TLO was we are on twitch. We are Live by the time you see this we won't be so just leave a like comment subscribe turn on your post notification bells Let's continue to grow the family from Chicago to the UK Remember if you want to see a live a previous live or be ready for the next batch of lives go to twitch.com Or download the app however you want to get and put this in right here Oh, you can't even see it the lit one you see it with the hashtags. That's my username We do watch stuff on there that we do not watch on YouTube like top gear. I'm out of watch top gear Y'all will never see it on YouTube But you can see it here Don't forget man. We got patreon and we got um Merch as well I got it on my way. I think somebody just bought something salute Ah Just a channel for news working, but poor millions in work and in poverty I got a lot to say about this copyright disclaimer under section 107 of the copyright act 1976 Allowance is made for fair use purposes such as criticism comment news reporting teaching scholarship and research Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing non-profit educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use No copyright infringement intended all rights belong to their respective owners true low-key YouTube premium Probably one of the best things that I ever done as a reaction channel besides learned how to be one of the best editors on the platform Let's get into this man. This is a real life thing working and still poor and like it's tough I shouldn't feel people be working just to survive. I shouldn't feel bad that I can't eat every day Sometimes you don't want to come home. She kept me, you know, I work five days a week and I still have to use a community shop Millions of people in the UK are in paid employment, but still struggling to make ends meet We are penny pinching with counting the pennies every day So I have school today and then after school right after school I have work So I could get home between 11 and half one Yeah, tired already Do I'm tired in this four day of school didn't go to work and Barely be able to eat in France. I didn't talk to my family. I just Live by myself. I have to do everything by myself The final year of school is never easy, but when you're on your own It's more than just exams and deadlines groceries budgets All of that kind of stuff. That's me. Otherwise, it just wouldn't get done I pack lunch packets of noodles because it's cheaper to do and you know, what's crazy, bro Like she said like she's on her own. She's really on her own She she lives by herself. She can't call nobody for help like a lot of people that are coming from like other like places Into the country like immigrant families That's really the that's really what it is Like you go you on your own. I got you here You got to do the rest Or I know at least growing up in Chicago the black community. I'm only speaking for the black community now I don't know about any other communities because I'm obviously black and grew up black Sorry, but I'm speaking on that that we have right now once you 18 You going really In most stories like you're out of there you get out Here's the world and I think that's the wrong way to do things I don't think that's the right way to do things I think other communities got it right and we got it wrong 100% Because that's not you at 18. We know nothing. We've been taught nothing in school about the real world Nothing has prepared nothing. We're not prepared and you know, it was shocking and Then parents wonder why we back at home at 25 like come on now But if anything ever goes wrong in my daughter's life, come on Period. I'll always have a room for you Or or or the couch is always but like you in there Don't even worry about it. First of all, I wouldn't even tell my daughter to leave You can stay until you're married. I don't care You get me but just don't let it be passed, you know, I'm saying Don't go crazy Everything's getting more expensive But you're not getting any richer. You're not getting paid anymore So it's like you either have to save excessively or you pay for food and You don't have money left over for bills and stuff like that Shouldn't feel bad that I can't eat every day. That's not a good thing at all. How long have you had to go without food? probably longest maybe two or three days Hopefully no one else has to be in this situation, but water helps like because you trick yourself into feeling for Kofira is retaking her last year of school after balancing work studies and housing became too much I was just skipping a lot more to work so that I'd have money to pay my rent by doing that I did almost cost myself my education School have helped me quite a bit. I think everyone knows this is stuff. We're not great for me I wasn't really eating properly sleeping properly Doing anything properly. I guess the hardest thing about it. It's like no one really taught me how to do it Politicians repeatedly tell voters the best way out of hardship is to get a job But for a growing number of people, it's just not enough when it's a Choice between you get some new shoes and you don't okay. It's some new shoes easy choice. My daughter getting My let's be real. My daughter's shoes is $10 You buy yourself some super glue to glue your shoes together and I do and it shouldn't have to be like that But you're making the right choice and the heart is hard. I shouldn't Don't do a week only. Oh, yeah, yeah, please shop. I can shop daily for bargains and I can go from one supermarket to another We are penny pinching with counting about juice every day once you've Got to give the quarter to an Audi out there dang. That's worldwide Ventures for the amount. How much are you left with nothing? Nothing. We're not living a life. I think we just For the last 14 years Melanie has been working in a local school as a learning support assistant I've always had at least one or two jobs.  It's honestly, it's not Like even if you have a degree or GSEs or what or what or you went to university and Some of that stuff is obsolete. It's all cap Not all of it, but it's some of it is like Do it for you children all three of my children they've seen mum doing the best We have a lot of staff illnesses due to being overworked and you've bushed you got so much you've got nothing left when you come home and you think to yourself Is it worth me getting up and going to work in the morning knowing? I could I could do half the hours that I wanted to and get my rent paid council tax paid But it's pride ended there Where Melanie lives in Yorkshire almost one in four people live in poverty in the Northeast the situation is even worse And living in poverty almost always means struggling to put food on the table As food bank use reaches record highs Community shops like this one in South Tyneside are popping up all over the country to fill the gap between rising costs and stagnant wages So I'll be getting some eggs some bananas and potatoes This community shops is free or something my little boy loves eggs, so it's worth it if you get that You're allowed to come here once a week because four pounds. I only work on time However, I'm above the threshold for getting any kind of help from sort of the government and I can't be referred to a food bank So even though I'm struggling and I'm a single parent and I can't I can't get any help from anywhere So this is a good way to do it when you sort of leave school.  You get more money if you don't have a dad or a father in the household like it's insane And if you may using using help from people using community shops using food banks, you think you're gonna be able to provide and Sometimes some weeks. I can't there's no way I would ever buy this from a supermarket Only because it's just too expensive six dollars. I work my wife real serial You ever been to the bro, I live in Florida a regular size Let's just say family size a family size of Kellogg's Captain Crunch is 649 Since we in and didn't have the nerve to expire I pay 649 for something that might expire on me and I might not even get to bro I'm blue And me I can't I can't buy not Like unnamed brand cereal It don't hit the same.  No, it don't If I want Captain Crunch, I'm getting Captain Crunch not not not You know, I'm saying not sailors crunch, you know, I don't want the sailor. I want the captain pause Also works what recently our kids just came into the country four of them So it's they eat a lot what we make as income is probably not enough It's just minimum way to it doesn't cover the bills the rent And everything we need to pay for So that's basically why I have to come doesn't make sense that we have to do with you all this That's what if I don't we're working full-time Record numbers of people in the UK are finding work But many of those jobs are insecure and while inflation rates are slowly improving real-term wages and benefits aren't keeping up So yeah, it's half-term this week, which it's nice to have time off and it is to switch off Is this great? You know, we're at home all day now budget in your gas your electric, you know, what you're gonna eat this week Cheese and butter, please. I used to cook every day And now I can't afford to do a meal every day So when you do you cook doubles for the next phase they're just to warm up This for my children when they go out and be Their own little adults and get their own lives out that I don't want that And I don't want most of the time Now here's my theory, man. I don't know I could die.    Hey, I'm Look I'm struggling Look at me. I can't I got to choose between the heat or the light Between my me eating or you eating you're gonna get it 100% of the time because I love you And that's what I should do But you're gonna be great And watch they're gonna be great 100% I'm telling you I'm telling you I'm telling you and to see me struggling Let them see you struggling, but at the same time Input life into them with your words watch watch What would you like to see happen? I'd like to see our wages be To make I have a better quality of life I don't I'm not wanting a flash car. I'm not wanting fancy trainers I just want to be able to get up in the morning. I think I can put my heating on today And that's all that we need go to work work your back side.  I have to enjoy we need to be heard. We need to be seen And we need to be believed Order number 74 I've sacrificed time with my friends to Work most people my age work part-time just so that they can Go on holidays and do extra stuff. I'm working part-time to support myself I don't have time to work full-time job. I just go Straight from school to work I'm not dropping out That's not even an option. I want an education I want to do a lot more than I'm doing right now. She got the dog in her She's seen some she's seen some stuff Being toured for social services, but too young for the full universal credit My age holds me back from getting support. The fact I'm in full-time education holds me back from getting support It's oh get a job. I have a job I've definitely matured. I've gotten louder like I talk I talk a lot more I Tolerate things less because I've seen the way the world can be Brand broken that you grow up quick. I want to study politics to Hopefully become an MP and I can fix the mess that this country is in and I know a lot of people won't like that And that's okay. I I really couldn't care less. I yeah, because I don't want anyone else to grow up the way that I've had to see, you know what I'm saying She's very aware of how she grew up And look look how hard she's working right now to get herself out of that situation The proof I be I I'll be spending real stuff She is very aware of the way she grew up. She wasn't shielded from it. She's seen it. She understands That she grew up poor And she does not want to experience this anymore or she does not want it for her kids either She is a dog. She instilled that dog that that instilled the dog and her That dog characteristic to go out and get it no matter what I'll be promised or something The number of I believe you working adults living in poverty has risen 56 percent in 25 years Back in the day my dad worked my mom stayed at home and you had everything and now two people can work and you still can't even afford To put a meal on the table and a night time and they want to be heard It's like the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and That's a very difficult cycle to break We're not just a number with people. That's true The rich do get richer and the poor do get poorer because that poor mentality is passed down through generationals Generations and that rich mentality is also passed down through generations Generational curses man. We got to break them. Simple is that If I have a guy or you want and I think those that I've got and like you said my bad, it starts with the mental If you can break it mentally The kid going to take care of the rest I don't realize what it is to go without A government spokesperson said we are providing 104 billion pounds in cost of support worth on average 3700 pounds per household Including investing over 2 billion pounds in the household support fund to help those most in need as well as boosting And benefit since 2010 there are 1.7 million fewer people living in poverty And we know work is the best route out of poverty So we're going even further raising the national living wage cutting national insurance curbing inflation And investing billions throughout back to work plan to break down barriers to work So even more people can secure long-term financial security Hey, man, listen, man, till I leave a like, comment, subscribe, turn on your post I say what I have to say, I'm a girl


Okay, now we are officially live with the Queen, Wendy Dio, nice to see you once again. Hi, nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me. All right, so on the show today, we're gonna talk, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about in 29 minutes, but first, Wendy, here it is. I did not open it until this interview today. Okay. I did not open it, so I made a little cut because I usually have a lot of problems taking off the wrapping at the top, you know, like shrink wrap, there it is, okay. So I'm gonna unbox and you could tell me about it as I unbox, is that good, you like that? Okay, this is like Christmas, but this is like a Yahtzee box, it's like a Yahtzee, is it not? I just very, very thick, very thick, not hollow at all, just giving everybody sort of a bird's eye view of this here up above. Look how beautiful, beautiful packaging, beautiful. So I'm gonna rip it open now. Lots of goodies. So this is, oh, I should say, this is the deluxe edition of Dreamers Never Die, that will be released tomorrow. Yep.  Oh, it's gonna be released tomorrow and all over the place, and I think you get it on Amazon, if you get it in a lot of record stores, I think Target has it all, I think you can get it everywhere, hopefully. And it was on Showtime, correct? Yes. Streaming on Showtime, and what else? It was streaming on Showtime, and it was in the theaters, and actually a year ago today it was in the theaters. Am I right? Yes, and what I like about this box set is the fact that Americans could watch it in Showtime, but the rest of the world couldn't watch it unless they called it the cinema in just a couple of days it was out, so now it's worldwide, so we can, everybody can watch it. That's right, the whole world is gonna get to witness, and not only that, but you get a lot of goodies, I don't even know what the goodies are yet, I'm gonna open it up and we're gonna find it out. Okay, so as you can see, have any of your other interviewers opened it up like I have? One. Oh geez. Okay, so I'm not gonna show you. Okay. All right, I don't know what this is first of all, this seems like a poster of some sort. Yes, is it a movie poster? Whoa! Yeah. I'm gonna hang this up in my room. I'm gonna hang this up in my room. Yeah, it's a movie poster of the documentary. Yep, look at that, beautiful. My wife will not like this, but I will hang this right above our bed. No, she'll love it, she'll love it. Okay, so we've got a poster. And what's this here? It's a wristband, and it says Dreamer's Never Die on it. I'm really bad at opening things. Hang on. Okay, here we go. There's a wristband here. So this is sort of like, right? Yep. Oh boy. It's like I'm in the hospital. So it says Dreamer Never Die, right? And what do we got here? This is like a pen, correct? Yeah, a pen, yeah, real nice steel pen. For your battle vest? For the battle vest that people wear, right? Do you know what else? We've got a patch also for the battle vest, correct? Patch, yep. Nice patch. Are these Kleenexes? That's right, in case you cry. It's true, it is a tear-jerker of a movie, isn't it? So they're Kleenexes, who would have thought? Look at that. Yeah. Okay. And here, what do we have? Baseball cards? Baseball cards, yes, there's some photos on them. There's four different photos. I'm not gonna load up because I want to keep it as a souvenir. Guitar pick, right? Yep, two of them, I think are in there. Okay. And of course a sticker to put on your fridge. Yep. Or a new guitar. And this here, what's this? That looks like, is that the DVD? No, it's too small for it to be a DVD. It says... Oh no, those are the... Coasters. Those are coasters. Oh, look at that. Yeah, you put your old drink if you're having a beer or a wine or a cup of tea. Those are for your coasters. Look at that, amazing. And now we're getting into, okay, now we got a little booklet of some sort, right here. Yep, telling you all about the story of the documentary. Beautiful, look at that. Wow, it's wonderful. Very well done, by the way, so far. Very well done. And this is, okay, now this is probably the Blu-ray or DVD, one or the other. Yep, that's it. This is the DVD, right? Yep. And a Blu-ray. And for all the people watching out there, if you could play your Blu-ray, you could play your DVD on your Blu-ray, but you can't do it the other way around. Hmm. There it is. Okay, I didn't know that. Yeah, you could play your DVD on your Blu-ray player, but you can't do it the other way around. You can't play your Blu-ray on your DVD player. I don't have a Blu-ray. Yeah, yeah, so there you go. And that's the empty box, so got a lot of goodies. Okay, so let's talk about, there's some additional scenes, correct? There's additional scenes in the movie. So tell me about that. Well, because, well, when we made the documentary, there was so much footage, but we had to cut out a lot of footage, unfortunately. But on the bonus, we get bonuses, you get The Son of Mike, Ronny's drummer talking about a story. You've got when Davis, Ronny's engineer, talking about a story, and then you have Jack Black talking about a story. Yeah, Jack Black. Did Jack Black, when he did the Pick of Destiny, correct? Mm-hmm, yep. With Ronny, I mean, a lot of people love that movie. And Ronny's scene was the best part there. That's what Jack always said, and he wasn't in it. Just meet Lof and Ronny, basically. And little Jack Black. All right, so what really impressed me about the movie, we could talk about that a little bit. I love how when the priest, the Holy Diver, which I love. You know, a lot of people, we know the Holy Diver here, and I will show also the last year you came out with the Deluxe Holy Diver remix. This picture here, a lot of people don't know, I haven't seen the film, I've seen it a few times, this was actually sort of inspired by a real photo shoot. Maybe you want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they went down, Jean Kirklin, who was a photographer, went down with the guy that, Jean, there's another Jean that actually drew the actual original photo, the original drawing of Holy Diver. They went down to Malibu Coast and they put a wetsuit on and went into the water and Jean was a photographer and they had changed around him. He wanted to reenact the actual scene, but what happened, he almost drowned and then Jean had to end up pulling him out. So it was not a fun time for them at the time when they were doing it. It was a great idea.  But Ronny's way of thinking was, you know, how do you know that that's a bad guy because he looks like a monster and that's a good guy because he has to freestyle it on. Never judge a book by a cover. In other words, whatever really looks like doesn't matter. Is it too short, too small, too this, you wear the wrong clothes, doesn't matter. What's inside your heart is what matters because that's what people should know, not what the outside looks like. That's very good. Well said. When you rewatched it, or I guess you've seen this so many times now, what have you learned that, you know what, I didn't realize that or, wow, or maybe it inspired a memory of yours that you didn't forget about? Many, many, many, many memories in there. It's very pretty sweet for me. The first time I saw it, I carded my eyes out because we worked on it for so hard for three years. We worked on it and it was longer because of COVID.  I've forgotten about that. I've forgotten about the accident that Ronnie had. You know, that was a terrible, terrible time. I'd forgotten about the really bad time we had when Ronnie lost his record deal. That was very hard for all of us because, you know, an artist without a record deal feels like nobody wants him. I've forgotten about those days. I've actually forgotten about how when that happened, he had to play club because of the big arenas that he played. So, you know, there's a lot of things that I've forgotten about that I brought back memories to me again. Did you, when you went to the club days and that was like, let's say in the 90s, like the late 90s, early 2000s, did you think, man, are we ever going to get it back? Are we ever going to get back to where we were? I may have thought that. I never portrayed that to Ronnie and Ronnie never thought that. He didn't care. You know, he could play to eight people or 80,000 people. As far as he was concerned, he was going to give his all for that, that eight people or those eight, 80,000 people. It did hurt him a lot to lose the record deal. You know, I mean, he lost it, Van Halen lost it. A lot of people lost it. And that was very, very hurtful to me. It was a bad time in his life. Lost it for a minute. But, you know, I went all over the world to find a new record deal and I found independence, which was great. You know, you license it to him. We don't give it to him forever in a day when you get it back. So it was like, it was actually a learning trip for me. But, you know, we persevered and we carried on and money got back up where it belonged. You know, at the beginning of the documentary, Lita Ford says, we had friends who named their children after Ronnie, right? Strange enough, my friend, Orlando, he named his son Ronnie. I mean, what are the most bizarre stories you've, I wouldn't say bizarre, but interesting stories of people naming their children that you remember. Oh, they named their children Ronnie, they named them Dio, they named them, in fact, Amit, Zappa wanted to name his kid Dio, but his wife didn't want him to. But, you know, a lot of cats are named Dio, a lot of cats are named Ronnie. I think somebody had a drag with a dragon, this is a dragon that they named Ronnie. It's a whole bunch of different things in there. I think it's fun, I think it's great. And, you know, what he's saying about children, I think this is the first time ever in history that kids are listening to their parents' music. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes or no, I don't know. They are, they are, they are, but yes or no, I mean, they're not listening to as much metal as we'd like them to, that's what I think. This is true, this is true, but it goes in and out. You know, it's always fashionable for a while, then it's not and something else comes in. But, you know, I think that Ronnie's fans are always there. I mean, they're the most amazing people ever. He's been gone 13 years, I still have two and a half million people on our Facebook and our webpage and everything. You know, it's like, you know, Ronnie's my life is to keep Ronnie's music and his vision alive and I try to do that. But, you know what? I don't have to try that hard because his fans are always there. Yeah, yeah. What did you learn as a manager? Like, okay, so you would transition from a wife to his manager and like, what were the sort of hurdles you had to overcome in the beginning? Because, right? I mean, because you know, it's easy to watch somebody do it and it's another thing to, you know, be the quarterback, right? Especially in the eighties because at that time there was only men managers. There were no women managers. Sharon and I were the only women managers. And we got it from the man who said, oh, you don't know what you're doing. Listen to me. This is it. Take the supplies and whatever. And I listened very carefully to what they had to say. I said, yes, yes, I agree, blah, blah. And then went and did exactly what I wanted to do.  That we both did it the way we wanted to do it and we both became successful. And I think that there are so many women managers now and women make great managers. They are multitask people. Men a lot of times don't see the multitask. They take little silly things that maybe look silly to a man but to a woman, we listen to what the musician has to say. I've seen bands break up over silly little things that could have been talked about and could have been talked about and thought about. And I think that when we have a lot more listening power to what the musician wants. Did you find it sometimes, like we've talked about this in the past in interviews. You were getting more of the heat because you're the so-called manager. And the wife, yeah. Yeah, and the wife.  Well, you know, it's her fault. She doesn't know what she's doing. You know, yeah. I mean, she's just the wife. Doesn't have a clue what she's doing. People, I do have background in music. When I was 17 years old, I wasn't at Decor Records as an intern in my summer holidays. I worked for a booking agency. I worked for attorneys doing contracts, you know. But those are things that nobody knew about. And that helped me in that but it was still very challenging. Very, very challenging. But you know what? I'm a control freak. One is a control freak. And together, the two control freaks managed to get to it. I mean, sometimes you gotta play good cop, bad cop. Right? When you're renting an organization. And I guess a lot of times the manager always ends up being the bad cop, right? Because. Oh, yeah. Like Ronnie, and I'm just guessing here. I would think Ronnie is just trying to keep the peace with the band, especially in the early days. Whereas you had to sort of come across as no, it's gonna be this way. And maybe unfairly so sometimes, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. And Ronnie would really have a go at me.  He wanted it his way. I wanted it my way. And we would have big, not more fights about it. But the thing is, you know, it was always the good friend career. And I think why it works this one and I is because I never ever interfered with music. Because music was his thing. I didn't interfere. And he didn't interfere with my business. Sometimes he didn't want to do what I wanted to do, but he ended up doing it. You know, just sparked the memory. I was reading Giza Butler's book. And you know, and don't get me wrong here. He loves Ronnie. And he says it throughout the book, but there's one point. He goes, during the Black Sabbath era, the first go around, you know, there were more laid back, right? Whereas Ronnie was, let's go, let's go, let's go. And I guess they found that somewhat annoying. Annoying, annoying. You know, I want to be polite here. I don't want to, I don't like, I love Giza Butler. I love Tony Elmi, but you could see that Ronnie was driven. Whereas Giza, and you know, they were just kind of a little more laid back like Ronnie would say in his book, at least what Giza said, cut down on the solos, Tony, cut down on the solos, right? But he wouldn't listen because they were used to their ways. I mean, what are your thoughts? I don't know if you read the book or not, but. I haven't read the book. Yeah, I asked Gloria for it and she said it to me, Giza's wife. But because I talked to her all the time, I think Giza all the time. But no, that was true. Because Ronnie was a perfectionist. He was a perfectionist at his art. Everything had to be perfect and done right. And yes, they were very laid back. There was a lot of drugs going on at that time too. So, but you know, Ronnie wanted it done and he wanted it done right. And as he said, they were used to just being, oh, well, this is the way it is, you know? Different, different from people. Yeah, yeah. All right, tell me about how it hurt him so much. I mean, there were so many points, there were so many highs and so many lows. He's at a black Sabbath just quickly. I mean, was that more painful than being out of sort of losing the label deal later on? Or was that even more painful than, was that his painful point, the most painful point for Ronnie? I think they're both equally painful, you know? He loved being in black Sabbath. He wanted to be in black Sabbath, but there were things that he did not agree with in black Sabbath. And so therefore he, you know, he always did what he wanted to do. So if something wasn't right, he wasn't gonna do it. So he had to leave. What about re-releasing? And I'm just jumping around topics because I know you don't have a lot of time. Ronnie and the Red Caps, are we ever gonna see some sort of major release on Ronnie and the Red Caps? I don't think so. I don't think so. There's a lot of red tape involved in that with Halone's in, who thinks they own it and who doesn't own it and whatever. I don't think so. All right, last in line. I know we got this one right here. It's beautiful. A remix and remastered. Last in line is next. So brishi. Are you planning on to keep on going throughout all the albums and sort of doing remixes? So what's the plan there? Rhino wants to do it. They did it with doberishi, which I thought did an excellent remix on it. Excellent, excellent remixers. You can listen to Ronnie's mix and you can listen to Joe's mix. And they're both different. They're both great. Yeah, they have plans next year. Rhino to do last in line on that. There's a beautiful release that came out two days ago. I don't know if you can see this on BMG with the last four albums that are in vinyl. It's a beautiful box that is really real. Do the unboxing for me, please. Do the unboxing. Unboxing. Okay, wait, there's one on the floor. It's okay. That's part of the unboxing experience. Dropping things. That's it. Okay, so we have this beautiful cover. We have Angry Machine here. Beautiful. Angry Machine has, let's see, what color is that one? I have to look this one. Oh, and it's got some great artwork in there as well. Wow, look at that. Yeah, and then they ask, what color is this one? Angry Machine is a Halloween orange. Wow, that's beautiful. So that's really cool. And then there is Killin' the Dragon. Beautiful. And that one is got some more great artwork here. You can see. Wow. And that album cover is, let's have a look. So that one vinyl is, oh, this one is a swirly, a swirly green yellow color. Grimy, grimy. Grimy, yeah, grimy. Limey. Are you calling me a limey? And you've got Master of the Moon. Beautiful. And this one, I think this one's my favorite actually. And you've got more artwork. Beautiful. And this one is, I think this is a beautiful blue one. Yeah, look at this one. This is beautiful, beautiful blue, that one. Wow. And then last one is Magica, if I can find it. Oh, here's Magica. Magica, but that color of this one, this one is, there's a booklet with Magica. And then this one is a red one. This is a really, look, then you've got more artwork. Geez, that's nice. And you've got this red one here, which is beautiful. And then you've got this bonus, if I can find it. Oh, here it is, of Electra. Oh, Electra, yes. Yeah, so that one is a little. Can you just turn around? Let's see the song selection on Electra. It's the song Electra, right? Yeah, it's the song Electra. And then, I wonder what my glasses on. Just put it up there on the screen. I'll read it for you. I got mine on. Okay, no way. It says Electra, and then on the B side is Electra again. There you go. B side, one side B is Electra. And it's blue. And it's blue, yes. Yeah, it's really beautiful. And I think that's a really lovely box set. And really, BMG did an excellent job on that. Is that strictly just LPs or is it CDs and LPs? No, it's vinyl. Vinyl, just vinyl. They're all vinyl. Yes, vinyl, yep. All right, now that, let's talk about bowling for cancer with Ronnie, right? Tell me about that. It's our celebrity bowling. Eddie Trunks always the host. He's so graciously busy this time. That's on November 16th at Pins in Studio City. And in the past, we've had, you know, Jack Black in April and Tom Morello, and his name has been there. And we don't know until the last minute because obviously people are working, they don't come. But I do know that Jack Black is not through a nation-state. And I think that Eddie Trunks been talking to Dave Ball, so I don't know. And I think there's, I think these are butler will be there this year. I'm not sure of it. But we're working on a bunch of things. It's going to be a really fun night. We sold out a set of tickets. There's a couple of lanes left. If anyone wants to purchase the lanes, they're 20, I think they're 22 flippers. Which, and then we have the auction on Eddie Trunks team, which is always like the celebrities. And they have an auction of raising money for the cancer. Whoever bids the highest gets to play on the team with the celebrities. But it's a really funny thing with money going to a great cause. Every penny goes to researching and education of cancer. We're working with Dr. Wong at UCLA on the saliva test, which is really good because it will tell your early detection if you have stomach cancers or pancreatic cancer, which are horrible cancers that creep up. You don't know if it's the last minute. Yeah, so we've been working on a lot of things. We're working on seed money with different people. It's good like Vanderbilt didn't have any money set aside for research on these two horrible diseases. And we gave them 100,000. Someone else gave them 500,000. Then they got a $11 million grant from the government to work on it. So we're working on things. You know what? It's such a great cause. You do this, man. You just do it like twice a year, right? You do it to Ronnie in the park. Yeah, when the park, we do the bowling and then we used to do ride for Ronnie. That's right. But it started to get too expensive to close the street and there's so much to my table. We have to work on it so long. So now we're doing rock for Ronnie. We did one last year. This year we've moved because we sold out last year and we couldn't get any more people in. So we've moved to Warner Center and that will be on May 19th next year. Warner Center in LA. And we're hoping to announce some great bands that will be on it next year. You know, something just came to mind. I always try to think of something that I haven't asked you before. And I think this is the question. Do you remember and how true is this? Ronnie had a movie in his mind to make. He wanted to make an animation movie, correct? Yeah. He wanted David Leroy's voice to be the main character. Do you remember this? Yeah, I do. Is this true? This is true. This is very true. Yeah, I think he's working on our magicers and then to be a trilogy, which unfortunately didn't work out. I don't know if that, I don't think that's the one he wanted David Leroy. No, no, I think that was, I think the David Leroy one was in the 80s. Yeah. He wanted to cartoon his story of Murray. And I think it was a Middle Earth, again. I'm going right from memory here, but I think... Yep, it was a Middle Earth, yep. It was, he wanted, how far did he get to that? Like, I mean, in that project, it was just maybe just on paper. Was it something that he was just bouncing around? I don't think he even got to paper. Ronnie was very much doing one thing at a time. You know, he'd be asked to do something, but if he was like on a tour, he could only do that. If he was home, he was writing songs and he was doing that. So he didn't multitask very well. But he wanted David Leroy to sing or at least, I don't know if it was supposed to be, it was a musical or just a speaking movie? No, it was a musical, a musical. It was going to be a Middle Earth, musical and David Leroy, he wanted as the main character. It was going to be the story of Murray and Murray is the name he gave of that monster that's drowning the priest. Okay, and I also remember, here's the last question as we have a few minutes left. Ronnie said in the papers, back when, I wish I could only sleep for two or three hours a night. Oh yeah, yeah, I think he didn't. He actually probably slept five or six hours a night. He thought that eating and sleeping were a waste of time. He had so many things to go and so many things he wanted to do. He was always busy writing things, doing stuff that he never thought there were enough hours in the day. Maybe he had a permission that he was in the past. I don't know, but I know he was always awake. I remember, and here's the last part as we have two minutes left. He said that he wanted the band deal right at the beginning. We're talking about right at the beginning, to be like Led Zeppelin, to be remembered like Led Zeppelin. I think he accomplished that. Did he not? I think so too. I think, you know, I mean, guys, I think, well, lost in life is going to be 40 years next year. Which means that Holy Diver is probably 42 years ago and people are still buying it and playing it. And I'm so happy. There's so many young tripple bands out there doing tribute music, which I love. It's people monitoring music, is legend alive. And I just, I'm so happy that the young kids appreciate the music that he did. On that note, pick up Yahtzee. No, I'm just kidding. What about Deal Monopoly? Are we getting to that stage yet? Are it made in AS Monopoly? Like a Deal Monopoly, something like that, maybe? I think we did some casino game that's only available in Europe with Wyber. It was gotten to Monopoly, yeah. Okay, all right. Well, I won't push my luck. All right, well, it's been a pleasure. I'm really happy that you're always keeping Ronnie's memory alive.  I think it's a wonderful initiative. And best of luck to you, Wendy. You know, Neil Turbin will be at the bowling event. Oh, great, great. And he will be there to, you know, to cover that for the metal voice, all right? So thank you very much. Any closing remarks? Thank you so much for inviting me. Couldn't do it without people like you that support us. And thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right, Wendy, have yourself a wonderful night. You too.


All right. Hello everybody. My name is Chris. Today I'm going to be presenting to you a talk called Behind the Curtains of making real consumer devices using Debian. I'm an engineer at Collabra. I specialize in the integration of boards and integration of customer devices into sort of Debian systems, continuous integration of those systems and kind of packaging software, that kind of thing. So if you have any questions about those sorts of things, feel free to ping me using the email that you've got on the screen at the moment. So basically this presentation is really for people who've got some hardware, whether that's development board or a final board. They've got an app running and they're missing the piece in the middle, the kind of software stack that runs everything, the embedded Linux, all of that integrated together. So I'll be talking today in two parts. The first part I'll be talking about the process that I use to bring up a new board. It doesn't matter whether that's which vendor the system on shipped by or anything like that. It's kind of agnostic to all of that. And then the second part I'll be going through some specific, more specific bits that we use for some projects, really with Debian and kind of all the bits that go around that. So continuous integration of the system, how we make it secure, that kind of thing. I've also done some previous talks on DevOps, which is the tool we use to create images, specifically Debian images, but also looking at its kind of generic tools that will work for any kind of image you want to create. So we've got some patches at the moment that are being written to run for Arch Linux, so you can build Arch Linux boxes. So please do see those previous presentations for that because that is kind of a prerequisite for this. And also we've got the famous question that we're going to be answering today. We've got the hardware, we've got the app. How hard could it possibly be in between? The short answer is very hard, but hopefully the tips I've been giving you today will help with that process. So really the first thing that you want to decide on before you start hacking or getting involved with anything is you really want to sort out the requirements of what the product actually wants to do. So you want to find the SOC or the system on chip you're interested in. You want to make sure that the peripherals you care about actually work properly. They've all got the right kind of parameters involved. And also you want to be very clear from the early day what the performance requirements are of your app and the product. Because there's a lot of chips nowadays that are very slow clock speeds, so you just want to make sure that everything is going to run nicely there. I would also highly recommend getting some SOC development kits. I mean, I've been through a few dev kits, blown them up, that kind of thing in the past. So it's useful to have one and a spare if you can for each member of your team. Or maybe the spare would just be like a spare, not one spare for each. You want to get as much stuff from the vendor as possible so you want to make sure that they've got all the BSP. Usually that will be like an image that has been created by the vendor. If you're lucky, you'll also get some source code. So that is also very quite nice if you can get the source code as well as a preview image. You're also going to want to get as much reference material, so schematics, SOC data sheets as you physically can get your hands on. Also, I recommend saving all of this information in a place where everyone can access it. So we at Collaborate Use Next Cloud, we find Next Cloud is great because we can just create an account for somebody and let them log in and download the files as necessary. Also, a really important thing is to kind of get yourself a tech contact at the vendor, whether that's the SOC or SOC vendor, because they can be really useful in helping to track down any problems that you may have with any of the technical requirements or any of the issues that you may come up with. And yeah, there are normally loads of issues, so it's always good to get someone who's really hands on at the vendor. So basically the next thing we're going to talk about is what the BSP is. It is obviously BSP stands for Board Support Package, but this could be one of many different things. So, I mean, I've seen BSPs that are normally just built images. Ideally, you'd like some source codes and build scripts, Yocto layers, Android source, dump anything like that to try and get your hands on. But I do like to get a preview image as well as all of that, so that at least you can verify the preview image works. Inside all of this stuff, you'll have a bootloader, a kernel, some root FS, whether that's pre-built root FS, or maybe a script that calls something like Debootstrap to build a Debian OS, something like Yocto or Buildroot that builds everything. And then all the scripts and things that go along with that, documentation of how to get it running. Usually, with any kernel you may get or bootloader, it's usually going to be quite an old release. It's going to have some patches on it downstream that will be of questionable quality. I mean, in some cases, I've seen vendors that do really good stuff. I've also seen some vendors that don't do so good. So really, I tend to want to choose the SOC based on how good the vendor is and how good the BSP is. But in some cases, you may just be stuck with it because of time or cost concerns. Usually it's because the cheap BSP or the cheap vendor has got terrible BSP, so you're stuck with it. So, unfortunately for you. I mean, it's not as simple as that, but I think generally that is how things work. So, it's quite generic advice there really, but at least try and get as much information as possible. And like I say, the pre-built image is really what I think is the most important thing, because then you can validate that everything works without having to compile anything. What I also tend to do is document how to flash that. I mean, in most cases, you'll flash it to an SD card, but in other cases, more recently this sort of thing is happening where you flash it over a custom USB protocol. It's always good to document how to build that flash of software and how to run that flash of software to flash the board. Not only will this help later in the factory build process, but it will also help other members of the team get started quicker. So, the first thing that you're going to want to do after flashing that image is obviously try and run the board, see what happens. Hopefully you'll get some sort of shell on serial port. Maybe you'll get a display, an X11 system on the HDMI port or a touchscreen. That would be very nice if you could get that. What I then tend to do is play around with everything, verify that things all work as expected. The drivers for the peripherals that you're going to be using just kind of work okay and get things running there as well as document how to do all of that stuff. If you don't do this early, you're going to be stabbing in the dark later when you try and get things running on mainline kernels. So I highly recommend getting things running in the BSP early rather than leaving it until too late. I tend to want to spend a week or so getting the BSP running getting everything running on the BSP to try and just get things running in a dirty environment to be honest. So then that brings us on to our next step which is replacing things. So you've got this BSP image of theirs running and you kind of want to start putting your app on it and replacing the bad stuff with potentially some mainline stuff if possible or at least something that you can compile yourself. So the first thing I always do is analyze the partition layout whether that's on device or analyzing the actual image itself that comes out of the BSP or kind of just a mixture of the two really. A top tip here, you can either mount the image on your local machine using loopback devices and all that stuff which is quite pain but you could also use fake machine which is the library Deboes uses to create his virtual machine to mount the image and then you can do all sorts of scripted things on that BSP image inside fake machine. Normally what I tend to do is extract all the binary blobs from that image so the boot loader, the kernel, even the root FS I'll just extract it all somewhere and then I will stitch that back together using a Deboes recipe to actually create my own version of that image even though it's using the binary blobs from the BSP and this is quite simple really because you then have an image that you've created yourself with the grep partition layout and you can then verify that that image works just fine and the partition layout is all okay and everything before you go any further and then we tend to do a replacement approach and as a top down replacement approach so what we tend to do is replace the root FS first with something like a very basic Debian maybe Debian unstable release or something like that using Deboes we tend to use Debian because it's quite mature and the process is make sure that the system is stable and very secure the process inside of Debian so basically we use Deboes to run the bootstrap action an app to actually install Debian itself a very basic system then we'll use the apt actions to actually install packages in there that are relevant so then we'll also use the run and overlay actions in Deboes to actually run scripts inside the root FS copy files in that kind of thing just a real basic system that we can get a shell to or maybe even a X or Western system and then we'll make sure that all runs okay and everything's all happy still with the replaced root file system and then the next thing I like to do is to build the BSP kernel and other things in the BSP myself so the boot loader maybe normally this will require a holder compiler as well for some vendors so I like to get all of that done first I wouldn't do this in CI I wouldn't do this on the local desktop with excuse me with some documentation around it to ensure that anyone in the future could do the same things well if needed then if you want to get some extra credit you can replace the boot loader with the boot loader built yourself sometimes it's worth just sticking with binary blocks for the boot loader in some cases like the first and second stage boot loaders and then also you'd want to rebase the kernel patches and the boot loader patches this isn't for the faint of heart as an integration engineer myself I would really enlist the help of the kernel engineer to help with this task I would prefer to give that task to somebody else to get on with that knows a lot more about the kernel especially on this specific chip I'd also want to make sure that I chose a stable kernel release to base those patches on so really all of that is going to be quite hard work I think trudging work I call it so it's like the hard stuff that takes a lot of the effort but after you've done that you'll have a custom image so that's really good you can stop there if you really want because that's part 1 of the presentation finished but now you have that custom image the hard part is then actually making that custom image into a product so you have a basic kind of image and then a lot of people will stop at that stage and say right the product's done but actually there's a lot of things that we haven't yet thought about including continuous integration security actually packaging the application to run on the system upgrades of the system chain of trust security updates automated testing factory provisioning and lots of other things so we'll cover all of that in this next part so integration in CI I mean continuous integration is a really important thing for us at least when we're building customer projects because we have a lot of different engineers who will be working on the same product having to download all the tooling and all of the right cross compilers and things like that would be a mess so really we decide early to create continuous integration we use GitLab for it but you could use other things like GitHub or Azure DevOps Jenkins that kind of thing but we we decide to push all the scripts up early into continuous integration so you've got a really nice base to start with so yeah you can build the DevOps recipes at least in all of these things GitHub actions, GitLab CI as your DevOps Jenkins you can build it on your local machine which is quite nice because DevOps actually abstracts all of the things away so that it doesn't matter where you run it in a very similar environment each time running on a system like GitLab CI also gives you lots of other fun features so you can set up schedules to run nightly builds that are done automatically you can have merge requests so other members of the team can actually do merges and be reviewed by people so you've got like a proper process there you can add tags to releases loads of other things sort of thing you get when you have a software project in Git you can do all of the same sorts of things also the really nice thing that I like here is we've got chat integration and email integration so any time build fails the right people get notified and we can sort out the right people to get sort it out so as well an important thing to look at is security so you want to lock down the serial reports on the device this is both in the boot loader as well as the OS itself so you don't want people to be able to interrupt the boot process and write their own commands in and launch their own things you also don't want people to be able to go on the serial report and get their Linux console so it's always worth checking all the serial reports the ones that aren't actually broken out to the user so I mean most SSH now have got multiple serial reports it's worth checking all of them and making sure they're all locked down also it's worth disabling any debug services or any factory installation things SSH is a common one really common to have SSH enabled in these systems so really nice just to close all of that down make sure that no one can get in so then we want to go on to packaging your application I mean there's a big thing these days where people are packaging their apps in containers, so docker containers so they can run on sort of any machine there's also the camp who run their software still on the native side native software is much more likely to happen if you've got drivers or things inside your software that talks more closely to the hardware it's really your choice docker these days you can just install docker and everything just works really well we use OBS to build Debian packages from customer software and apps and we store the source code in GitLab so OBS is open build service from SUSE it's a very good bit of software to build things because it builds all the dependencies that the software needs in the right order and also it creates app repositories which then we use in the image building process to pull down the image so everything really is quite nice there I think so then we've got over the upgrades so obviously systems these days are normally thrown out of the door as soon as the basic kind of software features work and then we upgrade iteratively with new features over time so these days cure and validated upgrades are really important so what we don't want is we don't want someone to install a random bit of update on the system we also don't want someone to get halfway through the update and then break the device by resetting the power or something like that all of these are really things that we don't want in the past the upgrades would have happened with an apt repository or a script something like that like a cronjug with an apt but these days we can do a lot better what I tend to recommend is AB upgrades so if you don't know an AB system has got two slots in the EMMC or SD card or wherever you're storing your image each slot contains an app and the boot loader then chooses which one of these slots to boot based on the last time it started up and then once the system started your application then triggers the upgrade at the right time you know after it's connected to GSM or whatever and then triggers the reboot and the update's finished into the new slot this is very nice because you've always got one slot that works so to a user it will be as if the product will never not work as long as the boot loader handles it correctly so you can roll back to the old slot in case the upgrade fails downside to this is it requires more EMMC space but it's not really that much of a problem I don't think because storage space can be quite cheap these days you can get in the order of 16 or 32 gig systems are quite cheap now and also we can trim down root file systems to be really small in the order of around 500 meg to a gig so I don't really see that as a problem in most systems so we've been using OS tree and Raoq for upgrades I tend to prefer using Raoq because it's very extensible and it lets you do these AV upgrades or really choose how you do your upgrade which I think makes Raoq quite a nice system we can integrate both of these into devOS so the same recipe that generates the actual image that you flash to the device you can use to create an upgrade image you can sign the updates so this is very secure make sure that so long as no one can access the console they can't just install a random update from anywhere which is very nice the updates you can also encrypt the Raoq bundles as well and also optionally you can use CAsync which allows you to install chunks of an update and also only download what has changed on the system so although the image may be 500 meg you can just install the bits that have changed which may even be in the order of megabytes this is really useful when you're on GSM connections although these days those connections are really high bound with and also they're quite cheap to transfer over so it's really one of these things that you have to decide based on the application so then we get to the chain of trust so Secureboot is very useful on some x86 platforms so long as the bias vendor has actually implemented everything properly it may not be in some BSP bootloaders it might be a mess to implement so I don't really have an answer on this one really apart from going for a vendor who actually has got Secureboot with their platform all kind of sorted nicely and it's something to check in the early days really before you choose a SOC or system on chip what we like to do is we like to convert the root file system to read only this has got a lot of issues because things like system D place some files in ETC directory which needs to be right but after you've created that read only file system you can then hash it with DM Verity and the system that's being booted is the system that you think is going to be booted which is quite a nice thing to do so that no one's tampered with the operating system or the root FS you can also use overlay FS on top of these read only systems on another partition things like the configuration files so you can actually insert a configuration into ETC so that the user may need to change and if all of that stuff doesn't work so the Verity checks some or whatever doesn't actually perform at run time then you can just not load the app and then you're sure that the system has been modified then excuse me so long life time or security updates so really the main thing here is the kernel and also going back to my original point of the fact that we want to try and port your patches onto a stable kernel rather than using the BSP kernel because the mainline Linux kernel is continuously evolving the BSP kernel unfortunately never really tracks that unless you're very lucky so what we like to do is we like to port it to a long term stable kernel which is usually supported for five or more years the current long term stable is 5.10 so it's always nice to use a stable kernel because then bug fixes and security patches excuse me are flowing from the mainline kernel into that stable kernel so these stable kernels are released really often in some cases they're released weekly and so on so you could even set up an automated pipeline to pull that stable kernel and either ping your internal maintainers to actually do the upgrade or you could also do the rebase automatically as part of that that's an option so then really begun to automated testing so a collaborator we've got Lava we've got a Lava lab which contains loads of dev kits loads of custom boards and we also use that for things like kernel CI which I'm sure you've heard about which tests nightly kernels to make sure that there are no kind of regressions on real hardware which is very nice but Lava allows you to flash an image or a kernel to a board run some tests and report back whether the test's parcel failed you can set up email notifications so that if the test fails you can again send that to the right people who know what needs to be done to fix the board or fix the issue we can also submit these test jobs automatically through GitLab so when a new nightly build for instance is ran we can then run the tests automatically on those nightly builds and then providing that that works you could potentially decide to automatically push that image out to boards in the field that would need a little bit more thinking about because I think a manual test is kind of a good thing really just to make sure things are working because automated tests are only as good as the tests that you've written so when we factory provision these items we tend to set up a separate PC completely to flash images you would tend to flash the same image as you're flashing to the board and have a separate script in that image to do the flashing and then the idea is when the board turns on it would then run a custom script to do things like setting up serial numbers that kind of thing using the PC that you've got set up next to it to kind of save everything in a database so you can go as simple or as complicated as you like here yeah so really the answer to we've got the hard way we've got our app how hard because it possibly be is it's as hard as you want to make it if you do things properly in the first place the first time you do things may be quite difficult but then each product that you designed through that then gets easier and easier that was quite a high level overview of each individual pieces but we've gone for half an hour now and my time slot is only 40 minutes so if you've got any specific questions please do ask below and I'll hopefully follow up at the next conference with any specifics that may have come from this presentation or any common points if any of the above that I've spoken about sounds like something that you'd want to work on with interesting customer projects collaborate are hiring so if you follow the link in this slide you can see our job opportunities we've got all sorts up so please do take a look there and finally I'd like to say thank you and take any questions thanks