Hi everyone, my name is Krishnan Lagas and I'm a freelance user experience designer And I wanted to start off today with you know, just a bit of a story not of the content migration itself But just a project that I worked on prior to that so in 2011 and 2012 I was working at a large telco and You know at the time we were tasked with building a customer support knowledge Knowledge space and you know, we're creating it using responsive web design techniques And so you know at the time this was actually quite new and exciting because the only things or the only major sites that Were that were responsive were was the Barack Obama site and the Boston Globe And so we spent several weeks learning about you know responsive web design Trying to be you know mobile first and just generally breaking down our desktop-centric thinking And so our deadline was tight and many compromises were made You know as is typical of many projects. We're actually quite literally locked into a room So there was about six of us given six weeks to produce this thing And so you can imagine how tight the deadline was and so launch day came and The system that we designed you know was going to be put in front of users and so both the editors sorry, not in It was going to be put in front of users so both the editors who would be creating the content and our customers and You know it all really fell apart and it was all because of one word well, it was actually two words and What we failed to realize that our content editors were just simply copying and pasting from word documents You know they were bypassing our carefully crafted HTML templates. So what we ended up with was you know About 200 support articles with malformed HTML broken content and no mobile version and What happened was basically the project team so everyone from say the designers up into the project leaders So my boss was Sort of on the ground floor in the CMS hand editing those HTML pages just to get it working So why am I bringing this up? well for starters, I became a real expert in you know, regex syntax and Just had to tell someone but but more importantly We were so focused on how amazing the experience would be for the end user that you know We neglected to think about the real users, you know, I eat the content editors and the producers So you might be thinking you know, this is this could all have easily been solved with a single button But I think it goes much deeper than that, you know, like why would people actively avoiding the tools that we created? You know that we created specifically to help them do their job so I've been working as a front-end developer for a couple of years and more recently as a UX designer and In my experience, you know implementing a new CMS has always really been about you know Technology first and less about the poor suckers who have to use the damn thing every day I know personally I have a tendency to design things from the outside in you know Just I often catch myself building a solution in my head You know rather than spending time and thinking about the underlying problem that I'm trying to solve And also the people that I'm trying to solve it for So I'm also equally guilty of putting together wireframes and Photoshop comps, you know Just filled with Laura Mipson I'm always assuming that you know someone else will take care of this They'll just fill in the boxes and I don't have to worry about it So all of this was just really front and center in my head as we moved on to our next project Which was the content migration that I'll get to and I'm hoping that you know if you're a designer Developer a BA a strategist, you know, whoever and if you've got some influence or any input into, you know Similar projects that today will give you some things to think about so regardless of the CMS that you use And I also wanted to share this as an example of you know It was changed that wasn't necessarily grand or ambitious or even overly transformative You know our reasons at the time went necessarily to redo the entire website provided brand new experience But it was simply to just move away from the system that we were on because we didn't like it we didn't want to pay for it and You know despite all of that we were still able to create meaningful change and improvements to both content producers and editors and also our end customers So let's talk about the project So what was involved was you know, it was approximately a thousand pages that had to be manually moved over It was multiple visual styles Some dating back from about 2006 there was outdated content and there was about there was a disorganized IA Just from years of sort of neglect and just any real lack of structure The core team was comprised of You know one UX designer visual designer a couple of front-end developers a back-end developers or two some producers one tester and a business analyst and Towards the end of the project, you know as the actual migration of pages was ramping up We added a bunch of visual designers and about ten more editors And the project itself was broken down into roughly three phases over seven months So we had the content audit That ran from January to March there was a design and development phase from about March to May and the migration the actual migration from April to July and It's probably important to note that there was a lot of overlap between the phases So you know design work would often bleed into the migration phase now guiding principle so we knew that this was a great opportunity for us to improve what was on the website because It was it was a bit of a shemozel So there was there was things that we knew we could tackle and also You know just things to improve because we had customer testing done over the years You know we had this raw set of data of how people sort of thought of the website but The underlying Motivation for this was you know, it was just a straight-up migration We were moving from one system to another, but we couldn't ignore how You know the opportunity that we had so we established this guiding principle of you know, what must be migrated? Should be equal to or better than the current experience So we knew that a lot of people stakeholders product managers and so on would see this as their opportunity to get a new website So we had to manage this and basically manage their expectations So what were the challenges? Well, we had many but I'll just pick out a couple and talk through and in a little bit more detail question How do you design for a system that you've never seen let alone use now? This might sound very strange But so we didn't actually get our hands on a sandboxed environment until about three months into the project And we had to fight for it We you know, but we're building all these things We're designing all these things without actually knowing where it would land and how it would be implemented and so, you know, we were pushing to basically, you know Get these things what we're pushing to to get these things life and and where we started with was Seeking feedback from the users. So, you know, we were talking to the producer team and Given the way that the internal team is structured meant that me as a UX designer You know, I had zero exposure to the actual CMS So I was designing all these things, you know modules pages sites and so on without really fully understanding how they would be implemented and So we talked to them about their experience what their workflow was like, you know, where their pain points were and In short the overall feedback that we got from them was so Our content producers had a tough job, you know, I have to hand it to them They were editing raw HTML to make content updates So it wasn't exactly, you know a dream weaver style of editing, but it was more like Windows notepad You know, it was a process that really could be described as inefficient You know requiring a certain skill set and very prone to mistakes So we started looking at different ways of building these pages and just really addressing the producer pain points And you know because everything was being moved over manually. We had to stop and ask how do we build this and You know, we would start with the producers and often the answer would be Well, I would just get the HTML code from the developers and we just chuck it into the CMS So what we've got here is the most recent version of pricing tables This is the nice version what we had previous to that was just inconsistent and generally a mess So it was a prime candidate for us to improve To improve this particular piece of content during the migration. We didn't want to just move it over one for one But we had some things to consider For starters, you know, this content would be reused across multiple pages We had to account for the different types of content that this module would display We also didn't want to spook the product managers So the product managers and the marketing team had very little exposure to our migration project so our thought was if we started coming in and just sort of Waving our fancy new redesigns in their face and saying, this is what's gonna. This is what's gonna happen You know, we get pulled into this endless loop of feedback cycles and approval chains we also had legal implications because Telco as an industry is very heavily regulated, you know, so we had to tread carefully So this is a bit of a failure story on my part But hear me out So when thinking about the different Interfaces that we could build for the CMS my first thought was Hey, let's use a spreadsheet You know Close enough You know things are being presented in table format. We could you know Do up a couple of spreadsheets for all the different pricing tables that we had and just import them, you know, quite quickly and easily So I went ahead and started designing a tool that would take a spreadsheet of pricing information sort of added to the CMS Did work? The idea really didn't resonate with our editors For a couple of reasons for starters None of the content producers could use Excel in their day-to-day work or rather they weren't using Excel in their day-to-day work They were using Photoshop. They were using this got off or CMS editor, but it's not acts not Excel So if we forced them to change the behaviors, we'd get a lot of resistance Second of all we could get the content in very quickly no dramas, but it was impossible for us to get it out You know if we made a mistake or we needed to modify the data structure or so on it became really impossible and Lastly while it worked for numerical content It really didn't work for anything else. So Any other text content like legal terms and conditions and so on just didn't fly So in the end what we ended up doing and apologies for the rough sketch But I think this was the standard of the documentation that we were producing as part of this process I can show you my sketchbook But in the end what we ended up going down with was you know relatively simple and structured set of data But we broke it down into smaller more atomic bits. So for example the features were sort of their own thing you know individual fields and You know you could apply those to a certain number of plans With a bit of extra data on top and if you wanted to combine them into multiple plans to say you had a variation of the 12 months or 24 months you could combine multiple plans onto a page So you would get this particular layout and we also had rules around the module that if there was say more than four being displayed at one time We would have this fancy Sort of scrolling mechanism that would just cut off the fifth and sixth and seventh elements Just so that we would indicate that there was actually more there so it wasn't the prettiest but it worked and You know as I said we had to stay true to what had already been there Because if we started redesigning this in in you know from scratch we would we wouldn't get anywhere because We have the product guys to deal with basically so this got me thinking about other examples of you know content editing tools and I Came across this one for the ITV news which is the news service for a British Channel and In 2012 you know they launched their news service and it was fundamentally different from typical news sites So without going into too much detail The site was structured more around issues and events rather than just publishing news articles on a given day So for example, you could follow the Egyptian uprising Over time from its inception right through to you know the aftermath with tweets photos and so on The agency that was responsible for this redesign. I think they're a British mob called made by many they spent a lot of time thinking about how journalists worked and Crafted the tools to suit how they worked They shadowed the journalists in the newsroom and even ran their own test fees for a while They prototyped and tested these tools with the people who would be using them and the tools that they created were designed to allow Journalists to focus more on finding and creating content rather than fighting the CMS So what we've got there is just a very basic post editor with very basic styling so you can only do bold italic and links What you see underneath is just sort of more structured data So you can include multiple posts tweets quotes and whatnot. You can also drag and drop and rearrange them So if you wanted to include a range of tweets or reactions, you could do so This is a prototype of their their picture editor So instead of having to find an image, you know find out what the editorial size would be Because you know, they don't have that on hands crop the image Save it in an appropriate format make sure it's compressed nicely Find out where they save the file Upload it check it to see on-screen Reupload it if it doesn't look right, you know this tool took care of a lot of this so they didn't have to And they also realized that people who are out in the field didn't necessarily have access to a laptop They often just had their smartphone on them And so the designers created this tool to allow journalists to quickly send content to the newsroom Where the web team could collate and curate streams of content coming in so there was this idea of you know Allowing the journalists to go out there and just worry about Gathering while the guys back at home base would put everything together into a sort of coherent picture So a couple of thoughts For us as part of this project understanding how your users worked became really fundamental for us to make any progress You know, we sat with them talked with them sometimes had a beer several You know we and As a result, you know, we were creating new tools and processes And we were trying to change how they work often for the better But you know if we were pushing too hard or if we were pushing them in ways which you know They weren't used to or it just didn't sit, you know, we would get resistance So we had to find out where the edges were and I think that came down to just listening to how they You know what their frustrations were finally You know, you're creating sorry these content creation tools, you know, can we make them more interesting compelling? Efficient, you know, can we do other things and just simply filling out a form? question So with many stakeholders, you know, how could we keep everyone focused and moving in the same direction? so This project was a bit of a bastard Actually, it was it was it was a mess, but you know, I think it goes without saying that, you know It was a really highly political project We had people in multiple parts of the business with a vested interest in in the success sometimes a failure But this also affected people's day-to-day work and you know, there was also legal implications to consider So given the far-reaching nature of this project now, how could we make sure that? Everything or rather every one, you know that needed to be kept in a loop was being done. So for us physical space was Really effective in not only getting the core team to focus on what needed to be done in anyone given sprints But also getting external stakeholders and even the greater online team on board with what we were doing How we've typically done things this may seem familiar to you guys But you know the UX designers would come up with a bunch of wireframes We'd throw it over to the design guys to make it pretty we throw it over to the dev guys to build the thing and then the back-end guys would get involved and Make it happen Testing guys would jump in there and then the production guys would make it live You know your standard waterfall process given what we had Which was three months during the development phase Just out of sheer necessity, you know collaboration between designer developer to the tester and producer became very important You know we had UX designers working with back-end designers sketching out potential solutions The visual designers were working with producers to try and understand how to upload images into the CMS all of this was actually quite new for us and and Typically how we didn't sorry it wasn't how we did things in the past We really couldn't afford to have instances where designers or developers would basically say you know I'm not gonna start work until I see wireframes Sometimes a sketch should be all you need to get people to start working And if there was another level of detail that was needed so for instance the testers needed You know functional specs and so on it was called out early and often It also really didn't hurt that we were sitting in the same area rather than it being siloed out This became a bit of a mantra for us So we used a cam-band board to kind of keep track of who was responsible for each bit of functionality So if you're not familiar with this, it's just basically a whiteboard split up into you know the steps UX design dev going down the track and using User cards or user stories to basically identify what stage of the process certain things were So at the start of any given sprint we would prioritize these user cards We were we would identify the goals that we wanted to hit And we'd use daily stand-ups to identify any potential blockers and you know We had many conversations outside of that to kind of collectively reach agreements on where we would do things So it was it wasn't uncommon for us to you know if I was working on a particular module say a Twitter feed I would say you know pull in the the design guys and dev guys and say look here is what I've got sketched out What do you think and? They would say no that's bullshit that won't work or they would say okay Let's go with that and they themselves would get started on the work that they needed to do so that when it came to them They were already ahead We also set up design walls and other spaces and we use these to get buy-in from external stakeholders We use it also to keep everyone up to date with our progress We sort of use this as a finish line for everyone We printed ias we stuck designs on the wall sketches everything We printed out every page that we were moving over and use this to talk managers through how the migration would affect their content so It wasn't uncommon for us to invite a couple of Product managers over and we basically walk them through the current version of their site and also what we were proposing as the new ia for their site and What became apparent was you know as soon as we talked them through as soon as you know They saw these these pages in front of them. They start immediately saying Wow that stuff's out of date and And these they were responsible for these sorts of things like this was their content this was their product and They had no idea on on what their site or their product looked to users and You know we found this is a little bit more effective than just sending over us a bunch of Spreadsheets kind of hoping that they would respond and it really also helped that we were only just a level or two above them Physically so we use this as clear agreement on where we would improve things and where we would leave things as is We also use this as a way of you know promoting the project internally as there wasn't a lot of visibility outwards So, you know, we were trying to be transparent create a greater sense of ownership across the online team You know it was it was a project that was you know, it was just working the core team was just working on this and so What we found was having this awareness Having this in a public place. So this was actually in the main sort of kitchen area You know it created a greater sense of ownership across the online team and People were having conversations around it, you know, they were working out how this affected their work you know people could see the potential improvements and Sort of how dramatic it was compared to the old version, you know, there was real excitement and Often, you know, they would have conversations outside of the team, which was great because they didn't need to talk to me And when it came down to the tail end of the project when, you know We were getting the migration and we're just pumping out pages. It was all hands-on deck So we weren't necessarily trying to be agile with the capital A. You know what we were doing made sense to us. I Admit I'm really not To sort of I don't know a lot about agile methodology. I appreciate some of the things that it promotes. So things like, you know Interactions over over rigid specs, you know being adaptable adaptable and You know just the greater focus on communication and By the same token You know we instilled this culture of you know communicating to others So if someone needed something from me about what I need so what I needed to produce to get their job done They would call it out early and often And finally, you know using physical space to reach consensus and buy-in was also a big one for us question You know, what's the best way to get a team of new producers up to speed on a project? So as I mentioned earlier the project started off with two producers But would ramp up over time with more producers being brought in So these producers wouldn't have the tacit knowledge that the core team had and often they were just contractors being brought in specifically for this project So how do we get them up to speed in a short time? For us it was wireframes and a patent library So Because the core team had to understand how content producers were putting these pages together and as much as I dislike wireframing You know every page that we moved over was had it had a an associated wireframe Because so so much of the source content was so different We saw this as the only way we couldn't get the produce guys to basically look at The original file because they often couldn't work out how it would be built with a new system So we created a patent library of reusable elements So things like content modules baseline grids and page types Which meant the producers didn't have to think about it how each page would be built So just to quickly run through the benefits of establishing a patent library Shared vocabulary When you say link box and I say link box, you know, we know we're talking about the same thing Consistency of experience when I hover my mouse over a link box. It's operates in the same way Rapidly train new people here's how to create a new link box avoid reinventing the wheel What if the link box has multiple links? What if it has no image? And finally empowering content producers, which is sort of a little bit at odds with what I just said previously But what we found was again because the content was so varied Premigration, you know, we basically established this framework so that we could let the producers make their own Decisions about how something could be built and if it was 80 80% of the way, you know And it didn't look horribly broken, you know, we were okay with that and often this would be applied to say lower level pages or Stuff that was generally considered a low priority as far as How useful it was to customers? so this is an example of Patent library that I put together So this style is generally a little bit more sort of casual in tone You know, I tried to make it less like a piece of statute and more You know, just a set of recommendations. I tried to keep it succinct I also wanted to include examples in line So people could see when I talk about hover states and you know clickable label elements, you know, they could see how they worked so a couple of other examples the BBC gel was For me the inspiration for the patent library. So when I sort of put this thing together I looked to the BBC gel and You know when I saw it I thought yes, brilliant. This is exactly what I want. This is how I want to communicate You know, they're solving the same problems that I'm trying to you know It was a focus less on actual code, but more defining the overall language For things like carousels typography other core page elements No, it also defined how things should work across different contexts, you know mobile and TV and When you drill down to the individual components, you know, they gave you variations based on you know If you were doing a carousel with no images and just text This is how it works if you're doing them with just images This is how it works and so on and they weren't sort of being so Rigid in there in their designs which made sense because they had so many so many different types of sites to deal with So compare this with the Starbucks stargine Which is a little bit more developer centric So you can see different page configurations, you know drill down into specific CSS show the grid overlay and Demonstrate how things would reshape on different screens. Just a reminder You know, don't just set and forget invest effort in maintaining the library, you know, if you set one of these up Work out who's going to be the patent librarian, you know, who's going to maintain this over time You know start thinking about how decisions are made as far as putting new things into the patent library And you can bet that already established patents may break with either new types of content or even new devices So you need to be prepared for that And also keep it in a centralized and visible place So whether or not it's a public URL or a place that is say on the internet or even just you know Hand like printed documents that you give to a new person when they start You know, it needs to be visible. It needs to be sort of reinforced over time And also never stop selling the benefits of the patent library to stakeholders. So we found this really useful when again I'd love them are dealing with marketing people and the product guys So they would often come to us with you know, we need this campaign up immediately. So we'd say yeah, sure absolutely But you should really follow it in this format and you know, we can take care of that for you So for things like, you know, competition pages and sales and so on It really helps like, you know, just repetitive content that is maybe just created every couple of weeks and so on you know, it really saved us time and Yeah, and finally How can we make things future friendly? So the company I worked for we sold mobile phones. So It was a bit mind-boggling that, you know, our content wasn't really optimized for the devices that we were trying to sell to people, you know, all we had was It was just some shitty, I guess, website that was probably built for Nokia phones. So At the start of the project, you know, we had high hopes that, you know, we could work in a mobile version of the site You know, we could develop this in tandem make things responsive. However, however you see it But, you know, unfortunately, it was the scope at the very start of the project Which was a bit discouraging for us, you know, given the previous work that we'd done But what we could do was lay the foundations for future mobile work So just a quick reminder, mobile does not equal lights You know, we shouldn't assume intent based solely on the device that we use and as a result, hide content accordingly Laptops often run off 3G connections and smartphones, you know, they're commonly connected to Wi-Fi So I'm not going to belabor the point because there's many other, far smarter people who have already spoken about this at great length But what I will talk about is how we approach the project. Sorry, how we approach this during the project So for us, we limited HTML usage, or rather, WYSIWYG, HTML usage, and we structured content and we started identifying page types So, we made the decision that we wanted to basically avoid WYSIWYG where we could For a couple of reasons, you know, the visual designers were worried about the wrong styling, the wrong look being applied at the time of production The developer guys were worried about code bloat and performance And I was worried about, you know, this ruining our chances for any sort of mobile version So, you know, we were happy that everyone was on the same page and, you know, I was quite happy to get rid of the inline CK editor The second thing we did was look for patterns in content We identified pages that didn't need anything beyond a simple edit box, so we called these flex boxes We started looking at landing pages, you know, bespoke pages that had a lot of custom HTML And this allowed us to understand, you know, just how much work was involved, what areas of the site might need mobile specific templates Or where we could just use responsive styling And it also gave us sort of a list of pages that we could just start giving to the production guys just to start moving them over And the last thing we did was sort of dive deeper into certain page types and create content rules around them So this is almost a functional spec of the pricing table that I showed you earlier And we used this to communicate to the developers and the producers, you know, just how content would be used in certain areas So for example, we used it to define link states, what could be edited, what remains static, you know, and what happened in certain situations And our hope was that when a mobile version was to be developed, you know, whoever was taken care of that We didn't need to second guess the kind of data that they were working with So how did we do? It wasn't too bad So of the four development sprints that we had, you know, we managed to hit the targets that we set out in each sprint The site went live in about August last year and, you know, there's been considerable improvements to the internal processes And the site itself is a little less bloated and a little more robust And as I understand it, the patent library is being actively maintained And, you know, the beginnings of a mobile optimized version is already live And it's drawing from the same pool of content as the desktop website So this is good news And to reflect on, you know, what's happened over the last few years, I'm really quite proud of what we were able to achieve You know, this experience challenged the way I worked It got me thinking less about specific deliverables and more about, you know, the relationships that I had with the people around me You know, a lot of the challenges that we faced as a team were more about communication and less about technical challenges And we skipped the typical waterfall approach in favor of, you know, more cross-discipline collaboration And type feedback loops with the end users So not only did we test our ideas and concepts with the producers, we also did usability testing on the new and improved pricing tables that we put out We created and established a design vocabulary and enshrined them in a resource that was to be used across the team We also tried to ensure that our content was created and stored in a way that could be reusable and adaptable And finally, you know, working in an organization like I did on such a project meant that as a designer, you very quickly learn to become very pragmatic And take the wins where you can get them You know, if you always reach for best practice, you're going to be very disappointed Only because, you know, there's so many other factors involved and, you know, you need to know when to push and when to yield Assets in total So I don't know specific assets, so if you mean things like PDF files and so on We have that in the spreadsheet somewhere But it was, yeah, so for every page there often had to be like specific Items About a thousand But that also included, yeah, it also included things like the, yeah, images, PDFs and things like that So what do you mean by that? It wasn't a Drupal site Gotcha No, yeah, it wasn't, we basically, we had to move things over manually So it effectively recreating each page in the new system We couldn't use anything like, you know, a database drop, you know, lift and drop Which at the very start of the project was what everyone had thought this project would be It was just simply carrying a database over to the new system and just putting the CMS on top But no, it was, we had to manually recreate everything Which sort of amplified the complexity of the project so much Sure, so the question was, why didn't we know what the CMS was? We knew what the system was, it just wasn't up and operational So we knew that we were working on this system It's, we went from Stelland to Fatwire So, yeah, it was funny because we went from an earlier version of Fatwire over to Stelland And then back to a newer version of Fatwire So as far as the rationale, I don't know But the bottom line is we didn't have access to it Sure, so the question was, when talking to the product managers How did we describe the project to them? Whether or not it was a straight up migration or something like a brand new website We were trying to be strategic in how we were framing this So for the most part, we said it was a straight up migration And what we said was, like, your content will generally be moved over one for one In particular areas where there was actually more changes So, for instance, where someone had an old version of, say, the pricing table We were a little bit different in how we approached it So we said, you and I both know that this content is really old Hey, we've got this really fantastic new module to display all this Wouldn't you like something like that? So, yeah, it just depended on, I guess, the state of the content that we were moving over So the question was, did we get any resistance in using the physical space? No, generally speaking, it was pretty great The developers themselves, they didn't necessarily need to use that But they always use that as a reference So for us, it was primarily, say, myself and the visual designer So we would throw up our stuff all over the place What was really effective was, I think, back here there was a giant IA That we printed up So if you just see in the corner That was sort of a blown-up A0 version of the IA that we put together And basically the producers used that as their reference point So they would often just get together in the morning and say Okay, you take this section, you take this section, et cetera, et cetera So, no, it was generally well received Sure, I guess, we were fortunate that the people editing the content were the producers So it wasn't the end, sorry, it wasn't the product managers and the marketing guys Making the changes, so we had a little bit of control in that sense But also, I guess, I think the people sort of heading up the project at a high level Were really concerned about performance And so the guys basically said, if you put in WYSIWYG, you'll get all of this blow And because we were so mindful of how things were previously Yeah, it was just, we knew we didn't want to go down that path Because it was almost a step towards enabling source mode And then we would just have the same problem all over again Yes, they were just using straight-up source code So, just to make sure I've got the question right How do we prevent the decay of the content? As part of the project, did we start educating the people? So product managers and so on about data structures and things like that Yeah, at a very basic level, it was to get this off-stellent And I guess the way that the processes tended to work was The product managers and so on, they interfaced with updates to the website through the online team And so they didn't care how it was done, often they just wanted it done So we had to, I think the education part wasn't really a high priority for us It was just we needed to tell them whatever we needed to tell them just to get the job done And also let them know of the benefits, but often they weren't necessarily directly involved in the process Time for a beer


Earlier I spoke to Akin Olawye, a public affairs analyst who was also a member of the Labour Party. Olawye had this to say. The Labour Party only emerged on the scene about eight months ago. However, it's been around to use that word within the spare of politics. What you find with the logo, it went through a revision and at the point the revision was done to upgrade the graphics and make it a lot more modern. Forward Ever was inserted. You would hope that INEC and a lot of the smart people that work there, mostly professionals, would have looked at the logo and said for the use of elections, perhaps it would be great to make sure it hasn't matched with the other establishment parties. That was overlooked. It simply took the logo, Mama Papa Piquin, with the Forward Ever inscribed in it and included it as part of the Insignia on the election ballot paper. We've just really gone as far as making sure we're communicating with the public, enlightening voters, not to leave the Labour Party on the list of logos, looking for the letters, but rather saying the Party logo with the mother, the child and the father should be what they search for. Ma'am, just skeptical. Looking at the logo right now on the screen, you have the Labour Party well written and then you have the Forward Ever, which of course is the Labour Party signage. I'm wondering why it wasn't represented this way, because you were trying to accuse INEC and its people for not doing that for Labour Party. I call it an oversight rather than an accusation on the part of INEC. I think, again, they've held elections for the past five cycles, going back to 1999. It's only fair that Labour Party, even if we have a logo or an insignia that was not going to properly educate a voter on this is the Party logo, I think there should have been conversations. However, what passed that point is what's on the bridge. What we're looking forward to is really making sure people know what logo to look for on election day. Fortunately, there are no other logos that have the same representation as in Mama Papa Piquin for Labour Party. So we're hoping, again, just making sure that there's no miseducation of voters at the polls by unscrupulous individuals, but believing that people will get this message and vote accordingly. And so what are you doing to ensure that, especially now that it's just ours to the election? So what you find in a lot of obedience, many individuals will fuel the Labour Party's rise to prominence as an establishment party, doing a lot of the heavy lifting, equally departing through its grassroots mobilisation and communications. It's equally going as far as making sure that people in rural communities and hinterlands and equally metropolitan areas get this message, understand that Labour Party will not be represented on the ballot paper, therefore, you know, really seeing that this message travels far and wide. Fresh news updates.


Hello, hello. All right, everybody. Sorry about that. I had a Had a quick Camera or not camera. I had a quick phone call. Let me check that music make sure it's okay. Okay I'll turn that down a little bit more and we'll get started here great to see a lot of you guys here Tony Escobar great to see here finally for a Actual live show again. We're here all together, right Saroni good to see you Matt D always great to see you too adventure taco. Thank you for showing up today shadow mask. Hey, how you doing buddy? What else we got here? All right Anyway, today. I just wanted to follow up. Let me get the screen readjusted. There we go I'm gonna do a little bit of following up on The latest production which was the tosheba af 24 Or 24 af 45 And uh, so we'll talk about that some today. Hey Belmont I was hoping you'd be able to make it. I saw where you had uh Got rained out so Glad you glad you made it Hey denver morgan good to see you Um, so yeah, I just wanted to go through Talked to she was a little bit more I actually have a different tosheba that you've been watching for a second and unfortunately this one is Just like the other tosheba in one aspect for sure and that is that it needs a remote control to adjust anything And I don't have the remote for this one Man, it's I wish I need to get a universal remote for this one because I really need to turn down the brightness I was even trying to find a um something like a extra on device to try to keep keep this the Brightness down. I didn't really want to manipulate the image too much on like filters for uh encoding for the live stream so Well, I'll try to improve it more and more each time, but we're just stuck with this on this certain level of brightness on this tosheba Uh, but the good thing is this one will switch inputs. It's kind of another odd ball tosheba tosheba has a lot of odd ball CRTs I noticed just weird ones This one for example has a built-in dvd player And the only input on the back is rf And then there's a digital audio out for some reason And that's it coaxial digital audio out and then on the front it has one input for stereo audio and Composite video then a little headphone jack right down in here And then there are quite a bit of buttons on there, but none of those are the menu buttons and Solda gear. I'm sorry. I don't know how to say that hear me. Maybe gear me Solda said try pressing up and down the same time on the volume We'll try that in a second here. Let's do that so, uh But anyway these There's no like menu button on the front there. It's all like up and down for channel volume and then some Skip controls for the dvd player So let's just again a weird one. I really like the tube. It's curved. Uh, I'll get you the model number here Says it's the md 13 p1 from 2004 So let's try that trick. Maybe that'll do it Let's press up and down on volume at the same time and maybe maybe that'll work and uh, unfortunately It's it's uh, that kind of trick works like it's weird. These these TVs are so random The toshiba ones. I've got a bunch of remotes for toshiba's TVs that are other ones that I have and none of them will Work with this tv. They don't actually work with each other. It's kind of like sony's used to so anyway This little toshiba is from the same time period. Uh, but it is not the same level of uh monitor television it's got lower inputs and uh Same same kind of deal. I do not know I have not even opened this particular one up ever to see if there's actually uh lead free solder on that board, but Um, I just wanted to show you kind of an example of another one I'm just having let it run there and what I'm really going to do is go over a couple of things about the last video because I kind of I kind of expected a little bit of this to happen, but There was a quite a few comments and people that wrote me actually uh, basically defending The toshiba 24 af 45 and not liking um The grade that I gave the television set and that was on the last video obviously so Um, I thought I'd just talk about the grading a little bit more and why it ultimately fell so low Um, unfortunately that monitor I keep calling it a monitor. It's not a monitor. It's simply a It's simply a a consumer crt television, but that particular model um The biggest flaw for it is the lead free components and uh so That's that's really the problem With the grade for it and I I was talking a little bit more to lewis about this and That's zezz it says retro and um, we were we were discussing this on catheter a podcast that we just recorded for next week and there's You know these this Lead free solder on these boards it makes a terrible a terrible starting point for the crt and that's just Kind of disappointing so If you're actually looking for a flat screen You know that should be something you're considering is the fact that you're going to deal with lead free solder on that af Board and that model Um, no, I did get the questions that we're going to go through here that I didn't talk about in there about like other sets and things uh, but The reason that grade started off so low Which I gave it a c-minus and you can go back and watch the video if you haven't already And see why I explained it there in the video was literally because of that led free solder for the most part and then also The the Picture quality wasn't great, but at the same time I you know people were upset that it had an issue with it and I graded it still I mean that's one of the first comments here that we'll look at but at the end of the day The most this crt could have ever gotten as far as a grade for me would have been a c-plus Almost a b-minus just because of the lead free solder on the board And again, you might say steve. Why is that the case? Why would you put such a uh big emphasis on that And a simple reason is because of again durability lead free solder Will not last as long as leaded solder and I I wish I didn't have to use lead in Lead free solder. So if you the chemist, I'm not I'm not like a brilliant person knows a lot about chemistry. Unfortunately So I can't give you all the exact Reasonings behind the composition of solder and why you need a little bit of lead in it But you just do for durability purposes if we um, if we look up what the internet has to say we can find all kinds of things where it's going to tell us that lead In solder is going to prevent oxidation from happening and For the most part what happens is the solder just breaks down quicker And and over time it'll break down and then it can have cold solder joints And when that happens, you'll have all kinds of problems And I got a lot of you guys in the comments are talking about it. Yeah and so When a company uses that lead free solder, yeah, it might have been a selling point that Hey, we're in 2005 when that tv was new. Maybe they were like we're going to be green. We're tosheba green And we're not going to use lead in the production of this particular crt And we're going to go all lead free and it doesn't really matter because they weren't planning on those tv's last in 10 years so When we get to the point where we're at 20 years of lifespan on these tv's sure my Unit that I reviewed may have been a more extreme case But I hard I'm going to have a hard time feeling that like in five years from now people are going to be telling me I was wrong And that this leaded lead free solder board is an actual good design and it's you know, I was completely wrong if I am I'm Won't admit it, but I do know that people who use solder in military applications have told me before that When they do that they do Have to use lead in their solder to actually Do any kind of project for the military Okay, so guys, I'm going to run here through here and we're going to We're going to go through somebody's comment so I can kind of back up because I know that the we'll come across some that people were Critical which is fine. I'm being critical of this tv But I just want you to know it's all from a good place and good experience and There's there's another thing and I explain this more in the podcast that I I think Things about crts look better Than you might and I know that other people You know, again, it's the whole thing. Do you like curved glass or flat glass more me? I'm always going to prefer curved glass So that's a kind of a bias I already have against flat glass tubes and So I I judge them harsher because I'm I'd rather see the curve on the tube personally that doesn't mean that's the right answer, you know That means if you like it you can Say hey, I like the flat screen more and I don't agree with steve on that. No problem All right, so john vandalin Constructively, I would say that you can't really say it has downsides and models of flyback is shot It is just this one sample that has a problem And of course he wanted to reiterate that the video was fun and good content. I would just call deep dive The one sample not a review per se Which it is a little bit difficult to say that And if it was something where I wouldn't have really given it a grade if it was something where it did not have that lead-free solder But I did again go in and look at other people's versions of this They did have tubes that could go darker and the picture did look a lot better But there's still always the trouble of having lead-free solder on that board. That's not going to change anything That's never going to change Even if the parts are good, so Yeah, I'm not going to make it a habit of saying that you know, this is grading is all you know This is again subjective. It's all just For an individual set anyway Um, I'm just gonna go briefly through some of these Sergio Osario Hey, Steve, I need help with the pvm repair If I join patreon can I ask you some questions there and the answer is yes That's exactly what patreon is for you get a direct dm to me and you get to access to a lot of other things Not just that but You do get a dm to me to ask me any kind of questions you want to right away Um, all right abes games and skates Oh boy, those discharges were scary And it will take place every time Certainly one of the scariest repairs you've done mr. Retro tech I enjoyed the way he presented the sections and lastly the grading system was clear And concise all right, so yeah, that's kind of the way I felt about it. I'm glad that it was interpreted that way by some people Um, so I really enjoyed that. I mean, I'm just gonna go through here if I respond to you on the video It might as well give you a heart So a lot of people have this I have at 24 af 44 I use it for my tate setup and love the thing. That's cool Oh adventure taco. You're here right there. That's funny. You just said it again in the Live chat. That's awesome timing, huh?  Uh, it is allergy season here And the last 24 hours it's really been, um pollinating my sinuses All right, we've got Mcbanjo mic I got this exact set for free a few years ago or a few years back to use with my mr Since my sony didn't have component inputs Mine has some geometry issues and reds are too strong But maybe I can prove that now with the access to the menu. You should be able to do that Um, but again saying it doesn't have the potential to look really great I'm Again guys, you can make it look great. I mean you can't make any of these Normal regular crts look like a pvm or something you can get close though So um, again, I don't want like again, I still graded it kind of low but I understand, you know And um, let's see what else we got here got This was a neat watch from jocelyn joe. I have a 24 afx 54 cinema series that I used for a while And uh, I found a kv 27 fs 100. I'm looking to hang on to the tosheba as a bank as a backup Thanks. Yeah, I would You know, this is a television that I said in the video I wouldn't add it to my collection Because it's 24 inches and I've got something to fit me in that In that format, but if that's something I wanted Oh guys, I just don't know what to say again. I'm just so harsh on this thing about the solder because Unfortunately again, it's it's a difficult it's a difficult fix high level stuff Dave bladegun saying hey to brutus, of course brutus is finally in the video now um Someone was asked if I tried a different console Which was a good question and yeah, I try a lot of um different consoles different inputs There's a lot of things especially in a video. I tried to really tightly edit yesterday's video and it's Uh, by doing that there was a lot of stuff that I chopped out that Would have just been kind of redundant I didn't it was already a 20 plus minute video and I appreciate everybody watching As much as they did of it, uh, you know, I didn't really want it to turn into a 45 minute video with a lot of redundancy And again, it was a difficult monitor crt to shoot anyway Anytime you have it's the same thing with the one we're trying to look at now. Sometimes you'll see The screen is just too bright On there and it makes the picture hard to even show on a camera at all All right, so samsung s10 asked if Wouldn't adjust to the g2 voltage on the flyback produce the same effect as increasing brightness and contrast or you could say would possibly Produce the same effect. However, you are literally increasing voltage on the flyback when you do that So by doing that you're sending more voltage into the system and Could cause a wear and tear to go down faster Uh, even though you may be sending in the brightness. I don't know what the exact difference on that would be Between cranking up one as the other I will tell you that I did try that. It didn't make a difference and The reason I left in the part about Out Using the brightness and Contrast in the video was that's something that I could do with this problem outside of getting inside the crt because you saw How many how bad that discharge was on that tube? Um, I would not I would prefer if people could make that kind of adjustment without opening their tube I mean that Who knows what if there was a short and somehow you got shocked Messing around back there could be possible. It feels like with that set All right See what's going on in the chat guys. I hope you're all doing well today Again, we're just hanging out doing some follow-up to yesterday's Toshiba video I'm taking a break here and See if there's anything I mean if you guys have any personal experiences you want to talk about on it Yeah Okay, it's just some good good conversation going on Hey Mr. Souter good to see here jt. Souter in the house p o 17. Thanks for coming in dpx Demo Kirby good to see you too um So the the thing about the Toshiba too if you wanted to know it had Uh in the sub menus you could set the brightness and the sub brightness And sub contrast you could set all that minimum and maximum levels also Uh, so if you wanted to you could go in and I didn't really make that video to be an exact Calibration demo or anything it was more of a overview of it. Hey Tony thank you for the tony eskibar. Thank you for the 499 super chat Say totally agree with your assessment and reasoning. Thank you Um, I appreciate it. Okay So, yeah, it was I mean I don't want to like Make people feel bad if they own it because I feel like if you own it you like it. That's awesome And I don't want you to throw it out after my Review of it either Especially if yours works better than the one I mean I just worked on that one and I was talking with the owner who's try actually for my life in gaming Some people asked about this tv. Is it the one from my life in gaming? Say model. It's literally the model that's It belongs to try so um I didn't want I told him the same thing only I was trying to work through it and I thought it was dying I wanted him to keep it And make sure that I could get it to where it was least usable and Again when I was showing you that video footage and stuff It looked really Harsh on your eyes in a darker room But if you were in a really bright environment, it actually looked a lot better Than it did. It's just I did get some footage and throughout the video of a more bright environment All right, let's see. Oh, I got some other people here about cab. Thank you. Just so they wanted to say Thank you for the videos great source of knowledge. I appreciate it. Thank you everybody and uh So that's that's just a little bit more thoughts on that. I do let's roll through some more of these things. There's some good Good stuff here. Toshiba's really popular in brazil in the early 2000s They have an aggressive marketing campaign focus on reliability and unprecedented five-year warranty Thanks to that people actually believe Toshiba's to be more reliable than even other brands Just summarizing this a little bit as you clearly see far from being reliable. It's the brands I mentioned above but It's an oddity that it happened here and And made to she was uh extremely common here. Well, that's actually a pretty cool story. I like the Thank you for this Suga grin, I think it's Suga Garin um The 32 inch wide flat crt from philco Sadly, it's not hd Uh, I looked at the tube was from samsung And didn't have a lot of results. That's a cool thing about I've actually seen some philco things Not not very common anymore. Um, it's really really Fun. Hey, june. Hey, james. Boone. Thanks for coming show Dario novella Thank you Pixage and pixels everybody. Thanks for coming. Yeah My life in gaming they've been my friends for a long time man. They were really great To me some of the first people to ever reach out to me were Corey and try and then also um, of course bob Without you know their help and Media they they introduced me to so many people I can't be thankful enough to them So i'm always glad to help them out and work on their stuff all right red 91 this is my daily driver ct crt these days I actually have a second one with under 500 hours put away as well Whoops. I'm sorry Let's see Fantastic set awesome video. Yes. Okay, so that's I'm glad awesome that I tried to make this video enjoyable even though the fact that the grave might be harsh to some people in the set Michael mitchell all crt is redangerous is dangerous if not treated with respect Uh, I don't get this video Just replace the flyback and you're good. You can take them apart, but it's hard. I mean there's no where There's no where i'm gonna find this replacement flyback But I appreciate uh, you know you writing that long type thing, but it is true that crt's are dangerous And obviously Um, you shouldn't do it if you're not willing to take on that danger And be shocked or you know be prepared. That's what I always tell people just be prepared to be shocked And then you're more surprised when you don't get shocked, right? Bob is great. Also. Yes. I love bob actually I wrote an article for this crt if you haven't seen that it's over on retro rgb an article to go with this video articles more focused on the secrets of the set like the Once we could talk about for a second the two ways to get into the menus and also the stupid velocity modulation Yeah, oh, yeah, just happened to have a tosheba lead free solder flyback hanging around that's still good Right belmont hey basil um Basil was asking about the fw 900. I did not but I have another So here's the thing I have another uh fw 900 coming in the shop supposedly in two weeks time This one works and is being serviced. So that should be a good example for me to make a great video with also I have Three quarters of the parts I need to make a connection Device that I can use with my crt tube tester and then I can verify Whether or not that d24. I'm sorry the fw 900 tube is good or bad because if it's a bad tube There's nothing I can do about it But if it's a good tube, I can do a lot with that So we'll find that out. I have to make this um I have to make this adapter for my Tester and uh, yeah, it's the hp one. Hey body below biscuit butter. Thank you for the 499 super chat. I appreciate it Occasionally random vertical jumpiness on a 32 a 60 Know these know if these use lead free solder doesn't matter if the tomb is warmed up or not. So, um That you know that could be anything from What we talk about today as Being solder even if it's not lead free There can still be times when a I see the like a vertical I see That could be causing that issue Like a transistor and those get so hot That those would be one of the first type of parts that would have a problem I do not know for sure that the a 60. That's a different line um I don't know whether that Uses the lead free solder also. There's a very good possibility. It doesn't uh, so that That to me it could be that I see it could also be Deflection capacitors in your vertical deflection block causing that Uh, but that's that's that's what I would first check out And when you open that Set you'll see if there's lead free. It's written on the board. It'll say pb Which is the um, what are the the periodic element Classification for I can't think right for lead All right. Demo Kirby asked did I see the scratch chip repair of glass method from gadget? uk 164 I did see that Little clip that was awesome. Um, have you tried it? Has anybody tried it? I haven't yet tried it. I did want to Eventually try it If you go over to his channel, he's got a nice video showing what he did and uh, it looks like he got good results Bob and I were talking about that when he released the video Very cool stuff. Um, hopefully if that's a real solution That's one thing I'd really like to try out is that and I also still need to try I Work and work through uh, what andy king and john lineman did and that's put a Darker overlay on a crt. I'm just not sure of the right one yet there was recently You know, there's recently a 14 l5 that was sold on ebay for $600 shipped But it had a big gash in the overlay That would have been a perfect one to try to re Do a new overlay on top of if you remove it And uh, let's see. Thank you, steve. I enjoyed this tv about seven years without an issue Never worked on a crt and didn't want the extra hazards of discharging at that. Sorry that guy's that comment right there is infinity and That's a very good point. If you died again, if you don't Need to get inside this television. Uh, I don't Want you to get inside this television while it's running. I don't care now I I don't think there's a problem if you want to get in there and remove that Velocity modulator because I think that makes makes it look bad. I think that this set I have here may have velocity modulator But I need to actually service it To find that out But yeah Stay safe out there All right Would I review a super flat from panasonic gao series? Um, I'd love to so here's Here's a brief idea of what I had about a way to get some more crt reviews without actually having to Have the crt's here That are huge And I was thinking what about one of the conventions that I go to The one in Tennessee if I had I probably have the good opportunity to set things up there where I could Take the uh I could take the crt's that are actually at the show And I could bring them to a private room Sounds dirty I could take the little crt and charm charm the crt a little bit and Buy it a couple capacitors And uh invite it back to the private room where I can videotape it And take the clothes off make the shell off Get inside and look at the undercarriage This is weird sounding but I thought that while I was On location Those those shows have about 50 crt's on average and I was why these are things I wouldn't these are crt's I'd never see anywhere else and I'm like man if I just took this Out while no one's using it slow time on the first day of the show and set it in the room And spend an hour videotaping it open it up Doing a little bit. I wouldn't ever do any full servicing, but I would take it apart We could look at the boards Um So yeah, me too. I'm trying to figure out a good Definitely getting a little weird there fellas. Sorry about that And uh show that's That's one One idea I came up with I think that would be really good because one one of the things I did last year was I went out to texas and when I was there I was able to review that 40 inch crt, which I've never seen again Oh, I basal. I did not ever get to review that htm 1990 r. I'm sorry. I did Get to do a little work on one, but it was so backed up at that time. I had to actually um I had to actually just Send that back to the customer before I could actually do the Review on it or anything and I have not done Like in-depth reviews like this one. I mean most of the time they were Much shorter less detailed Not not a concise video. I'm gonna just keep Yeah, it was it was nothing that you could lift you could go back and watch It's one of the if you go click on like my channel click up videos It'll be the most second most popular one on the channel um It's a shows the 40. It's very short shows the 40 inch crt There was two of them and they're now at a game shop in the museum lent them to a game shop in Uh, austin no houston. Sorry not austin houston texas Um, there's a retro video game store store with a video wall now And the biggest part of the video wall is the 240 inches pictures So there's the problem with those was keeping the purity straight on them though Anything would cause the magnetism to go wonky and you'd get a big purple splotch on the screen All right, my mickey mickey b86 said he had the 27 inch version of this he was underwhelmed The speaker was pretty poor Uh It said that yeah here this this would be a hard I'm just summarizing a little bit of what he's saying, but it's kind of it is kind of a hard sell on this crt to sell it as a good one when it has If it didn't have component Man, it would be a really You know, it would be really low grade like if it didn't have component Imagine if it was just composite only and there's a flat screen like that. I mean you would I'm not saying you'd get rid of it, but it wouldn't be something you'd never be looking for Poor console kits says he needs a new tv Looks behind his tv Brings his heart. He don't need a new tv Justed until That puppy dies. Okay I got the 32 a 43 I was wondering if the vm edge enhancement Is there or not and how to turn it off. That's something we're going to find out tgamer 91 I'm not sure about that, but I have that tv And that's actually one of my favorite toshivas is the turn 32 a 43 I got that my mom bought it new In the early 2000s and I've kept it and it's just awesome. I love it One of my favorites for a consumer set. So that's one of the things I like about the toshiba stuff Is I've got this one which we can I can review at some point And do a good review on that as well as that other toshiba 32 a 43 which is a great CRT like I can't say that's as good as like a d-series or anything got component input stereo audio Lots lots and it's it seems durable But I'm going to have to open up and look at the circuit boards to confirm that All right, everybody. Thanks. Again, we're going to hang out a little bit longer I've been alive for about 40 minutes 130 is my local time So I have to be out of here in about an hour's time to to go pick up my daughter from school, but If you guys have any questions about the a45 let me know or anything I think it's a I think it's a It's a fun idea I What's What's puzzling to me is what if you find And this is one one of the things I want to see like what if the day woo Flat screen to crts. What are they like? What is that samsung super slim really like I've gotten close short videos of them But it would be so much Better to get into the hardware And see what is actually going on in there And the great thing about this to shiba was I had a lot of time to actually go and research And find these cool extra things like the velocity modulation stuff as well as the The two service menus and then one more thing I needed to mention The actual Hours counter is in like hexadecimal. It's not in straight hours Um Oh, yeah, sorry guys to look uh fill lines. I don't Man, if you send me dms on facebook or instagram, I'm sorry. I'm just those are the two social medias I never have any time for and yeah if you um Honestly, most of that stuff is just you either have to catch it in live streams or question in live streams or um You can send them Through discord or patreon or something or twitter That's the only thing I really use Okay, uh Yeah, that's see that's what I've heard. I've heard the There's those samsung flats and stuff. I don't know. I've never Messed with one like I've I've seen them at the shows Uh, I've also seen some Some tv's that I like fell in love with Uh My last time I was at the show. There was this fissure tv. The brand was fissure It was a beautiful shadow mass curved every angle tube Just amazing I um I love I loved the look of this television. It was stereo audio and I like I I was so excited to get there and film it This last year um I I started to think about this last year how um, I just lost my train of thought there anyway, sorry but the uh I was trying to re-comments and stuff But anyway, I wanted to try to do this where I wanted to film that fissure tv and I got there last year and it stopped working It was dead like it was full on dead And I was laughing saying I should have brought my tools so I could have fixed it for him But I didn't have him there Yeah, I see the thing is is when you Yeah, it's like fissure price without the price. It was weird and it was like a bird emblem Matt D Do I have a favorite retro game?  I don't really play it that much anymore, but it's one of the last ones. I actually went back and beat um I just love Working on the tv's more than playing the games, you know I know it sounds crazy, but to me that is the game now and uh I love them Uncle funk 999 was asking if I thought an olympus ov 203 at $800 is a good price It's kind of like a box of worms there because Um, it depends where you live. It depends what If you can find anything else. I mean, that's a good monitor, but for $800 um That would be kind of the high end for not I'm not trying to say high end because they're they'll definitely sell for more than that but It depends it's all condition dependent You know um, so I don't think that's a bad price $800 if it works good looks good and you want it and it that's a reliable monitor But at the same time um You can get lucky sometimes if and and find them Recycling places, but 20 inches are hard to find so I can't I can't fault anybody for paying that Uh, it's really hard for me to find them and and and service them and offer them ever for sale I can't I mean it's been a long time since I've had 20s come in the shop that We're from any kind of load. I bought. Yeah, the 240p test suite is the best game race oroni That is the only game that matters PS2 look better on a crt. Man, that's a hard one So you got to have a good tv that looks good in 480i because the vast majority of your games are going to be in 480i however I still think 480i looks better on a crt personally. So I would say yes Now if you go to anything above that it will still look better on a crt Yes, but it needs to be a progressive crt of some sort. So you're going to have to use some kind of Scalar device like I recommend a gbsc all-in-one aio device connected that to a Cheap vga monitor if you wanted the cheapest experience you could obviously go up from there and use a Better equipment than that like a retro tank too if you'd like to Just picked up a 203 here for 700 plus tax um, yeah, I I bought one like for 550 On a deal on ebay a couple weeks months ago and it just showed up in 100 pieces Which I kind of knew was going to happen So If I see him for that price 500 bucks, I would buy it if it was in my area all day and If I really needed it I'd buy it for 800 if it was clean if it was in good shape and I needed it. Yes And again, I don't think that's unfair for somebody Hey del good to see you man So del I'm about to uh, finally go in and finish rebuilding that CRT tube tester. I got all the parts here for that these Change out the resistors on there with modern ones And I also have about three quarters of the parts to build the universal adapter So I want to do that and some Streams coming up probably probably not going to be a real video about that But it will be some stream material and then And then we can add that to The artillery A nice spruced up thing. All right mick Sturminator three I've got a 20 af 43 and I people were saying to unplug that sharpening feature without Discharging the anode cap good thing. I haven't gone through with it looks pretty good as it is in my opinion That's fine. Like I say if you'd like it, there's no point in messing with it. I just didn't like it Yeah, the b and k del it's the uh Oh gosh, it's the earliest one you can use that's worth a darn. I can't remember the model number off the top of my head It's before the 470. It's like 467. I think It's the one I did a video on before where I just reflowed all the solder and did some testing with it with a connection That I was able to put together from a neck board Epas vox the man the myth the legend Say I have it hd set from the teams tosheba With a similar jitter problem I'm going to try upping the brightness. I hope it works. Like I said, I hope it works any time I hear that If this any of these things can help save this problem for people, it's awesome Genji you were able to pick up a kv 20 fv one two for a hundred bucks. It's a gem Absolutely good stuff there. Oh, well duck man was asking. What are the the biggest differences is working on a crt television versus a computer monitor? Generally the computer monitor is going to have more shielding more hardware inside more voltage sometimes in some of the parts bigger capacitors Generally a little bit more work than just the standard You know Sorry Television set, but then there can be some really complex television sets also I think if you go back and check out well, there's the two the two 13 inch sonys that I worked on They looked almost identical from the outside. They used the same shell But one was an m10 and one was a tr 28 and The tr 28 at like twice as much hardware inside of it twice as much so it was it was kind of Crazy to see how much more hardware there wasn't there Have I ever seen a bno be at basil asked? I have not I'm going to have to go visit My buddy john lineman or Lewis or uh heck even martin Heinfeldt needs to go drink a beer with him and Pick through the wasteland of the bno television. I really would love one of those things This things are the so the best-looking crt's I've ever seen in my life at least from a perspective of marketing Reminds me of the I will I would consider that marketing level and the feel of a bno It's like the neo-geo of crt's Yeah, pc monitors do tend to have a lot more shielding electron gun gaming They tend to have a lot more shielding on them Usually you open it up and it's all shielded and then you take the shielding off and then you Get into a bunch of circuit boards tons of circuit boards generally have bigger power supplies things like that demo Kirby, what's the oldest crt I have ever worked on? Yeah, I don't I have one crt that's like those solid-state crt's that I tried to work on and it is a nightmare It's like one of the old ones from early 80s and it's got uh The circuit boards that don't make any sense basically hardly marked So I I couldn't really figure out what the heck was going on. I close it back up. I think that earlier generation is just something. I'm not I'm not Keen on yet at all. You can go there's a great channel of a somebody who just works on just the older stuff too named shango 66 and that Those are all old sets things that I've just blown away by because I get into those sets and it looks wild um So I would say Early 80s would definitely be the ones I've actually restored By 81 or something would be the earliest I'd imagine So let's see if there's anything else here. I might uh Hang out a little bit longer try and my quarry for my life in gaming As the brands have has these brands of crt's See I told you somebody somebody would even Say that it's funny Well, funny. You should say that because it is their crt Um other people asking about other brands of crt's under and heard of I may have heard of a dura brand But never really worked on one of those Are you going to replace the flyback again? No, I don't have the flyback to replace it with Oh, okay guys, so I don't I Don't really see anything in here. That's too Crazy And I got a quit accidentally hitting down votes on people's stuff I heard somebody I have to good comment peterson custom baits LLC Honestly, I was excited to see this review and shocked at the results or spectrum knowledge and understanding of set at component level I hope you try another one in the future because these are thought of as some of the best-looking consumer sets in some circles See these are a lot of these kind of A lot of these kind of comments, but I was not the only one who had blooming issues Man So like I said, I'm it doesn't hurt me. I love that People have opinions on this stuff. So thanks Thanks everybody to Uh for just doing all that, you know, it's like It's it's fun to me to see so many people actually interested in this set and other sets and everything All right guys, so let's uh Let's call this one a day. I'm I'm gonna try to come back and stream with all of you later this week I do not know exactly when but Uh, maybe friday. Maybe sooner than that. We'll see Um, I hope all of you have a great week And um, I will definitely see you Next time I there's a lot more comments there, but I could sit here all day and go through them and Then i'll be in trouble Because I forget my daughter at school Anyway, thanks again everybody. I really appreciate all the feedback on the videos and uh, I'll see you all in the next stream


Welcome folks. My name is Tommy O'Brien from TFNN and over the next few minutes I'm going to show you how I made over 1500% with three trades this year in 2020. I'm not selling you anything folks. We do live trading education every single day at TFNN. Let's kick it off with Disney. I have the chart up here, a daily chart of Disney.  It's been quite a year across the board folks. We trade from a price point of Disney of $143. You even want to back it up. Let's go to a three year weekly.  We have the rise. In April of last year, they talk about the details of Disney Plus. In November of last year, they go live with Disney Plus. You zoom it back in on the daily. We'll go back one year. We start out the year at about $144, folks. We trade from that level down to $79 in March. The lows March 18th, $79.07. Now folks, on April 2nd, when you talk about options, when you talk about the returns that are possible in the option market when using defined risk, when the market was selling, when panic was at its height, when people were in fear, and that fear was causing people to irrationally sell as restrictions were first being put in place. April 2nd, I was in there buying a January 2022 Disney $130 call. That call $7.75. Folks, this is real money trading. There's the Disney action on April 2nd, $130 call expiring January of 2022. I buy that call. I buy that option for $7.75. One option contract is 100 shares. That cost me $775, folks. Today, it's the end of December. We're not even into 2021 yet, and that contract's trading for $58.18. You're talking about a 650% return, over $5,000 of return, net return, over $775 invested. Folks, we do live trading education every day at TFNN, 8.30 a.m. till 4.00 p.m. eastern time. It's completely free to tune in. You don't have to pay anything to view our programs. We take calls live on the air about these types of trades. What kind of trades are you looking at? Coming into 2021? Because, man, the multiple is possible, folks. I just went over it. You're talking about a return of 650%. When you have the equity going from 100% to 180%, it's been quite a move. Okay, but these were not easy trades to make. We're going to jump right into the next one. Uber, quite a devastation to begin the year for this equity, down to $13.71 on April 18th on March 20th. Two days later, I'm in there buying a January 2021 call in Uber at the $33 price level. Now, folks, it's only trading at about $22. I have the option to buy it at $33 with this option. Well, why would I want to have the option to buy it at $33 if it's trading right now at $22? Because I only paid $3, basically, for that option, folks. Right now, Uber coming into the end of the year, $53.35 as we speak live trading, December 30th of the year. Now, there it is, folks. April 2nd. Oh, no. There it is, folks. We'll zoom it in. March 20th, okay? I had one order in. I canceled it. I didn't get filled. I went right back in on March 20th and bought a contract at $2.97 right now, folks. Today, December 30th, that contract's trading for $20.40. That's a 586% return. Okay? Now, quite the move we've had, but these are the trades we talk about, folks. Three trades, over 1500% return, defined risk on all of them. And I'm going to show you, even as we go through this, canopy growth. We're going to talk about the cannabis sector. Look at the run this stock has had, folks. You get down to a low on March 18th of $9, the very next day. Okay? There's canopy. The very next day, March 19th, as we mentioned, there's your low March 18th. There's the day, folks. I wasn't the only one buying. Okay? That's quite an uptrend bar. It's a sign of strength off the lows. In that day, I buy two contracts at $3.55 for a January 2021 $10 call. Now, remember, this is trading basically at about $10 in March. That gives me the option to buy this equity at $10 all the way through January 2021. As you can see, we're currently trading at $25.41, folks. That contract that I bought for $3.55, I ended up, I bought two of them, sold one off on October 20th. Nothing wrong with getting your money back, plus some. I'd take $910 off the table. I lock in a $200 profit. I let the other contract run. That other contract now, $15.40, folks, a 333% profit in that time. Disney is making all-time highs today as we speak. The run is not over. My Disney call, I've got until January of 2022, and I've already got 648% return on that equity alone, folks. Disney Plus, okay? Where we've been on this equity, whether it's Mandalorian, whether it's Star Wars, folks, we talk about these trades every day at TFNN. We do live trading education. Click the button. Come on over and check it out. I start the day off at 8.30 AM with the morning market kickoff. I take calls live on the air. I also host the Bull Bear trading hour with my father, Tom O'Brien, as well. 10 to 11 AM Eastern time. We stream live, 8.30 AM till 4 PM Eastern time every market day. These are the types of trades we're talking about, folks, in terms of how you make 1,500% in three trades within one calendar year, okay? You're going to have losses. These are the winners. But come on over, check it out. Check out our programming, folks. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we look forward to seeing you at TFNN. Thanks so much, folks.


QuickBooks Online 2024. QuickBooks Online Desktop App. Get ready because we're moving on up with QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are in our Get Great Guitars 2024 QuickBooks Online sample company file we set up in a prior presentation. After setting up the company file, the next step is generally to put down those foundational items necessary for the normal accounting process, the normal accounting cycle to function. Once those foundational items are set up, then we typically do data input forms with the plus button, the cycles within the cycles being the customer cycle or revenue cycle, the vendor cycle or expense cycle, the employee cycle or payroll cycle, and then we manage communication with the customer's vendors and employees in the centers on the left. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, actually, we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers, they don't want to be seen with us.  Like our CPA six-pack shirts, a must-have for any pool or beach time, mixing money with muscle, always sure to attract attention. Yeah, even if you're not a CPA, you need this shirt. So you can like pull in that iconic CPA six-pack stomach muscle vibe, man.  Yeah, as a CPA, I actually and unusually don't have tremendous abs. However, I was blessed with a whole lot of belly hair. Yeah, allowing me to sculpt the hair into a nice CPA six-pack-like shape, which is highly attractive. Yeah, maybe the shirt will help you generate some belly hair too. And if it does, make sure to let me know. Maybe I'll try wearing it on my head. And yes, I know six-pack isn't spelled right, but three letters is more efficient than four, so I trimmed it down a bit, OK? It's an improvement. If you would like a commercial-free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com, sale center or customer center, expensive center or vendor center, payroll center or employee center. The foundational items that we're currently working on are in the cog up top. We've been looking under the Your Company settings. We took a look at all of the account and settings. We looked at the managing of the users. I want to jump down here this time to get the desktop app. This is relatively new. I don't see many people looking at this at all. I haven't really used the desktop app for QuickBooks Online, but it looks quite nice. And I think it could be something that is useful. So let's take a look at it now. First off, don't want to get confused between the QuickBooks Online and the desktop version. These are two different things. The desktop version is the older version of QuickBooks. It's still in effect. Looks like they're trying to phase out the desktop version with regards to everything that's under Enterprise, for example. And then Enterprise, the more advanced desktop version, looks like it's still safe, at least for a while. But the online is a completely different thing, completely different look and feel. However, once we have the online system, when we're online, that of course means that normally we go into the web-based system, we access the QuickBooks or into its servers with a web application, and we navigate through the system in a web-based application, which means we need the internet access to do that. And then we access it kind of like a web page. However, if we download this one, then we might be able to access it from our desktop, although we still need internet connection. So this doesn't remove the need for internet connection. That's one of the pros and cons with the online softwares is that you have to have the internet. You can't work offline, typically, when you're using an online software, even if you download a desktop version that you can basically use on your desktop. That's kind of problematic sometimes. But on the plus side, the fact that it's online all the time makes it more accessible to things like applications that you might be able to integrate within the software. So in any case, if we go into this desktop view, it says, work the way you want with the QuickBooks online app. Number one, sign in and stay connected. We'll keep you signed in so you can get to work faster. So one benefit might be that if it's not on the website and it's on your desktop, then maybe you can stay signed in for a longer period of time considering you're not going on an actual website. Although, again, it's still connected to the website through the internet, so you still are going to have a sign-in process, at least initially and periodically, you would think. So find common tasks faster. Use the map view to get your daily tax quickly. Now this is really neat because it looks like they actually heard some people after how many years has it been that they like the map view of the flowchart that I keep on going back to on the desktop version, which looks like this. This is quite nice. Even if you're experienced like me, I still kind of like looking at the flowchart from time to time. It helps me to visualize it. That's what I see in my mind when I'm thinking of the process. So we'll take a look at that in a second. Number three, work efficiently with multiple tabs. Flip between multiple tabs and companies with ease. Again, I like that. I'll take a look at that process in a second. So all you have to do is you download if you're on Windows and then you download here on the Mac. So if you do that, then on your desktop, you get an icon that looks like this. It looks like a normal QuickBooks icon, except it's dark, which is interesting. So a little bit of a switch there. But if you go into it, this is it. Now if you open this up, it looks basically like the normal website system. However, you can access it just from double clicking on that icon. And so you're not actually in a browser, which I think is a little bit nicer, actually. It still acts somewhat like it's in a browser. And so you can kind of see the similarities. But you can see it's a little bit different, too. Because if I go up top here and try to right-click, I can't open another tab and duplicate the tab like we did before. But I can hit the plus button and I can open up another tab that way, which kind of acts like the same kind of system. If I close this out, if I go into my reports down here in this one, we still have the ability to go to the reports. And we can right-click on the reports and open in a new window or open in a new tab. So if I want to open in a new tab, I can open a report just like we have been doing, having multiple tabs open up top so we can still basically open up our reports to the right and then have our information on the left in the similar fashion that we have had before. We can also right-click and open in a new window similar to what we have on the online system so that you can have two windows open if you so choose as well. So I can pull that out. I can't really snap it back in place like we can with an online system. So if I take this window right here, I can't really pull it out. I can't really pull it off like I can if it was an online system. I'm trying to left-click on it and drag it out. But when I open a new tab, I can open it to a new window. So that's pretty nice. It's pretty similar. Now you also have this toggle thing over here. So if I go back to the dashboard, notice up top you've got this desktop view toggle. So if I want to turn on the desktop view, I go boom and then it gives me this flowchart. This is basically the same flowchart as this one here, which is actually on their desktop version of the software. So, and again, I think this flowchart is really nice. And the fact that they haven't standardized a flowchart like this in the online system, which I would think would be the most common thing to put in the desktop or your homepage area, just seems odd to me because it just seems like just a logical thing, a logical way to first look and organize and teach new users how to use the system. So now you got the vendor cycle, the customer cycle, the employee cycle. I'm still not totally confident. I'm probably still gonna jump over to this one when I talk about it because I think they'll probably change these icons because I don't think they can resist to do that. In an online web-based system with the developers and whatnot. But I think that's a nice thing to do. This is just the logical first page that you would take a look at that would be on the dashboard. But also note in the desktop, they change the left-hand side to mirror what you might've been used to when using the desktop view. So this is something that's a little bit kind of strange because if you stop using the desktop view and you're in the online system, now they basically have three kind of tab names over here because if I go into the online now, I could say, okay, well, here's the normal view. Here's the accountant view. And then if I select the dropdown, I can switch to the business view, which is basically the same now because they stopped doing their other business view, which was quite different before, but it's still a little bit different. They haven't completely gotten rid of the business view yet. I think they're going to, they're gonna consolidate those two. But if I go back on over to the accountant view, but then over here, this isn't the accountant view or the business view. They're using terminology that was used on the old desktop system, which means if I toggle back on over, this is what we're used to in this course for the online, it looks like this, dashboard transactions, sales instead of customers, expenses instead of vendors, reports and payroll instead of employees, projects and so on. If I switch to the desktop view, it's actually, I think it actually makes more sense to me. But maybe that's just because I've used these longer, maybe with the desktop than the online, but you know, an income tracker, the expense tracker tool, and then the reports are still here. And then instead of sales, you have the customers instead of expenses, you have the vendors. And that makes more sense to me because I think of this area as the customer center and vendor center because that's where I go to answer questions and manage things for a particular customer and vendor. And this is the employees instead of payroll. Calling it sales, expenses, and payroll sounds less personal to me. If I'm going into here to answer a customer question, to me, it seems like I'm going into the customer center to help me deal with my customers instead of going into the sales center, which sounds like I'm not dealing with a human being or something, I mean, it just sounds. But in any case, it's different though, but it's all just like all of the tabs, whenever they change something, they can change the name to whatever they want, but it's still the double entry accounting system so everything basically works the same way. So you can toggle that on or off if you want.  And so it looks more like the normal QuickBooks online, QuickBooks online, that is. And then you also have your dropdown over here. So if I was to open multiple tabs, for example, there's possibly you can open up multiple company files. So if you have multiple company files, you might go into the list up top and be able to open multiple of these company files. And that would be nice. Because when you're in the online system, sometimes it can be actually a little bit more difficult to go from one file to the other. Sometimes you might have to log out of one file so that you can then go into the next file. I don't think it's quite as easy as just having a nice dropdown and toggling back and forth between each of the company files. You also have this tab up top, which is an open windows tab. So if you're used to the desktop view, it used to show the open windows on a side panel over here. And I think that's still kind of nice, right? So I can toggle between these two tabs up top this way. So sometimes that's easier to see possibly than over here. And if you get the names of the tabs they're still not always useful because it just says get great guitars. If I went into my reports and I opened up a profit and loss in a new tab, it would be nice if this showed over here as basically a profit and loss report, the thing that is open. But it's nice that it at least has it in another tab and you can toggle between these two tabs and see an image up top of which report you want to be going to as you hover over it, which is a little bit better than the tabs up top here because you just have to memorize. That's why I always put the balance sheet and then the income statement because if I had like a bunch of tabs up top open, then I have to actually go do it and go into each one of them to see which one is doing what. Whereas hovering over them over here might be a little bit faster to be toggling between them. So like I say, I haven't used this a lot it seems relatively new to me. I haven't seen a lot of people, I haven't seen anybody talk about this, but I like it. I like, I think it looks nice. I think it's easier to open. You might be able to log in a little bit longer. You can switch to the desktop view which if nothing else can bring you to that home page that has a flow chart within it. So which is a useful tool. You still need to be connected online in order to use the desktop app. If I hold control down by the way and scroll in, it still does the zoom in just like it was a web page but you can also do it this way and zoom in this way or use the plus and minus things to zoom in. So yeah, I'm liking it but give it a shot. We'll be going through the course with the online on an actual online rather than the desktop app because that's the way most people will connect to it I believe still, but if you're working at a desktop all the time, might wanna check this one out.