And it did not fall under the alien rules of letting someone go.
I know that when I decided to take this promotion,
that I wasn't sure I would do very well on it,
but that I knew aspects of it already,
but just didn't know the others.
And it was really nervous and just uncomfortable.
But after discussing one soak, we figured,
well, you might as well try it, what do you have to lose?
Because there's been some turmoil where I'm working right now anyway.
So I said, well, I'm either I'm out of a job or I'm not.
But I'm kind of looking at that same thing.
If I stay in a stagnant position as well.
So I decided to take the leap and give it a shot.
And it's not been too bad.
But like I said, I'm just not comfortable yet.
And I've been with the company I'm with.
It'll be night.
It'll be 19 years in May.
So I was doing the same thing for 18 years.
So there's little wonder why I'm feeling like a fish out of water.
So you just started something new after being somewhere for 18 years?
Well, I've been I'm still at the same company.
I didn't change companies.
I just changed jobs within my facility.
So and I was already doing a lot of half of what I'm doing now.
I was already doing anyway.
But I stepped out of one role and fully into the other.
So instead of doing having one job description and doing three jobs,
I have a new job description.
And I'm doing half of what I used to be doing plus more.
Does that make sense?
I'm kind of understanding the yes.
Basically, yeah.
So there are just there are just aspects of my previous position that I miss.
But that I was really comfortable with.
But now with this new position, there's stuff that I'm just not I don't know it yet.
And I'm still learning it and.
And after doing the same thing for so long for 18 years to be doing something new after all this time.
I just you just aren't comfortable.
And I'm not used to being uncomfortable because I've been doing the same thing for 18 years.
So it's just really weird.
Yeah, sorry on a similar note.
And that's I've been taught about 18 years of whatever in one role.
I spent the first part of two decades unemployed.
So when all you guys were talking to me before, I was unemployed.
I couldn't find the job.
I couldn't get anyone to give me a chance.
That's when I disappeared from then on that was when I finally,
someone finally gave me a chance.
So yeah, going from being unemployed to being actually having a job.
Yeah, it's a change.
And I can imagine that going from one job for 18 years, whatever.
And another one that's I look at that the same.
I'm still getting used to the fact that I'm still unemployed.
Someone actually pays me money.
See, that's a congratulations you need right there.
Because that's a long time to go without being able to find somebody to give you a shot.
That's I'm really, really glad that you got that shot.
It's going well for you.
Yeah, I mean, that's I'm going to be three years from the start of February.
I've been there.
And yeah, it's almost like it's given me the kind of belief that yeah, I can do something.
That everything is sort of leaning on from that.
I've got all new.
There's no religious aspect to this, but it does feel like I've been born again.
But anyway, do I just overtones to that?
Yes, no religious overturns in what I was saying.
Aliens don't subscribe to any were eight religious of no religion.
Well, I do.
It's okay.
As long as I doesn't bother you guys that doesn't bother me that you don't have any.
But no, that's really cool.
I'm really glad that you that after three years, you're pretty well set there now.
I would guess.
I mean, I would assume that would work for where we're at.
That's really, really good.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's just becomes sort of different outward.
I don't care a bit of money.
Now, as long as I've got enough that I've always got enough for food.
I've always got enough for rent.
I've always got enough for the opposite.
Well, I was going to have to get to work.
Money really doesn't entice me at all.
And I now want to be, I now want to achieve something at work.
And I think that's where I'm outgrown where I'm just now.
With this autism thing with the ESD thing, I'm sort of looking at that and thinking,
like 2018, I'm now going to really focus on where I can really get job satisfaction,
where I can really achieve something.
Even if I'm on the same money as I'm just now, I don't care.
But I want to achieve something, you know.
I don't know where it was going with that sort of stuff.
No, I think I agree with you because money is important to the extent that you can provide for yourself
or in our case, provide for the family and make sure everybody's comfortable and happy and healthy.
But I don't think a little discomfort every now and again hurts anybody.
So I don't think that, you know, you need to strive to be so well off that nobody knows how to suffer a little.
Because I think that's good for them in the long run to some extent, as long as it's not extreme or extremely long term.
But in our house, we've always looked at each other when things have gotten tight and said,
well, nobody's going hungry. That's a plus.
Even the aliens understand that a certain man who has been getting praise,
dear praise from a dear leader of the United or divided states, Frederick Douglas, he's been making the rounds.
And he said, without struggle, there is no progress.
And I look forward to meeting him.
Well, everybody, I'm going to step off for a little bit.
I've got some preparations to do here. I've got to get myself ready, wishing you all a very happy new year and wonderful 2018.
So I'll try and be on before then a little after or if not when the sun rises.
It's been nice hearing advice again, Claudio.
If I don't see you later on, have a good new year.
Happy new year. Likewise. Likewise. Happy new year.
Happy new year, guys.
So yeah, Gordon, what do you were saying from being unemployed to them being employed?
It's quite a transition. For me, I've been employed all of my alien life even before aliens are allowed to work.
There's some provisions where you can get in, get in and start with little little alien jobs, rock mining on the dark side of the moon.
Yeah, I'm used to working. I need something to do. I can't not be doing something.
So to be unemployed, it was full throttle on everything.
Yeah.
I think when it came to employment for me, the first job I got at high school, I had no idea.
I absolutely no clue what I wanted to be.
Let's see. And second year, we pick it.
So primary school and in high school and the UK and high school begins at age 11, I think.
And that's first year. Something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, something like that.
And 12 a second year, the only choice you've got other than the basic curriculum is in our case, we had a choice between Latin and German.
And that's a whole different story for me.
Third year, you pick your subjects. That's when you want an idea of what you want to be.
And at the time, I had no clue whatsoever. I decided to pick lots of technical subjects like craft design, technical drawing, turns out not my forte at all.
I was advised against it, seriously advised against it, you want to spread your talents.
So you got an experience of everything.
Nope, I did not listen. I did that.
The first job I left school got basically I dropped out quite early on.
Hardly anything to be a qualifications left school and the first job I got was in sales.
And that's the only thing I knew how to do.
So every time I was unemployed, that's the only thing I would look at was sales without any clue at all that it was sales that was destroying me.
It's just not my, not my thing at all, but the time I figured that out, I'd already had like nine or ten jobs and been sacked from all of them, all sales.
Well, Rutteger is going to be joining us, hopefully soon.
I wish them safe travels in his, in his galactic pod, which will be, should be here soon.
And I think he will be able to relate to the slow death of a salesman if I understand correct.
I'm sorry Gordon, go ahead, I want to wrap.
No, I was going to say it wasn't a salesman and that's the point.
The only reason I kept going for sales jobs was because the first job that I ever had when I left school was sales.
I had no idea at all what I could do, what I wanted to do, what I was interested in.
I had no clue of any of that.
All I knew of was, well, I've done sales.
I must be able to do sales.
So because I got that job.
I'll go for sales again.
And it only took me, it took me a long, no, quite a few jobs to realize that actually I hate sales.
And that was where the problem was.
The problem, the end point of that though, was by the time I realized that I had such a bad employment yesterday.
When I was, when I was filming a CV, when I was filming an application form, I was sunk.
The minute of time, the minute of jobs you've had in that same time.
And why did you leave this one?
I've been sacked from the vast majority of jobs I've ever had.
Because the sales jobs and I have no interest in sales.
That's the thing that you go to a job interview.
And that's the thing that's the horrible that you've got to get over to get someone else to give you a chance.
That's what the, with the interview process, you're, that's a sales pitch right there.
You got to have confidence.
I had the, what was described as beaten dog syndrome for my, my previous employment.
Those are not my words.
My direct manager's words.
He said, oh, I know about this.
This is beaten dog syndrome because no matter what I did, it should have never worked for the grays.
They're, they're a homogeneous group of all gray male aliens.
And it was, it was just bad.
I, anytime a different type of gray say a female gray or a gray of a different complexion would come in.
I would say, oh, please, please, please hire them.
Please hire them. That will take care of half the horrible jokes I'm hearing.
But every time they wouldn't get hired.
And that was, that was just another aspect to it.
I think what you went through Gordon was a lot like what I was going to end up going through.
If I hadn't had my husband here to convince me to step out on that limb and try something new.
Because I had been in the same job for so long and I was good at it.
But I was never going to get to do anything new unless I took that chance and that opportunity.
And I would have ended up just doing the same old thing for another 18 years before I retired.
If I hadn't had someone to tell me, try it. What do you have to lose?
Yeah, I mean pretty much. I was, I was at the point for quite a few years.
When, when most of you, you guys knew me, I was basically unemployed for so long.
I was like, job interview, it's just not going to happen.
And I never realized where the, where the ASD came in as well.
Yeah, that did not help me at all in interviews, which was compounding the issue.
But yeah, say, you live and learn.
And if you, that's the whole point of life, right, you change, you learn stuff and you change.
Here, here, here's to a better year.
Exactly. And I've had a lot of people tell me recently that if you don't change, you die.
And I mean, that's kind of what we were saying.
Those who are just to change will, are destined to perish.
Yeah, that's, that's what I've said ever on. I mean, basically, after this autism thing,
I, my 2017, I was checking it right here, my 2017 was, was the start of a life-changing thing.
And then this year as well, 2018 coming up, that's where I'm basically going to evolve.
I'm going to become someone else. But I know that it's sort of a bit of a dangerous, I'm sorry.
It's not, I haven't seen you for a few years, sorry, my bad.
Do you find that knowing now that there's some assburgers involved?
Do you find that knowing that is beneficial and helpful to you with interactions going forward?
Does it, does it help you keep in mind specific things or assist in any way?
Oh, yes. That's last few months, five, six months maybe.
Yeah, I've become aware of so, so many things.
And some of the things, it's almost like you've got to pick your battles.
Anyone who knows me in person, which is no one here, basically, sorry.
I've recently taken my word for it. I cannot hold contact, I just can't.
I can look at you, but I'll be a glance and I'll be looking away again, I'll be looking over your shoulder.
Even if I'm talking to you, I cannot do anything other than that.
I wasn't even aware of that until this year.
So there's various other things. I'm 44 or 45 in January.
Up until this year, until half way through this year, I have been living a completely different life.
And until this thing's been awakened, and I'm reassessing my entire life through this new lens
as well as trying to figure out what this type of thing helps soothe the symptoms
or this other type of thing, it helps trigger them or whatever and build my world around that.
But yeah, that's been the change, basically.
Well, I think that's awesome then. I mean, I can, after you explain it, I can see how it would help to know.
I guess it's harder to fight a battle if you know a battle you're supposed to be fighting, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, I'm now aware of, if I'm starting to get into an argument with someone,
it's entirely possible that my brain has interpreted things wrong.
And I'm aware of that, conscious of that, or if someone says,
or this, it doesn't happen like this, it happens like such and such.
Now I can see, maybe I'm the one in the wrong.
Whatever electrodes go from my ears to my brain or whatever it is,
I remember things slightly different or interpret things slightly different.
And I know that if I'm getting into a downward spiral with someone,
more angry and sarcastic and aggressive and just snapping back each other,
as soon as I can sort of detect that, I'm like, oh, hang on a minute, maybe that's my fault.
Let's just step back and go back to square one.
What did you say? What did I say? How did we start this?
I think that everybody in this world, especially in this country, needs to do that exact same thing.
As burgers and no as burgers, I am so tired of people passing other people off as stupid,
just because they don't agree.
I don't know about anybody else who's listening to this, who's in the US, but it's getting old.
But that is certainly a lesson that all of us can stand to learn, just in general.
I think that's a big disconnect in this world in these days, no matter what.
Did I kill the conversation twice and get rid of that?
No, that actually brings me another wee announcement as well.
A lot of people hang on, I've got a bit of a start with this.
I'm a stolen again, I'm a fucking stolen again.
For so long, I was a stolen, I was also a smoker of cigarettes.
And I hated the cigarettes, I hated tobacco, I hated the nicotine.
I tried so hard to quit and I eventually did quit.
I did too.
Right, I've now stopped smoking officially over 10 to 11 years in a long time.
Oh see, for me it's relatively recent I quit in May.
But I quit and I'm not doing it, and I'm also about it.
Well done, congratulations.
Yeah, sorry.
I know I'm hard as to quit smoking.
I've done that.
For me, it came to the point of where, what do you want more?
Do you want to either get stopped smoking more than you want to keep smoking with weed?
And I was desperate to stop smoking.
So I thought it's, I can do it, I can't do it either, I can't do any.
So I stopped smoking, that was great.
And then up until a few months ago as well, I thought, you know what, I'm going to try.
I've not any weed or any grass or anything like that for a long long time.
I tried that a few months ago, just a curiosity without any nicotine that I'm just pipes and bongs and things.
Oh my fucking god, I'm a stoner again.
I'm so a stoner again.
Yeah, that's something I never really got into and considering my addictive personality with tobacco and caffeine.
I've decided I'm not going to go down that road or any other road in that department because I had hard enough time with the caffeine and the nicotine.
But you know, there's, there's certain things about it.
I don't know.
It's been illegal in this country for so long, so much of my life has been so illegal.
And in the state I live in, even having a tiny, tiny bit was the felony and you can like have your kids take in a way and stuff like that.
It's just not something I ever entertained.
Yeah, that, I mean, I understand why a different government treat it a different way to some degree.
But yeah, there's some states like light just as you're describing there, like how that's insane.
That's utterly insane for what weed is.
That's, that's nuts.
I understand that it's probably true and totally realistic, but that is nuts.
That is so nuts.
Yeah, it's really no different than alcohol.
I mean, there are some differences, yes.
But as far as how your body reacts to it and, and what you go through when using it, there's probably not a whole lot of difference in that department is treated just the same as they do alcohol in my personal opinion.
And I think that in lots of respects and a lot of places in the United States is starting to loosen up and get a little better in that department.
It, because it's been so taboo and so evil for so long to so many of us, it's still one of those areas that were just like you all just completely steer clear of ethics.
Yeah, I mean, for me, what this has given me, I have, I have been an unbelievably creative since I've started back on the weed that's unbelievable.
I've come up with so much good stuff.
Yeah, my plans for 2018 are heavily involving weed, a lot of it and then you can cope your amounts.
You do realize that that creativity is still there, even when you're not using, right? Because you need to realize that.
Oh, I know all that. I know all that. It's just a weed base. It's so much better.
Inhibitions, it's all about inhibitions. You got to get rid of those inhibitions.
I'm doing that. I'm doing that. See, that's what, that's why we need a doctor to medically prescribe this. Then that way it's everything's all good and done there.
Well, you know, here, here, I am preaching the preaching to you when there's lots of inhibitions I won't let go of.
Sorry, I was keeping putting my light on down everything I was talking to you there. I'm just having a lot of pipe as we speak.
Does it make me a bad mom if I just had my teenage single get the room down for the talk at the top of the cabinet because I couldn't reach and he had to make me a drink?
Well, this is the modern day. A clever one of the Victorians said the kids are in the mains.
I'm too busy playing. So I feel like answering how she shouted a question at me across the room and I'm going to answer through here.
Which is silly because they couldn't hear me shouting across the room.
I know.
Do you realize I just posted an IRC in part, what is it called? I can't remember my man.
How many drinks have you had?
Not enough. Anyway, I was an odd cast planet. I just posted in there because every time I go into odd cast planet, nobody is talking to anybody.
I just put up in there. How sad it is that when you log into IRC and then say nothing.
Guess what? I got crickets. No one said anything.
But are they not talking or are they just messing with you?
They're just they're not talking to anybody. They're just they're just all logged in there. There's like no conversation happening at all.
No one's logging in. No one's logging out. Nobody's talking to anybody. They're just there. They're lurkers.
Larkers are people to you now.
Okay, but I prefer by people to compensate lurking or not lurking. Just hi would be nice.
Look as life's matter. Someone's here.
I close to you, so I can throw something heavy at your head. The matter you make me the better my aim.
There's at least a wall in the way.
I can make it in there. I haven't had that many Roman coaks.
Maybe you better hit your stepson there up to make a wall stronger so I can't.
You know what I said? Roman that's harmless. It's a coke that gets you flying on the bike side.
Don't tell anyone. They still let me drink coke at work.
Just, you know, I still listen to every one of your HPR episodes every day on my podcast.
Didn't my car on the way to work, even though I'm not doing my name or I'm still an avid listener.
So he has a musician and for instruments, you play.
I play a tiny bit of piano, but I usually just sing. I haven't actually done any active piano practice or playing in decades.
I had hazard to say everybody hears a musician whether they cop to it or not.
Nope.
I just completed something that we discussed last year on the show.
I made some sov with my beeswax.
Takes a while to make that happen, but I guess if you get it done in a year or so, it's still done.
You know, I have no idea what you just said, but it's fascinating.
As in, I sound like crap.
No, I am stoned at this particular point.
And when you mention a bit of beeswax, I'm like, what the?
This particular sov is beeswax, castor oil, olive oil, coconut oil,
a little bit of marijuana tincture from last year's crop and tiny bit of GSE.
Ah, okay.
And what do you do with that?
Whatever you need to.
I wouldn't need it. You'd get the craps probably from the castor oil.
So, since I was allowing the conversation, I suggest a new topic.
Has anyone seen or been newly discovered a TV show, TV series that is thought, wow, that's amazing.
Well, I'm going to start off with a throw into the heart.
Baba one, Birlin.
It's on the UK, in Sky Atlantic.
It's in German, set in 19 early 30s, I think.
It's a kind of film noir TV show, our long episodes about the kind of early 30s Birlin,
rising the communists, rising the Nazis, and all this kind of stuff.
That's fantastic. Any figures?
What shows us?
It's called Baba one, Birlin.
Aliens have not heard of this transmission.
Sorry, guys, I'd stuck away for a few. What'd I miss?
Babylon, Birlin. I'd heard something about some beeswax.
Well, well...
Yes, close.
Come on.
I've seen...
Is there anyone seen any kind of fascinating TV shows this year, 2017?
The one huge one for me is Babylon, Birlin.
Set in the 30s, Birlin.
It's all in German with English subtitles.
It's the rise of the Nazis, the rise of the communists, and all that's amazing.
It's a film noir type TV show.
It's awesome.
Is this new?
I think it was made in 2016.
It's very current.
Is it on a flex or a flex or a cash or a...
How do we access transmission?
I don't know.
I see it on Skype, landing in the UK.
I don't know where...
That's what I got to say.
Oh, it's awesome.
How is so good?
It's currently two seasons.
Of totaling 16 episodes.
Something like that.
It is awesome.
Absolutely awesome.
I know Minizo has really been in the new Netflix series, Stranger Things,
but I don't get to watch any new TV.
I get to watch cartoons.
The mouse.
Oh, God.
Disney Junior, Nick Jr.
The Netflix Originals.
True.
And...
Octanauts is a recent favorite.
We're always watching Octanauts.
I could probably recite every one of the episodes' word for word.
Sorry to hear that.
I guess they're worse things.
My child is happy, healthy, and smart.
I'm going to just take that as good and move on.
Indeed.
When the kids are older, you won't have to watch this stuff anymore.
There was one TV show that I found on...
I've got Amazon Prime after all this time.
I've got Amazon Prime and it's really good value for deliveries.
The fact that you get TV stuff with it, hey, great.
Anyway, one day, it was...
It was something that Amazon Prime found a show called BFFs.
That is fucking hysterical.
That is so funny.
Black Mirror.
I'm guessing that...
Oh, wow.
I'm genuinely shocked right now.
First...
Okay.
So on YouTube, or on Amazon Prime, there's a show called BFFs.
That's exactly what it is, BFFs.
It's first-person shooters.
They're in the kind of college-out-a-type game.
There's a cartoon set, and like that kind of universe.
It's hysterical.
Is it meant for children?
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Very adult language.
Okay.
That's all that the aliens were concerned about.
I'm seeing a bunch of people connecting.
I don't know how many of them were sticking around,
but if you're getting connected, it'll happen here.
Say hi.
I finally had two, and if I can do it, you guys can too.
Happy New Year.
Yes, happy New Year to the United Kingdom, London,
Casablanca, Dublin, and Lisbon.
Happy New Year to my family.
I was just thinking of them too, but I wasn't thinking of happy New Year.
I was thinking of how long it took us to get them connected to Google the other night.
Just to talk.
No, I'm just going to text them.
Type slowly.
I thought you were going to reach to the phone and absolutely smack them,
but I'm glad you didn't.
I'm really glad you didn't.
Hopefully, our children won't have the same problem when we're advanced in age.
I'm already advanced in age, so uh oh.
I don't think you're 70 going on 80 and some as some realms.
Yes, my parents were born in the Second World War.
The fact that they can even use their smartphones at all sometimes baffles me entirely.
But watching them try to navigate Gmail,
when they're at my house, is absolutely a nerve-wracking experience.
They make every effort and they're not stupid people,
but they're just technologically disinclined,
and they make all the effort in the world.
But I have the time I have to fight every urge in my body to vice from them and say,
just let me take care of it.
Be gentle.
There are senior citizens present.
I'm trying to be very gentle with them and with everybody,
but I think that all of you can probably, because you're here,
can probably understand where I'm coming from.
Yes, I tried to help my mother who,
I don't know how she was at the time.
She was probably in her 70s,
and I was trying to get her teacher how to use email.
You have to give them credit and props for making the effort
for wanting to do it, for trying to learn it.
And in a lot of cases, learning enough of it to be relatively functional,
given sometimes very detailed instruction.
But the efforts there and a lot of people in their generation
aren't even making the effort.
So I'm seriously not really putting anybody down.
My whole thing was how frustrating it can sometimes be,
even when you want to give them complete and total credit
for the fact they're making the effort,
no one else even mothers to make.
I wonder if that comes down to the relatives,
to the friends, the family.
If you're getting on in years and you don't have much contact
with anyone younger, then you're going to,
you know incentive to do anything beyond the normal,
beyond what you already do.
For as if you've got someone son or daughter,
grand daughter or whatever,
you're kind of more inclined to want to do the things
to get interested in whatever they're interested in,
as some sort of a link to them.
I think that has a lot to do with it.
But even in the example of my mother,
she was, she used to write her own HTML
and her own web pages and whatnot
when she was doing her genealogy research.
I mean, she was out on the web with her genealogy
before roots web and ancestry.com and whatnot.
She was coding her own HTML, writing her own web pages.
And now sometimes she has issues navigating certain aspects
of Excel.
And she worked in Excel and in an office job
with a computer all of the years I grew up with her.
So I think another part of it is that they don't use it
as much as they used to.
And when they try to get back into using it,
they have missed several generations
as far as the software goes,
or in some cases the device.
And they just find it hard to catch back up.
If you don't use it, you lose it.
It's true.
A lot of it's fair.
They don't take seconds, you know,
to learn the stuff.
They'll surprise themselves if they have the will.
They'll do it.
You know, I know I have to will myself
into learning stuff all the time.
There's a lot of truth in that too,
because when I've been training people on programs at work
that I was the super user for,
with just the program,
there wasn't anything they could do
of that program that I couldn't fix or get fixed.
But people were terrified of it.
They didn't want to do it wrong.
And I would have to tell them repeatedly
before they finally figured out that it was true
that you can't break this program.
You can break your PC,
but you can't break this program.
So don't worry about the program.
If you do something wrong, we can correct it.
Sounds like you really didn't trust
their ingenuity to what they could break.
Maybe not.
But I never had any of them break the actual program.
I had a few of them do some things that were kind of weird
and we worked it out and it didn't take too long to do so.
Now, when it came to their actual PCs,
they broke those all the time.
My other rule there was,
if it asked you if you're sure
and you're not sure, then answer no.
You know, this reminds me of another
book with Adam's quote,
never underestimate the ingenuity of the complete fill.
Exactly, because the fool has nothing holding them back.
The fool runs an errand.
I worked in IT for 35 years,
over 35 years,
and you do forget the programs that you're not using anymore.
Things that I used,
I had forgotten stuff by time I quit working things
I had done in a while,
and now that I've been out of work for a few years,
I go back and try to do a few things that I used to do,
and I don't remember how to do things.
I have to look things up,
or I'm just completely,
okay, this is not worth the effort.
Yeah, time is precious.
Yeah, I can totally see how that happens
because I haven't been out of what I was doing for very long at all,
and there are still times,
because we were on an AS-400 system.
That was when I was helping support.
There are times I can't remember the numbers that I need
to get to where I wanted to go,
and I've got to look them up.
And there's nothing more annoying to somebody
who's been used to the program for a long time,
and having to sit there and go shift,
11 shift, F12 shift,
to go through the menus,
so you can read everything to see what you did.
All F4 is a very useful one.
I've been involved with computers for 26 years,
and have been fully,
the last time I had windows installed on my main desktop system
was XP,
and ever since then,
I find myself every time a new release of windows comes out,
trying to learn that is difficult,
because I have to support,
I do part-time computer repair on the side,
and then I'm also a network administrator
at a K-12 school,
so Linux is, you know,
nowhere except, you know,
on the servers that we use.
We have windows in Linux servers.
I run Linux on my desktop at work,
so I don't even use windows in a daily basis,
so to help my customers, you know,
with their problem,
because they're majority windows users.
I can see, you know,
so I have to force myself to install windows
on a spare machine,
and use it, and learn it,
and I don't like it.
I guess I'm just used to it.
Sorry, go ahead.
Over the years, I supported every version of windows,
and I also supported,
like, 30 years ago,
Macintosh,
and other things that I didn't actually use,
but you have to keep them loaded,
and you have to occasionally practice with them,
and look,
less able than the person you're trying to help,
but if you don't,
at least try to keep up,
and that includes keeping a current version of windows probably.
When I retired,
I switched over to Linux for my everyday stuff,
but I've got windows 10 loaded,
and I still use it,
probably 40% of the time.
I found it, yeah.
I went away from windows for quite a while,
and then just sort of migrated back
to having it on a machine,
and like it, not like it,
I can show people in five minutes
how much slower,
and how much harder it is to do a task
with windows versus Linux,
but yeah,
keeping abreast of what windows 10 or windows 8 will do,
is I think it's been well worth it.
I have to use it for one task,
and unfortunately,
I'll have to keep it,
but I keep it on there, I use it.
My life still uses it.
It's just a little bit easier,
you know, there's a, you know,
if it's not on windows,
it ain't anywhere,
so oh well.
I run into some pretty ridiculous windows issues
at work at an auto shop,
where I'm just not allowed to update the software,
because if you upgrade,
everything's broken.
Aliens understand that windows in and of itself,
especially among the hacker public radio community,
I guess,
well, a good example is say,
you bring your car in,
and I need to reflash your computer,
and it's from Chrysler Corporation,
and it's pre-2009.
The program only runs on windows,
and it will not download the firmware
from their website,
unless you're running Java 6 on a 32-bit installation browser.
I think I'll just throw up in my mouth a little.
Sounds like you'd need either a newer car or an older car.
I wish I could tell these customers
that the ones with the older cars are wonderful,
because the wires are easy to trace.
You just read some ohms and you're done.
It's definitely that in-between stuff
that is computerized,
but was done so long ago.
I have equipment at work that's
the only way I can talk to them is to
you know,
go back to an old laptop
that's got windows 90,
now it's XP.
It's the only machine that will talk to it,
because the software won't work on anything else.
And this stuff is carrying gigabits of data over fiber,
so it shows you how long,
how old it is.
One of the nice things that where I am now
is my company is like this huge international conglomerate,
and every two to five years,
depending on the environment,
they just start sending us new PCs
and send these guys out,
they just hook them up and transfer all our data
and make everything work.
First thing that's part of my job.
I feel sorry for anyone who has that as part of their job,
because if you get people like me,
who are sitting there going,
how come my printer won't print?
Where are all my emails?
What did you do with my pictures?
Yeah, it's sorry.
I apologize on behalf of all users.
That's okay.
It paid the bills for me for a long time.
Windows is good for the IT community to support.
I'll have to agree there.
My Linux customers are my best customers.
Is there anyone on here currently
who has in the past spoken to Minnie's Oak when he was Minnie?
Nine, not I.
Okay, I was going to have him say hi,
but if you guys haven't talked to him ever,
then it just wouldn't hold the same weight,
so we'll bypass that.
You should still have him say hi,
so we can hear the deep, deep tones.
Well, Zoke, can you put Minnie's Oak on?
Um, he left.
Oh hell, he's on the recliner right in front of me.
Wow, I'm an observant mom.
There was a lot to be said about the fact
that I missed six-foot-five body mass walking right past me, right?
Good morning from Arnway.
Good morning from Arnway.
Sorry to interrupt, Karen.
He's decided to remind me that he's been longer a minor,
and he has decided to say that he will not come to the microphone.
You should have said he said, I don't want to.
Can't sleep with wine.
It goes from there, it goes from I don't want to.
Yeah, it's pretty much the latter that I heard.
So is God your hit from minor to major then?
Major, what is the question?
Major Captain Sargent, sorry?
Um, or jerk butt?
Or...
She go, dad's army on them.
Don't mention your name, Pike.
Yeah, he's actually usually, mostly, a very nice young man.
It's usually just his mother whose buttons he likes to push.
Well, I've heard they don't like it up him.
You know the classic thing your mother does when watching dad's army though?
He's dead.
He's dead too.
Oh, he died really young.
He's dead.
Your mother, your mother sends us weekly updates of whose life and who's not.
Yeah.
Paddock.
Paddock.
Did she like pick out the red shirts when watching Star Trek and stuff like that?
No, it's people on their street are dropping like flies.
I had a conversation with one of my former co-workers that that's what it always leads to
when you see somebody's retired from the company.
Oh, did you hear someone so died?
No, I didn't hear that.
I know.
It's not how you're doing.
Hey, who died?
Well, I know it has lots to do with the fact that we are so far removed from where they're at.
I mean, we're across the ocean and the nation.
I mean, we're a long ways away.
And I know that she's a mom.
And as a mom, I know that you have trouble letting go when things like that happen.
And I'm not saying I'd be any better if the tables return because I'd probably be far worse.
But if we don't send a weekly email with an update, she completely panics and thinks that we've dropped off the face of the earth.
And I don't really have a whole lot to update her with.
I mean, we work, we come home, we take care of the kids, we go to bed, we get up, we work.
We come home, we take care of the kids.
We don't have anything to say.
So I don't know.
I don't know what to do half the time.
I'm not dead.
One word, cron job.
I'll wait.
That's two words.
That might work.
So that's your next project.
Cron job emailed to mom.
You know, you know, you want to divert them.
Just rewrite today's so far from whatever soap you choose.
And just repurpose that as your daily update.
I certainly don't want to say that it's not right.
You know, that she's off base.
I mean, she's a mom.
She's worried about her youngest.
That's fine.
I get it.
We're a long ways away.
She can't just drive over and check on us.
I'm totally okay with it.
I just don't know to tell her.
I mean, how many times can you tell somebody?
Nothing here has changed.
Everybody's fine.
Kayleigh had a cold last week.
Oh well.
Yeah, just casually.
Kayleigh mentioned the end all problem.
And see the question.
What?
Seriously, what?
Hey, that's that.
That's the grace.
It's not us.
No.
And then like I said, it doesn't really bother me.
Other than the fact that that I can answer her all week too.
This is the other thing.
I can answer her.
Like twice a week when she emails us and I can answer her.
But she'll eventually get to the point within that month where she has to email and say,
Ian, we haven't ever.
We haven't heard from you.
Sorry.
So.
Stand by.
My name.
My daughter's name.
Do you want to do our address as well, whilst we're at it?
I just take care of that.
I'm so secure in our workplace.
Last four digits of your security number.
Just go to Equifax and look me up.
I am so sorry.
I will search the database for Ian's Oak.
I am so fired, right?
I'll be you up later.
Okay.
So many soaks.
I know that I made that leading tower of garbage.
But instead of picking it up out the floor and retouring it, because you just take it out
for mom, please.
I don't want to.
He put his headphones back on and turned his volume up.
Same, same thing.
Turn his headphones up.
Turn his volume up.
Yeah.
You just know he's speaking to Britney Spears underneath that.
Not Britney Spears.
I don't know why he's got going on, but it's most likely some little herd of pop band out
of France or something crazy like that.
Uber Pound.
Guys, sorry.
I just popped in to say happy New Year from England as we've just gone into the New Year here.
But it is getting late here.
So I'm going to say goodnight.
So apologies for the short visit.
What part of England?
Yorkshire.
My expanse was some Yorkshire.
Oh, okay.
Where the tea comes from.
Good evening.
Good evening, Gordon.
How are you, sir?
Do you know Alex?
Do I know?
LG from Steins.
Well, actually, I'm using Lee.
I used to live down in Snell, which is about, I know, 10 miles from the Steins.
And when that film came out, the LG in the house, I was actually watching it in a cinema in
Snell.
And presuming you've seen the film, one of the last...
What sort of east side?
Yeah, kind of thing, exactly.
One of the last lines in the film is, it's all right.
We're going to flatten Snell instead.
And the whole place just cheered.
It was quite amusing.
That is a movie experience.
Yeah.
A moving experience.
In a movie experience.
Yes, both.
You could say.
All right.
Anyway, sorry.
How can New Year?
Yes.
And the same to all of you.
So, I'm going to be really, really, really moved and having been connected for probably all
of 10 minutes.
I'm going to leave you to it.
So, yeah.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Just about...
We're sorry, Steins.
Northside now.
Represent.
Hi.
Yeah.
Happy.
Hello from the 2018.
Let's see.
We still have five and a half hours to go where we're at.
Yeah.
That sounds like a job.
Yeah.
The world is still here.
So far anyway.
But maybe not where America actually enters at 2018.
Yeah.
That would be 10 pm.
What?
Okay.
Well, I've never been known for a math skills.
That's why they're for going to be the finance.
No.
In all seriousness, for all the hard times I was just giving the...
Not so many, Zoke.
He just took the garbage out.
Hey, go a little bit of tough love.
Never had no one like that.
And save his mama drink.
The Monday start with the...
So, what exactly are you after?
Absolutely nothing right now.
I've got a full drink.
And the garbage has been taken out.
We're good.
I think you're mad about Mini-Zoke.
Mini-Zoke already owns a car, so I don't think he's after the keys.
I get it.
You mean when we usually say here, what do you want?
No, I don't know.
Because he doesn't have any obligations to me tonight.
And he hasn't asked me to go anywhere.
And he hasn't done car anyway, so...
Well, either of that or he's done something hugely wrong
and embarrassing and he's like, oh, I'm going to bottom these people up
before I even broke that subject.
He probably has, but he wouldn't tell me.
He'd wait till it came in the mail.
So, does Zoke's communicating over the inner webs
has this improved your communication experience?
So, how does that work?
You really should hear us when we don't have our push to talk activated.
We're talking to each other, but yelling,
or in my case, throwing things or threatening to throw things.
So, it may as suggest little air guns, little dark guns.
You look at the soft dark guns with a lot of rubber suction things.
You can use that.
Yeah, yeah.
And you can have the other person with a lot of alphabet like a Ouija boat.
And you just shoot the letters to mean what you...
to spell out what you mean.
Have you moved up to the turret?
I think our time here is probably limited.
Because it's probably getting close to time for the princess to wake up from her nap.
Oh, no.
In which case, you might get to hear a little bit of her before we decide to sign off
because she's out of control.
We'll see.
I think it's a chance to check out the moon tonight.
We prepared it, especially for everyone on your blue marble.
The moon.
Where's that from?
Who knows it?
The moon says hello.
My back, Eric.
Pink Floyd.
Yeah, I saw on the internet that tonight was the super moon,
and of course the blue moon, but I haven't looked outside.
I think it may be cloudy here.
I probably should have asked that.
I probably said the love bug when he was on.
Is it the blue moon today or is it tomorrow that's actually the blue?
Or it wouldn't be.
It would be the second full moon of the month.
Yeah, I can't see tomorrow.
I just don't recall.
I know there's a blue moon comment, so.
Well, right now the moon is already a couple hands high in the sky,
and the sun's just about getting down, so I think it's tomorrow.
Which makes tomorrow's full moon something else.
I know they've got a name for it.
And then the second full moon of the month is the blue moon.
Where that came from?
I don't know.
Never seen a blue moon.
From the lunatics on the dock side.
I think that the term blue moon has to do with rarity.
So it's the second moon of the month is rare rather than the color.
Yeah.
So I'm assuming that's where the phrase once in a blue moon comes from.
It, that must be.
I was just looking at pictures from the eclipse.
How many people got to see the totality?
We got to say it.
It was about 90% here.
So it was not, I mean, it's close, but not the full Monty.
I was going.
Yeah.
My intention to drive to see it, but I didn't get to see the blue,
the eclipse got my car broke down about 60 miles from home.
Oh, no.
We were very lucky.
It came, you know, right?
We were right in the path of it.
I'm happy to say that's my second one that I've got to see in my life.
The first one I don't remember much of, but I tell you that was awe inspiring.
You're welcome.
That one isn't the princess, but the princess is now awake.
Yeah.
Say something.
Say something.
Say something.
Good eye.
Miss Oak, it does sound like you're going to be watching those cartoons for a long time.
Well, mine is not most of that.
I don't know whose child that is on the rest of this, but mine hasn't said more than,
and she's just turned four.
So yes, it's going to be a while.
I'm sorry.
My mistake, but okay, if she just turned four, yes, it will be a while.
So yeah, I've got it almost.
Gosh, so many so it turns 19 on the first tomorrow.
And my only other child just turned four.
That's, hey, what's your name?
I'm Mrs. Oak. What's your name?
Connor.
It is very nice to meet you, Connor. How old are you?
Three.
Oh, I like three.
Kaylee, my baby princess was three recently.
Is he hacking about yet?
I think so.
He's frozen a couple of toys here and there.
He's certainly far more social than mine.
Pirates.
What's your favorite TV show, Connor?
Oh, my little princess loves that too.
Her favorite, she likes Rubble.
Who do you like?
You like Rubble?
Who's your favorite?
One.
Both patrol.
Yeah.
Chase.
Yeah, she likes Chase too.
I like Chase too.
I like only him too.
I like her, baby.
Yeah, that's my little princess.
I know you're sister.
No, I don't think that's what they think at all.
They know you're my daughter.
The only one that you're a sister to is her best.
Oh, sorry, label issues.
Are we able to hear?
Sounds like she still needs to go back for a nap.
Give her a few minutes. That one's never been quick to wake up.
All right, well, I guess I'm signing off.
The wife's going to stay on for a bit.
I'm sure at least send me.
So I will catch you guys later.
Bye.
Bye.
Have a new year.
Bye.
Happy new year.
That's what you're checking in.
But she is definitely her daddy's girl.
Mom doesn't even rank if daddy's anywhere in the house.
Sorry to get that.
Oh, it's okay.
I've got the boy.
I rank in his world.
There you go.
Well, those days he is almost, you know, 19 tomorrow.
I don't think anyone ranks anymore.
Really?
But I used to.
See, that's a good premise for a book.
It's to start this conflict between the boy and the girl
and controlled by the mom and the dad.
It's kind of funny just how those things work out because girls
always go to their dads and boys always go towards their moms.
For years, Zook didn't have that relationship
because the boy went to mom and now he's got princess
and mom doesn't even rank.
I'm getting it back twofold.
Many so probably just appreciate you giving him a trade.
You made him a bartender.
You know, he's really, really good at that.
I really should tell him he's got a future there.
But no, he actually has a job now and he's working towards
getting one that's full time.
But he's, we have a really small town that we live in
and he's working as a cook at one of our diners.
And that's a promotion because he started as a best boy.
So, you know, they obviously saw some intelligence in him.
So he's like Tom Cruise without the same technology?
You know, if he starts flipping bottles in my kitchen,
like Tom Cruise did, we can make a go of that financially
with our ability to market and internet skills.
We will so be real raking it in, right?
Get the fireworks.
Kill him with kindness, flower power.
Fireworks, fireworks.
Are you guys going to have a fireworks show, Connor?
Yeah, you have fireworks.
You know, we do here at 4th of July,
but they don't usually do them here in our little town on nears.
But if we drive about an hour west of here,
we can catch him in Reno.
It's a hell.
Ha.
Las Vegas.
Hala.
Hala.
Hala.
Hala.
Woohoo.
I think it's favorite Halloween Halloween.
Yeah, I think that the kids here have the same problem.
My daughter's favorite pajamas have a jackaliner on them.
Dressing up is fun.
Just ask Hoover.
Does anybody else have one of those, like,
the vacuum cleaners, the robots that do their,
the room bus?
Does anyone else have like a room, but type vacuum?
I saw one.
I do.
We got one because they were on total sale with Amazon on Black Friday.
It's not like a room.
Um, it's not one of the fancy schnancy I wrote about ones or anything like that.
But we have this thing.
And every morning at 3 o'clock in the morning,
I wake up to it beeping because it's wedged itself underneath the couch.
You know, you need a sound sample instead of just beeping.
You want a hike into that and replace the sound sample with Penelope pit stops.
Hi.
I really much rather it just get out of its predicament without my interaction.
I don't care what it makes.
I just think it needs to you back out of its hole and start over.
Mrs. Oat.
Yes.
I have an eye life and it's not much better.
I mean, I'm amazed at what it picks up,
but invariably, we have a running at 10 a.m. every morning
and it will get stuck in the same three or four different places every day.
Well, we are still trying to work out what places tend to be its biggest issue
because we've resolved a few of them.
Others of them are going to require like huge hunks of wood behind the couch
to keep us going under the couch or just various other items like that.
It just makes me insane.
Because every time we close one hole, it finds another.
And I don't know how, but they seem to have installed four-wheel drive on our public gym
because they can climb things that she would not expect to be able to climb.
It's a Seth Lord.
That's what it is.
As soon as one door closes, another one opens.
It's an even Seth walk.
Well, you know, we get up in the morning because we haven't run in the middle of the night.
And we get up in the morning and we search this thing out.
Every morning, we hear on a vacuum hunt.
And we have to dig and dive and look for where this thing is decided to hide itself this time.
We have no idea how it gets into like three out of four places.
Well, you can guarantee it's not a Dalek.
The Dalek is going to be totally stuffed and soon you get one of the stairs.
That's lost.
That's can't get anywhere.
Are you amazed at how much it picks up?
Oh, yeah.
It does.
It really picks up a lot.
And we have to empty it all the time, even if it only gets stuck on one thing.
I have no idea how long it's actually gone.
It could have only gone for 10 minutes before it gets hung up or stuck.
But yeah, it's always full.
Yeah, I'm wondering what the heck was going on before we had one of those with the amount of dirt it picks up.
I don't want to know.
I really don't.
I mean, I mean, I have long hair.
And so I lose a lot of hair.
I've long thick hair.
So no matter how he has the vacuum in this house, it's inevitable that when we do, we will have to take the roller off the vacuum cleaner and cut my hair off of it just to finish vacuuming.
And it's no different when this little robot vacuum.
It really isn't.
It's scary.
You think I'd be bought by now.
You know, the perfect little supplement function to this device, a lot of vacuum cleaner, is to have it respond to whistles.
As little as you're calling a dog.
So you basically whistle and the vacuum cleaner comes shooting out from whatever it is.
But the car dratt will not be like a tail.
I guess I haven't been able to dedicate any of my energy into making that happen with a mechanical device.
I still have yet to convince my children they need to respond to whistles.
I think that's what differentiates the Roomba from these other ones.
Like the eye life and lower is that from what I understand the Roomba has a memory and it'll map out your house.
These just drive around bounce off of things and then eventually after an hour and a half, two hours, go back to its base.
Yeah, most nights, mine doesn't even make it back to its base because it gets itself so hung up on something in the living room that it never even makes it back to base.
And we had to start running at three o'clock in the morning because if we run at any other time of the day, it is the four year old's favorite play thing.
That one that doesn't have memory like the Roomba, how did you feel like it still gets full coverage?
It does a pretty good job.
I would probably doesn't get full coverage. I want to watch it.
It goes off in angles and like it will not go the full length of the room before it turns, but it tries to do as much as the room is possible in quadrants.
If it gets hung up or stuck somewhere, that gets all messed up.
When you pull it out and free it and start it again, it's like it's starting brand new.
So if it was able to go through the entire room without getting stuck on something, it would probably do a decent job of hitting every space.
I agree. And I think that one of the things that we found most successful with ours is being able to lock it in one room on the weekend by itself.
So like we'll do the laundry room, for example, one Saturday morning, we'll just turn it on, make sure there's no obstacles in the laundry room.
Put it in there, shut the door and let it do its thing.
And then like the next Saturday, we'll take it into this room, into Princess's room.
We'll put it in there, we'll turn it on, shut the door, let it do its thing.
We've had more luck with it in that respect than we have with just letting it do its thing at night.
At night, it does its exacts across the room.
And I think that if you can get it to work and run without interruption, without getting hung up over the course of a week, you'll probably do a pretty good job of getting the whole room.
So we're not seeing that happen with this one because we spend so much time trying to find where it stuck itself this time every morning when we get up.
So it's amazing the lengths that you go to, to have these things running, these robots cleaning and still say it's a good idea.
If you're listening to just how much you clear the room out and stuff like that, that's bizarre. That's utterly bizarre.
I think that you're completely right.
But you know what, if we can get this thing to do what it's supposed to do in the area it's supposed to do it in, it could save us hours a week.
But in the meantime, we're losing six times as many hours trying to train this thing to do what it's supposed to do.
Do you mention, of course, the fact that it's mapping your home and collecting that data so that they can sell it one day?
Well, I don't have it set up at any kind of Wi-Fi network, thank God. I mean, my thermostat's about the extent I've gone to with the internet at things in this household that you know of.
Okay, that's true. I'll give you that.
Do you find yourself that you still have to mainly run a vacuum also?
Currently, yes, because we haven't figured out how exactly we're going to train this thing to do what it's supposed to do.
Can you hear from us?
I've got it to be kidding me. And top of all that, you don't have vacuum cleaner as well.
Well, I have to, I have a teenager and a toddler in this home.
I understand the carpet needs vacuum, but I'm sorry, but that seems like failure.
If the box can't do it, that's the job that's the job, that's the job of the boss.
It's got one job and if it can't do that, you know.
And that's just it. And I was hoping that when we got this week, only got, we only got it because it was a huge black Friday discount through Amazon.
And we did get it and we are using it and we're trying to make it work.
And over time, it's supposed to be ultimately better.
Maybe it only wants to train it.
Right, we have to get it trained.
But I don't know that at this stage, we're ever going to get it trained because the other aspect we're looking at now with a toddler in the house,
is that there is any number of things that are still on the floor when that thing decides to run.
Now, typically, we do the walkthrough at night and try to put everything in its place and pick everything up and put everything where it goes.
But some nights, that just isn't going to happen.
No matter how hard we try, it just isn't going to happen.
And that's, you know, like one night, the vacuum, right after her birthday, ate her balloon because it was on a string.
So the next morning, we spent an hour entangling this balloon string from this vacuum because there was a meltdown happening because the vacuum was eating her balloon.
Maybe less time training the robot, more time training your spawn.
Oh, yes, please, yes, yes, please.
But if any of you have spawn, you know they don't take programming too well.
You know, not always the case.
That visual image, I could just imagine like one of the exhaustive balloons, big long, long, all long ones, as it gradually shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and pops.
Well, you see it's funny because Zoke is an excellent father and he didn't expect to be able to program his children like little robots, but he's also a programmer.
So this has been a learning experience program as well.
And he is taken to it very well.
All things considered, but yeah.
Children do not.
Children do not take programming.
They just don't.
So it's all like what you've been saying the past while though is you don't have to worry about the EI singularity anytime soon.
You know what, if they ever come out with anything that can brainwash the program your children,
we're beyond a point where we can save ourselves from our own detriment.
I mean, you just can't.
And if you ever watch kids, I mean, people who tell me they hate children, I don't think they've ever actually watched children.
Children can be so amazing, aggravating.
Yes, trust me, I get that every day.
I get aggravated by my two kids.
But they are extraordinarily interesting to watch.
I mean, the things they do when they pretend, the things they do when they try to, especially when they're young,
when they try to rationalize the stupid decisions they've made.
They're just amazing little sponge creatures that absorb everything around them.
And I don't know how to explain it.
It's just so hard to put into words.
But the way they learn, the way they interact with things, the way they expect the world to rule out in front of them,
the way they have no expectations while having expectations.
I mean, the list can go on.
They are just amazing to watch.
Scary.
And if you ever in a million years thought you could train a child, you're wrong.
You can't.
All you can do is somehow convince them to play by the rules you want them to play by.
You will never actually truly train them.
All you have is just some sort of, I don't know how to explain it.
Some sort of agreement that they will abide by your rules.
Chocolate is very much like poetry.
Absolutely amazing and interesting to the person who created it.
That's true.
I think it is music and interesting to people who decorate it too.
Definitely more interesting to those who do create it.
I don't want kids.
I respect that because do you not have any parents I've seen in this world who never really wanted kids that had them anyway and should have never had them and don't give them the time that they need.
I'm not saying you be that kind of parent if it happened to you.
But for you to acknowledge that now and make the decision, I respect that completely and totally.
In a conversation, a slight tangent but I'm going to bring it back, trust me.
But what a colleague of mine and I figured out why I'm a cat person rather than a dog person.
And forget the cat side.
The reason I don't like dogs particularly is they have no concept of personal space.
So just jump on you and try to lick your face and lick your hands and get right in your face.
And they mean the best. They absolutely mean the best.
But I think that's part of it where the kids as well.
Especially younger the kids.
It's a kind of different mindset.
So you have no idea what's going to happen.
And you immediately make them just sort of turn around and run it you into a hug you or something like that.
Just totally invade your personal space with some uncle hearing stuff that only they understand.
But they mean the best.
That's what I was trying to get out. That's what the analogy was.
So back to the robot vacuums.
You mentioned you both Dan and Mrs. Oak got a different model than the Roomba.
What's the price difference between them and the one that can actually remember your house layout?
Hello.
What happened? Do we have dinner?
I'm sorry. I think you're talking about two three hundred dollars difference in price.
If I'm not mistaken, Roomba is around four hundred dollars.
Well, let me double check.
I know the one we got was about it was a gift from another law.
So I'm thinking about a hundred and some dollars.
Roombas are anywhere from four hundred dollars up three hundred seventy four dollars for one of them looking on Amazon right now.
When it becomes an automated thing like that to do some sort of a housekeeping task for you.
Surely it makes sense to have the device where you're able to plug it in or to switch it on as the last person leaving the house for the warp day.
And that will just work its way around the entire house so that the time the first person gets back from school or college and whatever it is.
Then it's done its thing and it's back and it's come up again.
That's that's what ours does.
I mean, it does it does a really good job.
I will say we have a great parenting is and what we don't have anymore is big tufts of fur laying around even though we have to clean it every day because of that.
But it works with what when it gets hung up on for us is that my kids my wife thought of be cute to go out to the craft store and get big globally eyes and slap it on top of it.
So it has eyes and invariably they the robot itself fits under just about everything but there's an entertainment center and then my desk where it will go under.
And the eyes will get hung up on certain parts of it so it can't get back out.
It gets stuck and I have to pull it out.
Now again with with an Arumba, I believe it would map that out and be aware of where it gets stuck.
Whereas with the ones that are cheaper, they don't map out where they're going.
They just go in one direction until they get a certain point.
Yeah, they don't learn from their mistakes.
So couldn't you adjust where the googly eyes go so that they're a bit low and they don't get caught up?
Good. The best way to do that would not be to put the googly eyes on there.
But there's two issues. First off, the googly eyes, they get hung up.
There's also a button on top of it.
So if there's a button that does like pauses it stops it and sometimes that gets hung up on on the entertainment center or under my desk like that.
But other than that, it works good.
I mean, the best way to prevent that from happening is to just put a little barrier right in front of there.
Absolutely. We've been trying to do some cardboard type barriers around the back and underneath of our couch so that it doesn't wedge itself under there on a nightly basis.
The other thing I need to remember is to roll up my laptop cord because it likes to come in to contact with that.
And then of course, like I said earlier, the nightly walkthrough of the toddler toys to make sure there is nothing down there that it can eat.
Mine's not been doing doing too bad as long as we take those things into consideration.
But like Dan said, ours is not the kind that remembers where it's been or where it's going or maps at a room.
And of course, in my house, if it did that, it probably wouldn't work because I'd rearrange the furniture.
So you're protecting against the whole terminator thing.
If it can't remember where it's come from, it's not going to have an idea where it is, where it's going to go.
Now, why rearrange the furniture?
I rearrange the furniture and move heavy objects in front of the front door so that I don't have to stay up on that waiting for the teenager to come home.
Because if I rearrange the furniture and put heavy things in front of the front door, he trips over them when he comes through it and his mother wakes up.
And then he's ripe for a lecture about what time it is.
And at that point, it's probably one of them that, why do you keep telling me what time it is?
I know what time it is, but why do you keep telling me that?
He says that too, but one of these things, I'm going to change all the locks.
And to what?
And make sure that he doesn't have a key.
I mean, it's going to come to a point where you respect the rules or you don't.
And if you don't, you don't live here.
Wow, did I kill the conversation again?
I'm sure that must be a really important thing for that.
If I did, that's three times in one, two hours span.
Oh, it's like a scheme track.
Ooh, look at you.
Well, you know, I got to go for those goodness world records where I can.
Goodness world records.
Okay, so if we need a new topic of conversation, I've got one.
I need help.
I need to come up with two predictions for what will happen in the Linux world in 2018 and I can't think of anything.
So if anyone's got any predictions, tell me now, please.
Why do you need to come up with those?
I was going to say you just heard crickets.
Is that a protection?
Why do you need to come up with issues?
I predict some major company will buy Ubuntu, probably Microsoft.
Everyone always predicts Star Wars.
I think it's quite for sale like that, even though the board will think money and whatever.
Now, canonical on their way to IPO, I don't think they're interested in being bought at this stage.
They might take some investment, some pre IPO funding, but think we're going to sell completely.
We've just reached another new year.
Happy new year.
Happy new year to Kate Verdi, some regions of Greenland.
And the rest, somebody else will have to attempt.
I still have six hours until my new year.
Okay, predictions 2018.
It's finally going to happen.
Yes, it's finally going to happen.
I repeat the third time.
It's finally going to happen.
It's going to be the year.
Desktop Linux.
Oh, yes.
That's right.
Finally.
Speaking of Microsoft buying, buying somebody, I think they'd be more likely to buy red hat.
That would help their bottom line.
My question to all of you is if Linux goes worldwide or I should say worldwide,
but more diverse than it currently is, how many of you are willing to support it?
Because I think one of the major stumbling blocks for Linux right now is that most of the people who are able to support it,
aren't tolerant of the users who don't know how to run it.
I think that's not quite well.
It's true to some extent.
Although, actually, that's the point.
Linux presentation day.
Linux presentation day.
We've done two of these in my city.
But yeah, that's my list of new basically spread.
It's the public with your small events that use a group.
Things like that.
I do think that only about most Linux users actually do want it to be more widespread.
However, I would say what about 80% of the users do want it more widespread or something like that.
It's still that 20% or so.
Don't really care.
But the thing they're here as well is that.
Well, most people don't really understand computers enough to go beyond windows or Apple for that matter.
They use what companies give them and that's about that's that really.
Although it's interesting because when there is a choice,
like with mobile phone, Android, iPhone, the mainstream.
And now BlackPri have disappeared as well to do Android.
When Microsoft has given up doing windows, phone,
completely now as well.
And that's that's just interesting because it kind of shows what happens when there is choice in the mainstream to some extent.
I think there should be lots of choice.
I think that that's always better for for for every party involved.
I am just concerned with the well, like corporations like mine are not going to roll out any change,
any kind of major operating system without knowing they have major amounts of support and the pipeline.
And from my experience, and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing,
but most of the Linux users I know are so well versed in the technology aspect of programming and whatnot that they have very little patience
with your average user.
And the average users are the ones we've got to pick up the use of Linux in order to make it a widespread,
a widespread use operating system.
Actually, there are a lot of, there are a lot of Linux users that actually program as well,
but are reasonably technical enough to use them.
Oh no, no, no, I'm aware of that.
I know that.
I'm just saying the vast majority of those that I've been in contact with,
that doesn't mean all of them.
And I know I'm not anywhere near in contact with with all of them or even a large,
a large sampling of what's available.
I'm just saying from what I've seen,
and that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to every market, every aspect, every place.
It's just what I've come in contact with.
So I wonder if this is more,
and this is in the whole hindsight of my ASD thing,
where I can really fix certain things,
and I can really go into unbelievable details and monologues on,
I mean, I love the Napoleonic era,
I love Napoleon, the French Revolution.
I can wax a little bit of that,
but I can go into all sorts of,
when I'm doing sort of technical explanations of things to it my mum.
She doesn't need to know all the caveats to why I'm saying this.
She only needs to understand the sort of the big picture.
Right, and most users can be like that.
That's how they're going to want you to work.
They're going to want you to tell them how to make it work,
and they're not going to want any of the finer details.
They don't care.
And I'm not saying that's the right way to go about it.
I'm just saying that's how 99% of them are going to be.
Yeah, exactly.
And because someone is trying to,
that's not aware of that,
that's trying to explain in all this technical detail,
that you've lost your audience,
that your words are just going straight over her head,
but you're not realizing it.
Exactly.
And then that's what happens in a lot of people.
I mean, it's like when we were kids,
and trying to teach our parents how to program the VCR.
At some point,
you throw your hands up in the air,
and you just do it for them,
because they're not going to learn.
But that's unfortunately what you're dealing with,
with a lot of the users who are out there on the computers.
They want to be able to point,
they want to be able to click.
They don't want to have to do anything else.
And if you have to do anything else,
it's not going to work.
That would let all of them moan the right circumstances.
No, I agree with someone.
And all should,
but they don't.
And a lot of them aren't going to want to,
and they're not going to be motivated to
for any reason.
That's the only,
that's still,
to this day,
the only drawback I see,
to using Linux,
it's an OS versus Windows,
because Windows has dumbed everything down.
Windows has dumbed it all down for every user.
It's an operating system for dummies.
Well, Windows has not particularly worked that well.
And I think, actually,
a lot of these people we are talking about,
we are talking about,
they were just deep down,
even the ones that are not particularly technical,
because if you look out there,
I mean,
like I just said,
I've used mobile phones already,
but yeah, I'm going back to that.
People have iPhones,
and they have Android phones.
It seems a lot of people actually go for iPhones as well,
because they think that it's more liable,
and more user-friendly than Android, in fact.
I do not know this thing.
Any of what you just said.
Everything you just said is exactly correct.
But what you're looking at,
are people who use computers only,
you can't imagine,
everybody has a PC at home,
and they have a PC at home with Windows.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Everyone has a PC at home.
That is not...
No, not everyone knows.
No.
Roger.
I'm not talking about people who can't afford it.
I was going to say,
I'm glad that this idea of Android and iOS,
iPhones and everything came up,
because the reality of the situation is,
that most normal, non-technical people
may have a laptop at home that runs Windows,
but they barely use it these days,
because the only time people interact
with a quote-unquote proper computer,
is at work,
where they have absolutely no control over what it's running.
That's the IT department's call,
and that's almost what they can do with us.
That's the only interaction they're having is at work,
and they don't care,
because it's a work-based situation.
What they've got to roll this out, too,
would be to the corporate entities, correct?
I mean, you're not going to expect somebody,
most people use Windows at home,
even though Mac has been a viable option for years,
I've never liked Mac personally,
but most people haven't even tried both.
Let alone throwing Linux into the scenario as well, Mario.
Well, haven't tried, well,
haven't tried Mac as in the Macintosh,
which is quite if you have,
but a lot of people haven't,
but that's also actually down to money,
they are the max alternative,
and that's another point.
I don't know if it's entirely money.
Because how many people need about the iPhone
when it's costing everybody four times
what an Android would.
Well, yeah, but not everybody,
but I wanted to say something about Linux
and consumerizing and society,
and actually encapsulating all of this,
that's also why desktop Linux does not hit off,
because there is no proper serious big company backing it,
but knows the money into it.
I mean, there was kind of cool,
and there's been some,
there's some importance to be placed on marketing.
I agree with that.
There's some importance to be placed on marketing,
but you know, you can't use costs as a factory
because people have bought the iPhone,
even though it's so much more than an Android,
and to my personal opinion,
it's not performing better.
But, but,
I'm going to have to stop.
Please let me stop you there, right?
You say people buy iPhones rather than Android devices,
and you don't think that cost is a factor.
Well, the fact is this,
that most people who buy a computer
have to buy it outright,
whereas almost nobody buys a phone out, right?
They pay so much per month
to essentially what we call higher purchase in this country,
basically lease that phone.
So, the difference between 35 and 45 a month,
you know, that's the difference between Android and iOS.
I'll give that to you because even in the United States,
even if you're re-upping your two-year contract,
if you're a provider all the time,
your iPhone versus your Android purchases
and costs you any more or any less.
So, I'll give that to you.
So, maybe that is a factor involved there,
but that still brings us back to whether or not
the Windows versus Linux issue
is something that you see rolled out
in a marketplace that's consumer,
or a marketplace that is corporate.
I think the difference here, I think the big difference here
is regardless of your circles that you travel
and you watch your college, your school, whatever,
you see a vast chunk of people
on something that you don't use.
So, if you're using Windows at home,
then you see plenty of people
where your study buddy might be a Mac user,
or the other way round.
iPhones, Android, whatever.
So, you know that there's another viable alternative.
If you're looking at, or wonder what that is,
then you've at least got a decent chance
of your high street store,
the store that you know of as an electrical gadget retailer.
They've got the stock, they'll have the answers
that I've got questions for.
So, it's a fairly valid thing compared to Linux,
where you're going to struggle to get it pre-installed.
If you do get it pre-installed,
the salespeople are not going to be clue what it is.
You know, so that's the reality you're dealing with.
I completely agree with your Gordon.
I think you're completely on point there.
Because one of the things that I remember most
is that, A, most of the people I know,
and that's not everyone I know,
but most people I know,
their whole soul interaction with technology
happens in the workplace.
That doesn't make it right,
make it wrong, it just is.
And workplaces have given them windows to work with.
So, when they get a personal computer at home,
they go with windows,
because windows is what they know.
The same thing is happening with their phones.
When I, before my boss retired,
she had an Android phone,
and she had an iPhone, okay.
And what made her stick with the Android phone
over the iPhone was simply because
she found someone who could help her operate that phone
and navigate that phone,
and teacher had to navigate that phone.
That person happened to be me.
I don't like apples,
so she's stuck with Android.
But that's what it comes down to at the end of the day,
which is why I had my first question,
which didn't have to do with which operating system
was better or worse,
because we all know the answer to that,
but the question I had was
how many people are willing to support
the average user on Linux,
because until the average user can be supported on Linux,
I don't see it going anywhere.
And unless people who are going to support it
have the patience to do that,
it's just...
In my part-time job as a computer repairer person,
every time a person brings me a computer with issues,
I evaluate what they're using that computer for.
And when they bring it to me,
yes, 90 windows they're bringing to me.
And so I take an inventory of the software on their computer
and question them,
exactly what are you using this computer for?
What do you do on your computer?
And I evaluate,
and if there's nothing proprietary that they need,
then I will heavily suggest Linux
and offer training and support for that.
So I've converted quite a few people over to Linux.
Can I just ask you,
have you found that that line of business
has steadily drying up over the last few years,
as in you've been doing far fewer of those jobs
of actually fixing laptops and desktops for people?
As the death of the desktop has progressed,
because I certainly have.
I used to have a pretty good sideline in fixing computers,
mostly the reformatting or converting people
or setting up new machines or whatever,
whereas now I get hardly any of that work anymore,
because people just don't use laptops and desktops anymore.
They use phones and iPads.
Yes, I agree.
It has slowed since I've been doing it for,
and I don't know, say maybe 20 years now.
And my age demographic of customers is my age,
which I'm 50, you'll be 50 to this coming year,
is my age and older.
So the younger people,
I know what you're going at,
are probably more up to use a tablet and a phone.
Yes, although some of the older people use them as well.
I think it comes down to the people of an older generation
and I include myself in that,
where if you wanted to do anything online,
the only option was initially a desktop and then a laptop,
whereas the vast majority of people now online,
they're perfectly well suited with a phone or tablet,
and they go on a Facebook, they tap on a few replies,
they're listening to podcasts, they watch YouTube,
they watch Netflix, play some games, play some music,
whatever, a tablet's absolutely fine for them.
The thing is, if they had never been exposed to a laptop,
they wouldn't miss it.
If they had never been exposed to a desktop computer,
they wouldn't miss it.
They wouldn't have any issues with it.
A tablet is perfectly fine for them.
Exactly.
The thing is, if we are chasing people on the desktop,
what we're essentially talking about is laptops,
the occasional desktop.
If we, as a Linux community,
and a free software,
I can source whatever you want to call it community,
using those people,
then surely we're doing it wrong,
because there are far fewer of those people than there ever was,
and that audience is shrinking.
Surely we should be doing what Purism is trying to do,
and pushing forward outside of things,
pushing free software out of the source into the mobile world,
with the Labron 5,
which you can call it a phone,
but it's essentially a computer,
but it's a more modern computer.
You know, I've got a funny analogy.
I've got a funny analogy for you at this point.
It's like we're playing King of the Castle,
but the problem is,
the actual, the one piece of, the one piece of ice
that's ours is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
Yeah, maybe the King of that castle,
shrinking.
Yeah, people have moved on from,
from what we consider computers,
X86 machines.
The other people who are using those are at work,
whether that is people using the Windows machine
to send emails and connect to, you know,
a mail service and all rest of it,
exchange servers, whatever,
at work in an office,
or creative professionals using
a Mac in a studio.
I think everybody is missing
that the true, or as I see it,
the true reason why Linux does not have
a foothold in desktops and laptops.
It's the fact that Microsoft
and a bunch of other companies
are throwing money at the manufacturers
to put Windows and MacAfee, etc.
on the machines.
Because all of you go out to,
to, and look at computers,
it's going to cost you more
to get a computer without
zero operating system
than it will to buy the same.
Well, yeah.
And that has,
that has historically been the problem,
but the point that we have
surely all agreed upon is that,
yes, someone brought up gamers,
yes, that is another core demographic of PC users
x86 machine users.
And there are some people in their Linux world
trying to push that forward,
although they're doing it in a very pragmatic way,
trying to make steam work
and the proprietors' drivers and everything.
And it could be argued that what's the point of that
if you're only looking to run proprietary stuff,
but that's a different argument altogether.
But what is the point of us dwelling
on this idea that Microsoft gets together with Dell
and ASO and all of the other OEMs
and forces them to pre-install windows on it?
And it's far more expensive to go
to the likes of System76 or Entroware
and buy a software Linux laptop
and you can't go into a big box store.
But who cares about that?
The majority of the people out there,
the real people,
not people who would ever even consider
joining mumble and talking to us right now,
but the normal people out there,
they don't use x86 machines anymore.
They're using iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.
And if we really care about pushing free software
and OEM source to the masses
and getting people to convert
and realizing about that stuff,
and the importance of it from a privacy
and all the rest of it point of view,
then we need to start chasing this shrinking market
of x86 machines and start thinking about mobile.
I've been saying this on this New Year's Eve show
for the last three or four years.
It's still people in the Linux community
are still chasing x86.
Yeah, yeah.
Well,
well, 32-bit is kind of die-out
between 64-bit and only sporty-bit.
Yeah, we'll make a desktop.
As for the mobile,
I agreed that Linux should be chasing the mobile more.
And, well, there were attempts,
but they've all kind of died out now,
except for Yola's cell-fish OS.
That's still around.
That's,
so I've got a spirit X can be buying that one there.
Later on.
And do you be caught as well?
Which is a construction.
Well, yeah.
Well, yeah.
Well, yeah, there's you be caught,
which is great.
But the thing here now is that
because conical has dropped
about new touch.
But, you know,
because conical,
however, decided that conical
doesn't matter.
And it's just going to say conical.
Because that was dropped
by the actual company,
the actual sponsor.
That's basically it.
That's never going to go on
that a phone ever again,
probably,
except unless the community
ports under you be ports.
But it won't be hardware deals again,
like BQ,
I really,
I really don't think so.
Well, I would,
well,
I look to different ways.
Okay.
And I'll tell you why, right?
Yes.
When cononical were doing deals
with Mazoo and BQ,
they were selling hardware
with this preinstalled, right?
Okay, that is fair enough.
But they made one crucial mistake.
And that was.
You could call it arrogant.
You could call it ignorant.
Whatever,
but they refused to support Android applications.
However,
what you reports is doing now
is they are integrating
an box and that it's not been released yet.
But it's,
it's being developed at the moment.
And so,
an box is a application.
It's free software that lets you run Android applications
on a Linux.
Yes.
I know about that.
And so,
I know about that.
And so,
I know about that.
I know about that.
Into.
They're integrating that into
you report.
It would be much better if everyone
used headphones for this,
by the way,
because whenever we have people
talking over each other,
they get a lot of echo.
But anyway,
they're integrating that into a bunch of touch
at you reports.
It's still a,
the branding is a little bit unclear at the stage.
But anyway,
once they get that working.
And,
and potentially with micro G,
as well,
which is free software implemented
the Google services,
you might well have a situation
where you can
side load at least Android applications
onto a bunch of touch.
And when that happens,
if that happens properly,
what I have is a mobile
form that is,
a GNOS Flash Linux
that will run Android applications.
So it's,
it's a bunch of touch
with Android applications.
So it's all of the good bits of
Android.
And so,
as you can see,
it's all of the good bits of
Android applications,
where you can run Android applications.
Alongside being properly open source
and free software.
And so that potentially will attract a lot of developers
to the platform.
Now, I'm not saying that
that is necessary overnight,
going to
hideaway pre-instals and deals
with the lights of BQ and stuff.
However,
if you get a lot of developers coming over
and if a buzz
is created with that,
then there is the potential
a small cellar of devices like VQ,
may do a deal with you reports that that must be their goal
and it should be their goal.
And I'm not talking in 2018, that seems very unlikely,
but perhaps 2019 or 2020,
we may see a bit much on hardware again,
run in Android apps,
and that would be a major step forward
for and source mobile operating system
because it can run Android applications
in this hypothetical situation
where Unbox has been implemented perfectly.
And that means that people don't have that barrier to entry.
I could start using that immediately then
because there are certain Android applications
that I rely on and therefore I can't use
the older one to touch.
And there are going to be a lot of developers
who will be attracted to that platform.
And the one thing that Steve Obama got right
was developers, developers, developers.
You need those developers working on the platform
and the biggest problem
that all new mobile operating systems have,
the biggest problem that all mobile operating systems have
is applications, the lack of applications for it,
but we're not going to see that problem potentially
because of these Android applications.
So for me,
UBPORT is the one to watch for 2018, definitely.
And it is the hope for bringing free software to the masses.
And I'm not saying that's going to happen in 2018,
but I'm saying we're going to see the start of that movement
that happened in 2018, if all goes well.
All goes well.
I would agree that UBPORT is one worth looking at.
Definitely, I mean, I've got a BQ 4.5,
I've got a MX4, I've got a, well, NM10,
it's got a bit of a screen issue now,
but anyway, the full HD.
And I was really passionate about UBPORT's.
I even went to a talking Brussels
where I got to meet Mark Schrockenworth in 2016.
And I went to those talks that were happening to post them.
And I was, when they were really talking about a tablet,
what was going to come and all that stuff.
And it was great.
And then I got to actually meet Mark Schrockenworth
at the end briefly and I talked to him
and I got shaking and he chopped my hand and stuff like that.
And I've, you know, and I was really,
and I've used, I've used it as my daily driver, the MX4,
for good two years, despite all this.
Oh, it doesn't run Android apps and it won't do this,
it won't do that.
Find the text messages, calls and browsing.
But here's the thing.
I don't quite believe that.
I mean, I understand the hope and the passion
and the that you have, Joe, for UBPORT's
and how it may, may hit off and all this.
But I don't think, I think that's had it now to be honest
because there is no company behind it like that.
And that's something else.
We have this thing called Capitalism,
we have this thing called consumerism,
we have this old money system,
we kind of need a company of some sort,
kind of back these things out into the mainstream
and UBPORT doesn't have that community
where sales fish kind of does,
but you'll probably isn't going to make it quite either,
but it's going to be a nice niche or else anyway.
And that runs Android apps really well
with its capacity layer.
I don't think it all has to do with backing
from a big company.
I mean, yes, don't get me wrong.
I know that helps.
I know it really does,
but several things in this world
have come out with little to no backing,
but they've had a very marketable product
that has had something revolutionary
that wasn't available anywhere else.
And if you just take it out.
Yes, and in his case, we've talking about freedom,
and the privacy that goes along with that.
I know, but as for them not being a proper company,
I'm living in a country that has founded itself on freedom,
and is systematically giving away every freedom
that it has for scary and everywhere,
but the technology world.
So I don't know if that's a viable way
to sell your product these days, right or wrong.
I am completely with you on freedom
should be what it should be based on,
but we know that we're not the norm, guys.
We're not what everyone else is
facing their decisions on.
They're not thinking like we are.
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, but can I just come back to this point
if I'm not being at this big company, whatever?
Yes, UV ports as a project is not backed
by a huge company and a billionaire who's been to space.
However, they do have grassroots support.
They have a big community,
well, a big community is behind them.
And if you look at their patron,
it's at 2,600 something a month.
This is so, it's a big money.
They're not being paid for.
They're not.
And now the UV ports work is amazing
when they're doing the, the,
the Norwegian guy and the Vester team,
you know, they're very passionate.
I've seen videos that they're QA's videos
that they're really passionate.
And it'd be great if they could have more donation.
They really would be so that they could,
in fact, it'd be great if they could have more donations
so that he could actually work on it full time
as his day job.
But, you know, that's not happened yet, has it?
But I mean, I think a few guys,
just a few guys and, okay,
I mean, more developers really,
but as a community person who can hit off,
it's like saying, hey, look,
and I'm in ball with my dear distra, as well,
to an extent, I should add tears.
So it's a great example, I can use an example.
That's a nice community distra,
keeping the old mandriva alive,
all community volunteers, very democratic,
all that great stuff.
But, you know, that's not going to become
the number one distra,
it's just not very likely because of how.
Not by the UV ports is the only,
it's the number one by default only,
truly free software,
asterisk, drivers and things.
But it's the only free software operating system
while devices that we have.
And so, it's the best that we have.
It is the most open source by far,
apart from, to run the hardware.
Well, yeah, it's one of the most open source, definitely.
I wouldn't disagree with that.
Although, sailfish is most open source,
I mean, the graphical use interface,
I'm not really, it isn't.
Graphical use interfaces, and they say,
but there's a way to get no resource one
and things like that.
But, you know, it's running things like BGFS in there,
Wayland, it's got some great desktop and up technologies
in the background and it's, you know, it's a bit...
Yeah, don't get me on the surface, it's a great operating system.
From what I've used of it, it is probably the best.
It's probably better than UV ports,
but it's got this proprietary UI on it,
which I don't think you'll have any intention of open sourcing.
And therefore, that really puts me off it,
and it drives it towards UV ports,
which has a way to go.
But, as I say, once this Android thing happens,
I think that's going to be a real watershed moment in 2018.
So, I want to ask you this.
Do you think that the open source community
should, in essence, shift its priorities
to more mobile platforms
and less into Linux and BSC?
Well, it depends on whether or not you want to attract new users
to the platform, and if you want to attract normals
for another better word to the platform,
I don't want to see desktop Linux die in terms of development
because I use it every day and I want it to be good.
But, that said, I think that if there are members of the community
who do want to go out and evangelize for one of the better word,
advocate is the one that I prefer,
that this platform, this idea, more than the platform,
this fundamental principle, open source or free software,
whichever one you prefer.
If that is what we're interested in,
then we have no choice but to go after mobile devices.
Okay, well then, I'm 100% behind you in that
for open sources sake.
Yeah, a little more time or effort needs to be done
in the mobile arena to give us the equivalent
of what Linux is to the X86 to the ARM processors
that are in phones and tablets.
Of course, of course.
I think that all of you are on the right page, of course.
I agree with all of you about most of everything
what you're saying, but what you've got to remember
is that your average user doesn't care about open source,
be care really about their security
because they've interested to other companies
that have not done that for them for decades.
So, you're going to have to give them something really big
in order for them to snap that up
as what they're going to use going forward
and lure them in, so to speak.
So, Joe, you alluded to one factor that you believe
was the downfall of the Ubuntu phone was the lack of apps.
Was there anything else that you feel like
where Ubuntu went wrong?
Well, I think that trying to completely reinvent
the mobile was probably a mistake.
I think that people generally fear changing
you only have to look at Windows 8
and then the subsequent change sort of back
to the traditional paradigm in Windows 10.
As people do not want this new idea of scopes and things,
but I think that the apps thing
is the absolute fundamental thing
because you've got this, there's an app for that slogan
or whatever.
And the thing is that if they had implemented Android apps,
which would have been a lot harder at the time
because Android has progressed significantly since then.
And it's now technically far easier, say, easier,
it's still difficult,
but it is technically possible now to implement Android apps
to a point where they will work well, at least in theory.
And I think that had they tried to progress that
and accepted that they needed to be able
to run third party apps from Android
to bootstrap the platform.
Then that would have been one thing
and that's a mistake they made.
But I do think that totally reinventing the UI
and having all these gestures and everything
is too complicated.
If you look at Android OS, OK, there are pretty major differences,
but there are some things in common with it.
It has an equivalent of a desktop, the home screen,
it has icons that you click on.
Whereas this idea of scopes and just eyes still can't
fully get my head around it and I'm tech.
So the average user hasn't got a hope of getting on with it.
And that, I think, once the Android stuff
works in it reports a bunch of touch
with everyone I call it, that, I think,
the next thing they need to address
is getting at least options for the UI on it
and having a more traditional Android and iOS-like UI.
And you could say, well, what's the point of doing this
if it's just going to ape and copy the proprietary platforms?
Well, the clue is in that word, proprietary.
This is not a proprietary platform.
And free-dem platform source and the privacy
and security that comes along with that is the selling point.
I wonder if there's an analogy here between comparing
Imagine if Linux and BS, but that's one of the BSD.
But certainly, Linux.
Imagine if they decided we're not wine, there's never a thing.
So any Windows programs, you cannot run them at all on Linux
because we want to be pure.
We want to do things all our own way.
I wonder, would that have taken off as much as it did?
Could at least any of the options, the dual boot,
you're the option to run wine for programs
that you couldn't work around?
I wonder if that's the same sort of a thing with...
Yeah, if you imagine a world where you didn't have the OS
pro, you didn't have grab that picked up
on the Windows loader and made that to dual boot
and you didn't have wine.
I think you would have far, far fewer people
who are willing to try it out in anything more than a live session.
And it certainly helped me.
The ability to dual boot, in all honesty,
I still dual boot on some of my machines
because I do Windows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so, okay, dual booting, yeah, I agree with that.
Most things uses dual boot, I would default
because of certain programs here and there.
Wine can be helpful because it lets you run those two apps,
Windows apps.
However, what I wanted to add in here is the whole thing
about Android app, two reports and also the scopes
because geometrics and scopes.
Now, first of all, I think basically,
quite simply, the console is not one sport Android apps
or apparently there were some technical reasons
why they didn't just do it.
Actually, you can't tell you quite what these reasons are,
but I remember being from GIOC channel and someone,
but they didn't want to do Android apps
because of some technical reasons too, I believe, actually.
But yeah, people aren't gonna make native apps
if they can use fun Android apps.
That's also the debate in itself,
but you will have decided to support Android apps
as did Samson and Tyzen, but that's a different story there.
It's like the ass, but GIOC is talking about scopes
and we're just failure of Ubuntu,
touch or whatever, and I think the scopes idea
wasn't really a problem with such.
It just sort of loads up web pages,
a lot of this web apps and all this
and then you get a few of those apps that aren't web apps.
Something I'm quite good at, like I really like
Staleboard that Alan Pope made,
little Richard Stalman quote board, I love that app.
Even the Asteroids in UB ports or Ubuntu touch,
I gotta say try that out if you got one of these devices
because that importation is really good, how it's done.
One life, not free, and just all the rest of it.
But anyway, what I was also,
what I think kind of made them fail as well, to be honest,
and we're talking about Ubisoft's sporting amborts
as well, there's something bear in mind as this.
I've got an MX-4, it's in my pocket right now,
but that's a legacy device now under Ubisoft's
and just like it would have been underneath Connacle
if they've carried on with Ubuntu touch.
In other words, that's going to run the 15.04 based
Ubuntu touch or UB ports, and that's it.
It will not get any of the 16.04 based update,
which Connacle were working on
before they close the whole product down
and UB ports are still working on.
The goal is to have a 16.04 based version.
The problems with Ubuntu touch as well
was that Connacle started off with click packages for apps
which later meant that basically all of the app developers
would have to redo their apps
because they've switched to snappy,
which causes issue in itself when you think about it.
Another issue to some extent, it's not really an issue
of a Connacle as such, but it is for more so for UB ports,
actually, is that of course, Ubuntu touch uses Mer,
and that means that for the graphic cool server
and that means UB ports, I believe,
are trying to basically make it work on the wayland
or for the time being because they won't be supporting
a completely different graphical server
that obviously hardly anybody else is using.
So that's holding up some of the progress
over the thought as well.
And yeah, can I just say, as for Mer?
Not to be confused with Mer, of course, but Mer, MIR,
which is the display server that they will for Unity 8
and the phone.
That now has been adapted to be a wayland.
Because of course, Wayland is not a server,
it's just a protocol.
And so you need something to interact with Wayland
and Mer is being actively developed
by Connacle, as we speak, because they need that force,
the IoT signage systems and all the rest of it.
So it's not something that's just being abandoned.
And so it is entirely feasible for them
to continue to use that as a composer with Wayland.
And obviously that's something of a simplification of that
and oversimplification.
But I don't think that say that Mer is dead or whatever
is true at all.
If anything, it's further along than it was in April
when they dropped the phone.
So what company is going to pick up this UB ports ball
and make it available to the masses?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
If Ubuntu can't do it or Connacle,
then who's going to bring it?
Well, yes, actually, and that's basically wasn't quite
to say it like that.
But that's basically what I was sort of saying earlier
that it's under community.
And now the community is very passionate,
but as a community, it's not a, not the volunteers,
not paid full time and all the rest of it.
And I think, no, I don't care what I'm saying is
this community can develop this UB ports OS
to their hearts content.
But until some major manufacturer starts producing hardware
that it runs on and advertises it on TV
so that the masses see it like Android and iOS,
I just don't think it's going to go anywhere.
Yeah.
Sorry to hammer up, but I'm going to take off for now.
I might come back later, but it's time for us to start.
Our festivities on the west coast of the United States.
And to do that, we're going to head to my sisters
where I have limited availability to said equipment.
Okay.
Happy New Year, Mr. Soaps.
Happy New Year, guys.
I'm sorry, I don't get to talk to you guys more often.
And hopefully that will change in the upcoming year.
Happy New Year.
Okay, I have a question with an answer to that.
Sorry, I was about to chip in with an answer
to that question about a major manufacturing coming along.
Now that you had a couple of manufacturers
working with canonical,
but the brutal honesty of the situation there
was that Ubuntu was pretty terrible as a consumer OS.
Now, the thing is that it's not being pitched
as a consumer OS anymore, it's a community project.
And as such, my opinion has massively shifted
because I was very negative about it
when it was being sold on consumer devices,
albeit on a couple of niche websites.
What was canonical were pretending
that this half-baked thing was finished
and it was quite frankly far from being finished.
Now, it's actually further along than it was.
And also, once this Android stuff happens
and once we get some more development,
it will be closer to being finished
and a consumer product.
Now, for a major manufacturer
or even a small manufacturer to come along
and in order to sell it to them,
you need to eat something that's actually good.
I think that this year, we're going to see
a major improvements with Ubuntu Touch.
The branding needs to be,
that's one of the things that needs to sort out,
but technically, they need to get that sorted first.
And that is what they are currently working on.
And I honestly believe that that is going to happen this year.
And I'm not saying that there's going to be a major manufacturer
interested in shipping it or even a small one this year, 2018,
but perhaps in 2020, it may be a situation
where it can be pushed out on a small number of devices
with a small OEM.
Well, maybe that works out well,
so maybe we can go mainstream.
Maybe in 2020, it can get an OEM again,
but although by then Android would have gone miles ahead
with whatever as well of IOS, the two big targets
in that sense, we've got market share.
So it's going to probably remain an ESO-ish.
What I do, like, what you worked
is to mention how it's under a community now.
And I said something early on here,
but what I really like personally in UB ports
actually is the little welcome app,
which has a nice little message about what it is,
how it can't really compete against Android and iPhone,
but now it doesn't matter,
because it's not a commercial product, basically.
And I think it's at the same thing on the website,
it's somewhere you probably know what I mean, but yeah.
Yeah, I've mentioned that it's not a commercial consumer
ready product, it's a project rather than a product.
And that is the first step to success.
First, you have to admit you have a problem.
And you know, the problem was that it was not
a consumer ready, and they've admitted that,
and now they're working towards that in a very full
and much more, well, much less arrogant way
than Shot of Worth was trying to do it before.
And fair enough to him, Shot of Worth,
he had this product that he really wanted to push.
And so you can't, if you're trying to push a product,
be humble about it, you have to make Apple
and be very confident about it.
But the reality is the confidence was totally misplaced,
and it was a terrible operating system
compared with Android and iOS.
And it's not only reports now, it still can't compete,
but at the same time, now it's,
it's the goalposts have shifted,
it's a community, and they've lost it for it.
I did this total operating system,
half-baked, and all this.
Now, okay, when it, before the BQ phone with it on,
and before the MyZoo phone, I didn't use it
because I didn't have an X of seven,
but I believe that there were like a lot of very half-dessen,
that one really was like alpha.
There were screenshots with things missing apparently,
somewhere I believe, and all this,
but that's before 2015, so I'm talking,
I'm gonna, so putting that to the side,
I want to talk 2015 to now,
basically when I started using it,
I've got that BQ 4.5,
and I first started using it personally.
Now, I would say personally that it was actually,
that despite all this, oh, it doesn't do,
the Android apps and all the rest of it,
it's actually for the basics,
it was actually very usable,
and since then, and it still is under UB ports as well.
You can do a text, you can do a call,
you can do a web browsing,
you can install a few apps that are native,
and some of them are actually quite decent now,
so I did that, it's a bit half-baked,
so whatever, because it doesn't run very commonly now,
and Android apps, that's a sound debate in itself,
don't you mean talking about it?
I think, I think, I think,
I think you're, I think you're kind of brushing over that.
That's a major, major thing,
because people don't differentiate between the third party apps
that they put on their iPhone or their Android phone.
If they use Twitter, if they use IMD, believe they use,
whatever it is, they install it in the user,
and they don't make any distinctions
between a first party and a third party,
so if you're going to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
and if you're going to,
and if you're going to,
and if you're going to,
and I thought,
and I thought the unitiated interface
was very nice on the Ubuntu touch,
and in the preview version, 16.10,
17.4, and I can see improvement there as well,
but they still dropped it,
there's why Unic carrying on the desktop version,
but yeah, but yeah, yeah, thing, okay.
But yeah, okay, okay.
Well, this is big.
One idea is that it doesn't matter,
they didn't install Android apps, or yet.
The other side is there, it does matter.
Oh, it did matter.
And, you know, that's the point there is,
if you're selling someone,
if they've used iOS all the days,
and you're trying to sell them on Android,
you can at least say like the vast majority of the apps
that you use every single day,
you point out the apps on your iPhone that matter to you.
There's Android equivalents and vice versa.
You can, that's interchangeable.
You can push someone one way or the other.
You compare that to something else.
A Windows phone, you look at some apps,
it's just not available on Windows phone,
you look at some other one,
and there's Ubuntu thing, it's just not available.
Actually, that's a good point.
Windows phone as well had an apps issue apparently,
where yeah, a lot of apps were not available
that people wanted,
and so that's partly why it lost a lot of market share, I believe.
And also Blackberry has a question quickly.
Sorry to break the flow of the conversation.
Are you using headphones?
No, at the moment, maybe I should put some in
if I can find some.
It would make it far easier to conduct this conversation
if you were using headphones,
because every time we try and sort of interrupt each other,
it gets very difficult.
I mean, I know it's not possible for everyone to use headphones,
but if anyone who wants to talk could do,
then it would make everything far easier.
Sorry to try and be technical about this,
but it just makes it a nicer, more pleasant conversation.
Yeah, hold on, I think I might have some actually.
Like Mac, Mac, there's it, there's it.
This reminds me of me last year,
when I come on at the very last minute,
went to the New Year's thing,
and I could not, for the life of me, find my headphones,
and you had them, because I did podcasts before,
I could not find them at all.
And then the following day, when I woke up,
and I looked at this, are there, they're there.
Right underneath it, it's right underneath the laptop,
for another server.
I have that with lecturums.
I can never find my favorite lecturer in it.
I moved my laptop.
Ah, it was underneath my laptop, I can't believe it.
How am I sounding, as we're talking technicalities?
Because I'm using a Bluetooth headset,
does it, is it coming through loud and clear?
You're coming, yeah.
Yeah, your courses are coming through loud and clear
by the blue headphones.
Okay, that was a terrible attempt at a joke,
obviously, it felt kind of flat, no worries.
Hang on.
You brought it up, unfortunately.
I think the key to the joke was lost
in the slight technical, you know,
the slight glitch in the sound.
I'll go with that.
Is this thing on?
Is this thing on?
Can you hear me now?
Yes, can hear you loud and clear.
Well, we talked about mobile quite a lot, right?
But one thing we haven't talked about at all,
is Purism and their Libra 5,
which they crowdfunded that this year,
they got over $2 million towards it.
They're planning to have a completely false phone.
And we're not talking about something like Ureports,
where it's free software,
bug and source, from the kernel and the drivers upwards,
you know, on top of the kernel and drivers,
which has to be blocked.
So we were talking about a phone
which will be running completely free software,
all the drivers and everything will be blob free.
And it's going to have a proper GNU slash Linux based system
on top of that.
And it's going to run potentially KDE, organome.
And that's going to be delivered, hopefully, early 2019.
That is, if they can deliver that,
that is surely the great hope,
the great secondary hope along with Ureports.
Have any of you followed this?
And what are your opinions of it?
Do you have any hope for it actually?
For, for pureism actually delivering it?
I would gladly switch from Android to this device
if it had the apps that I needed.
So, okay, so I've got some headroom thing
and I'm sure you might still be heard as well.
Just test that first.
And I've got to say something about Libra Fein as well.
Yeah, yeah, that seems to be working fine.
The lines you're looking for are testicles,
testicles 1, 2, 1, 2, 3.
But the Libra M or the Libra M or the Libra Fone
or whatever, yeah.
Now, I wanted to actually crowdfund that that and I still do.
But I didn't even have 500 pounds in spare cash right now.
So, I haven't crowdfunded it for that reason.
Although last time I looked at the best you said,
we've got two million something dollars.
So, if you want to have the phone anyway,
just pay up later on or add yourself to list or whatever.
And you'll get one in 2019 as well.
I mean, the thing expects to deliver this phone until 2019,
January 2019 by the list.
Although I think there's a developer phone
before that possibly for those who crowdfunded that.
Now, somebody said to me for my Linux user group
with that apparently it has quite awful hardware.
The hardware is quite awful apparently.
It's not that, you know, the RAM and all the rest of it.
But I don't know how true that is or not.
But the idea itself, I think is very interesting.
It's supposed to be all free software respecting.
It's in its base.
It's done laptops like this already.
It's going to have be able to just switch off the webcam
in the my frame, kill switches or whatever.
And it's going to run some sort of work.
It's got there, you've got there in operating system,
tourism, OS based on Linux.
And so, yes, I mean, I do want to get one.
And I intend to get one at some stage I expect.
And I guess if it goes wrong,
they will probably refund everybody.
But they've already released a few laptops like this.
So yeah.
So that's not a case of 2017 spec hardware
that already has been deemed as being a bit of meh.
But that'll be released in 2019,
where it's completely going to be in 2019.
Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying.
That apparently it's 2017 or ever had
where it's already not that cutting edge and all the rest of it.
And then the actual phone is not come out until like 2019 as well.
Although I've figured it'd be that they might upgrade
some of that have a little bit, but I'm not sure quite.
Yeah, because I can see that really working in the marketplace.
Oh, come on here, boys and girls.
The new iPhone 9, the greatest iPhone 9,
or you can have that other thing.
That's their equivalent of iPhone 6.
What don't you think the old age,
the retro things are good thing these days.
Come on, you better go for the old thing.
Well, to be fair to them,
they have said that the specs are not final yet.
And it depends on what they can actually get
hold of and where things develop.
But they will at some point have to freeze that hardware
in order to develop the software for it.
So it is probably going to be outdated by the time we say it,
but that's not really the point.
It's a proof of concept at this stage.
Yeah, I mean, it's not not so much that.
I mean, I think it's more a case of the buying for the box.
If you're paying top dollar, you're expecting
the newest hardware, the newest innovations.
If you're paying entry level, I mean, I'm perfectly content
with an entry level laptop now,
but I know that I'm not going to get anything fancy for that.
I'm going to get something that's perfectly functional
for what I need.
But other people will look at that and go,
is that call that a laptop, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
It's a bit of a side point that I want to make now,
but it's what we're talking about this.
But that's something else, actually.
There's a lot of these in its phones.
I mean, I mean, okay, so the Xperia X with some on now,
I believe that's from last year or something like that.
Yes, you can do that.
There's no way you're on Xperia.
No way of telling you.
You're heading that well.
I said it in my name, but yeah.
I'm just, I want to go through three of these phones.
I'll start with that one because, yeah.
I believe that's from last year.
I'm not sure quite when it was released,
but I believe it's already a bit old
because they're going about on about the X-WireWet
on TV now.
They don't really follow it so many.
Yes, you come on, Yola, when you put on yourself
and all that under the community theme, you dig.
However, then let's look at the like MX-4 as well.
You know, the brand new phone that came out.
How's it going?
I believe it could run Yola.
Yeah, when I put, when I get the sale fish for it,
I can put that on it.
That's what I'll be doing later on.
But I want to talk about some of these phones.
So when they released the MyZoo MX-4, the brand new phone,
that in 2015, I believe that phone was already about,
maybe about two years old,
but I mean, it was sold under Android originally.
Also, I'm not sure about the BQ 4.5 quite,
but I believe that was a bit old
and hardware sense as well.
And I know the Yola phone was already old
when that came out or the sort of hardware that was in it.
So it seems that a lot of these Linux phones
that do come out generally speaking
are already running quite old hardware.
That, you know, Libra and Yola,
Buntley Touch, police from the Firefox OS phones
and they were released as well.
And you know, so it goes on.
Now, to me personally,
I wouldn't the hardware that a open source
operating system on a phone or a mobile device
wouldn't have to be comparable to whatever Apple is using
or Samsung if the performance was comparable
because I don't rush, since I use Linux,
I don't have to rush out and buy new hardware.
I'm using tin or old computers here, you know,
but the performance is comparable to a newer computer
because I'm running optimized open source software
so if the performance feels the same on a cheaper device
than I'm still all for it.
But that's just me because I'm already involved
in the Linux, you know, Ecosphere.
Well, yeah, I mean, all the hardware doesn't necessarily mean bad
but obviously generally speaking,
a lot of people were probably afraid of Radio Linux
running the phone on, you know, it was newer hardware
but I've seen that even the slightly older hardware
still works quite well or should do
in the same but laptops really these days.
Test slay.
Another element to this is what people experience
as a kind of clean experience.
Like, you get Android unless you get it
from a pure, not a pixel.
It's not really Android, it's Android plus other things.
It's Android plus what Samsung do to it.
Whereas, if you get a Windows laptop,
it's not Windows, it's Windows plus whatever
Dell do to it, of course, whatever HP do to it.
It's really Windows, you can really see
what Windows actually is.
Compared to back in the mobile world,
you get an Apple phone, let's say an Apple phone.
This is a my phone.
Well, yeah, that's true.
Well, that's you with Android,
because I hate that sort of part of it.
It's an open source project really, isn't it?
It's not Google playing on that,
but that swipe can go on all these different
manufacturers in the first place.
Most people don't really know that or think about that.
But then each manufacturer does it.
So, an implementation of Android,
it's only branding a bit.
I do actually think this is the Xperia X.
Android is pretty good at this.
I was certainly set up.
I still have to remove it,
because I've already talked about that.
But yeah, each one does its own Android customizing,
basically, which for the better or the worse,
although then people kind of think
get used to the Samsung implementation
and usually and things like that.
And that might find it slightly too different
with another one, but I guess that's how it is.
Okay, we need to take a small break here
and welcome in another new year.
We want to say happy new year to Brazil, Uruguay.
And that includes Rio de Janeiro,
Sao Paulo, Brazilia, Matovedo.
So happy new year.
Happy new year.
Although then Apple is keep the same interface.
And that's part of the whole Apple thing.
They make with iOS and Mac,
it's all Apple branding.
And I think that if you'll customize it much,
and that's what they do as well.
Now, I've got a question for Joe.
What about Chrome OS?
Because it seems it's already got a foot in the door
of the same place you would have the Ubuntu Fono-S going.
I mean, it runs essentially everything
from a browser.
It can already access Android apps.
It was a little sketchy at first,
but I believe that over the summer,
they enabled Android apps for most of even the cheaper Chromebooks.
Though I don't know how many of the regulars,
I believe you call them, are even aware of that.
I'm certain most of the regulars have no idea
what Cruton is or what to do with it.
But I think probably that's gonna be big marketing
for Chromebooks going for is,
hey, you can run Hulu and you can run Netflix.
All from the same app as you run on your phone.
And that's essentially what I do with it.
I mean, this is the computer sets in front of my TV set.
Start Netflix, start Hulu, throw it over the Chromecast
on the big screen, you know.
Sorry, check out my social media, you know, in my email
in the browser, somebody makes a post that has a link
that has a web page, go track that down, find,
you know, somebody makes a post on G plus.
Oh, hey, I'd like to buy that thing, you know,
go find it on Amazon, you know, do my commerce through it,
not so good for things like, hey, I've got a report, do Monday.
And I'm gonna sit down and do that in Google Docs
so that it is certainly, certainly a possibility.
And, you know, really since I understood the,
the canonical mobile app was going to be everything
for a browser, well, you know, yeah, Chrome OS
is not really a mobile app, but it seems like it's pointed
in that direction.
No wonder.
Yeah, you're definitely right, that is essentially just a web browser.
And if you think about it, Google has done probably
one of the best jobs in the world of getting people
to use Linux on a daily basis.
But the magic trick that they've used to accomplish that
is making sure nobody knows they're using,
using Linux on a daily basis.
They use Google search, they use all of the other Google products
in on Linux on the back end, these Android,
which is of course running Linux,
and now they're using Chrome OS, which,
I think about it, they are doing,
they're probably the most successful desktop Linux operating system,
but it's not going to be as much Linux.
It's running loads of proprietary software.
So really, what's the point of using it?
If, you know, if you're totally pragmatic
and you want something that's good, then yeah,
if all you need is a web browser,
then Chrome OS is great.
But I'd rather have, I've got a Chromebook
and I've run what's effectively Zubuntu,
I forget the name of the distro now.
And if I want to run Chrome on it,
I'll install Chrome on that,
but then I've got the opportunity to run anything else
I want on that.
So I don't think that there's any point in pairing it,
because it's got this huge proprietary layer on top.
And as a result of that,
I have very little interest in it.
I like that.
So there are those different things here, though.
And it's about what you use it for.
It's a completely different idea of the device
that you sit on a desk or on your lap.
You flip it open, you sit in the,
it's got a full tight keyboard on it,
you do homework, you do work for the job, whatever it is,
you're doing tasks, you're getting stuff done,
and then you close it down.
That's a completely different device
from something that you carry about with you all the time,
that you're gonna need to interact with when the phone goes,
text messages with email and whatever,
you want that to be absolutely 100% reliable,
battery life, like lasting ages and easy to respond,
doesn't crash and all that kind of stuff.
That's two different sort of things.
Yeah, yeah.
So Google, well Google, yeah.
They have these lot of Linux,
but people, but people like Joe said,
people Android, Chrome OS,
but it doesn't say Linux on there.
I think you've even used GNU in Android,
because that's done as well,
which it's all kind of clever.
It's all marketing.
People go Android, Android, Android, Android,
or Linux, or Linux, Chromebook.
On top of that, though, what they also do,
because you're a clever,
and I mean, they are really out of clever,
because what they've really done here as well,
of course, is that they started this Chrome OS
and this Chrome browser,
but I believe that was open source first,
and what I believe,
and then the open source community basically started
doing a lot of development for free, for Google,
and then as far as I know,
they basically take it back to the code,
re-brand it, put a bit of branding on it
and do some other changes,
and then of course releases closed source software as well,
to the public.
So they basically use the open source community,
but there were a lot of development for them for free.
Now that's clever, isn't it?
So I think with Chrome and Google,
I think it's more like IE was so dominant before that,
that no one ever thought anything would ever change,
and then Mozilla came along and fired out Firefox,
and that, going from nowhere,
had some huge market shares,
as people thought, yes,
something other than Internet Explorer,
and then on the co-tails of that,
Google came along and said,
you know what, we could do the same,
and they had their Chrome,
and with that additional push,
it became Chrome became the huge thing.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Google watched on to.
The Chrome, yeah, I mean, that's what,
that's slightly annoyed me to be honest,
to an extent, although it doesn't really matter as much now,
really, because the browser was in that sense over.
I mean, Google Chrome obviously supports quite a lot of,
where web standards and all that,
and the WebKit, which obviously has its links
perhaps, the KHML, which is Conqueror's rendering,
and they're on top of that,
so again, they've used Open,
actually, it was Apple, who were a top KHML,
but anyway, and then Google will use it as well,
but, and to make WebKit.
But, yeah, the idea that Chrome,
what they've basically done is what,
sort of what Microsoft did with Windows,
they put Internet Explorer into Windows,
they've got 95% market share, basically,
Google put Chrome into Android,
that got popular, and now it's got really popular,
so it's basically,
that I'm very loyal to Firefox still,
because that's the one that changed the market, really.
That's the one that made Internet Explorer improve,
and all the rest of it will start to make them improve,
again, after Internet Explorer 6,
being so awful, which WebStanders and all that.
See, this is the thing,
even going back to, I used to think,
this is the only used to think,
and when you slide track, I'll leave it on guitars,
I thought, the guitarists in the 60s,
they had it, the 50s and 60s,
they really had it going on.
I've got a 56, there's Paul now,
and it's not easy to play, because it's not,
there's been all these sort of advances in technology,
that still makes it a guitar,
but a modern instrument is so much easy to play,
it's so much more versatile,
so I'm thinking there's the same here,
just because it was a traditional sort of way of doing things,
doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good way.
Mm-hmm.
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