So, after months, I have finally finished reading the Broken Empire Trilogy, so that's Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, and Emperor of Thorns. I had to stop in the middle to read both All of Evermore and The Lost Metal, so that's why it took me until now, because I think I started the first book in, like, September and it's February now, but yes, I have finished the whole series, and I really liked it. It's really good, at times I even think it's great, but I have trouble bringing that all together into any sort of thesis statement. You know, I have trouble summing up this series in any short way. This is the introduction song, it's not very good, but it's not too long. See, in some ways, this feels like a common heroic fantasy slash low fantasy slash epic fantasy sort of story, in fact in a lot of ways, it feels that way, because, like, when you look at the world it takes place in, the sorts of characters that are there, the sorts of conflicts that occur, it feels like that a lot, with the main exception and main standout just being the protagonist, because Jorg Ancrath is anything but a typical fantasy hero. You know, he's not a plucky farm boy, or any of the other archetypes you might be buying into. Very very different.  But then after finishing, this really feels like it resists being put into any sort of box, you know? At times it feels like epic fantasy, but it really isn't. At times it feels like heroic fantasy, but it really isn't. At times it feels like it's a very character driven story, but at times it feels like it's a very very story driven story. At times it feels like science fiction rather than fantasy, but it is still mostly fantasy. And at times it feels like grimdark, but it really doesn't fit that either, like it just resists being put into any sort of box or being defined by any sort of genre. And in a way that's really impressive, you know, it's very rare for an author to create a whole genre from scratch, or at the very least reinvent one to the point where it's completely unrecognizable like this. For those unfamiliar, the story of this follows a guy named George Ancrath, and he was a prince of a kingdom in the Broken Empire. And basically the Broken Empire was once an entire united empire, but the Emperor died without an heir, and none of them have been able to elect a new one for almost 200 years now. And so it's just a hundred smaller kingdoms that are all fighting and trying to conquer each other, and they're all trying to become the next Emperor. And George was the prince of one of these kingdoms, and then when he was nine years old, his mother and his younger brother were murdered, and he survived because he wound up getting thrown into a bush, is that the word? I don't know, he got thrown into a bunch of thorns, and the thorns actually held him there, but they also gouged his arms pretty deep so he scars there even years later. And so that's where his nickname comes from, the Prince of Thorns. The main story picks up five years later when he's 14 years old, and even at such a young age, he's already the leader of a gang of bandits. And if you're wondering, how does a 14 year old get to be that? Because number one, he's really, really smart, and number two, he's fricking psychotic. You know, like, these are very hard men, I say the word hard, but that doesn't fully encapsulate everything. Like they're also crazy psychotic. They're nuts, they're crazy people, and they follow him because he's crazier, more psychotic, but also more competent than all of them. And basically from there, the entire story of this series is just following George's journey to becoming Emperor. Now this story is told from a first person perspective, like it is almost 100% just from George's perspective, and him going over the adventures that he's had. And when you tell a story in first person, your protagonist can really make or break everything.   Like I said, he is a bandit. He's the leader of a group of bandits that roam around, attacking villages, and stealing stuff in order to make a living. And he's not any sort of Robin Hood type figure. He doesn't steal from the rich, give to the poor. Nor does he have any sort of real moral code in a more traditional story. He probably would. He'd be a leader of bandits, but he would attack a town and say, okay, don't kill anyone unnecessarily and don't shoot anybody or anything like that, and that is not at all what happens. Like literally the first scene of the first book is them attacking a town and then they go to a farmhouse and realize there's nothing there, so they say, okay, let's just see if this guy has any daughters we can... And like that is, that's your introduction to this character. And George keeps that attitude throughout. Now, he's not a sadist.  He is just willing to sacrifice pretty much anything and anyone in order to achieve his goals. So while, again, yes, he is an awful person, he's never boring. You know, he's very interesting to follow and he's very good at what he does. Like I said, he's very smart, very competent, and whenever there's battles or anything, he doesn't hide behind his soldiers.  It's just, he's an awful person because he's willing to sacrifice and risk anything including the lives of other people. This is encapsulated pretty well in the second book when he gets into conflict with this character named Oren, who is also a prince of another kingdom. The kingdom is called Aero, so he's the prince of Aero, which sounds like a nickname similar to Prince of Thorns, but it's not, that's just, that's his title. But anyways, Oren is also very young, he's also very intelligent, also a very competent battlefield commander and everything that George is, but he's a decent person. He has spent years conquering nearby kingdoms and bringing them into the fold, but he's actually a very good ruler and people like living under him, and the second book is basically about him coming into George's territory and trying to take over. And I'm sorry for minor spoilers, but I kind of have to bring that up in order to talk about this. And in a traditional fantasy story, Oren would probably be the protagonist, or at the very least he and George would switch personalities. Because think about it, we have this guy who's trying to conquer this entire empire in order to make it better and make life better for all the people under him. And then we have this person he goes up against who is sadistic and wants power just for the sake of power. Okay, he's not sadistic, let's be clear, he's brutal though, and he wants power just for his own personal desire to have power and he's willing to sacrifice anything in anyone, like in a more traditional story he would be a villain. Or at the very least they would just switch personalities, like again, you know, we still have George who had his mother murdered and led bandits and everything, but he'd be much nicer about it. And then in the second book he would again be the underdog because Oren's army outnumbers his by a huge margin, and so for most of the book he was thinking, how is he gonna get out of this? And after spending three entire books with him, I just felt gross. You know, George is a horrible, horrible person for a variety of reasons, like he kills people, he steals things, he just does not care. But again, he's never boring, you know? He makes no excuses for himself, he makes no excuses for why he is the way he is, like in fact in the third book there is a point where he is captured by some other bandits and he witnesses them torturing people in extremely horrific ways, and he doesn't want to end up that way, but he also specifically says in his narration that, yeah, they weren't really any worse than me and my old road brothers, you know, they didn't do anything that we wouldn't have done, really. And that kind of brings me into the actual prose, like the way the story is written, which is fantastic.  It is full of like information, like very straightforward information, you know? It doesn't feel like an encyclopedia entry about the world or anything. He just gives very straightforward info about the world, about people he knows, about just life in general. You know? It's very straightforward, very fun to read, and it reveals his personality and the way he's just extremely practical in pretty much all things. It has some very blunt truths about himself and other people. Like I said, he makes no excuses for the type of horrible person he is. He just says, yep. I want power, and in the first book he also wants revenge on his uncle, who is the one that killed his mother and his brother, and he doesn't make excuses for that.  And just watching his thought process as he comes up with plans and everything is, it's just great. It's a lot of fun. So, even if I didn't, well, I don't know if I'd say I like George, but even if I, George, but even if I wasn't invested in his journey and invested in watching this, I would probably still stick around just because I love the way these books are written. It's a lot of fun. Now, the story is kind of told weird though. I will say that because the first book is very straightforward, you know, it's just George explaining his journey in chronological order as the events happen. But then in the second and third books, it has like two parallel journeys, which are also still from George's perspective. But it has one journey which takes place like right after the first book. So he's still 14 years old, and it just goes on with some of his other travels throughout the second and the third book. And that introduces like several characters and bits of information about the world and everything that we need to know later. And it just, for the most part, doesn't come back until later. But it keeps cutting back and forth between that journey and the one where he's older. So in the second book, it's four years after that, so he's around 18 years old. And it just goes over his conflict with the Prince of Oran. And in the third book, he's 20. And that mostly goes over, again, more of his struggles to become emperor. And so switching back and forth like this, I get why they did it. It's a pacing issue. But it is kind of odd because the thing is, if they had just told the whole story in chronological order, then the first book would be the same. But then the second book, you'd probably have enough material for his other journey there in order to fill the whole book. But it wouldn't really have much of a climax. It would just be a series of, yep, this is going to be important later. Yep, this is also going to be important later. Yep, you need to know this for later. And then the third book would also be weird in terms of pacing because it would have like a relatively short section. In fact, I think most of the storyline when he's 18 in the second book takes place over the course of one day. But you would have that relatively short section there and then it would just skip ahead two years. And then it would be about everything with him trying to become emperor and going to the congression, which is where all the leaders convene to elect a new emperor. And so I get why they did it. It was a whole pacing issue. But it is still a little weird. And it took some getting used to. Like I don't know. I just I felt the need to mention that. And I have to say that for the most part, the pacing here is insane. Like you can see this is the last book. It's not it's not that thick. It's not that big. It's around 400 pages. And the other two books are also around that length, if not shorter. And despite being three not particularly long books, they cram like seven books worth of content in there. Like if this were told in the fashion of a more traditional fantasy, like I keep saying it's very different, then each of these books would be like twice as long and there would be twice as many of them. Like they would go into a lot more detail about certain things, like, you know, battles and stuff would be described in more detail. We get more information about the world itself. It would probably follow a much bigger cast of characters and show their perspectives on various events going on. But no, it's it just goes by like that really fast. And sometimes that's great, but other times that is to the series detriment. I also think that the world is cool and a little bit unique.  And I stand by most of what I said in that video. However, I do think that this series does that concept well, because excuse me, right from the beginning, we know that this is our world like a thousand years in the future.  And now a thousand years later, they've regressed to something akin to feudal Europe. But there's also magic and they are also aware that this is our world a thousand years later. Like they refer to our civilization as the builders and that they have builder technology and stuff. They don't necessarily understand how it works and how to use it, but it's there. And at first I was wondering, like, OK, where does magic come from then? Like, is this just really advanced technology? And there is an explanation given for that. I won't give it away because it's really interesting. But I did like that. So this is a cool world. It's a bit unlike anything I've seen before. I do wish we got some more info on it. But like I said, George's narration is very straightforward, very to the point. And he doesn't spend time on frilly details like how does the government of this kingdom work or what sort of cultural exports to the people over here have or things like that, you know? And maybe the author has an idea of that in his head, but it's just not brought up in the books, which is fine. But if you're looking for, you know, more of a travelogue where you really get to explore this world, you may be disappointed. Now for the problems. Sometimes the story feels like it's just moving George around because it needs him to be somewhere and it needs him to receive this knowledge or receive this item or something so that he can use it later.  It just feels like, OK, we need him to travel there. So the author comes up with some sort of crappy excuse for it, especially in the flashback sequences after the first book where it's still him young going on this long journey over the course of months or maybe a year, I think, before it finally ties together at the very, very end of the third book. So yeah, it just doesn't feel that natural is what I'm getting at. The climax of the series and, in fact, the last book in general just goes by way, way too fast. And so it just does not have time to sink in or to have much real impact. Like we hear about these distant events happening, like we hear about this guy called the Dead King, who is a very powerful necromancer or something along those lines, at least. And he's raising an undead army and attacking people, but we don't really see any of that in person until the very end. Or at least we see very little of that in person until the very end. So I don't know, there's just not much of a sense of dread. You know, we're supposed to be feeling dread that this guy is coming closer and closer and how are the heroes going to deal with this? And the only way they can deal with it is if George becomes emperor and unites everybody, but it just, I don't know. It just, it doesn't work very well. And while George is a fascinating protagonist with a lot of layers to him, like it makes sense why he would be so psychotic. You know, he's basically a child soldier, like we see his childhood and the things he went through in the sort of abuse he faced from his father. He witnessed his mother and brother murdered, and then he had to survive on the road as a bandit, which I mean, again, that means fighting and killing people and stealing their stuff. So he's essentially a child soldier. So he's a very deep, complex character, but very few other characters get that much development. You know, like Miana gets a little bit, you know, she seems like a cool person and it makes sense why George and her would get along so well, but she just doesn't get that much time to shine in either the second or the third book and all of George's road brothers that follow him around. They have like little hints of personality, and I do remember some of them being different. But again, they just, there's not that much to any of them.  And it's, it's a good thing that George is such a fascinating protagonist because if he wasn't, then he wouldn't be able to carry this series the way he does. Like if this were, again, a regular fantasy story where it was told third person and it jumped between characters, perspectives a lot, then I don't think it would work very well just because George would be the only one I was interested in. There are also a few moments, like nothing too awful, I don't think, but there are a few moments where it feels like the entire universe is just bending around George to make things work out for him.  And then the thing turns out exactly the way it needs to for him to just skirt by and barely succeed. You know, like that just happens one too many times. And so I don't know, it's it's a little frustrating to deal with. So yeah, overall, I do think that the Broken Empire Trilogy is great. I really enjoyed it. But if you hate the beginning section, like if you hate George from the start and you just can't get over how awful he is, then you're not going to like the series. You know, it's not going to change your mind. Like he gets maybe a little bit redeemed at the end, but it just does not make up for everything he does. It just it doesn't. So I would recommend this for people looking for original fantasy, looking for something different than what you would expect. But again, keep in mind, it is pretty dark at times. And if you don't like George from the beginning, you're not going to like him at any other point. No, perfect. It's in Japanese. Jingchao Nonging Tao. Wait, that's Chinese. Luckily, I can read barricade. So now for spoiler stuff, because I need to talk about the ending of the series because it's not great, but in order to talk about the ending, I have to explain a couple of things. So basically the builders, you know, us, our civilization, whenever that was destroyed, it was some time in the future, like at least a couple of decades in the future, because they have technology we do not have today. They have things like fully self-aware, sentient artificial intelligences, they have androids that can pass for human, you know, things like that. And apparently either this may have contributed to the apocalypse, it may not have, but the builders just broke physics at some point. Like they made it so that human thoughts and human willpower can affect the real world. And that's magic. That's where magic comes from. But at the same time, as this goes on and as more and more people use magic, it is slowly destroying the world or possibly the whole universe. Like, again, Jorg doesn't really understand exactly how it works. So he doesn't give a whole lot of detail about it, but it's clear that there are some other characters he talks to who understand it in more detail. So if you're looking for a better explanation, you're not going to find it here, but it's clear that there is one. And so the third book, a huge chunk of that is just Jorg traveling to Vienna. I think that's how you say it. Like, it's supposed to be like a bastardized, garbled version of Vienna. And that's like the capital of the empire. But anyways, a big chunk of the book is him traveling there. And then once he gets there, it's the Congression, which is, again, where all the leaders of the hundred kingdoms come together and try to vote on a new emperor. And he has to get a majority of the votes, which means 51. And while they're there, the dead king attacks. And there's a battle going on. And Jorg just barely manages, like with them literally beating down the door, Jorg manages to get elected emperor. And then he fights the dead king very briefly.  Now, because Jorg understands that magic is basically just using your willpower to affect the real world, he pits his will against William slash the dead king and he just kills him that way. You know, he just thinks really hard about it, basically, and then kills him. But he knows that the world is still on the path to being destroyed. Like either it will unravel because everyone's using magic or the artificial intelligences, which are still around, are going to kill all of humanity in order to prevent them from, you know, doing that. And so Jorg, immediately after being emperor, has someone kill him. So he's emperor for like two minutes, and then he goes to a sort of afterlife. But it turns out that this afterlife, this heaven where he sees his brother, that was actually created by humanity because, again, it's willpower affecting reality. And so humanity's like collective consciousness created the afterlife. Like it feels like the ending of a Gainax anime, honestly.  Like they put things back the way they were, and so magic disappears from the world. And in the epilogue, we find out that someone made an artificial intelligence copy of Jorg, and so the whole story, or at least most of the story, has been written down by that AI copy of him. And now Jorg's son, who is only a child at this stage, is the emperor of the empire, which I didn't realize that was how it worked until the last second, but because I figured that, OK, they had to vote on him. Now that he's dead, they have to vote and choose a different emperor, but apparently not. It just passes through his bloodline that way. So yeah, this is not a great ending, I don't think, because again, the whole thing that we were building up to was Jorg becoming the emperor. And at the end, he's on the emperor for a couple of minutes. And again, it passes to his son, it'll go through his bloodline, so that is victory of a sort. But it feels unsatisfying that the goal the character was working towards this entire time wasn't attained by them. And on top of that, like I mentioned, the super fast pacing means that the climax doesn't mean much either. Like this entire thing happens over the course of like 20 pages, maybe a little over 20 pages. Like I remember getting close to the end of the book and thinking, OK, how are they going to wrap this up all that quick? And as I was getting nearer to the end, I was thinking, OK, is there a fourth book? And I just thought this was a trilogy. But no, it just it just ends really quickly. And so it doesn't have much time to sink in. And yeah, again, just the fact that Jorg didn't really get to be emperor is immensely unsatisfying. You know, I wanted it to end with him being crowned and then saying, and I ruled for the rest of my days or something like that. And I get that a story not ending the way you want it to can still be great. But I just don't think it was handled well here. So yeah, really good books, but they did not stick the landing. They just they didn't. And yeah, like I said, I recommend it to people looking for a different type of fantasy because there's a lot of interesting stuff here, but, you know, the ending is a little iffy and also the storyline with Catherine never really felt like it went anywhere. And a couple of other issues that I don't know. I think this was Mark Lawrence's first book series that he wrote. So yeah, that explains some of the issues. But still, it it didn't stick the landing. That's all. Bye. Oh, my goodness. People are still watching this. I'm I'm not sure why I thought most people clicked away before the credits started. But yeah, these are all my patron, Patreon people. And my ten dollar and up patrons are Oppo Savilane and Olivia Rayan, brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovich, Dark King, Don, Dio, Echo, Flacks, Carcat Kitsune, Lexi DeLorm, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, microphone, Nist Boy, Peep the Toad, Robi Reviews, Ruby Ishmael, Sad Martigan, Celia the Vixen, Stone Stairs, Tesla Shark, Theyvictus and Wesley. All of you are great. And if you want your name on here, then consider becoming a patron. You get early access to my videos as well. It's it's a great deal. I promise.  That that's cool, too. Follow all my socials and stuff, which are linked below. I'll see you. Goodbye.


Welcome to the Global Symposium for Regulators 2019 here in Vanuatu we're very pleased to be joining the studio today by Abdi Ahmed who is the general manager for the National Communications Authority for Somalia. Welcome to the studio. Thank you for having me. Great to see you. Now I wanted to start off by talking a little bit about inclusive connectivity which is very much the theme for this year's Global Symposium for Regulators. You're one of the newest regulatory authorities Somalia that's been set up. In your opinion how can one best achieve inclusive connectivity? As you mentioned it's one of the topical issues that we are here in Vanuatu and the global regulatory symposium and connectivity is becoming a really big issue globally. More so in Somalia it's a country that's coming out of a civil conflict and rebuilding its institutions and in that process and in the world the digitized world that we live in today is very it's critical that people are connected to the Internet because the globe is connected so for people to participate in the global economy they have to have that connectivity but connectivity by itself is not enough it has to be inclusive it has to be affordable and people have to have access to it and all those are require a lot of thinking from regulators from policymakers in terms of building infrastructure making infrastructure available and in terms of people having digital skills to access content content itself is a big part of that and also reaching not only a city's and major population centers where operators can make you know financial gain but also extending to rural areas and on remote areas and also also to people who are disadvantages in many ways whether it's disability or or underserved communities so it's huge and you have to look at from different angles and as a regulator we have to think about how we extend that connectivity and make it inclusive and and use the policymakers also to guide us to get connected communities. I was going to ask as a regulator what are the the modern challenges facing you today? Well I mean in our case it's a unique story and most as you know the deregulation and building regulatory authorities across the world has become a common practice but traditionally the way it started was government owned networks, government owned infrastructure and they privatized those networks to take advantage of competition and the private sector. In our case the industry grew before the government was capable of regulating so you have a powerful operators that are in in our in our country who have not been regulated in the past so you can imagine how difficult it is to come in into a marketplace where people are not used to regulations and ask them to do things that it took for granted for doing for a long time by themselves so it's so we are trying to build so one of the ways we're trying to really get leverage within the regulatory sphere is to get the to build confidence and to build relationships with the operators and make them understand that you know light touch regulation is the best interest for them it brings order to the marketplace it ensures and gives them assurances to their investments in the industry so they can invest and have the assurance that you know they will be treated well and the regulatory aspects of it will be covered so instead of being afraid of regulator we want them to work with the regulator so it's to build the networks to get access to people so it's win-win situation where when you build the networks and you get access to people companies make money people get access and we make sure in areas where the operators may not make money necessarily to incentivize through maybe universal fund and things like that and use innovative technologies and encourage them to use innovative technologies to have the reach and inclusivity that we need how is ITU helping you on your journey or ITU has been critical to our growth and establishment the ITU is particularly the development bureau has been very instrumental in in getting us the assistance we need we recently have a working relationship and we have an agreement with the ITU we have a frameworks agreement with ITU where they have been helping us with the policy development as well as now we're working on different projects within with the DEET sector to build our capacity and and then bring knowledge to our people but also to build some of these policy areas and policy frameworks and regulatory frameworks so we're getting a lot of assistance from them and we really appreciate that and and we will continue to work with them and also with other regulators in our region but also globally you've come across the world essentially to be to be here for this event it is wanted to find out what do you hope will be some of the key takeaways that you'll be able to take back with you well as the one of the new US regulators is a very important for us to not reinvent the wheel so because regulators have been around they've been meeting and have conferences for for many many years now 20 years and for us it's learning opportunity learning you know to learn from the experiences developed as practices so we can have some things that we can take away back home and apply and also it's a great forum for exchange of ideas and how people are dealing with issues of connectivity issues of inclusivity and things like that so we view it as a great venue and a great summit for us to be to be around to learn from our counterparts. Finally inclusive connectivity is it do you think the future of regulation? Oh absolutely I mean you to really get the connectivity and make it inclusive you need not only the policies and the policy frameworks that go live but also the regulatory interventions so regulators have responsibility to where the private sector and the private sector is not efficient enough to come in and help and incentivize private sector to provide that inclusive connectivity. Well that's wonderful thank you very much indeed for for sharing a few insights into your side of the world and into your perspective and we hopefully will catch up with you again at the next GSR. Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity and I hope fully in the future we will have sessions like this and I hope others will learn from our experience as well. Yeah thank you very much indeed.


Hello, everyone. I guess I'll get started now. For anyone who's coming in here to the print schedule, we were a last minute replacement for White House.gov. So if you are coming in for that, don't leave, because I'm going to be talking a little bit about open government, but also other cool 3D things. So we're going to talk to you today about how you can use this X3D and X3D graphics to add interactive 3D content to your Drupal site. And I'm going to use an example of the NIH 3D print exchange. So my name is Megan Coakley. I am an analyst at the Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch of the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology, which is really just a fancy name for being the scientific arm of the IT department of the National Institute of Biology and Infectious Diseases. And then my co-presenter here, Leonard Daley, is the president of Daily Realism and is a board member on the Web3D consortium, which we're also a part of at NIH. So because this is in the showcase track, I'm going to talk about a couple different things involving Drupal. Just some unique stuff that we did with the site. I don't want to get into too much of our scientific stuff, but if you are a science geek, hopefully, like me, hopefully, you'll get some good stuff out of it. So oh, sorry. OK, so before I launch into that, I just want to talk a little bit about 3D printing itself, just so you have a context for where I'm going with this. So 3D printing, if you're not familiar with it, it's a means of fabrication that involves putting down layer, fabricating objects layer by layer in 3D. And it's being, typically, it evolved from industry and manufacturing and rapid prototyping. It's kind of an old technology. It's been around for 20, 30 years or so, but it's only now becoming mainstream. You can print in all different kinds of materials. There's amazing uses for it. And it's kind of right now that it's moving into the biosciences and medicine being used in things like 3D printable prosthetics, surgical planning, printing out 3D prints for surgical planning, bioprinting is now the thing. And then it's great as a scientific visualization tool. And that's what we do at my institute. So talking about 3D visualization and why you're all here, a lot of what I'm going to be saying is using scientific data as our reference point, because that's where I'm coming from. But all of the concepts and methods here can be applied in any way, and of course, with the Drupal specs. So we know that a picture is worth 1,000 words. And I could spend far more than 1,000 words telling you about this molecular structure, which is hemagglutinin or receptor on the influenza virus. But there's only so much information you can gather from that. So here's the same model, a digital 3D, and then a 3D print. So there's much more to be gained from that. This model, actually, that 3D print itself kind of was a critical turning point in a breakthrough discovery for researchers at NIAD, who it was a discovery that's leading towards a universal flu vaccine. So these can be really impactful in helping people. When you get the physical object in your hands, there's things that you can see. So we had great things happening at NIH, but how can we help the public benefit from that? So we created the NIH 3D print exchange, which is the site built in Drupal. And there are many kind of repositories to get 3D prints, like there's iPhone covers, gadgets, widgets, things like that. But we wanted to be able to share things that are bioscientific and medical and that are accurate, and there's not a lot of that out there. So, and even to make those models requires a lot of, experience a lot of advanced software for anyone who's familiar with 3D graphics, and hopefully many of you are, it's not that easy, and particularly make something that's watertight in a 3D principal format that is compatible with a 3D printer. So the exchange was kind of our way of narrowing that knowledge gap. It's open and interactive, you can download anything, you can upload stuff, it's been a great resource. And the opportunity to do that, getting to the government part, was through the HHSID Lab. So NIH is under Department of Health and Human Services. We got some seed funding from them, and it was great because they encouraged us to use lean and agile development methods, which was a major change from the typical waterfall and enterprise performance life cycle stages, that kind of thing that we were used to. So that was really cool, and it's really transformed how we work. So if you're in government and you haven't gone that way, I would highly recommend that. So, and then a major part, so this was sort of our timeline. We actually had a public Drupal site up in less than eight months, and we actually launched the site, a public beta in April after starting development in November of 2013, launched in April, 2014, and then the public version, the initial public release was available in June, 2014. But so the government, if you're not familiar with that, it's Drupal's being widely used in government. I think it's great because it's all open source, there's things that we can share. It was HHS that suggested that we use that, and hopefully bringing this open source stuff is saving us all a lot of taxpayer dollars. So OCRCB, the Office of Cyber Infrastructure where I am, we have a lot of really talented developers and administrators, but we didn't have any experience with Drupal. So as a beginner, anyone, I don't know if you felt this way, but it's kind of a weird beast. Up until this project, we have worked almost exclusively in SharePoint for our internet, intranet, all our collaborative administration websites. So we had this really tight timeline. We were working in a completely new CMS. We had abandoned waterfall and we're doing this completely new development technique, and it was pretty crazy, but it was a great learning experience. But one of our developers one day asked us for the project requirements, and we said we don't know them yet, because there's never been a resource like this, and he was kind of, oh my God, you're breaking all the rules, you're making changes on production, what are you doing? But breaking those rules, we were able to launch at the White Housemaker Fair last June. So that was kind of a big, and in 11 months since that public launch, we have over 30,000, as of, yeah, I guess as of last month, we had over 30,000 unique site visitors, over 2,000 registered users, and over 5,000 downloadable 3D models, 3D files that are compatible with 3D printers. So it's a community-driven database, so it's not just government stuff. Anyone can go there as a registered user, you can upload that file, medical models, labware, chemicals, molecules, anything related to science and medicine. So there's two main, so getting into the visualization part, there's two main file types used in 3D printing, serial lithography, which only, it doesn't have any color information, and then the virtual reality modeling language, VRML or Vermal, and that does contain color. So because 3D printing has been mostly about functionality, this color aspect hasn't really been that important. So there are 3D graphics visualizers on the web, and even some in Drupal, but we didn't really feel like they met all the requirements for us in being able to display these color models in a really nice, accurate way, and they're kind of big files, what's something that's robust and fast. So, but the color is essential in getting that extra information. So here's an example of what these standard, this is actually, this is NASA's website, so this is the now-famous wrench that they sent up to the space station that was printed there, and they actually streamed their 3D graphics from Git. So Git has a 3D viewer, and you can flip that around, turn it around, because if you're gonna print something in 3D, you wanna visualize it first. So what we did, because we wanted color and we wanted something different and new, we turned to the X3D file format, and Leonard's gonna kind of go into more of the technical specs on that, but it's a royalty-free open standard file format, and it's actually a more mature, evolution of vermal, but it's not, it's actually not 3D, 3D prints are compatible, there's just STL and vermal mainly, but it's really easy, it runs in JavaScript and WebGL, so it will work on virtually any browser, and it's just kind of really simple, lightweight. So I'm going to actually do a live demo because it would just kind of go to, just seemed a bit easier. All right, so here's the site, this is where you can go and search and filter and look at all these things. See, bring this in. So this was actually just downloaded last night or earlier today. So here's the preview image. I can click 3D here, and I'll get, this is all, doing this as part of the module, so the great thing about X3D is it has this compressed binary format that it allows to do this progressive loading, so you're not just sitting there waiting at a white screen and that's a new implementation to the site as of just a couple months ago, and it's really enhanced the user experience. So you can, in our little, it's just an iframe there, and then you can launch a full-screen viewer, and again, so you get that faster loading, and you can kind of go in and play around with it, it's just a nice, whether you're gonna actually have content like this that your user is gonna interact with, you can have sort of a running animation, it's just one of those things to add a little bit of novelty, it doesn't have to be too flashy, so it's just kind of a nice thing that we added. So thank you, I figured that was gonna be a lot easier to do a live demo. I was a bit risky with the wireless, but it's been good so far. All right, so as I mentioned, X3D is not actually printable, and when people are uploading stuff, they're uploading an STL or a vermal. So we actually turned Drupal from a content management system into a content creation system, and this is our really kind of the part that we were excited about that was really novel. So these pipelines work, it's just a Python script that calls on a workflow to convert either the STL or the vermal to an X3D format and then it generates the PNG preview. It's totally simple, it's done in Blender, which is an open source version of Maya, which is a 3D graphics application. So the other part of this, as I said, they're difficult to create. So how can we make this easier for people? So we made these create tools where you can click on this and upload your raw data so you could go on there for instance, get your CT scan from your doctor and actually upload that to the site and you can get out, you know, you can see the bones of it and print them if you wanted to. So it's kind of a cool thing. And so it takes a couple different, 35 different file formats that range from microscopy image docs, protein structure data. So I won't get into this too much, but as an example, this is a protein, 3D protein structure data, which is essentially just a point cloud. It's just GPS coordinates for atoms. And we have the more sophisticated workflow that converts all of this into the 3D principle format. And again, this was something our developers hadn't worked with Drupal. He's a Jedi master, he's awesome. And he said, you know, he was a little scared of Drupal at first. And then he said, wow, this thing is really amazingly scripted of all, that you can do so much more with it outside of just, you know, managing content. You can do all these incredible things and you could apply this, I'm sure, to many other types of file conversions or I don't know how many people are integrating these kind of back-end workflows, but it uses all open source applications. So that's what you get out of it with the protein structures. So it's actually from that one data file, we're creating 24 completely new data files. So for instance, this pipeline spits out six vermal in color, two STL, you have eight X3D for display and then eight PNGs for the previews. So we have a lot of memory storage there. So we did this and the idea is that you can do this too. So actually here we go. So the X3DOM module that we built, so this kind of went into, that viewer went into a custom module that we had that was sort of our giant thing that runs all these workflows and we took that out, put a scaled down version, it's in Sandbox now and what it does is it just gives you a media image type in your content type. You have a field for X3D file and then you can pick this X3D interactive viewer and actually I don't know if Jamie is here, we had a buff yesterday and he actually uploaded the module and got it working while we were right there. So and if you need X3D files to practice with, we of course have loads on the site. So it's in Sandbox but hopefully it'll be approved soon and I certainly encourage everyone to try it out. So I'm gonna go to Leonard, I'll go to you now and he'll tell you more about the standard. So as we're doing these switches, if anybody has any questions here for Megan, come up to the microphone up there so we can capture it on the recordings. We can take a couple of questions now if you have any. Also for those people in the back, you may wanna move forward. Some of the slides may have content that gets a little small, not that it's critical that you see it right now, you can always capture the video and the slides are online. There we go. Complete with sound effects. So these are also slides I presented at the baffle yesterday. We're gonna skip it, it's one combined deck. So the slides we skipped will be the more technical nature and dealing with more code and this is more of the presentation of capabilities of X3D. So this is a complete overview of the slide set. We will be touching on about half of the topics. First off, what is X3D? And this is not gonna be a course on how you create X3D that's fairly involved. There are quite a number of content tools such as Maya and Blender, which will create X3D. Also most of the CAD tools will output X3D or Virmul and do that so you're not needing to do this by hand. It's a rather extensive process. But when you're done, you do create scenes that are fully animated involving rich media. In this case, it doesn't have audio but it's fairly simple to add. This one has an animated camera but with the controls over here in the top left, you can switch to a camera that is user controllable. This particular scene is nice because it's very visually rich and it will play for itself and it loops around so you don't need to continually interact with it. The top left, there's a counter showing the resources that are coming down. This is a live demo going on for a very slow internet right now so we may not see the whole thing. But this is linked from the slide so you can get to it. These examples were all done by the developers of X3DOM, which is a library produced by Fraunhofer and we'll put this up later because it'll take too long. Web3D consortium is the developer as a standards development organization for the X3D standard. X3D is an ISO royalty free open standard. It's usable by anybody without the need to pay for royalties to, for any purpose involved in that. It will run in browsers as you saw with that example. It also runs in standalone systems and in plugins. It runs on phones, tablets, desktops, laptops and cave environments and pretty much anything that can handle a WebGL or direct X type interface. Web3D consortium, talked about that. Their site is one of the example sites that I'll use for showing a simple plugin. X3DOM is X3D plus HTML5 plus JavaScript. It all runs in the browser, on the phones. If you have any phone you can go to these slides and pick up most of the examples. The really big ones like the cathedral take a lot longer and may crash your phone depending upon the particular sophistication or capacity of the phone. So the integration into HTML is fairly easy. It requires one external JavaScript and one external CSS and some code. See it there? And it just runs right in there. And this simple example of a box that's user-controllable in terms of orientation. Anybody who attended the AngularJS talked just before lunch. They did talk about cores. I am not going to go into the details. There's details in the slides here for reference. You need to pull out the stuff but it has the same issues that Angular does. So we'll cover three integration methods. Megan talked about one which is the Drupal module. This is in Sandbox. Not quite ready for production yet but just about to be. There's the old traditional iframe method which brings in anything external to the page just drops it into a box you identify. And that's the case of this globe here. And this is just a screen capture but in the website you can manipulate the globe. It also goes to a separate application where you can get the current weather for any point on the earth. The partial integration we'll spend most of the rest of the time on is involving moving the models so that they're visualized on a phone. And the neat thing about that is that the phone there also can track motion. So as you reorient the phone either by looking up, down, left, right you can see different parts of the model. And we have to do this one. This model was loaded up yesterday, day before. It's the flu virus. It's available. Here's the URL. There's 15 to 20 models there. Many from the NIH. There's also another set of collections of museum, scanned museum objects. They're all visualizing on the phone. And then through another switch which you see over here in the stereo view on the phone or actually in an A environment it will go and you'll see it go into split screen mode. And then using the very expensive device called Google Cardboard. And this runs between five and $15 depending upon the particular model. You will see this in stereo. If you remember the old ViewMaster slides where you click through and you got a pair of like seven different views. This is essentially what this device is. But because you plug your phone right here you get the full interaction that you would with the phone. So it rotates the model. You see it in stereoscopic views. Some models like the flu virus which are particularly round. You see the details. Other models that have large extents in one direction but not necessarily the other one will have a very pronounced 3D effect. And after the talk today people can come up and use this and check it out with their phone and look at the various models. So we're running early here. And I've pretty much finished my talk of the slides. So going back and picking up what we covered about the three integration methods. The inlines with the iframe, a partial integration method into Drupal content. And you get the stereo viewing and also the NIH Drupal module. Plus then the NIH workflow Drupal as a content development system, content creation system. Are there any questions? Overall I'll just, I won't go back to, see if I can go back to the questions. So essentially the crux of this is that everything is done open source. Which I know being the Drupal community you would all appreciate. It's all really simple and I think you can see that there's the opportunity there to provide a lot of rich content for your user base. And as well all of this openness means open government. So that's kind of exciting. We actually, on our developer page you'll find links to. We built an API actually with Squishy Media. Greg Lunche was here earlier. He's a Squishy Media. He was involved in organizing the conference. And we got a lot of help from 18F which is part of the GSA to get this API out there and just see what people are gonna do with it. And we're kind of excited to see what they'll do with that. The code for our pipelines is gonna be up on GitHub soon. And then we will, and then there's the module. So we're really trying to put this out there. And actually the entire site because it's in Drupal is completely transferable. So my goal was kind of all right well let's get a 3dprint.nist.gov and a 3dprint.rme.mil and see how it goes from there. So getting more return on your taxpayer dollars. And one of our things we are excited about is we were written up, if anyone is aware of Ken Lane, the API evangelist gave us some great praise for mainly for Squishy Media for making just a great really easy to use API. So again we'll have the slides up and there'll be links to the Sandbox. You can just search Sandbox X3DOM and you'll find it there. I encourage you try it out. And as I said hopefully that'll be approved but it is working now. So we had someone test it yesterday here. They had it set up, run in really quickly. So we've got a small team that's around from a couple different institutes beyond mine at NIH. We've really reached out to a lot of, there's so many people that we would have to think for this but sort of that theme was getting, reaching out to sort of getting people to help you think outside the box. And so there's our final thanks. And if anyone has any questions, certainly or come on up and try the Google Cardboard. This place to start is realism.com slash models or there's a menu item. Well as long as it should display in here. Maybe you have to unlock it. Yeah, if you have unlocked it. Yeah. Okay, yeah, okay, so that should be close to the screen. No, it doesn't go full screen. There's two links there. The picture takes you to model. There's also next to it, a model and a stereo link. Here's the influenza for everybody who wants to take a look. That's influenza right there. I'm sure you should in there. Going full screen. You take it out of the case. It's just a little bit too thick for it to fit in. You have to turn around completely side by side. Side by side. Some phones. It isn't quite. Yes. It isn't. What kind of, oh, you don't have a kind of browser. This thing here, it's not the stereo view. So this is the regular model view. And then the other way around. Oh no. Well, that's. While it's downloading, you can see it counting down there. So this is another biologic model. Oh yeah. This is yours, it's ready to move. You may be seeing that the picture's for the phone. It worked too well. Yeah, let's hold it. Yeah, so this was made last year and the phones that designed for this were phones that were a little bit smaller than they got. It's real simple because the Oculus Rift was selling for like $1,500. And this is, and so if you wanted to illustrate this and you want to take it to Asia or Africa, you can't take a breath because they're too expensive. You can't. But this one, yeah, okay. They're not cheap by their economic standards, but they're easy to take. They fold up flat like a CD mailing box. Yeah. Or you can ship it easily. It ships in a nice box. You don't need a special packing. You know, it's its own packing. Yeah. You know, the only really damaged, oh, I lost that already, is the lenses. Yeah. Well, it folds up. There's some glue tape here, so I can't unfold it. But in the, no, velcro on top, but there's actually double stick tape. When you get it, it's a box about this size about that thick. And really light. So, and it's, yeah, and so it makes it very easy. And if you need for education purposes, for medical purposes, everybody's got a phone. And to run a Rift, you need a computer, a laptop or a desktop, you know, pretty big one, too. So it's a major effort, whereas this is very easy to do. And we can take it to shows like this, and if we lose it, yeah. It's unfortunate, but you're not losing a major thing. Yeah. So that makes it really nice. The pattern for this is available for free online. Yeah. No, no, the pattern is like Google. I need to put some links on it, yeah. But I do have some links on the realism site from a couple of blog posts about that, but I should, some engineers at Google. So that's why I get nicknamed Google Cardboard, but there's also Dodo, yeah. Dodo case makes it, makes one, Samsung has a Gear VR, which is all, those, these are essentially the same. Really simple design. And to go, it's like they talk to IKEA to go from their flat package to the final. And it's not even difficult to put together. It's not too complex. Do you have a card? South Korea? Yeah. You, Han, how's that come? The web 3D consortium has a Korea chapter. Yes. Yeah, I'll be around. I, we just have to leave this room because there's another presentation here, but we'll be around both Megan and I will be around for, oh, okay, so the, the printed presentation. It's great, yeah, I'm gonna work it out. It works really well. And actually, it's Google really sticking up.


In 3 minutes, you're going to find out where to look for photos or pictures on your Android phone. This is Amit Dan of amitdan.com. Today, I'll have another episode of Android Tips and Tricks video, and I'll talk about how to look for your photos or pictures on your Android phone. If this is your first time, or if you visit, thank you for your support on this channel. I'm always trying new and different ideas to take you beyond boundaries. If you're into thinking outside the box, this is the channel for you. If you're looking for more Android tips and tricks videos, there will be links in the description box below. So today, I'll talk about how to look for photos or pictures on your Android phone. So the first thing you want to do, go to your apps tray, or where all the apps are located. So you can easily do that by clicking here, this run button right here. And then the two apps we're going to be using are files and Google photos. Now, if you have an Android phone, you should have these apps installed on your phone already. In case if you do not have that, then you can just go ahead to Google Play Store and install these. These apps are all by Google, so they're very safe to use. And the first one I'm going to show you is the files, which is going to be located under FILES right here. So I'm just going to click on it. And here, you can see that it's giving you all the stuff you have on your phone. And the second one is images. So if you click on images, which is right here, and then this is going to give you all the pictures on your phone. Now, you can see that there's a breakdown by categories. So for example, pictures, screenshot, messages, canva, transfer, or any files you created.  And this is how you can see all pictures on your phone. However, if you want to just look at pictures, just, you know, tap on the pictures, then this is just going to sort out by pictures. And here you can see all pictures you have on your phone. So this is a very easy way to check for pictures on your phone. Now, the second one, I'm going to be showing you via Google Photos. So same idea. So if you go to your, you know, apps section and then look for Google Photos, which is going to be under PHO. So let's take a look here. So here we have Google Photos. So click on it. And then here you can see that there are a few options. For example, photos, search, sharing, and library. So if you click on library, now here you can see that there's a section called photos on device. And this is where you can see all photos on this device. So if you just click all, view all, then it's going to show you everything. But if you want to check by category, then here they have like in all the folders located. But let's say if we click on view all, and then here you're going to see all your photos on this device. Now there may be other ways to check for photos on your phone, but I just wanted to talk about these two because these two are the best and simplest, you know, methods. And you're using only apps by Google, which is much safer than using other apps. And they're easy to find. And if you don't have these installs, they're easy to install, download and install from Google Play Store. So thank you for watching this video. For the next video, I'm going to put a link on the screen. I'll see you in the next video.


Here it is. He's waking up still. Cool. You can just... Careful there, Joseph. You guys ready to go for a ride? You guys ready to go? Yeah, you just... You get the... Let's load up. Oh, this is cool. Oh! Oh! Joseph, don't do that. Don't do that. Joseph, you go over one seat, I think. You go over one seat. Joseph started driving the thing. All right, Seth, and you got to share a seat with me. We made it. Isn't this cool, guys? This is called a snowcat. Go over there and don't hit that. OK. Besides that, we're going to go. All right, here we go. Always different than the other two. Oh, look how close it's groomed to the trees there. Oh, is it? Man, you must get some epic sunrises. Here we are with Uncle Joseph. You're two groomers of America. Sign them up. Hold on. Hold on, Seth. All right, what mountain are we on? Well, on Aspen Mountain. What run is this? This is Deer Park. Deer Park on Aspen Mountain. Yeah, just kind of wrapping things up. Pretty good night overall. We've got quite a bit done. And yeah, having some fun. Yeah. Having a good time. Gaining elevation. Eating that vertical for breakfast in the snowcat. It's nice up here. OK, good sunrises. Oh, we've got to keep an eye out for the fox. Oh, we've got to keep an eye out for the fox.  They're waving. OK, we'll go inside. The two Josephs are the brave ones. They're going for another hour. And the two Seths are going to go inside. That was fun. Holy smokes. It's amazing. Yeah, we're going to go in this building. We are on the top of a mountain. I'll get you some views here in one second. The vlog out at 9 AM, but we had an early morning in Aspen, Colorado. Now we're just riding the gondola down to the bottom with Joseph's ancestors.