As you're adding services to the mesh, one thing important is to make sure your service continue function, right? So we want to make sure we can still hit the Istio Ingress Gateway on port 443 and the traffic continue to flow. Let's spend a minute to understand what actually happens. So if you take a look at the pod information for the web API pod in the Istio Inaction namespace, you can see it's a little bit long, but you can see it has one init container, which, let me see if I can find it. So it has one init container, which calls it's using this proxy V2 image, and it runs Istio IP tables command to config the IP table for inbound and outbound capture. So that's the purpose of the init container. It sets up the IP table configuration, and it finishes. And then the Istio proxy, Psychoproxy, and the web API container would run in parallel. So this is the Istio proxy container. It's using the same proxy image as Istio init.  It's configurable. And this is the web API container that's being off the web API deployment YAML. We just looked at it earlier. So we talk about Istio init container. We talk about the arguments for the init container. And the one thing I want to show you is if you're interested, this is getting a little bit of advance. If you're interested in the Istio IP tables command from the pilot agent, you can actually understand some of the configuration I showed you early on, like dash D, for example, dash B, dash I, dash U, what this means. So they actually have really good explanation here. For example, let's figure out what dash D means from the tooling here. So it means exclude ports. So why are we excluding these three ports? Because some of these ports, we don't want our way to capture, for example, house check ports. We don't want to go through mutual KIS to do house check. So these are the ports we purposefully config the psychoproxy to exclude from the capture. So feel free to poke around if you're really curious about how this command works and what these commands means. They are available for you. The next thing we want to talk about is the Istio proxy container. So we talk about the proxy container is using the proxy V2 image, same as the innate container. And it can fix these three ports for the exclude list from the inbound capture. So apparently, yeah, 15090 is the one that emits traffic to premises, and 15020 is the merge premises metrics. So these metrics, we're excluding from capture. I believe R21 is the house check port. So if you go back to the Istio proxy configuration, notice that we also mounted a couple of volumes. So for instance, Istio CA cert, root cert, one of the certs that's mounted. Also, there is Istio token that's also mounted to the psychoproxy. So why do we do that? Because we need these for the use of the proxy. So we need these to bootstrap the psychoproxy. So the psychoproxy can establish a certificate signing request with Istio control plan so that it can get the necessary key and certs signed for the psychoproxy to communicate with the rest of the services in the mesh. With that, we're going to add more services to the mesh. Recommendation, purchase history, and sleep to the mesh by rolling restart the deployment.  So we're going to continue to curb the web API through Istio Ingress Gateway, just making sure as we add services to the mesh, we're not breaking any of our existing traffic. So what have you gained? You added psychoproxy. It's going to come across to you. Those psychoproxy does take a little bit of memory, a little bit of CPU. It requires your actual effort. So what have you gained? To do that, notice we have two terminals here now. So we're going to work with both of the terminals. So we're going to first put a loop for that command to access web API. We're going to put a little bit of loop to generate some traffic. And then on the second terminal, too, we're going to open up the Kayali dashboard. So once you open up, click on the Kayali UI tab here, you're going to see the Kayali graph. So click on the graph here and select Istio Inaction. And you can choose to display different data. I like traffic animation. I also like security. So it shows you the live traffic comes through. And it also shows you whether the traffic is mutual TLS. So that's one benefit the psychop brings to you. You immediately gain access to all this data from the Kayali dashboard. The other thing we want to talk about is distributed tracing. So we're going to go back to this terminal 2 and Control C to get out of here. I can Control C correctly. Let's see. And we're going to copy this command over to start the JGAR dashboard. So click on the JGAR UI here. And on the service dropdown, click on Istio Ingress Gateway. So that would capture all the traffic. Or you can click on Web API. So either way, it's going to capture all the traffic coming through the Web API service. And if you click on Find Trace, it's going to show you all the traces for the last 20 traces. So for instance, you can click on one of these. And then you can drill into a little bit more detail about this particular trace information, where the time is spent, the duration. And you can click on the text to find a little bit more information about the request size, response, upstream cluster. So pretty much everything you want to see is here. When sense works, this dashboard could be a little bit boring. But when sense breaks, when you have like an error different than 200, it could be really, really helpful to help your troubleshooting issues. The X request ID is how we know these traces are belonging to the single request. So it's very important to help propagate these headers throughout your service, which may require a change to your service if your service are not automatically propagate these B3 trace headers. The next dashboard we're going to look at is the Grafana dashboard. So click on Terminal 2 here. And we're going to Control C, get out of here. And using dashboard Grafana command to view the Grafana dashboard. Now we're going to select, let's see, go back to the dashboard folder, click on Home. Let me refresh here. Seems a little bit slow to me, too. OK, so if you click on Istio folder here, you can see Istio service dashboard. So it should show you all the services that we have. So all these data that's generated for Web API purchase history recommendation, it's all available for you that you can see all the client data, server requests, client requests, a successful rate, whether the traffic is mutual TLS. Every single data is available for you. And it's an application level data, so a lot of interesting data. So congratulations. You have added the sample application to Istio and observed the metrics tracing and dashboard. So these are the benefits by injecting that site card to your services, and you are getting all these benefits. So if you click on the check, you should be able to get a good result and progress to the next lab. I would say let's take a few minutes break here before we continue. Ram, how is everybody doing? Yeah, I think that was much better. People were able to follow along. So let's do that same pace for the next lab. But like I said, we'll do a few minute break. Maybe you could pull up a blank screen or something with the message that's saying that we'll be back in five minutes so that people that are streaming in can stay up to date. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, let me create a new slide. All right, congratulations. You guys got clean this far. So now we're going to talk about how to secure the services in your mesh. So let me share my screen. So this is lab four. We did two labs together. We're going to talk about how do you incrementally adding services to the mesh, which actually you already had that in the previous lab. But you might remember you actually see mutual TLS security badge in your Kayali dashboard, right? That is true because it's your automatically config mutual TLS for you. However, that's the best effort that we don't guarantee it's mutual TLS. So if mutual TLS works, the traffic goes through. If mutual TLS doesn't work, we will send plain text. So in order for you to enforce the traffic to be strict mutual TLS, you would have to apply a strict mutual TLS policy either for your target service or for your namespace or for the entire mesh. So that's what we're going to do in this lab. So we're going to enable mutual TLS. And we're going to talk about how the workload key and certificates are distributed in Istio. And we're going to inspect the key and certificate for each of the services. So that you can understand how mutual TLS is enforced by Istio proxy cycle. With that, we're going to jump into a demo on this lab. So you should see this and click on the Start button that would start this particular lab, secure communication with Istio. So you should be already in the Istio basic directory. So you can skip the prerequisite. The first thing we're going to do is check out what are the peer authentication policy in my Kubernetes cluster. So peer authentication policy is the one that specified what are the secure strict mutual TLS policy in my Istio cluster. As you can see, I have nothing specified. So by default, Istio allows permissive mutual TLS to be used, which is what I was mentioning earlier. We will do a best effort on upgrade your connection to mutual TLS from that cycle proxy. But if the traffic didn't go through, we will downgrade to plain packs and still allow the communication to go through. So that's what permissive is for. So we're going to apply strict mutual TLS for the entire mesh. The reason I said it's entire mesh in this example is because I'm applying to the Istio system namespace, which is the root configuration namespace for my cluster. And I'm naming this peer authentication policy with default. And I'm applying mutual TLS mode strict. So I'm deploying this default policy in my root namespace to the entire Istio mesh. As you can see, it's applied. You can also run the Kube gap peer authentication policy. You should be able to see the policy we just applied. Now let's see mutual TLS in action. To do that, we're going to deploy a sleep service in the default namespace. So the reason why we do that is in the default namespace, the sleep pod is one slash one. So it's just one sleep container without the cycle. Now, if you look at the pods in the Istio in action namespace, if you recall, we also have a sleep container in there, but it's two slash two. So this means this has the Istio cycle proxy injected in the Istio in action namespace. So we're going to run a current command to access web API from the sleep in the default namespace. What do you think is going to happen? It's actually not allowed. Why? The reason is we apply the strict mutual TLS policy for entire mesh, which includes every single services in the mesh that includes the web API service. So when the sleep service in the default namespace trying to reach out to the web API service, which are in the mesh, so we're talking about a client outside of the mesh trying to reach a client in the mesh, it doesn't have the key and certificate to do mutual TLS connection, which why the connection is rejected.  This time, it did succeed, right? Because that sleep container has the Istio proxy, it knows what to talk to, the keys and certificate to do establish the mutual TLS connection and to do the mutual TLS communication with the web API service. If you go back to the Kali dashboard, so let's generate some traffic, you should be able to see a little bit different. I want to point out that difference quickly for you because you're probably wondering, I'm already seeing my security badge, right? So what's the difference? So now if you go to navigate the Kali in the graph that we mentioned, so you can still display the security badge and traffic animation, right? So this is same as before, but one key difference here is if you click on the secure button here, it does show mesh-wide mutual TLS is enabled. So Kali knows that we have mutual TLS enabled on each of the service within the mesh. By the way, this is an enablement on the target service side. So let's dive a little bit deeper to understand how this works. With that, I'm going to exit out of the Kali dashboard command so I have my terminal back. Now, if I do, it's your proxy config, man. By the way, it's a super helpful debugging command allows you to look at the on-way configuration, many of the psychoproxy configuration for each of your services. So if you check up the web API secret, you can see we have the default and the root CA secret for the web API. The default secret contains the public certificate information for the web API service, and you can analyze the secret, the default secret a little bit more by analyzing the issue. So it's issued by cluster.local, which is your local Kubernetes cluster. And you can also check if the public certificate is valid for the web API container. You can see this was just generated. So it's actually only valid for a day, by the way. Don't you find that interesting? After the day, how is this going to stay valid? So it still actually automatically handles certificate rotation for you before it's expiring. So we know, we constantly check when it's expiring, and we stage the certification rotation for you and make sure it automatically renews the certificate in the same way that you are getting the initial key and search signed. And we're using the same way to renew the search for you. Now let's validate the identity of the client search and check if it's valid. So you can grab the subject alternative name, which you will see the specific ID for this particular service. So let's try to spend a little bit of time to understand the specific ID. So where does the cluster.local come from? And this is namespace. This is the Istio inaction, which is your namespace. And service account is web API. So if you go to the Istio config map, during installation of Istio, by default, we config a trust domain for you, which is part of your specific ID. So that trust domain by default is cluster.local, come with the default profile. You can choose to overwrite that if you want. So Istio operator.yaml. So that's how your specific ID is built. And the other thing I want you to check is the service account. We talked about this earlier, but in case you don't remember, the web API deployment was used in this particular service account. We created, which is also used in the specific ID for this particular service. Now, the next question I want you to think through is how does the web API service obtain the necessary key and certificates? So remember, early we reviewed the injected Istio proxy container for the web API part, which you can do it by finding out the part, and you can always do a gap part on this web API. And you can do it dash.yaml. So we did that together when we examined the init container, the psychoproxy container.  So what are these volumes? And there's the Istio token that we reviewed together, too. It's on the right side here, too. So what are these things, like the CA certs and Istio token? What are the purpose of these? So these are mounted to the Istio psychoproxy container so that when the psychoproxy container starts, the Istio agent, which is also called pilot agent, remember you run the command of pilot agent to check out how it configs the IP tables. So the pilot agent would create the private key for the web API service, and then send the certificate signing request to Istio certificate authority, which by the way is the Istio D control plan, which are installed in our cluster on the Istio system namespace called Istio D. So Istio D, man, that's what it stands for. So it sends the certificate signing request and using the Istio token and the web API service account token as the credential to talk to Istio D, and the Istio agent sends the certificate back. So Istio D gets the certificates back from the Istio D and then sends the private key to the Envoy proxy through the Envoy SDS API.  The only thing you need is just get the psychoproxy injected. And we talk about the expiration of 24 hours. The next question you may be wondering is, how is mutual tiers strictly enforced? So this is something actually I find really interesting. So when you do a proxy config on your web API deployment, you get to see all the configuration. But one thing interesting is before you have strict mutual tiers enabled, you are actually seeing a lot of the times that we allow raw buffer to your services in the mesh. But once we have mutual tiers enabled, the raw buffer we are allowing actually got reduced. We're still allowing raw buffer for services not in the mesh, but for services in the mesh. We are no longer allowed raw buffers. So we no longer allow plain packs in that sense. That's how we make sure the traffic are mutual tiers and the only mutual tiers are allowed. The other question I want you to start thinking about is, there's so much data. Every time I do an Envoy proxy config, there's just so much data. It's so hard to read and interpret. How can I config my Istio to only listen to the stuff I care about? How can I selectively config what my Istio proxy cycle can see? So in fact, in 30 minutes or so, I think ROM is actually going to talk about what's the best practice to deploy Istio in production, and he's going to cover export to and cycle resources. We also plan to cover discovery selector in one of our future workshops. So stay tuned. These are available in Istio, but we're not going to cover in this lab. So congratulations, guys. You have Envoy's strict mutual tiers policy for all the services in your entire mesh. And the next, we're going to explore controlling traffic and the wisdom services. So click on the check button, which will load the next challenging for you. And you can click on Start to get to the next lab. How's everybody doing? We have a couple of thumbs ups, right? Yeah, I think you can proceed. That's awesome. Yeah, I think we only have 17, 20 minutes. So I want to make sure this lab is a little bit long. I have to say the control traffic lab. So essentially, we're going to introduce a new version of one of our services. And we're going to teach you how do you dark launch the service? How do you do canary-based routing? How do you add resilience to your service? How do you interact with external service? So we may not be able to get everything, but the lab environment will be available for you throughout the day. So feel free to play with them. So in this lab, in addition to gateway and virtual service, we're going to talk about virtual service to not bind to a gateway. So this is interesting. You can config route rule without a gateway, right? Because not every single of your services would be connected to the ingress gateway directly. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to also config subsets and policies for your destination. So destination rules are essential when you have multiple versions of your services. You're going to need to config how are you going to shift your traffic? What are the subsets of your services? Service entry allows you to access external services by having services entry in our Istio system, in our Istio service match register the Istio knows the external service and how to allow you to connect to them. So the first lab, as part of lab five, first portion, we're going to do a doc launch of purchase history version two. Then we're going to do a canary test to route 20% of the traffic to version two of purchase history. Then we're going to control the outbound service by introducing purchase history version three. And we are going to config Istio to only allow register service to go to the external service. So with that, we're going to jump to lab five. We do have a bonus lab, but unlikely where we'll have time to cover. You can do them on your own. It's not going to be required for the certification. So make sure you are in the Istio basic directory, which I am. And let's check out the purchase history version two. As you can see, I actually built a service myself called version two. It's a fourth version based on the Nick Jackson's fix service. The only reason I built this version two is I want to introduce external service into my purchase history service. So it will curate this external service and get a response that I can't really read, but it essentially gets a different response every time. Yeah, it's just a deployment here. And so we talk about destination rule. So one thing we're going to do is config a doc launch by route of the traffic to version one right through weight 100. We can fake all the traffic to version one. We also have a destination rule, because in our virtual service, we specify subset V1. So in destination rule, we define how what is V1, what is V2 subsets? It's by a label selector to select on the deployment of version V1 and version V2. So if you remember our deployment label here, we did label the selector match label. Let's go ahead, apply this virtual service and destination rule to our environment. So now we have configured Istio to send 100% traffic to version one. Now we can introduce version two. By the way, you really want to apply this first before you introduce version two, because the moment you apply version two, Kubernetes by default is going to do wrong dropping the traffic between version one and version two before you actually had a chance to test the version two. So now we deploy version two into our environment. If you do a gap pass on the Istio in action namespace, you can see both of one and two are running. Let's take a look at the logs of version two of purchase history. There's actually an error here. I'm unable to connect to the external service. Connection refused. So this is interesting. Why do we get this error? OK, let's generate some load first. So let's generate some load just making sure our traffic is still good. As you can see, we can fix 100% of traffic to version one. So even though version two was not good, we're still fine, because we're not breaking anybody down. So now let's think through why are we having this behavior? Why is this guy trying to reach out the external service? And it's got the connection refused. Remember, I mentioned early on, when the init container runs the Psychoproxy and the web API or purchase history runs in parallel as the Psychoproxy. So this pose a problem. What if the Psychoproxy needs to reach out to any external service, but it doesn't have network connect? What if the purchase history container needs to reach out to the JSON placeholder service, which is external, before the Envoy Psychoproxy is ready? It can't. That's essentially the problem we're running to. Luckily, there is a configuration where you can hold the application container until the proxy starts. So let's make sure we include that configuration. To do that, you add an annotation to your deployment, like this. And let's go ahead and deploy this. And finger crossed when you fix it for us. OK, so let's check out the logs for this part. It depends on where we are. OK, it's actually picked up. No, it actually takes a little bit of time. So sometimes the logs does take a little bit of time because it takes time to start the container. So let's try it again. Yeah, so now you can see the logs did pick up the new one, which was just started 18 seconds ago. You can see we're able to connect. So that's all because we can fix the whole application until your proxy starts. So this is highly required. If your container, your service, requires external connectivity outside of your Kubernetes cluster, make sure you can fix this. Because I actually stumped on this and took me a while to solve this problem myself. All right, so let's test version two of purchase history. As you can see, we were able to test it successfully by exacting into the container and do a local hosted. So this is like the most simple testing. Now we want to do, once we test a little bit, we want to do a header-based routing, because we don't want to test within our container. We want to pass through some other service. So to do header-based routing, remember, we talk about route rule. So you can fix that in virtual service. You do a header-based matching. When the user is JSON, by the way, it's capital J, you route the destination to version two. And for any other traffic, you continue to route to version one. So let's go ahead, apply this, and let's do a testing. So what we are doing is the user JSON. Why is it still going to version one? All right. This is because in the route rule, we had exact JSON and we were using a lowercase j in the QRA. So let's fix that. So if you use user JSON, finger crossed, uppercase j, tada, it does return purchase history version two, exactly as we told Istio to do. So this is great. We were able to test it. Let's do canary-based to put 20% traffic to version two. So go back to our virtual service and change version one to be weight 80 and version two to be weight 20 so that we can achieve 20% traffic. Let's go ahead and apply this virtual service. Now, if we do a loop of accessing our web API service and grab the purchase history, you can see out of 20, we got exactly four. So that's 20%. So let's continue this trend to shift more stuff to version two. We're going to shift 50% this time and apply this configuration. And let's do a loop. And as you can see, it's about 50%. Not going to count, but it's nice that with Istio, you can config a simple virtual service. And without needing to restart anything, you were able to shift traffic exactly what you wanted it to be. So that's the power of what Istio brings to control traffic. The next thing we're going to do is shift all the traffic to version two. So let's apply that and run this loop again. As you can see, every single traffic is version two now. So very nice. Now, we're going to teach you how to control inbound traffic. By default, Istio allows all the outbound traffic to go through. This is by I'm just double checking the outbound policy. We don't have any outbound policy, so default is allow any. To config Istio to only allow registry only, let's go ahead install this command by setting outbound traffic to be registry only. As you can see, all the configuration are updated. By the way, this configuration does take a little bit of while for Istio to pick up. The main reason is this configuration is updated in a config map. And it does take a while form that config map for Istio to recognize and then push down to the onboarding cycle proxy. So now if we send the traffic to the web API service, let's see how it goes. So Istio goes because I said it's going to take a while. So yeah, now you can see now it fails now. So the onboarding proxy has been refreshed with registry only, so it's not going to allow purchase history to go through because it reaches out to the external service that it's not allowed to access. It's not registered to access. So if you do a pod log command, you can actually see that we actually retry for you. Remember what we talked about? But in Istio, you automatically get retry twice. So this is exactly why you are getting attempt to count three because we retry for you. So let's go ahead fix this. And then we have about four minutes left. Okay, I'll run through this. Let's go ahead fix this. To fix this is apply a service entry command, a resource by importing this external services into the mesh. Now once we import this, you should finger cross to access. Yeah, it did work. So that's the nice thing, right? You have the precise control into, you know, what external services are allowed. So this is all the control traffic section. I'm going to go through the rest of my slides because some of you might be interested in the badge program. So we do have this foundation badge I talked to you through. So we really appreciate you guys provide a feedback to our survey and test. Could one of you, Ram, or we'll maybe send this out. So by completing the test and passing 80%, you will be able to get this foundation for Istio badge or certified by solo. And please give us the feedback through the survey. And we also have the rest of us talks from the solo team. Make sure you attend like Ram's workshop. If you like this workshop, and we also have a talk about designing service management global scale at SAP. That's really interesting. And also multi cluster workshop. And Christian is also talking about zero downtime. So don't miss any of our talks. And visit us at the booth too. We have in person booths and virtual booths. So please engage with the solo team. That's all I have. All right. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you so much, Ram and Will and Eric. I appreciate you guys support. And thanks everyone for attending and joining us for the workshop. We do have a lot of future workshops at solo.io. And if you go to our event page, we do run these type of workshops very frequently on a monthly basis. So feel free to join us there too. Yeah, just to kind of elaborate on that. We covered a lot of content in this very short amount of time. So if you're interested in this, but you want to kind of go at it at a much more slower pace, then go to solo.io. Look for the events section. And then you can see where we run this workshop, the workshop that I'm going to run next, which is a slightly more advanced deploying exterior to production. And we also have workshops around multi-cluster meshes, API gateways, envoys, et cetera. OK, so I think at 11.10 is actually the next workshop, which I will be running. Let me give me a couple of minutes to kind of swap computers, and then we'll get started. OK, great. Thanks, everyone. Have fun learning.


Okay.  That's, or roughly, doesn't matter. I can just go around. Okay. All right. Sounds good. Good morning, everyone. The title of my talk is... I'm sorry, okay. I'm not good with this. Right. The title of my talk is Entropy-Driven Assembly of Colloids and I'm very happy and honored to be giving this talk at the Hands-On Research in Complex Systems and as Petro had mentioned that I was one of the students in the first Hands-On School back in 2008 in India and this is Harry, myself and others looking at a bouncing jet. In addition to the school, you know, the school was a wonderful opportunity for me to learn the scope of the field and it really got me excited and continue with research in this area but it also made me really famous by becoming part of Figure 7 in this paper and it's a paper in annual reviews of fluid mechanics which talks about how to take fluid mechanics to the public. All right. Going back to the talk. So the outline of my talk is about... I'll start by discussing what colloidal dispersions are, what are colloidal particles and how do they interact with each other and how these interactions lead to assembly of ordered phases like crystals and partially ordered phases like liquid crystalline phases and then I will discuss how entropy can be utilized to assemble two-dimensional membranes from hard rods and then I will discuss how using chirality as a tool we can assemble really exquisite phases with colloidal particles. So colloidal dispersions are everywhere around us. We have these materials or dispersions that we use every day in our life starting with paints, inks and milk. Opal is really a colloidal crystal so it's a crystal made out of colloidal particles and we'll talk more about this as we go along. So essentially a colloidal dispersion is made out of micron-sized solid particles suspended in a solvent. So for example, ink has these colored pigments or nanoparticles put in water or something like that. And the micron scale is really special because at that scale Brownian motion becomes really important and thermal fluctuations ensure that all these particles are uniformly suspended in the solvent. So another theme in the area of colloidal research is to use these particles as model atoms. So chemists have become really good at making colloidal particles all of which have the same size. So that property is called mono-dispersity that means all the particles have the same diameter, same surface properties and so on. And if you put some of these in water and look at them under the microscope and that's really easy because the micron length scale can be simply visualized with an optical microscope. What you would find is that they jiggle around in water due to Brownian motion and the time scale of motion is in millisecond so you need really simple cameras to look at that. The advantage with colloidal particles is that one can change the interaction potential between them and have them mimic some of the interaction potentials that are relevant in atomic systems. The advantage here is because of larger length scales and slower time scales we can access the same similar physics what you would access in atomic systems but far more easily and with far more detail. So let's look at what are the interactions that exist between two given colloidal particles that universally exist. And the first one is van der Waals. I'm sure we've heard all of you must have encountered van der Waals at one point or the other. It's an attractive force that exists between any pair of atoms even if they are neutral and so the idea is that fluctuations induce dipoles in atoms so the positive nucleus and electron if they are separated that leads to a dipole and then two neighboring atoms act as a pair of dipoles and interact with each other through an attractive force which goes less minus one over r to the power six. So it's a really short range force because it's going as one over r to the power six and it's fairly weak if you are to think about van der Waals interactions between two atoms. But if you're worried about van der Waals between two macroscopic bodies what we need to do is to sum up the interactions between all pairs of atoms in each of the two bodies and then the interactions become significant and longer range. So what that means is that if you have two macroscopic plates at a separation of a few nanometers they experience force per unit area of 10,000 atmospheres. So at that scale thermal fluctuations are way too weak to overcome this attractive force and that's what exactly happens with colloidal particles if there are no other repulsive forces if the only force that exists between colloidal particles is van der Waals they will all stick to each other eventually and now they are big enough to sediment and that leads to what is called instability of the colloidal dispersion. So if we want a uniformly suspended colloidal dispersion we need to introduce some kind of repulsive interactions and one of the ways to do that is to use electrostatics. So the idea is that we graft charges on these colloidal particles and similar charges repel each other. So if I have only a single electron charge on a particle and they are separated by a micron it's too weak. The interaction energy for such colloidal particles is only about a KBT so thermal fluctuations would be good enough to overcome this repulsion and so what we need to do is to graft many more charges and then put them in non-polar solvents to enhance the electrostatic repulsion energy. Typically if we have put in the colloidal particles in an aqua solvent another very important phenomena takes place which is that there are counter ions in water. So if the colloidal particles are negatively charged the positively charged ions in the water rushes towards these particles and arrange themselves in a layer like geometry and what this layer really does is that it effectively neutralizes the charges on the colloidal particle and so instead of having a 1 over r kind of potential what we end up having is e to the power minus r over lambda by r. So the potential experienced, the electrostatic potential from a given colloidal particle exponentially decays out with a screening length that is about 10 nanometers if you have a millimolar of sodium chloride in there. A second way to introduce repulsion between colloidal particles is to use polymers. Essentially here the idea is that we will graft polymer chains on the colloidal particles and this leads to some kind of steric stabilization. In the community people have used standard polymers like polymethylamethacrylate but also there is an interest in using novel polymers like DNA and the advantage with DNA is that you have these base pair complementarity that can be used to introduce effective attractions. So if you have a polymer brush grafted on these particles and these particles are suspended in what is called a good solvent. By a good solvent what I mean is that the chains of the polymer are extended in the solution. When two such particles come close enough what is happening in this area is that you have a very large concentration of polymer chains and therefore a higher osmotic pressure that introduces an effective repulsion between the colloidal particles. And if the polymer brush is in a bad solvent in which case the polymers would rather be among themselves than be with the solvent that leads to enthalpy attractive interactions. So having discussed these standard interaction potentials let us look at a model system which is called hard spheres. So a hard sphere interaction potential shown here is a very simple interaction potential. It is zero until the particles touch and it becomes infinitely large as the particles touch each other. This is the simplest interaction potential that one can cook up and analyze theoretically as well as experimentally. And this is how John Dalton had imagined atoms to be. So if I look at the free energy of such a system the free energy is given by internal energy minus T times entropy and here the internal energy is purely kinetic because the potential energy stays zero and the only energy scale in the system is KBT so U is given by number of particles time KBT and so the free energy, the temperature really scales out. So what this expression shows you is that if you want to lower the free energy of the system you have to maximize the entropy. So phase with the largest entropy has the lowest free energy and that's the phase that one would obtain in equilibrium. So there is this usual notion that entropy is a measure of disorder and so one would imagine that for a hard particle system ordered phases don't exist but that's not quite true and in fact that was a really big question do hard spheres crystallize in the 50s and at one of these conferences the very famous people participated to debate over this question and they go around saying oh yeah yeah you know it really goes against intuition because many simulation and computational people had indeed found a phase transition for hard spheres to go from a fluid phase to a crystalline phase beyond a certain volume fraction and so there was a lot of controversy about whether that is really an artifact of simulations or it really takes place and eventually after all of this debate they actually say that oh no this is really too hard so let's abandon the scientific method and just vote it out amongst themselves. So they just voted and the vote was 50-50 so half the people thought that it's an artifact of simulations and half the people thought that hard spheres can indeed crystallize. Well now it's very well understood we have very large computer power and we can do simulations to actually plot out the phase diagram so this is how the phase diagram looks so below a volume fraction of 50% the colloidal dispersion is in a fluid phase what that means is that the particles are arranged in a completely disordered manner and then above 50% the crystalline phase sets in where all the particles are arranged on a hexagonal lattice or an ordered lattice and this can be intuitively it's counterintuitive that crystal phase has higher entropy than fluid phase but you can get a sense of it by considering let's say a volume fraction of 64% so entropy is proportional to number of accessible states and so if I were to pack spheres in a completely disordered manner the highest packing fraction I can achieve is 64% but if I were to pack the same spheres in a crystalline arrangement I can have a packing fraction of 74% so that tells you that the number of accessible states for a crystal are way higher than for a disordered phase yes, T is temperature and temperature plays no role in this transition so the phase diagram stays the same all throughout so Y axis has no role really and so after this phase diagram was put out the question was that can we see this experimentally and in a beautiful experiment by Pusey and Etal they prepared hard sphere colloidal particles by grafting a very small polymer brush and so in this picture what you're looking at are vials which have these hard sphere colloidal particles put in at different volume fractions and then after equilibration what you find is the following so these vials are backlit with white light and what you're getting in the 50% volume fraction is some kind of iridescence and what's going on is that you have crystals made out of micron sized objects and so the wavelength of visible light which is about half a micron is undergoing Bragg diffraction which is giving you these beautiful colors so having looked at hard spheres what I would like to now show you is that that the geometry of the colloidal particle plays an important role in the kind of phases that we can assemble and so the farthest away you can go from spheres is the most an isotropic object a rod and unlike hard spheres where the chemists know how to synthesize highly mono dispersed particles the situation with rods is quite grim in the sense that we don't know how to synthesize rods which have identical lens and diameter and so physicists resorted to using viruses and in particular tobacco mosaic viruses these viruses are engineered by nature and mono dispersed because all viruses are identical to each other and they have very high aspect ratio so the aspect ratio of the rod governs the phase behavior and they have uniform surface properties so in a beautiful experiment by Bernal what he did was he took a very dilute TMV solution about 0.1% TMV in a fish tank and examined the fish tank in cross polarizers and so basically he has this goldfish that is swimming in a dilute TMV solution and what you find is that away from the fish in the cross polarizer regime you don't have any signal so if you have an isotropic a uniform refractive index material and you observe it between cross polarizers you are expected to observe dark signal but what this fish is doing is actually through its flow fields is aligning these rods and once you have an area where the rods are completely aligned it's optically an isotropic so the refractive indices along the axis of the rod becomes different from the perpendicular to the axis of rod and that makes it bifringent and gives you signal even under cross polarizers and what really is exciting about hard rods is that as you increase the wall infraction of rods from 0.1% to say a few percent what you observe is two phase coexistence so in a while which has to begin with 1% of hard rods they phase separate into two phases which if you examine under cross polarizers the top part is lighter in density and has no signal and the bottom part is heavier in density and gives you strong bifringence and so the top phase is what is called an isotropic phase where the rods are both positionally and orientationally disordered on the other hand the bottom phase is called the pneumatic phase where still there is no positional order there is orientational order meaning all the rods are roughly pointing along the same direction whereas in the isotropic phase the rods can point in any direction so also I really got interested in this problem as to how isotropic to pneumatic phase transition takes place in hard rods and in a way it's a much simpler problem to analyze because the phase transition is happening with a volume fraction of few percent unlike spheres where the phase transition took place at 50% so what Ansarva did was he expanded the free energy in terms of as a virial expansion in density and he has two terms first is entropy of mixing which is basically translational entropy and then he has the second term which encodes the orientational entropy and so what's really happening is that by forming a phase where you have lost orientational entropy or orientational disorder but you have gained a lot of translational entropy so at the expense of orientational entropy we have gained translational entropy and therefore the pneumatic phase becomes stable and this transition is sensitive to the aspect ratio L over D because if you look at the excluded volume in the pneumatic phase it scales as D squared L whereas in the isotropic phase is D L squared and so if I take the ratio of that that tells me which one will be more favorable so TMV is a cool virus to work with but is also very difficult to synthesize so it's a plant virus where you have to grow the plants for four months and then hope to purify TMV out of it a new system that I have been working I and others have been working for a long time now is what is called an FD virus it's a bacteriophage so it infects bacteria and so you can just grow up E. coli and purify within a day or so so that's a huge help that we can get virus in a day's time rather than over a month's time scales it's a completely non-pathogenic virus it infects laboratory strains of E. coli and it is chemically homogenous it's highly mono dispersed and also it has much higher aspect ratio than TMV TMV has an aspect ratio of 16 FD has an aspect ratio of 150 and so it's a virus which is one micron in length and few nanometers in diameter and in a beautiful paper by Fredin what they did is they figured out the isotropic pneumatic coexistence as a function of ionic strength and the experimental data had a beautiful overlap with the Onsager's theory of hard rods so these rods are truly hard rods so it has quantitative agreements with Onsager's theory so when you increase the volume fraction of rods even beyond the pneumatic phase what you end up getting is a symmetric phase where you have layers of rod-like particles and the rods are arranged as shown and this phase was first predicted in computer simulations by Franco and then experimentally observed in FD viruses and the advantage here is that the rod is one micron in length scale and so we can also do single particle studies in these phases so so far what I have shown you is that we can make three-dimensional structures both with hard spheres and hard rods but if you were interested in making two-dimensional structures the situation is a little bit non-trivial and so most people think about membranes when they think about two-dimensional structure and one of the ways, standard ways that our body and you know chemists alike use to make self-assembled membranes is to use amplifiers or magnet-like molecules which have a hydrophobic head and a hydrophilic tail and if you have many such particles they would in water they would spontaneously assemble in these sheet-like geometries so that the hydrophobic tails are shielded from the unfavorable solvent and so now what I am going to show you is how we can assemble two-dimensional membranes starting with homogeneous hard rods instead of heterogeneous surfactant-like molecules and to do that I am going to use what is called depletion attraction and essentially the reason I need to use depletion attraction is that the viruses by themselves are electrostatically repulsive so they do not really form ordered phases at low concentrations and so what we really do here is to mix these rods with polymeric coils and the idea is that each such polymer coil is excluded from a zone around the rod and if two rods come closer than a coil diameter apart then some free volume is available for the polymer coils which increases the entropy of the polymer coils and here the number of polymer coils are way larger than the number of rods so it is the entropy of the polymer that really matters and therefore favors alignment of rods so the excluded volume zone overlap is maximum when the rods are aligned along their axes and it is a generic mode of attraction where the polymer concentration sets the strength of the attraction and the polymer size sets the range of the attraction and so what is going to happen is that if I have two rods and I add polymers they come together and get aligned along their axes and then more rods will join to form these disk like structures right so basically the rods are joining the initial cluster of two rods and now these disks themselves will undergo depletion attraction to stack up on top of each other and give you a phase which looks like a bulk symmetric however at low polymer concentration what is going to happen is that the rods will now fluctuate up and down from the disk and therefore if I bring in two such disks at low polymer concentration these protrusion fluctuations will be suppressed and lead to an effective repulsion between the disks if I am at the high polymer concentration the protrusion fluctuations are not allowed so I have really very two smooth disks that undergo depletion attraction and stack up on top of each other so at low enough polymer concentrations this is how the assembly kinetics works out so as I mix rods and polymers together I make many such disks of aligned rods and this is how they look under the microscope so from the top they appear as a circle and from the sides they appear as an ellipse and if I have two such disks they coalesce and make a larger disk so in the end I can end up with really large disks tens of microns in diameter one rod length thick and on a good day on a good sample this is how it looks like on the cover slip lots of these sheets and here I will switch to fluorescence where one out of 10,000 rods are labeled and the rods are pointing at us so they appear as dots and they freely diffuse within these sheets so these sheets or membranes are very similar to lipid bilayer in the sense that the constituent rods or molecules are free to diffuse within the sheet and they have long wavelength elastic properties that are similar to those of lipid bilayers so far I have shown you that we can hud spheres and hud rods assemble in fluid and crystalline phases and I can use depletion attraction to assemble two dimensional membranes with hud rods and now I am going to give you examples of how I can use the chirality of the viruses to control the line tension of these sheets and assemble what are called colloidal rats so I am left with like 10 minutes for 45 minutes barrier and so let's go quickly so if I were to and I will explain by chirality exactly what do we mean but first let's look at the edge of the membrane so there are two possibilities at the edge the rods could be perfectly aligned and that would give me a square edge and that is quite implausible in nature there is nature never really likes sharp edges and what really happens is that we have a rounded edge where the rods are tilted and the reason we have a rounded edge is because of surface tension with the surrounding polymer solution yes yes yes yes I will show so this is a fluorescence micrograph where one out of 10,000 rods are labeled so in the center the rods are pointing at us in their dots and at the edges the rods are lying along the XY plane so you can see the entire rod this is about a micron and so essentially what's happening is that this membrane itself is optically birefringent so within the bulk of the membrane the refractive index is the same in the X and the Y direction but the edges it's not true and so if you were to look at it schematically this is what is happening the rods are standing straight in the bulk and tilted at the edges and if I measure the polarization of such a system using what is called a pole scope so in this picture the intensity is proportional to the local tilt of the rod so I have huge tilt at the edges and no tilt in the center of the membrane and one can write simple Frank Free Energy models to analyze this phenomena and this phenomena of expulsion of twist to the edges is has one-on-one analogy with how a superconductor expels magnetic field and so the twist penetration depth is about half a micron and the penetration depth does not change with assembly conditions and if you notice the dynamics of the edges so here I have zoomed on to the edge of a colloidal membrane what we find is that the edges are fluctuating and they're fluctuating just like any other liquid droplet would fluctuate so it has a certain surface tension associated with it because I'm taking a 1D cut it's a line tension and one can analyze these fluctuations to measure the line tension so essentially what you do is you break up the height of this contour in a Fourier series and then the mean square fluctuations of the Fourier modes are inversely proportional to the line tension and what we can do is we can control this line tension by tuning the chirality of the rod so by chirality what I mean is that the two rods don't want to be perfectly parallel with respect to each other but instead prefer angle with respect to each other so instead of making a perfect pneumatic these rods make what is called a twisted pneumatic where the directed continuously turns and so if I plot the preferred tilt angle versus the temperature what I find is that these rods become achiral as I increase the temperature and so if I plot the line tension as a function of temperature what I find is that it drops off as I lower the temperature so in this movie what we are doing is that we have a membrane and we are changing the chirality of the rods by lowering the temperature and what's going to happen is that the line tension continues to decrease and so the fluctuations increase and eventually there is a polymorphic transition into ribbons and the reason one gets twisted ribbons is the fact that that rods would really like to be tilted with respect to each other and they're free to twist at the edges and so basically we want to generate as much edge as possible so what's going to happen is it's fluctuating more and more and then eventually it would turn into twisted ribbons and so twisted ribbons is basically small membranes that are now connected to each other through these bridges and with such high surface area structure the rods have as much twist as they could ever ask for and it's completely reversible, we can go back and forth from the membranes to ribbons so so far the data that I've shown you was from my postdoctoral lab Professors Juan Medojec at Brandeis University and this is the data that I acquired while I was a postdoc in his lab so the problem that I was interested in is related to lipid rafts sorry so in a cell membrane is made up of hundreds of different types of lipids and proteins and it is known that certain lipids and proteins associate within the membrane to make what are called lipid rafts and these are highly controversial because the length scale of these rafts is few nanometers they fluctuate a lot and it's not clear why they are stable and so to mimic this problem in the colloidal membrane system we decided to add a second rod which is slightly shorter than the rest of the rods and so there are two possibilities the two kinds of rods can be uniformly mixed or they can be completely demixed and that's understandable purely on the basis of depletion attraction because in this case the excluded volume is as nice as much as possible and here I'm actually dominated by entropy of mixing so when we did this experiment we did it with rods which are different in length by about 26% they were oppositely handed and slightly different in flexibility so I will come to each one of them why oppositely handed is required and so on and so forth but when we did this experiment we found the uniformly mixed ways so from now onwards all fluorescence movies only shorter rods are labeled and longer rods are not labeled so you have two kinds of rods but in the fluorescence images you can only visualize one kind of rods and so here you have uniformly mixed rods and then at higher polymer concentration the shorter rods have completely face separated within a background of longer rods and in the fluorescence only the shorter rods glow up so what was really interesting is what happens in between these two limits and what happens is the following that we observe these clusters of shorter rods in a membrane of longer rods these clusters have a very well defined size of about two microns and you can wait a day a week or months the two clusters will not merge they repel each other strongly and they are self limited so schematically what you are looking at is a sheet which has these two dimples made out of shorter rods so these samples were made by mixing the two kinds of rods first and then adding the depletant so a question that a natural question that arises is it the true ground state of the system or is it a kinetically arrested metastable state meaning the two clusters cannot merge because the repulsive forces are really large or is it that the system would really prefer to have many many clusters and so to answer that question we did the following experiment where I took a sheet made out of purely shorter rods and a sheet made out of purely longer rods under the same polymer concentration and have them merge this way I would start out with a bulk interface and this is what happens so indeed now I have a clear interface between the shorter and the longer rods and it looks like that nothing much is happening although I would not be showing you this movie if nothing much was going to happen so let's see what happens next and this is what happens the interface destabilizes into these clusters which are connected by thin liquid bridges which then break due to thermal fluctuations and the system equilibrates itself into these clusters that are stable and hang out in the membrane so this really shows that the micro phase separative state is the preferred ground state of the system and it's interesting to note that each of this cluster which is about two microns in diameter has about 24,000 rods and it's highly mono dispersed and so what we have done here is we have taken 24,000 colloidal particles put them together in a cluster of well defined shape with an error bar of maybe 500 rods and that's really a very sophisticated self-assembly given the contrast in the colloidal sphere regime where it's a matter of great pride if we can put together four spherical particles in a tetrahedral cluster and so this is a large membrane where I'm showing you these clusters of shorter rods and we can see that they clearly interact with each other through repulsive interactions and we can measure these interactions so in order to know the origin of the interaction I need to first measure it and we measure it using what are called optical traps so the red dots are essentially focused laser beams which push on these clusters like snow plows and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring these two clusters closer than what thermal fluctuations would allow me to do and then I would let the traps go so this is what is happening I'm coming in with focused laser beams and then I'm pushing them together and then I would let go and once the traps are off the particles feel strong repulsive forces and they drift apart and by repeating this experiment many many times there is a way to back calculate what is the true interaction potential and this is how it looks it's really an exponential fits really well to this it has a characteristic length scale of half a micron and it's strongly repulsive so on contact with hundreds of KBT and so what sets the size of these clusters and what's the origin of repulsive interactions has to do with the fact that these rods are chiral and so the half a micron length scale comes from the twist penetration depth so if I look at the polarization image of these bidesperse colloidal membranes what I find is that at the edges of the cluster I have a preferential tilt of the rods by forming these clusters I'm allowing the twist to penetrate the membrane interior and lower the chiral free energy of the rods and that's why it is favorable for these clusters to form and they interact repulsively because as I try to bring two clusters closer than the twist penetration depth then the rods at the edges have to untwist and that costs a lot of energy and leads to effective repulsion and if this hypothesis and so we can add what we also observe is that shorter smaller clusters have less twist associated with them then larger clusters and we can quantitatively measure measure that to find that the peak retardance or the maximum tilt angle as a function of the size of the cluster goes up and the twist penetration depth stays the same so if this understanding is correct then I should measure the interaction potential between clusters of different sizes and and we do that and we find that indeed larger clusters repel more strongly than smaller clusters and I can collapse the data with an experimental error by scaling with the experimentally measured tilt angle and now I can use these repulsive interactions to hierarchically assemble larger larger crystals and so essentially sorry so at low volume fraction the clusters are in a disordered configuration as I increase the number density of smaller clusters some short range order starts to set in and then at the highest volume fraction I get these beautiful cluster crystals so in appearance they look like colloidal crystals but they are actually very different because here each cluster is also self assembled unlike colloidal crystals that are made out of let's say polystyrene beads and so what I have done is that I have shown you that we take hard rods we add polymers to get membrane like structures to which we add a second rod or second component to form analogs of 2D micelles which I can then further self-organize to come back to colloidal crystals so I have completed the circle in a way and this is just to emphasize that it's not that I took 2 rods that were highly designed to see all the phase behavior so colloidal rafts are quite ubiquitous we have changed the relevant parameters such as the length difference the chirality to get a zoo of phases that I hope to explore in future and I would now conclude that I have shown you a number of phase transitions that are driven by entropy and we can engineer the colloidal interactions by changing the geometry of the particle the chirality and the flexibility and what colloidal length scales really allow us to do is to directly visualize and manipulate with simple tools and the system of hard draws, chirality and attraction has a complex unexplored phase behavior so with this I will thank you for your time


This may be the most important video you ever watched from me if you choose to skip it or ignore it because let's face it It's a little bit boring, then you may come to regret that big time Let's talk about the best way to back up your music studio data Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will and I hope your music production data as well also I went for many years without any hard drive failures, and I didn't lose any data then in the space of 18 months I lost one hard drive and two SSDs now on those occasions I didn't lose any music production data But I did lose some precious old photos of my children gone never to be seen again to be honest with you It was quite an emotional experience And I knew it was only a matter of time before I did lose some music production files Which perhaps I've been working on for months and may contain performances. I can never replicate So I set about looking for a much better solution and looking around at what other music producers were doing I found quite a lot of flaws in their methodology. We'll be taking a look at that later But I will be setting out my current solution, which I believe is excellent and involves using this black box here The Synology DS920 plus but more on that later. First of all, let's take a look at what you may be doing wrong The worst kind of backup is to copy your files to the same drive in your computer. If that drive fails, everything is lost So what a lot of you do is copy your files to something like this an external SSD or hard drive And this methodology is absolutely fine as long as you maintain a copy What some of you will do is copy your files from your computer to this drive and then eventually Delete the original files from your computer. Of course, then you've only got one copy of your data And if this drive fails everything is lost But as I say as long as you maintain the copy, this is not a bad start However, there are some other issues with this namely the human error issue You need to make sure you diligently do your backup to this drive Maybe several times a day or at least once a day You can bet your life that the one time you're too busy too lazy or you just forget will be the one time that drive will fail And your data or at least your most recent data will be gone The other issue with this is it doesn't take into account things like fire, something like a house fire Or theft where maybe all of your gear will get stolen or some other natural disaster For that you need an offsite copy So the idea of an offsite backup is that your data is in a completely different location Not subject to the same conditions like natural disasters or physical theft or even things like flood or fire I was recently watching another music YouTuber and his solution for this was to take a copy of all of his data once a week And drive it over to his grandmother's house on the other side of town And the problem with this is that of course he was only doing it once a week He would have to do all of that manually and his grandmother's house may be subject to the same kind of natural disasters that his place is So what's the solution to this? Well recently of course the solution has been to use cloud services We can upload our data to a server probably in a completely different part of the world Now this is fine but again it contains that manual element It's fairly tedious and long-winded to do and you may have something much more interesting and much more important to do So these are all the problems. What's the solution? So the solution I've been using is a reflection of long-established principles in data protection The first one of those is the 3-2-1 rule which states you should always maintain three copies of your data Your original or working copy which is normally on your computer and two backups Now at least one of those backups should be off-site So for example I may have my song data which is created by my door on my computer I've created backup on an external drive like this one and then I've got another backup Which may be on something like Google Drive or Dropbox or some other off-site storage or online storage area Now the other principle I'm adhering to is something called redundancy That is where if any of my drive should fail or my backup drive should fail Then my data can be rebuilt using the other drives. That's rather clever So those are the principles involved. How am I actually going about doing this? This is the Synology DS920 Plus and I have four four terabyte drives inside it That's 16 terabytes of drive space in total. Now you of course may not need anywhere near that much Now this is not to be confused with a hard drive enclosure That's the kind of thing you would typically connect up to your computer via USB This is a NAS, a network area storage device So it connects to your system via the network so it doesn't even need to be in the same room as you It doesn't need to be in your studio making any extra unwanted noise Now the thing about a NAS is it's smart It can automatically take care of some of the tasks we've been talking about earlier Plus this one has a few bonus features which I think are really useful for music producers We'll get to that later, but first of all I'd like to talk about its redundancy So I was easily able to install my four drives by popping them in their drive trays And slotting them into the front of the system. No tools required And I can even swap out a faulty drive while the system is still running Now if this were a traditional hard drive enclosure I would just simply start to save my data there The problem would be is if one of my hard drives were to fail I would lose the data on that drive Something some people do is to save their data to the first two drives and then copy or mirror that across to the other two drives The issue with that as a solution is that although I would have a backup of my data I would only have 8 terabytes available of my 16 terabytes of drive space That's not very appealing to me So thankfully with a NAS system like this things are a lot smarter We can use something called a RAID configuration and striping With this our data is cleverly stored across all of our four drives at once In such a way that if one of those drives were to fail we can swap it out And the data on it can be rebuilt from information on the other three drives This gives us something called redundancy Now with some other systems they require that when you're using RAID You have to have four drives or three or whatever it is you're using All of the same size and perhaps even the same model With Synology they have a variation on RAID which I'm using And with that you can mix and match drives of different sizes and models I find that incredibly useful Now for my 16 terabytes of drive this means I actually have 12 terabytes available With this system I think that's a price worth paying for the peace of mind I get So of course your Synology NAS drive is accessed from your computer via your network And you could just drag files from your computer to the drives or folders on that NAS drive Of course the problem here is human error you may forget or what have you So it's much better to have an automated solution So for this I use the Synology Drive client This is a free app which can automatically check certain folders on your computer To look for changes, things like new files or modified files When it finds changes it makes backups to your NAS drive automatically It happens without you even knowing about it If it needs to check at a time when your computer is switched off It will just check the next time it gets switched on Now of course the initial transfer of files if you've got a lot of them can take quite some time But once that initial one is done of course it's only saving changes So it's very small amounts of data which is being transferred across your network To be honest I never even notice it's happening It's one of those set and forget features So we have two parts of our puzzle solved Our data is automatically backed up to our NAS without us having to think about it And there is some redundancy involved If one of the drives in the NAS should fail we will still be able to maintain our data there So what about the next part Making sure that our data is also backed up to the cloud or to another location Well before we get into that we need to understand that this NAS is actually a little computer With its own operating system Now that may sound a little bit intimidating But in fact it's rather user friendly Let's take a look So we actually log into this operating system which is called DSM Through our web browser And that's what I'm looking at it with now This is in my Chrome web browser And as you can see it's much like a desktop in something like Windows or Mac We have this desktop and things are draggable here So this information window here is draggable and I can minimize it like so Then we've got this kind of notification area up here Which is quite useful And then we've got some icons over here Which are kind of shortcuts if you like to different operations Now we can for example click on this file station icon Which is a bit like browsing folders in your desktop operating system So we can open several windows like that if we wish And then we could if we want dragg files or folders from one window to another Just like you would on a Windows or Mac operating system You can even drag items from your main desktop on your computer To this window to quickly and easily transfer files that way if you wish Now of course the main power of a system like this Or like any operating system comes from the apps or programs which are installed Now we install those via this package center We just click on this up here It's a little bit like an app store if you like You can browse the various things that you can install You can get a bit more detail on them if you like Say by clicking on this here and you can read all about them what they do And if you want to install them just click on the install button Nothing technical to do or anything like that They just simply install onto your system And then they become available via the main menu Now this is kind of like the start button in Windows if you like You click on it up here the main menu and click on that And then you can see all of your installed apps And you just execute them from there Well by the way if you're finding this video useful Could you go ahead and hit the like button for me Do it right away so that you don't forget Alternatively hit the dislike button twice And if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe And ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos Now the final part of our puzzle is to make a backup of our data And store it remotely or on a cloud service Now exactly how you go about doing this May depend upon the current services you are using Let's take a look One of the apps you may choose for this is called cloud sync I'll open that now Now there are a number of popular cloud services that you can use with this And you can easily set up scheduled sync or backup tasks However I eventually decided to go with Synology's own service called C2 I found that that was most cost effective for me And extremely easy to use Now the app we use with this is called Hyperbackup I'll just open that up now Now you can easily set up any number of scheduled backups For whatever folders you choose on your NAS I've set up most of mine to happen in the middle of the night When I'm sleeping Again this is a set and forget kind of a feature I initially set up a few months ago And it's all happened automatically Without any input or action from me But of course it will notify you if there are any problems Now just like the PC to NAS backup The initial backup to the cloud did take some time Because there was lots of data However once you're up and running It's only actually transferring new or modified files So you definitely don't notice much of an impact on your network So I actually went for the $69.99 US dollars per year plan Which gives me one terabyte of space Now you may be asking, but Mike How can you get by with one terabyte of space When you've actually got a 12 terabyte unit here Well the answer to that is I'm only actually using around about 2.8 terabytes of this so far And remember I've got lots of video content on there as well The other thing about this is Is that lots of my data has other What I'm going to call natural cloud storage What do I mean by that Well lots of it for example is made up of large sample libraries I can always redownload those from the original producer From the maker of those libraries So in a way they're taking care of the cloud storage Of those sample libraries for me Another example would be my YouTube videos I like to archive all of them I like to keep a copy of all of them But of course there's also a copy on YouTube itself Which I can always download So in a way YouTube are already taking care Of that cloud storage for me So I'm actually left with 365 gigabytes of data Which I actually need to store in that cloud space with Synology So I've got plenty to spare And I can always increase it in the future if I want to To be honest I've hardly scratched the surface Of what this unit can do You could also use it as a media server And it's a great place to store and organize your photos as well Lots of other sort of server type tasks And collaboration tasks as well You can even upgrade its memory from 4 gigabytes to 8 gigabytes And you can insert an M.2 drive for better performance Although I haven't felt the need for those upgrades With the kinds of tasks that we've discussed so far Now there are a couple of smaller features with it Which I think are a big bonus for the studio So on the front of the device we can see a USB 3 port And when we use that in conjunction with an app called USB copy Supplied by Synology We can configure it so that it will recognize particular devices Like hard drives or USB sticks when they're plugged in And it will look for any new or modified files on there And copy them to specific locations This is incredibly useful If you're recording say a band on location You're taking your laptop and you're recording using an external hard drive Like this When you arrive back to your studio after a gruelling session You simply plug this drive into the front And it will copy over any new or modified files Without you having to log in Or without you having to switch on a computer Or anything like that Those files are now going to be available on the network To any other computers which you designate on that network So you could start working with them in the studio right away That's incredibly useful Now what about if you want to share some files externally With a band that you're working with or something Maybe some mixes or something like that For that we'll use a feature called Quick Connect So perhaps you want to share mixes or stems with artists And they're too big to share by email And you don't want to use services like Dropbox or Google Drive Because perhaps you're concerned about security Or the amount of space you're using there Well you can actually use a feature on this called Quick Connect Which will share files over the internet directly from your NAS It generates a custom URL which you can supply to your contacts You're in complete control of the data You can even protect it with things like passwords And it just makes that process really really easy And in this day and age of remote collaboration I think this is an absolute godsend Data loss can be incredibly painful when it happens to you So it's great to have a better solution Now I've been using this system for the last few months And whilst no system is absolutely foolproof I really believe in it and it's been an absolute delight to use Yes, it automatically backs up my music data to the NAS Without me having to think about it And yes, there's some redundancy involved And yes, it automatically backs it up to the cloud Without me having to think about it And that points to the best feature for me Just how transparent this is in my workflow Once I did the initial setup I've not really had to think about it I've just been busy making music and videos for you guys Now check out the link in the description down below To find out about this unit I would love to hear about your experiences With either data loss or other solutions What are your successes and what are your failures? Let me know in the comments down below Thank you so much for joining me for the whole of this video Let me know if you did make it to the end I'd be impressed And I'll see you in the next video


It's number one happy Monday. So I want to kind of go over what's been working for me in this market because I've been doing really, really, really, really well and I don't want to jinx it but I just had another $20,000 day today and I'll post my P&L in the description so you guys can see it as well. But I've been doing really, really, really, really well in this market. So there's a couple things I want to go over, couple concepts I want to go over and then we're going to be talking about today's trade. So the main thing that has been working really, really, really well for me in this market cycle is understanding the money flow concept. Now this is something that we started talking about earlier last year in 2022 is the money flow concept. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to explain it again very, very clearly so that you guys understand and then I'm going to talk about how to use that concept to make money in the markets. So the money flow concept. So the money flow concept is very simple. So what you have to realize about the stocks that we trade, the small cap stocks that we trade is people that are buying these stocks, most of the time are buying them as lottery tickets. They say I'm going to buy the stock at $1, I'm going to buy the stock at $2 and then if it goes to five, six, seven, eight, nine, I'm going to retire, I'm going to buy myself a BMW, whatever it is. And as you guys know, 99% of lottery tickets are zeros, right? So what ends up happening is people that put money into these small cap stocks, people that put money into these penny stocks, they're just putting money into whatever stock they think is hot and they think is going to go up on the day, right? So the money flow concept is very simple. So what the money flow concept means is that if there's two stocks moving on the day, right? And stock one is the first stock of the day that's going up, that's going up, that's going up. Well, when stock two shows up and stock two seems to be going more aggressively up, people that bought the lottery ticket of stock one, they sell it. They sell it to put their money into the new stock and then stock three shows up. It keeps going crazy. They sell stock two to put it into stock three and then so on and so forth. So the way that you could profit on this for me as a short buys trader is when the money flow exits stock one and enters stock two, that tells me that it is time to short stock one. The money flow is exiting and entering a new stock. Same thing. When stock number two's money flow is exiting and moving to stock number three, it makes stock number two a lot easier to short. So for me in this market cycle with a lot of stocks moving, I'm not trying to figure out what's gonna be the hot stock, what's gonna be the side stock. All I'm doing is trying to identify the top stocks that are moving on the day, usually two to three stocks that are moving on the day. And then when the money flow exits stock one and goes to stock two, I'm gonna short stock one. When money flow exits stock two and moves to stock three, I'm gonna short stock two. That's how you profit as a long buys trader.  As a long buys trader, when you see the money flow entering the stock that you like, then that is your ability to piggyback that trend and join that trend. But if you see the money flow exiting that stock and you see people starting to short that stock, that might be your signal that hey, you should move on to money flow number three. So the money flow concept is what we talk about every single day in MIC and it's been the single, number one single thing that has led to me having an awesome, awesome year so far. I can't even believe it. It's been going really, really well. I'm focused, I'm sharp, I'm staying zoned in because what I've been doing is making sure that I'm not touching that hot stock. And if I am, that I am stopping out if I am wrong. So today we have a lot of crazy stocks moving. So let me talk about what I did today. So I made most of my money on LCID today. I shorted around $14.50 pre-market and right now it's trading around $12.00. So it went down a lot. So that was where my main winner came and the reason why is because Elstead had a parabolic move on Friday. It went from $8 to $18.00 on news that the Saudis were gonna buy a stake in it and after it had that parabolic move up it had a parabolic move down and this morning pre-market it bounced. So all I did is short the bounce on the stock that topped out and had I covered a little bit later I got out way too early I would have made an extra $20,000. So I actually under-performed today. I got out way too early. That was number one. Now let's talk about stock number two, GNS. GNS was a stock that was moving like crazy, moving like crazy, moving like crazy until we had HSCS take the money flow. So when GNS was moving and HSCS started moving even crazier money exited GNS it moved to HSCS and that allowed me to short GNS, okay? So that was actually what went really well for me today. In addition we had BZFD that was from the watch list to short. Our watch list was to short around 375. It hit 370 and I got my 370 short and I got out around like 350. It ended up going to $3 so I under-performed there too but the key, the key, the key has been stock selection. Finding which stocks are fitting my criteria. Finding which stocks are fitting my strategy. Which stocks are fitting my setups because with 8,000 different stocks moving every single day it is very, very easy to get distracted. What I do is I like to post the watches of the stocks that I like to trade. I like to post what I think is a high probability setup. And today BZFD was a high probability setup. Lucid LCID was a high probability setup. GNS after it topped out was a high probability setup. So the key for this video, if you are watching it as a member or non-member is to understand the money flow concept. Now something else to make sure of is if there's only one stock moving on the day and there's no new stock here, there's no new stock there, chances are the money flow is going to remain in that stock. It's going to remain there. So because the money flow is going to remain there that means it's higher probability of the stock trapping you. So the money flow concept comes in very, very handy when there's two, three, four different runners on the day because the money goes from here to there and here to there, then here to there, then here to there. So I short, then short, then short, then short. I only short when the money flow exits. So that's why in MIC we mentioned the money flow concept so that if you are still learning how to identify it, if you still are not understanding to identify it, you will at least know that, hey, money is flowing out of this stock. So as a long-buy trader, you should probably pull your money out of the stock too. As a short-buy trader, you should start to put in money into that stock because it's going to start to reverse. So that is the money flow concept. That is another million dollar concept and this is going to help you improve your training. Now, in addition to that, right? In addition to that, what's been really helping me this year is sticking to the zombie rules, okay? We talk about the zombie rules nonstop. It is what we started MIC on. It is our claim to fame is the zombie rules and the zombie rules are very simple. It means after 10.30 a.m., after 10.30 a.m., after 10.30 a.m., stocks tend to find the bottom and reverse. So as a short-buy trader, after 10.30 a.m., no more shorting. As a long-buy trader, 10.30 a.m. is your green light, it is your signal, it's your way to tell you, hey, there's money to be made. If I didn't have a bunch of other responsibilities, if I didn't have a thousand different things to do, I would be trading long at zombie times every single day. So what's been working in this current market cycle is stock selection, picking the right stocks to trade, the money flow concept, understanding the timing, the timing as to when you should be trading these stocks long or short, and then knowing when to walk away at 10.30 as a short-buy trader, walk away at 10.30, as a long-buy trader, that's when you get to start to pull those into your setups, right? So that's the main things I want to be talking about today, the money flow concept, the zombie concept, and pretty much what's been working. So I've been doing really, really, fuck, bro, it feels really nice, man. It feels really, really nice to kind of not be mentally in your head. I know a lot of people are still struggling in this market. What I tell you is less is more, okay? Understand the very, very basic concepts, which are money flow, zombie times, and if you need help, reach out, man, reach out. There's very few trading communities. There's very few people out there that come on here and every single week make a video, make a video, make a video. I am recording this video at 11.31 a.m. I just finished trading. I am done for the day, locked in my $20,000 a day, which I'm gonna put in the description below. So aside from these main concepts, guys, aside from these main concepts, leave me a comment if you have any questions. If you want to learn more about trading, you get to go to myinvestingclub.com slash webinar. We have a free one-hour mentorship course that will take you through our strategies and that will even show you some live trades. So if you wanna check that out, but aside from that, I'm gonna keep it going, start it off Monday the right way. Tomorrow is Bow's Instagram Live Day, Wednesday's Tash's webinar, Thursday's Austin's webinar, Friday's Day Off, Saturday's Weekend Mentory. So we've been doing really well, man. I'm feeling very happy. So I wanna kinda come back on here every single week and provide you guys with the main concepts that I think are working in the current market action. So if you have any questions, let me know. If you guys have any comments, let me know. Well, please leave a like, please leave a comment, please subscribe to the channel and please let me know if these videos are helping you or if there's a different concept that you want me to cover in the next video. Thanks, guys, and I'll see you guys back in the room.