Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Julie from RVLove and today I'm taking you on a bike ride to check out this Blick's Vika Plus electric folding bike. Let's go. So today we're reviewing the Blick Vika Plus electric folding bike. Blick's has a large selection of electric bikes, but the one we felt was most appealing for our life on the road was this Vika Plus folding bike. So they sent us the Vika Plus to try it out and share our thoughts in this video review. So the Vika Plus is a compact adjustable folding bike with the added benefit of having an electric motor to assist you in your pedaling effort. It has seven-speed Shimano gears and four levels of assist plus a throttle for an extra boost when you want it. It's a bit like a turbo boost. So of course there are folding bikes and there are electric bikes but this is a folding electric bike and that's what makes it so different and so ideal for our traveling life on the road. So the bike comes standard with a 36 volt 11 amp hour battery providing a range of up to 35 miles. You can also get an optional 36 volt 17.5 amp hour battery which gives you a range of up to about 55 miles and it only takes about three to four hours to recharge a battery. It gets about 500 to 800 charging cycles which means a lifespan of around 25,000 miles. So today's ride we took the bike out for about 13 miles in about in about an hour and 20 minutes. We used about 35% of the battery power so I'm very confident that the estimation of 35 miles that it can travel on one single charge is pretty accurate because we were using higher levels of pedal assist and a lot of full-on throttle electric power as if it was a scooter. So this really has the range that it talks about. Cannot keep up with her. So dimensions of this bike are 34 inches by 27 inches by 20 inches when folded and it's 49 pounds in weight six of those from the battery.  It also indicates the level of pedal assist that's activated and it shows you when the LED front and rear lights are on. The bike has an aluminum frame and the angle of frame and handlebars aids in a really really stable feel when you're riding.  This is pretty funny. This is the first time I've ever scooted up a hill on a bike and been so far ahead Mark Bennett. He's a very strong cyclist and he's on a very capable bike. So anyway there's somebody else coming so let's get out of the way. So of course with our RV life so we love being active getting out and about and exploring local areas. We both have bikes but Mark's a much stronger cyclist than I am and so often we'll go and ride together and I find myself struggling to keep up with him and I'm just not as fit as him so it often makes riding not quite as enjoyable when I'm really having pedal hard to keep up with him especially going up hills. This is a great bike for somebody that loves to get some exercise but also doesn't want to be intimidated by going on a longer ride or going up hills or even just pushing yourself too hard whether that's for health reasons or comfort and enjoyment reasons. One of the things that I've learned that I really love about this bike giving it this test ride around the park here today is I really love biking and being out in nature and feeling the wind in my hair and just smelling the smells of everywhere that we're going but I don't like working too hard and pushing too hard. I don't like working up the sweat. What I love about this bike is I can just get on and ride and have a blast without worrying about how far I'm going, how hard I have to push or what the terrain is going to be like because we're always in unfamiliar places so I never quite know what I'm going to encounter when I go out on a bike ride. Some of you might remember Mark and I used to have a tandem bike. We sold that last year and one of the things that was great about that is we could go out riding together and follow a similar pace but the view for me was really limited to the sides and Mark's back and this bike allows me to keep up with him without pushing myself too hard and get to enjoy all of the scenery around me from every angle. So the regular price on this bike is $1,649 and that's not the cheapest electric bike out there. It's not the most expensive either. It may seem expensive to you but for me as somebody that likes to have a bike and I used to have a motorized scooter which I absolutely love, to me this is the best of both worlds combining a bike and a scooter in one without the need to fuel it and without the noise. So again it may seem like a lot of money and it is an investment but the quality of this is unquestionable. We took this bike out for a ride on all different kinds of surfaces today around a very well paved bike path out in some construction area and downtown in Colorado Springs to really get a feel for what it was like in all of those conditions and I have to say it was very impressed in how it handled it every single one. Even on the construction surface it wasn't too rough. Those tires really absorbed a lot of the impact as I was riding. It felt very very stable. It's clearly a very very well built and stable sturdy bike so you're definitely paying for quality. One of the great things about blicks bikes is they offer a 30 day risk-free trial so if you try the bike and you don't like it you can just send it back and get your money back no questions asked but they sent it to us on a trial to do this video review and I have to say as you can see I'm absolutely impressed absolutely love it and there's no way I'm setting this thing back so I've decided to keep it. This makes for such a nice easy ride. I'm just cruising here. I'm not putting in any effort at all which sounds like sound bad to someone but I like it. Blicks will send the bike to your local bike store to do a sample and you can try it out before you buy it. Blicks bikes come with a three year warranty on the frame in two years on the technology so that we thought that was a really good warranty. So what do I love about it? Well I absolutely love the rush of feeling the electric motor helping me out especially in the lower gears and at lower speed. I love the adjustability of the pedal assist with seven gears and with four levels of pedal assist you actually get a lot of control of how hard you pedal and keep the battery lasting longer. You can always override the assist with a throttle at any time for that extra little turbo boost. One of the things I really like about this bike is the low step through. Being vertically challenged it's very very comfortable for somebody of my height to not only mount and dismount from the bike but just to ride it. That's one of the reasons I particularly love this Vika Plus model. So Blicks says this bike goes up to about 20 miles per hour but going downhill and in the higher gears we actually have got it up to 22 or 23 miles per hour. We didn't try to push it to its limit but that felt very stable even traveling at that speed. So the bike packs away really compact and easy. It only takes a few seconds to fold the bike up. It actually almost takes longer to put it into the bag than it does to actually fold the bike up. It's a nice quality storage bag that can carry the charger and accessories as well or you could just fold it on itself to take it along with you and store it at your destination. So I'm an avid cyclist. I primarily road bike but I've done extensive mountain biking as well. I love the way this bike rides. It feels very stable. Part of that's partially because of the battery being located really low on the frame but it's primarily I think the geometry of the bike. I love the low step through especially for Julie but you can see how the handlebars come back towards you from the front wheel. That provides a better stable environment especially if you get any bumps. I like the wider handlebars. It gives you a nice controls feel as well. It's got a lot of really high quality components and a lot of good control touch points. I put a lot of attention to detail as well. The handbrakes for the bike as soon as you start to squeeze the handbrake it has an electric motor shut off on it so you don't have the motor still trying to push as soon as you pull the brakes. I also like that it has multiple sensors around the sprocket so it's very responsive. As soon as you start pedaling it immediately notices that you're starting to pedal and it kicks in with that pedal assist. And you're in a deeper gear it has it's very noticeable even at level one pedal assist but there are four levels of pedal assist for this bike and seven gears. It uses Shimano Acera 7 speed and it has V brakes so it has pretty good stopping power as well. The 20 inch wheels roll really well over uneven terrain. I'm just super impressed with this bike. I love the way it rides. It has great ability to go some distance even when you're riding it basically as a scooter just using the power. And one thing that was really funny for me I love being able to ride with Julie now but I'll tell you it was a real wake up the first couple hills when Julie just went right away from me and just totally effortless giggling and laughing as she just completely dropped me on the hill. So I loved watching her be so excited and I love that we can go out riding together. If I wanted to run a quick errand that might be something I'd jump on to go run that quick errand because it's so nice to not have to break up a sweat if you want to go pick up some things. It has a little lug of drag on the back to be able to carry your cargo back with you. I love the adjustability for the rider height from all the way from someone as high as Julie at four foot eight. Says it can go up to someone six foot three. That seems a little tall for me but it feels great for me at five foot eight. I also love the adjustability of the actual controls. You know it has the seven speed gears but with those four levels of pedal assist you can tailor this to exactly how you want to ride that day. We've put a few miles on it now but it's actually really funny the first time you put a pedal down on this thing it's really gives you a rush because you start to pedal like it's a regular bike and all of a sudden zoom it picks up right underneath you and gives you that boost. It's such a rush when you take your first pedals on this bike. Oh my first ride of my Blix Vika Plus. The bike comes really well equipped with all kinds of options already with fenders and lights and everything. There are some additional accessories available on the Blix bike website but this bike comes very well equipped and pretty much loaded as a little toolkit that makes little adjustments to it as well. It folds and unfolds very easily and I find it to be very compact. At nearly 50 pounds it is a little bit of weight to be able to lift up but it easily fits in the back of our car. It can carry it into the RV as well. Very compact size for traveling. So it's not just Julie that loves this bike. I love this bike too. I think it's amazing and I think the price that it is is a very good price for how much bike it is. The components and the quality of the bike really come through and having that electric motor makes it more like a scooter than even a bike so very well worth the money and I think it's a fantastic product. Trying to get bored? Had to come back for me? Yeah.  It's shocking the power on this thing. One of the great benefits for me is I now have a huge gain in confidence in going out for longer bike rides knowing that if I get tired I could always use the battery power to get me home. This bike is ideal for going for a ride in scenic places, riding to the ranger station in the campground, going to run errands or to the store. I love the quality feel of the components. Many folding bikes like the one that I had before use much cheaper feeling parts to be lightweight but the saddle grips and all of the touch points on this bike are a really nice quality so it does feel built to last. Even the wire wraps are sturdy and look really nice. The bike comes with vendors to help keep the bike and the rider clean. Overall it's just a very very nice looking and stylish bike. It actually reminds me very much the Elektra Towney bike that I used to have before we hit the road in our RV but just really wasn't very practical because it was too heavy, too bulky and wasn't folding. My next bike was a folding bike and even though it was compact and folded down much smaller it was just a much cheaper quality bike and of course it was only a few hundred dollars so you definitely notice the difference. You get what you pay for. This is a bike that gets me around running my errands but also going and exploring and having a blast. This is awesome. I absolutely love this. I am having a blast. This has brought the joy of biking back to me. I tell you this is amazing. The control panel has a lot of information about current speed, distance, battery power remaining and it's easy to rig while riding. You can lock the lithium battery in place on this bike to keep it secure or you can also remove and detach it if you're leaving it out for a period of time and are worried about security but one of the things that I think is really great about having an electric bike is if you're somebody who maybe isn't quite as fit or you'd like to go longer distances without worrying about what the terrain is going to be like or how you're going to handle hills or safety or crossing busy roads as we did yesterday it was really handy to be able to have that electric boost to get me across traffic really quickly and safely. If you're somebody who has any health challenges or knee problems and biking, typical biking is more challenging for you this could be a really great option because you actually don't have to pedal as much. You can use the electric option so you can still get out and enjoy the ride and get around feel the wind in you here and have a blast without worrying about bothering your knees or pushing yourself too much physically if you have any kind of health conditions or if you're just like me and not exactly super fit so it really is the best of both worlds of a bike and a scooter all in one but without the noise and the fuel and I know this is something I'm going to get a lot of hours of riding pleasure out of. Well if you couldn't tell from the video I had an absolute blast today biking around on the Blix Vika Plus electric folding bike this was said to us on a 30-day trial but I am definitely going to be keeping this bike because I just am not willing to give up this much fun so I hope you found the review helpful if you have any questions at all if there's anything we missed please feel free to put them down in the comments below Mark or I will be happy to answer them so of course if you're interested in learning more about the Blix electric bike range whether it's the Vika Plus or any others in their range folding or non-folding they're all electric bikes you can check it out at their website blixbike.com will put the link down in the description below hit that subscribe button and click the bell to get notifications every week of new videos from the Road Gear Reviews team until next time I'll see you on the bike trail


In a Damawa state of police command says it has apprehended no fewer than 208 suspects and recovered 7 AK-47 rifles and locally fabricated guns among other exhibits. The command disclosed that out of the suspects, napped in connection to armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, culpable homicide, 108 have since been charged to court for prosecution. According to the command, AK-47 rifles, locally made pistol, live ammunition, live cartridges, then gun, up action, motor vehicle, tricycle, military camouflage, uniforms and handbags were recovered. We have a total number of 208 suspects who are arrested in connection with cases of kidnapping, armed robbery, cattle rustling and other violent crimes. 108 of them have been charged to court. We've been able to recover 7 AK-47 rifles from different locations within and outside the state. A large catch of locally fabricated weapons, just yesterday we were able to recover 2 AK-47 rifles with 197 rounds of live ammunition.


That's a Roger Chad, be right with you. Ten four. Four zero. Okay Chad, I just got a call from the mill at East Dixfield, from Andrews Coggin paper. They've got a couple of paper loads in the siding at Andrews Coggin, Andrews Coggin siding at the bottom of the hill there. Ten four. Proceed from Bethel to Carthage, holding the main track in Carthage. You're going to meet CPIP, AGR 208 South. We're tied up on the siding at Carthage. Just give me a status on VM2 when you can. That's a Roger. VM2 is down at Andrews Coggin. It's got to pick up down there, so you should be on its way shortly. CPIP answering, AGR dispatcher answering CPIP over. Yeah, MV2 is passing me now. Just wondering if I get that next clearance number when you're ready. Yeah, that's a Roger Neil. Let's go ahead and get that going. Clearance number's got to be three. Clearance number three, dated April 23-


So, my name is Jean-Baptiste Holcroft, I'm a G-Backfed, is my nickname, and Fedora, and I'm contributing localization for a few years now. What we did in the localization team recently was the localization of the documentation, the migration from Zanata to WebLate, and now the new big project is providing language measurements in Fedora. And we went very lucky because we were able to go far in the past because the packages were still available in the mirrors, so we were able to run this system on old releases. So I will do it in a very, very simple manner, just explaining why we do this, explaining the difficulties that we had and the challenges. Then I will show a little bit about the results and tell you a little bit what you can do to help us, to help everyone to have a better localization in the Linux world. So if we wanted to work on measurement is to be able to understand where we are at the global level. The user experience is at the operating system level, so we had to measure not only what the Fedora community is doing, but the whole open source community, the whole community and people contributing to the Linux ecosystem. And also it should help us to reduce complexity because localization is a combination of a lot of layers, technical things, and codifications with complexity in how to handle each language. For example, right to left writings, the way to handle players, it's a complex world, so we try to make it easier to understand so we can start thinking about how are we moving forward, how are we evolving over time, is our global community in good health or are some languages going down in terms of contributions. So the challenges were many, but the biggest one is Linux and Fedora specifically is a distribution, so it's a combination of thousands of software. So there are multiple ways to store localization files in each project. Sometimes it's in the same Git repository, sometimes in another place, sometimes it has its own release cycle. The language codes are not harmonized, meaning depending on the project, you can use a single two-letter code, so you can go up to three or five letter codes plus the way to write the writing script. The file format are not harmonized at all, so it means that each file contains some information about the language. Sometimes this information is in the name of the file, sometimes it's written inside the file, sometimes it's written using a code, sometimes it's using the full name of the language, and it was very complex. And of course, if you want to make a computation of data across 20,000 software, it takes a lot of time to download everything, it takes a lot of time to compute everything, and of course, when you have a bug, you don't want to restart from scratch. So I will not go into details and how we did, I will go into detail on what are the outcomes. We are not the first one to try to do it. The localization team in Debian also does this. It's using some Perl and the content is a little bit obsolete because it covers, it detects translation file in a very, very basic manner. In Ubuntu, they do the same, but Ubuntu is doing some downstream contribution. It means what you do in translating in Launchpad most of the time will never reach the upstream project. This is a philosophical difference that we have in Fedora, we always contribute upstream. And in Fedora itself, we also have a project, which is named Transstats. Transstats is a very interesting tool that focus and there is multiple places where the translation are, and is it synced together and do we have all the language, do we forget to push some languages to the package, but to my opinion, it's a little bit complex, but it's way nicer that what we did with translations that Fedora project.org. So let's talk about the results. So as you can see here, you should see two little graphics. So on the left, you see the number of packages in Fedora. So with Fedora 10, 13 years ago, we had like 6,000 packages, and out of that, we had almost 1,000 packages with actual translation detected inside it. And in Fedora 34, we now have more than 30,000 packages. And as you can see, the trend, the number of packages that have translation is way lower than the trend of the number of packages in Fedora itself. It does not mean something very negative because all packages don't necessarily need translation. For example, we have wallpaper packages. We don't translate wallpapers. So if there is no translation for wallpapers, it's no big deal. But still, you can see that the number of packages with translation increased. I think in Fedora 34, we have 2,300 packages with actual translations. But the most important is on the right and the right-hand side. You can see in Fedora 10, we had more than 5 million words to translate. And now we detect more than 25 million words to translate. So if you want to translate this as a human, and if you are alone during the translation, it means it will just take you 12,500 hours to do everything, which is impossible for one single person to do it. In the 25 million words to translate, there is a lot of different content. Some content is specific to the user interface. Some content is related to the documentation of the software itself, or it can also be manages and etc. So the fact that we have more and more words to translate means that the coverage of what we can translate is increasing over time. It means we can do more translation of main pages, we can do more translation of documentation that can be inside the software itself. Like for example, the first time you launch GNOME, you will see a welcome page and some tips about how to start on GNOME. This is a documentation embedded inside the software. So the amount of work required to translate is outstanding. And as you can see, the number of language available in Fedora Linux is increasing over time. It means even if it is impossible to reach 100%, there are still people who want to promote their language, who want to translate, who want to contribute to move. Okay, they won't have the whole operating system translated, but it's no big deal. They will still translate the key software for them, and one by one they will slowly provide a good user experience for non-English natives. In this website, I wanted, it was very important to me to show the diversity. Often there is a misunderstanding between a language and the territory. The territory is just a political border that has some rules inside it, but it can contain many, many, many languages. Here for this website, I reused some data coming from the CLDR, which is part of the Unicode Consumption, which contains a lot of data. So you see here the Russia territory. Russia contains 141 million inhabitants of population, and you can see that there are a lot of languages. Some of them are official, like Russian, but you have a lot of regional official languages. So the percentage that you can see here is based on the total population. So even if you have 1% of the population talking a language, it still means more than a million people talking this language. I wanted to highlight this because we often forget that Russian is spoken a lot out of Russia. French is spoken a lot out of Russia. And on the right hand side, you can see the list of languages which are available in each language. So you can see on the top the list of languages for Fedora 34 and the list of language for Fedora 10. So it increased a lot and it always increased over time. I don't go in all specificity of language codes and etc. I just wanted to highlight this fact. For each language, I try to list the territories in which this language is spoken. So here you have French because obviously I'm French by my accent. You could have guessed. You can see that French is spoken in many countries. Whatever this official or not official language, it doesn't matter. So you have some more African countries, but you have also North America with with Canada. You have and you have a lot of countries that are impacted for French. So when you contribute to French language, you can help people who actually are in in the Canada or in Africa or in Belgium or whatever. Whatever it goes way beyond the borders. So something very important is about language progress is the measurement. You can either measure the progress of French translation on what is started or measure the French language translation across every single packages that can be translated. So the French translation progress is 83% for what was started and is about 39% if you compare it to every single translatable string in Fedora itself. You can see there is a single script language. It's Latin, but you have some language you can do. You can script and the progress is based on the 25 million words that are available for translation. So this is a major language. We have a lot of French people contributing to translation. And so there is a few disclaimers to do here. When we compute the translation statistics from now, we only focus on get text, the PO file. And there are other translation files, but we don't cover it for now. And when we do the computation, we don't try to guess if it is a man page, the documentation, or if it is the user interface, or is it the priority string in the user interface, or is there some very hidden screen at the end of the user interface? We don't try to do that. If you want to see that, you can go in GNOME and they do it very well. There is no need to try to do better than them. And each project is providing its own measurements. Of course, there are some bugs that can be either upstream in the file format or in our code. So we should be quite close to the reality, but still there are some limitations. And what we will have to provide in future releases is the language health. We are able to do the computation for languages across releases, but we are not yet able to provide an easy progress rate for each language because it depends. There are some new packages that are added, some packages that are deleted from the federal repositories. So there are still some work to provide useful health measurements. And there are a lot of details to improve. Like, for example, here, the list of territories provided is using some CLDR codes, which are not very easy to read. So you can guess that BF is Burkina Faso, of course. And there is a lot of traps here. So a thing that this website provides is some translation memories. So these are basically huge files containing all the translations that were done in Federer. This is the compendium. The terminology is an attempt to find recurrent translations of the same word to build some kind of dictionary, translation dictionary. And the translation memory is a very generic database that is written in XML that you can use in many translation platforms or many translation tools to help you to go faster when you translate because there's a lot of translation that exists. You can reuse it when you are translating a program. So as far as I know, there's no other organization providing these files to translator. So we hope it will be very useful for translator to be more efficient or also to detect some errors because, for example, some languages like to translate everything like French, we like to translate email because we don't like to use English words for concepts we use every day. So normally you should be able to use this file to spot some errors and stuff. So this is an overview of the results. And there are a lot of things, there are little things that you can do to help. If you are a developer, you can help us as translators to translate. If you can make translatable your software itself, you can help to make translatable the main pages, the websites, the documentation. And for this, just keep it simple. Use standards, use get text, purifies for everything. And if you need to convert some content, like for example, what we do with Askidoc and the World Fedora documentation system, we use PO4A. PO4A means PO for anything, which makes it way easier to update and keep the content easy to translate. And of course, there are some very good tools. For example, if you have to make a website, there is the Hugo Static Generator, which handles localization very well and is very easy to personalize. So just be careful to use the good tool to make your life easier, to make translators life easier. And to make it easy for us to contribute, just try to provide a suitable tool that allows us to work as a team, translation team, and to allow to automate all the dirty works that we have to do in a Git repository to update the file. So Weblate does that very well. That's the reason we choose Weblate for the Fedora community. There is many hosting possibilities that are free. You can be hosted by Weblate itself. You can be hosted by the Fedora project. There are some other instances in OpenSusie, or you can go also on Documentation Foundation. Don't try to limit languages, whatever the size of the translator of the community, whatever if there are only 10,000 speakers in the world. If there is someone who is willing to do the translation, just let it do the work. And you may eventually set a percentage level to approve the language. Like I want at least 50% of my user interface to be translated before included upstream. Okay, this works very well. But please don't make pull requests. Pull request and peer review is awful when you do translation. Move this work to the translation platform. Again, you can do it in Weblate. You can do it in TransFX. You can do it in the translation tool. It's way easier for us to do this. And it lowers the complexity because doing some pull requests with technical knowledge, which most of the translation contributor don't have. So no pull request, no peer review, do this in the translation platform. So in Weblate, for example, you have a log of everything happening in the translation. So even if you don't control it before publishing it live in the software, you can still access everything that was done. A little bit like the mindset of Wikipedia. And it works very well. And of course, if we do translation, but there is a release once every five years, our work is not reaching end users. So try to release often. Or if you want, you can make release regularly, like the GNOME does. They have a release every few months. It's not very fast, but it's perfect for what we do. We know when is the next release. We know when it will reach end users. It's easy for us to plan our work. Because if a translator doesn't know when you do the release of your software, it can be a little bit frustrating or say, okay, we'll do this one later because there's no rush. I don't know when there's a release. And you make your release and there's no translation in it. And then the translator will come to you and say, why did you do this? And you forget to send us an email. So keep it easy to release often. Even if it isn't just translation release, no problem. But please do it. So I wanted also to thank all the people that are providing language support in allowing it or translating in a daily manner. Special thanks to Darknau, who helped a lot with the work and the infrastructure work, the automation, the optimization of execution. And the WebLate team who creates and maintains quite a lot of tools that we use to make this extraction from the detection of translation files itself to the list of languages. And they do a lot of work, which is very hidden. So a big thanks to them. And thank you to the World Federal Community for supporting this change and making translation a subject of an important subject and allowing us to work on this. So I think it's the right time if you have some questions. And you can write it directly in the chat. So I'm trying to keep track of everything that was said. So question from Justin Florey. Did the Federal Community translate 25,000 words in Federal 34? No. The Federal Community, and it translates a few software. We do translate DERSEDU, we do translate DNF, we do translate Anaconda, but this is just a subset of what is provided inside the Federal Distribution. So most of the work is done in GNOME, is done in LibreOffice. It can be the same contributor who contributes both to the LibreOffice project and to Federal, but it's not only the Federal Community. It's the whole Linux community, and operating system. Yes, something very good said by Quentin is in Launchpad you can translate software that no longer release new version. This is something that is very important. Sometimes we have some software which are old or un-maintained and with Launchpad in Ubuntu you can still translate it and improve the user experience, which is quite useful. So what is the 2,000 words an hour? Is it a lot? Is it not a lot, Justin? Yes. So I see there are some computation. So Luna is sharing some... You have desktop use to translate. If you don't like WebLay, for example, you can use POEdit. The GNOME translation platform is not really a translation platform. It's alternate that GNOME.org, which is more a tool to help on the process to submit translation and review it as a team. So it works well. It's not a great tool, but there's a lot of different tools that exist to do the translation. So a good question asked by Quentin. How can we share the translation between distribution? This is a good question. I have no answer for no. The first step is to be being able to produce translation companion, aggregation of all translation. And then the next step will be to share it with other communities. But I think it may come in the future. But for example, in Fedora, we always say upstream first. So the question is if we detect some new translation that are done in Ubuntu, how do we help projects to integrate this new translation into their project so that we get it into Fedora? So it's complex question, and it touches a lot of technical stuff. So, Marie, will you apply the slide? Of course. I will publish it, I think, in the Viki page. I don't know if this is the right place, but whatever needed. So I'm done with this short explanation. I will just show a few links to get the stats. And Fedora, Viki, Elton and to join the Fedora community, localization community. Or if you want to directly translate without asking any questions, you can go straight here. So there is no issues in translating into Fedora or localization or document defederation, Orgnum or KDE, whatever your translation is reaching end user at the end. So whatever you do is very welcome. And to translate in translate.fedoraproject.org, there is no validation required.  And if you don't do it well, there will probably be someone coming and say, hey, this is not correct. Can you please fix it? Or they will fix it directly without bothering you. Just remember one thing, don't use automated translation to do your work. Try to translate the things that you use on a daily matter. It will help you to do a better in context translation. It's very difficult to translate something that you don't use or don't understand. And it's fine if you don't use some software. You don't have to use every single software in the world. Just do the things that you like to use. And it will take good care of it. And it will be a great contribution. I think I will stop the video. And I have a question for you, Marie. And is this recorded? Will it be able to share it? Yes, it is recorded very good. So thank you everyone for attending this short talk. And of course, my email address is not example at federalproject.org. It's Jean-Baptiste Ulcroft. You will find me very easily. My nickname is Zhebek Ferdic. It will be way easier to find me inside the federal community. So there's a lot of positive comments. It makes us very happy. Have a nice day. Goodbye.


So, you just want to make your own topology. Not a problem. Press B, T, O, make sure your object has no division levels, and left click to draw curves over your object. Now, you need to have at least three curves to make a triangle, but obviously try to aim for quads. Hold and shift while left clicking will let you draw a perfectly straight line. As usual, holding space bar lets you move the curve anywhere you want. And as with any curve tool, dragging into empty canvas will wrap around the object, and holding space will let you slide up and down. So as usual, holding alt does the opposite, and clears curves. This includes holding shift, wrapping around, and space bar commands. If you hold alt while hitting no curves, it deletes everything that's not a quad. And if you remove a curve that's part of a quad, it will disappear.  So if you want it to follow the actual lines, all you gotta do is draw more curves, and then you will start to get your shape. At any point, if you left click, it will turn all the quads into real polygons, with the draw size, control, and thickness. If you want your topology to be perfectly flat though, then set draw size all the way down. Regardless, once you've created the new topology, split by mass points to separate it into its own object. From here, you just apply your standard group by normals, polish, z-remesh, and whatever sculpting techniques you want. Hope that helps, and as always, hope you have a fantastic day, and I'll see you around.


Okay, we're going to get started here in just a moment. We're doing our best to get Professor Doug Lee on Skype. One could probably question our choice of methods of getting him here, but in any event, we're going to see if that works. Other than that, I'm actually pleased to say that I think this is the most complete representation actually being physically here in the room that we've had in one of these sessions in beat space, as Andrew says. And so we'll just start out and quickly to make sure everyone is in the right place. This session is the Open JDK Governing Board Q&A. And so of course that means what we're going to do is let you guys ask us questions and then we're going to do our best to answer them, right? That's how it works. And so before we do that, we'll just do some very brief introductions. So hi. I'm George. George Saab, I'm the chairperson of the Governing Board. I work at Oracle. So I'm also the vice president of the group that works on Java SE and ME and Card and associated stuff at Oracle. And I'll pass it to Andrew. I'm Andrew Haley. I work at Red Hat, but that's not how I got to be on the Governing Board. Hi. Hey, there's Doug. All right, Doug. How's it going? Oh, Doug's a tool. I'm going to turn it around. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, sorry. It's going to be like that, isn't it? I work for Red Hat, but I'm not on the Governing Board representing Red Hat. I'm there as, well, I'm there to represent you, really. I'm the at-large member, one of the at-large members, sorry. I'm along with Doug. And I'm there because I want to represent you and the rest of the open JDK community. I don't represent Red Hat. No. We're going to try that. Oh, yeah. Okay, go on. Go on. Don't talk to us. Just try that. Doug? Hi, I'm Doug Lee. I'm surprised that I'm here on somebody's phone. I'm just like Andrew, just like he says. I'm here to represent you. I focus on academic research community, but hackers galore. My name's Mark. I work on Java. Oh, and I work for Oracle, so. My name's not Mark. Luckily, my name is John Dujovic. I work for IBM. I'm the vice chair of this fine open JDK governing board. And I'm a distinguished engineer, and I own all of the runtimes, including Java at IBM. And since we've been participating since 2011, somewhere around there, in open JDK, as most of our Java runtimes actually built on all of the class libraries from open JDK, we're interested in continuing the innovation at the community with community members from this audience and others. All right, so this is Q&A, so before you do the question, let me just say one thing. The very first time that we have all the governing board here, so for me it's a great thing. It is beyond exciting. I'm so excited, I cannot believe it. Okay, and Mario, are you going to run around with this thing? We're going to make it, because that one's for Doug, we're going to make it. Sorry. Okay. Well, all right, then people will have to yell. All right, Sonny. Yes. The question which I should repeat for posterity is what's happened about the open bug databases because we were talking about that last time, or a couple of years ago, I think it was. We're doing okay, kind of sort, is my take on it. Open JDK members can create bugs, but nobody else can. Other people go through the Oracle gateway, which I think, am I right in thinking that's a general Java bug gateway, rather than a specific open JDK bug gateway. That probably makes sense because end users don't necessarily know whether the bug that they've got is specifically open JDK or generally Java related. There is a problem in that until it's been triaged by staff at Oracle, it's quite hard for people to know what the status of the bug they've just created is. That's an ongoing problem. On the other hand, I think that the high quality bugs that we need in order to be able to act tend to be created by people who are open JDK members anyway, because they have the requisite knowledge to create all of the information that we need and to produce repeatable test cases and so on. I would argue that this still isn't an ideal situation, but I do understand the reasons for it. The bar is actually not that high. If you change that, you get the author status and you have the access. Yeah. For posterity, Alexi Shiblov was saying the bar actually isn't that high to get to author status and then be able to get access to the database. I should point out that database is one, and I don't know exactly which year you were talking about Sunny, but definitely in the beginning, we had a bunch of work to do to actually move from the legacy bug system that had been used by the team at Sun to the system which is being used today. It is the case that you can go and look yourself and see the bugs, see what's happening, see what responses people have made. The only thing that is a bit of a challenge is if you want to go and report a bug directly and you haven't done a bunch of work and made contributions and gotten some level of status in the OpenJK community, you need to do that through the sort of bug reporting system which is for Java users in general. One of the reasons that we do have that at the moment is we get an immense amount of traffic there. There's really a lot and I think it would not be ideal to have all of that traffic going directly into the OpenJK bug database because there's just so much noise. That's true. Sorry, Alexi points out as I was just about to say, 95% of that are Minecraft video driver bug reports because when the VM crashes it gives you the URL to that exact page and millions of people dutifully file their Minecraft crashes. There's a third channel that's worth mentioning. It's not a huge source but it's not uncommon for developers who are familiar with OpenJK as a community but not real active. They'll show up on a mailing list and say, hey, I've got this problem and then somebody who does have access to the database says, oh, yeah, that's a problem and they basically create the bug for it. That happens on an informal basis pretty frequently, I think. So if you're in to follow your bug, could you say that again, Doug? I said if you would like to be a member, because you found a bug and you'd like to help fix it, the easiest path is find somebody else who's already a member, they can file the bug and then you can collect brownie points for your membership. Well, yeah, and that's basically the algorithm for how to get involved is you find somebody to help you. That's true for many things. A different question in the back. In terms of non-X86 platforms, how are we doing? Spark is doing great. How are we, I'm trying to remember what he said. How are we doing in terms of, was it features and testing and quality for them? Yeah. Well, let's just go through the platforms. The non-X86 OpenJDK platforms. There's PowerPC, S390X, ARCH64 and Spark. ARCH32. Oh, yes, I suppose so. Some people think of that. That's awesome. I agree. The ARCH32.64 port and the Spark port are also tested by Oracle. Correct? The Spark port certainly is. The combined one is too. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's right. Outside there, we have a number of partnerships in the community for things like the ARCH64 port. S390X, I don't know. I mean, you guys must be testing it, right? Along with the PowerPC. We're doing testing at Red Hat. I mean, one thing I can guarantee is that we're running the regression tests and we're running TCKs. So we do know that the other ports are compatible.  And it's something of a challenge for the community to pull together a whole bunch of big stuff that we can use for testing. Yes, that's still very much a work in progress. And in order to get everything up to the same sort of high level of quality, we're going to have to do more of that in the open. I understand.  Okay, I'm not entirely sure. I understand what... I think you're asking why don't we have HTTPS? At the very least, for those of the people who can download the source code securely and have some assurance that there's no man in the middle giving them source code with bugs, this has been bugging me for quite a while. And it's something that I've been meaning to talk to the info team about. Just haven't gotten around to it yet. We should do HTTPS preferably only on all of the open JDK infrastructure. We already do it on the bug database, I believe. But for all the rest, we should do the same thing. So we need to work it out with the info team and the way we need to do it to do a few internal oracle approvals to get the certificates minted, but that's pretty straightforward. So, yeah. You're doing pretty good. I want to place for the website. What do you got? Volcker. Oh, so during the last year, I was always complaining a lot, so this year I'm quite satisfied with Volcker. Whoa. Volcker says he's quite satisfied. He's usually the guy who stands up and he's got a list. And he reads from the list.  I have maybe just one question this year. Recently, we had a problem on the Open2DK meetings. Somebody was complaining that the class library had a check-in with some folks from Stack Overflow and a personal check. And I see in the end it turned out that the guy who was published was from Stack Overflow, also an oil company.  But my question is, are there any plans to do something like code scans or to code some more checks on the code that should come in like Apache or Azure? Are there any plans to do code scans to catch code coming in that maybe shouldn't be coming in because its provenance is unknown or uncertain? Xerxes, do you have another question or did you want to comment on that? Another question? Okay, you're just being very diligent. Very good. Or maybe you've got a cramp in your stretching. That's fine too. Yeah, so the whole code provenance and all that, Oracle doesn't have any current plans to do any more. Do we as a governing board need to encourage someone to have plans for this? So far the honor system has worked pretty well. We did catch that one case. We got a lot of lawyers. We scanned the shellac out of everything. So if you didn't think it's being scanned, it is by us. However, however, thank you IBM. You're welcome. But it would make good sense because the problems of the code, stuff happens. I think we should have some policy that would help us for sure, but probably helps others because there's a lot of ways to get the wrong code in the wrong place. And you guys are probably motivated at the same time. I'm surprised you're not scanning it or you're not admitting it. But here admit it. Well, I will say that there are a couple of things. I think in general code scans are done whenever, you know, whenever Oracle does an acquisition, we look at all of the inbound IP. And so that certainly was done. In fact, it was quite humorous when that was initially done on the JDK code because it immediately came up with, you know, lots and lots of warnings of things that were in some other bit of code. Because they were in the JDK. And so that's kind of interesting. No, no, no, no. I mean because it was actually, you know, code that was in the JDK, which is a known bit of code that's out there that people shouldn't be copying and using except this was the JDK. So that was kind of interesting. Thanks, Black Doc. In any event, I think, you know, one thing that's worth keeping in mind, I think, you know, many of the folks who work in the open JDK community work at companies who have pretty strict rules around this kind of thing and are pretty used to that. I think that, you know, we do have some people who are sort of individuals who come in and work that may not be as used to that. It certainly is the case that the OCA has information about what's expected. So, you know, when you sign up and say I'm going to, you know, I want to be a contributor to the open JDK, one of the things that you're saying is I'm going to be diligent myself about not taking code from somewhere and, you know, kind of contributing code that's not mine to do with. And so I think there already is that, you know, whether we, it makes sense to put something more in there. I think, you know, we've seen kind of one case where we had a question, you know, possibly surprisingly, I don't think we're aware of any others. And so, you know, my feeling would be, and, you know, we're kind of having a governing board discussion here in real time, is that, you know, unless we start to see that this is something that's clearly a problem, we don't necessarily need to worry about introducing additional friction. Yeah. Policy when it comes up. Whenever these things seem like they might require involvement by lawyers in creating more process documents, we cringe because that's open JDK governing board at its worst. We don't do anything because it takes so long to do anything. And a great example of that is something I thought I'd bring up since nobody asked yet is the brand new and thank God it's finally proposed project which was just announced this week and sure to go in effect. And this is finally an open JDK process that corresponds to the evil, secret, secret society of CCC that people live to fear from. And now we have, we will have a process for doing that without a huge process document. I am so proud of Mark of figuring out how to put this into effect without writing a hundred pages about what it does just saying basically it does whatever the sponsoring group would like it to do. I think it's us at our best and I want to publicly congratulate Mark for finally putting it together. All right. I think it's due to the color of Trump orange this morning though, so I'm not sure. Yeah, it's a joke that I think we've made every year and there's a danger of us getting to the end of the session without saying this. So I'll say it again that in an ideal world our job as a governing board is really not to do anything. We hope that the various sub-communities within Open JDK will be self-organizing and they almost entirely are. Yes, there are infrastructure issues which tend to cross boundaries of teams and groups and organizations and all the rest of it. But we're just there to make sure that the sub-groups and all of the stakeholders have what they need in order to organize themselves. We don't want to run people's lives for them. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, OK. This is all to do with making binaries available. This has always been a very vexed question. I think there are lots of really, really good technical reasons why that is very, very difficult to do. And indeed, the binary may not necessarily work on your system either. Could Oracle do it? Would Oracle want to do it? Publish early access binaries on a more frequent basis. Under what license is always the question. I think Oracle, we've had directions from the business side that shipping binaries under the GPL is not something that Oracle wants to see. I haven't asked that question again for a couple of years, but I got a pretty firm answer the first time I asked it. So we've already been thinking that for 10, it would make sense for Oracle to publish nightlies or whatever on a much more frequent automated basis. The Oracle JDK, it's 99% open JDK, right? It's not that different. But it's under the BCL, which some people won't be able to accept. Maybe other organizations can step up and provide binaries under other licensed terms. Doko, did you want to reply to this? OK, so Doko's pointing out that Debian Experimental and Ubuntu's, what was the Ubuntu one? OK, so the current development line in Ubuntu will have open JDK binaries. Are those updated frequently? Mostly weekly. So that's another source. Are these Linux binary source specific to Ubuntu? Yeah, OK. Yeah, so I think you just saw the reason you don't get a nightly binary for open JDK because there are at least five builds that you're talking about. We have another one, maybe I'll be the sixth. And they are nightly available and depends on where. And so everyone's building from source and there is no binary distribution from open JDK that everyone can then unify on. So that is an opportunity the community would like to do by a distribution project. I don't see why that wouldn't be a problem to just build it. But each of the five of the companies still do theirs and we all have separate builds. So I think that's where you're seeing the challenge. And so everyone goes, yeah, there's nightlies. Mine, mine, mine, and mine. Or you guys have the common one. Maybe Doug has a nightly, I don't know. Even Doug is crazy to have a nightly. So I don't know. But there is, because you want to do the work last night and the answer is where. What code did you get? What did the experimental guys have in there? It's kind of a mysterious thing. So maybe there could be a community effort around it. Another bad story. And we have, of course, a bigger problem. We have all sorts of additional code that's not part of the core yet. So hopefully we can fix that, too. So related to this question, you publish not only your Oracle binary builds, but you also publish test results, which is good. But you only publish the results like which of the regression tests read. But you only publish which results pass and which don't pass. And it would be good if you published the exact test details, the files, the JTR files, because I spoke with Roy about this and I just wanted to bring this to your attention.  And the result, it's always OK. So if the test passes, it can mean it wasn't executed. It executed without errors or something in between. So a better publication would be good. There's more details. No, that's a good point. Publishing JTR files, technically, I don't think would be hard. We would probably run a fall of some of the same issues we're having with the experimental submission forests in that we have to scrub test logs for internal host names and other stuff that we're just not allowed to reveal. But maybe we can somehow combine those two efforts and if we have a general test result scrubbing filter, we can use it in both systems. So yeah, it's a good idea. I think we're coming towards the end of our slots and FOSTA and staff are going to get rather impatient with us. So while this is all very interesting, I don't want to stop anybody talking. If there's one more really quick question and then I think we're done. Go on. With additional ports coming into OpenJDK, AR64 and PPC, if there's a security issue to report, there's different owners. Who should I talk to? Okay, so that's actually one of the things that Mark discussed earlier today was the work that we've been doing on proposing an OpenJDK vulnerability group. And I think we're just about there. There's sort of one last detail that I'm trying to get pinned down and worked out. But the intent of that is basically that we have a place where it's very easy for anyone who finds something to come and report an issue so that all of the people who are involved and potentially can help in fixing that issue are able to find out about it and to sort of work with the rest of that group and actually being able to find a solution. And so I think that's kind of how we'll try to work that out and we have a little bit of a sort of guidelines of what people might be people that would join that group and certainly having responsibility for a popular port or something like that would be one of those things. I think another is we've seen this happen fairly often where there's some possibly relatively obscure branch of the class libraries or something where a bug comes up and we really need to be able to find the world's expert on that. And that's not something you want to be doing when there's potentially a zero-day vulnerability happening. So a lot of this is trying to get that all mapped out and sort of work in advance of potential issues coming in so that you're able to act really quickly and we can do that as a community in order to keep all of our users safe. Is that helpful? I had in mind when I said we sometimes move way too slowly if there needs to be lawyers and very careful wording, things just don't go fast and open JDK. Sorry. Yeah, and I think Doug's right about that. What I will say for this particular area is that one of the things that's contributed to it is the need to have lawyers from multiple parties kind of review it in the interest of trying to make it as good and tied in agreement as it can be, but also I think because we actually do have something that works today. It works non-optimally and it's mostly non-optimal for Oracle because at the end of the day, we end up actually often having to have discussions with multiple parties one-on-one, which really should be everyone getting together in a room and discussing. So it ends up being far more difficult and expensive for us than certainly I would like it to be. And so that's one of the reasons we've been pushing for this, but it's taken a while and Doug's completely right on that one. I think in the meantime, what I can say is we have seen situations where people are unsure of where to report a bug and then typically what happens is one of two things. If they're smart, hopefully they figure out where they got to build from and they report it to whoever that is, if it's Oracle, if it's IBM, if it's Red Hat or Azure or whomever. And then I think those folks try to deal with those responsibly as they can. In some cases, we've sort of seen people scratching their heads and then posting details of a potential security vulnerability on public mailing lists, which is not a good idea. Don't do that, please. While people want to hear about the issues and try to fix them, we don't want all of the details of those publicly known because the bad guys are looking too. So what I would say for right now is I think the best thing for people to do is try to report it to the people that they got a binary from. And I know if you're in the business of doing that, it's a good idea where you have downloads to also have information about how to report issues and how in particular to treat security issues. Another way of saying that is even though we do not have good rules in place, we have some good people in place and things are not as bad as they could be. Yeah, things are not as bad as they could be. And I think that is a really excellent time to end this session. Thanks, Doug. All right, Doug. We'll talk to you soon. Take care. All right. Cheers.


Russian commanders mock foreign mercenaries and send them to certain death. The famous Serbian war criminal Dejan Berik, who in 2014 helped the Russians occupy the Crimea and then was a sniper in the Donbas, became the cause of a huge scandal in the Russian Federation. He said that Russian commanders mock foreign mercenaries and send them to certain death. However, this situation is not limited to the Serbs. Now, citizens of Nepal, Syria, Cuba and other countries are being massively recruited into the ranks of the occupation army and they are being disposed of in Ukraine without regret, writes oboes.ua. The Russian army is rocked by scandals day after day. This time, Serbian mercenaries rebelled. They reported a beastial attitude on the part of the Russian command and, in particular, the officers of the 119th Parachute Regiment of the Russian Armed Forces. The mercenaries fighting against the Ukrainians suddenly realized that they were being used as cannon fodder. It all started with the fact that before the battle, the Serbs were given two to three machine gun horns. The Serbs, who refused to go into battle, were accused of treason, beaten, expelled from dugouts and deprived of access to the kitchen. The Serbs agreed with Kadyrov's men that they would take them in, but in the end, the transition never took place. The Serbs, of course, cannot return to their homeland. They face prison for mercenarism. However, more and more often foreigners who previously believed the promises are fleeing from the Russian army. So now, Tahr Nikolos Jackson, who serves under a contract in the 27th Separate Guards, Sevastopol Motorized Rifle Brigade, is on the wanted list in Russia. The military unit is located in the village of Mosrentgen, near Moscow. The brigade is part of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the Western Military District, which is participating in the war against Ukraine. The orientation states that the serviceman left his place of duty without permission and is capable of deception. A reward is promised for his capture. According to the Ukrainian Center for National Resistance, the Russians are now intensively looking for mercenaries in Africa to participate in the criminal war.