Welcome to this session on Kubernetes Manifest Lifecycle, what it is and how to get it right. I am your host, I am Oli Lansmar, CTO at KubeShop.io. I have a background in open source and a bunch of things over many years. And I'm gonna talk to you about manifests. As I'm sure you're familiar, Kubernetes is very much focused around manifests or YAML configuration files, as you might know them. Gonna talk about the lifecycle of manifests. I'm gonna talk about templating manifests. I'm gonna talk about some tooling, some best practices. Obviously love to answer any questions at the end. I'm gonna do a little bit of a demo as well. This is a pretty high level talk. So if you're already deep entrenched, hopefully there's some new things in here for you. But if you're relatively new to Kubernetes, I hope you'll learn a bunch of new things and find some new ways to think around manifests and related workflows. So first of all, just jumping straight in, what are Kubernetes manifests? If you wanna break it down, manifests are specifications of Kubernetes objects in JSON or YAML format. I'm sure you've all seen those YAML files that kind of describe an object that Kubernetes is going to manage for you once you deploy your manifest. The manifests are, usually it's one object defined per manifest file, but you can define as many objects as you want in your manifest files. And once you have your files, you can manage those obviously, and then you apply them to Kubernetes and Kubernetes will then try to create objects in your cluster corresponding to the configuration in the manifest file itself. Just basic manifest structure. I'm gonna look at YAML here throughout the presentation. Every manifest has an API version and a kind at the top, which specifies which kind of object you're gonna create in this example, the service. The version of the service is V1. Also a name is usually something that's required for manifests, although there are some exceptions. Namespace is definitely something that is optional. This is something used to tell Kubernetes in which namespace you want to create this object. And then maybe most important of all is the content related to the actual object that you're creating. And of course, this will vary depending on the type of object. So in this example, I am creating a service and the content of the manifest is the specification with ports, et cetera. This can, of course, be much more lengthy and complicated. This is just a simple example. Important to understand about versioning and schemas. As I said, the API version and kind to tell which schema and manifest you're about to use. And the schema itself then defines which properties and arrays and types and enumerations, everything that you can use to define the state of the object that you're trying to create. And these schemas are defined using JSON schema and OpenAPI. There's some limitations around what you can do. This is all, of course, documented on Kubernetes.io. Important here is not to confuse this version with the actual version of Kubernetes. So if you're running Kubernetes version 1.24, which I think is the latest for now, this supports both versions V1 and V1 beta one of the Chrome job kind. So if we go back here, you say I have a service here, API version V1, your Kubernetes version might support V1 and maybe an older version, but that does not really relate to the version of Kubernetes itself. And you'll have to keep an eye on the Kubernetes change logs to see which versions of API objects or manifests that it supports. For example, if I had a Chrome job that was using older schema, the V1 beta one, that will be removed in Kubernetes 1.25. So something to keep an eye on. And of course, if you're creating new manifests, always try to use the latest version. But with the caveat, make sure that that's actually the version that you're deploying to. So if you're deploying to GKE or Amazon or whatever, make sure that the target Kubernetes version there supports the version of the manifest, the objects that you're trying to create. Okay, moving, rushing forward. Next thing to be aware of is that manifests pretty often refer to each other, right? So an object in Kubernetes does rarely live entirely on its own. So there's plenty of references in objects to other objects. So just a couple of examples here. Some references are purely name-based. So for example, this is a config map ref inside a deployment and it refers to a name, config map with this name here. The specific case, it's actually an optional ref. You can see optional is true. Other very common types of refs are what's called label-based selectors. So here, for example, we have a service which applies to objects or pods that have labels, annotations with this property name and this value. So it's a way of selecting which other objects this service applies to. And finally, more complex object references are also common for you. So here you can see this is a role binding which refers to a role by not just the name, but also the kind of object it's referring to and the API group it's referring to. And these refs can be pretty complex. And this is important to know, obviously, when you're creating your manifests and you're referring to other objects to get these right because if you try to deploy these manifests and your references are wrong, they're not going to work or they might not work at least as expected. So good to keep an eye on. One thing that Kubernetes adds to your manifests once you've deployed them is a status section. Usually, well, at the end of the YAML file. And the status kind of tells you the current actual state of the object. And I'm gonna show you an example a little later on. But so if you, the status is not something you add yourself but when you deployed your manifest and you can look at your manifest running in the cluster you'll see information on the status of the object. This will vary depending on the type of object depending on kind of the life cycle, the object itself goes through what kind of states or changes or metadata that Kubernetes and corresponding components can provide for this object. But something obviously good to know that if you're creating a manifest, your status is not something you're expected to add by yourself, it's always added by Kubernetes itself. So speaking of the life cycle, let's take a little bit of a step back. We've talked about very high level aspects of Kubernetes manifests, but let's have a look at the life cycle itself of a manifest.  I'll get back to that a little bit later. One thing super important when you're working with manifest is to validate them. And I'll talk more about validation and different types of validations in just a second.  And what that really means is that you're taking your YAML file or JSON and uploading it to Kubernetes and telling Kubernetes, hey, this is, I've described my object here, I want you to create an object in the cluster corresponding to my manifest. And what Kubernetes is gonna do is gonna take your manifest, store it in at CD, and then using its components, try to create an object corresponding to the description in your manifest. That object will then go through a whole life cycle of its own and that life cycle vary depending on the type of objects. I'm not gonna drill into that here. You say that there's a corresponding YAML is stored in Kubernetes. This is something you can debug and troubleshoot. If your object is not working as you might want, you'd be looking at the YAML manifest deployed and the status that I talked about earlier, you might do some hot fixes directly in your cluster to see if that helps. Or if you're more process oriented, you might actually make changes, go back here, make changes, validate them, apply them, and then see, go through this loop until you've hopefully got your object in a state that is what you desired. And at the end of the day or the week or the month or the year, you delete the object and it'll be gone from your cluster. So very high level life cycle for your manifests both outside your cluster as files but then also inside your cluster stored inside Kubernetes. So let's just have a quick look at these steps. I think creating an editing manifest is something that's pretty straightforward. You'd use your IDE to create maybe a manifest, maybe you'd copy paste from another manifest that you find online or that you use as a blueprint or many IDs have plugins to help you with snippets or templates. To get started, another way to create your manifest is to use kubectl which is the command line tool included with Kubernetes. And it has some commands that will just, by just generate vanilla manifests for you that you can then work off. I'm gonna show this a little bit later on in demo as well. Other ways is of course you could connect to your cluster and extract manifests from there and use them as blueprints. But ultimately, these are text files that you would work with in your IDs or your code editors. Once you've worked with it, let's look at validation. And validation is a super important part of manifests actually, it's something that's often overlooked. I think what many people kind of do by default is of course syntax validation. Oops, sorry about that. Making sure that the YAML syntax is correct and your editor is definitely gonna do that for you. The next thing you wanna do is schema validation. So make sure that all the properties and values are in line with the target schema for the object that you're trying to create. We talked about this earlier in the here. Of course it's important to once again know which Kubernetes version are you targeting and are you using the right version of the kind of object you're trying to create and then are all the properties and values, et cetera, compliant with the schema for that object. And usually IDs will help you here. For example, here I see an error because I made a deliberate spelling mistake. It said names here, but it should be name and it's complaining that the volumes is missing a name. Next step of validation is reference validation. This is we talked about links to other objects. And here we can see we have two links referring to config maps. And this is referring, here's a link to secret which doesn't exist in my manifest or any of my other local manifests which is in this case marked as an error. It's also set optional false. If it was optional true, then this would pass because it's not a required reference. This can be tricky because sometimes the objects you're referring to are not in your local manifest. They are already running in your cluster. So when if you use a tool to validate references or links and they tell you, hey, you're trying to refer to an object that doesn't exist in your local manifests, those objects might still actually exist in your cluster. So this might work well when you deploy. So it's something to be aware of that even if the local validation fails, it might actually work in your cluster. So you'll have to kind of check that or use a tool that'll actually validate references against your cluster as well and not just within the local files that you're working with. And finally, I think maybe the most important or, well, definitely something not to forget especially when you're moving into production is policy validations. And policies are something you can define in regard to a couple of aspects. So one is more local policies in the sense that you might have policies that are naming around labels, around annotations, namespaces, et cetera, things that are specific to your project or your team. Other policies are maybe around performance or security.  So definitely urge you to look at tools that do this for you. Of course, for all of these validations, there's plenty of open source tools that will help you get this right. I'll mention a couple at the end and they're easy to integrate and to use. So it's definitely something you should be doing and discussing, of course, within your team if you're working with others, which policies are important to us, discuss with your DevOps and the people who manage your infrastructure. This is maybe something they would be more concerned about as they put manifests and applications into production environments. Okay, moving ahead, I've created my manifests. I've validated them, they're all green. I've fixed all security issues. Next thing is I have to actually deploy my manifest to my cluster. And this is straightforward using KubeCuttleApply, using tools like Helen and Customize or others. They will provide you with commands to deploy the manifest that you're using to your cluster. That works really well in the local development workflow. Eventually though, you're gonna wanna automate the deployment using CICD. And if you're adventurous or if you're scaling up you might be looking into adopting something called GitOps, which is pretty popular now. You've surely heard of tools like Argo CD and Flex that can promote a GitOps workflow. What GitOps boils down to is not that complicated. What it basically means is that you're managing all the state of your cluster, meaning all the manifests and infrastructures code and configuration management in Git. As you probably do already. And then you're using a tool to automatically synchronize those manifests with that source of truth for your cluster into your cluster itself. So all the changes you make, you just push to Git to your configuration. And then the tool or your CID system will make sure that your target cluster is actually has the same state as the state you're describing in Git. And there's a lot of advantages here. First of all, you have a record of state of your cluster. You can always recreate your clusters because nobody else is gonna go take backdoors to configure your clusters, hopefully. You can audit logs, you have a level of security and access control to who can change what when it comes to working configurations in your cluster. And there's a lot of great tools to help you establish these workflows and manage the reconciliation of what you're describing in your cluster in Git. Oh, sorry, what you're having Git with what you're actually running inside of cluster. Okay, now that was a really quick overview of kind of a basic lifecycle of manifests. I'm gonna do a really short demo of some of these things. I'm gonna use a cube cuddle and a tool called monocle, all free and open source. And I am handing it over to myself. Good luck, Ole. Okay, thank you so much, Ole. So I'm just gonna do a really quick demo of lifecycle from creation to deploy. So I'm gonna start here in my command prompt and run a command to create a deployment. And this is the same command that you saw in the presentation earlier. So I'm using cube cuddle and it's gonna create a deployment for you.  And this is the deployment that was just created, just how to quickly look at that here to the right. So as you can see, well, I'm trying to resize. This was the YAML that was created by cube cuddle. You can immediately see that there are some things that aren't in line with the schema. These are marked as errors. And I'm gonna actually just delete those because I don't like these errors. You also see that it actually creates the status property, which it shouldn't, I'm gonna remove that. So for now, everything seems good from a validation point of view. I am going to enable validations of policies just to kind of show you what that can look like. So I've now done that. And now you can see that the default YAML created here by cube cuddle does actually violate a bunch of policies related to security and performance. And I'm just gonna find one of them in this list of policy. This one is called, let's disable all, let's enable this one. So this policy is related to that you should specify a specific version of which images you're using. So if you don't specify a version, Kubernetes will use the latest version. And this is a security, potential security issue because you might not know what the latest version contains. So we should be here more specific. So let's write the actual version that we wanna use. And as you can see now, this error now went away. And now I've created my manifest. I've edited it here. I've validated it with policies. I ignored some of them. And now I am ready to deploy. So I'll just press the deploy button here. And I'm gonna just deploy this in my local Minicube cluster and it's done that right now. And let's just connect to Minicube just so we can see what's been created there. We can close this thing to the left. Here we can see the actual deployment. So this was the object that I applied to Kubernetes. And now you can see that Kubernetes has added a status property to it.  Kubernetes will add these for you. And it's also created the actual Nginx pod for me. You can look it here. I can see the status that it's up and running and everything is all good. So now let's just end this whole thing by deleting the object, deleting the deployment from my cluster. And now it's gone. And if I reload, you'll also see that the Nginx pod has been removed from my cluster. So we went through the entire life cycle in just a couple of minutes, three and a half minutes as I can see. Back to you Ole. Awesome. Thank you so much for that demo, Ole. Now I'm gonna go back and look at a little bit more advanced concepts related to manifests. One thing is around templating. This is something you'll pretty quickly run into. Basically, let's say you have a set of manifests that you're deploying to different environments, dev stage prod, but you see that there are some differences, right? You might have different resource limits. You might have different network settings. You might have different namespaces as you deploy these manifests, but a lot of the other things and settings or properties in your manifests are the same. So you want some way to kind of have a core set of manifests and then modify these just in line with some needs or some changes you might wanna make across your environments. And there's a couple of different approaches to this. I'm gonna look at two of them. One is customized, which uses a YAML native approach in Helm, which is not YAML native, but nonetheless popular and great, just to kind of give you a high level of view of your options. There are other alternatives as always in this world, something called CDKs or Decrate. You can generate your manifests from code. So if you prefer the right code and don't wanna write YAML, there's a lot of great tools out there to help you do that and adopt that approach. It's not something I'm gonna touch on here, but it definitely something might be worth exploring, so that's kind of in line with how you wanna do things. Let's start with customize. Customize is Kubernetes native configuration management. You can go to customize.io. I think the big advantage of customize is two fold. One is that it uses YAML for templating, so it doesn't introduce another templating language or format and it's also built into Kube-Cuttle, so it's pretty native to the Kubernetes ecosystem. What it basically does is that you have your base manifests as I was showing in this previous slide here, and then you provide what manifest called overlays or patches which then customize applies to these files to generate your final manifests. So these overlays and patches would modify your base manifests as needed. They might set a certain namespace or change some properties or whatever you might wanna do specific to a target environment. Just looking at a common file structure is that you would have a base folder where you have your base manifests and then you would manifest called overlays. Here's a dev and production folder which each has a overlays for different replica counts and then the actual customization YAML file which kind of tells customize how to overlay these files onto the base configuration file or manifest. I'm gonna show you a very quick demo of this. So this is one way of working. The other one is using Helm. Helm has a huge following, it has a slightly different approach.  And Helm charts are parameterized using values files which are YAML files which can provide any properties as input that these templates use. And these Helm charts are usually distributed through Helm repositories. You can go online, there's an artifact tree I think is a big one where you can find Helm charts for most of the common applications, everything from Minecraft to MySQL have Helm chart so it's really easy to deploy them into your cluster. Ultimately Helm takes these templates, takes the configuration files, process disease and creates manifests, plain manifests as output and that's what you then apply to your cluster. Just a quick look at the file structure of a Helm chart. You have a chart YAML file which is the metadata file for your chart, licenses, et cetera. I think the important thing is the templates folder where you have your actual templates. As I said, these are go templates but they could also actually be vanilla manifests that don't do any interpolation of configuration values. Once again, I'm gonna show you a quick example for the download. Ultimately, customized in Helm are tools that kind of saw the same thing but you can really, something that is more increasingly common is to use these two together. So they're not inherently opposed to each other and a common approach is to use Helm for packaging your applications and providing configuration that's specific to the application itself. So if you're building an application internally, you'd package all your components that you wanna deploy into Kubernetes in your Helm chart and you'd add configuration values related to the application itself and then once you've used your Helm chart to create that, you can then, your DevOps team, your SREs can then use customized to overlay any configurations that are specific to the infrastructure which you wouldn't be aware of when you're building the Helm chart. So this is actually a really nice approach. So as the application developer, you create your Helm chart and make sure that that has a nice self-contained packaging and then once this gets deployed, your infrastructure team can use customized to set security settings or work with secrets or network configurations, et cetera, that would ultimately fit this application into the infrastructure. If we're thinking again about the lifecycle, how does this kind of fit in? And if you remember, initially I had a preview step and this is in the lifecycle and this is super important, I think, is that when you're using customized or Helm or any other tools is that you, before you apply them, that you preview the output of those tools and then validate that output. So similar to the validations that we talked about earlier, that you run policy, specifically policy validations and maybe link reference validations against what customized or Helm creates for you before you deploy that to your cluster. And this is pretty common if you, that you'll find maybe policies specifically around security issues in these manifests that are generated for common tools. And this is just because the teams that create those tools don't really know what your policy or security requirements are. This is the nice part where your infrastructure team can then take that output from Helm or customize and then further customize it and add the security settings, et cetera. So just going back here to kind of put that into context, so you'd create your manifests before and you'd work with your templates and then you would preview the output of the templating engine that you're using, you'd validate that output and then you would apply it instead of blindly asking Helm or customized to deploy to your cluster, which is the common approach and I'm sure it'll work in most of the times, but especially if you're looking into production, deploying into production, adding that additional validation step can be a huge life time saver when it comes to debugging. Okay, I'm going to hand it over to myself again for a short demo, this time with customize and also a little bit of Helm. And I will be back. Good luck with the demo, Olle. Thank you, Olle. Just a really quick demo of customize and Helm. So I've opened a customization here from the customize examples of repository or folder in the customized repository. And this is an LDAP server. You can see here to the left, the base folder, containing some basic manifests, deployment, a service and then you can see overlays for production and staging. So if we look in here, you can see that the production has an overlay for the deployment and staging also has a different overlay where there's different replica setting. And so what's interesting for me to do here is for example, if I want to see what would I actually be deploying in production, I can use this preview functionality here and now I can see the actual objects generated by customize so I can see the deployment, a config map that was generated and service. I can also see these links here between the objects that are referred to each other and I'm not getting any errors or anything like that. As before, I can turn on OPA validation and here I am going to see a bunch of errors once again related to security policies that aren't set in these manifests. So that might be a good cue for me to fix those before I deploy anything, but let's disable those and go back here. So that was a really, really quick view of customize and let's just have really quick view of Helm as well. We're gonna look at a Hello World Helm chart in Amazon's example repository. So let's go over here. Here's the actual chart YAML file. You see there's not very much there. There's one template, so there's only one template file in this Helm chart and you can see here that it uses kind of the go template syntax to pull values from a values file that's specified here which has some custom properties and I'm gonna do the same thing here, use this preview button to see the objects that Helm would generate if I around use this Helm chart. So here I can see that using Helm with this template, with this values file would have generated these two manifests or these two objects, this deployment and the service. You can see once again, no errors, everything lines up neatly when it comes to links, et cetera. Just for the fun of it, I'm gonna enable the OPA policies and once again you're gonna see security and performance related warnings which I should probably fix if I wanted to deploy this into production, but of course as for learning purposes, these are something that I can blissfully ignore. Okay, that was a super quick demo of templating and what that could look like with both Customize and Helm. And now back to you Ole, thank you. Awesome, thank you so much. Hope that gives you a little bit of insight into how Customize and Helm work. Let's just wrap up about tooling. We talked about, hope this isn't too confusing. So we have the lifecycle steps here and here we have a different types of tools. So CubeCuddle is great for creating and applying objects. I think the common or the knee-jerk reaction would be to use your IDE and IDs are great for editing obviously, but usually they rely on plugins for many of the other features. Some of those plugins might be bundled, some of them might be third party. The risk here is of course that the plugins themselves aren't very aligned and maybe not well integrated, so you'll have to kind of figure that out and choose and install and learn each plugin and see how you can get them to provide you with a nice workflow. Validation tools, there's Trivi, Cubescape, CubeVal, there's Nameit, if you Google it, you'll find many, many obviously apply to the validation phase and some of them provide plugins for your IDs as well. So it can easily be integrated there. Talked about Helm and Customize, obviously for creating, previewing, applying, not for editing, that's where you would use your IDs.  These tools are great for working with manifests once they have been deployed in your cluster. They're not huge on the earlier phases when it comes to working with files. Some of them might have the ability to apply, but so there should probably be next year, but they are very much focused on working with your cluster, which is great and they're great at that. And then finally, there are a couple of specialty tools out there claiming to be like Kubernetes IDs, basically the goal of these is to really provide an integrated workflow for what I've been talking about, right? So instead of you having to pick and match plugins and trying to get those work together, tools like Monaco will kind of provide an integrated and hopefully more productive experience. Usually they are still built on the same validation tools in Helm and Customize. So it's more of providing an UI and workflow on top of tools that are already out there. So usually I think you would start with KubeCuttle, maybe your IDE, you'd throw in a validation tool, you'd start using Helm and Customize and maybe use a cluster tool and then you'd have kind of this mishmash of tools that work well together. And then as you move forward, you might be saying, I don't have the energy or time to always keep all of these different things up to date. To date, how about giving these kind of tools a try that just makes you more productive right from the start? But obviously it's up to you. I'll have our preferences there. So finally, best practices. Understanding manifests in your lifecycle is important. Use the latest stable API version. Mention this for your manifests. Keep your manifests simple. Don't overly specify default values. This could be a security risk. The easier they are to read, the easier it will be for others to manage them. Use templating systems. Use them wisely and what I mean there is don't throw yourself into complex Helm or Customize setups until you actually need them. Try to keep it simple as always good, at least initially. Validation is super important and try to automate that if as much as you can. Use tools like the ones I've mentioned for validating and automating the validation of your manifests before you deploy them to your cluster. They spend so much time debugging things in your cluster, hours of why is this not working when just a simple validation pre-deployment would have figured out that you spelled this name wrong and you're referring to a config map that doesn't exist or something like that. And then finally, I did mention GitOps. GitOps is awesome and it's a fantastic approach to managing cluster state. It is though something that's pretty complex and it requires kind of buy-in from your entire team. It's not something that one person can do and then the rest can do work as just more manually. It's something that your whole team adopts and there are workflows related to that. So make sure everyone understands that and kind of aligns with the benefits and then before you adopt GitOps work for them. And that's it. I hope that was somewhat insightful. Happy to stick around and answer some questions. You can always reach me at oley at kubeshop.io. Thank you so much for listening and have a great conference. Goodbye, everyone.


No, I would launch some bays and let the guys kind of get used to the new boats pushing them around first and then we'll start building Right now we've got our our new mark 30s in the water The tricky part of driving one of our boats is catching the bays when they come out of the water a Lot of our environments that we're breeding on you You've got seconds to grab a bay before current rips it downstream somewhere and out of your control To me having this MOS is is actually open job opportunities for those soldiers Because they they can go on the state active duty bridging missions


It's such a beautiful day to be outside in the woods. Oh my God.  A plane? All right guys, welcome back to another smartphone gimbal review. You are probably asking yourself if you even need a smartphone gimbal when using the iPhone 13 Pro Max. Now I'm going to be straightforward with you. The iPhone 13 Pro Max has great censorship stabilization. You can create some smooth looking handheld shots but when it comes to longer complex movements nothing beats a good gimbal. It not only makes it very easy to get these creative shots but each gimbal comes with their own unique features and my job, you know my job man is to help you find the right one. I believe that every smartphone filmmaker should have a gimbal for their phone since there are small, portable and inexpensive compared to larger gimbals. In today's video I'll be reviewing the DJI OM5 and show you how to set it up with the iPhone 13 Pro Max to get you started shooting great looking videos. Specifically, I will give you a quick overview of the gimbal. Talk about the build and design. Show you how to mount and balance the gimbal. Introduce you to the basic button functions, shooting and operating modes. I'm also gonna walk you through the DJI Mimo app and give you the best camera settings for shooting high quality video. Talk about some of the specific features the app offers and the behind the scenes of how I use the gimbal in action. And finally, the price and my final thoughts to it.   Keep in mind that there will be a timestamp below if you wanna skip or go back to a particular part in the video. With that said, let's get started. So we're gonna start with the quick overview of the DJI OM5. On the top you have the famous magnetic phone clamp which I personally love. To the side you have an M3 0.5 screw hole to add counterweights when using add-on lenses. You have the pan tilt and roll motor for all three axis stabilization. A built-in extension rod and looking at the controls you have a joystick, a shutter record button, a switch button, below is the battery indicator which also functions as a system status indicator. To the left you have the M button, the zoom slider. On the opposite side you have the USB-C charging port. On the grip you have the trigger button and to the very bottom a one quarter screw hole to mount the included tripod. As you can see the buttons are well placed allowing you to use the controls with one hand. So let's move on to the built-in design. There have been some significant improvements compared to its predecessor, the DJI OM4. I like how they kept the magnetic clamp that allows for a quick setup. It is 100 grams lighter and about 30 percent smaller when folding the OM5 for easier storage. When folding the gimbal you will have to remove the magnetic clamp but I have it attached on my phone most of the time anyways. So the gimbal is strong enough and has a max payload of up to 290 grams. It can easily handle the iPhone 13 Pro Max which weighs around 240 grams. The biggest change we see is the built-in extension rod that works like a selfie stick. It extends as far as 21.5 centimeters which is a good distance for those that want to vlog and have more in the frame but also for getting unique shots which we will be looking at later. The included tripod is great to place it on a flat surface to record time-lapse. The gimbal feels high quality and is very well built. I do like the round shape of the grip which kind of reminds me of the OM5 can operate up to six hours under ideal conditions with the gimbal fully balanced. Now let me show you how to mount and balance your phone with the OM5. To unfold the gimbal rotate the pen and tilt axis clockwise as indicated to unlock it. Then unfold the gimbal as shown. Attach the magnetic phone clamp in the center of the phone. Make sure that the camera mark is pointed towards the camera of your phone. To attach your phone with the DJI OM5 align the marks on the phone clamp and the mounting plate. So the magnets will hold the phone and the gimbal together. It's super strong so you don't have to worry about your phone falling off the gimbal. To power the gimbal just press hold the M button and you're ready to rumble my friend.  Most of the gimbals work similarly. The DJI OM5 just has a few buttons which makes it easy to use. Let's look at what the M button does. When the gimbal is turned off you can check the battery level by pressing the M button once. To power the gimbal press hold the M button. When the gimbal is on you can press the M button once to switch between the photo or a video mode in the DJI MIMO app. You can put your gimbal into standby mode by pressing the M button twice. This way you can save battery and to exit this mode just press any other button. To start and stop recording press the shutter record button once. This also works with the native camera app and Filmic Pro. Pressing the switch button once will change between the front and back camera when using the DJI MIMO app. Pressing the switch button twice will switch the phone between landscape and portrait mode. So this also works regardless of what camera app you are using. By the way you can also adjust the phone by hand if needed which I find super awesome. Now you can use the joystick to move and control the direction of the camera. The zoom slider can be used to obviously zoom in and out but this only works when using the DJI MIMO app. When pressing the trigger button once you can activate or stop active track which also requires the DJI MIMO app. Pressing the trigger button twice will re-center the gimbal. All right, we made it till here. Let's continue. So when shooting videos with your gimbal it can be helpful to know the different shooting modes and operating modes to get the shots you need. A lot of camera moves can be done handheld but it takes a lot of practice and you are more likely to have camera shakes in your video, you don't want that. Especially when the camera movement is complex with the gimbal it makes it much easier because you can use these modes and shoot more creatively. So first we have the follow and FPV mode. By pressing the M button four times you can switch between FPV and follow mode. By default when turning the OM5 on it is set to follow mode. I use this mode most of the time because that allows me to create smooth pan and tilt shots that look natural in my video. When switching to FPV all motors are unlocked and you can use this mode to record action-filled moments. Then there is the tilt lock which only the pan access follows. This is great for recording forward or backward motion where the subject is walking for example ensuring that the composition stays the same. Then to enter all lock mode press hold the trigger button. In this mode the gimbal will not follow your hand movement. This mode is perfect for maintaining a straight shot while walking forward or backward. Next is sport mode. Pressing the trigger button twice and holding it will enable it. You will notice that the follow speed of the gimbal increases which is great for capturing quick movement. Finally we have the spin shot where you can use the joystick to rotate the phone to create an inception effect. I made a dedicated video about it using the OM4 but it will also work with the OM5. If you wanna check it out make sure to head over to this link. All right guys, let's move on to the operating modes. Here I will show you the different techniques and how you can use the gimbal for your creative shots. So there is the upright mode which you will be using most of the time to create your camera movements. If you want to learn more about camera movements I also have a video on that which you can check out up here. Then you can enter underslung mode by placing the gimbal upside down. You will notice that the phone rotates so that the motors don't block the frame. This mode is great to shoot from a lower angle. Then by simply rotating the gimbal 90 degree you will enter side grip mode which can be useful for creating a slide shot. Last you can use the built in extension rod and adjust the angle to get into low position mode which you can also use to shoot from a lower angle. So these were the four main operating modes tried to be creative when using these modes as there are many camera movements you can do with it. So if you want to access all of DJI OM5's feature then it's best to use the DJI Mimo app. As I say in all my videos I personally like to use the native or filmic pro app as I'm most familiar with these and I don't necessarily need those features. Now make sure to download the DJI Mimo app and have Bluetooth enabled so that you can connect the gimbal with your phone. Make sure to use the DJI Mimo app to update the gimbal to its latest firmware. All right, so let's open up the DJI Mimo app and it's gonna automatically connect with the app. So this is the interface of the DJI Mimo app. On the top left hand corner you can head back to the home to select your device to hit that camera icon. And right now everything is set to auto but if you wanna have full control over your camera it's best to use the manual settings. So instead of auto you're gonna press the M button and in here you can dial your camera settings. So ISO I usually keep as low as possible at 100. And when I set it that way it's gonna be locked. So no changes occur during the shoot and I'm gonna set my shutter speed double my frame rate. So because I know I'm gonna shoot 4K 60 frames per second I'm gonna set it to one over 20. This way I will have that natural motion blur. Now if you're filming in bright conditions then you obviously have to crank up the shutter speed or use an ND filter to maintain that natural motion blur. Then you have exposure value. We're gonna leave it how it is. Then below you have your resolution and frame rate. So I'm gonna set it to 4K and the frame rate is 60 frames per second. And 4K just has more detail and 60 frames per second allows me to slow the footage down later. Now below you have some beauty filter options. I personally don't use this feature. And then the three dots at the bottom left in here you have additional settings. So you can enable flash if you want to. The white balance very important. I don't recommend setting to auto otherwise your colors will shift during the shoot. So I prefer to set my white balance using the presets or custom. So right now it's set to 4800 Kelvin which is about right. Then below we have additional gimbal settings. I always have this gimbal set to follow mode but if you want to you can change the different gimbal modes. You also have the follow speed. I keep that in medium. I find it works for me really good. Then if you need to calibrate your gimbal just hit the calibrate button. Also the horizontal gimbal adjustment if you find the gimbal is not leveled you can adjust it manually in the settings. But I would always first check if you balanced your gimbal correctly. So I'm gonna adjust it to make it horizontal. It's a little bit off because my tripod is not leveled. Then you can also use the M button to switch between photo and video mode. Now I personally like to use the M button to open up the quick menu. This way I can head back to the DJI Mimo app quickly select my video shooting mode and then use the native camera app or Filmic Pro to shoot in that mode. If I press M for example, I'm now in the quick menu and I can quickly change between these gimbal modes. Now the control speed I set to slow especially when using the spin shot I don't want it to spin it quick. This way the camera will move more smoothly which is important when creating smooth camera movements. So to the very right you have different shooting modes. You've got video, photo, panoramic. You've got also dynamic zoom which allows you to create that vertigo effect. Now in the time lapse mode you can also create a moving time lapse if you want to. Hyperlapse is also a great feature that I like to use especially with the tracking feature. This way I can track an object and just move the gimbal and the gimbal will keep that object centered. Now you also have story mode which are video templates which will help you make the video. So all you have to do is follow the instruction and to the upper left you have a video tutorial that you can follow and it will sort of create the video for you. Now to the upper right you have different symbols indicating the battery life of the gimbal and of the phone and also the current shooting mode you're in. Top right you can switch between the front and selfie camera which is great. So let me show you how to use gesture control. I'm gonna select the hand icon, enable it and I'm also gonna select follow shoot and this will also activate the tracking feature. So when I do the peace sign it's gonna track my face and start recording which is great for vloggers. And when I put my hands up it's gonna stop the recording. So this is pretty cool. Now you can also activate smart tracking by pressing the trigger button once and it will detect my face and follow it wherever I go and it does a pretty good job at doing it. Now what you also could do is use your fingers to track an object or a person. So as you can see by drawing a line on my face it detects me and follows me. Now if you don't wanna use the manual controls you can also go with auto but I suggest you lock your exposure and to do that you can just tap hold on the screen. As you can see a box appears with the lock sign which means the exposure is locked and I can also drag down with my fingers to lower the exposure which I recommend doing because the iPhone tends to overexpose the image most of the time. So the gimbal is priced at $170 which is one of the pricier gimbals but considering the built in extension pole the magnetic clamp system and the overall performance makes it worth purchasing. Now vloggers will like this gimbal just because you have more range when extending the pole this way you will fit more into the frame and combining it with the tracking feature on the DJI Mimo app makes it convenient to vlog. Now with the extension pole you also have more reach and can be more creative when you're shooting. Now I personally enjoyed using the DJI OM5 and this is certainly a gimbal that I will bring with me along the way. So guys let me know what you think of the DJI OM5 is not the gimbal you have been waiting for let me know in the comment section below. Now if you're new to my channel make sure to subscribe as this will help the both of us. Now if you're not part of the private smart phone filmmaking group make sure to join as you can share your work with others and get feedback. Now before I end this video I never really had the chance to thank you as a loyal subscriber. You may have noticed that we have reached 100,000 subscribers guys and I'm just blown away by it. And it truly feels amazing. I'm actually planning a special video not sure when but hopefully soon. Now by the time this video is online I'm probably on vacation for two weeks. Now I will be taking a break which means I won't be uploading a video next week. Oh my God. But I think it's important this way I can refill my creative energy again and provide you guys with valuable content again. Once again folks I'll keep you updated stay safe and by the way I'll be leaving for Tenerife. It's gonna be awesome. So you guys take care and I will see you the next time.


Hello everybody! Watch this video to find out how to recover data from the hard disk of a virtualbox virtual machine. How to create such a virtual machine, take a snapshot and revert the machine to that snapshot. Virtualbox offers you a free and easy way to create a virtual machine and run Windows, Linux or any other operating system, along with your main operating system, without having to use any extra hardware or equipment. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to create such a virtual machine in Windows, how to take snapshots and how to restore its previous state if something goes wrong. Also, you'll learn how to recover data if restoring the operating system didn't go as planned or if the virtual machine refuses to boot. You will be able to recover accidentally deleted virtual disk files, VDI or snapshot files. A VDI – virtualbox disk image – file works just as if it was a physical hard disk and it can store your data just as well. When several operating systems are installed on a single PC, the program will create a VDI file for each virtual machine, as well as additional files when snapshots are taken or when additional virtual disks are connected. This aspect should be taken into account in case of recovery. To create a virtual machine, you need to install virtualbox and find an ISO image of the operating system which you are going to use. For starters, open virtualbox. In the Programs window, click Machine – New. In the Next window, specify the virtual machine name and operating system type. If necessary, you can modify the folder where the virtual machine should be stored. And click Next. Now choose the amount of RAM. It should be at least half of the system memory installed on this computer. Next. In the following window, choose the option to create a new virtual hard disk and click Create. If you'd like to open a virtual disk that already exists, choose the last option. Now specify the disk type – VDI, VHD, VMDK. If you don't need to use the disk with other virtualization software, leave this setting without changes and click Next. If you access the Expert mode, more disk types will appear – HDD, QCOW, QED. At the next stage, choose the storage type – dynamically allocated or fixed size. Set the size of the virtual disk and click Create. After that, you will see the program's main window. Right-click on the machine and open its settings. Jump to the tab System – Processor and increase the number of allocated cores. Then open Storage, click on the disk icon, go to the tab Attributes and select the option Choose a disk file. Give the pass to the ISO image of Windows 10. Okay. After that, run the virtual machine by clicking on the green arrow-shaped start button. When it starts, the installation of the operating system begins just as if it was a conventional PC. When it's over, you'll be able to use the virtual machine. VirtualBox lets you take snapshots of your virtual machine. To take a snapshot on a currently running virtual machine, find the menu at the top of the program's window and open the tab Machine. Then choose Take Snapshot. Give it a name, add a description if necessary and then click OK to save it. Now you have a snapshot of this machine representing its state on a certain date and time, for recovery in case of a failure or accidental removal. You will be able to restore your machine to its state at the time when the snapshot was taken. To roll the virtual machine back to its state fixed in a snapshot, go to the tab Machine, Tools, Snapshots. Select the snapshot from the list. You can look at the names and dates to understand which one you need and click Restore. Decide if you want a snapshot of the current state of the virtual machine and check the Xbox below. Then click Restore. Then run the virtual machine and check it for files that have been lost. If you have accidentally removed a snapshot or a virtual machine disk file – VDI, you can bring them back with the Specialized Date Recovery tool – Hetman Partition Recovery. If the machine was removed without deleting files, it's very easy to restore it by clicking Machine, Add. However, if you deleted the files, it takes a special utility to bring them back again. Download, install and run the utility. Right-click on the disk where virtual hard disk files were restored and start the scan. Try Fast Scan first. Open the folder we choose to contain virtual hard disks and check if the files you are looking for are now there. By default, this is the path to find VDI files. Snapshot files are stored in the folder with the same name – Snapshots. If the Fast Scan can't find the necessary files, then go for Full Analysis. To do it, right-click on the disk, analyze again, choose Full Analysis, specify file system type, click Next and Finish. Select the files you want to restore and click Recovery. Choose the disk where to save them and click Recovery again. In the end, you will find the recovered files in the folder that you have chosen. Now you should add the disk to the virtual machine, start it and access the files you were looking for. To add a disk to the virtual machine, choose the option Use an existing virtual hard disk file when creating a machine. Give the path to the file and click Create. When the machine is ready to use, click on the Start button. If you also managed to restore a VBOX file containing virtual machine settings, to add a virtual machine you should click Machine, Add. Give the path to the file, click Open, and then it will appear on the program's list. If the virtual machine refuses to boot or displays a narrow-edged startup that cannot be fixed, remember that our program supports data recovery from virtual hard disks of various hypervisors. The list includes such file extensions as VDI, VHD, VHDX, VMDK, HDD, QED, QCOW and others. In my case, virtual hard disk files are kept in a NAS system, which stands for Network Attach Storage, and that's why I'll show you how to recover data from virtual disks VDI over the network. Start the program, click Tools, Mount Disk. There are two ways to mount it. Choose a raw disk image if necessary or choose virtual machines. After choosing the second option, you can see the list of files and tools that our program supports. Check the corresponding image type. In our case, this is VirtualBox, the file extension, VDI, and give the network path to the folder where virtual hard disk files are stored – Network, Archive, Virtual Machine, VirtualBox. When you have given the path to the required directory, click to select the folder. The program will display all virtual machine files which exist in such folder. As you can see, there are disk files and snapshots, that is, copies of the virtual machine state on a specific date. The disk file, which is currently in use by the virtual machine, will be marked as Active. Check the box next to the disk you are interested in and click Next. If you need to recover data of a snapshot, check the box next to it. You can easily find this file by its name and date. After you have selected the folder, the mounted disk will appear in the Drive Manager immediately. Right-click on it, open, select the scan type and choose Fast Scan for status. If the fast scan can't find the required files, then go for full analysis. Right-click on the disk, analyze again, full analysis, and specify the file system for this disk. Then go to the folder where the lost data used to be stored and look for the ones you need to restore. Select them and click Recovery, choose the disk and folder, and click Recovery again. To make user's lives easier, our program features the option to search for files by their names. Also, you'll be able to preview the file contents to make sure that this is the actual file you need. The program's ability to operate over the network simplifies the recovery process, as you don't need to arrange additional disks for copying VDI files to your computer. And this way you can save both time and resources. Just mount the disk files over the network and stop the scan. The only serious disadvantage is that if your network connection gets interrupted, you will have to run the scan again when the connection is restored. And that is all for now. Hopefully, this video was useful. Remember to click the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Leave comments to ask questions. Thank you for watching. And good luck! While you're watching this video, civilians in Ukraine are dying from attacks in bombardments of the Russian Federation. Putin's insane regime has attacked a peaceful country in the very heart of Europe. Save the Ukrainian army by making a contribution to the font Come Back Alive. Use the QR code or the link below the video to transfer any amount of money that will boost Ukrainian resistance and help it counter Russia's designable invasion.


Yo, yo, yo, what's going on? Joe for Jasky's with the Fanatics Live recap video from Monday the 11th. This is a three box break of Cosmic Baseball number 15. Big thanks everybody here for making this happen. I appreciate you getting into our breaks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not in any real order here, but there's Jordan Groeschan's autograph. That went to the Fish Jake, Vaughn Grissompton 199, Jazz Chisholm ET to 50, Riley Greene Refractor. We got a Boba Shet to 199, Ivan Herrera to 199, Lodge to Orbit Die-Cut, Francisco Alvarez. We got Francisco Alvarez, yeah. Those Die-Cuts are pretty nice. I like those. Who's in my mind? Yeah, Francisco Alvarez. Star Clusters to 50, I rarely see these numbered. Both Red Sox players, it's gonna go to HB, Tyler Freeman Greene to 75, Trey Turner to 99, Corbin Carroll ET, Trout and the Sun. Adley Rushman for the Orioles, Lux with Downey. There you go. Thanks for watching, thanks for breaking. I'll see you for the next one. Bye-bye.


This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positive League, Vermont. This is our first show of the new year and we are going to be exploring a very interesting organization in our state called the Nature Conservancy. Conservancy and my special guest is Heather Furman who was the State Director of the Nature Conservancy and we're going to be exploring all that the organization has done in its history certain issues that it's facing now and most importantly how you can help in its work. Welcome, Heather. Thank you, Dennis. It's great to be here. I'm here and just tell us if you were a little bit about yourself. Don't be shocked. Sure. Sure. So as you've said, my name is Heather Furman. I'm the State Director for the Vermont chapter of the Nature Conservancy. I have been living in Vermont for about 25 years and I've been the State Director at the Nature Conservancy for almost nine. I went to UVM. I graduated from UVM's graduate program at the Rubinstein School and I studied natural resource planning. So I'm really excited to be able to apply what I studied to the work that I do every single day. Great. Well, tell us about the organization itself, its history and what its mission is. Sure. So the Nature Conservancy was founded in 1951 by a group of ecologists, scientists in New England, in New York and we over our 70-year history we have been conserving some of the most special places around the world. Today we are in around 76 countries, so we partner with organizations in countries around the world and as a science-based, science-driven organization, we bring research, we bring science to apply it to the conservation work that we're doing to protect our lands and waters. In the US, most people know us for our history of land conservation. We've protected about 125 million acres of land in the US. And in 1961, our Vermont chapter was founded and it's a very homegrown, local chapter. It was founded by Hub Vogelman at the University of Vermont. And for a long time it was volunteer-led, a group of really passionate conservationists got together, worked to conserve places like Shelburne Farms and Bar Hill up in Greensboro. And over the years, we have become the second largest private landowner in the state of Vermont. And so today we own and manage 58 natural areas around the state. There's probably one in your hometown or at least in your county. We operate our natural areas for public access, for their ecological values, for climate resilience. And we allow the public to use our properties. We have what we call flagship areas. We have 11 flagship areas, places like Raven Ridge in Moncton and Charlotte, where we support public access. So at Raven Ridge, for example, we've put in a universally accessible boardwalk so that everyone can access the property and experience the beauty of nature. And we often have work days and field days and opportunities for school groups and researchers to come out and learn about the ecology of the place or just experience the beauty of nature. So I encourage everyone to experience our natural areas. It's something that we're really proud of at the Nature Conservancy. And today we continue to protect lands. When I say protect lands, I mean we conserve them by either buying them and owning and managing them for all of the things that we care about for climate resilience, for public access, for clean water. Or we partner with our other organizations to conserve lands. And something that I'm really proud of is that the Nature Conservancy has had a hand in helping the state of Vermont acquire new state parks, new state forests, wildlife management areas we work with the Department of Fish and Wildlife. So in fact, we've helped protect about 23% of all of our state-owned lands today. We've worked for a long time with our government agencies so that the lands that we have helped protect are in the public domain and available to everyone. So we're really proud of that. In total, we've probably protected over 300,000 acres in Vermont. And you can find the hand of the Nature Conservancy all across the state in that work. That's great. Just to get very basic here, how is a natural area defined? Is it the void of any development or is it partially developed? Just give us an overview of that concept because I think it's important. Yeah, so thank you for that. We protect land for all kinds of reasons, right? Sometimes we protect land so that we can continue to operate it as a working forest, you know, to harvest timber, to supply wood products to people and to industries. Natural areas in Vermont are protected typically to protect really special ecological values. Maybe there's a rare and endangered species or there's a habitat type that is really unique and special to Vermont. So historically, as a science-based organization, we've identified these areas in Vermont that are pretty special. And we have worked to protect those for the natural values that are there. What we have learned over time is that many of the places that we have conserved also happen to be really important for what we call climate resilient lands. So climate resilient lands are areas where maybe the topography, the diversity in species, the microclimates are supporting a rich tapestry of biology. And as the climate changes, it's really important that species are able to move and colonize new areas. And so we need protected habitats. We need protected areas that are connected together to allow species movement across the landscape. And so when I say natural area, these are kind of what I think of as like strongholds for species to be able to meet all of their life needs, as well as adapt in the face of climate change to move to new ranges to have all the habitat available that that species needs as the climate changes. So typically, there's no human development there, but there is opportunity for the public to use those properties. We open all of our properties for hunting and fishing and hiking and cross-country skiing. And so it's a blend of being able to protect the variety and diversity of nature as well as give people a place to go and really see something special. I remember our immediate last governor, Peter Shumlin, when he took office talking about climate change being one of the most difficult issues that he and the administration would face. And it is now all over the news, of course, as it should be. Tell us a little bit about climate change and the impact on Vermont from your experience. Yeah, so many ways in which we're seeing the effects of climate change. So recently, we partnered with the University of Vermont to look at the effects of climate change on Vermont. And I'll give you a link to the website of the 2021 Vermont Climate Assessment. And this assessment just looks at what are we seeing as the climate changes, as what are the impacts on our environment, on our communities. And one of the things that we learned is that the rate at which we're experiencing major flood events is increasing. Vermont is becoming warmer and wetter. You wouldn't know that today. But overall, Vermont is becoming warmer and wetter. And we are experiencing 1.4 major flood disasters per year, which is an increase of about 20% over historic rates of flooding and impacts due to climate change. So the other thing that is affecting our communities is that over the history of our development in Vermont, we have straightened our rivers. And so as we are experiencing this warmer and wetter climate, the frequency of those floods and the velocity of the floodwaters. It's really starting to impact our communities in ways that put a lot of Vermonters at risk. And so one of the most important things that we could do is to protect our river corridors from encroaching development. And because one of the biggest impacts during the flood is that somebody gets flooded out. You've seen this, you saw this with Irene. You're seeing it more and more during these summer floods. Our roads get washed out. Our bridges get washed out. Sometimes homes get flooded. And so knowing that that is going to continue this trend around increased flood events. And because of the history of our straightened rivers, those floodwaters are moving that much faster and the impacts are that much greater. So by protecting our river corridors, and I mean like conserving and restoring our river corridors with natural vegetation and restoring wetlands and our flood plains, that activity can actually slow floodwaters. So you think of a river and it's cruising down the mountain and it needs somewhere to go. There's velocity there during a big rainstorm. And if that river can access its floodplain and flood that floodplain and there's plants and trees to absorb those floodwaters and those sediments, it's going to slow that river down and the impacts will be much less downstream. So it's something that the Nature Conservancy is working really hard on, both from a policy perspective as well as actually getting in there and restoring our floodplains, using our science to understand how to restore these floodplains in a cost-efficient way that keeps invasive species out, that provides habitat and brings back some wetlands for birds and I don't know my life. Sounds like a very big and a very important job. Can you just give us an idea of the scope of your organization in terms of personnel and outreach individuals? I know you talked about scientists and perhaps I guess environmental consultants, but just give us an idea. You're based in Montpelier. Just give us an idea of the scope of your organization because that'll fit into how people can help. Sure, absolutely. So we are a chapter in an organization that has a chapter about every state, very homegrown kind of local chapters. And our team in Vermont, we have about 25 people on staff. And we have folks working on our land conservation work, on our water work, as well as in the policy and climate arenas. We have a communications team and we have a fundraising team as well. We rely on both public and private dollars to support our work and we do offer many opportunities for people to engage with us. We host events and field outings and so folks can get involved with us by just coming to one of our events and seeing some of these wonderful natural areas that we've helped to protect or they can volunteer for us. And we've got lots of work going on on our properties. If you really like to tackle and pull invasive species or you want to help us build a trail or a boardwalk, we can certainly use your help. That's great. We have a very excellent website and we're going to publish that along with the video. And I noticed there are a number of projects that are ongoing or coming up. Could you describe some of those, such as the Artist in Residence Project and the Forest Garment Project, things like that? Yeah, sure. Yes, we've worked with an artist in residence over the course of the last year, Elizabeth Billings. And she has done a number of installations actually on our natural areas. You can go see them. She built a beautiful bench at La Platt River Preserve in Shelburne. And she's installed a landscape, I don't even know how to describe it. It's just a landscape installation. You're kind of walking through the woods and you kind of come up on this piece of artwork in the forest at Raven Ridge. And also down at our Equinox Natural Area down in Manchester. So you can go see the work that she has done there. We did that work to, you know, everybody during COVID has taken to the woods for a little bit of reprieve early on in COVID. Folks didn't have a lot of places to go when we were all in quarantine. And so the public began using our natural areas as well as other parks and trails. And we saw an incredible uptick in the use of our lands. And so we wanted to give people just something special to see in the woods, a place of contemplation. We had a lot of artists visit the woods and it was really nice to be engaging with different communities. And just as a way to say thank you to everyone who's helped support us and endured the quarantine last year. So that was really great. The other project you mentioned is our forest carbon work and forest carbon. That is simply the ability of trees to absorb carbon out of the atmosphere. So of course we're all aware of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions out there. And one of the ways that the Nature Conservancy is working to mitigate that is by managing our forest to absorb more carbon. And we're working in southern Vermont as well as northern Vermont with landowners to enroll their lands into what is known as forest carbon. This is a voluntary market that organizations, institutions, companies can buy carbon credits. And so as we manage our lands for carbon, those carbon credits become available for purchase. And it incentivizes and is actually a way for forest landowners to have another revenue stream coming in to their, you know, they need revenue to own and manage land. So forest carbon markets offer another revenue stream for forest landowners. So it's exciting because we've worked in the Cold Hollow Mountains with our partners, Vermont Land Trust and Cold Hollow to Canada to aggregate landowners together so they can enroll their land into the carbon market together. And we are beginning to work in southern Vermont to enroll forest landowners in a program called Family Forest Carbon, which essentially helps give landowners the resources, the tools, the techniques and the support to manage their land for more carbon absorption and actually achieve a revenue stream for that. So it's pretty exciting. That is. I just want to ask you now, since the legislature is in session and Congress is in session, what advocacy issues are you concerned about and how people can help? Yeah, so one of the most important ones is what we talked about earlier. I think there is legislation being introduced to help protect our river corridors. It's really important that we get a handle around on development in our river corridors. As I said, for all of the reasons, we don't want to see communities continue to be flooded out. We don't want property loss. That increases tax dollars in recovery. And so protecting our river corridors by excluding development from those critical flood plains is something that we care deeply about and we want to see it advanced forward. The other really important policy action that we take every year is to support the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, VHCB is one of our most important funding sources in the state for getting land conserved and having these places, really important places protected for communities. And that's everything from protecting farmland to protecting recreation land to protecting our wetlands and flood plains to support water quality. So VHCB is funded through the Vermont Property Transfer Tax and we strongly support full funding for VHCB for both affordable housing as well as for all of the conservation projects that the Nature Conservancy and our partners work on around the state. Great. Well, one of the things that we like to do here on Positively Vermont is tell people how they can help. What do you need? Funding, volunteers, people for call representatives, just let us conclude with your wishes for people what they can do if they want to know what they can do. Because I believe you have piqued our interest and there's plenty of great stuff on the website and we're going to publish that. But tell us how people can help. Yeah, there's so many ways. Obviously, we're a member based organization as a nonprofit. We love, we would love to have you as a member support us as a member, you can go online. You can come right into our Montpelier, well, maybe not right now, you can't come into Montpelier office, but you can send us support to our Montpelier office and we would be exceedingly grateful for that. If you have forest land that you are interested in conserving or you want to manage it for habitat and biodiversity or for forest carbon, get in touch with us. We're helping and supporting landowners to enroll or to manage their land for forest carbon. We can always use volunteers. We are, as I mentioned earlier, as the second largest private landowner in the state, we've got a lot of land to own and manage and we have a wonderful volunteer coordinator who helps us track all of our interested folks and match them up with opportunities all around the state. A lot of that work happens in the spring, summer and fall, but we're in the process of planning for those activities now, so if you'd like to volunteer with us, we'd love to have your support there. That is wonderful. Well, thank you very much Heather, you've really been an excellent guest. There's so much more to this and hopefully people will look into the website and see some of those very interesting videos on that. And we will keep in touch and let us know what's going on as the year progresses. Wonderful Dennis. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you very much again, Heather, and this is Dennis McMahon for Positively Vermont. Our guest has been Heather Furman, the State Director of the Nature Conservancy, and thank you for watching.


I'm Rory Metcalf, Head of the National Security College here at the Australian National University. It's my real pleasure to welcome today Professor Satoshi Morimoto, former Defence Minister of Japan. Professor Morimoto is one of the key speakers from Japan at a conference we're hosting here at the college today on the future of trilateral security relations involving the United States, Australia and Japan in the Indo-Pacific region. Now obviously with the uncertainties that the Trump Administration brings to US policy settings in Asia and the world. Plus of course the anxieties that many countries in Asia understandably hold about Chinese power and Chinese assertiveness in recent years. It's a really important time for US allies and partners to get together to talk about how to manage these uncertain and difficult times. And that's really the theme of our conference here today. So I'm going to ask a few questions of Professor Morimoto regarding his own perspectives on these issues. Professor, thank you for joining us and welcome to the National Security College at ANU. I might ask you firstly about really the Trump Administration and the alliance between Japan and the United States. This is an alliance of long standing. It's been extremely important for Japan's security and for regional stability in our shared Indo-Pacific region. What's your view on how Japan is likely to approach the challenges and the uncertainties and maybe the opportunities that the Trump Administration brings? Well still both countries share the common security concern in the Indo-Pacific region. The most serious concern is China, especially Chinese advancement to the blue ocean, especially South China Sea, East China Sea, India ocean as well. And this is the most important security policy to meet and to react to this kind of challenge. At the present and the future associated with each other. And already Japan and the U.S. has almost a half century of very close security relationship between both countries. But recent years Japan and Australia and the U.S. and Australia security cooperation and relationship is close to close each other. I think this is a very important timing to make trilateral security ties and cooperation to deal with future challenges and instability in the Indo-Pacific region as well. Of course number two is North Korea. North Korea has a double approach including nuclear development and missile development and also economic reform. Unfortunately they are not successful economic reform. But in addition to in that region we have another type of concern including cyberspace and outer space and sea range of communication and human rights as well. I think we share the almost all national interests among three nations and also even Americans intend to revitalize their military forces due to the defense budget difficulties. I think they cannot maintain the same modernized military posture in the Asian Pacific region. So both Japan and Australia has to make some compensation to help and assist roles and mission of U.S. forces in Indo-Pacific region. I think this is a most important agenda for three nations security direction in the future. Thank you Professor. I think something I have observed recently is that Prime Minister Abe of Japan has been very active in his strategic diplomacy with visits to Australia, to Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and of course very active forward-leaning efforts to engage with the United States under President Trump. What do you think the purpose of Prime Minister Abe's strategic diplomacy is including in relation to the new Japanese strategic policy statement about a free and open Indo-Pacific region? I think we have two background. One is that China also expands the influence to most of the ASEAN countries, especially Cambodia, Laos and recently Myanmar and Thailand. But we would like to the other ASEAN countries, especially Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia to our side. Our side means that Australia, U.S. and the American side to share the similar national interest and economic prosperity and freedom of navigation in order to sustain the peace and stability and prosperity in the region. Our Prime Minister made a very energetic constructive foreign policy approach to the some ASEAN countries in order to improve their capability and also some technology revolution and economic reform. I think we share the most of national interest and values with these countries and we increase exchange of personnel. I think this is a very strong encouragement for our Prime Minister. We make a very active role to encourage most of the ASEAN countries to our side. That is the first one. The second is that this country unfortunately has not to possess any effective and comprehensive military might to deal with military threat, especially by China. If you look at the huge prospect of this region, this region is a maritime area. All of Ireland is an island country. And we have a comprehensive approach to maintain safer sea range of communication, not only in the ASEAN but also in South China Sea, in East China Sea to encourage the ASEAN countries to help our military or defense cooperation activity with us. I think this is not some sort of associated regional structure to meet the Chinese threat, but I think as we are close to the ASEAN nation, not only defense posture as well as defense spending and also transfer of defense equipment. I think this is very helpful to jointly, militarily maneuver and activity in the region. I think this is another motivation to make a very active role to play. Thank you. I think my final question is really about the relationship between Japan and Australia, but also the potential to connect a Japan-Australia security relationship with other third countries. Not only with the United States, where we have an established trilateral security mechanism, but also perhaps with countries like India or South East Asian countries. So I guess my question is, this is the 10th anniversary this year of the Australia-Japan Joint Security Declaration. What do you see as the opportunities to keep strengthening the Australia-Japan security relationship? And perhaps, how can we link that to additional countries? Well, I think it is a little bit to say that premature, but as I said, the U.S.-Japan security relationship is one of the most successful security ties, not only in the Asian Pacific region, as well as in the international community. I think our relationship, especially Japan and Australia's security relationship, is the next to U.S.-Japan security arrangement. If possible, we would like to make a broad sense of alliance relationship between Japan and Australia, associated with each other to supplement U.S. roles and functioning in the Indo-Pacific region in the future. This is our common interest and values, and also this is the most important major to sustain and maintain our peace and stability and prosperity in the region. In this sense, so far, we have many agendas between Japan and Australia, especially already, we have axe-meaning or signed, but in addition to we have many agenda, new agreement to make more progressive bureaucratic procedure between both, especially the both countries have to receive military forces in their soil applied by new agreement, which is corresponding to U.S.-Japan status agreement. Also, if we rent some facility in Guam, Ireland, we have more close security ties among U.S.-Japan, Australia. And also United States is thinking to transfer and deploy some U.S. Marine Corps to the South China Sea as a rotation for three months, twice in every year, beginning next year. And maybe U.S. Marine Corps stopover our Okinawa, Hawaii, and also Darwin in this country. And so we have to help and assist U.S. military presence in the Asian Pacific region. And I think this is the most important deterrence capability we reinforce in the future. In addition to we have many agenda such as joint military exercise and also joint development and production of defense equipment and technology, and also some personnel exchange, especially expert or military forces. And also using AXA, we have more close security activities for each other. I think we have a lot of agenda. We have to promote these kinds of agenda for the both countries. I think this is timing to change nature of bilateral relations between Japan and Australia to joint U.S. presence in the region. In this context, I think Trump administration would maintain re-balancing policy in the Asian Pacific region. I think new defense secretary indicates re-examining re-balancing, but I think re-balancing policy is the most useful and effective U.S. policy to maintain the deterrence capability in the Asian Pacific region in the future. Thank you very much, Professor. And that's a very thoughtful tour of the horizon on these issues. Thank you again for contributing to our conference. Thank you.


I think goes back to the nature thing we talked about. I really, truly believe that people don't experience living. And I'm going to revert it back into the hunter and gatherers. Now, I'm also in the camp. I don't believe just 10,000 years ago, we're hunters and gatherers. I think there's way more history. I think we've been bombarded by meteorites and asteroids, had earth level extinction events. I know at one point in time, we were down to only like 15,000 humans on the planet. And we repopulated like we're super survivors. And I'm not just talking about Homo sapiens.  If you look at our lineage of millions of years, even predating Homo sapiens, there's a commonality in our lineage. We experienced living, I don't like the word now, but we experienced living in our surrounding environments. We didn't do things for the sake of doing things. We didn't wake up, go to nine or five job. We weren't worrying about mortgages. We weren't worrying about college tuition fees. We had to feed ourselves. Yeah, yeah, the Maslow's, the Maslow Hiker needs. What mattered the most is the safety of our little tribe that we had here and getting food and reproduction, right? Food, sex, safety. We're good to go, right? The simple things that matter. And so through millions of years of evolution, we've been imprinted this genetic makeup. And remember, we, even though we have, we've encoded the DNA, we've soon come to realization is epigenetics. One gene does many things and we still don't know everything because now you have all this section of like junk DNA and mitochondrial DNA. It's like we're just scratching the surface. And so for me, it's if I look at, if I'm an observer, I'm looking this from a subjective manner as observer, looking how our ancestors or even like modern apes, they, how they behave. It's like we don't, we're not, I think really for, there's, I think that this is why people have a deep connection when they're walking in a forest or they're fishing or they just like look at the beach. Like we've been, we've been doing this for millions of years and if we've, you know, in the last say 50 years, we've stopped this. We live in a completely different world than our, than the overwhelming majority of our ancestors have lived.  Absolutely, sitting, sitting there. We're not meant to sit. No, not at all. And so like, I think, I think coming back to fractals for me and kind of what you're saying is that like, for me, understanding fractals helps me appreciate and helps me help, helps me have a reverence for nature, a deeper reverence because I see the connectedness. I see the connection. I don't just feel it. I also see it and it's, it's kind of like science. It's like, you know, just breaking things down and, and you know, does science take the magic out of life? No, I don't think so. Yeah. I think that it doesn't have to. I think it can if you allow it to, but I don't think it has to. I think it can re-enview the magic into life by helping you see how incredible things are, how incredibly detailed things are, how against all odds they've come to be. And that's where the fractals come in. It's like, holy cow, everything is actually connected, everything.  Like I was this, I come from a sperm and egg. Dude, I, so like I'm a father now, you know, I have a 16 month old and I've never been a person who, you know, I've always wanted to go through the process of like, of raising a child and like kind of having a second chance at life almost of like teaching him the things I know and sharing, like I love sharing, right? So I've always wanted that, but at the same time as I was like, kid, hell no, like that's a lot of responsibility and all the other kind of jazz that goes along with it. But I'll tell you, man, that like the moment he was held up and he came out of his womb was, was a psychedelic moment for me.   And that's my experience. I'm not, I'm not saying that everybody's going to have that experience, but that was my experience. And it's like everything made sense. It gave me, it gave me so much more innate purpose, not to say that like I'm just living for him, but it's like, it came full circle.  I gave back and now it's not just me selfish anymore. And now it's like all the mistakes I've made and everything else like, gonna make some of those too and that's okay, but I don't even have the words to describe it, but yeah, it was like a psychedelic moment, very powerful one. I think it speaks to that like fractal nature to like reproduce. He is me. Yeah. Yeah. After G. Wild. Crazy. You know, like Genghis Khan has like one in like 100 people had his genes. Oh, totally. Yeah, they did. They did a lot of raping and pillaging back then. Genghis Khan was crazy. Yeah, they spread like wildfire. I didn't even imagine how it would be to like live back then.  Yeah. And this is another thing where like a lot of people don't realize because we have it so good, right? And we've been like coddled and stuff like that and some of us anyway. And we don't realize how tough life was for 99.99% of the existence.  It's fucking. Absolutely. Things are tough. The whole world was like that. I know and it's like you were lucky enough to get food. Yes. There's a freedom though in that though. That I feel like the survival mechanism.  You know, like apart from the PTSD and some of the really negative elements that they come back from. There's this element that I hear a lot where it's like they were there surviving one foot in front of the other. And it's kind of what I felt in the Himalayas. I didn't have anybody shooting at me. Maybe it would have taken it to a whole another level. But that's all that you cared about. That's it was the one goal. You weren't thinking about anything else. You didn't have any other anxieties or worries. Did you read Sebastian Younger's book Tribe? No. This is all he talks about. Really interesting. He has gives one example in Bosnia during the Bosnian war after finished there was there was like signs that it was better during the war like from the connection perspective. Yeah, the camaraderie and they say actually people who have gone through war together build the strongest bonds and relationships. Yeah, through adversity, the type of adversity. Yeah, I think we're engineered for it. Yeah, I think we're engineered. We're obviously not engineered for war. Yeah, that's what I don't mean to say. I mean, like we're engineered for for pushing and for overcoming hardship. Yeah, I think. I think humans in general, I think there are a small group of humans who are sociopaths who are engineered to kill and they have no remorse and that's how they program.  And so that's why I think like a small percentage of humans have Neanderthal DNA. But that's on a small scale, right? It's different when you have a tail end of the curve. Yeah, you have nukes and you have tanks and RPGs and F-16s like a whole different ball game. Obviously, I don't recommend war nor do I want anyone to go to war.  It's always the little guy. It's always and so, but there are ways where you can incorporate like I mentioned earlier where like how do you challenge yourself?  It's not Netflix. Yeah, it's something else. It's not just sitting on your phone. It's not just going out, drinking, partying, whatever that is or just like working on your business 24-7 because like honestly, frankly, like this whole entrepreneurialism thing today and it's like how sexy it's become. That's another thing that can be very dangerous.