Welcome to the Randy Show. I am the James Randy Educational Foundation's field coordinator, Brian Thompson, with me as always is James Randy. Good to be here. So how are you enjoying the last year anyone is ever going to be on earth? Well, every day is to be treasured, of course, as we all know because the Mayans knew about these things. Brian, they just, doesn't dawn on anybody who's taken up on this thing that the Mayans just ran out of stone.  I don't have a 2013 calendar in the house. Does that mean that it doesn't exist or it won't exist or the end of the world comes at the end of 2012? Come on friends, let's get real. Yeah, I think the Mayans were behind on calendar technology in a lot of ways. Like their calendars were pretty cool looking, but I don't think the Mayans ever came up with the puppy a month calendar. No, no, no, nothing like that. Maybe sacrifice of the month or something like that. That's not, I don't want to see that every time I roll over to a new month. Very true, very true. I just want to see an adorable puppy. So we're also going to be talking about psychics or self-proclaimed psychics in particular, there's one psychic named Nancy Marks who last month was found guilty of stealing close to $300,000 from some of her clients. This was in Colorado. Apparently she demanded money from them in order to draw out their bad energy. Oh, of course. And she took their credit card numbers in order to look for how many times the number six appeared in them. It didn't dawn on any of these victims to tell her the number of sixes that were in their credit card. Of course, they had to send her the credit cards, no doubt, or at least give her the whole number. And she went off to Macy's and Gimbles and a few other places and spent all kinds of money, I understand. Yeah, yeah. So she went on trial last month and it was a pretty speedy trial. I think it was a fairly open and shut case. So I'm not really sure what her punishment is going to be right now, but she was certainly found guilty. And I wanted to talk to you about how you feel about psychics being prosecuted in general. I mean, in this particular case, she was stealing money from people. She wasn't just providing a fake service for money. She was actually stealing their cash and spending it at Target. Well, I find that's a pity that it has to get to that point, Brian, that it has to get to a point where there's an actual theft of goods and or cash from these people where they actually reached into their credit card. That's the sacred thing with Americans, of course, is the credit card and the credit rating. And that would spoil the credit rating. That seems to make it a crime much more than just taking the money, actual currency, that they put in the basket and leave with them or whatever. The particular bejour is at that moment of time, the one that's most popular on Saturdays or whatever. It's incredible that it has to be that kind of a theft. But maybe that's the only kind of theft that some judges recognize that actually taking $100 bills from someone is that's nasty. You shouldn't do that. To actually take out their credit card and use it in Macy's, whoa, that's heavy. I don't see the difference at all. Theft is theft. There are some parts of the world that actually have outlawed psychic or storefront psychics anyway, people who set up a shop and say they'll tell your future for a couple of bucks. But there aren't many places like that in the world. And why do you think that is? I think it's political correctness and there's sort of an indolence, there's an inertia with law enforcement authorities. They're a little afraid of this sort of thing because they don't know on what kind of ground they stand. I can tell them they're standing in quicksand and it's going away underneath their feet right now. But they don't seem to want to listen to that. It is incredible that these people haven't come to justice before this and particularly the Marx family. Now, whether that's their original name, I have no idea. But there's Linda Marx and there's Suzy Marx. There's all kinds of Marx's all over the place. And the funny thing is, of course, that their term for a sucker is a mark, M-A-R-K. It's strange that they would be using that name. But this family is notorious, all over Florida, certainly, all through the South and in Georgia and all over the United States. They are notorious and they've come into contact with the law, so to speak, many times and many of them have gone to prison. But the amount of money they make far outweighs any prison penalty. They just have to sit there for a couple of years and wait till the time goes by and then they've still got the money. How many of these families do you think exist all over the world that have just, this is the family trade, is setting up a psychic storefront and they've been doing it for generations and generations? Well, there is a gypsy culture. Make no mistake about that. The gypsies call their maneuvers these various swindles that they carry out. They call them bajours. We've had several different guesses that where that name may have come from. But they use it among themselves, but certainly not with their victims. And they're all kinds of them. Everything from repaving your driveway with motor oil, which is a very popular one. They have a huge truck with a sign on the side of it and they stop by. Oh, we have some of this coding for the driveway left over here. We can give you a really good buy on it. That's a gypsy scan, too. They're all over the world in different cultures.  If they won't, we'll come back and do it again. Yeah, I know the term gypsy has become kind of slightly politically incorrect, at least in Europe, but not so much in the States. People say it all the time in the States. But in Europe, I think it's sort of been used. There are certain governments that have tried to use, I think gypsies, as scapegoats to pass anti-immigrant legislation and stuff like that. But you're right. There is this culture of generations and generations. These families that pull off grifts, I guess, if you want to use another word for it. My favorite one, when I was in Rome, I was told to watch out for this particular scam, which was that an old lady would be carrying a baby and she would trip and the baby would come flying out of her arms. And when someone would sort of dive in to catch the baby, a bunch of other people would swarm and just steal everything out of this Good Samaritans pocket, which I thought was a great trick because really the only defense against this is that whenever you see a baby flying through the air, just forget it, throw up your hands. Let the baby bounce and go on your happy way. Of course. Yeah, there's no good way to inoculate yourself against that scam. No, I think not. The bejure is out there and you've got to be very careful of it. I don't know whether I told you on one of these interviews, the story of me in Spain, we were in Barcelona. Did I tell you the story about that? I don't think so. Well, I'll try it now and you let it out if it's redundant. Sure. Pause for edit. Yeah, I was visiting my friend, Sonny Fontana, a magician friend from many years ago in Barcelona, at the way they say it, though I'll say it the same way. As in the general square there, and we were sitting around having endless cups of coffee and getting a buzz on. And I noticed that they were doing the three-card Monte business, the business of three cards facedown, which one is the queen, you have to point it out. And they had a couple of people, taller guys, standing there looking around to make sure that there were no interruptions coming, because this is strictly against the law to work the tourist trade like this in Barcelona. Other cities in Spain, I can't speak for, but I know that it is there. And every now and then, while I was watching them, and Sonny was telling me some of the acute gimmicks that they were using, a very interesting story and very interesting development of their culture was given to me in those few minutes. And then I heard a hum, and I thought, what was that? It's very, very loud and very obvious. And it was from one of the two gentlemen, this gentleman, ho, ho, ho, who was looking out for the cops. And indeed, a police car started to cruise by. And the gypsy just folded up the whole operation, the tip, as they call it, they just folded the whole thing up and looked around at the skies and the swallows going by and whatnot. And the cop car passed, there was a knot of ascent, and they went right back into it again. And so I did something rather daring, and Sonny told me afterwards that he was, what's the expression? Yeah, scaring shitless is the expression. It says something better in Spanish, I'm told. And in the case, I had been doing something which was rather risky. And so by observing this thing and seeing what the gimmick was, and I decided to move further into the fray. So I got a little closer into the operation, and while looking in another direction, I did a ho, sort of a thing like this. And everybody dove for cover and they covered up the gimmick. And there was no police car coming by, and they're looking around for it wondering, where are the cops?  Didn't know that, but I made them clear the whole area. And then they went back to business when they saw no police car. And I did it a couple of times and then Sonny came to me and advised me that discretion was a better part of any kind of dollar that I wanted to display. And he took me out of the square. Perhaps I might not have lasted another hoon. Well, if you want to ask any more questions of Randy, I think next time we're going to answer some viewer mail, if you don't mind. If you want to ask any questions about possible practical jokes or world travels that Randy has had in the course of his life, you can send them to me. I'm brian at randy.org, b-r-i-a-n at randy.org. And just put Randy's show somewhere in the subject line. And I guess we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks, Randy. Yes, please do. But I just want to add one thing before we go, Brian. This woman, Marks, who has been convicted already, I want to follow that through and find out whether she actually does go to prison because they have huge amounts of money to invest in lawyers. And I'm very surprised to find out they got this far that it actually went to trial because usually they bring in 30 or 40 lawyers and they sit around the room and they offer all kinds of objections. And usually the thing blows over simply because it's too involved and too expensive for the local authorities to follow through on. They just can't afford to do it. And when justice is something that can't be afforded, you're in serious trouble. The Randy's Show is a production of the James Randy Educational Foundation. To learn more about how we promote science and critical thinking, go to randy.org.


second speaker is Danika Roth who will be speaking about wildfire and surface roughness. Thanks. Can you guys all see my screen? Should we share a title slide? Yes. Great. Okay. Cool. So let's talk about wildfire and surface roughness. So in the broadest sense my group's work has been centering on the question of how do landscapes respond to wildfire? That's a really big question though. So for today we're going to narrow it down to looking at how steep landscapes respond to moderate to severe wildfire. So kind of more the noticeable and members of both landscape and post-fire responses. All right. So if we're going for a really basic description here we could say that in an unburned landscape roots support soil stability while above-ground vegetation both stores sediment up slow and provides some kind of protective cover for the bare ground. During a fire or right afterward that vegetation gets incinerated releasing sediment to travel from the hillsides to the channels as dry rubble and exposing the surface to wind erosion. And then once rain starts falling on the surface the bare ground gets reworked by rain splash to create micro topography and overland flow starts to develop real and gully networks. Then after this comes a prolonged period of elevated erosion and hazard risk until eventually the hillslopes start to recover as vegetation regrows and starts to store sediment again and the channels incise through all the settlement that the hillslopes dumped into them. And finally many years later we'll return to our initial unburned state. So this describes kind of a basic cycle of wildfire impact and recovery. The details and timing of some of these processes are still kind of unclear but they're starting to matter more and more as wildfire frequency and severity increase with climate change. So the good thing is that many of these processes also are somehow related to surface roughness which we can measure through high resolution modern topographic data. So for the rest of this talk I'm going to take you on kind of a whirlwind tour through this fire cycle by looking at three ways that my group and I have been exploring what we can learn about postfire erosional processes from topographic roughness. We'll start with this initial postfire landscape, go through rill and gully formation then talk about longer term hill slope recovery. So in the earliest postfire stages wildfire simply removes surface roughness. So these are images from a study that Tyler Doan, Josh Boring, David Furbish and Aaron Zettlerman and I have recently submitted to PNAS on some rock job experiments in the Oregon coast range where we compared the roughness at a bunch of burned and vegetated slopes and found that the median micro roughness is up to an order of magnitude lower on the burned slopes which you can see in these cumulative distributions of micro roughness. Just to clarify since there are a lot of ways to measure roughness, roughness height here is a measure of deviation around a standard or an average ground surface and micro roughness means we're using a high-pass Gaussian filter to examine roughness over length scales or spatial wavelengths up to about a meter. So we'll notice we're also showing surface gradient S here. So we'll look more closely just at these two sites which have the same surface gradients and only a one and a half centimeter difference in median roughness. I mentioned this was a rock drop study so we were throwing rocks down hills and these are the histograms of particle travel distances along with representative hill slope profiles of the green lines for each of these sites. I just want to point out that these are on the same horizontal axis is up to four meters same same distance there. So what we're seeing here is that while around 20% of particles traveled over four meters on the burned slopes, some of them quite a bit more, not a single one made it past four meters on the rough vegetated slope. And again these sites have the same surface slope and only one and a half centimeters of difference in their surface roughness. So not only does fire remove roughness but that removal has direct implications for the motion of sediment after fire for example like dry raffle because roughness steals momentum. So particles travel much farther on smoother slopes. One last note about this study you might have noticed that there's a bit of a slope dependence to those roughness distributions. If we look more closely we find that short wavelength micro roughness is only slope dependent at vegetated sites. But the longer wavelength macro roughness so through a low pass filter looks like it scales with slope at all sites. So that implies that there are some specific length scales of roughness that either burn away or erode really quickly in a wildfire. And that's something that we're currently investigating using spectral analysis of burned and vegetated topography. All right so moving on after a wildfire roughness eventually starts to recover. One of the first ways that roughness returns to a post fire landscape is through the development of real and gully networks. So this is some work that my master student Claire Bavres is doing to examine how roads impact the development of those networks. Specifically she's looking at this following Thomas Fire in Southern California. She's still in the preliminary stages here so we don't have real results to show yet. But one of the things she's having to do is to figure out an automated way to detect and measure real network density which she's looking at in a few different ways including flow routing, light-r, return intensity, maybe some spectral analysis and by looking at surface roughness in cloud compare. I just want to point out that here you can see the real showing up pretty nicely. She's also looking at how overland flow can be rerouted by roads which going back to our last study we can maybe think of as kind of spatially explicit macro topography or macro roughness. So if you'd like to find out where her work goes you can look for her results at AGU this year. Okay and then the last project that I wanted to touch on looks at roughness recovery over longer time scales. Excuse me. So my colleague Gabe Walton and I taught a class on point cloud analysis last semester and our students Andrew Graber, Claire Bavres, Kale Kelgan and Ryan Koh are actually putting together a paper now with some pretty neat class results from analyzing Steve DeLong's light-r scans following the horseshoe to fire in Arizona from 2011. So Steve used change detection to get at some very nice high resolution erosion and deposition patterns but our students were looking at roughness. So this is the first of Steve's scans immediately after the fire and a histogram of roughness heights over here from cloud compare again. Compared to the same region nine months later where we can see that surface roughness has increased. So it shifted from smaller roughness values or roughness heights here to larger values over in the tail. But what is really exciting here is how well spectral filtering pulls out these changes so we can clearly see the roughness reforming on these hill slopes. And again going back to our first study our students are also using spectral analysis to investigate whether we can pick out the characteristic frequencies of roughness that are evolving here and identify specific features or processes that they represent. So for example we think the roughness here is probably a combination of vegetation regrowth and erosion excavating around immobile roughness like boulders. So you can see the rest of their results at AGU too and hopefully in a class publication sometime soon. And that's all I've got for you today. Thanks. Okay. And so please put your raise your hand or write a question in the chat. And while you're while we're waiting I had a question about is there any ability to pick out vegetation versus roughness from the signal? And you mentioned that a little bit at the end. Yeah. So our students are they're taking a couple approaches to this they're looking at first trying to remove the vegetation and look at the how the bare ground is evolving. The vegetation is itself a form of roughness. So for example in that first study the vegetation was the roughness there that burns away.  And some of this is probably regrowth. But like I said vegetation also can stockpile sediment behind it. So it could be a combination. But yeah they're they're looking into into identifying which parts are are actual vegetation which parts aren't. Interesting. So let's take one more question before moving on to the next speaker. And if you don't need your slides Danica go ahead and take your screen off. The question is from Kristen Sweeney. And it's can you expand on how you chose the window size for measuring surface roughness in cloud compare. Is it all a single neighborhood radius or are you looking across neighborhood sizes. And Arvind could you get your screen up while we wait. Yeah in the in the most recent one that I'm showing I believe that was a one meter window size but they are exploring different window sizes to to see what's kind of capturing different types of signals. I think really kind of looking at a spectrum is is a more universal effect. Then then using cloud comparisons. Cloud compares kind of looking at within one window size. So I think the goal is to kind of examine things overall scales.


What's up guys hold on guys, I left a little stack out right here to the side I don't even notice it Let me show you some more relics that we hid in the mixer. Sorry if you realize hey, what happened my cards But there's a little stack here to the left. They had a little AJ Dylan relic We had a little Jake from Jersey number patch order to 25. This will be a third video guys unfortunately Damian Williams to 50 got an acue Harry autograph mirror image To 25 you got a nice Tom Brady 7 out of 10. That's pretty awesome. This was some certified first off the line Danutchi got a chase young triple patch autograph to 22 first off the line gold standard mark Bernardo 75 We had a relic here of Terry Bradshaw. We had a DJ more delving cook relic and then from prism This was from the team all we got a Joe Burrell base. I use silver We got a relic here of Zach Moss or sorry Devin Singletary Ryan Finley. We had a mosaic Disco burrow Colt Matt. We had David Johnson at a 10 from Diamond How we long we had a Jalen strong redemption. We had a pampal DJ more. We had a Jamon more We had a relic here Jared Goff. We have rookie evolution Benny snow jr. Plexigal Burris and Warren So this is just a little stack here. I had to the left that I totally forgot to include into the last Recap video guys. So I'll post this a third video just a little stack that we forgot here but that should be all of them guys and Yeah, guys appreciate it Jaspies case breaks comm


Hey what's up guys welcome to another video by TrendingReviews, so I have a deep brown skin here huge one for my MacBook Pro 15 inch touch bar edition so I'm gonna give you a quick tutorial on how to put that on I've ordered the top and the trackpad I didn't get the bottom one so if you want to have a look at how to install the bottom one I'll leave a link in the description below on how to view that tutorial but let's go ahead and see how this looks with my brand new black camo coloured MacBook Pro skin. Alright let's go ahead and open this up alright so we have the top skin and the trackpad and a cloth and that's all you need. Wipe down the surface make sure there's no marks next we're going to peel off a bit from the top about that much fold it there and try and line it up from the top. Once it's fully lined up with the top there we're gonna do it along the sides here so turn that over what we'll do is take this all off just leave a little gap there so now try and line it up on the bottom right there we go and what we do is we pull it down diagonally in this direction so we just keep folding it from the ends you can use a cloth to press down when you keep going the Apple logo is the trickiest part if you think it hasn't fit correctly then you can just take it off and do it again try not to get any bubbles in it otherwise you just lift it up to remove the bubbles and you start again and once you're comfortable just take all of it out and slowly start rubbing into it.  Now last step is to do the touch well make sure that's clean as well so you just take a little bit out of the end like so line it up and then slowly start peeling back from behind keep an eye on if it's straight you feel like it's not you can just grab it again and just move it and rub it down and there you have it guys black camo track pad. So I hope you found that tutorial good let me know what you guys think if you have any questions do drop them in the comments below but thanks for watching guys I'll see you guys next time


On a rather sudden note now, a former political adviser to ex-president Goodluck Jonathan Ahmed Gulak has been shot dead. Gulak, an all-progressive Congress chieftain, was killed in early the emo state capital on Saturday night. Now, sources say he was ambushed while on his way to some Umbakwe international cargo airport. A chieftain of the People's Democratic Party in a Damos state and personal friend of Gulak, Dr. Uma Aro confirmed the incident on Sunday. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hey everyone, welcome back to figure fantasy. So today we have a new Announcement for an update. This will be dropping definitely on Friday. So let's take a look at The official Facebook page of figure fantasy. So what you have here is first one is Immortal Badge series of limited time events. So event duration is going to be six on December 31 212 This is going to be January 6th. So a week full of events on lock conditions Please make sure that you have cleared to dash 24 of the story. Okay, sunflower girl dies for prizes So just to give you guys an idea on what it looks like. I'm gonna Be showing you this so this is from The Japanese version This is how it looks like it's similar to the baseball event that we had so Again, it's still the dice RNG and you land you get different prices So that's it basically for the sunflower girl event. Let's go back to the update So for the update description of the event sunflower girl limited that time event is arriving soon masters You can now use normal dies and wish dies To let how we advance according to the number of points. So your normal dies is usually your one to six Your wish die is you get to dictate how many or how many steps are you going to take like three? You get to select a number from one to six. Okay, so Then advance to the number of points rolled and trigger events on the different grids and she lands on when the event Concludes and use dies will be recycled and converted into a lucky coin Okay So when you land on reward event will be getting great rewards such as fully wish diamond the Chateau rezzo There are a lot of that there are a lot of prizes here. This event is if you want really to finish it off It's usually not free to play. So as free to play just Just try to accomplish at most or at you know at the most that you can do as free to play Okay, so you will be getting you will get the event exclusive item I patch when you land on or pass by I patch ward Which can be used to exchange for rare items such as immortal infinite badge Okay, that's something nice. So this is actually tied to your immortal badge for number one Fully anniversary badge and sticker sent by email when you land on the lucky that you can choose a random Glaciat to open our trigger the corresponding Incident effects. So again, this is same to our base will event when you land on the kitty kitten robbery You will get pestered by ginger and randomly move back one to four grids That's ginger. So warm reminder that she meant Rewards include a super rare badge the immortal infinite badge Can be it can be break through with fully anniversary by the don't miss your shot So just try it guys most most of the time These rewards require you to spend but hopefully for this one we can get this for free Okay, so That is it Number two is train morning training event sign-in so description to be event the quirky girl Midori will join the sunflower girl Event during the event you can get normal dice for free by logging inconsistently So this is just your log in rewards and you can also Get additional rewards such as wish dice by paying for it so That's it number three is the same one so to be expressed projects same as the last one that we had This is to compliment your sunflower girl event number four is limited packs are coming daily selection event pack This is just additional dice then photosynthesis die pack So description of the event the content includes dice and other items Okay, so this the last one limited pack is limited limited special pack re Training angel version. So as you can see in the thumbnail re is there or rye is there? I already teased this before that this is going to be an incoming skin and It actually came through so you can get the limited special skin Rye training angel version and there is no other way to get the pack after it is removed from the shop So, please don't miss it if you're interested. So for those who are interested with rye, please Do make sure that you get her within the period one reminder all duration mentioned above are based on the regional time So NA EU SEA and Take note this will be dropping on December 31st, okay, so all of these um too bad. We don't have a new Figure for this event, but More or less in the future Probably by January. I hope they will add more figures because right after this video I'm going to you know bring more updates for you for the Japanese version of figure fantasy Okay, guys, so thank you very much for staying this fire Hopefully that I explain this event to you and Tomorrow I'll be doing this event and hopefully put together a small guide for you for this event Hey guys, thank you very much Please consider subscribing because this helps my channel a lot and also don't forget to click that bell icon Thank you guys. Stay safe. Take care. There's the warden and I'm out of here


Hello guys, welcome back to another one of my tech videos for the Daniel's Tech world medium channel and my YouTube account and so for this video today. I wanted to take a look at a multi cloud Multi cloud is an interesting tool and it's kind of I've been thinking a little bit about it this week Just because I have been on a backup backup bonanza I guess you could say of taking backups and making backups I've written about backups a little bit It's probably something nobody really wants to think about but it is good to think about it because Well, if stuff goes wrong, then you'd be happy you did basically So I've written about three to one rule for backups about how if you have your primary data source like your computer or your You know a server on your network or whatnot and that you should always have two copies of that two copies on Different storage media and working down the three to one system here That means for example that if you have your computer and you're going to take two backups Well, let's say one of those is on a drive in your computer a backup drive Which is a perfectly legitimate way to create one backup copy the other one could not be on the same storage media so that could be for example putting that on a External drive and if you just think about the practical reasons for all this it actually makes a lot of sense that if God forbid you your computer was zapped in a lightning surge or something like that and all the You know connected drives in the computer were completely fried If your two backups are just on different drives and that wouldn't make a lot of sense But just say they were Then you would have no backups if on the other hand you had your backup sitting in a tech Habit or just you know a tech habit or something else Then that might survive that lightning strike And then the final the final step in the three two one the one stands for one off-site copy So you should you should have one copy of your one backup copy of your primary data repository that is stir stores off-site So that's something like in the cloud it could be in your office It just needs to not physically be in the same place as your primary in your first backup copy so coming back to these kind of far-fetched scenarios of why that might be useful if you take the case of Hives that I don't know the The house caught fire again. God forbid Your house caught fire and that would mean that everything would be would be gone your computer would be gone your First backup even if that was you know somewhere else in your house would obviously be in synders as well and in that case if you had something off-site whether that was in your office or on a You know it could be a it could be like it could be a private cloud it could be a server you run in your office or it could be a commercially run cloud service like for example AWS S3 or Google cloud storage or Azure or whatever whatever whatever you're comfortable using whatever you are using the point of all this of all this Preamble here is to basically say that this should also be applied to cloud storage Cloud storage is a bit more debatable as to whether you need to back it up at all because The whole advantage of a cloud and what is a cloud is kind of a misnomer a cloud is just a publicly Managed data center really it's somebody else somebody else's server But that that has quite a lot of advantages that somebody else is managing the server. It's a professional server It's a managed server The where the data center which the server lives in is going to have power redundancy and stuff like that That would just be kind of impossible to really set up adequately and cyber security. I should have added added added to that list So you can't really replicate that in a home environment But at the same time it is prudent and best practice and I would say you know Take backups of all everything that you are in any way uncertain about Even if it's that's like a hosting company, you know, they might not be they might provide backups But they will not be responsible if you screw up if you screw up your stuff on the cloud and it gets destroyed so don't in order to not rely on The backups of other people and to keep your own to keep your own stuff your own This is a reason why backing up clouds is good. So more clouds comes into this picture because it's a cloud to cloud backup service basically So more cloud works. Basically, you're just adding your clouds Into more clouds and then you're using it to sync and move stuff across So I subscribe to this service premium for many years a little bit embarrassing that I'm now on the Freebie tier the free the freebie tier. I'm on it now because they don't really use this all that often anymore And the advantage of getting it to a paid on I think is you just got better You got better backup More options as we'll see shortly in the type of sync and the and the limit is higher It's worth pointing out just one thing while we're talking about cyber security it's one concern about the service that I certainly have and I'm not really using it for anything majorly sensitive. So I'm not super worried about this for that reason, but You know, it would be it is prudent to just kind of investigate the company behind anything that has access to your data So as you can see in the footer here where my cursor is this is made by a company called AOMI tech and You can go on to the website and check out there Not super glowing Reviews on trust pilot. I certainly have a bit of questions particularly. I think it's a Taiwanese company These are Taiwanese or Chinese. I can't tell what these the difference between these three variants of that alphabet are I'd be a little bit kind of concerned about that and imagine that some Companies would not be able to use a tool like this just for that very reason that it would be considered questionable They do say that they manage your data what not carefully wonderfully and all that but You know, it's basically up to you as to whether you want to rely upon What companies say and and take it as unquestioned truth or whether you're not going to do that So just that's just kind of a side note about this thing So let me was that as it was that aside. Let me show you the whole how this works So basically you you create your cloud you kind of just create your own little cloud network here And again, this is this is for cloud to cloud backups. This is the use I'm showing demonstrating for it The advantage of cloud to cloud as opposed to home to cloud. Let's say is a typically Cloud stuff is closer to the core of the internet. So you have faster exchange speeds I know for example that might upload my uplink here at home is Pretty terrible. It's like two megabits per second and that makes Transferring multi even, you know, 10 gigabyte transfer could take something like 10 hours. So it's not really feasible When you're using cloud to cloud you might find that you're you're moving data quickly over a good protocol between two Good data centers and that can really speed up and their up links might be as fast as your down links So basically in terms of the cloud coverage here that more cloud offers. It's pretty good I would divide it into a few different tranches. You have your main. Let's say the let's call these consumer facing You know clouds your Google Drive all the major ones Dropbox Dropbox for business one drive They have the main ecosystems all covered nicely here Microsoft Google Dropbox as well as a couple of more obscure ones As you can see, I'm a fan a massive fan actually of P cloud. They also have mega And then they have that's that category Don't forget on cloud on cloud is pretty cool And then they have the next one I would say is these kind of like individual services. You're looking at Flickr You're looking at Evernote. You're looking at That would really be us in terms of the biggies then the you know the big Professional places to put your data. They have those two most importantly. I would say for my purpose. They have S3 They also have back plays and they have webdav webdav is a kind of slightly old school protocol HTTPS protocol for transferring stuff into webdav servers So that's really it and in terms of FTP worth pointing out that they they do support SFTP over port 22 So if you're concerned about the security of unsecured FTP transfers as you should be Then you should know that you can use this to to drive FTP transfers across port 22 Use over SFTP. So basically connecting stuff is just a case of You know, if you just want to create an S3 bucket, for instance You can just if I can get back to where I was for a second add cloud drive and You know go on to Amazon S3 and you'll just need your access key ID and your secret key in the bucket name You don't actually need the You don't need the Location in which, you know, which SW3 region it's in So that's that and then once you have them connected now I'm just going to show you what you can do just kind of what I'm doing the various Permutations of what's possible for backups. So let's say I want to do Let's actually go into sync over here. I want to cloud explorer by the way Just lets you look into clouds and see what's there So let's take a use case here of I'm backing up my P cloud and you know, this is one cloud Data source I'm using so according to my 321 methodology I should be keeping that two copies of it to keep the first copy Keeping that somewhere locally is pretty simple. I would just you know I can just compress P cloud into a nice little tar or tar GZ or a zip archive and keep that Either on my computer or I can keep it on an external drive And let's say I also want to keep it somewhere in the cloud somewhere else in the cloud I should say So that if P cloud were to lose all their customer data tomorrow, I would have a I would have a copy of it somewhere So your source volumes on your left and your destinations on your right And what you can do is you can do a two-way sync or a one-way sync And you can just give it a nice description. It's gonna call this P cloud to s3 And this is kind of something I actually do use all the time because s3 is just so affordable for storage And I think that for the small cost You know, even if you could argue that there's no point backing up your Google Drive or your Microsoft office or What have you basically? I Think that for a few dollars per year or a few tens of dollars per year or whatever it comes to for your storage costs in s3 I think it's very smart to have them somewhere else in the clays and they're not trying to Maybe a bit of modest to call myself right this really isn't isn't my idea And I'm sure there are alternative approaches, but this is one that just Does a trick pretty easily in the grand scheme of things So this is a backup I've made for my client backups and I'm just gonna I've created a little folder here Now the little kind of workaround trick is if you're on the if you're on the unpaid tier What you can do is just create three subfolders here And you could call those, you know, you could call those for example, this is pCloud now This is there's pCloud here because I've got it. I've done something weird in my pCloud for Back of purposes and created another folder called pCloud at the root of pCloud. Usually you wouldn't have this You could have for example weekly Then build out another folder called monthly Did you get me and then another one called daily and you could just kind of have three snapshots Running at all times and just create a sync from a daily sync to this one a monthly sync here in a weekly sync here I'll just nuke these after the video is done Right, so that's that so let's let's just put it in the top level folder pCloud now You have pCloud on the left and s3 my bucket here and that on the right Lovely now what you can do two cool things in in more clothes here You have a number of different sync types now the simple one is a simple sync as the name says it's just going to move stuff Across basically add and modify deleted will be replicated and in the target So this is actually fine for simple backups, right? You're just going to literally move across from source to targets You can go for one of these more exotic ones now I did have I did use this actually to sync Google Drive and Dropbox for a few years and Was kind of hard to set up The problem is when you're doing this in Google and Dropbox and people are You're telling them there's a sync and they don't listen and ends and add stuff on The target namely Dropbox. That's when stuff gets a bit confusing, but it did work in the end So that's for backup purposes. The simple sync would work. Okay. If you're using my approach here I've just shown of creating three points obviously this will add to your s3 storage cost because You know, you're going to have three times the the data moving across But as you said, it's relatively relatively small money. We're talking about here mirror sync Will Will basically knock off extra files on the target site So if you have stuff being added to target, this will destroy them when it sinks move sync I'm just gonna I'm just gonna run through the rest of these pretty quickly. I'm not actually totally a Couple of these I've not used like move. Oh move actually just moves it. It literally will Move everything from source to targets Cumulative sync I Will ignore deletions in source. They will not the deletions will not occur on the target Update sync The target will be deleted and then that modified added and modified files in the source will be transferred to the target directory Now incremental backup and full backup are relevant for that for this backup discussion So presuming that you know, you know people watching this video know the difference between full backups and incremental backups This one will create a source directory just for the incremental so That could work with some people. So in other words, you'd have you know, you could take a main or first Snapshots and then put the incremental backups into their own folders and that will that will create the folders automatically That might be a little bit tricky for restoring stuff, but the final one here is a full backup Now this will kind of do the job I was talking about except the problem is and this is why I'm telling you about this the daily weekly monthly approach This will do it every single time. So if you set this up to run weekly, let's say on a schedule You will eventually end up with 52 Weekly and this will batch them into their own folder you end up with 52 folders in here And yeah, that could end up to something substantial in data and it'll just accumulate and accumulate Until such time as you as you stop it. So sim simple to three ones kind of controls sets the amount of snapshots you want to keep In the target cloud. So let's just just to show how this works, right? I already have have done this process yesterday Finally, here's where here's where you can set a schedule. You can run this up to three times daily You can run this Weekly on a certain day and set a certain time I can and you can do multiple options here Like what run it every Monday Tuesday and Finally, you can run it you can run it on a certain day of the month And this is just basically I guess creating creating, you know cron jobs on the on mull cloud server Let's say I'm just gonna do this I can set it for you know, I can create a weekly job over here save schedule and that's really is What you can do then is you can either add this to your task list and sync now or You can just add it to the task. So I'm gonna actually start the sink and just show you how this works now you need to click on this guy up here task manager and You can actually see all your all your sync jobs in progress over here. And as you can see I have this is just started and you can click down into details and you can see It gives you a whole report here. How many files it's at the kind of file checking stage. It tells you basically, you know, you're The the time left in the elapsed time and the start time and everything all the details are there as well So that is really it and the final thing to say is that you can get an email alert I'm just gonna take that off So that basically you'll get an email when it's finished so that is basically That is basically how it works more cloud. As I said, I do have Press marks about the the security of it, but if that if that were not something of particular Concerned to you and you're happy with transferring stuff, you know between Between between two cloud buckets over a protocol you're happy with Then I think it's a it's a very good tool. There aren't really many tools Like it on the market that I'm familiar with at least And it's certainly like I will say this that it's very very reliable. I've had a couple of things running for years at this point and When we were looking at syncing a Google Drive in a dropbox a few different tried a few different tools And really more cloud was the only one that did the did the job very very capably every time without any problems That's it. That's my video for today. If you've any any questions or thoughts or feedback or anything like that My email address or just go on the website Daniel Rose Hill to Allison Rose Hill or OSC H as the American say or H as the British say HILL.co.al. Thank you for checking out the video


Welcome to BCH Technologies. This is Kevin. Today we troubleshoot a black cartridge for our customer. Let's talk about the light first. Canon doesn't know how much ink is in your cartridge at all. However, Canon has a counter on your cartridge's chip. So you know how many pages a cartridge has printed. So basically, when Canon thinks you have 20% of cartridge left, you're going to see this brown light going to light up for the color cartridge. Nothing to worry about it. It just shows you it thinks it's low on ink. So now you can see the black is blinking. Why is black blinking?  And Canon doesn't track the black ink level anymore. So it doesn't count how many pages you printed with black. And it will always blinking. There's nothing you can do to make it unblink. And when Canon stops tracking the ink, you can print forever as long as you actually have ink in the cartridge. This is different than when you have something on the electronic ribbon, or maybe you have ink stand that caused some electronic problem with a printer. And that kind of blinking is different than the blinking you saw. So we pretend that we have some electronic problem with the cartridge by putting a piece of masking tape on the electronic ribbon. Now you can see this is actually the air. You can see the hazard light is blinking. I also asked how can we turn off the ink monitor so make it more like a black. You have to light this light up. Actually, you cannot do it as low. You cannot do until the printer thinks you are out of ink. So the color cartridge, you just need to keep printing, keep using the color cartridge. So if we go to print, you can see the color cartridge have a yellow exclamation mark on the top. That means it's low on ink. And the black cartridge, if you notice it, the black cartridge is totally blank.  So there's no other way other than just print and print and print until one day you're going to see a pop-up window when you print a color. And here's the air. That is a support code 1688 or 1686 for the black, if it's black. And you can see the monitor, the color has a red cross on it. Don't close those two windows. Just go to your printer and find the stop key. And hold down that key until the window goes away. And I'll hold down the key right now. And you can count how long the window disappear. There we go. Now you can print forever.  So the customer sent this in. And he sent it without the refill plug. I don't know if he lost it or for some reason. So I just randomly grabbed a blue plug plugged in. And so basically when you print, you have to have this plugged in. And if you see here, here's a hole. That's the air hole. And do not ever block that air hole. So the symptom for this customer is he, I think his black is clogged. He refilled it and put it in and he printed stripes. So let me just do one thing that probably going to fix both of them. First thing I'm worrying is whether he sealed the parameter correctly. So I'm going to blow some air into this air hole. And that will increase the pressure here. And if he sealed this correctly, the ink will coming out from the bottom. And there's no air bubbles coming from the top. And when I'm doing that checking and also what it does is I push the ink out and therefore unclog the bottom. After I do that, I'm going to remove the plug and release the excess pressure. You can blow on the top and sink the end and see if there you have bubbles or you can just put it under water and blow the air in. So you can see it was sealed tightly and you push some ink out. That's good. So now I'm going to release the pressure. Be careful that most of the time you're going to have an explosion. And rinse a little bit. And have a paper towel or something to dry it. And it's ready to put in for a checking. Since we only work on the black cartridge, let me show you a trick. Here you can go about ink cartridge settings. And you can let it only use the black color or the color cartridge or the color cartridge. It's OK. However, there's a glitch here. So for example, even we have a black and white picture. And with that print, I don't want that big, I'll do a smaller one. And that's a print. And you're going to see a says it's going to use the color cartridge. Although I turned it to black to only use the black cartridge. So the reason is Ken automatically selected a photo print for you.  Let me show you three things. One is we use a plan paper. Plane. Not a glossy for a glossy paper. And then we go to options. And then we go to printer properties. And make sure we turn the gray scale on and the borderless printing off. Not if I will click print. Booyah black cartridge. That's the cartridge that hard working Americans use. I hope you enjoyed this video. Cheers.


Good evening and welcome to episode 308 of the Private Property Podcast. I'm your host Uzaman Dunwoa Kumailo. It's a Thursday edition of the Private Property Podcast and if you're joining us for the first time, welcome to the only daily property show in South Africa. Make sure that you go to our Facebook or our YouTube page to catch up with all the great content that you have already missed out on. And to all our regular viewers, whether it's on Facebook, on Instagram or on YouTube, welcome to it. You know how we do every single weekday. You and I have an appointment at 7 p.m. when we tackle the property topic and have an expert guest who helps us navigate our property journey. Doesn't matter where you are in your property journey, you could be looking to buy, to sell, or you might even be looking at a building. This is the show that is there to help you make better informed property decisions. And of course, we love hearing from you at home and certainly love seeing all the green huts that you sent down here. Make sure to also share this live if you're watching us on Facebook so we can make the property circle better and certainly see your friends and family will be able to see that this is what you are tuned into and watching this evening. I'm coming to you from a low shed house, so we low shed right now. So I want to apologize in advance if there's any delay of any kind. We know how the signal sometimes gets when there is low shedding, but so far it's been behaving and I do hope that it's going to stay behaving throughout the show. Talking about the show, you know that there are also great shows that you can look forward to at 8 p.m. across properties, social media pages. As it is a Thursday, you can catch a warning farmer, Umbalinoa or bringing you the farming podcast where every Tuesdays and Thursdays you're always in conversation with somebody within the agricultural sector dissecting one or other topic that has to do with better helping us understand the farming and agriculture and of course the value chain and even how you at home can get involved even in your backyard. So it's making farming as accessible as possible. And for those who are looking at exploring it from commercial perspective, certainly going to help you make better farming decisions. And every Mondays and Fridays, child takes us through exquisite properties that you can find on triple w.private property.co.za. And of course, one of the great things with the home shop is shows that if you are in the market for a property, especially those who might perhaps be in the market for some of the more expensive properties and even those that are slightly on the lower scale, you are able to get a really good sense of what you're able to get for that amount. So that certainly is a show that you do not want to miss out on Mondays and Fridays. And on Wednesdays, we don't leave you alone. It's the class that brings you the first time home buyers show, which is always in conversation with people who've not only walked that first time home buying journey, but have gone on to grow the property portfolios from string to string. If you want to get a good sense of how you can go from that wild first property and to growing your portfolio and adding more properties, that is a show that you do not want to miss out on. And that goes is only the great shows that you can look forward to every single weekday at 8pm here on the private property. But this evens conversation is one that I'm quite excited about. And one of the reasons why I'm excited about this conversation is we've spoken about it in different instances. And it's one of those topics I'll always keep coming back to because I think so many of us still don't have a good sense of what we can expect when this happens, why we should do it and really the big value that you get in the event that you do it. Probably wondering what I'm talking about. We are talking about home inspections. And I'm joined by John Graham, who's a property inspector and manager at House Check. John, good evening and thank you so much for joining us. Good evening, Zama. And thank you for having me on your show. It's only a pleasure, John. John is coming to us. We're talking about first coming to us from the western Cape. So they're cold and wet. I'm in Joerg. I'm in the dark. And it's also quite cold. Luckily, we don't get the rain. So it's going to be an interesting conversation as we explore winter and even some of the perks of home inspections, depending on the kind of climate you find yourself in because you'll find that searching properties are more prone to certain kinds of damage in certain areas. But John, before we get to those omitted gritties, I think first let's just look at the top end. When we talk about home inspections, what are we talking about? Because I think there's still so many people at home who think maybe this is one of those things that's only relevant for commercial properties. Or if I'm buying a property that's above, for example, 3m or 3.5m. But if I just want to buy a, you know, a small house that's million or 1.2 or perhaps even a property, this isn't something that I should even bother with. When we talk about home inspections, what exactly are we referring to? Okay, so I know what we're talking about with home inspection is basically a conditional assessment of the condition of the property that you buy in. And if you think that for most people, whether they're spending a million rand or 10 billion rand in a house, that purchase is probably one of the biggest that they will ever make. And it's quite a complex thing, a property. It has hot water geysers. It has roofing systems, waterproofing systems. It's got to manage stormwater so that the water doesn't flood in your door. And it's got to be compliant. Most people who buy a house have home owners insurance. And the thing with homeowner's insurance is that insurance companies, unlike a life insurance company, a homeowner's insurance company only really underwrites their risk at claim stage. So when you buy a property, you take a bond and part of the bond is they say you must ensure your house in case it burns down. And then a couple of years later, there's a hail storm and portion of the roof collapses or whatever. And at that stage, the insurance company sends a necessity to have a look. How much is the damage and is the claim valid? Or was it going to be repudiated? And quite often people find that the claim is repudiated because the house was not compliant. The Giza was not compliantly installed. The roof was not compliantly installed. Now, South Africa has got really fine building regulations and national building standards. And part of a home inspector is to ensure that the house is compliant. But also that people know what they're buying that damp has not been hidden away. That there's not a fresh coat of paint disguising a whole lot of things that you really should know about. And I always say, and then I'll sort of complete my introduction is that consumer protection is incredibly important in South Africa. But probably the home buying consumer is the most vulnerable of all consumers, because most properties are still sold foods to us, which means it's sold as is that let the buyer be aware in terms of what they're buying. And a home inspector can protect buyers can protect sellers and can make the entire property transaction process a lot more transparent and trustworthy for all parties concerned. And you know, John actually wants us to then look at what actually goes into a home inspection with inspectors coming in. So when you go into a property, what are some of the key things that you are looking at as you do your home inspection. And because one of the things that I find is people often sitting in the beginning stages, they'll look at the artificial stuff, right? So things that we can see with the naked eye, and then assume that that is necessarily sufficient, because it looks good. And when you open the doors, you open the taps, everything looks relatively okay. Therefore, there's no need for an inspection. Perhaps shed light on what inspectors are essentially looking at almost at a high level. I know it's actually quite an extensive process. And just so viewers able to get a sense of the deeper level that home inspection would typically take versus what we would do when we, for example, just go and view a property or even when we go and do a second viewer. Yeah, I think the first thing is to ask you viewers, would they buy a secondhand car without getting a mechanic or the AA to check it out and make and obviously with a secondhand car, you also need a roadworthy certificate. A lot of people do just that. They don't go in with the mechanic. It looks great. It's shiny. And that's probably why car sales people will always make sure the car looks clean. And they're like, they'll start it. It starts quick to go and they buy it. Two days later, it starts falling apart. So we already know that we do that, right? Yeah. Okay, so you asked the question, what do we look for? Will all houses, once you've inspected a few hundred houses and you understand how they built, as you climb out your car, you can see what's likely to be wrong with that house, depending on what type of roof covering, what the ground looks like, etc. But one of the biggest problems is the hot water geyser. In South Africa, most hot water geysers are located in the roof cavity. And no one but no one gets into a South African roof cavity because it's hot and it's uncomfortable and it's dirty. And a geyser sits above your child's bedroom. It's under pressure. It hasn't been installed properly because maybe the plumber didn't even go up. He sent one of his laborers up and he didn't check there about between 20 and 25 critical points of installation of a hot water geyser, from the electrical connections to the plumbing connections to the relief valves to the overflow trays. And you physically have to get into the into the roof space to see that. And then while you're in the roof space, you're looking at the structural timbers. Are they straight? Has the roof been properly anchored down? Is the insulation in place? Can you can you see roof leaks? Are there paintings in the roof to catch the rainwater? All of that sort of stuff. Inside the house, you're looking at damp penetration through the seals of the windows. You're looking at whether there is safe glazing, whether the glass is thin three ball glass, or in areas where there's likely to be human impact with a with a glass pane, the National Building Regulations say there must be safety glass in order to protect human life. So Home Inspector will look at that he will he will typically if he goes into a bathroom and sees a shower there, and now the shower is tired, so he can't tell whether there whether there's been waterproofing behind the tiles before the tiles were inserted. But he can go into the next door room and open the built-in cupboard and see if there's evidence of damp in there, because it has a real wet damp. He will use his moisture meter to see about pipes which are inside the wall. He will he will look he's not a qualified electrician, but he will look for obviously dangerous situations with electrical wiring. He will look at the at the plumbing. He will look at the roof covering. He will look literally everywhere. And one of the things that they've noticed internationally is wall cracks.  Because you get a great many wall cracks which are settlement cracks which occur over the first couple of years as the load of the house settles down into the earth. And then it stabilizes. So if if I'm buying a house and I don't know much about houses and I walk in and I see there's a crack in the entrance hall, I say, Horrors. It might be structural. It might only cost a thousand round to redecorate, but I'm going to offer a hundred thousand round less because I don't know what's involved there. Whereas a home inspector will be able to look and say it is serious. There's been foundation failure. It is simply a plaster crack. It's a movement crack that's that ceased. Same the same with damp. You get rising damp. You get black mold in the bedrooms in the bathroom. Sometimes something because people sleep with their windows closed other times because it's a serious damp issue. So it's all of those sort of things. There's there's nothing that a good home inspector won't look at. If if I might say, I will say a good analogy is to use the medical profession. If you feel sick, you normally go to your GP, your general practitioner and you say, I'm not feeling well. I'm running at temperature and I've got a bit of a runny nose or whatever. And in the pre COVID days, at least, he would say, open your mouth and he would he would look down your throat and he would take your temperature and feel your glands and he would say, take two aspirin, go to bed for a couple of days and you'll find if you'll find or alternatively, he might look down your throat and say, Oh, big problem here. I suggest you go and see an ear nose and throat specialist or cancer specialist or lung specialist or whatever, because there's something here that I'm worried about. Now home inspectors a bit like the GP. He's not a specialist. He's not a structural engineer. He's not an electrician. He's not a plumber. He's not a waterproofer, but he needs to know something about just like the GP knows about the human body. The home inspector needs to know something about every aspect of a South African home. He needs to know what the law says. He needs to know what the insurance how insurance companies will view that property in the event of a claim. He needs to know what the buyer what the seller might be covering up. He needs to be able to tell the buyer how much is it going to cost to fix this house? How much is it needs to be spent urgently? And how much can you budget to you for maintenance over the next three, four years? So it enables buyers and sellers to make informed decisions. I am this evening in conversation with John Graham, who's a property inspector and manager and looking at home inspections. I can see some of you are watching us. I'm one of our top fan gang members. I see there's a fellow who's also watching us and I certainly want to find out from your home what your experience has been when it comes to doing home inspections. Have you ever done a home inspection before? Or is it something that you were either not aware of at all? And or have you, for example, encountered an instance where you bought a property and now retrospectively realised that had you actually done a home inspection, it would have probably saved you a bit of money because you ended up finding out issues with the property once you had already bought it. Do share your views down here below. I absolutely love hearing from you. Now, John, I think one of the things that I want to, you know, explore and I'll ask both questions at the same time because I know that they may actually, you know, link with each other quite well. The first one is what are some of the key things that typically get snagged during home inspection that you found that overwhelmingly, like these are the key things that a lot of homes typically have that needs to be fixed, right? And the second question is what are some of the mistakes that home owners make in the, we'll say, management or maintenance or lack thereof of their properties that ends up getting to a stage where when a home inspector comes in, that then becomes a snag. So I think they may probably be overlaps with the two, so that's why I didn't want to separate them. Okay, let's start at the roof summer. One of the problems of the roof is the roof drainage system, which is typically the gutters and the downpipes. And if you have trees growing too close to a house and it's filled with and leaves and debris and branches fall on that roof, particularly if it's a metal roof, you will start getting rust and you will get the gutters blocked and the overloading of the gutters, they will start leaking at the joints. And that's a maintenance issue that very often is totally neglected until the gutter is pouring water and it's waking you up at night because it's so loud. And it's something that's very easy to fix. But typically it's only when a home inspector gets out his ladder and climbs on the roof and takes a few photographs that people realise what the what the state of the roof is actually like. And that it should have been painted four or five years ago, the roof screw should have been resealed. If you've got a concrete tile roof, often the ridge capping, the dugout, the cement will have cracked and you'll start getting water penetration along the ridges of the roof. And that might be because the ridging was put on on a very hot day and the and the dugout, the cement dried out too quickly and so the cement cracked away from the concrete roof tiles or it might simply be wear and tear. And then you would often find if you get on a roof like that, you'd see that they've used some sort of acrylic membrane to patch that roofing. Now there's acrylic membrane and there's acrylic membrane. Some of it is S-A-B-S approved. A lot of it is cheap imports in South Africa. And with the harsh South African sun, if you use the wrong sort of patching material, it will crack and you need to recode it every year. So that's a typical sort of combination of an issue which can be arrested. Roof drainage and roof covering and which should be maintained and often is not maintained. Damp is an issue. Let's stay with the roof drainage. You have the water running, falling on your roof into the gutters and down the downpipe. But what happens when it comes out of the downpipe? It should be channeled away from the structure either with an impervious apron or with a concrete channel. But very often you'll find that downpipe finishing up at the base of the walls in a flower bed or unprotected soil. And if you look there, what a home inspector will suspect as soon as he sees that is that the foundation will over the last couple of years have been undermined because the water seeps under the foundations, washes out the fine particles of soil and the foundation begins to collapse, resulting in cracks on the inside. So the home inspector will look at the outside and say there's probably a crack on the inside here because of the poor maintenance and because of the poor management of storm water. A floor level in a South African home by law must be a minimum of 150 mls above the finished ground level. But what often happens is that people build a house and only put in paving later. And then the paving is about the same height as a floor level. And so you have a flooding issue, but you also have this thing called dam proof course, which is an impervious layer of malchoid or plastic that stops the water seeping up from the ground into the walls and causing efflorescence and all sorts of ugly damp. But if your finished ground level over the years has been built up with landscaping or paving or whatever, you might find that the outside level is actually higher than the dam proof course. Yeah. And that you even find that with a lot of people who even built even back rooms that they don't put that. And even I've seen it again in suburbs where they actually don't put I've seen it it's black you kind of put it you know close to the foundation and then they built on it. They don't put that there. And then they always have issues of you know damp in their rooms where they don't quite know why is there rising damp. And there's nothing you know particularly wrong for example with the with the yard or the spacing. But it's because that sort of waterproofing component wasn't wasn't put there. But John you you're still seeing some of the key things that you typically get get you know picked up in a home inspection that some when some of it certainly stuff that access home owners can try to prevent because if you're maintaining your property well over the years then it's not going to get to the point where it's something that would get snagged during a home inspection. Yeah another thing is is ceramic four tiles. If you putting in four tiles there's thermal expansion which means when it gets hot the tiles expand slightly and when it when it gets cold they contract. But you need to have an expansion joint in a typical room and that's normally built under the skirting board. If that doesn't happen the tiles will press against each other and tend to tend to upwards and might crack. But coming back to the damp proof course how critical that is. Sometimes builders do install a plastic barrier damp proof course but they don't install it right through so that it extends under the plaster. In other words a brick layer lays a brick and the plastics under the brick but there's another 20 moles that's going on the outside with the plaster and that goes straight into the ground which means that the most you can wick up from the ground through the plaster bypass the plastic barrier and you wonder why you've got you've got a damp issue. Not all low down damp is rising damp from a lack of a damp proof course. It's possible that the roof is leaking and that the water is finding itself a longer after and into a top of a wall and down through the cavity and is manifesting as it hits the floor slab at the bottom. So a lot of experience and a lot of training in how houses are built is needed for a home inspector to be the GP of the of the South African home and say this is what's wrong this is where specialist investigation is needed this is easy to fix this is not so easy to fix and so that the buyer can then then shape the offer accordingly. If I might say one of the things that we recommended house check is that no one should put an offer to purchase without making it conditional on a satisfactory home inspection and generally speaking the home inspection will be paid for by the buyer sometimes a seller or even a state agent will pay for it but in South Africa at house check probably 95 percent of our inspections are funded by the buyer because the buyer has most to lose if there's a problem. So the buyer typically say I want to buy this house I'm going to offer 2.2 million subject to a satisfactory home inspection and then if you wise also subject to the approved plans of the house being made available to me. If you're buying in a sectional title property subject to me having sight of the financials of the body corporate and subject to me having sight of the 10 year maintenance plan which is required by the sectional title schemes management act. So there are a lot of things that a buyer can do to protect themselves but the average buyer is a school teacher or or a clerk or whatever he might be and does not know the property law and can and can make expensive mistakes which come back to bite them later. And you know John I've certainly also made some of those expensive mistakes in my own property journey and and I've had to learn the hard way I think one of the the things that actually jumped out when you're talking about some of the clauses that should potentially put in in terms of you know the home inspection being done and particularly the the approved home plans. One of the things I've encountered often far too often is people do a lot of extensions you know in their respective properties and house plans were not drawn up and approved and you come in and you want to buy and sometimes it very well you know the bond will pass so the bank may not actually be asked for you know for the house plans and as you've pointed out then something happens and you you know want to claim from insurance and insurance actually realizes that but this is not the original structure and the way that this has actually gone and been built you know it would have been raised if it went through all the the proper channels and I think more than anything it points to how there are just so many different factors that we often need to think about and I think even for people for example are looking to buy a piece of land and that's just by itself we're seeing in different suburbs there's just you know searching pieces of land you know I you know John I did a course building construction and the during the course there's a part where you're doing you're looking at soil and the different kinds of soil and how in your how they're in the region this is a typical type of soil we find and then in different parts of the country these are the typical kinds of soil if you're going to have you know clay type soil or this kind of soil and you're building on the slope these are some of the you know limitations or these are the reinforcements that you need to you know put in and the reality is so many of us wouldn't know this you just see a piece of land you're thinking this is fantastic it's got a great view it's even on the you know on the cliff not understanding that there are so many things behind the scenes that are at play before you even buy that piece of land to build on and always slowly running out of time John before I let you go on to find out what can we then do as homeowners in particular because I think we first want to deal with those homeowners that will make sure that over the years of our home ownership journey or having that particular property we don't end up having a property that's going to have issues that are that a home inspector would you know pick up and this could be because you don't obviously want to end up 10 years from now having a huge bull and a whole host of things that you need to address or even when you're now ready to buy I mean sell that particular property obviously also don't want to get an instance where a home inspector comes and snags all sorts of things that had you just diligently done certain things over the years you are not going to find yourself in that situation so what are some of the low hanging fruits as home owners that we can already start regularly doing to better maintain our properties so that we don't have issues when it comes to burn inspections okay probably the main the main thing is to maintain your roof because your roof is the most vulnerable part of the house and the old story a stitch in time saves nine that's what my grandmother talked talked my my sisters didn't teach me because I could never learn to knit or ought to sew but preventative maintenance on a regular basis costs a lot less than emergency maintenance you know we spoke about the leaves in the gutter cleaning the leaves out the gutter is a whole lot cheaper to do that to once a month than it is to wait for the gutter to collapse and have to to replace it managing water away from your foundations is another one making sure that that your geezer is in good shape that overflow pipes are properly connected all of those are obvious ones looking after storm water management something else that is what it mentions I know we're running out of time but boundary walls are a huge problem in South Africa and and the reason for that is a boundary wall technically is what they call a freestanding wall and the freestanding wall means that it's not as strong as a cellular wall put your room in a house there four corners and the wall and each each wall supports other wall but if you build a boundary wall you it's unstable so you need supporting peers you cannot put in a damp proof course because then you've got no grip onto the foundations and the law says if it's over 2.1 meters there must be approved plans and the municipality won't pass plans until the the foundation in the wall is being designed by a structural engineer but when I was a kid a wall fell on myself and my sister I got up quite lightly I broke my leg she smashed to I think I was three she was four it was a cold shed wall in Joberg and she spent six months in hospital with a crushed pelvis and simply because it was an unstable wall and sometimes in storms because of lack of weep holes and in wind walls fall down and kids get hurt and those are the sort of things that one needs to look at is your property legal is your property well maintained just like a wise car owner gets a car regularly serviced it makes it makes sense to make sure that you are you are servicing the biggest investment in your in your life and with the property practitioner's act coming into into effect the property practitioner's act is going to be a game changer because sellers are then going to have to make it a written declaration of the condition of the property and the estate agent is going to buy law going to have to provide that written declaration to every prospective purchaser and that becomes part of their legal agreement of sale now the easiest way around that is for the seller to say let's get a home inspector in first and let's do full disclosure we'll probably get a better price because the purchaser will trust us because we're not hiding anything we have an independent inspection and we can negotiate realistically and nothing's going to come back and bite us in the backside so but the property practitioners act was passed in 2019 we now halfway through 2021 the draft regulations were published before lockdown last year they closed republished after lockdown they closed for comment in November last year we now sitting in July the next year and still nothing and so property purchases are vulnerable until the law will protect them and perhaps even afterwards because it's one thing having a law it's another thing to enforce a law and in South Africa I think we have great laws but our enforcement is not so great the home inspector's canister student and I think John that's such a great note to leave it at that you want to make sure that you take care of your investment and this isn't just for property investors but even your whole you maintain it regularly don't wait until the very end you already know that you have to service your car every 8000 kilometers I don't know how many kilometers it is because I'm very terrible with cars generally but you know that you regularly have to maintain your car and so similarly with your home whether it's even an apartment or of course a freestanding house there are certain things that need to be maintained on a regular basis so you don't find yourself in a situation where there's now a crisis that there are too many things that have gone wrong John we're going to leave it there this evening thank you so much for being with us on the show thank you Zama pleasure to be here and thank you for having me goodnight and that was and there is John Graham who is a property inspector and manager at house chick wrapping up the Thursday edition of the private property podcast with myself Uzaman Dunwo Komilo I'll be back on your screens tomorrow evening at 7 p.m it is a Thursday so you can catch a award winning farmer Umbali Nwaka on the farming podcast at 8 p.m until then hoping you stay home and staying safe you're welcome home shop the show and what a special month this month is going to be we've just come back from touring the mother city and showing you some of the most opulent homes that Cape Town has to offer now we started off in Constantia thereby the hotels under wine on touring a beautiful home that crested and overlooked all of the mountain ranges in Cape Town from there we shot across down to Blowburg and showed you what a seaside home looks like we also went to Vulgar View to the place where everybody likes to relax enjoy the view enjoy the time and we showed you a home that I say it's architecture only quite is beaten by the decor of that home we also went into the University Town of Stelenbosch it was an incredible desalza estate and then we came all the way back to the famous Camps Bay to show you what being a millionaire and living in Camps Bay in Cape Town feels and looks like guys there's so much to show you there was so much to do and so much that we spoke about so make sure you tune in every Monday and every Friday at 8pm on Facebook by the property the home shopper show see you there


All right guys welcome back to the channel if you're new my name is Bobby guys today We are in the kitchen reason being I'm going to show you one simple trick how to incorporate liver Into your diet Unfortunately, we've been removed from our natural food source many people find liver Disgusting and believe me. I can relate in the beginning. I couldn't stand it at all Especially not when it was cooked people say it's easier to eat when you spice it up with onions garlic Yari yara for me personally. I absolutely hate it. The consistency turns into a mush almost sandy I like it raw much better But even raw for many people the aftertaste is an issue and of course the consistency It's kind of rubbery so guys today. I'm showing you how to get around that issue All right guys and here we go a beautiful piece of liver in my case.  It tastes disgusting at first and I get it. I was there myself So this is the way to get around the issue just like so put it onto your tongue And you swallow it like a vitamin capsule like a gummy bear Hmm Boom that's it doesn't take much This is the easiest way to get into eating liver and as I said for beginners You don't have to make a meal out of it Just treat it as a supplement little piece like so here this one is a bigger piece as you can see just onto your tongue and Swallow it down. Usually you won't need any fluids for that either. It goes down really really easy Once you develop a taste for this you're gonna start liking it and you're gonna start craving it as well I know I know it sounds crazy at first. I hated liver myself. I thought it's crazy to eat raw liver But believe me once you develop a habit and your body starts Recognizing it as food the body starts craving it guys most of us grew up on an artificial unnatural diet We've been eating corn place catalogs processed yogurts and whatnot all that junk food Many children grow up with even words McDonald's and what not therefore? We have to reintroduce those nutritious foods and this is the way to go Many of you guys want to reap the benefits of raw liver, but they don't know how to go about it This is hands down the easiest way Done. All right guys, and this is just a quick video today if you liked it Leave it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed already Please do so if you want to support Bobby's perspective all the links are in the description box below We have amazon links for you. You can head over there by whatever you might want to buy and it doesn't cost you anything extra We get a small share that is a fantastic way to support Bobby's perspective If you want grass-fed beef deliver to your doorstep butcher boxes for you And we have cbd links as well on top of that guys Consider supporting Bobby's perspective through subscribe star or patreon We have a vip community there where we have skype group calls Every single week where we can discuss any topic no matter if it is health Lifestyle or nutrition related on top of that by joining you straight away receive your comprehensive nutrition guide It is an ebook that teaches you the basics of nutrition But goes beyond as well and is catering to your personal goals no matter if you're keto primal Paleo or even raw. All right, but this is it for today Thank you very much for your support guys and as always much love and peace