On this great salinity of Saint Joseph, we are reminded of the second most important figure in the entire church. Obviously, Jesus is the church. He is the body of Christ, so he doesn't count. Mary and Joseph are the two greatest members of the church. Mary, of course, the greatest, but all the saints put together. You could put Joseph and all the other saints together. Mary is still superior. But second to her would be Joseph himself. Joseph is the patron saint of the church, the whole church. And it makes perfect sense why he would hold this patronage, why he would be entrusted with care of the church at large. Because he was chosen by God the Father to be entrusted with the Father's most precious gifts. His only begotten son and his immaculate mother. No other human being has been trusted as much. So imagine the type of man Joseph must have been on earth and clearly is eternally now in heaven. Flawless, perfect, absolutely virtuous in every way. Yes, he was tainted by original sin like all of us, but it's very likely he had no personal sin. Such a perfect man. And so he was ideal to stand in the person of God the Father for his only son, Jesus Christ, to be the adopted father of Jesus. And just like Jesus chose Mary to be his mother, he would have also had a say in who got to be his adopted father. And he chose Joseph. No one loved the mother more than the son. And he would have only chosen the best spouse for her. Imagine kids if you could pick out spouse for your parents. I mean, hopefully you'd pick out the one that they're with. So, but imagine that wasn't the case. You'd only pick out the best. Joseph had to have been, even while on earth, the best of men. In our gospel today we hear about this conundrum that he has. He's already engaged to Mary and you have to understand something about Jewish engagements. So once you get engaged at this time in the Hebrew world, you're considered married. That's it. That person is your wife. That is your husband. You're married. You're just not living together yet because there's a period of courtship that's required until you formally tie the knot, as we would call it. But you're considered married once you get engaged. So we know they're engaged and notice the gospel tells us that it's his wife. So it uses the word wife. It's following this Jewish tradition. Now I'm not saying when you get engaged you're married. So I'm not saying that now. The rules have changed. But this is Jewish culture and tradition at the time. So Mary was considered his wife and Joseph learns that she's with child. Now you have to know something about St. Joseph.  We assume he had to be old, right? Because a young man can't be virginal. And I think that's an offense to St. Joseph. He was certainly older than Mary, but it could have only been by 10 years. He could have been in his mid 20s. So I'm not a big fan of the old Joseph theory, but we don't really know. There's no evidence. There's no proof one way or the other. Regardless, Joseph hears that his wife, his fiance, is pregnant. Now Joseph is a good Jewish man. The Bible says he is righteous. You need to understand what righteous means in the Hebrew mind. It means not only does he follow all the laws, because a righteous man would always follow all of the laws of God, but it also means he's personally holy. So he doesn't just follow the laws in regards to some legalism. He follows them in his heart. He's the perfect Jew. Again, the perfect foster father for the Lord. So being a righteous man, he would have probably not spent any time with Mary up to finding out that she's pregnant, you know, an hour or two here or there. So he finds out she's pregnant and he's concerned. He's a righteous man. He doesn't know Mary is the holy mother of God. He doesn't know any of this. He just knows that he's betrothed to her. Literally that's it. This is old school arranged marriages. So he can't judge. He's not judging her character. He doesn't know her, but it's not his baby. That's all he knows.  He can't. She's unfaithful according to the law. It's not his child. And so he intends to divorce her. Now there are two different types of divorce at this time in the Israelite world. There's public divorce, which depending on the circumstances, like with her could have ended in stoning. She's an adulteress publicly. At least that's what it would look like. But notice what Joseph decides to do to divorce her quietly. Meaning no public show, no formal declaration, a private divorce. Now in order to divorce her privately, Joseph is de facto accepting some of the blame for the divorce, even though he's innocent. So I want you to consider what he's doing. Joseph, again, the perfect foster father for the Lord. For all he knows, Mary has sinned. But he still wants to protect her and her unborn child. You see that paternal instinct, even though it's not his child. So he's willing to take some of the blame of the divorce just to protect them. What a man. What a perfect man. Don't you see why he was chosen? Even when he had no reason to, he was still willing to defend their honor, their lives. So the angel is sent to him and it corrects his ignorance. He couldn't have known the nature of this conception. Right?  And then the angel says, take your wife into your home. And he does this immediately. That's something we know about Joseph is once he knows the will of God, he does not hesitate. He accomplishes it immediately. And from that moment forward, he cared for his wife and his foster son with this knowledge that they are the holy and chosen instruments of God. We know that he maintained his chaste relationship with her until he died, which was sometime before Jesus started his public ministry. We don't know when. But what we do know is that this man above all men was entrusted by the Father with the most precious of gifts. And so it's not surprising that he holds this exalted role in the church. And hopefully in our own devotional lives that we ourselves have a strong devotion to Saint Joseph. He can do so much for us. The Holy Family, right? Jesus, Mary and Joseph should be the center of our hearts and our homes. The name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.


Good morning and welcome to the weekly market update with me. David Madden today's date is Monday the 14th of December 2020 and the time has just gone 12 o'clock GMT and it's been a fairly positive start to the European trading session The main kind of news has been Surprise surprise the UK and the European Union didn't reach agreement over the weekend the Sunday deadline was passed Cal Surprise But both sides said, you know, they're gonna go the extra mile to try and work out on an agreement Michelle Barnea the the EU's chief negotiator this morning Say that it's you know, it sees a way in which a deal can be achieved, but we've been hearing this in a rhetoric Redrick for a while Ultimately traders have taken that as a sign of traders have taken the Reactive thing to do is by thinking well talk to slow go on going therefore the silly possibility of a deal being achieved So European equity markets are higher across the board The pound starting is Is that performing on top of that? But we also have kind of chatter and speculation about a stimulus package from the US There's a 908 billion dollar. That's a bipartisan package. That's going to be introduced today There isn't a huge amount of optimism that is going to get it get achieved Gonna get support, but there is a bit of bipartisan support cross-party support So that's that boats. Well, also Steve Mnuchin the US Treasury Secretary Has also proposed a few days ago proposed a different stimulus package. So With that kind of in the talk in the in circulation that's kind of lifted sentiment over on the in the US As always what I'll do is I'll run through the week ahead article And then talk about the major markets and then look look at the major markets of the week because this week I am working a short week this week I would do I would mention a couple of other additional markets Which I ordinarily wouldn't really cover in this in this update kind of in lieu of my separate chart of the week video So I'll go to the week at the week ahead article now. I then go through the major indices Currencies and commodities So the week ahead the week ahead article can be found on our website Cmsaracus.com under insights and then news and analysis So tomorrow well overnight, we're going to hear the Chinese retail sales That's going to give us a good indication of domestic demand in China China's been bouncing back nicely in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and These the this report could give us an indication of how well the economy is recovering probably bricks the the property crowd the and the state agent They're going to be They're going to be in focus tomorrow because they had half your numbers out. We have seen a fair bit of activity in the in the housing market in the last few weeks and months So their their update is going to be fairly interesting Tuesday tomorrow, we also have UK unemployment numbers Wednesday, we have first half number numbers from Dixon's car phone Electronic items and kind of anything that can be used for a home office has been a high demand in 2020 So that's likely to be affected in their update. The Fed reserve meeting is on is on Wednesday You know, we're likely to hear the usual commentary about how they're committed to keeping interest rates very low We'll also probably hear Calls from the policy from central bankers to say, you know to politicians, you know, we can't do this alone guys Can we have is there any possibility of a fiscal response? We hear the flash Manifact, you know the flash PMI reports From Germany and France on Wednesday, we've the Bank of England interstate decision on Thursday given that The Bank of England given that UK and political, you know The the turmoil of the the COVID-19 crisis the uncertainty in relation to the future relationship between the UK and the EU It's highly unlikely, you know, you know, all It's likely we're going to hear from the Bank of England, you know pledges to keep it pledges to keep monetary policy accommodative to the state of the UK economy FedEx the The delivery company they've numbers coming out second quarter numbers coming out on Thursday They're going to be of interest because given these been a huge surge in online shopping They become a good barometer for demand particularly on the one up to Christmas. We also have Nike Second quarter numbers coming out on Friday. They're they're they've been a very popular sports brand Simra scenario ties in with the whole Christmas retail sales scenario Which brings me on nicely to UK retail sales the report for November will be posted on Friday morning So when I run to now is the major indices starting off at the with the footsie with underush I'll go through the big indices go to the big front currency pairs a couple of commodities and then a few other markets I find interesting So the footsie with underush not too long ago Was was up at a nine-month high. We've retreated ever so slightly But the broader uptrend particularly of the last few months were basically since late October onwards It's still very much intact. So if we do press on higher from here with Kubrick, Newtara getting this zone here in a 6891 if you do have a pullback below the kind of six thousand five hundred area I Could potentially take us back down towards the kind of six thousand forward zone So a bit of consolidation around there, and if you go below that Excuse me, please keep an eye for this area here in a six thousand two hundred and fifty eight Excuse me. I'll take a look now. What's going on up in Germany on the DAX In relation to the DAX we can see here that it's had a like the footsie It's had a great run between late October and into November and December. It's been range bound The last few weeks, but we're sort of very much in that upward trend If you press on higher from here, we could look to retest kind of the recent We'll get the top end of the range in around thirteen thousand four hundred and sixty-two if you go beyond that We could then be looking at retesting will basically the all-time high Which is achieved in February just before the COVID-19 crisis kicked off Moves to the downside could find some support from this area here in around well just north of thirteen thousand It'll cut thirteen thousand thirty three. I should we go below that we could look at heading back down towards this blue line here the fifth of the moving average and The fifth of the moving average comes into play at 12,000 eight hundred and seventy seven I keep in mind there's been a few occasions in the last few weeks and months with the fifth of the moving average Active both as support and resistance. So metric has been important in the past It makes it more likely it'll be of importance in the future, although there are no guarantees the US markets like it like as like I mentioned and At the top of the video is I'll talk about a stimulus package whether it'll go through not as a different story But the fact that this has been spoken about as elevated us index futures. We're calling the essence that the The Dow Jones North it's going to open north of thirty thousand two hundred So we're currently expecting it to open around thirty thousand two hundred and seventy We're talking we're pretty much at or near all-time high territory So we're talking that the markets are clearly very bullish if you press on higher from here, you know tears You'll be looking out for thirty thousand three hundred four hundred and so on as the fourth because we are let's face it Heading just just about, you know looking upon Uncharted territory If you do have a bit of a pullback You can a thirty thousand big psychological number that could act as support a move below that could take us back down for this area here at the lows of late November in around twenty nine thousand Four hundred and sixty one and if you go below that, you know, we could be looking heading back down towards well south twenty nine the area of 29,000 down to around twenty eight thousand eight hundred and sixty eight. So this is all in here Looking over at the S&P 500 similar scenario we're kind of Not we're not too far away From all-time high territory, which is achieved last Wednesday if so if you kind of we're currently in around 3688 if you press on higher from here We could look at retesting the the all-time high in that area in around 3714 or 15 there they're about and if you go beyond that Cheers, we're looking up towards three thousand seven hundred and twenty thirty so one and so forth Any moves to the downside could if you know, so if you do take out last Friday's low We could take us back down towards this area here in around three thousand six hundred I don't move below that could take us down towards this area here in around well with the fifth The moving averages this blue line in a three thousand five hundred twenty nine down towards where this line here is in a three thousand five hundred and eleven Yet three thousand five hundred and eleven So take a look at now. What's going on the currencies starting off on Euro dollar So you're a dollar at a great one recently It's highest level since 2018 had a bit of a pullback. We've had a very bullish move on Thursday So we are moving higher a continuation of the kind of upward trend we've seen in the last few months So if you press on higher from here, and if you take out the highs of early December it could take us back up towards The one twenty three area this zone here, which was last seen in April of 2018 Move to the downside could find support in around here in a one-spot 20 58 a break below that could take us back down towards 120 it's kind of a big number for Euro dollar and even if you go below that you could then be heading down toward this zone here in 1923 Looking at pound dollar So there's been broad dollar weakness across the board and and even though there's been a lot of uncertainty in relation to the UK Future relationship with the European Union starting as broadly speaking held up fairly well Obviously at a fairly negative day on Friday just gone where I felt it was the lowest level since mid-November, but You can have quickly rebounded today We're still in the upward trend over the last few weeks and months if you press on higher from here We could be looking up heading up towards one spot 35 one spot 35 15 Which is and if you go beyond that we could be looking up heading up towards one spot 30 608 Now these levels the last saw one spot 35 15 but just over a year ago in mid December 2019 on the back of the Very sizable victory by the Conservative Party at the UK general election of last year And if you will be on those highs we could take us back up towards this area here in a one-spot 30 608 Moves to the downside keep an eye out for this blue line here the fifth at a movie average in a one-spot 30 160 We can see how it acted nicely as support was just below it On Friday just gone and on a few occasions in the last few weeks and months It has acted as both the resistance and support. So keep an eye out for the fifth at a movie average Coming on to commodities now taking a look at what's going on with gold market Gold has had not a pretty great run recently Obviously had an all-time high in August had a quite a sizable sell-off trade range bound for a bit had a leg lower It tried to kind of reclaim the highs of mid-September which you couldn't get to and really since early November onwards has been trading lower Coincidentally, you know coincidentally this is around the same time stock markets got a leg up because we've had the everything from Pfizer BioBioNTech the DERDA atrezenica Atrezenica offers university all the very different news about the vaccine stories So gold has been in kind of you know has been suffering as a result Traders even looking to taking on more risk. And that's why we've seen stocks probably speaking on a pretty good run the last few weeks So while we hold below the fifth of the movie average is blue line here in at 1873 It's likely we could see that the recent negative trend continue I feel you press on lower from here And if we could be looking at retesting the lows of late November in at one spot, sorry In a 1764 a break below that could take us down towards 1740 And if you go below that again, we could look at it back down towards 1700 now if you do manage to reclaim the fifth of the moving average We could then be looking at heading up towards the 1900 zone or just north of it the 100 a moving average in 1909 and we'd really need to be basically retaking the highs of early November in around 1965 this this high see this high here if you want to kind of shake off the recent negative trend and You know fall back into the wider bullish trend Take a look now. What's going on with the oil market start? I take a look at brain crude oil the cash market Sony I was only on Thursday just gone. We set a Fresh nine-month high for the for brain crude oil the cash market We've been the last we had a bit of a pullback on Friday, but we're higher again today We're north of $50 a barrel, which is kind of quite a bullish in itself If it continued to press or press on higher from here We could be looking at retesting the highs of early March in around 54 spot 28 Any moves that are downside could find support from this area here in around 48 and a move below that could take us back down towards The lows of early December in at 46 spot 81 And if you do have a deep move below that we could then like heading back down towards this blue line here The 50 moving average we can see in a few cases elected active resistance and support Not too long ago to keep an eye for that and the fifth day moving average comes into play in around $43.91 Now as I mentioned mentioned a couple of other Charts in this video to wouldn't usually usually cover because this would be the only video for this week I'll take a look at the Australian dollar versus the US dollar And this isn't this is an interesting one because the Australian dollar is often closely tied in what goes on in commodities Industrial metals and oils have been strong recently. It's considered to be a risk on the currency and it's been broad dollar weaknesses So with that, we've seen a decent move to the upside in the Aussie dollar. In fact, we're back up at Russia basically at levels Excuse me We're basically at levels last seen since June 2018 so we're in a strong upper trend If you can we're currently trading in around the 0th about 75 67 if you continue to move higher from here We could be looking at targeting the highs of June 2018 in around zero spot 76 76 And if you go beyond that, we could have been looking at heading up toward the kind of zero spot 78 area Any moves to the downside could find support in around the kind of zero spot 74 And a move below that could take us back towards the world this blue line here Well, also this yellow line as well One of the moving average and the fifth and moving average seem to be converging on each other in around zero spot 72 53 zero spot 72 31 and you know the last few weeks and months We can see that those metrics and a few occasions have acted as you know both support and resistance And of course, you know, if you have a major move below that We could head down toward this zone here in around zero spot 70 31 down to zero spot 70 And lastly and also Tying in with the Australian dollar. I'll talk about copper. I mentioned at the top of the video about China's economy is rebounding. They're very mineral hungry It's needed for the kind of the rapid expansion of the economy and it was only on Friday just gone We actually saw a copperhead a bit of a fresh seven-year high Yes, it was basically its highest level seen since February 2013 so the copper market is in a strong upward trend If you continue to press on higher from here, we could be looking at targeting the highs of January 2013 in around 377 cents a pound Take a look at the price action recently So the price action would suggest the last couple of days It seems to me to ever solve slightly other be potentially taking a breather We could see a bit of reversal just because we've had a very bullish candle on Thursday We had an all-time high on the friday, but but the market managed to You know closed below where it opened now It isn't an over, you know, it's far from a bearish engulfing But the fact that it hit an all-time it hit a multi-year high and then closed well below where it opened And as a relatively long week And the range of the days been relatively long It would suggest to me that there's a bit of a decision going on That could mean we trade sideways. It could mean we trade In the upper trade at a more gradual pace, but today's range has been very small So it seems to me that's a bit of a decision going on in copper So if you press on higher from here, we could be looking at targeting 377 cents a pound A move lower could take us back down towards the kind of the 340 area here seen in late november And even if you have a fairly sizable Pullback we could head back down towards this area that this blue line here at 320 cents a pound the 50 moving average We can see how it might actually support in early november That's all from this from this video. Thank you for listening and have a good trading week


Alright guys, this is the eMeetMeeting capsule. It's a very premium speakerphone that you can use for meetings, both for remote and in person. This is one of the Red Dot winner awards for 2022 and I'm pretty excited to try this out. I'm gonna unbox this to showcase you guys what comes in the box, but essentially, it has five different types of modes that you can use, collaboration mode, speech mode, classic mode, spotlight, and in private mode. And I'm gonna be showcasing all of those modes to show how this works. This is a 360 degree 1080p full HD camera which can capture pretty much the entire room. And there's so many different features packed into this, including intelligent AI, and I'm excited to show all of that to you guys. So let's just get straight into it. Okay, so this is the speakerphone right there at the top. It's a very nice design. I will be covering more on the design in a second once I've turned it on. Let's just take a look at the accessories box. So you have the e-meat user manual, lots of information on there on how to use it. But one thing I really like about this and all of the e-meat speakers that I've used in the past is that they are plug and play, very quick and easy to use. This one, you just connect to your laptop and it pretty much is instantly paired and you can use it with any type of meeting and remote calling software that you have, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, whatever it may be. Else in the box, you have yourself the USB to USB-C. This also has an adapter, so you can just take this off and have it as a USB-C to USB-C one. So if you want it to use with traditional USB, you've got the adapter attached to it. It's a very nice, high quality braided cable.  So you do need to plug this into a power source so that it works. And in here, you have yourself the remote control, various different functions to change the different modes which you'll see there. And I will be using the remote control and give you an introduction of this when I do set it up. And it does come with two AAA batteries as well just to put inside the remote control. So it's pretty straightforward, simple things. I'm gonna be just plugging it in, connecting it with the USB to my laptop and then opening up a Zoom call and showcasing all of the different modes and showcasing the quality of this. And not only that, but also, I'm gonna run through now the specifications of this which are the main highlight and features of this. Starting off with the price, it is $700. It is quite expensive, but with the amount of features that is packed into this and with sort of like the intelligent system in there, the plug and play and all of those specs that I'm going to run through with you now, you'll understand why it costs that much. First of all, you'll see the design of this all around 360. This has eight intelligent omnidirectional microphones that pick up voices from all different angles around the room. And you can have a radius of up to 18 feet which is around five and a half meters, which I think is great. So even if you use this in very large boardrooms, you're going to manage to pick up everyone's voices now as to how far they are from this speakerphone. Five meters is quite a long distance to be from any microphone. And the fact that this has such high quality mics in there just really shows the power that this packs in. So let's talk a little bit about the buttons and the ports. This is the mode button. So this will cycle through the four different modes. The fifth mode is the in private mode, which is this middle button here that will turn off the camera and the microphone. And if you just wanted to mute the mics, then there's the button there. You've got the USB-C port to connect this to your laptop, a link port, so if you wanted to do auxiliary output then you can also use that. DC input for the power and then there's a lock button just there at the bottom. Right at the bottom of the device, you'll see there's a quarter inch thread there. So you can mount this on a tripod if that's something you'd like to do. Now this boasts a 10 watt 90 decibel speaker which provides high-five grade sound. That just makes it very louder and clearer. And I will be showcasing some sound samples to you guys coming from this speaker, not only by people speaking on a meeting, but I'll try and place a music as well just to show you the quality that the output this provides with the audio. When you do turn it on with one of the modes, you'll see the camera will flip out like this. When you want to use the 360 view, this will face upwards and the camera sensor there will show the entire room and it'll give you like a panoramic strip at the bottom of your meeting call, which you can also turn off. But this is a very high-quality camera and I'm going to be showcasing a lot of sample videos that I'm going to take with my Zoom meeting calls on this. But essentially this is AI-powered autofocus as well. And what that means is it's intelligent, multimodal algorithm autofocuses on the active speakers responsively. And what that means is if you have five people sitting around a meeting room and the speaker is right in the middle, it will automatically pick up and focus on that person speaking and highlight them on your meeting call. I will be showcasing that as well so you guys can see that in action, but that for me is very intelligent thing that not a simple speakerphone can ever do. Then this also has optimized voice pickup. What that means is this provides full duplex audio and EMiT have created an exclusive voice IA DSP algorithm that features noise reduction and human voice enhancement. If you have maybe a lot of background noise, people type it on keyboards, maybe some soft music playing in the background in the distance, this will eliminate all of that and just focus on your vocals. And that is quite important, especially when you're having meetings in open areas. And like I mentioned with plug and play, you don't need to connect this via Bluetooth. You don't need to have this connect to any particular wifi. Just connect that to your laptop and it will automatically be recognized to use as your speaker and your microphone. So for me, that's a big bonus when you're gonna spend a lot of money on something like this. You want it to be very simple and easy to use and not over complicated. And finally, if you work for a large enterprise and you want maybe more of these in a single room because you might have 20 people that are in a very, very large open space, then you can daisy chain these. So E-Meets have the M3 model speaker phones that you can connect directly with the meeting capsule. So you don't necessarily have to buy a whole bunch of meeting capsules because that will cost quite a lot. You can get the smaller M3 ones to extend the audio to further distances in the same room. And that just shows how much they have this ecosystem of all of the E-Meets devices. If you guys are not familiar with E-Meets, I definitely recommend you guys check out the link in the description. Have a look at their website. They don't just do meeting capsules like this. They have a bunch of speaker phones. They do webcams and they do headsets. Perfect for businesses and I've used their products in the past and I've been super impressed. That's everything. Now let's go ahead and set this up with my laptop and showcase all the different modes, the capabilities, how it sounds and how the camera looks in the video quality. And let's get into that. All right, guys, so before we get into going through all the different types of modes, I'm gonna run through the remote control and how you can use that with any of your meeting softwares. But I'm also going to showcase this one. This is the E-Meet link. It's one designed directly by E-Meet. And I think it's really good to showcase some of the more advanced functionalities that you can use with this software. So on the right-hand side, you have yourself the pane that can switch between the different angles of the camera. You can turn the panoramic frame on and off from the right-hand side here. You can see at the top, the video mode is at collaboration mode and I'll cycle through the different modes and I'll showcase them in action using Zoom, which is probably the most common software that you will be using this device with. And then we have various different other settings down here, as you can see. But one thing I really like is you can also adjust the brightness levels, contrast, sharpness and saturation levels. So if I turn this up, I can make myself a little bit more sharper. I can turn the contrast however I like, depending on the lighting in the room. And of course, the brightness, I can go darker or I can go very bright. So you can find your adjustments that suits your needs. You can also flip the mirror horizontal and vertical. And you can also update the firmware from this software itself. If I go ahead and look at the remote control, I'm going to be switching the mode using the top left button here. But before I do that, you can see in collaboration mode, you have a panoramic strip along the bottom, the button at the bottom row of the remote control here in the middle. This will turn off the panoramic strip like so. And you can see it's very quick and easy to do that. I can turn it back on like so. On the left hand side of that button, this is the sensitivity modulation button. On the right hand side here, you have low, middle and high. You can set this to whatever you like using the button on the remote control. So if I press it once, it will go to higher. And you'll see in the software, as soon as I press it, it cycles between them. And then it loops. So you can adjust that yourself. You can also change the initial angle of the camera as well. You can change the anti-flicker from 50 hertz to 60 hertz. And then let's go ahead and change the mode with the remote control. This is speech mode. The camera will still be facing upwards. This is now classic mode. You get to see the entire fisheye view of the room. Then it goes to spotlight mode. And then finally it will go back to collaboration mode. If I wanted to go into in private mode, I'll just press that button in the middle. It will turn the camera and the microphone off. And now you'll see nothing and it will be very private. If you press that again, it will turn back on and everything comes back into collaboration mode. Now, if you go into classic mode, you have a zoom button on the remote control here. This will zoom in in the camera if you want it to maybe get a little bit closer to your subject. There you go. I've pressed it once and I pressed it a second time. So there's three different levels of zoom. You can see in the software, you've got 180, 140 and 120 degree field of view with the fisheye lens. So if I press it one more time, it goes back to 180 degrees. So there's plenty of different functionalities you can use the remote control with. And then you have the volume control at the bottom as well. And you'll see on the speaker, it gives you audio notifications of how loud it is. So that's everything with the eMeet link software. I'll leave a link in the description of where you can download this software. Let's go ahead and now try out all of the different modes using zoom and using this in a real life scenario. So I'm going to head over to the office and set this up in the meeting rooms. Okay, so I've gone into a meeting room now to really highlight the perfect usage of the meeting capsule. So if you're going to have quite a lot of people speaking in a meeting like this, this is going to be the perfect type of product for you guys. So I've connected it with DC power and I've got the USB-C connected to my laptop. The first test I want to do is show the microphones that is inbuilt into this 360 degrees by walking around the entire table from both sides, showing that my audio is still stable and is picked up clearly from no matter which angle I'm speaking at. And I will be roughly around two to three meters away from it as well, different lengths. And hopefully that gives you a showcase of how clear this picks up any type of meeting from various different distances. Okay guys, so now I'm starting to record the zoom video call using the emeat as the video and the audio source. So I'm currently playing this audio back directly from the microphone on the meeting capsule. So I'm going to start walking around the table. So no matter which distance I am, I'm going to be facing the speakerphone and you guys can hear how clearly it still picks up the audio no matter where I'm moving around the room. So I think that's really going to be important if you are going to have meetings with several different people sitting at several different types of distances and how clearly this can still pick up the audio from all different types of angles. So I've pretty much walked all the way around and I'm going to continue walking back again to my starting position. And hopefully that gives you an idea that this maintains the clarity in the audio for no matter which angle that you are facing to the emeat capsule. So that for me is a big win. All right guys, the first mode I wanted to showcase is collaboration mode. As you can see on my zoom meeting call there's a panoramic strip there at the bottom. It shows three of us in the room. Right now at the top only I'm the one visible because I've the only person that started speaking first as more people start to speak they will be consolidated in little windows at the top as well. And then you can easily see who's collaborating who's speaking within the meeting. So here's an example that I'm going to showcase to you guys. So I'll speak to the first person and ask them to the my right. What is your plans for the rest of today? So after this I'm going to go grab coffee. I think I'll go for a nice walk the weather's looking good today. And then yeah, it might go out we'll grab some food a bit later. Cool and you guys can see the second window has appeared there on the zoom. Now I'll get the third person to speak and ask what your plans are for the rest of today. Yeah, we'll just grab a coffee on the way home. I've got some work to do but after that I'm going to meet some friends this evening for an evening out for dinner. Nice sounds good. And as you guys can see this is now picked up all three of us and it's created these separate little windows. If you wanted to get rid of this panoramic strip at the bottom to be honest, I quite like that and this just works straight out of the box no matter which meeting software you're using whether that is zoom or teams it will just show up like this. If you do use the remote control there's a button on the middle at the bottom there which can turn off the panoramic strip if you'd like to which I think is quite a nice touch as well gives you more flexibility. So now let's go ahead and move on to the next mode which is speech mode. A press the mode button. This will go into speech mode and what this will show is it will focus on one person at a time at the top so you won't have to split windows. So as I'm speaking first you'll see I'm the only one visible there. So if someone else starts to speak then they'll be the only ones visible at the top of the screen. This is a very similar functionality that you do get in zoom and teams at the moment when people speak they can focus the video just on them but this is quite a nicer way just to have that if people prefer this seeing that maybe on a larger TV screen. So maybe just wanted to ask you guys what type of food should we go get after we finished our meeting today? It's quite a nice Thai restaurant nearby if you want to go there. Yeah, I think Thai food is quite good. It's one of my favourites as well. I think I'm feeding Italian food today. Here we go for like some pizza or some pasta maybe. It's a lot of carbs there. I don't know what you feel like eating. Okay, let's go for Thai food then seeing if you both want to do that. Yeah, I mean I like Thai food as well so I think that's a good show up. Let's try that. Okay, so the third mode is classic mode. This is where you'll set up your speakerphone and the camera maybe at the end of the desk. So you get to see a wide view of the entire room and it's just there from one location. So we're going to switch over now to the classic mode. So if you press the mode button. There we go. It will just show the entire room in kind of like a fish eye view. So here you won't have that panoramic strip at the bottom of your meeting course. So this is great for people that are dialing in remotely from different locations and they just want to see the entire room. It's going to be good as well because I'm at the furthest distance from the speakerphone and as I'm facing towards it from the back of the room it still picks up the audio quality quite nice. So if anyone else would still like to speak then that would also be captured from no matter which distance depending on the size of your room but it can go up to five, five and a half meters away and this is really useful for having like company meetings where you want to see everyone in the same view. So what do you guys think of this view of the speakerphone where everyone is still visible in the room? Do you think that looks quite beneficial? Yeah, absolutely. It's good to have a good view of everyone in the meeting and it'd be quite hard sometimes trying to cramp everyone into the view and it's a normal camera. So it's quite useful. I have a weekly all-hands company meeting and we always set up a camera at the front of the office and we try and get at least 30, 40 people that come to the office all in the same view. So this is where that would be very beneficial as well to have something like this. So that is the classic mode and I think that looks pretty great. Okay and finally the fourth mode is spotlight mode. This creates kind of like a four by five ratio where it just highlights yourself. This ideally is going to be good for individuals if you're just gonna be using this by yourself and you don't have any other people in the room. It's more focused on just one person having this mode although this speakerphone is tailored for multiple people like larger teams. If you do end up just having a meeting by yourself and you're dialing in remotely with a lot of people on the other end of the call, then you can go to spotlight mode. So the quality on the camera is a little bit clearer just so that it's focused on one person rather than the entire room. So I just wanted to showcase this as well. You may not use this the most often but this is an option that's still there and I still think this is quite good that they've added this as a feature. And finally the fifth mode was the in private mode. To do this you can simply tap on the in private button there on the speaker or also on the remote as well just there in the middle at the top.  The camera there will flip upside down. So let's go ahead and do that. And you'll see everything has stopped on the Zoom call as well. So nobody will be able to hear me, no one can see me. And you'll see that the red indicator lights on the meeting capsule will indicate that this is completely private. And just on the topic of these indicator lights I think it's quite nice that this doubles up also to showcase the volume that you've said it at. So as I adjust the volume on my laptop have a look here and see how it goes up and down. So I'll put the volume up and it goes to max which is the five LED lights. If I go down you'll see this also reduces. So this is kind of like a volume bar based on the LED lights which I think is also a very nice touch. All right guys, the next test I want to showcase to you guys is the audio quality that I hear back from the speakers on this because the speakers are pretty powerful. They're very clear.  So you guys can actually hear how good this sounds. So you guys tested the iPhone 14 Pro Max. I actually want to ask you specifically about one thing. Okay. Battery life. Yeah. How is your battery life been and have you compared it to a previous Max phone? Yeah. So the Pro Max is good battery life. Obviously it lasts like almost two days but last year we did the same thing where you reviewed the Pro and I reviewed the Pro Max. And last year it was a solid two straight days. Yeah. And I noticed that on this one it was still good but it died on the second day at like 4 p.m. Whereas last year it died like at midnight on the second day or like a little bit into the third day which is crazy. It's still good but... So you guys can hear the really good quality on the speaker of this. This is also dependent on the microphone that the person on the other end of the call is using but nonetheless if you are in a meeting and they have very good microphones on the other end you will get very good speaker and audio coming directly from the speaker phone. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this video I'll also play back some music as well. So in case you wanted to use this to have some music in the background then that's something that would be very useful to have this type of speaker with you. And if you did want to maybe use this as a speaker for music this will give you really good audio and it's very punchy, it's very loud. Of course this is not made to have like high bass and any type of subwoofer equipment inside it because it's not intended for that purpose but for what it is intended for the quality I can say is very very good. Okay guys and another benefit of having this is the noise cancellation feature that this is in built with. You guys can hear I'm playing some lo-fi music on a phone and I'm just placing this in the background quite close to the speaker. In fact I'll put the volume up a little bit and I'll just place that down and at the same time what I'll do is type a lot of words on my keyboard to be very loud and to see if the audio is still picking up my vocals more than a lot of this background noise. So let me go ahead and start typing. But now I'm starting typing, I'm gonna be tapping quite loud and I'm just doing random typing here but I wanna showcase to you guys how much noise isolation that these microphones in built into this with the voice IA algorithm that's in built into the meeting capsule. How well that works? So if you do have maybe some speakers in your meeting rooms that you are unable to turn off in the office, then you don't need to worry because this is actually gonna be a very good speaker to just focus on the people speaking and having those meetings. So can you guys hear me typing which is exactly right next to the meeting capsule and can you guys hear the Spotify music in the background? I think this does a very good job and it focuses more on the pure essence of what your meetings are intended for which is the talking. So hopefully you found that review useful guys. There's so much capabilities in the meeting capsule by eMeet. Take a look at the description below where you can find out more information and if you wanted to purchase this, they may have some offers running from time to time. So do check out the latest pricing information. If you guys have any other questions about the capabilities of this meeting capsule, as always, drop a comment down below. Make sure to subscribe. I have new videos out every week. I'll review really cool tech gadgets much like this one and I will catch you guys at the next one. Take care.


Our next speaker tonight, Matt Westcott, has been writing music and demos on the ZX Spectrum for over 20 years. He's had some amazing career with that. He's won competitions at assembly, the biggest demo party there is, and tonight he's going to take all of that experience and try and condense it to you in an hour. He's going to teach you how to ride a chip tune from scratch and best of all you're going to get to choose the chip tune. So have a think what you'd like to see turned into all its 8-bit glory and please give a warm welcome to Matt Westcott also known as Gasman. Thanks very much. So given that you've come to this talk, I hope you have at least a rough idea of what chip tunes are at least at the level of it's that sort of blippy-bloppy video game music. It's like many retro things. It's kind of something that's been borrowed as a kind of aesthetic choice. So if you're making music on something like Ableton Live or Logic, then you can easily find these chip tune plugins and to make the music in this style. But it's only really when you get to doing it on the original machines where chip tunes originated from like the Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the NAS that you can really get a sense of how the whole style of it has been born out of the technical constraints and it kind of emerged as ways of getting around those constraints. So hopefully that's what I'm going to be able to communicate to you today. So as you mentioned, I'll shortly be taking a request for a pop song to cover as Spectrum Chip Tune, which I'll attempt to cover in an hour and explain the process as I go along. But while you're thinking of requests, I'll give a bit of background to the parameters that we're working in and where the chip in chip tunes comes from. So the original home computers, when they were being designed and they wanted to add audio support, they were very much in the mindset of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, which meant wiring up, going from one of the CPU's output ports, wiring that straight up to a speaker so that if you're output to one, it would send a voltage across the speaker. If you're output to zero, it would turn that off. And by alternating between those two states at a given rate, then you would create an audio wave. And the advantage of this method is because it's all been done in software, is that there is basically no limits audio quality aside to the sort of sounds that you could produce. You could do speech synthesis of multi-channel audio. If you can program it, then you can do it. But the real disadvantage of that is that you can't really do anything else at the same time. Because it's, well, if you're going to be turning this speaker on and off at a precise rate, you can't just set the CPU to say, okay, set a timer to do this thing while I go off and do my own thing. You've got to be, even if you're just waiting, you need to count cycles to make sure everything is happening at precisely the right time. So it doesn't mean that you're very limited and what else you can do at the same time. I'll play an example of a load up Manic Minor, which is famous as one of the first ever games with background music. And you can kind of hear that it's got this very choppy sort of quality. And that's because it is literally having to divide its time, like a fraction of a second at a time, playing the music and then stopping to actually do the next bit of game and then playing the next bit of music. And people just, they wanted to do better than this. So the next generation of home computers, including the Spectrum 128K and the Commodore 64, they started shipping with built in sound chip. That's all this of unlike the CPU based approach that we've just shown. This is a fixed capabilities. So usually it would be something like you have three or four tone generators and they would just be able to play a square wave or a sawtooth wave and nothing else. You'd be able to sort of set the speed of these generators and the volume, but you're kind of stuck with the sounds that they provided. But the big upside, of course, is that these things can run under their own steam. Once you've actually told it to start playing a note at a particular frequency, it will just carry on doing that until you tell it to do something else. So in the case of the Spectrum, that sound chip, it was the AY38912, which is also used in a few of the machines like the Amstrad CBC. For the Commodore 64, there's the very famous SID chip. So that's basically the constraints that we're working within. So you don't have the flexibility that you have for doing things in software, but there's not enough flexibility to totally reinvent the sound it makes, but there's enough to be creative enough with it. So having said that, I think it's time to take requests. In fairness to people who aren't feeling like shouting stuff out, if you want to come to the microphone, if you've got an idea or shout out if you want. I see some theme from the arches. That's a really hardcore audience here. Any other suggestions? I kind of like to pick and choose what the time is. I think I'm going to stick with the theme to the arches. I've already done that one in my illustrious 20 year career. I do that when it's minimal. I like the theme to the arches. It has to be a tune I know very well. I've not done something of that sort before. Give it a bit of a drum and bass remix or something. Let's go for that. Here we go. Let's fire up the tracker. Let's give a quick burst of this. This is my first ever attempt to do a chip tune under time constraints. This was 15 minutes of American pie. That's as far as it goes. I didn't manage the whole nine minute track unsurprisingly. This is sound tracker. This is the software I use. It's running on the real spectrum or in this case an emulator. This is an original bit of software created back in 1991. There are better trackers around, such as Vortex tracker, which runs on Windows, also on Wine for Linux and Mac people. The reason I'm using this isn't out of some sort of hipster authenticity thing. It's just that this is what I'm used to. There's nothing worse than when you're in your creative flow, having to stop and remember how the software works. This is just what I'm used to. Let's clear this song. As you might have just seen there, this is the bit in the middle. This is where all the actual real music writing happens. It's divided into these three columns, which they correspond to the three same generators that you get on the spectrum. What you can do is, and the vertical axis is time. If I start entering some notes, these are just using the standard musical note names. Let's spread them out a bit here. As I saw there, if I start this playing, then you can see that the time is scrolling past and the white row is the one that's showing the note that's playing at the moment. The reason you didn't hear anything playing right there is that I haven't actually set up any sounds yet. This is where we need to go for the sample editor. Samples is a bit of a misnomer here, because this kind of originated from the trackers on the Amiga, where this whole concept started off. Samples in music usually means a clip of recorded audio that you're triggering at precise times, perhaps slowing it down, speeding it up to vary the pitch. In the case of the Amiga, that was the building blocks that you're using to build up your song. Since we're restricted to the sounds that the sound chip can generate, the meaning of samples is kind of a bit hacks around a bit in our case. What we have, I'll edit sample number one here. This is, rather than it being sort of a real audio waveform, it's a graph of how the volume will vary over time. As I said, we're pushing data to the sound chip every 50th of a second, so each of these bars is 50th of a second slot. Let's start creating a waveform that starts loud and dies away. The top half is the volume over time. Since the arches theme, it's very staccato. We want to note that kind of dies away quickly. I think it's going to be this sort of, fortunately, being a spectrum program, it's all kind of very fiddly to actually do the editing. I think there's a bit more volume there. We've got the feeding away fairly quickly sound. You'll notice it is sounding a bit sort of noisy there. That's because the AY chip can also do noise, which is what this second half is. It's control link. I'll set these to one to mute them out. It's also very annoying how you get this click that's actually louder than the music you're playing. I might get around to explaining why it's one to turn this off. It's because it's talking to the chip at a fairly low level and this happens to be how it works at that level. We've masked out the noise and now we've got this pure tone. Again, it's because it can only produce square waves. This is a square wave sound that's dying away fairly quickly. I'll skip past the screen. This is actually showing how the tone will vary over time. I think we want this to be kind of a flat note at the moment. Now we can get on with editing, putting in our notes. Let's clear these out. We've created that as sample one. Let's see what note do we want to start on. I think that works. One important decision at this point is what the tempo is going to be, how quickly we scroll past here because you can only put the notes on the, you can't put them between rows. You probably don't really have much choice here. It's going to be like... I did a second bit while I'm here. That's the one. Incidentally, it's the bottom row of keys here that CVBNM is like the musical keyboard. It's all very low-fi, no midi or anything. Let's hear how this sounds. It's probably going to be way too fast at the moment. Not too bad. Good start. I think I will slow that down slightly. Delay six. Since everything is in units of a 50th of a second, that will be... Advanced I think it's every six 50th of a second. That's one X. I think there's a couple of notes. What's booking me slightly is there's some longer notes that could do with another sample. In trackers, you don't really have a concept of setting the length of a note. If you want a longer note, that just means a sample that takes a long to die away. Let's make it so it sticks at that level here. Again, this is very fiddly and clicky. Again, we want to mask out all of the noise. That's more like it. So far, we've just specified sample one at the beginning there, and then the zeroes means it will carry on playing sample one. That's the one who wants to be a longer note. I've kind of forgotten to actually set it back to one again for the shorter notes. Let's do that again. One, two, one, two, one. Oh, I need to do it for the second half as well. Let's hear that again. You can hear the difference between those two note lengths there. Since unlike a lot of the music that the youth is listening to today, this is in three, four times. Well, in compound time, which means that by default, you have 64 rows in this. Since we all probably want to change that to a 48, because it's all in threes, or 47 in fact, because it's zero based, just to confuse you. Now that's about to repeat again. As a space saving measure, because memory is always very tight on the spectrum, the song you're making is divided into what's known as patterns, which kind of musical phrases. Since a lot of music is quite repetitive, if you've got a standard song structure where it's verse, chorus, verse, chorus, you don't want to have multiple copies of that data. You can actually define your song as a sequence of these patterns possibly repeating. In the case of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, it might be one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, and then three, four if there's another chorus, and that way you're not storing multiple copies of the same data. At the moment we're just only working with one pattern at the moment. We'll see if we get time to do a bit more of the song, but let's make this be a bit more adventurous about the samples here. So this long note here, we can add a bit of vibrato. Let's imagine we're playing the arches theme on an overdriven electric guitar. It might be a bit too much to hope for. We can have a bit of, when it's doing the long note, so we can do a sort of a bit of vibrato effect on there, so that adds a bit more life to it. As I say, these columns on the left here, it's actually just one column. Again, it's sort of defining what happens over time, and every 50th of a second at the moment, we're not adjusting the pitch at all, it's all just one flap tone. Let's say, let's shift it up a bit here. These are in units of, it's complicated, because again, because this is all addressing the chip on a very low level, which is kind of incidentally why we're using this sort of interface and not kind of conventional like music sort of, yeah, musical notation. So this is kind of adjustment to the period of wave in clock cycles, which also means as you're going to the higher frequencies, these notes have, these little adjustments have a bigger effect, so it's all a bit of a blackout to adjust it all, so hopefully you'll, so hopefully you might be able to hear if I stop it at this point. It's very subtle, but it's kind of, it's, I'll move a bit more to, you might, you might just be able to hear it's, it's sort of rampings of up in tones at the end slightly, that's a bit more, a bit, a bit. So let's say that's, so it's going up and down again and then, it's all very subtle, we don't want it to actually change the note we're playing in any fundamental way, and let's do that in the negative direction here. So, so you can hear this sort of sound there. So the other thing that is kind of what we're going for there, so we can see if we play that back we can hopefully hear the effect on the actual song here. So yeah, it's a bit, hopefully you can hear the effect there. Let's get a bit of a baseline sort of going here. So let's start entering stuff into the second, this is a second channel of audio. So, so down to sort of octave two, I think I should do it. Let's, I'll use sample one for this just because we don't really want the vibrato thing going on here. So, let's see how this is, it probably goes down, down to, down to A, down to A, down to A. Okay, so let's see what that's giving us. Okay, that's kind of working. So, let's onto drums which I'm sure the original theme didn't have, but let's go in wild here. So, this is where we start sort of getting the noise side of things into play. So, although we still need to sort of define something here, because it's still using the same volume control. So, let's see, we want to, let's get, so let's do a snare drum here. So, we want that to be, again to fading away fairly quickly over time. Let's do something like this. And so, again, you've got that sort of, that's a quite noisy thing. We want a bit of tonal content in there. So, I'll leave that, I could mask this out completely and then it will just be noise, but I think we need, we need a bit of tone as well. So, the second half is actually controlling the, again, this is where it kind of gets easy and low level, the pitch of the noise. I know white noise doesn't really have a pitch, but because it's actually done by adding sort of random ones and zeros and this is controlling, yeah, how quickly it changes from one to zero. It kind of changes the kind of, the flavor of the noise, I suppose. So, if we, so here we can hear that, that's kind of a very sort of, quite a high noise and then if I take that down, you can hear that's kind of going a bit deeper as you go down until the right of the top is that. So, rather than So, we've got some extra white noise coming from outside by the sound of things.  So, let's go start. Again, this is sort of backwards and confusing, just, but again, it matches the way that the chip works. So, let's, so let's get that one to sort of go down to the lowest frequency there. So, so can kind of hear a bit there, maybe we'll make it reach the, the lowest bits faster. So, it's kind of in a way, so that's kind of what we're aiming for, but I think what we also need to do here is make sure that the tone content also sort of goes right down to zero, well, not just zero, it plummets down. For some reason, you get the options of sort of adjusting this by either one or by 128 and nothing in between. So, let's do this a few multiples of 128. So, the idea here is that we're kind of making it stop sounding like a tone, because you could still kind of identify that as a specific musical note, and that we're taking this down, so it's sort of going sort of down to the ground really quickly, so that you can't really identify it as a particular note. So, I think that might be enough. Okay, it's kind of turning a bit bass, bass note-y there. Let's, no, wrong way. Let's move that up a bit. So, I've kind of got a bit of a snare, sort of, it probably could have done with sort of not fading out in volume quite as fast, but it'll do for now. So, let's also do a bass drum. In this case, we don't really want it to have that sort of sort of white noise quality, so we can get this whole percussive thing just by just using this second trick of sort of ramping the tone down really quickly. In this case, a bass drum that sort of does, that's kind of a very short stabby sort of noise, so the volume should fall away quickly there, and as I say, we don't really want any noise there. So, then we've got this very blippy sound, and then, again, we'll take this down to, yeah, runkeys, make this pitch slider way down when you go a bit faster than that. Okay, that's kind of more what I'm looking for there. So, this is all a bit of a sort of trial and error sort of thing. It's not like we're physically modeling these instruments or anything, so, and we're only going to come so close to it actually sounding like a real drum, but I think that's probably good enough to work with now. So, now I've got to decide what a drum beat for the arches theme is going to sound like. So, okay, I'll try something like that. So, it's, four is my bass drum, so it's, boom, two, boom bass there. Let's see, how does that go? Okay, and because I can't be bothered to figure that out for the second half, let's do a spot of cut and paste, so it's still very low level again. So, that was, so we're still working in pattern one, copying the paste from one, and that was zero to 23, paste to 24 to the end. So, it's like copying from the first half of this pattern to the second half, and that was channel C. So, yeah, it takes a lot of experience to kind of remember what numbers to put in there. So, okay, so I think we're definitely getting somewhere here. So, what next? Probably wants us a bit of accompaniment. So, it's a bit, a few chords to add to that, except this is where we kind of run into a bit of a problem, because we've, now that we've got the melody, the bass, and the, and the drums, we've run out of channels to actually put notes into. And so, it is kind of the, the sort of perennial problem we run it and run into with, sort of chip music, if, if, if it's the, the real thought where you have these constraints. So, we'll need to find ways to kind of insert our, our chords around these. And obviously, chords consist of multiple notes being played at once, which, I know we're going to have enough trouble sort of inserting a single note in, in, around what we've already got. So, this is where we actually get to what's probably the, the most distinctive thing about chip tunes, which is arpeggios. So, if you've got sort of several notes to play at once, like a C chord, then the, then the trick is to, to cycle between, very fast, except faster than that. So, that's, it's, well, it doesn't really sound like they're all playing at once, but there's enough of an effect to pass, and this is kind of the, the, the sound that you would always associate with kind of Mario soundtracks or whatever. So, this is under sort of ornaments here. So, ornaments again, this is another way of the varying pitch over time, but this time this is measured in actual semitones. So, we're working out the actual musical level, rather than the, rather than this abstract frequencies thing. So, at the moment we're just, that's all zeros. So, so I probably want sort of a C major chord. So, I think that's, yeah. Now, I, I'm, I'm doing, so it's sticking at each note for two fiftieth of a second. I've found a three experience that, if you do it, this kind of leaves it with a nice melodic one. If you cycle through the notes too fast, it kind of becomes a bit harsh. So, let's go for 047, and let's repeat this a couple of times. Usually, I'd sort of go through this whole, the whole list of notes, but given that we're kind of a bit pushed for time, that's probably good enough. So, there, you've got this son of major chord there, and it's, and you can come here while it is sort of cycling through the notes there. Yeah, it's, it's sort of a decent, a decent enough recreation of actually playing that as a chord. So, let's get another one. So, that's a du du du, let's, we probably want to do du du du. There. Okay, so we'll start with those. You might find that we need more of these, as in pretty much everything in the soundtrack, there's some of a quite a sort of severe limit to the number of samples and ornaments you can have. We've got sort of 15 or 16 to play with. I think we're not going to have time to fill that up, but once you're actually doing a sort of full length song, you can find yourself running into these, and you have to make creative compromises. But so, let's, let's see, this is going to be a tricky one. Is it where, where to insert these? So, I can probably, let's see, it's, this is kind of a different problem solved every time you write a song. I think we can probably get away with the bass notes being sort of shortened, so it's, it'll be du du du du du. It's, I guess it's kind of a ragtime sort of thing or something. So, okay, so we've got so a bass note there, and now we want this to be, let's see, it's probably going to be this, that octave. So, let's, so that was, oh, we're probably going to want another sample at some point because this is the same volume as the main melody, which is, is no good. Now I have to say, so F is the, that's the code to say, let's turn this into, let's use one of these ornaments, and in this case we're using ornament number one, and if I sort of leave it, so for running like that, then, so we hear that's kind of added the ornament to the bass line as well, which is sort of pretty horrible, so we're going to have to explicitly say turn that off when we're playing a bass note. So let's see, that's probably the second one, and that's off. Okay, let's see if that's sounding vaguely possible now. Okay, so let's hear that again. Okay, maybe what I really need to do is just cut out some of these bass notes so it's, so that we've got a bit more time to actually hear that accompaniment. So let's sort of chop out every other one, and let's, okay, so, so well, I'm going through sort of removing a few of these, these bass notes, so to fit in some of the non-bass ones. Okay, and since that second half is not quite the same as the first one, I don't think I can do my copy and paste tricks, so I need to quickly go through and add those two, and that's, that needs to be played for. I'm going to remove that one. Now we need to sort of mine a note, mine a chord, so off to the ornament editor again. Let's see, let's just do one more repeat of those notes. Okay, so that was on number three, so let's hear where that goes again. I'm going to stop that too early. Yeah, so that's the minor note we want, so now I think it's, right, so I, okay. So yeah, that's actually sounding pretty good. I like that. I thought I would have to take the volume of those accompaniment staves down a bit, but I think that's working pretty well. It's, I think that's quite a distinctive bit of our tune now, so we can sort of bring that up in the mix as it were, and I think the fact that it is also fairly short stabs that then gets interrupted by the bass means that it's kind of not quite as prominent as the melody there. I think it's time for a bit of hardware abuse of the very mild sort. I'm not going to set fire to my laptop or anything, but so those bass notes, while we've kind of jazzed things up a bit, let's just focus on this channel here. They're still sort of pretty plain, so that's the we can do something a bit more sort of exciting here, and this is where, so, so this is where I think we have to go back a bit into the history of like where the AY chip originated from, because I get the impression that when they first designed it, they didn't really imagine that people would use it by pushing data to it every 50th of a second, like we've been doing all the way through this. It seems like they imagined that you would just send data to the chip on every time you wanted to actually play a new actual musical note, because obviously it can play a note under its own steam if you're not bothered about doing all fancy effects to it, so they probably imagined that's how people would use this chip, but then they evidently realised that, well, this is just going to result in tunes where all the music notes are just going to be a flat B sort of sound, so let's throw our users a bone here, and so they came up with the idea of envelopes, which is a bit of functionality on board the chip, which would allow you to vary the volume of that note over time, and so you'd be able to set the, rather than having it just a flat volume, have it say that it will fade away at a certain time, then maybe it will repeat. There's a few different options, which is a nice thought of them, but as it happens this is pretty much completely useless, because we've already been doing our sample editing to vary our volume over time, and doing this in software is a lot more flexible, we could, for example, do something that sort of goes down and then sort of ramps up slightly to get sort of one-one-one sort of sound, which you couldn't do on board facilities, so as I said this bit of this feature of the chip is pretty much useless except for one thing, which is that if, because you can sort of control how long it takes for the envelope to fade away, what if we sort of ramped up the speed of this, so it's actually fading, so the volume is fading away much, much faster than one-fiftyth of a second at that point, and then we set it to repeatedly do that. At that point we've actually moved out of the sort of volume domain, and it's actually become an audio waveform in its own right, so when I said at the beginning that the AY chip can only do square waves, that wasn't exactly true, it can also be tricked into doing sort of triangular and sawtooth waves, but the downside of this is, like so many things here, you have to sort of work with it at a very low level, because this is kind of, as I say, hardware abuse, there's kind of speeds that you're actually setting the envelopes to are sort of right at the edge of the tolerance of what it was designed for, which means that you don't really have much resolution to control exactly what pitch this happens at, so you can't reliably match it to an actual musical tone. I think the Atari VCS has a similar sort of issue for crazy people who write music on that, because that was not designed for music at all, so it's that they kind of have a kind of very, because they're kind of working with this very limited resolution that doesn't always match to musical notes, then they kind of have to compose their music out of this reduced scale, and it's even more hardcore than I'm prepared to go, but so luckily we can sort of, we can make the best of this though by using it for the like the baseline of where, kind of because the notes' lengths are a lot, the periods are longer, then you've got a bit more control, so let's start sort of dropping in some of these then, so these are, rather than using the F command which is for the ornaments, we can, the ones to use it's A and C, I think C is kind of, that's like the sawtooth which is a harsher thing, so let's see how that goes, and because this is actually happening on top of the existing square wave, you can actually get some interesting distortion effects, where if it's not exactly in tune then it will kind of go in an outer phase, so let's see how this goes then, so that's our our note at the moment, so let's try adding the C, so a moment so zero is that's the fastest, so let's slow that down to so here you can see as we're setting the speed of it to like 24, and oh yes by the way this is in hex just to throw another spanner in the works, so we can, so as I say we can't reliably tune this to actual musical notes, so we're required to do this in hex values and kind of tune it by hand, so we want to try and find a frequency that sort of fits well with that, so let's see, I don't know and that's quite well, let's see what the ones on the side are, okay let's go one octave down actually, I don't know what 2d multiplied by 2, it's probably 5 8, actually no I like the first one better, so yeah so what's it, so 2d we're going for there, so yeah let's so find all of our notes here are f's so that's a G, so that will be a slightly higher and faster one, so it will be so it'll be C, so like 2, so that sounds right, so 2d again, so down a bit more, yeah that sounds about right, and up again, so that's what that's to, so you can see I'm kind of having to sort of adjust this by hand to look sounds right because there's no guarantee that you will actually match this up to a real musical note, okay so let's see what our newly pimped up theme tune sounds like here, okay so that's sounding a bit better, yeah that's it, so now we've got a bit of time left, let's try and move on to the second half of the theme, and let's actually, I'm enjoying that bass line quite a bit, so let's try and make this one a bit more basic then, so let's so Melody first though so, so that's, so rather than that I'll just do the Melody first then add these samples, I was adding the samples so it's 2 for the along notes, how that's sounding, okay let's see so let's say a bit of time, let's copy and paste the drums from pattern one, so that was channel C and luckily we didn't have to stick any of our chords into that one, so that should be okay that's sounding good, so as I say we're going to make this a bit more sort of bass heavy this time, so let's see, so I think we went for like note and tones around the 20 mark here, let's take that down, so okay so let's go for sort of, play that for one note and then they have the accompaniment, let's do all the bass notes first, that's sounding right, and then 70, there we go, we had for F that was 58, 78 there, okay let's see if you can make that, actually let's stick that an octave down, ah I should have done that, nice fat note shouldn't have done that all the way through really, okay and let's stick in our accompaniments here so then let's another of those chords, then it's going to be, oh no that's not quite the one, it's so it's another one that we don't have, okay let's just stick that one for now, let's not bother repeating, okay yep there you go, okay so let's put both of those halves together, so as I say, so now we've moved on to a second pattern, so in position one we have pattern one and in position two we have pattern two, so we didn't actually get to do any repeating there, but okay so let's see what our finished tune sounds like, thanks to Matt Westcott, we have five minutes for questions, so if you've got a quick question and it should be quick please come up to the microphones, okay we're just saving it first because I think this is a good one, I'm going to keep it, yeah okay uh no hang on, there's a weird book there, question at the back, I don't have a question, I just wanted to say it's brilliant thank you very much for this big show, thank you come to the microphone please, I have a question for the audience actually, do the non-brits in the audience actually know what the arches is, good point, show fans, hands up if you actually know what the arches is, okay that's um, hands up if you know and you're not British, yes it is a very British thing, it's a soap opera on the radio, it's sets of in the countryside so most of the story lines are, actually I could be horribly misrepresenting it because I'm not a follower of it myself but it's all about sheep getting stolen and things and uh yeah it's like say very British, so microphone, can we have the fun mic up please, I'm not sure if this is question for you, how does this compare to for instance punch cards on dance organs, can you I suppose yeah I can kind of see the similarity of uh yeah it's um music, yeah it's vertically over time, I suppose in that case you could sort of think of that as kind of an extreme version of this, where we've got three channels, I suppose like a player piano would be like 80 channels except each one is just one tone but uh yeah it's an interesting thought, yeah there's definite parallels there, yeah. Do you happen to have a copy of your Derude Sandstorm cover that the audience could listen to? Oh yeah okay I think we've got time for this yeah okay, particularly if you've got the video to go with it, yes I do I believe we can do that yes yes um okay so it's um yeah good okay um it's gonna do top, sorry what's the song called? okay um yep this'll be the one, all right it's okay um actually need to be on okay it has lyrics, I'm afraid that's all the time we've got so huge thanks to Matt Westcott


My name is Skaj, I am a media designer from the Netherlands and I am finishing my master's degree of future design at Praxity University. During the last two years I have specialized in artificial intelligence and implementing machine learning in art and design. My graduation project is called N-Visage, which means to make up an image inside of your head. N-Visage is a software that contains multiple AI models and lets you make an AI generated animation video out of a piece of text or even a photo of text. My prototype is built for fiction books, which means you can make a photo of the back of a book and N-Visage will create a video based on keywords, emotion and the sentences of the book description. I started my research with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to enrich the library experience of the future? And pretty quickly after I started my research and I started talking to people, I realized that I wanted to continue my challenge within fiction books and how people decide what will be their next book, so kind of the decision making of books. And after I've spoken to a few people I found something very interesting and that's even though people say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, actually 90% of the people that I spoke to, a really important part of choosing their next book is what the cover looks like. And the cover is usually the only visual that you get from a book. Movies however are often not what a reader expected when it comes to for example what characters look like or how the story is going to like expand and that can be pretty frustrating. So how do you visualize a book without spoiling too much and without taking away from the readers their imagination? Because what someone imagines while reading is very different for each person and this is why I used a lot of user-centered design methods in my research. I met up with a group of people online and I hosted a few workshop sessions. What's the point where you would find yourself the most in library or like what area, what kind of genre is your main go-to when you would pick a new book? It was actually very fun and there were quite some interesting results that helped me to continue my research. It turns out that a more abstract video of the mood and the setting of a book actually can really stimulate the imagination. So as long as it follows a few guidelines like no character should be visible or recognizable in a video and no full storyline or plots should be there for example. By watching a book trailer that's in line with the book and its description a person might actually choose a book better because they could like already connect a bit better with the story and already maybe have a sneak peek of the setting of the book so they know a little bit more about what they choose to read next. I created it in this first prototype especially for fiction writers so that they could use it in a way to enhance their story to like expand on what they already have in written form and also so they have control over for example the cover of a book. It can actually be very useful for writers to have an AI analyze their text because in the end the AI learned from a huge amount of data from the internet what people in general imagine by certain words. Next to book descriptions using AI to visualize text can have a way bigger potential. Could you imagine important medical tests that you don't understand and having that visualized or if you are keeping a journal and this you would like to have visualized. I can even see use cases where illiterate people could really be helped by this tool. So how does it work you ask and it's a pretty technical story but I really enjoy this edge of creativity and technology. So here's it in short this software takes an input either a text file or it uses an OCR to extract text from an image. Next we have a piece of text of which emotions will be classified keywords will be extracted and also the text will be cleaned up. That means names have to be removed special characters have to be removed and it will be put into sentences split at the comma. From the keywords and emotion classifier you're able to generate a soundtrack with an AI model. And the soundtrack can actually then drive keyframes that can drive a camera movement in the final video. The processed sentences together with the keywords and the emotions can then be used for prompt engineering. This means that we will create new lines of text that will then drive the video frames so it can move from one scene to another to another to another and so on. These new sentences together with the camera movement are then led into an AI diffusion model and this diffusion model creates the new video frames. The individual video frames are then post processed and stitched together in template that I based on a research on trailers and teasers. After that sound will be added and the video is good to go. You now have a fully AI generated animated video that's based on the book description. I'm preparing very hard at the moment for the exhibition that will be in June. It's really going well but it's a lot of work. It's been really fun also. At the exhibition I will showcase my project in an interactive installation. I'm working with sensors, projectors and books and I don't want to give away too much of what it's going to look like because I really want you to come and take a look for yourself. The exhibition opens on Thursday the 9th of June at 7pm and I really invite you to be there. It's going to be in the Pragovka Art District and we will be with a group of ten fine arts and future design students showing our works and what we've learned during the last two years.


Hi guys, how you doing? This is Rich. You're going to be having Rich TV Live and I got a new secret pick here for you. This is a penny stock. The symbol in Canada is OEE and the symbol in America is M-E-N-X-F. The website is memex-O-E-E dot com and This is what memex Inc is. It's a leader in real-time shop floor-to-top floor technology solutions. Memex's flagship product Merlin delivers overall equipment effectiveness OEE. That's where the symbol OEE came from. Metrics in real-time enabling manufacturers to enhance production and increase income and profits from operations. Merlin has earned the 2013 North America Frost and Sullivan Award for Technology Innovation Leadership. Since 1992 memex has partnered with 280 dealers worldwide to provide a variety of manufacturing connectivity products and services to over 12,000 customers globally. Now, this is their investor's page. You can get more stock information. You can see this is a Canadian company from Burlington, Ontario and I've just been researching this. About memex, memex with its visionary attitude has been on the leading edge of the convergence of the industry trends in computing power, connectivity of machines, industry standards, advanced software technology and manufacturing domain expertise. This is Internet of Things company and I love IoT technology. Memex is the developer of Merlin, an award-winning IOT technology platform that delivers tangible increases in manufacturing productivity in real-time. There it is, IoT technology. You can go to investor news. Let's click on investor news. You can see they just reported their 2020 results. They just reported the 2020 results. All of a sudden the stock is starting to trade millions of shares a day. I'm letting you know this right away that this is trending up. This is a penny stock. Now remember, Rich TV Live is strictly for education and entertainment purposes. Always do your due diligence. Always do your research before you invest in anything we talk about here in Rich TV Live. Now you can see that this has gone from 002 to 2 cents. This is already up 1,000 percent since November. It's a penny stock. It's just getting started. This is the American symbol, M-E-N-X-F. So it's already up 10x, right? Well, let's look at the Canadian one. We started buying the Canadian one and the U.S. one yesterday actually. Our club did. I personally haven't yet, but some of our members started to buy this yesterday. You can see it's up 20 percent, went to three and a half cents and traded 4.5 million shares. So all of a sudden out of nowhere, after they reported their financials, the stock spiked. So this is a penny stock, but I want to show you guys why I thought there was some interest here. M-E-N-X-N-K, a leader in industrial internet of things, IIOT, manufacturing, productivity software, today released its annual financial and operational highlights for its fiscal year ending September 30, 2020. All results are reported in Canadian dollars. A complete set of audited September 30, 2020, Consolidated Financial Statements. So let's see here. M-E-N-X reported revenue of 500,000 for the three-month period for a two-cent stock. I guess a three-cent stock in Canada now compared to 932,000 in the same period a year ago, a 46 percent decrease. But what they're saying is the reason they're having this decrease is not because the company isn't growing, it's because of COVID-19. Bookings for the period totaled 532,000 versus 503,000 in a year ago period, a six percent increase, which means they actually are not slowing down. They're actually growing. This is where I saw some interesting reasons to take notice. Finish the period and year with 1.25 million of project backlog. So they got 1.25 million of business coming, 63,000 more than September 30, 2019. And this was very impressive. Their gross margins were 87.8 percent for the period compared to 69.5 percent for the year ago period, which means they're going to have higher margins. So maybe on the next report, we may see a huge spike. Cash generating from operations before changes in non-cash items, 20,000 was a 91,000 improvement from the 71,000 consumed from operations same period a year ago. Income from operations for the period of 3,000 was a 96,000 improvement from the year ago period and a second consecutive quarter of profits from operations. So two quarters in a row of profits from operations. So they were operating at a loss. Now they're operating in profits net and comprehensive loss for the period of 11,000 is a 126,000 improvement from the 137,000 net and comprehensive loss from the same period a year ago. 267,000 working capital deficit and 549,000 in cash on hand in September 30, 2020 compared to 356,000 working capital and 740,000 in cash as a September 30, 2019 company received 181,000 from government of Canada's emergency wage subsidy, as well as 102,000 regional relief and recovery fund loan, which helps stabilize its financial position in wake of COVID-19 pandemic. So let's just take a look at summary financial highlights for the year ended September 30, 2020, 2.25 million a revenue for the fiscal year versus 3.25 million a year ago, a 31% decrease bookings total 2.41 million versus 3.48 million a year ago also a 31% decrease gross margin was 76.4 for the year compared to 70.9 a year ago cash consumed from operations for fiscal 2020 year before changes in non cash items was 600,000 222,000 less than a year ago and net and comprehensive loss for the year of 749,000 0.006 per share compared to 1.07 million 0.008 per share a year ago. Now let's see what management says. Mexmex Memex has been able to maintain its working capital since the onset of the pandemic due in part from Canadian COVID-19 relief programs C.E.W.S. and R.R.R.F commented Memex CFO Ed Crimble and in light of COVID-19 and its effects on commerce across North America, we are satisfied with our year and results and are highly motivated to improve on them in 2021. Like most organizations, we had to adjust our business model to accommodate operating in this global pandemic and stay relevant our product delivery strategy and a more digitally focused sales and marketing approach have enabled us to stay engaged with our customers and prospects and to think positively about the future said Memex CEO David McPhail. We continue to see strong interest from new opportunities as well as a growing number of follow on opportunities for our established customer base. So this is a company that I thought is interesting. It's a penny stock. I was given this pick from Alberto Ramos. Thank you Alberto for bringing me this pick.  It's at three cents might be interesting and who knows where it goes from here. I mean, if it goes to five cents or 10 cents, we get an opportunity to make a multiple on a small potentially growing company. Now this is a penny stock. It's very risky. One of the things that caught my attention was the share structure for a three cent stock. 135 million shares was very tight. I thought that that was very interesting. And I think that I like that. And then the other thing that I liked is the market cap only a 3.6 million market cap. I think this could easily grow to 10 million market cap, which means we could see a multiple and as an investor, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for growing market caps and tight floats, tight share structures. This is a relatively good share structure for a company that's only trading at three cents. No news here on OTC markets. If we go to look at the key data on TMX money, once again, you can see four million market cap, just a baby market cap here. So very interesting company. And I think that there's some potential here for some upside. And if there is, we need to be on top of it. We need to be aware of it and we need to be prepared for it. Okay. I'd love to know your opinion on this. O E E in Canada. M E N X F in America. I'm the first one ever to talk about the stock. I'm sure once again, we bring you the winners and we bring them to you first shadow to Alberto Ramos for bringing me this pic. And our members are now starting to position themselves in case this starts to rock it. If it does, congratulations to all members. I'm not telling you guys to buy this stock. I'm not a shareholder of this stock. Just another pic that we're bringing to you and we're bringing to you first. We love to get in early for the win. Love to know what you guys think. Memex measuring manufacturing excellence. Memex O E E dot com and the symbol in Canada. O E E was up 20% yesterday after we talked about it to our club and in America, M E N X F. Thank you guys for watching. This is your boy, Rich, from Rish TV Live and I'm a piece.