and I am I live yes there we go any moment now people people are waiting for it and I wanted to pull this up too there's a thing to talk about and stuff to discuss welcome to vlog Thursday number 288 wow that's a lot let's see what I'm going to talk about some of the other all the fun things we can talk about here there's a couple things I wanted to bring up that I'll be talking about later I think I had all the tabs always that last minute to make this all happen hello from the land down under I like saying that every time it's funny to me from you know Australia being land down under for those you don't get the joke not the New York of America but York I imagine there's some relation there we got Sacramento all right got people local Jay is Jay from learning TV I believe that's where scale is a big Linux conference he's there this week today probably I don't know if he flew there today or it starts today I lost check of the details hello Cody my friend to the north so Cody's in the Canadian area just a little above my head just a little north of Michigan there Nashville all right it's good place all kinds of people from all over the place I think this is the furthest one yet Pakistan that's definitely a lot further away Q back not bad let's see Charleston Charleston South Carolina Devon UK all right best place for the edge router I don't really use them so not in my network would be my favorite place for the edge router but if you want to use one I mean they work they're fine I don't think that they have the clearest roadmap at Unify on their life I'd seen a few comments and I don't know like how well updated that router firmware is anymore me look at the firmware hammer firmware history router firmware is it still frequently updated hmm yeah looks like there's still some firmware updates for it we'll share the screen here so we're on the same page but we don't really use them and I don't I don't have any particular true dislike for them but yeah they're I don't know it that to me they're not the most the best solution out there I can't I see which tab this is there's so many tabs there it is well that's the search there we go so he's working on making this easier to find all these things so looks like there's still some firmware updates for it so 718 there's some that's the edge switches so let's look at like this one here is there a history I can look at is there older firmware version or do I have to just do it this way so yeah 2014 2014 2022 so yeah there's not a ton of updates on it I don't feel like it's a product is getting a whole lot of love from ubiquity that's at least my feeling on it is Zurich awesome Zurich Switzerland we got Berlin Germany Winnipeg I want to get a 40 100 for giga internet should I get a 50 100 for half the price instead you know the 50 100 is a solid device but it is past end of life I don't think they sell them anymore but they're good I mean we pulled ours out and switch to the 60 100 but we were running a 50 100 up until two weeks ago we just did it because we realized it was end of life so we bought a pair of 60 100 because we always keep a spare sitting in a box or sometimes more than one spare for our own stuff but yeah I don't there's nothing wrong with the 50 100 there's plenty of useful life in it so end of sale is not really end of life is probably a better way I should just script that yeah the 50 100 aren't available anymore but I don't know that they're really end of life because the support life is really long because PF sense doesn't spin you know specialized we're only making you know software that'll work exclusively for this device and now we're done compiling it so you lose support they will keep supporting because you can really load PF sense on a machine older than you should probably load PF sense on and it'll probably work it'll just have some speed issues but the 50 100 I would say is still relevant so end of life is probably not the right way to put it end of sale is a more accurate description so end of sale which Cisco does a labeling similar send Cisco has like end of sale then they have X number of time before its end of support I guess Microsoft does too they support an operating system longer than they sell it so yeah it's just not sold anymore so end of life is not the right term what are the things I want to get out of the way one I still do a lot of business content the link down below is to business technicalities we're posting all that business content for those of you interested I know some people are going not my bag of tricks I would just rather watch Tom talk about technical things that's what this channel's for but for those of you that are interested in the content we produce really regarding business a we're still cranking out content over there on the business technicalities channel so for those of you that want to subscribe there's a link down below but while it's at the beginning here in the first six minutes because not everybody watches to the end and I understand that and I did put something at the beginning here and it's something I'm going to have to change a little bit about my YouTube channel the it's aggravating dealing with the AdSense revenue and things like that and how that works inside of YouTube even Jay from LearnLinksTV we've been many other YouTubers we all discuss this because I'm one of the last holdouts amongst my peers that have not stuck a bunch of ads on the channel and I don't really want to stick a lot of ads on the channel so I'm trying to figure out a better way to deal with sponsorships and I think what I might do and I'm asking the audience because you are the people who are the dedicated join me on this Thursday adventure where we just kind of open forum talk about things and sponsorships I'm thinking of doing it and for those of you that don't know like Risky Business Podcast I'm a big fan Patrick Ray is a great job with that podcast I've talked to him a few times super nice person and I like the way he does sponsorships and I think they're the most convenient way to not annoy the audience which is offering sponsors a couple pieces one he does he does sponsored episodes so there's an episode sponsored by someone for a discussion on something so it gives them an audience to put them on the channel so I still do my full technical video with no ads other than an ad for myself if you want to consider that an ad but then there's a sponsorship opportunity for the vendor to say I want to sponsor a conversation with you and it's fully disclosed up front this is a sponsored conversation which is what Patrick Ray does and he calls them soapbox editions he jokingly says it's all snake oil it's these people paid to be here you know it's prefaced with that and instead of having an ad that has to be watched all the time in all my other videos peppered around it's a dedicated video that allows that person to talk and of course I'm not here to give them a platform to talk about how great their product is but have a technical conversation about maybe you know I actually have a data center company that wants me to advertise but cool this is sponsored by XYZ or whatever the company's name is data center company but then the conversation be like what goes on in data center what can we talk about or some technical detail that may have some audience interest but they'll be an awareness right up front that it's sponsored and because I'm not peppering my videos with this ad role as often you know technically we do have the homelab show is sponsored by Linode and someone said well you always have to do that same Linode ad read at the beginning I'm like yes we do that's what sponsorships are we have to keep the lights on and you know keep content being produced so yeah I think it's kind of where is I always want to make sure it's clear and up front and I fear I get some audience feedback on that some opinion you can leave comments down below if you're not listening to this live and things like that just they're just throwing it out there of following Linus calls them showcases that's certainly not my first idea and Patrick Ray is not the first person to do that either with the Risky Business podcast but yeah I think it's just kind of a fun idea to have this and still not in convenience now granted they won't give me they won't do this and sponsor me for as much but that's okay it's not like I'm trying to get the most sponsorship out of there and I think it's just kind of a reasonable sponsorship the other thought I had was putting the ad at the end which they won't pay as much for but I think that's kind of it might be another way to do it on when people specifically want to sponsor a tutorial cool I'll open up a tutorial this tutorial on blah blah blah is sponsored by blah blah blah blah blah at the end of the video is their ad then I do the tutorial and my stuff's all time indexed so you're still going to be able to go jump around between any of the sections that you want I even let you skip over my own little spiel of you trying to get out there of trying to get some things on there because I need to fund some of the time and recoup some of it that's on there so do it at the start and that's why I I also been trying to avoid you know the usual generic mattress ads and in from some food ad I could do those those companies reach out to me all the time but I'd rather do something that's more relevant to the audience that I have so yeah sounds a good balance to keep up financially stable and I'm not having to dictate too much from what your content is yeah and that's one thing I have a full content ethics policy and they cannot dictate my content matter of fact when vendors send me things they do not get to like get a preview copy or anything like that now for example and my review process I am working currently with Cisco to resolve how silly I find these devices and make sure all the problems I'm having with them are addressable so you know in the review process right now and this would be part of the review as well and I'm very public about this I found some bugs with these Cisco systems that I said am I doing it wrong you know I'm not just going to say blatantly this device doesn't work as expected but the problems I ran into I'm waiting to see well Cisco gave me some suggestions I got to try some back and forth but it's hung up the review because I don't know why these mesh extenders don't work with some laptops that I have on it and it's kind of haphazard they just don't connect they get in a loop of all thigh authorizing and then when I turn on WPA3 my phone doesn't work which doesn't make any sense because some phones work and some don't some laptops work some don't and I don't know why it's consistent so yeah so it's just a matter of figuring all that out oh if I can find a hot sauce place to sponsor me that'd be great would you keep the higher section yes absolutely that is how people get in contact with us to hire us for projects so that that isn't changing that parts you know it it's a balance because it's kind of like an ad but at some point is it enough and this is a financial question is it enough for all the time I put into this would I you know do I want to keep doing this or something else that makes me more money why really want to keep doing videos so I have to kind of fund the videos that does help fund them because it can bring a lead in that brings us a project that we can make money on yes it's not the goal but it's it's a way to do it and because at the end of the day this place I'm sitting in and all these cameras and lights and everything else has a cost and my time and effort I put into scripting writing and all this has a cost to it so yeah it's just one of those things the mesh tube no the mesh tube is still sitting in a box next to me so there is the mesh tube this is next time I review I want to finish the Cisco things it's bugging me all the weird issues I had with it so so they finished Cisco I'm jumping into a bunch of unified stuff I wanted to give Cisco a chance and I'm gonna I'm diving deep on this like the there's paragraphs of details I have back and forth of Cisco so I'm giving them absolutely because they're Cisco and they do make a product I think is reasonably priced I want to make sure my review of it is thorough that I've tested all the angles so when I say what I like or don't like it's going to be you know very I want to be accurate and articulate about this device and it's not that I'm saying you shouldn't buy it you should be aware of exactly how it works how it functions so you can be an educated consumer and make a decision based on information I give not necessarily buy this thing type of recommendation so oh let's see I would like to see some sponsored discussions let them pay to have interview with them they get into say what they want you get to grow them about the product yes that's a big piece of it that when we do these type of interviews there's going to be some solid questions matter of fact Okta when they had their incident they had a great interview which I really recommend listening to if you want to understand what happened with Okta a few months back with the laps us and everything else the interviewed by risky biz one it was sponsored to Patrick laid into them and really did a good job of making them say things in the interview like getting out the truth and understanding of what happened even though they paid to be there I highly recommend listening to it like hey cool they sponsored but that was a solid interview with Okta talking about the details and how they messed up on their security disclosure of it and it was also interesting because just a little bit on that Okta topic it's part of a playbook that you don't really have you had a you had a threat actor making statements that were completely false and kind of faking as if they had more access than they did so there was a lot of confusion in there and Okta didn't do a good job to get ahead of it to stop the confusion but that Patrick interview actually really clarified what actually happened really well and it's not like because he went soft or they answer the questions no no there was a lot of clarification in there that made a lot of sense and a debrief is much better so oh Marie Sharps yes that's a good hot sauce there pizza ads yeah I mean the front might my thumbnails kind of a Pringles ad anyone didn't see the thumbnail I used because I bought them they're good maybe increased Pringles sales look at some of the Cisco 1000 stuff it seems unobtainable I don't know what the status of stock is right now that's a different problem these are the the ones I'm reviewing are the Cisco 41 8 140 AC mesh units that's what I'm looking at right now there's just there's a lot to it and I'm kind of unraveling it all I should have the review done soon hey Lawrence love the content would you take a sit or doing a podcast episode about getting into the it entry career options I'm six months in my T career looking for a direction you know I need to in Brett I think might be listening hey Brett remind me to reach out to it career questions the Zach he's great and I've been he's been wanting me to jump on there he is more oriented towards talking about it career path I'm not it's a little challenging for me and Jay to talk about it especially me I've been unemployed for 20 years is kind of my joke I mean I may employ people but I have not had to look for a company to employ me in 20 years so it's a lot different I have I have a different perspective on it and Zach because he works in that field more I have no problem contributing what I do know but it's hard for me to put it into a structure because I've been unemployed for so long it's best way to I can describe it I'm more than willing to help people get employed I just don't always know if I'm the best person to ask you may even ask this before I recently finished the how they got hacked it was kind of curious if you ever considered new episodes absolutely I'm actively engaging with some people to try to get the band back together again so yes absolutely something I really want to do is put that back together the problem is the other folks Xavier and Mo have they're still working in cyber security they just don't want to currently participate in a podcast due to work commitments and life commitments and I said that's fine so that's why that's not happening I didn't want to do it by myself and I may spin it all back up with some new friends that do have time to commit to it that work in cyber security and sponsors are fine as long as they are transparent I absolutely love the transparency of anyone who is and I would also participate in that transparency just bring more money to keep making great content yes have you used neck gear wireless access points no I have run in management land that doesn't access internet trying to figure out regarding firewalls to speed test and firmware upgrade yeah I have no idea I've not used any of the stuff from there yeah I've seen octa was in the news today I didn't see why I've seen people complaining about octa I should say in the news so that was Cisco product stock it's all product stock not just Cisco so we use Cisco work and we always quote 12 is it too much time for switches yes a lot of that stuff is very back dated back order right now yep same with access points what is all about there's a big lack of network equipment I mean understand you Russia yeah it's there's a huge lack of equipment just the demands out is exceeding the pace at which the stuff can be built ZFS3 performance I believe Z2 is going to be better I think it depends on except the mirrors I have a whole video if you look there is a video where I break down all the performance metrics and you can look up the white paper from true nas on this they've done all kinds of things on there so your opinions as an employer might be useful to people getting an entry not really because there's not enough small businesses and small businesses are dramatically different than big businesses when it comes to hiring and the reason why is because you work for small business you just talk to the owner and you I fill seats based on needs so I have a need for this and I find someone to help do this but it's not the same as a large company and that's mostly where people are going to cut their teeth is at the large companies because there's just more you know there's any given moments these large companies have like 200 openings and things like that and but by doing that they have to have processes vetting and part of that vetting process love it or hate it is usually what search do you have because that's the bar is this high to enter no that's usually search that they're just like even even if you're not really leveraging no search matter of fact a large company years ago I talked to her HR person and I was laughing I'm like why do you guys require a bachelors that says anything as opposed to computers he goes well I figure if they've got a bachelors in anything they've had to write a few papers and can articulate things and put them on paper and even if it's if they have a bachelors in some random thing but they come work here it's helpful for us because we know they can write he goes we have a few people working in our department that aren't really good communicators and I'm like oh yeah yeah and what Corey said here is a problem global shortage of semiconductor for an extended period of time during the pandemic and are still recovering from the backlog. This is the downside of just in time delivery which is you know I used to work at a transportation I used to manage it GIT is what we called it basically when we would ship something from a Ford supplier up here in Detroit we would take it down to the Louisville stamping plant where they would build the Ford truck was built there still is and we were delivering stuff that within hours of it leaving the truck hours not days not weeks it was being turned into a truck the components start arriving they start assembling and this assembly process is followed in the chip manufacturers so the semiconductor manufacturers not having a big backlog of things causes this you know a little disruption in it there's there's not an easy way to catch up they just stay behind all the time with a video guess would it welcome a video and guess feeling unified AP Cisco switch and PF sense Vlan interface all tech correctly PF sense which could not get to work not a favorable rule issue either confused I'm not really a Cisco guy I mean I do know how to put a VLAN on a Cisco but that's probably where your problem is if I had to guess VLANs are easy on PF sense VLANs are easy on unify other manufacturers I just did a review on an ingenious they they don't even have documentation as to how to set their VLANs up their documentation is incomplete I and I haven't checked to see if they fixed it but I commented in my video that at the time of release of the video and yes I contacted them about this they have incomplete documentation how to set up a VLAN I do show you how to set up an ingenious VLAN but you know and there's plenty of documentation I don't need to recreate and how to set up a Cisco VLAN but more than likely if I had to guess I know three devices your Cisco VLAN is the one that's not set up properly so I have a video on how to do guest VLANs with PF sense and unify just insert how to set up you know find one of the many many videos and documentation how to set up a Cisco VLAN and that'll answer that is unify a good home system to have it all in one spot or should I use PF sense to set up the unify controller it really comes down to your use case I don't think that the firewalls are bad they are just not as feature rich in things like VPN features the VPN is probably the biggest reason that people don't like the unify system like the firewall system it lacks a good VPN that's usually around where the problems start coming in for people there's some advanced things that can't do but not every home user needs those advanced use cases but VPN common home user use case that they just really fall short on there but if you want to if you're just going I just need internet I don't care about VPN on my firewall will awesome it makes a good home system oh love the videos you did with even almost civilization to skater yeah we did talk about that on the you know I think it was on the unify video I'm sorry the PF sense video we talked about that what's the issue with advertising YouTube's full of the creator should make money users can always skip it or YouTube premium for non-skipple that's not the part I'm talking about it's sponsored posts in addition I'm not the ads from the AdSense system are one thing it's the additional sponsorships that I was mentioning in the beginning total agree regarding recruitment I work for a big finance company and our challenges regarding recruiting all the team GIT works when everything's running fine oh yes it does and what a disaster is it I know from working in that industry that when a truck has a incident there's actually a challenge that if that truck that can't make it to its delivery location for many reasons potentially that can cause the shutdown of a plant so and then that actually delays the shipping of Ford trucks well because I worked in a Ford supplier chain and that means someone didn't get their truck on time or just late I'm doing research and when I seen the chips act just pass it's too far down supply chain to make an impact until later than they pretend yeah it takes a long time building a fabrication plant if I said yes I approve building a fabrication plant down the street here in Detroit there's a few years of building before that fabrication plant gets built I was actually talking to a semiconductor manufacturer I mean they're 200 million into their facility still building it not far from here and it was just crazy how about when hiring stations are 10 years experience in a five year product oh there's a bunch of dumb when it's on there too so yes there's there's already people was that new one is called coal it's a it's a new programming language by Google and there's already requests for people knowing a language just released I see people I don't know how true they are people joking about it so yes Cisco is a trunk port something my PF sense config yeah let's see I only use unified access points to home network and firewalls open sense VM on a forbidden router yeah I need to I'm going to do a follow up video on the forbidden router thing I was actually talking to Wendell about about that so I love that video by the way so I think it's pretty cool I have PF sense with TP Lincoln 5 eLands all working together never I have got there without your videos awesome glad to hear that I agree on the PF sense over unified firewall more features easier to config my PF sense my biggest issue with my business that odd place that I don't make enough dollars to hire someone even part time in ideas how it with oh with my business is that I'm in this odd place where I don't make enough dollars to hire someone even part time you have to charge more and I've talked about that before I have some backlog videos on this channel I don't remember which one I mentioned it I think it's called like building for growth or pricing pricing for growth and it's the problem a lot of people have when they start an IT business and I people think I'm gatekeeping and I don't ever want to say I am but I always ask like are you sure you should start a business because I hate my job isn't a business plan I'm not picking on you specifically but a lot of people go I'm just going to do it cheaper than the person I work for and then he realized that doesn't allow room for growth and all the expenses that you have as a business that allow you to hire people give them benefits and everything else and keep the machine running so you just have to raise prices I mean it is kind of a you can only cut costs so far a lot of times the only solution to you moving yourself to a spot where you can do it is to raise the prices also you know when I say I hate my job is not a business plan because I have a friend who makes really good money and he said I think I should start a business I'm like well how are you going to generate leads he has no idea he just thinks owning a business to be cool I'm like dude you make a lot of money and if you don't like where you work just go work somewhere else there's a lot of places hiring today so you know and it's no shame in that this you know there's it gets oversold that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur and I'm like you don't necessarily need to be but you do need to work somewhere that doesn't suck I will say that thanks for having set for 45 drives great technology and getting more people exposed yes I thought that was a wonderful video we're going to do some follow-ups on that too that was on the home lab show the whole stuff conversation 45 drives it was great I learned a lot and I went in there somewhat blind so I could ask better questions because I was genuinely curious and I'm going to work with the 45 drive scene to make a few more videos and carbon was the word we're looking for I want to say coal but carbon Google's got dumb names I mean we got go laying at least we can call it go laying but if you just say it's written in go like the game go the board game like that's not an easy thing to do yeah you're so right about documentation the systems I set up in the military have full step-by-step docs from start to finish my civilian job was a mess until it breaks yes yeah it's it's it's getting there the military is about frameworks and process and procedure there's a lot of I've always respected a lot of the people that came from the military for the process procedure they'll bring when I meet people with military backgrounds combined with it they're often really good because they have a discipline especially if they worked in a technological sector of it for the military like if they had I don't know what they call it but the what you were deployed as like your job you have as in the military non-military person so it's alluding me at the moment your job description there's a word for that you the military loves acronyms more than the tech probably or even more so than the tech industry but yes it's pretty awesome when you get that discipline and you organize it and then you realize but you know if you were in the military your understanding is better than the average civilian I see average because there's some civilians to definitely get it of how these process procedures lead to a better outcome especially in tech the thing is funny with you big buddy firewall is that I'm new and I can't tell the difference between when I'm screwing up or when it's screwing up yeah that's probably too too I have to go but I'm really going to cut your live stream thanks for all the great content hope you find a group to pick up on how they got hacked if you can definitely on my two list thank you for joining the live stream sharing leads converting them is the big thing yes most people do not have a good process it's like my first question for tech people because tech people frequently start businesses this is across the MSP space this is one of the reasons me and Sean are doing that business technicality channel link down below if you want to subscribe to it where you talk about business but we talk a lot about the MSP journey and it people who start businesses are frequently people who just didn't really have a solid plan but we're very technically adept that's why they're lacking on the marketing and sales side they usually weren't sales guys who started a business they were almost always 99% of the technical companies are founded by technical people without a sales engine and they have enough clients because they were helping someone or they had some contacts to get those first clients enough to get them so far but until they really build that marketing and sales and lead engine and put processes in place for it they just kind of they hover they don't really grow they maybe grow a little bit if they're lucky they latched on some clients that are growing too but that whole sales engine process was the hardest part I learned about my business not the technical side MOS that's it what's your MOS I just know I've heard that phrasing a lot so do you charge per hour per workday or fixed prices block hours and contract is both of options that we have so MOA someone said so military occupation specialty MOS makes sense okay so as MOA was a typo MOS sounds like I thought it was the right one hourly and project yes you can charge for an outcome we do charge for an outcome that would be our wiring jobs are especially done that way because they're there's a very tangible with a wiring job or a install of infrastructure it's not installed it's installed you know how to get there you quote it you bid it it's not done there's no ap's mount on a ceiling now there's ap's mount on a ceiling so the outcome is tangible so you can put a tangible amount of money on that you bid it you go it's going to cost you X dollars for these ap's to be from on the floor to on the ceiling but when you're dealing with it's way harder church for not coming you're dealing with like alright integrate this weird set of products that you have to tie into our network and get the sequel server set up and get all these other stuff well unless it's something that we do day in day out like a common product it's usually not you know it's not like hey how much to install QuickBooks it's almost like how much to do this entire large integration then you have to just start charging block hours for things do you recommend ST do you recommend better than gray log where you can see logs so much cleaner without spending half a year set up all the things what's STH I don't know what STH is so I don't the answer might be no but I'm not sure what STH is after switching from like sell the PF cents I'm amazed how many things a great documentation one of a big some any chance you guys will get OpenZia from OpenZia interviews um possibly that might be a chance Chris Roberts would be perfect for how they got heck I don't know that Chris Roberts has time so um yeah Chris Roberts would absolutely be perfect for how they got heck we work pink but for those of you that don't know and uh I'll jump I'll share this I'm gonna throw it in the links here so uh so much context switching I gotta do here don't worry folks I gotcha I have interviewed Chris Roberts I threw the link in there um Chris Roberts very interesting hacker did a fun interview about getting into cybersecurity specifically so this is a great interview it was a few years ago I posted it Xavier hosted it so this is from 2019 but yeah great um he's awesome so if you if you don't know and of course uh the infamous Xavier um and so you know he's also great cybersecurity guy personal friend of mine so yeah check that video out uh do you have a deployment for your gray log set from scratch um or I will have them contact gray log and get a support contract so a lot of times we're um we're doing things like uh you know pushing clients towards some of the support contracts for things and you know I understand like the question that was asked over here by RK where did you ask it was it up here this is one of those things like do I recommend something else well I love open source products I like open source products with business models attached to them and what I mean by business models attached to them is the fact that you can um whoops I uh we're gonna do it right in a second here great log I gotta learn how to type alright so we can pull this up but one of the things about gray log is you have a support model that you can buy and this is just one of those things like they have you know gray log security gray log open gray log operations pricing and you contact sales because it is custom to how you want to do it someone can be mad and I like when things are publicly priced but sometimes you're not and if you want help setting it up you just pay someone to set it up that's kind of the business model you can use it it's open source or you can contract gray log to pay them to set it up and get things going for you so that's one of the reasons um that we like that tool a lot so it's it's nice you can do that if you want to use it for free which is I like things are very accessible to people in the home labs and stuff like that awesome uh and this is the same thing with uh XCPNG so kind of similar here's XCPNG and you're like but Tom it's not you know I need help or I want support or I need an SLA agreement blah blah blah all those things that you need for corporate support well you just changed that.org into a .com and uh yeah look pricing look at this isn't that great you can give them money for their uh support as simple as that and you can buy it and it's you know very clear you can get the product but here's the support contracts that come with it so this is how it works on there um what VoIP solution you're pushing nowadays no back of day you're a big reessential fan years ago I liked reessential I won't lie um I got away from them and I would be uh I would say right now I mean right now what we are technically our offering is VoIP services we're a reseller for OIT VoIP um so we kind of have our own branded solution internally we're selling with it you know we don't want to deal with it it's out the back end is going to be my friend Ray at OIT so they're awesome uh yeah great setup great support uh easy to work with and I don't have to deal with a lot other than you know putting the sale putting the process in place and uh rolling out to our customers starting a tech business I'm guessing it would be similar to applying for jobs at several companies that don't necessarily have an open position uh drumming up business yeah uh great log provides an example docker compose file that says well too you can deploy great log with docker as another way to do it I have another open source recommended security model called wazoo yeah wazoo's been around for a while um it's just complex it's been a while to see if it's become less complex but I always found it to be a little it's based on osak and I learned osak before I learned wazoo and I liked it but boy I never did a video on it because it was just the cumbersome nature of it some of the complexities of dealing with it um wazoo is a fork essentially I can't tell if it's a fork or still based on osak uh it's definitely more popular than its original form um but there's still a lot of complexities to it now I know that since elastic owns it I think it's getting better but yeah that's the channel challenge with it is compared to the tools we use um it's not um it's not as easy as like setting a one for security setting a one just makes it way easier that's where the challenge comes in and there's really not an easy way to do this um to make a direct comparison to wazoo versus seven one you can look at the way they claim to do things but seven one is extremely um you know just in depth with what they do and considered quite good is as is huntress and the way they do security monitoring I don't know if wazoo can really compare to the threat detection that they do but that's a game of who's got the best dev team at the back end watching things um I you know I trust the dev team at huntress implicitly to be able to keep an eye on things and make sure things are good I don't know how that works with wazoo um I think they can do some custom api integrations uh it's all ip phones yeah it's all ip phone cloud based uh currently use free ppx for clients but it's too much work support that's why we stopped right there you nailed it currently and I would say we used to use free ppx for clients but um the support time is too much it's it's just became I didn't have enough people to support that along with all the other network engineering we support and it wasn't enough money though to justify hiring a full-time free pbx person which by the way there's not a ton of free pbx people out there if you if you do I know that's even been Chris's challenge Chris from cross talk solution has um you know he's put out there a couple times he's trying to hire free pbx people and it's been it's been a tough road to do so definitely a challenge for sure uh well it's up to get and get doctor compose path in slough before I spend a vm for gray log yeah doctor compose is definitely um you know the the low hanging fruit way to do it uh on the gray log topic though people ask and I have a client asking this too and people are talking about you know what do you log and I'm like what one log at all um provided you have storage and space to do so um but I may do some alerting videos and people uh over complicate that um you know I alert on login for one that's the like your low hanging fruit alerts we have um that we just kind of like to put in we I want to be notified if someone logs into something especially when it's something that doesn't have regular logins like SSH logins to all kinds of things uh it's if someone SSH is into any of our servers which pretty much is only me um or if one of my staff if there's some problem which it rarely is because all of our servers our linux servers are all automatic upgrade unintended upgrades they're just doing their thing uh so they're not like we need to log into them very often our pfcents we have a notification that comes through if someone logs in the pfcents it's simple because why would they log into pfcents you know well there's a reason they need to make a change that's fine there's not a reason for me ever to not be alerted of such things and uh it's one of those things when you're parsing stuff in the in gray log and we'll go ahead to go to the alerts um I can share these on the screen hold on let me make sure I gotta make sure because I don't want our alert where our alerts get sent to be public uh let me pull up one of them yeah there's no email address in here so I'll just share it real quick boop so when you're looking at the alerts it's just really simple of if someone logs into my invoice ninja SSH send me a notice because they shouldn't be logging in unless there's an adjustment or a thing to be made so you just set up an event I was logging because I was doing something today so there's the log of it it's really simple um how a lot of that works and you can also say failed login attempts you know another good thing to alert on because no one in my internal infrastructure should ever fail to log in so really any login attempts um are what you kind of want to alert on and people ask this question a lot let me find the pfcents one because there's an assumption that you have to structure the data and put it into something in order to get it to work and you don't at all um let me zoom in real big here to make it look you can do a search query like this and I'll bring it back up you can do search queries inside of here such as index php colon successful login you don't have to know the field that that went into you don't have to structure that piece of data into a field to parse it to trigger it you do need to filter an index and parse that into a field if you want to grab that data and integrate it with something else but if you just want to know when index php also has a successful login statement well then you just pull that and send it as an alert and a story and so I'll probably do some alert videos coming up um on gray log but they're that simple you don't have to structure because someone more than one person is contacting me or comments they've sent into forums well don't you have to put structure and parse all the data out in order to alert on it I'm like not really you just send me the log containing this is it formatted pretty no doesn't need to be no I can see the data that's in there it tells me the username that logged in the time they logged in I mean if I wanted to aggregate and make a summary of the data yes I would have to parse it and put it in some fields but I don't care too because I don't have a use case for that you know there's a lot of simplicity to when you do this gray log stuff it makes it so much easier um do you also are redirected to the community page from gray log after clipping marketplace they can't find any official extractors um I don't know just go google search for gray log extractors they're usually on github um let me look at the gray log see is there a CT or gray log I guess what I usually look for extractors based on yeah I mostly find github stuff that's usually why I get them if you go into the forum they have like a forum where you can find some of them as to for the gray log extractors so there's they can be found places but you can write your own they're just written I hate red jacks I'm not good at it so biggest problem with alerting on failed login as you find it who cannot type well in for us we use password manager so no one better be typing in these things I'll find out who's trying to type that's then that's the bigger issue ooh gray log so Veronica's looked at it too I bet Veronica knows regex though if I had to guess she's probably better at regex than me I don't know answer in the comments below uh thank you for your videos running pfcents as a sim bridging service uh two years awesome setting up pfcents remotely via wan um I just you know restrict it to your IP address that's one way to do it uh tail scale complete another way to do it um tail scale is really cool it gives you option you can administer it over tail scale um there's another option so those are a couple different ways you can do it but opening up a firewall port and restricting it to a management IP that you you know static IP that you have access to that's a popular way to do that I once got an argument with a CTO about the necessity uh for logging logins they aren't to see yeah you shouldn't have had an argument with that person they should have just understood a video about sidecar log collector filters be great I always question if I have a set up the best way or not they have videos that gray log is put out I would actually reference those because I haven't used a sidecar at all so um I I did the videos before gray log had videos then gray logs started putting out some more videos I reached out to the person doing videos he said let's do some videos together I said great when do you want to do them and I'm waiting on a reply um so if gray log watches this hey I'm over here um I don't mind doing some video horrible at regex but good at cobalt if you don't know Veronica explains has a YouTube channel so go look and check out the great videos that she has done like and subscribe over there lots of fun stuff she's among us fellow YouTube geeks we have we have behind the scenes there's a persistent communication going on that's why you see people like me and Veronica and Jay and Jeff Kearling and Jeff from Kraft Computing and lots of other people Chris from crosstalk we do chat with each other about YouTube and about content creation and we occasionally collab with each other including people like Wendell as well so yes all stuff in gray log marketplace that I've is for older versions of gray log yeah problems importing extractors yeah that's a big dent hi Tom do you ever write PowerShell scripts um the best PowerShell scripts are from Kelvin so I'm going to give a shout out to my friend who writes this stuff um I am not the PowerShell person but he is so CyberDrain Kelvin I know my real name but CyberDrain has a lot of solid scripts that help techies manage things lots of stuff it's all free uh he's believe he's got all this on a github as well so yes uh you can sponsor some of the stuff on there but yeah lots of things that uh he's a busy he's a busy person uh dropping a lot of code by the way he works for a large IT man of service writer so uh his code is very actionable and useful to other service writers because as he solves problems he dumps it out on github so you can enjoy the solving the problem together every time I write regex I end up on the grep man page uh open yep pretty much but trying to get the opening port thing to work but it's sorting me currently trying to uh do it with primary LAN as LAN web source um I don't know usually I go to WAN I open a port and you open a port to the firewall self so I'm not exactly sure what what you're doing wrong hey no problem Veronica agreed CyberDrain is solid and full of content yes and I I'm into some chat groups with Kelvin he's great um just good person to know good person to be able to ask questions you know Kelvin actually started something um where's one of his projects here it would have been with uh what was that called one of them see if it's in here I thought it was in here maybe it's on his CyberDrain blog isn't typing reload this page there we go weird uh here we go PowerShell for creating network maps uh this is something it started and there's still more that can be done with it but it's basically um unified PowerShell module uh module a friend of mine asked me and I'm that friend uh because it's a pretty awesome project and this is just kind of neat it's uh he does have a uh okay maybe this person was where it started there's a few there's some cool stuff anyways um you can find all this on there it's uh it's pretty neat lots of lots of learning to do at least I know it's not ubiquity up this time it's actually Premiere Land as UDM Pro so yeah uh do make sure you're not blocking Bogan networks on land because that will cause uh you if you're coming from a non-public IP address and by default I believe the default option is checked to block um RFC 1918 networks so you want to make sure those are not uh blocked there's no comparing Vios and PF sets that's not that's not even uh an apple to oranges um comparison so yeah it's they're very different products not likely I don't use Vios so I'm not likely to review it also Vios is not the same as um PF sets at all I know they're working on a web interface for it I have no idea the status of it because if for it didn't even have a web GUI I still don't see one I don't know this so this is the what appears to be the most recent update for it I don't know not something I've used but it looks like someone's working on uh making a web GUI so it's completely command line driven and they're working on a web UI PF sets is not very command line driven but has a really extensive web UI that lets you do everything that's why they're not when it comes to usability in learning curve PF sets has a lower bar of entry compared to Vios so I don't even know if Vios has all the same features but because Vios is Linux technically if there's a feature you can't find you can usually throw it back in there um so yeah there's that so I wouldn't say that they're the same all right what else did I have in my list here I think I may have reached the end of all this stuff we've got to the errata what does Tom do um I thought I was doing a video about that because I had a fun conversation with someone the other day asking what I do now and I'm like well I make sure all my staff is um paid and make sure they have all the things and tools they need to do their job and uh meet with customers and all kinds of fun stuff like that but um I don't know where the interest level is in a lot of that it was interesting conversation because it makes me think a little more critically about what my tasks are which a lot of them center around you know enabling my staff because I'm the anti micromanager I don't want to micromanage things I want my staff to bring questions to me and then me put a process in place so that question doesn't come up again and in back to me I want them to be able to have the authority the means and the tools to get something done so that is a big thing of what Tom does as he works yeah the the micromanaging of stuff is in there oh now I know what I'm talking about this will be the final thing before I wander off here uh this is always the scary stuff is where did that go where did it go oh did they remove it is the post removed huh I'm not seeing it oh here we go I just was overlooking it there's not a lot of data on this yet it's in bleeping computer um there's just not a lot to talk about just yet and this is a uh manager-survider called um net standard in Kansas City announced this morning their host environment was hit by a cyber attack and of course all the discussion down below about it I can throw a link in here for that but it's easy enough to find um but yeah this is uh you know one of those things that happened a lot and it didn't take long for me to in I don't know what happened we're very speculating here um but one thing I noticed at this particular uh place was well had a lot of uh things publicly exposed and because they had so many things publicly exposed it made you wonder a lot how they got hit if they were hit from their public exposures or not and uh it's just those things that it's scary as an IT search writer and why we do so much internal auditing um and it never feels like enough because getting attacked is just yeah just bad you know what I mean just a lot of problem so and then they did have stuff in shodan um yeah just so much stuff it was it was kind of a mess and to go further to talk about this as a topic we don't know if this is related or not but let's talk about this um this was a uh public post on LinkedIn and basically and let me jump so open an image a new tab there we go oh this is the interpreted version but this was someone selling access okay zoom it in here yeah there we go access to the msp panel 50 companies more than 100 esx i and a thousand servers all corps are american and are prospering in the same time zone I want to work qualitatively I don't have enough hands in terms of preparation there are little things left so my percentage of profit would definitely be high for details and suggestions private message what you're looking at is what they referred to as an initial access broker selling access to an msp now we don't know if this was that company or not but this came about 48 hours before that company became attacked and someone posting in a forum and in basically you know a dark web forum saying yes I've gained access who wants to help me ransomware to this company and this is how they sell this is a public view of how they sell um access they're referred to as initial access brokers and this is how it happens so yeah it's just a mess um uh do you oh do you accept new contracts even the staff is already 100 book maybe make sure you have enough work if all client if a client quits relationship um we we tell people like someone needed a wiring job done we say yes but are you okay with it happening on this date in two weeks three weeks in the future whatever it is that's just we're very honest with any of the people we don't accept things we can't do because that would be stupid um I probably you're right there's someone out there doing that I don't doubt but that's a um not something or a practice we participate in we will only accept things we can do and we're always always clear up front when we will do those things some woman tells us they want something done great we're going to put a time schedule on it because you don't want to take on things and and start off at a bad foot in a bad relationship with the client so hopefully that makes sense there just to clarify I want to remove firewall rules for ROC 19 networks then uncheck those boxes there's just a couple boxes on on the WAN that you unchecked for that but nonetheless um I'll leave you with that that Kansas City incident um is interesting the fact that someone it seems very coincidental was uh having access so yeah it's a mess that whole thing is a mess it is a big challenge and a big worry of anyone running an IT business and goes back to that do you really want to start an IT business and be a target that part sucks and I think that's it I have for the day folks I'm going to go one around and do something different now and uh that's about it anything any last questions in the last couple minutes here I don't I'll give you guys a couple more minutes to see any more questions or smash that like button because I do see 130 people 132 people and not 132 likes business is hard yeah it's complicated and confusing hey talk to you later Travis so smash that like button absolutely so you can get a few more likes before I leave can I share that screen what if I did this if I went and did this and I put it here and then did this you guys can see the likes and now I gotta zoom in 129 people 62 64 let's get those likes up there before I leave there's they're going up we gotta get it to the internet funny number man we're two away to an internet funny number so two more likes come on 68 come on one more gotta reach an internet funny number all right cool we pass it thank you very much everyone I should suggest that you know more throughout the series as we do it but hey why not 70 damn 76 uh right now is what I'm reading so awesome well as always thanks to everyone who joined uh see you in the forums is a easy way to communicate with me sometimes on Twitter as well uh Twitter's not for tech support Twitter's places to say hi forums are for tech support so I do spend a lot of time answering questions in there so if you're looking for something more complex so awesome and glad to see all of you here oh and uh who else was in here see someone else oh yeah thank you also Veronica for joining in so hey have a great evening have a great night I'll see you in the in the chat where we usually chat we have our little youtuber group where we chat with everything behind the scenes so thanks everyone and uh take care


I would like to thank Nathan for inviting me to speak and just to explain we're going to split this talk into two parts. I'm going to say a little bit about specifically what I've been doing with regard to data on the Beyond Boundaries project, but the last time that I wrote a paper on data management and databases in numismatics was five years ago, so all of my knowledge is now obsolete as dinosaurs. So my colleague Amelia Dowler, who currently deals with a whole bunch of databases, SNG and the various ANS Oxford databases, she will take over halfway through the talk and give a bit more detail about how numismatic databases operate more widely than simply the one that I'm working with. So I'll first of all begin by introducing the British Museum's database. Now this is the one that I've primarily worked with during the project. I've worked with other numismatic databases in the past, but the BM1 is the one that I'm currently spending most of my time working with. And somebody in our AS department will get irritable, I'm sure, at the simplifications in the description I'm about to give you, but it consists of four different databases. A database for managing the metadata associated with the objects, which was once called MAGUS, is now, when I arrived at the museum, was called Merlin and is now called MI+. A database currently called Odin, which manages all of the images associated with objects, these are the two databases that we put data into. So upload images into Odin, type things into Merlin, then connect those in some way. And then two shadow databases that exist within the museum that disseminate this. So a copy is made of MI+, and a copy is made of Odin, and collectively these two other databases are called Collections Online. And if you access data from outside, so here's our input, here is you accessing data from outside, what you see are these two shadow databases, which in theory contain the same information as the two places where we put data in, accepting, of course, things like personal addresses, precisely where the object is located in the museum, the kind of thing that we don't want you to know, but we want to remember ourselves. In principle, in practice, the link between those has been broken for how long? That's an unfair question since July. Since July, okay. So what you see when you come to the museum is not the data that we currently see when we're looking at this. The system is excellent at preserving data. It has mixed success with disseminating data. So what it effectively acts like is a repository. Now, it's worth saying that alongside these two databases online, one of the things that happens is to transform the data into a form that other computers can get at. And Amelia will talk a little bit about portal databases in a little while. Every department in the museum has a different workflow, a different way of arranging what it does. Coins and medals, getting data onto the databases consists of three steps. You have a pile of things and you have to put them in order. And you must do this before you can do anything else because the data that we put on is not inherent in the objects. It's created by our taxonomic processes. It exists. A really good example of this is diameter. Ancient coins do not have a diameter. Circles have diameters and ancient coins are not circles. But every coin that goes into the database gets a diameter, which means you have to decide which measurement you are going to take and how you are going to take that measurement, rulers, calipers, before you can actually put data in. And this is not consistent. I measure the diameter of a coin from the top to the bottom of the design. It turns out that the colleague that I worked with five years ago entering the same set of data, alternating coins, measured whichever distance passed through the centre that was longest. And my Roman colleagues downstairs all measured from left to right. Meaning three different measurements were going into the data. Once you've got everything in the department ordered, you can create metadata, the diameter and description of the coin, a type. A hugely important typology that you've created academically can go into the database that allows the coins to be grouped and recovered later. And you can take images of the coins. Ideally images of coins consist of two images welded together. The front and the back of the coin placed into a single file so that they're not easily separated. One of the issues that arises with this workflow is time. It's very, very hard to automate data entry for coins because it requires you to know something about coins. It turns out it's incredibly easy to automate photography. When I arrived at the museum, the practice was to scan coins on a flatbed scanner. Then take the image you had scanned and use the white paint brush tool. Everybody is familiar with the paint brush tool in Photoshop. And colour everything that wasn't the coin white by hand. Very carefully so you didn't overrun the edge of the coin. Now we put coins underneath a fixed mount camera. We photographed them under a vertical fixed lighting that doesn't cast a shadow. And we have the computer run over lunch, remove all of the background information and combine the obverse and reverse image together so that it's all done when we get back. It takes about 30 seconds whereas entering the same, even basic data for the same coin takes about 5 minutes, significantly longer for certain coins than that. Exactly how long it takes to order the coins of course depends on how much people already know about them and how much of a mess they're in when you arrive. So there are differences in the amount of time. And this creates an issue with our activity. So for example, we held an event on the Huns recently. As part of that I spent 5 hours and I photographed every relevant Hunnit coin in the department. Which meant that I could pull them out when I needed to for the event, I could carry them with me to the event. To have created data records for them and remember we need both to get them online would have taken about 4 weeks. So that hasn't been done. And it did take me actually until relatively late in the project to realise that A, that was really bad and B, there was a way available in the project to solve this. The issue is that the database itself is very robust. It's backed up extensively and off-site short of some major natural disaster striking the whole of South England. The British Museum's data is going to survive. However, the images of coins are stored on memory sticks, CDs and portable drives. They wouldn't take anything more than somebody accidentally leaving a magnet in the wrong place to get rid of everything you've produced. But we do have Xenodo. We can upload all of the images while they're waiting for their metadata to Xenodo and store them safely there. There are some limitations. Xenodo is even worse at disseminating data in many ways than the British Museum's database. Once they're up there, you don't seem to be able to pull all of the images back out. Unless you also upload a second copy. You can't change them if one of them turns out to be the wrong image. It's nowhere near as good as the British Museum's database. But what it does is temporarily store, or in fact permanently store, this part of the workflow. Here are all the images now. At some point in the future we might get round to being able to put them on the database. One of the problems that databases have and they're much more apparent at the British Museum than anywhere else because the British Museum is very old. So it got into databases in the 1980s for recording its collection. The ancestors of MI Plus are nearly 30 years old now. In fact probably slightly more than 30 years old now. So we actually experience conceptual and linguistic drift in our database. When we first introduced the field that records an inscription, somebody decided that the appropriate way to do this was to have a field within it for the language and a field for the script. This is a drop-down from the recent language field. You will see that there are seven, eight different entries for Cypriot Greeks of one type or another. There's some interesting ones on there that look... Dunish. I'm not sure if Dunish is a typo for Danish or if we genuinely have some Tolkien-related artefact in the museum. D and E, I've no idea what somebody was thinking when they put that in, and Devan Agari as language. But my favourite of all the things that got into this field over the years was, does not seem to be Latin, right? Which some classicist clearly believed was all the information you needed if your inscription was not actually Latin. So what we need are guard dogs. This is something that we have at the British Museum. We have two features to the database that make the database particularly ideally suited for numismatic data. Other than its robustness, one of them is multi-user curation. I am curating data that other people in the past have created. Other people will curate it after me. Other people are checking me. And more importantly we have guard dogs. And the guard dogs check that we're all using as far as is possible roughly the same concepts when we put our data in. And one of them at the moment is running through that language list item by item making sure that everything in it actually makes some coherent sense. Amelia is going to talk a little bit more about that in a second. So the longevity of the database, and we now have practical experience in that because the database is 30 years old. But we want it to be 200 years old. It's going to need to be there in two centuries that data is the robustness of the storage, the multi-user curation and the guardianship custodianship that's exercised over it. What the database is still not good at is version control. Though it's getting better, right? And dissemination. But in a sense the dissemination is secondary to having the data stored in a usable format. And Amelia will now explain some of the ways in which other numismatic entities have begun to engage with the problem of dissemination and some of the practical issues that that has brought on. Thank you for joining us. Yes, I'll reach the computer. Otherwise I'll have to get you to change slides for me. Oh, yes, that's all. It seems a bit odd. Hello, everyone, and apologies. You may have noticed me scooting in rather late. Please blame southeastern trains and not me. As Robert said earlier, I'm going to talk quite broadly about numismatic databases. I don't know if there are any numismatists in the audience. I'm assuming not. But what I say is applicable to any kind of specialised object database. The same sorts of conceptual problems occur whenever you're dealing with a specialist object. Thank you very much, Robert, for inviting me. And Nathan as well. I haven't met you. You are Nathan. Thanks, Nathan. Again, sorry for being late. So what I'm doing here is a very brief survey of how institutions deal with their numismatic data and also a little on how projects deal with numismatic data. These are all object-based databases. I have a limited time. This is necessarily quite brief. And this is a developing field. So for a lot of what I'm going to say, it's developing. People are still working on this. So to start off with, I've brought up two examples here. On the left you can see the Bibliotech National in Paris. They're Gallica websites. And over here, this is information about the Ashmolean's collections online. So this first part of the talk will be about institutional databases, how institutions deal with their data and what you may not appreciate about what the institutions are doing behind the scenes and the effect that that has on the presentation of their data through their databases. So on the left is the Gallica database from Paris. As you might guess from the name Bibliotech National, this is the National Library of France. Coins, as objects, have had a peculiar history in many ways and were quite often classified as manuscripts and thought of as metal manuscripts because of course many have inscriptions. And that is the history of coins in the British Museum as well. They used to be part of the manuscripts departments. And in a number of major institutions around the world, coin collections are still held in national libraries. The coin departments in Bibliotech National came across a problem a few years ago. Their building had to be redeveloped. They were going to close their collection to all researchers and people would not be able to have access to their material for a number of years. The solution to this of course was to digitise as much as possible so that during the renovations people would still be able to access the collections. However, the existing institutional database is a library database and so the coin room was faced with shillhorning their information into that database. You may not be able to see it at the back, but the mint I've given you, an example of the mint of Athens at the bottom here, the mint of Athens is under author in the library database. This is what they had to do to get the information out there. This isn't a permanent solution. They are working very hard behind the scenes to improve this. But this was the quick fix that they came up with to sort out this problem. It does mean that searching can be quite difficult. There isn't very much data on there at the moment. Again, having specialist subfields from the misbatic data, these don't already exist in the library database. So there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes to try to fix that. But for the time being, there is at least a way at getting at the material. So if you didn't know that history, this looks like a very odd choice of how to present your data, but there are reasons for it. The Ashmolean, when they started putting their collection online, followed quite a typical path for institutions, which is that departments within the institution might have had someone with an interest in databases or funding, and they developed individual databases. So here's a list. Actually, that hasn't come out terribly well at all. There are multiple Ashmolean object databases, which were not connected with each other, which had their own fields, their own terminology. So you couldn't search the entire Ashmolean collection. You had to have specialist knowledge and go into, for example, Roam Provincial Coinage, and search for data there, and then come out of that and search the Beasley archive, for example, for further information and try to connect it together. This is, as I said, this is a very typical way that institutions in the past have approached the management of their data. They're publicly facing data, I should say. And so what the Ashmolean is currently doing is working on having a cross-institution database so that you can access all of this material through one search. This is particularly important if you're not so interested in coins. I can't think why. It might not be. But if, for example, you're searching for images of, I don't know, the goddess Artemis, you'd be interested in coins, yes, but you'd be interested in vases, you'd be interested in mosaics. You'd be interested in a whole load of different kinds of objects, and having to search individually is, say, the least annoying, and it runs the risk of you missing certain types of objects. So here are the British Museum and the Ashmolean. This is how the Ashmolean is now presenting the object searches. You can search across the whole institution, but you can still have access to specialised databases. You can restrict what you're searching for. And I think this is actually quite a neat solution. It's a work in progress. They're still adding a lot of data to this, so not all of their institutional data is out there yet. One of the criticisms of the British Museum website, and this is the search page, is that you do search the entire institution, and quite often people come to our website after very specific classes of object or information. And they're faced with this. People find it quite difficult to use, and they may pull back things that they're just not interested in. Now, given that we have several million objects in that database, this can be problematic if you've used quite broad search terms. Even when you're searching more specifically, you can often pull back thousands and thousands of records as well. So this is something that institutions really need to think about how to present this to the public. I, as a member of staff at the British Museum, I could use this, I know how it works. It's great for me because I can do all sorts of detailed searching. A member of the public will find this quite difficult. As Robert highlighted, the collections online of the British Museum has not been updated since July. This is because these conversations are happening behind the scenes, and there is going to be a new way of searching the database soon. We don't quite know what it's going to look like yet, so I can't tell you. But who knows? I'm hoping it'll be much more user-friendly. So, as Robert said, our database has been around in various forms for about 30 years. When you're approaching, as an institution, making a database, your institution has probably been around for a few hundred years. You want your database to be future-proofed. You want people to still be able to use it. What we don't want is every couple of decades someone having to rewrite the whole thing. This is a waste of time, it's a waste of money and effort. I've spent an awful lot of time putting data into the database. I do not want to think that whoever succeeds me in my job will then have to redo absolutely everything. It's wasteful. So, I'll put the top right. This is one of our old access orders. This is actually brilliant because it's got pictures of the coins. Someone's lovingly drawn them in. You can see down there on the right. That's very unusual for coins. Usually it's just a line or so of description. This is not always enough to identify an individual coin. Coins, of course, are mass-produced. So, you might have ten examples of a particular type in your collection and you don't necessarily know which one it is. We don't put object numbers on the coins. They are only identified by the information that is with them on small tickets. So, if you were to drop an entire tray of these things and have to put it as I have had to do in the past, someone else dropped the tray, if I would like to point out. I wasn't that angry. You do have to put the data back together again and it can take quite a long time. This is an example of collections online. This is one of my coins from Carthage. You probably can't read any of it. Don't worry about that because there's not very much data there for you to read. There's a nice big blank square for where the image should be. What we don't want to do on databases is replicate the errors of the past and not to have very much useful data there. However, the decision was made when we released our data online was to release absolutely everything, apart from anything that was security-sensitive. So, you do get records like this. Other institutions take a different approach. The Moons cabinets at the Bodum Museum in Berlin, for example, they have beautiful records. I highly recommend going and having a look at them. You can zoom in on the images of the coins, lovely descriptions, absolutely beautiful, but it is limited to what they have had time to do so far. They have not got their entire collection out there. At least you know how many coins we've got, but there is always this conversation between an institution like mine and my colleagues in Berlin who have this fantastic, useful, wonderful, beautiful data and ours, which looks like we're not trying. I have 100,000 coins to look after. I haven't got to this one yet. So, I'll do my best. The Ashmolean, the Hebron coin room there, are taking a middle ground. So, you have an option of seeing their approved final records, or you can click on a button and see absolutely everything, no matter what state the data is in. But at least you're forewarned that it may not be perfect. Although that does raise the question of, is data ever perfect? Will there never be further changes? For example, if something goes on exhibition somewhere, should there be a public history of that? If an attribution to a mint or a ruler changes, how final is the final data? With everything that you've seen so far, you'll hopefully have noticed that there are quite controlled fields for the data. There are still a number of databases out there. At the top left, this is Coin Archives, which is a archive of auctions, coin auctions. This employs a lot of free text. It can be quite difficult to search and to reduce down to the kind of data you're interested in. But again, at least all the data is out there if you have the time to plod through all of it. It's a very blunt tool, and you can't use it in a very detailed way. So, the trend really is towards these more controlled fields. But, as any institution will say, it all depends on the resource that you have to be able to input good data into those controlled fields. This requires considerable staff time and expense. One of the problems, of course, is what happens when a particular project finishes or a curator leaves or whoever is responsible for that data leaves if there is no replacement. What then happens to the data? The traditional way of publishing coins is over here on the left. This is the earliest coin catalogue from the British Museum, and that was published in 1826. So, there has been a very long history of publication of the collection at the British Museum. It's the same of most major institutions which hold coins or indeed any object. This on the right is the Syllagene-Nymorum brycorum website. The Syllagene-Nymorum, or SNG, project is the oldest British Academy project. It publishes collections of Greek coins in the UK in hard copy catalogue form. The database on the website replicates that hard copy. It never changes. It is a digital version of that hard copy. This can cause some institutional problems because there are a couple of British Museum SNGs on that website. Because it is a much more specific set of search fields for coins, researchers will quite often use that, and then email me asking me questions. But the data may not be, there is a drift between the publication of that data and what we now have in our own database. This can cause problems, and it will only continue as the years go on. This also raises the question, do we need to track the changes? Do we need to track when we change attributions or when people's opinions change of which mint is which, which ruler produced which coin? At the moment on the British Museum database, this is something you can add in a free text field. I haven't seen on any other databases controlled fields where you can put a history of an object. I think increasingly this is something we're going to have to start tackling. The future of databases is probably portal databases using the institutional data that places like the British Museum or the Ashmolean or the Bibliotech National put through. These are two examples from the American Lismatic Society. This is coins of the Roman Empire based on the Roman imperial coinage catalogs and Pella, which is based firstly on the Alexander coinage published by Price in 1991. They are dependent on institutional databases and people there putting in the right data because then that data is extracted and presented in databases like this. These databases have a big advantage for other project databases in that the American Lismatic Society has given institutional backing to these projects. Quite often the problem is when a project ends, the database is orphaned and it becomes obsolete, links break. This can be difficult and there are huge implications for firstly getting the data in lines funding implications for that but very rarely do people work funding for maintenance into their projects or consider what happens to their data afterwards. To finish up, some specific object problems which as researchers you may not think about but this is how institutions approach things. In the world of Greek coins and Lismatic more broadly there is now a project called Lymysma which is an international group trying to come together and explain what terminology we use and so that can be applied broadly across databases. Hopefully this will have been given the stop sign. This will mean that in the future conversations can continue and institutions can provide data for researchers to use which can then be replicated and managed in a more appropriate fashion. Thank you very much.


It's Mark here hanging out with Chris from IASA and we're going to find out a little bit more about what they do and exactly what they want to achieve here at the Property Buyer Show in the Sansan Convention Centre.  In this area as we look at the economy, it is now the renters market, most of them are renting these days those that want to buy are the ones who determine the price of the property because the past two months some of the properties that were selling, the owners wanted so much but the buyer could offer a little but because the owners were desperate of selling they were taking all the offers that were given to them by the buyers so I can say it is the buyers market until maybe March next year but it has started becoming buyers market from August.


According to the largest study of risk factors for death in human history, a poor diet causes more death than anything. Cigarettes only kill about 8 million people a year, whereas humanity's diet kills millions more. What's the worst aspect of our diet? Processed meat, a Twinkie, soda? No. The five deadliest things about our diet are inadequate fruit intake, not enough fruit, not enough whole grains, not enough vegetables, too much salt, and not enough nuts and seeds. Nuts should come as no surprise, since interventional trials have shown that eating nuts improves artery function and arterial diseases like heart disease are among our leading killers. But that's not all nuts can do. They may also improve blood sugar control, lower cholesterol, suppress inflammation, reduce oxidative stress, and feed our friendly gut flora. All nuts are just tree nuts. What about peanuts? What about peanut butter? About 50% of peanut consumption in the U.S. is through peanut butter, but the association between peanut butter and mortality has not been thoroughly evaluated. To get that granular, though, we can call on the NIH AARP study. It's the largest prospective health and diet study in history that followed more than a half million people since the 1990s. And nut consumption in general appeared to protect against all-cause mortality, meaning nut eaters live on average longer lives, and specifically are less likely to die from cancer, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, infectious causes, so maybe they help immunity as well, liver disease, and kidney disease. However, no such associations were found for peanut butter. So when it comes to living longer, peanut butter doesn't seem to count. Why? Well, we know peanut butter consumers tend to eat more meat, smoke cigarettes, and we're less likely to exercise, but the researchers controlled for all that— red meat, white meat, tobacco use, exercise, and vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, so it's not like the peanut butter eaters were just eating more white bread sandwiches or something. The researchers didn't control for sugar, though, so it's possible they could have been eating more sugary jelly. It could also be the processing that goes into making peanut butter, the added trans fat, oil, salt, and sugar, but regular nuts are also often needed with added oil, sugar, and salt. Could it just be the peanuts themselves? I mean, technically they aren't nuts, so maybe they just don't have the same benefits, but no, a meta-analysis of all such studies found the same nut-like benefits for whole peanuts, just not peanut butter. Well, one thing missing from even no salt, oil-free, sugar-free, nut-and-seed butters is intact cellular structure. As I noted, and how not to diet, no matter how well we chew, whole or chopped nuts, some of the nutrients remain trapped in tiny particles that deliver a bounty of prebiotic goodness to our friendly flora. That makes me wonder if there would have been any difference between chunky and smooth peanut butter. In the meanwhile, there is compelling evidence to recommend the use of nuts, preferably raw nuts over salted or toasted, and whole or chopped nuts rather than nut butters, at least three times a week in order to maximize our chances of living longer and healthier lives.


Holy crap, that was incredible Up towards the coast to look for some good old-fashioned water detail wish me luck heading off to the beach Hoping for some good clouds really expecting any got this makeshift rig on the bag So I only got to carry one. I guess it'll have to work It says it's only 83 outside, but I feel like it's about a hundred and fifty.  I've been there once before and I got an awesome sunset, maybe one of the best that I've ever gotten and I Certainly don't think I'm gonna get that tonight, but I'd like to try something else So it was like 85 degrees in San Jose. I Love the coast. It's like it says it's 69 degrees here. That is what I'm talking about But parking is a disaster I'm thinking there may be too many people and I may need to go find somewhere smaller I'm gonna try and find a spot to park and Assess the situation not sure going to be the right spot Super pretty and I love it and the sunset looks like it might be nice, but I think That there's just too many people Maybe I'll have a walk down the beach and see if there's a better place Starting to get pretty nice out here. So I'm starting to go down Starting to get a little darker can start getting some long exposures and We'll see how it turns out man. I am kicking myself in the butt for not bringing a wide-angle lens These clouds are Insane Sun's going down Just getting some horizon shots right now. Super pretty.  Look at this.  I'm out of here. Let's talk about how I process this image I did everything in the lightroom. I shot the image at a hundred and twenty-one millimeters ISO 100 to get the best quality F 22 to get some nice depth and make the exposure as long as I could that gave me point six seconds of an exposure So here's the original import This is the raw image and I started out by making basic adjustments to the color Contrast highlight shadows and just really tried to give it a little bit of vibrance and clarity to make the colors in the sky Pop here and also the color in the water I then added a curves adjustment, which basically Creates more contrast. I brought up the highlights and brought down the shadows You can see this is getting really dark here and I actually don't like that But I knew I was going to change it later typically always use the lens correction It does a really good job of not distorting the image Then I added a vignette and a little bit of de-hazing and you can see this got really dark down here What I noticed was in the sky. There were so many Sensor spots. I need to get this thing clean. Look at this. They're freaking everywhere. So painstakingly I went through I Adjusted the angle of the horizon to make it straight and I brightened it up just a bit to get exactly What I was hoping for this is the final image If you enjoyed this content go ahead and hit that thumbs up button and do us a big favor and subscribe We're bringing one of these things. Do you ever week a lot of work goes into it? We really hope you enjoyed it Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you later