So yeah my name is Eric and yeah we'll get right into this basically we'll do a whole whirlwind tour of in-vehicle networks and how you can get on them and play around with them and then hopefully get you out of time for lunch so yeah that's the goal. So this is all gonna be about this thing called can bus what the heck is can. It stands for controller area network and it's pretty much just the networking that's used in all cars now. Why? Mostly because it's cheap and it's also really integrated into a lot of controllers out there so you can buy a microcontroller that has multiple controllers inside of it that actually do the physical air stuff and they're cheap. So the automotive companies like to shave penny so they've continued to use this can bus thing. It's also rather reliable you know there's a CRC built in at the on the wire so at the hardware level it's kind of nice. So there's a lot of types of can bus you'll see in automotive the main ones are high speed and low speed difference being high speed it's a differential signal so you get some noise immunity there two twisted pairs kind of like Ethernet and then the low speed is a single wire which is just one wire in ground and that's used for things that are even cheaper like lights and switches and things you don't really care about that much if they go wrong. Fault tolerant can is something that's kind of a neat hack it's basically the high speed one but if you cut one wire it becomes a low speed one that's used in airbags mostly and can FD is this new flexible data can that's going to address some of the limitations of can but nobody uses it yet so whatever the setup in a car looks something like this picture so you'll have multiple different buses chained off of each other for example you might have a high speed network with your engine control transmission body control anti lock brakes things that you really care about and then one of the controllers will act as a gateway almost like a router in a way to send messages back and forth to a separate bus for the lower priority things maybe your instrument cluster your door control modules and there really are this many controllers and cars nowadays like they pretty much are computers for all intents and purposes there's no mechanical linkage between the pedal on a modern car and the engine it's just all electronics so why might you care about can it's using a lot of stuff not just cars industrial control systems skater systems all that is often using can for just certain industries prefer it pretty much every car like I said and also apparently planes use it so I mean if you wanted to you know get on a 777 and plug into something under the seat maybe can maybe you'll find something I wouldn't recommend it though it's a direct interface with the controllers and this is really the key for the automotive world is there's not many other ways you can directly talk to a controller in a car you might have like some weird button press sequence that gets you to a maintenance like menu but that's about it so this is actually you know you're sending messages straight into a controller and it's actually an interport you're saying and it's pretty accessible that connector there plugs into a plug like this and on modern cars anything past 2008 there will be at least one can bus on that thing some manufacturers give you more which is nice to them so we'll just talk about the protocol itself so we understand this stuff basically you have a bus and this is just a bunch of controllers that are you know connected together usually it's high speed which would mean you know differential twisted pair and just whatever wire they had lying around in a wiring harness and then on that bus you'll have frames so these are sort of the lowest level packet of can and really they consist of three main things an identifier which is just you know what is this message it has an identifier a data length code which just says how many bytes of data are in it up to eight so zero to eight and then data which is actually your zero to eight bytes it's pretty simple it looks like that so the identifier again is some of this 11 or 29 bit ID data length codes for bits of zero to eight and then your data and that's really on the wire all that from a softer point of view all that it is it's nice and simple and this brings us to the first really easy thing that you can do if you're on a can bus which is a denial of service the reason being the way that can works and one nice thing about it is it's multi-master so if you take a controller off the bus it will still work there's no one master control so the arbitration is done at a hardware level and the way it works is whoever has the lowest can ID just wins the arbitration and gets to send their stuff which means that you can do something like this just you know for ever send the ID zero and in cars this will actually cause some pretty bad things to happen I've done it by accident once it set every single fault code on the car like all the lights just came up and the check engine service stable track service it's not a good idea I wouldn't recommend it but you know it's really the simplest thing you can do so it's fun to mention but some more useful things come into how cans actually use in a vehicle so when you're driving your car around there's just a bunch of these messages flying around all the time and we'll just take a look at one contrived message to get a feel for how that works and it's pretty obvious how this could expand to all the different things that need to be sent between controllers so in this case you have an engine control module that's going to be you know taking a pedal request figuring out what to do with your engine and all that stuff and also sensing everything from oil pressure to you know intake air pressure different exhaust stuff there's just a whole bunch of sensors in an engine it's nuts so from that it's going to periodically just be sending out messages and they're all broadcast so just whoever decides to pick them up gets them and in this case you know I said okay we'll send this ID 123 and we packed the first two bytes with some useful stuff and the rest is dead beef for fun and the whole idea here is that beforehand whenever you actually write the code that goes in these controllers you have to agree on what byte means what and you have a database file essentially that you know says what means what and you would kind of assign some bytes to values so in this case you might say okay bytes one and two the ending this is this way and it's going to mean engine rpm you could also say things like to get to the real world revolutions per minute you need to multiply by two and to the track six or whatever all that's set up beforehand by the manufacturer in these can database files and those are pretty proprietary they won't give it to you unless you're you know actually a vendor they work with and in this case you know they broadcast that message your instrument cluster picks it up and then it takes that and eventually converts that into a command for a little servo motor to move your rpm dial and that's a really simple example now it also leads to a really pretty simple attack which is these can buses are totally trusted if you send stuff on them everyone will just assume you're supposed to be there and all the traffic is visible to everybody it's all broadcast and also any controller can send any message with any ID kind of like a Mac address you can spoof you can still spoof any ID on cam however because the ID is directly correlated to what the data means you can do some intentional spoofing so if you had some rogue controller you might be able to say send a different value in this case 1f 40 which is 8000 rpm and we're using the same ID we're patting it with the same stuff and the key here is if you send it faster you'll probably win in most systems they do some filtering so usually whoever's faster wins if you send the messages at the same time it's it's actually sort of strange whatever mess or for every bit in the message if there's a zero the zero always wins so that's just this how the electrical level it works so you know you can inject stuff and if you have more zeros then you're the winner so you do something like this and you end up getting you know 8000 rpm on your cluster which is kind of fun by the way this car had no engine in it when we did this so clearly it's being toyed with now the injection thing it's this is a really simple example it's not terribly dangerous or anything I spoke with somebody from one major company that makes automotive controllers so the actual controllers that GM or Ford or whoever buy and put in their cars and we were talking about this injection thing and he goes yeah don't tell people to do that because it actually is possible to destroy your engine by just injecting the wrong stuff which I still haven't seen or believe but the guy from the company that makes the engine controller said that so I take his word for it so yeah that's that's kind of dangerous obviously you can change you know if one component is expecting an air pressure from something else and you fake that out you might be able to install the engine completely there's so many different things you can do once you're modifying these values which is why the injection thing is kind of dangerous so we've talked about two simple things you can do but how do we actually connect to this system you'll need some hardware and software hardware because no MacBook Pros don't have a can bus port on them so you'll need something to go to can and in this case most of them are USB to can some are Ethernet to can or even some ancient RS 232 to can which don't do that because RS 232 can't even do the full bit rate the can needs to work so those are terrible and they don't need some software obviously to do the send and receive and to encode and decode data in a way that makes sense and you know you stick these things together and you sort of get some toolkits that let you talk to cars hardware I did the sort of Yelp style breakdown of hardware vectoring Kavassar for example they're like the ones that target the automotive OEMs you're looking at a lot of money probably more than you'd want to spend unless you were doing this you know for some serious commercial reason the next level down you're looking at peak or grid connect it's literally the same tool with a different sticker on it or the ecom cable these are in the like couple hundred dollars range going down one more you have the open source stuff so there's the good thopter and the obduino these are both open source designs that are based on the one micro chip spy to can chip that they have the problem with these is you can't actually buy them you have to like you know have a board printed and then get it and then buy all the components and then like solder it together yourself so if you enjoy surface mount soldering then that might be an option for you if you don't I have actually worked on this contact thing which is a new open source tool I have one here that goes from USB to can and also is signable for pins so you can plug in this guy if I can figure out how a db9 connector works on stage and you plug straight into a car and you can get stuff right out of it it's kind of fun but if you want to just play with cars and like really invest zero time or money there's these things called the Elton 327 knockoffs basically this Canadian company Alan electronics made this really cool chip that does all of the OBD to which we'll talk about later protocols you can find them from China for like scary cheap like so cheap that you're probably going to go I don't know if I want to plug this into my car we're talking under $10 here from deal extreme like but there are some well-reviewed ones on Amazon stuff so for you know 1020 bucks you can get something that you can actually plug into a car and do some stuff that can actually save you money clear your fault codes read fault codes that sort of thing software side you have all the proprietary tools but we'll focus on not those so the main ones that are on Linux I guess are socket can this can-utils package and v can socket can is you know actually all of this is sort of now part of the Linux kernel and some kind of user space tools that let you work with it wire shark actually has support for can which most people don't know but it does so you can do all the pcap goodness and you show that and this canard tool I wanted to write a tool that made it easy to do stuff from Python I wanted a pun that involved can and something else but vector has already stolen most of the puns so I was left with a French word I guess so yeah the socket can is the first thing to look at here so basically this makes a Linux system look or any unique system look at a can device that's going to go USB to can or whatever to can and make it think that that device is actually a network device and at this point you can use like the standard socket API and everything you'd expect with a normal network device you can actually have like raw can sockets and yeah it's one of those things that people have played around with sockets a lot have never seen but it's there and it's included in the modern Linux kernel like if you install the newest Ubuntu it will have this and it literally works like if config can zero up that enables the device then there are the can you tools package if you're on Ubuntu like app get install can you tools and that gets you these things like can send which is a really simple way to send a message can dump which will just dump all the traffic to you and different formats or do a file can gen which lets you just generate random junk and can sniffer which is a neat tool that let's you like visualize a bunch of messages all at once and watch how they change so all those are pretty handy for doing some basic work with can wire shark yeah it actually does it the shows up like you'd expect but the really useful part of it is you can do all the normal filtering that you'd expect you can do based on you know ID or length if you're using a protocol that we won't talk about because it's not used in cars but one called can open it actually has filters for can open much like it has filters for HTTP or something and you can just save the whole thing to a pcap file you know send it to people whatever you want to do so wire sharks actually in some ways a better tool than most of the proprietary tools that do this even though it was never built to do can so that's it's fun and then there's the one that I wrote so this is can I add a python toolkit for can four main goals one is to sort of abstract away the hardware so you can plug in you know this or a vector tool or whatever you want and it doesn't matter it was work protocol implementation so we'll talk about the protocols at the end here basically getting those done for you so you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to send OBD clear fault code request ease of automation so you know it's python you can script it to do stuff and hook it into all sorts of other things you want a web server that's gonna talk to your car sure whatever python's good for that and sharing of information the idea being if you write a script in python that can work with different hardware it should be easy for you to send that to somebody and they can then use that maybe with different hardware but on the same car so hardware abstraction really simple basically a hardware device that talks can is just a class and it's got four methods you start it you can stop it you can send a message or receive a message so really simple example we create a socket can device with the name can zero so we'll have already you know plugged in and loaded the driver for that and we'll have a can zero device start the device we'll create a can frame in this case we want to have ID 100 data length 8 and just 1 through 8 it's a useless frame then we'll send it that's pretty simple and then we'll receive a frame that's actually a blocking receive there so it's gonna wait for it to get any frame back and then it will stop really simple but that's those four functions are really all a hardware device actually needs to do so those that's the basics so from this we can go back to the denial of service attack and do it in real code that actually works in one slide which is nice so we import some stuff cool we create a device in this case because socket can is meant to be really generic it doesn't have support for some of the more advanced features that you'd expect to find on a can controller like hardware level filtering or acting in silent mode or it won't acknowledge anything it'll just listen passively so because of that I created a different class for this contact device even though it works with socket can you can just choose which one you want to use so we create that we start it cool then we create our payload frame which literally is just zeros it's got an idea of zero it's got eight zeros it's just a bunch of zeros and then while truth send it and your car will have check engine lights and probably different things dinging and all sorts of bad stuff don't do this by the way I don't recommend it but since you know breaking your cars only so much fun we should probably talk about useful things you can do and how you can actually fix it if you did not take my advice and run that code so there's two main diagnostics protocols used in cars today one is OBD two ones unified diagnostic services OBD two is actually a subset of unified diagnostic services but they're kind of separate OBD two comes from these folks at the California Air Resources Board the whole reason it exists is because they wanted to be able to smog engines and kick cars off the road for polluting too much that is the whole purpose of it so don't expect to get too much useful information that's not about engines out of it it will give you things like engine rpm map or math pressure vehicle speed throttle position all the engine things you'd expect and not much more the useful parts for you if you own a car is you can read and clear fault codes it's a little limited in what you can read and clear and you end up getting sort of a 16 or 2 byte code and then you go on Google and try to like figure out what that means but I have had cases where like someone's got a car that's not working and we run that and it says oh your mass air flow sensor needs to be replaced so we just plug in a new one and it works and save them like a thousand bucks and then clearing the fault code is kind of nice if you have that annoying check engine light that will never turn off I'm sure some people here have a car that has that lights like stuck on maybe you've put electrical tape over top of the dashboard so that it won't shine in your face at night so yeah you can clear those codes if something is still wrong with your car it'll turn on again so that's too bad but at least you can find out if something is actually wrong because some fault codes latch and I have to reset by a mechanic whereas other fault codes are just kind of temporal if it's happening it'll stay on if not it'll go away so clearing it can be handy that's all I can do with OBD2 it's only so much fun unified diagnostic services is where the real fun is I'm gonna call this UDS from now on because that's a really mouthful but this is an ISO standard which is probably why it has such a long name it's ISO 14229 if you care to go find the PDF and pay ISO a bunch of money for it but it allows diagnostic access to controllers and what this is meant for is everything OBD doesn't cover and that's everything from when the manufacturer sets your car up during like end-of-line manufacturing to when you take your car in for service and they may be on a reset that oil filter change thing that tells you how long it's been since you changed the oil filter and because it's an ISO standard we might not know all the details about how it works for a specific car but we can kind of generally get you know a framework for sending and receiving stuff over the standard it's really simple how it works from a kind of network perspective a client which is some device you plug into your car that is not normally there sends a UDS request and sends that to a server which this is their terminology not mine the server is the automotive controller so maybe an engine controller body controller whatever seat controller yes cars have individual controllers for seats then you get a response back either a positive response or negative response with either your data or a fault code or whatever it is and you take that and figure out what to do next there's a bunch of different services and these are just like the really cool ones there's there's a lot of different ones security access is one that's really broken they they use this to try to secure some of the more important features things like changing you know manufacturing stuff and bin numbers that kind of thing there was actually a talk or a paper rather back in 2011 from the folks at University of Washington's automotive security research group and they basically found that this thing is broken in every car and we'll see how in a minute but they were the guys who figured that out and it's bad but that's one of the services routine control this lets you do everything from like roll the window up and down honk the horn apply breaks in some cases just all sorts of different arbitrary routines it's it's super arbitrary you literally pick an index and something happens I've been told that this well I've never seen it but someone was daring me to do this on an airbag controller and like try every routine I don't have the guts to do it but maybe it would do something bad but the point is there's a lot of functionality that you can actually expose just by doing these routine retort the control requests so the read data by identifier and write data by identifier these are things like a VIN number and oil pressure both readable and writable stuff stuff that's going to be read only because it's temporal like an oil pressure other stuff that's going to be secured so that you can only write to it if the car is you know in security access mode and you have also read and write memory by address and apparently in some vehicles this is still enabled in production which is scary because you can literally just like get a memory map of the controller by running through every address so yeah that's that's a feature that I'm not sure exactly what the purpose of it is it makes sense in development but no shouldn't be turned on at the time where you're dealing with a car really so yeah this library is also going to provide you some help I guess for doing UDS still a little bit not as high level as I'd like it to be yet but we're getting there so we import some stuff cool and then we're going to set up a device in this case we're using sys.org v1 so that we can you know choose a device that we want to use at the command line we're going to set the bit rate to 500 K 500 K is what you typically see in cars for high speed can buses some are different but usually it's that if you really want to know you can like stick a scope on it and look for individual bits and figure it out and then we just start the device and then we're going to create this UDS interface this is going to essentially wrap around our device and just provide us with a request response and because all requests are initiated by the client which is whatever's running this code makes it nice and easy because we can just go hey I want to request and get a response so what we're actually doing in this example is pretty useful actually we're going to try to find all the controllers that will respond to a diagnostic request so that we can enumerate all them in the case where you're plugging into that OED port you might only be able to see certain controllers and other ones you might have to send messages that end up being gatewayed through various can buses to get to you know that final controller then the messages come all the way back so this lets you you know just run through and see who's out there and kind of knock on knock on the controllers and see if they respond. Pretty simple stuff we just go through from OX700 to OX7FF which is the last can ID then for each one we're going to do a UDS request this is the little bit of a cryptic part if you haven't seen the spec basically we're going to do a request on the ID that's I we're requesting service OX10 which happens to be diagnostic session control then we're going to send a payload of just OX1 just one because that is just put me in diagnostic mode one please and then we'll set a time out because we don't want this to go on forever if the controller is not actually responding and you do that and if you got a response back you know a valid UDS response back you know hey this is actually a controller that's going to be using this service and we can actually try other stuff on it I did this on actually my roommates car because I want something different he has a Honda which I haven't played around this much and I immediately was able to get out okay there's one controller that responds on the OBD port and it's OX740 and from there I could start doing like ECU resets and read data and fire all that stuff pretty simple example but it fits on a slide so and it does something useful so security access I like talking about this just because it sort of sums up the theme of security and automotive which is it's not great so this is done there's a number of reasons they do it this way but we'll go through how it works first so the idea is there's certain things that they really don't want you to do one of them is upload firmware to a controller because you know being able to modify firmware on a automatic on the engine seems to be a bad idea and modifying things like odometers vins other things that are probably protected even even engine calibration values maybe that would change the operation of your engine one thing that's worth noting automotive companies basically they optimize for emissions and only emissions performance they do in their performance vehicles but emissions is what they really care about because of some new requirements that the vehicles across their fleet maintain a certain level of emissions so yeah people want to reflash stuff because they want more performance and they know their cars been kind of nerfed a bit to meet the emissions requirements so they don't want you changing those things the way that this works it's like a really simple seed key exchange which you've probably seen before for stuff on not cars basically the client's going to request a seed the server will send one back and based on that seed it will generate a key it sends that to the server and it comes back with hey you were either allowed in or no that was an invalid key or you've tried too many times sorry don't try again doesn't look so bad at first but the problem is that the seed is fixed for that controller and so that's the first kind of red flag and that means that the key is also fixed now the reason that they do this is because or the reason that they say they do this is because they can't generate good random numbers on the controllers which is I guess fair I mean there's probably other stuff they could have done but that's their rationale but this in itself is even going to be like just a pain if you don't have access to the controller if you can't dump memory the real problem is that they're only 16 bits long so you can brute force the key space in not that long it ends up being you get locked out after a few tries but you can just reset the controller and continue trying because they don't have any non-volta storage for that type of thing they have a some controllers have a delay from the time where you turn the controller on to when you can start requesting this which actually if you read the guidelines like that's the recommended thing to do is just wait one second to prevent brute forcing but with 16 bits you can still do it in like a matter of days if you want to take over a specific controller so it's not great and then this sort of this is why it's a little broken but the really bad part is in some cases there's been like DLL files that come with upgrade tools from people like Ford specifically Ford that end up containing code that actually just generates the key given a seed so I mean you only need it once there's only one algorithm in there so once you have that you're pretty much good to go some people have been able to extract those types of things so that's also bad so the whole idea with this diagnostic stuff and we have a little bit of tools to talk to it now is we can fuzz we can do this automated controller discovery thing but it's hammering all the different IDs that's that's a start but we can do some way more complex mapping we can actually you know read all the identifiers and all the memory addresses it'll let us read we can try running every single routine which is the thing that would be scary on an airbag controller literally from zero to FFF do something and you'll find out when it happens we could dump yeah also get the memory permission so we can try writing and see if it fails and if it does we know okay that's only readable and obviously we can do things like brute force security keys and you know a lot of this stuff is just left open so pretty much anything you can think of you can write a quick script to be like hey I want to I want to read all this stuff out or I want to try to try to modify some values you may void your warranty I mean that probably should have been in my first slide but yeah the this stuff is it is meant to be accessed by a tool that's external that's the biggest differences there actually are tools you can buy that will plug in and do this the problem being that you know they're expensive and they only have a very limited subset of all the diagnostic actions you can do because you know Ford doesn't want to give every mechanic the ability to change the VIN number of a car if they don't have to so that's where it really comes in that you can start to reverse engineer these and figure out what they are so yeah the little conclusions on what we went over here and then we'll have some questions basically three simple things you can do to a can bus that all work pretty well as you can do a really terribly easy denial of service attack you can do injection on the car and you know change things that are running maybe destroy an engine according to some people and then you can do these diagnostic actions and that is a whole software stack that you know who knows what you'll find in there when you start to go looking you the you can access it and modify stuff as you're supposed to but who knows what else you'll find and another concern is that these attacks any device that's on your bus can do this so if you have one of those I think they gel day has the little device that plugs in and it records stuff about your driving and then gives them your data and return for lower insurance that's kind of concerning for a lot of privacy reasons like I won't even go into but potentially they could also take control of parts of your car so you're signing that over to and little concerning and then the other thing is you'll need a hardware interface and software tools I mean if you want to can I'm partial to my own this contact device but if you just want to play around for 10 or 15 bucks to buy one of those OBD album 327 things it'll work on any car past 91 so you can have some fun only thing about those is you probably don't want to buy the Bluetooth versions just because if you leave that plugged in you're sort of asking for it and then the software side you have all sorts of stuff but open source stuff there's library that I've worked on and also some other you'll there's actually a Ruby library as well if you prefer Ruby that does can there's a lot of different languages people have kind of hacked some stuff together can you tools if you want to play around with that you can actually install it on Ubuntu and using the vcan driver if the mod probe vcan but once you get that up and running you can send messages around in memory so you can play around with this these tools without actually having a car without having a hardware interface that's something you want to play with and wire shark you can also connect wire shark to anything that's running and just watch which is very useful I have no time up here so I don't know how I did but thanks for coming and hopefully it was an interesting thing to listen to and I think we'll have some time for questions we do have questions


What's the difference between a workshop and a meeting? Well, in a meeting, everyone sits together and people talk and they try to solve problems and it's a bit open and who's speaking is not really clear and in general a meeting is something where just a group comes together and they talk but there's not necessarily an actionable outcome even if the idea was to have an actionable outcome. The difference between a meeting and a workshop is a workshop is a facilitated session meaning that one person is controlling the conversation step by step and using exercises to help a group get to a specific end goal. So before you start a workshop, you always have a very specific end goal and the facilitator builds out the exercises to get to that end goal whereas in a meeting it's a lot more open and it's not really one person clearly in charge of directing the conversation but if you really want to get big things done or make big decisions or solve big problems then a workshop is a better structure for that.


Hi, I'm Neil Lorenz and I'm here to welcome you to the 21st annual Kettle Carvers Club Carving show and competition. We've got over 40 carvers here today And I'm going to go around and show you and introduce you to many of the carvers and introduce you to their work So let's get inside and explore the show Hello, I'm Neil Lorenz. I'm from Sheboygan. I've been carving for about 14 years and I've my interest in carving has gone from Christmas ornaments to figures to relief carving and I try to do a little bit of carving every day and Like I said my my interest has now been in caricature carving. You can see a number of them here One I finished up this past year is this Fisherman who is ready to get out and do a little fishing for the day I took a class recently where I carved these little caricatures of Jiminy Cricket Here are some of my ornaments that I've done I've also tried my hand at relief carving. This Santa was a weekend class that I took and It I like the effect of having the bark on the outside edges adds a little more interest Our next carver is Tom Julian. He's from Middleton, Wisconsin Tom I see you you're really doing a lot of wildlife carvings. What types of wood do you like to use? It depends on what I'm doing for a fish like that. I like to use basswood For something like this.  This is this is actually a metal What type of paint do you use? It depends on what I'm doing if I'm doing a small bird like the birds over there, then I'll often use oils Something like this is all acrylics. Okay, do you find that one type of paint is easier than another to work with? The oil is definitely easier to work with but it's really expensive. Okay interesting How many pieces do you have in the competition today? three Are they all birds or? There's a smallmouth bass Then I do combinations like this and so one's a hila monster with a roadrunner and some young hila monsters coming out of the eggs And then one is a barn owl on top of a rat Interesting. Well, we'll try and catch those when we get up to the competition area. Thank you for talking to us today Our next carver is Greg wurz from Wisconsin Rapids Greg. I see your interest lies in relief carving Yes, I do a quite a bit of relief That's probably the majority and that's what I teach It's called an antagonial style, which is a little different What makes it different? It's where I use the wood as the frame Another relief you carve that back and your picture pops out this way. It's in the The piece carving is into the wood, right? Okay, and it's a very ancient style it is on the pyramids so it's a just another difference that Style I brought back certainly seems that you've perfected the style. I enjoy it. It's fun Do you use different types of finish on this type of work? the finish is pretty much the same I Paint with acrylics and use minwax to seal it a nice seal You say you teach classes all over the state or do you go further than that all over the country? I teach in South Carolina North Carolina all over I Understand you're involved with the International Woodcarver's Congress. Yes, that's centered in Iowa And Betendorf, isn't it? Yes in Betendorf they have the show in Makoka to now at the fairgrounds there and It's one of the premier shows in the country. It is it has a Really nice show plus a lot of classes with top-notch instructors from Canada All over you bring Carver's in from Europe for the show even yes, it's quite a draw Well, thank you for talking about your carvings with us today, and I'm assuming you're in the competition Yes, I am I have three pieces entered excellent So good luck with that. Thank you Our next Carver is Larry Lino Larry. Where are you from? I'm from Sheboygan, Wisconsin And how long have you been carving? Oh? Not that many years actually this is the first year I took our course at Fox Valley Tech and I but I've been doing in Tarza for Maybe ten years. Okay, and every year it gets a little bit better. You know certainly certain techniques change So the the fish that you have here on your table are those from the class or the one that I have From the classes I have been a being judged and this one here. I've started like Five years ago and it was laying around and I took the class and I finally learned some techniques Mm-hmm, and I finished it by me. No, that's sometimes that's how it goes Yeah, I see your other fish here on the table looks like a brook trout brook trout Yes, I carved that quite a few years ago like ten years ago or so when you do a piece like that I see you have a lot of work in those fins. Are those separate pieces or are that all out of one piece? That's all separate separate pieces. Yes. Mm-hmm very nice nice technique on the paint on that Okay, thank you very much as you mentioned In your introduction that you started in to work on in Tarja That's a little different than a lot of what our other woodcarvers and How do you and you must enjoy that quite a bit? Oh, yes I it's quite a process you go through to do it a lot of sawing and shaping and sanding and Time-consuming sure consuming so do the paint on that is very intricate What what techniques do you use there? Well on the bird feeder I painted the cardinal and the Skullfinch and the others is basically all different Textures of wood. Yeah, okay, so you're using a lot of different woods Not a different color and mostly red Western Red Cedar and Some cherry some walnut And that's about it and then this was that the cardinal was red wood But you added a little more color to it and I couldn't get it red enough. So I added a little more color That's right. Well, I'm glad you brought those here today. It's a little different like I said and it offers to the public Get a view of some of the other interesting things that we have at the show very good. Thank you. You're welcome Our next next exhibitor is Peggy Nelson Peggy. Where are you from? I'm from Lake Mills And you have an entire table of wood burning objects. Why don't you tell us a little bit about them? How long have you been doing it? I've been doing it a little over a year Quite new at it then. Yes my dad has come to this show for many years and he passed away a year ago October and I Started it in his tradition took it took a whack at his wood burner. Okay, and and I love doing it Okay, so you're actually using his wood burner then. Yes, that's very nice and Do you do you buy the patterns or do you do your own drawings? Some are my own some are my dad's the little This is my dad. This was his favorite little chickadee. I'm sure it's very nice item some I just get an idea and I go on Google the internet and get it and we have a copy machine at where I work and I just get it to the size I want and mm-hmm and put it on the wood and fill it in Many your items are colored. I I understand that in wood burning You don't really use a pen or brush. You use a different technique. What is that? I use an oil pencil That's what my dad used Are they I'm not real familiar with that do you Sharpen them like a colored pencil in the old days or just like a colored pencil Yeah, only they're a little softer a little more more color and probably a little more permanent Yes, they're more permanent and then I do seal everything too. So the color stays on what type of sealer. Are you using on these? I just use a shellac or is it a polyurethane? No, it's a polyurethane Mm-hmm. Your work is wonderful. Are you entering items in our competition today? Yes, I do have a piece entered It's a gross back on the judging table. Okay. Well, good luck with your your items in the competition and thank you for talking with us today Thank you very much Our next carver is Don Burns Don. Where are you from? I'm from Chippewa. You'd hear it. Okay, and how long have you been carving? I've been carving Dick knows About 15 I say about 15 years and you're a member of the Kettle Carvers That's right, and you've been active in our club for probably most of that 15 years most of that and You've got quite a diverse group of items here. What do you what do you enjoy carving? Well, the sports thing got hot one day. Okay packer packer items and I see you have even a Chicago Bear Clack here and this here is one of the Price classic classic ball in a cage classic. Yes People have been carving those for probably century Everybody has to get one of them in That's very true I'll sharing a table with him is as Dick Jalovnik. You're also from Sheboygan Yes, I am and you've been carving with Don for quite a few years I started shortly before him and he I showed him one of my first projects and It was a little axe. Oh little axe in the stump He saw that he said I like to do that too. So that's how we got started We go to meetings together because our daughters were good friends and Just exploded from that and I try to make things that I don't see in the books like my trophies Are you do a bit of a bit of sports memorabilia as well? I love doing different things. I got pictures of Orcas, okay, I was in Alaska here a couple years ago and my son and So our cause they're the only ones so I took many pictures for okay These pins hearts with the arrow through them, right? I'm that's my wife's there, but she's gone now, but All my children and my grandchildren. They all wanted one. Of course Keeps on going everybody wants one I remember at one of our meetings A few months ago you brought in a ring that you had made I don't I don't see any here today But I would assume that was a rather difficult item to to carve. Oh, I see you have a couple here So they're they're actually like a small almost like a little wedding ring But it tell me is it quite difficult to carve on an object that small and get it that thin Well, you break a lot. I Lot of trial and error You actually drill the hole first. Yeah, these are made out of cherry Okay, drill the hole first and then I have a dowel that I slip them on and then I'll shape them on there And I use sort of a knife or use a rasp Okay, so you're filing away a lot of that wood. I made approximately about 20 Okay for all my all the girls in my family. Okay, I see you have a letter on the top of K on this one So it's for one of my daughters. Her name is Kitty. Okay, Kathleen That's a kind of a unique item that I've never seen anybody else carving. I Started out like this But my daughter says that's a man's ring. Okay, ladies ring. Okay. That's how I went to the dental gentle That well the very unique item and thank you for sharing those with us today Our next carver is Jean Bengal. Where are you from Jean? I am from Oshkosh, Wisconsin And how long have you been carving? 21 years. Oh quite a long time. I see by your table here that You've got a number of large large mammals. Is that an interest of yours to carve? It is I enjoy the animals because I can add and the muscle structure to it and work on fur production Mm-hmm, and then finally the painting is a lot of work Do you wood burn a lot of the hair and get the movement? I do. Yes, yeah after after I carve though and Use a little power to put some of the fur in then I go back and break it up even further with wood burner Okay, what type of painting are you doing? I'm doing acrylics Okay, like like the speed and the ease of working with acrylic right and I don't know Have the odor that I don't care for the sure of the And you've done a little bit of work with birds I see like the Cardinal on here. Yes, I I've done several birds in that this one here was my latest one here and and I like to do birds because I Sort of a bird watcher, okay, I get out there and get some unique ideas from From well, you're familiar with them and you can see them in your own yard great I know from talking with you in the past that you have an interest in caricature carvings, and I see some very nice work here Are these new for new items that you've done? Yes, the the doctor the country doctor there he's knew this year and Had to he just caught my eye and I thought it would be kind of fun And I was also in the medical field so not as a doctor But I think I was in the medical field and I thought I should have that as sort of Piece to finish up your career great No, the feature piece that you have here is this Alpine gentleman. Tell me a little bit about that great. That's a Bavarian mountain climber and it was I did take a class with the Carlin Honaker and It's a Though the figure itself is all one piece. I did add on the lantern and that And I did add a few features on to it such as the wine flask or water flasks And and then a little coil of rope on the back and Very very nice piece. Is it also done in acrylic? It's done in acrylics a wash I use the wash to it and so that I can have some of the woodgreens showing through Very effective very nice work Did you said you traveled to take this course didn't you yes, I this course was taken in Nebraska Crete, Nebraska at the Dorn College Don't they I understand they have a week-long class there every year. Yes, they do it's And they have feature carvers from all over the United States and It's really an exciting adventure actually Well, thank you for sharing your your carvings with us today Jean. Thank you Road in front of the municipal building now and our our chainsaw carver this year's Dave Bartels You can see some of his work. He's got quite a diverse grouping of carvings We can get his attention We'll go up and talk with him Again our featured chainsaw carvers Dave Bartels Dave. Where are you from near shot on Wisconsin? How long have you been chainsaw carving? total about 15 years I See you do a broad base of work from from birds to bears. What what do you enjoy most? Probably the Eagles they sort of connect with them and they've always came out of the wood real easy for me Very nice. What type of wood do you use? Just about anything that grows in Wisconsin most of the ones that I have here today for sale are either white cedar or butternut Looks as though you're you're doing a little bit of burning you use a torch or how do you how do you do that technique? Just a map gas torch like a small Butane torch. Okay, that's a lot of nice texture You said you don't necessarily put a finish on them is that they don't really need the protection I take it Cedar does not it will turn dark gray after a while. So that's I leave it up to the customers Some folks like everything to go natural. There's wanted to secure it as close as they can with the finishes It looks as though the bears are very popular. I we saw some up front. Maybe they're Got him doing different activities like Most thing marshmallows and stuff a little little humor involved in your work. Yeah, there's always a little humor. I most of the carvings are people tell me they have a slight smirk to them. I guess that comes out, but There's a variety from the raccoons Raccoon sell well the bear sell where well and eagles also very popular, but do everything from people's pets to hodags Well, you were certainly are enjoying your work here today and good luck with your sales and We we hope everybody has a nice day here at the show. Thank you for stopping with you Our next carver is wrong Ron Ingan Ron. Where are you from? Sussex, Wisconsin and I see you're a member of the carbon club in that area. Yes, it's the Lake Country Carver's out of Della field. How long have you been a member there? About eight years and you said you've carved for quite a few years 25 or so. Okay, and I've also taken like Instructors about four different instructors. I've had and things like this and I do a little bit of teaching too I've got three guys coming over my house and do some teaching the guy here with me His first carver he's ever done. He's got it in the show today. Oh, excellent Uh, I look it looks as though the majority of your work is is in birds. Yes, it is. I like doing the uh the waterfall and I'm working on a kestrel here. Okay, and uh, and I've also done some bears and stuff like that A lot of power carving I assume on those. Yes Mostly all power carving I do some knife and gouges carvings out of the uh my santa clauses and that And you can also see down here. You got a another unfinished, uh Hen yeah, be a looks like you got it about half wood burned already. Yes I do wood burning and I do also texturing on it Okay, the the paint that you use what are you uh oil or your acrylic type painting? I use mostly all acrylics and uh Some some you can see I just use the just wood burn them and leave a natural with a little natural. Yep. Uh-huh Um I it's very nice display you have with the with the cases.  Yes, I make the cases. I make big ones small ones and just just for the carvings and And the mounts and stuff like that And do you have some items in the competition today as well? Yes, I do. I have a hood of maganser in a competition I'm gonna I'm gonna guess by the quality of your work. You're probably in the master's category Well, I usually do end up renting the blue ribbon in the categories now Well, good luck with today's competition and I'm glad that you took the time to talk with us today Well, this is about the fourth year. I've been here. So I really enjoy the show. I'll be back again. Thank you All right. Our next carver is uh fuel phil hewnick. Where are you from phil? I'm from usberg, wisconsin And how long have you been carving? I've been carving approximately 10 11 years Okay, and you're a member of the kettle carvers. Correct for most of that time. I take it right well the first four years or so I wasn't okay But now you've been a member for a number of years. Yes. Yes We started in on that that Relief carving of santa just a great great work on getting the expression in the faces I imagine that was the most difficult part Yes, uh, I saw something similar to that on a magazine cover and I just wanted to put it to wood So that is what I use some up with you certainly did a nice job of capturing that expression. Well, thank you You've got a large gentleman here. Tell me a little bit about him. Uh, yeah, that is a mountain man Uh, I took a class down in Nebraska with the jeff ferris and I had a Type of wood is that that is butternut. It's laminated. It's cutting About 15 20 pieces and glued together So you don't have to worry about splitting How is that working with butternut? Is it a difficult wood? No, it's not. It's uh, very nice soft wood This particular piece had a few knots in it, but it gave it character. It certainly does. It's a nice nice piece of work Um Looks as though your interest uh Moves over to caricatures. Yes, that is uh, My favorite this first item is a rockwell piece, isn't it? That's right. It's Norman Rockwell Uh, I like I saw it on a magazine cover again I hunt for those types of things, you know, and if I see something that inspires me, I like to go at it The football players are also a rockwell. That's correct. Yeah And uh, that was a lot a very fun piece. That was the first rockwell I ever did Very very very nice Your sport memorabilia care caricatures are are also I'm look to be a favorite. Yes The baseball players are a lot of fun. I've uh had people Come to me. They were a lot. They want some Okay, but uh the manager there in the middle I uh call him Tommy Lasorda before slim fast, even though he has a Metz uniform on It probably brings a chuckle to a lot of people's eyes when they see that correct A number of golfers that you have here as well Yeah, that kind of green vest there. That was my first golfer I ever did and after that I had to do about 40 of them for friends. Wow The uh the female figure is a very nice movement in the skirt Very nice. Uh tough to get that Tough to get that movement movement Not really well there again. Uh, I saw that in a sculptured Piece going through a furniture store once and I I like the way that skirt was flowing and Tried to put it to wood. I guess you get your inspiration from a lot of different locations Thank you for taking the time to talk with us today and hope everybody enjoys the show Right. Our featured carver at this year's show is Paul Tetzla. Paul, where are you from? I'm from Fanlac And uh, you've been carving for how long? Well, I started in the 80s Okay, so you've got quite a number of years in quite a few years and correct I see by the work on your table here. You're predominantly a power carver All I that's all I carve with this power. Okay, and what type of wood do you use? Strictly Tupelo Which I get out of Louisiana Okay, um A little bit of wood burning I take it very little. I do the only thing I burn are the primaries and the tail Okay, tell us a little bit about this kestrel that we have right here Well, um, how long of a project is that to do a piece like that? It usually takes me anywhere from three to four hundred hours Four hundred hours per bird. Okay, and that includes the painting and the finish the whole works And you use a very light wash of acrylic you said, right?  Yes, we did we did that Last fall yeah in september Very nice Very nice Tell us a little bit about the piece that you're working on right here today that there is a hen bluebill and Like I like I'm showing here I've got the head attached And I've got all little filler in here to pick up the The imperfections and so on so forth so you fill around that neck where you've drilled those two pieces together, right? And yet you can still car power carve on that wood filler right right and I use generally a it's a 50 50 combination And I just sand it down and carve it I understand you have a couple of items in our competition today. What are those? I have a red tail hawk And a pentail drake They're not done and I haven't completed the judging yet, but good luck with those and Hope you enjoy our show today. Thank you very much. Thank you for taking time to talk with us. Okay. Have a good day Here's a an exhibit of our the items that are up on the judging tables right now Our judges are going through and and inspecting the work and and rating our competition We've got a lot of items in different categories from from birds and wildlife to to still life items These items are in the advanced category multiple groupings Here's a nice Santa that old world santa that was done in the also in the advanced human figure category One of the thank everybody for attending our show the 21st annual kettle carvers artistry and wood You


Yeah. Okay. So as we were speaking, Gradle, so we moved from the and build system to Gradle. So today I'll be quickly talking about a few things that have changed. These are not specifically Android, Android changes, but more on the lines of what IntelliJ brings to Android and what the new grade build system means for Android developers. Okay. So though, so there have been a lot of tips and tricks which can save a lot of time for you. So I'll cover the best ones, which like, you know, are lesser known to users in general, will speak a little about live templates and then move on to Gradle as well. Okay. So I'll jump right into it. Yeah. So we always have this problem, you remember. So you want to debug something which keeps going on and on, but that is inside that statement being inside a for loop. Now, at you just see everything comes, but there is one particular one particular way value which is not being which is not being shown. So the regular way would be you would put a debug point, loop through run through it for like, whatever the loop run length is and finally get to it and then see it. So Android Studio has a nifty new feature called as conditional breakpoints. So what it lets you do is once you set a breakpoint on a particular thing, right click it and you can give it a condition as well. So in this case, as you see, only if I the value of I is equals to nine that the big point activates else it doesn't. So you just save a lot of time. You don't have to loop through like eight times before you go there. Okay. Paste from history. This one is something which I like very much. So you copy a ton of things.   So what this does is keeps a when after you open the Android Studio, it keeps a track of all the content you have copied till then and you should be able to paste from history as well. So you can copy like five different things and you could paste the first thing which you copy. So no need to re go, go back, find it and copy it over again. As you can see this, it shows you those first five things. It even shows you what it has copied as well just so that you can confirm before you paste it. Okay.  So rather than manually doing it, this is something new which is you can select all the column wise and as this demo shows, you could just replace layout margin with padding and everything. All of them get replaced. Okay. Regular expressions. These these are things which are like, you know, the most painful thing to do. You write a regular expression, but you never know, will it work? Will it not work? You go online, you try doing 10 different sites, entering a regex, trying to see it matches, not matches. How would it fail? This, all of this can now be done here itself. So you enter a sample, you give it the regex, keep typing the sample, it will turn green or red based on whether it is matching out your regex or not. So the way you do it is you right click and say check regex, give it the regular expression, the sample and whatever sample you give should show up in green if it matches, else in red if it doesn't. Okay.  The way you would use, you would create a new method, go copy paste it, remove it, then call everywhere, wherever you have had the same piece of code. What this lets you do is select the piece of code which you want, create it and allow it allows you to make a method out of it. It declares the puts all the implementation in a different method and also calls the method right away from there. So as you can see in this demo, which is, yeah, so four lines of code, give the method a name and press okay, though creates a different method for you. Multi selection. So if anybody of you have used sublime text, this is that feature which allows you to do multiple selection of all the variables with the same name and rename them in one go. So you have a variable X, you want to rename it at the end of the file into Y, just change one place and everywhere else it gets updated automatically. Okay, live templates. So this is, this has been around in even from Eclipse as well. You could go ahead and create custom code docs which you could use. Why today I'm speaking about live templates, what is new is the support which they have in Android Studio and Intel J basically. So the very for people who have no background water live template or a code block is. So basically, if you are reusing a ton of code over and over again in your application, what you do is you select that code and make a template out of it and just using a shortcut key, you can invoke that template. So in this case, if you see if I type ifn, it does a null check for me. If that is equals to null, then so this is a very simple thing. While this is nice, Intel J takes it a step forward wherein you could share these templates across teams, team members as well. So what we do in our company is we somebody creates a ton of classes, ton of methods or templates which people have to reuse over across teams and across cities. What you could do is just give them the XML files of an Intel J and they could just drop it in their Android Studio path and all of those templates works and all of those shortcut keys are something which is configurable and autocompletes as well. So if you can start typing, let's say you have something called as A, A, B, C for something, you start typing A, B, it will autocomplete as well for you. So that is one thing. How you do it is there is no keyboard shortcut apparently. The only way is preferences editor and then go to live templates. This is how it looks like there. You go in and you could so this is very powerful. If you are familiar with Groovy, you could go ahead and do a lot of things wherein you could pass in the parameters, read constructor parameters, return types, do things like typecasting, all of those things right away. So that is there. Moving on to Gradle. The bell system changed a lot of new features like product flavors and variants and configurations came in. I'll briefly talk about what these are. So product flavors. So how many of you people have two different code bases just to maintain a free version and a paid version? Yeah. So that pain goes away like no longer need to maintain two different code bases just for the sake of not showing ads or not being able to do packaging. What this lets you do is you could define a build product flavor saying this is the paid flavor and you could change the package name right away. So no more overwriting of the debug version and the release version, same EPK being overwritten. So you could now just say give it a package name and add whatever package name. So as I saw this is let's assume this the base package name is com.bms. There are some fields which are configurable like there is the ads field, there is the payments field and there is the promo field in this example. So if you see here in the paid version I say show ads should be false, skip payments is false and show promos is false as well. These are custom variables which we have defined at R and so based on these variables we decide at runtime whether or not we want to show people ads, show people payments, should the payment gateway call be skipped all together and all. So this is the paid version. I'll show you the free version as well. So as you can see I changed the package name to dot free after at the end and in this as well I have all of them by default. Yeah, so let's say you have a promo version, you get a dot promo at the package name. So now for all the free versions you maintain the same code base but three different APKs and three different installables are available to you. You say show ads true, skip payments true, show promos true. So all of these variables which you define here in your Gradle file are available to you in your code at runtime through a debug variable. So build debug variable should be able to give you this. So at the end of the day it is just a if check for you whether or not to check whether I'm supposed to show ads or not based on that show or hide that ad relevantly. Okay, so it goes a step ahead wherein not limited to just one set of variables which you can use each flavor you define can have a separate set of resources and Java files as well. So you could have different UI elements, you could hide a show elements, let's say one particular version of your build needs to show a particular color and a particular UI element but the other doesn't. So you could just do this is if you see you see a free package, a paid package and a promo package. There is a resource variable resource package inside each of them. So these need for this to work you'll need to name them the exact same way what you have. So if you have a red dot color something with a key called red in colors dot XML, you need to if you need to override them and something else you need to provide them the exact same names everywhere. So this works. Since you have separate package names as I mentioned like you know you could know more overwriting of the release version with the debug word. So a common problem with a lot of us what we used to face was we used to have the release versions on our phones but when somebody sent a debug build to us to test a new feature which was in ConLive, it would override the existing package, the package name because the package name was the same. So now we no longer have to do that debug will get a separate package itself by itself. Using this you could easily switch between test and production URLs as well. So like you know you don't need to actually go comment out the production URL then type in the test URL. You can maintain them separately and at runtime check which environment it is and then use that variable. A lot of people have used this for API keys as well. So with maps as an example, you have unlimited debug key and you have a release key as well. So that also can be configured so that you know which key to use when based on your build type at runtime. And again, you could easily remove the paid and promote to become phone and tablet versions as well. Since it you the entire resource folder and so this is in the example I have just shown you the resource folder. You have access to the Java files as well. So you can actually have two different Java files pointing to the same activity as well. Bill types, this is an extension to what we just spoke. You could have a release build, you could have a debug build, you could have a staging build. You could even change the suffix from here, the package name from here, but refer to do it in this way. A variant is what comes out with a combination of flavor and the type. So since in the example we saw we had like three flavors and three build types. So if you see promo debug, promo release, promo staging, paid release, paid debug and paid staging. So you could select whichever you want and then compile and build that particular APK for you. Okay, so that should be it. Any questions I would be happy to answer. So if you have so many dependent libraries, so is there any tip for improving the build time because whenever you switch between the builds, there is so much build time which Gradle takes, which was earlier very fast in Eclipse, if you see. So is there any tip on that like which can actually fasten your build time? I don't think that could be possible because Gradle will still have to look at your dependencies and build it because like as an irony, you can't have two buildout Gradles for one for test and one for production. So I still don't see that how we could be able to do that. The only way I have achieved, so if you have split up your app into architecture thing like an MVVM or MVP kind of thing where you have separate modules, separate packages, buildout Gradle allows you to do things like you could define them separately as well. So I could say these are the modules which are common. Okay, so when you build just the app and if your app does not depend on the common dependencies at that point of time, then just the app dependencies will get picked. So rather than in your app's buildout Gradle, you have like 10, 20 different this, which are all because like, you know, some module is depending on them. But if let's say you're not even trying to build that module for that particular run cycle, that what you would do is upgrade them out like that and just the app needed ones will compile. Okay. Hi. Quite a similar question, actually. Let's say you have an X number of files which are actually not dependent on payment or pay or any feature like that. And how would you just separate them out and, you know, you don't have to copy them on each and every folder or something like that. So you mean, let's say you have something called as payments which you don't want in the free version at all, correct? No, I mean, let's say you have some some part of your files that are actually common to all of all three of them. All three of them. Yeah. And you don't have to copy them every time you build some place you don't have to copy every other time. So these folders which you create separately will only have those Java files and resource files which need to change. Everything else which is common goes in the main folder itself as your regular app. So that way your main will remain the same. Only files which you need to change. You just need to take care. Let's say you have payments activity. If it is a different implementation in the free and the paid version, you just need to copy the payments activity to those two. Everything else should remain the same and work fine. So you're saying that payment activity should be there in paid and free paid and free and not in the main version. Okay, but in the main one, what files would you import them? I mean, because so package is is different that all of that build Gradle will take care of you when you choose which version to build across. Yeah, when you choose here, which version to you are trying to run, he will automatically pick those folders being active and do the important runtime for you. So you don't need to bother. Okay, thanks. So I have to cut Q&A again. That's about it. Yeah. So any questions if you still have, you can always come and talk to me. There's a launch downstairs with so far. Again, you can take the questions there. This is the last talk before lunch.


I hope that this isn't all shaken up and it doesn't explode on me. Have you tried the Whites from Portugal before? Maybe it's about time you did. Learn more on this video. Welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horkey. Welcome back to the show where we help you drink adventurously so you can expand your palate and expand your mind. We're going to get into some exciting, we're going to learn a little bit more about Portuguese white wines today. Before we get started, I want to let you know to check out our Patreon page. If you like content like this, you can help support this content and get some even behind the scenes look into what we do in our daily lives. But without further ado, let's get into the wine. So Portugal, a country that a lot of people know about. Most people associate with the fortified wines of port or Madeira. But a lot of people don't know there are exciting table wines, still dry wines being made in the country. As much as I love red Portuguese wines, I think the white dry wines are what excite me the most about the country. For the last couple of years, I've been going to Portugal every single year. COVID-19 has kind of knocked my schedule off this year. Hopefully, I do make it at the end of the year. I love the country. You have to understand that Portugal has a very old history of wine production. You know, it's regularly one of the top 15 wine producing countries in the world. There's close to 250 indigenous grape varieties and the white grapes are very, very exciting. A couple of things that you need to know for such a small country, Portugal packs a lot of diversity in terms of wine growing conditions. A cool thing also is a lot of the grapes are planted in all the regions of the country so you can start to see what the real regional differences and the real terroir differences are throughout the country.  You're going to look out for things called Alvarinho, also known as Alvarinho in Spain. Arinto, Gouveio, Viosinho, En cruzado, Fernão Pérez, also known as Mérida Gomas, Bical, Cercia, there's some Malvazia there as well, Rabigato. So there's a wealth of unique white wine grapes. The regions you want to look out for, if you want something crisper, high acidity, if you're a fan of Reese's, if you're drinking a lot of shellfish, adult wines, you want to look to Vinho Verdes, most famous for Alvarinho, but there is Arinto grown there. There's a lot of different types of Viosinho is also grown there. These wines have really high acid work, perfect with shellfish. Another area you want to look to is the Durro. The Durro is known for port wines and big hefty red table wines, but you know what, I've been getting excited about the white wines there lately. A lot of them are barrel fermented and they're just rich white wines with a lot of fruit and a lot of structure. The wood gives them some durability, some age ability. I think those wines are exciting. Then the other regions in the north that are exciting, Bajada, where you're going to get Bical and also Maria Gomez, Fernão Pérez, some piney type of wines. But the region I really love is the Dao known as the Burgundy of Portugal. There's a lot of white and red wine grapes there. I'm most excited about En Cruzado. I don't think I've had a bad En Cruzado. These wines when they're aged in wood can have real elegant Burgundian type characteristics. Another region that all winemakers are crazy about is the region around Lisbon or the Lisboa region. A lot of winemakers when I'm in Portugal say that that is the premium place, the up and coming place. We have a wine from Lisboa we're going to actually taste today. We're also going to get some bigger, heavier white wines than the Septubal, Tejo, Alentejo, the Algarve. Those are the southern regions of the country. Those are hot regions, more known for red wines but there are some bigger whites being made there. I am a big fan of Alentejo, the white wines made of the grapes and talvas, real crisp easy drinking wines in addition to Rupáro. I know my pronunciations are going to be terrible throughout this video. It's funny the last time I was in Portugal, an employee from Sogrape told me, just think about when you speak Portuguese, think about a Russian guy trying to pronounce Spanish and I was like, ah, okay, okay. You know, one of the things I really like about Portuguese white wines is I find all of them have this nice mineral kind of backbone. There's plenty of fruit. Some wines can be too minerally without fruit. Some wines can be too fruity without more complexities. I think Portugal has a nice balance in between and we're going to get into some of these here today. The first one we're going to taste is the Vale do Mídio. This is Alvarinho and Viosinho. This is from the producer Miguel Jarrantes. Now these two grapes, it's so funny, are actually grown more in Vinho Verde and this wine is grown in the duro although it's not labeled as a duro, it's labeled as a Vino Regionale, Durianze, which kind of a lower classification but the wines are coming from the duro. I expect this to be a little bit richer. Let's give this a go here. Very nice nose. You get this lime-iness, lemon kind of kefir lime mineral. This might have been an Asian award because I get just a touch of vanilla but you know what? Portuguese white wines, I always think they're oaked very well. It's going to be the seawater characteristics, exciting. Let's give this a go. Much richer Alvarinho. The Alvarinho is going to get in Vino Verde like this bad boy from Escatano. This is the Alvarinho from up there in Vino Verde, this is 2019. These types of wines are going to be more steely, high acid things that you want to have with shellfish. This right here is a richer white wine. It's not as big as a Barrow Age or Barrow Fermented Chardonnay but it's kind of getting up there. Beautiful wine, limey, minerally. You know what? I also like about the duro. There's just slady soils there. So I get this slady type of flavor in the duro whites which I wouldn't expect since it's a hot region. That's really exciting. This wine is beautiful. I'm in a 90 plus point type of range for it and I think it's a wonderful wine. Let's move on. So one wine that we tasted already. I think this is definitely worth seeking out. This is the Chao De Sao Francisco Chao de Quinta and Cruzada Oto Reserva 2017 from the Dao. Like I said, this wine was extraordinary, very, very burgundy. You know what I mean? It's elegant, mineral, had this nice lemony acidity but still plenty of white peach, quince type flavors up front, mouth filling, a long kind of a sandy texture. I mean, I had this at about a 91 point type range. I thought it was extraordinary. I also thought this was a wine that was not even close to being ready to drink. This wine I think has a big future. Another thing that's cool about these white Portuguese wines or Portuguese wines in general is they offer tremendous value for money. I think in the country this is less than 20 euros. Maybe 15 euros for a world class white. This is under 50. I think all the wines here I have are under 20 euros. So I think that's really cool. Let's move on here. This is a famous producer I haven't tasted before. This is the Quinta do Convento Reserva Branco 2018. Now this is from what we talked about earlier, the Lisboa region around the capital Lisbon. You know, I actually haven't, I haven't found what the blend actually is. I've been looking, looking, looking. It was sent to me. I can't find it. So I don't know what the grapes are, but I think we'll be able to taste a little bit of what Lisboa brings to the table. I saw a couple possibilities. Could be anything from a rinto to some semillon in it. Who knows? I do know that it is aged in oak and it won a gold medal at the Lisboa wine competition recently. So let's give this a go. 2018. Oh, I almost blend it and mixed it. Let's give this a little bit of a go here. So first of all, color looks like a douse, not really, really, really dark. Let's give this a sniff. Now the wood comes out here, but the wood, and this is, this is really well done. It might even be barrel fermented. That's kind of what it smells like.  Maybe sliced white apricot. It smells really good. Let's give this a go. This is what I really like about this really well done saltiness. I actually feel like we're on the beach now in Dalmatia. I feel like I'm swimming in the ocean and licking some rocks. Extremely salty, really well done with the barrel integration. I'm a big fan. This has some semi-on characteristics, a little of those natural gas type flavors. Really good wine. This is not ready to be ready to be drunk yet. I'll have to taste it through a little bit more before I get my final score. But I think I'm pretty close in the 89, 90 point type range. I think this is a really, really nice wine. Shows a great example of why Portuguese wines take oak so well. Wonderful. I think I'm getting a little bit more excited about the Dal Incrusado Reserva. Maybe even the Valladonidia, but still a really, really nice wine. We don't have a dud yet. Let's move on. Now I'm cheating a little bit because this is a white wine, but it is actually made from red grapes. This is from Bajada, region known for big, tannic reds made out of the baguio grape, but also an area that's traditionally been a sparkling wine area. Sparkling wine production goes back to 1890 there. This is the Rama Enceles, Ramai Enceles, Metidoclasco, Blanc de Noir, Brute 2017. Let me see if there's any information. 12 months on the lease, 12 months in the bottle. So let's give before it was disgorged, let's give this a go. I hope that this isn't all shaken up and it doesn't explode on me. I'm glad that nobody was up top there because my face wasn't there because that could have definitely hurt somebody. Let's give this a go, shall we? So I've had some nice sparklings from Portugal lately. I was actually in a champagne blind tasting in November in Hungary and actually one of the wines I picked was one of my favorites. It was a sparkling wine from the Durro and it tastes like champagne. Let's give this a go.  I don't know where the cork went. Let's give this a go here. Really nice note. Strawberry, kind of like an unripe type of strawberry cream lemon, it smells pleasant, doesn't smell like champagne, it's not overly aromatic, it just smells nice, delicate. Let's give this a go. Nice mouthfeel, good fine bubbles. I think this is a good sparkling wine. It doesn't have super rich complexities or anything like you want out of champagne. But it's just nice, delicious, serviceable. I don't get the baganness out of it, but I do think it's solid. I'm kind of in the 87.87, 88 point type range. I think it's a good sparkling wine, just not something that's blowing my face off. Yeah, it's good, not overly exciting but delicious. Before we go, I want to thank the family wine group in Portugal. They kind of represent these wines, help them go abroad so they were nice enough to send me some of these wines. Really, check out the white wines from Portugal. They're super exciting. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on. I hope to be back this year. I still actually haven't been to Mededa. I'm going to go to the island of Mededa. I haven't been to the island of Azores and the island of the wines that I like very, very much. So check it out. So let me know.  Do you have any favorites? Let me know in the comments below. 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