Over the course of my time on this channel, I've talked about the importance of distrohopping several times. I've talked about the reasons why I think that if you're going to try Linux, the best way to find out what distro is good for you is to try basically all of them. But the monotimes in my comment sections on Macedon, on formerly Twitter, on Discord or whatever that I've heard from people who have said they've only ever tried one or two distros and they've never moved away, it's just kind of shocking to me that there are so many people out there that have never really, truly distrohopped. So what I wanted to do today was talk about four distros that I think everyone should try. No matter whether you're happy on your distro or not, I think that there are four out there that you should absolutely try at least once. And even if you don't succeed in installing them or you don't use them long-term or whatever, the experience of using them or at least installing them is very important if only because you're going to learn so much doing so. So let's go ahead and jump into the four Linux distros that everyone should use. The first one is not going to seem all that special simply because it's been around for a long time. It's very easy to install and well it's very popular and that is Debian. Now, the reason why it's on the list is simply because it's like the granddaddy of them all, right? It's one of the oldest distros. It's either Slackware or Debian depending on which way you look at it. I'm not sure which one actually came first, but they're both very, very close in terms of being the oldest. It's been around for a very long time. It's very well maintained even to this day. And probably most importantly, it is the foundation for the vast majority of Linux distributions out there. It's the foundation of Ubuntu and therefore it's the foundation of everything that's based on Ubuntu. You get the idea. Debian is the foundation for the vast majority of Linux distributions out there. And if you've never tried it, you probably will never understand why. Now, obviously Debian is not for everyone, but it does have many very good factors playing in its favor. So it's very, very stable. So even if you use the non-stable branch, you're still going to experience a very stable operating system. And like I said, it's very well maintained so that you get updates fairly often. There's a brand new version of Debian quite often. And it has a huge selection of software because it is Debian and Debian is one of the most popular distributions to base software on, which means that you have access to all that software. So Debian is a fantastic distribution. It's very, very old. It's been around for a very long time, but it's still very well maintained. And I think that everyone should definitely give it a try at least one time. Now the second one on the list is Arch Linux. Now that might not surprise you, but Arch has traditionally been a very difficult distribution to install. But that's no longer actually true over the course of the last two years with the introduction of the Arch install script. Arch is actually very easy to install nowadays.  And when I say Arch, I mean actual Arch Linux, not something based on Arch Linux. Now I have nothing wrong with trying Arch-based distros. Most of my time on Linux has actually been spent in an Arch-based distro and not on Arch itself. But I think that trying vanilla Arch at least once will give you an opportunity to learn many things about Linux itself, but also will give you a sense of why so many people really, really like Arch Linux. The ability to build your system from the ground up, but not so far from the ground up that it's gen to is a, it's a pleasing experience. If you can get your mind around it, right? You can learn so much. You can kind of be in full control over what's on your system. And it's just really, really nice. Now you obviously get a lot of the benefits of Arch Linux. If you decide to use it specifically, I'm talking about the AUR. And once you've used the AUR and kind of understand why the AUR is so special, it's really hard to leave the AUR behind and use something different.  If only to kind of understand why it's so popular and why it's become such a meme worthy distribution. The third one on the list is gen to. Now I know what everyone was thinking. I'm not going to try gen to, I've seen some of those install videos and I'm right there with you. I've only ever successfully installed gen to twice. And both of those were with significant help from members of my community and friends. So gen to is not a very easy distribution to install. The documentation is fantastic. And if you follow the documentation, theoretically, you shouldn't have any problems, but it is a more complex distro than you'll find basically anywhere else. It's probably the second most difficult beyond Linux from scratch. So the reason why I think everyone should try it is simply because it's so difficult to install during the install process. You're going to learn a phenomenal amount of how Linux works, how things are supposed to go, why people see gen to is such a good thing and why it has so many options. And it's just a process that you should be able to take from one step to another until you finally get to an installed system. And if you read the documentation and understand the documentation, you'll learn so much. And really that's what gen to is to me is the learning experience. Now a lot of people will say gen to is a fantastic distro that you can use on a daily basis. And for a lot of people it is, but for the vast majority of people who try gen to, I think it's more of an experience for education about why Linux is good, why gen to is good, and the process of installing it is going to be where you're going to gain most of that knowledge. So I think everyone should try to install gen to at least once. And I really do think that is one of those distros that it just kind of has to be tried before you can really understand why it's good. So I think everyone should give gen to a try. Now the fourth and final one is Slackware. Now if Debian is the oldest or Slackware is the oldest, I don't really remember. I know that they're both started around the same time. So they're both very, very old distros. Debian is way more maintained than Slackware is now. That doesn't mean that Slackware has been abandoned or anything. There was a brand new version of it last year, but it's not as the releases don't come flowing as fast as Debian's do. Really outside of that, the reason why I think everyone should try it is simply because it is one of those distributions that has been around for a very, very long time. And this is the big thing. It does things so differently than every other distribution. Yes, it has package managers and packages and all the stuff that you have to kind of deal with, but it does all this stuff in a very unique way. And it does give you quite a bit of the control that both Arch and gen to give you when it comes to building your system. So it just does it in a different way than those do. It is also significantly easier to install than at least gen to. And I would even consider it a little bit more easy to install than Arch, at least Arch in the past, probably not Arch right now. But Slackware is one of those distributions that just has been around for a very long time and you'll hear about it a lot. So you'll hear from people who are very ardent Slackware users. They're very pro Slackware.  And then you have, then you use it and you realize this is a very modern system despite the fact that it is an older distribution. So Slackware I think is one of those distributions that is just different than all the rest of them. And it is an astonishing achievement for it to still be around all these years later. I mean, it's one of those things that will just, it's like there are several distributions or at least I should say there's two distributions out there that Linux could have stopped at. Like we could have never seen Arch. We could have never seen Solis or Fedora or Rel or any of these things. Right. All those things would have not been here or at least not have been the way they are right now. If it weren't for Debbie and Slackware, those are the two distributions that have been around the longest and are still here and still provide a lot of influence over the rest of the Linux ecosystem. Especially Debbie, because we talked about how many distributions are based on Debbie and while Slackware isn't necessarily one of those distributions that a lot of distributions are based on, even though there are a few of them, it's still one of those distributions that has influenced the Linux history over the last 30 years. And that's why I think everyone should give it a try. Now, usually when I do these lists, there's a fifth one, right? There's I tried to print it out to five because found five is a a number of a list that you'd see on like BuzzFeed or something like that. I don't know.  Now, there are obviously a few honorable mentions that I could put out there. If you've never tried Ubuntu for the love of all its holy co-use and try Ubuntu, everyone probably has. That's why I didn't put it on the list. But if you haven't at least tried Ubuntu, you should definitely give it a try. Personally, I think everyone should give Silver Blue a try because it is something that a lot of Linux distributions are proclaiming as the future. So Fedora Silver Blue is one of those distributions that I think everyone should probably try. But I didn't put it on the list for multiple reasons. One, it's still really, really new. It's only been around for a couple of years and they're still working on it. And while it is definitely very stable, it's not going to be for everyone. So I decided not to put it on the list. Frankly, you could probably try any immutable distribution out there and kind of count that off your list simply because there are a few of them now. So you could give one of those a try. And I think everybody probably should. So those are the four distributions with a couple of honorable mentions that I think everyone should try somewhere along the point in their Linux career. And I really truly do believe this, that if you try those distributions, even if you don't get them all the way installed, like say you try to install Gentium, you don't get all the way through, that's fine. You have some of the experience because I tried and failed a couple of times before I got help and actually got through the process. But even those failures gained me some knowledge and really, especially with Gentoo, that's like half the reason why you want to use it. So if you have any distributions that you think everybody should try, I'd like to hear from you in the comment section below. You can follow me on Master Donor Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast.  Seriously, thank you so much for your support without you. The channel just went up anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so much for your support. As I said, now like three times because I'm rambling and I always do that. They do this at the end of the video because the script is just something that it's guidelines and I don't need to follow it. Anyways, thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. See you next time.


Good afternoon everyone. Oh my gosh, this looks amazing. You all look beautiful and handsome in your red. Thank you so much for joining us for our annual recognition of National Wear Red Day. I am Councilwoman Tamika Isaac Devine, your hostess for our first day party to celebrate Go Red Columbia. Go Red Columbia, we started an initiative and Miss Utsi and I were talking and I can't recall. I don't know, Steve, do you remember what year? We're about seven or eight years in to this recognition and this partnership with the American Heart Association. And I did an interview just a couple hours ago with NPR about politics, but of course in my red she asked about Go Red Day. And she asked me why is this so very important for the city to recognize and partner with the American Heart Association for Go Red for Women. And what I shared with her is that we as city leaders understand that our community is only as strong as our citizens. And when you have citizens who are dealing with health challenges, then that affects all of us. And so we at the City of Columbia understand that we know our job is to make sure that you have your trash get picked up, you have running water, you have roads. But it's also to make sure that our citizens are healthy and we're providing the infrastructure and resources necessary for you to live your best life. And so we have tried to do that through a variety of things, having walkways and greenways, having a wellness center and having educational programs. But this program and this partnership with the American Heart Association is so very important because it allows us to engage you as the community and taking ownership on how we all deal with our health, our lives, our communities health. And so being here today not only is dressing up and being amazing in your red, but also an opportunity for us to educate ourselves and our community about risk factors associated with a heart disease. We know that heart disease is the number one killer for women. A statistic I just saw in South Carolina where right now in the American Heart Association can correct me if I'm wrong. But I saw I think South Carolina is now number two in heart disease and something I read. And so I want to make sure that we are continuing to elevate this to the forefront to educate ourselves, but also to take action. And so when I come up at the end I'm going to talk to you guys about what we all can do to take action on taking control of our lives. But with that said I want to welcome you all for being here. Thank you for being here. And it is my honor and privilege to introduce, and of course a man that really needs no introduction, but to introduce you all to our mayor, the honorable Stephen K. Benjamin for some remarks. Who has a day party for Go Red for Women Day? And Tamika Devine is the answer to that. It's always incredible, incredibly fun day to come. I didn't wear a red jacket in the whole nine yards this year, but to play a role as a city, as a community to not only increase awareness of the importance of heart health, as Tamika indicated, the number one killer of women. But also to serve as a catalyst for change, to help all of us do more, to make sure that we extend the health and activity and vitality of the people that we love in our lives. Indeed the women who serve as a backbone of this great community in which we all live. We're thankful to each and every one of you for showing up every single year. We're thankful to the American Heart Association for the constant and consistent leadership. And I will say I'm personally thankful I get a chance to participate in the program every single year, but I'm personally thankful to Tamika Devine for her incredible leadership in this space and the wonderful staff and the team at the City of Columbia that supports her every year and making sure that Columbia is in the forefront of pushing for all the right things. So thank you and God bless you. And Milana, I'm sorry, stand up. I know she didn't like this. Milana Pinkney is my shadow today. So we also have an opportunity. The overlaying of Shadowing Day and Go Red for Women Day is a wonderful opportunity to expose our young leaders to their role in making sure that we make this world a better place, a healthier place for each and every one of us. Thank you. God bless you. So Stola didn't have to read the whole proclamation, but there are like seven or eight where as is. But we know that Go Red for Women encourages women to take control of their heart health by knowing and managing these five numbers. The total cholesterol, the HDL, the good cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and body mass index. And Columbia is indeed, we understand the importance of the ongoing fighting against heart disease and stroke. And as a result, we proclaim today, National Wear Red Day in Columbia, South Carolina. My name is Stephanie DeFries and I'm honored to be this year's Midlands Go Red for Women Chair. I also work at Blue Cross for the Shield of South Carolina. So health is very important, especially our heart health. I want to say that you have the coolest shadowing today, I think of all of your classmates. So I've been sitting in meetings all day with many shadowers and they're probably bored to death. Hopefully this is not boring for you. So very cool. I offered to bring someone with me and none of them took me up on it. But I'm here today to not only support the Go Red for Women, also National Wear Red Day. So Go Red for Women movement is the trusted and passionate, relevant force for change to eradicate heart disease and stroke in women all over the world. Launched in 2004, as our awareness campaign, Go Red quickly grew into an international movement and has become a platform for real change. Today, more women than ever recognizes that heart disease is the leading cause of death for women. The next phase for Go Red, we'll focus on inspiring and empowering women. This room is amazing today. I love all the red. I love the women empowerment in here. The more women that we can talk to, our sisters, our moms, our daughters, the more powerful of an impact we are going to have. Go Red is going to create powerful collaboration, accelerate community based initiatives, integrate health technology, increase awareness and amplify influencers. It's no longer just about wearing red. It's no longer just about sharing the health statistics. It's about all women making a commitment to stand together with Go Red and taking charge of their own heart health. Together, there is nothing women cannot achieve. Thank you all for coming today to show your support. I encourage you to get your numbers today here. Special thank you to Mayor Benjamin and of course, Councilwoman Tamika Isaac Devine for raising the awareness in our city. And we hope to see all of you if you can make it on April 30th, which is the annual Go Red for Women Luncheon at the Alumni Center downtown. Thank you all and have a great day. Oh, sorry, and I would like to invite up. So we have nine faces of heart this year and we have several that are in the audience and we have Nueve to come up and tell her story about heart disease. I can tell you I have kicked off 2020 and I have met more women impacted in men for that matter with heart disease. And the more awareness and education we can get, the better our community is going to be. As a survivor of heart disease, it's important to know your condition and to go and get checked. Do as the doctor says and to constantly go and do as the doctor says, I have rheumatic heart disease and I also have mechanical valves and a pacemaker. And also last year of January 2019, I had no heart activity for 40 seconds. And by the grace of God, my heart started back up before they could use the crash cart to start the heart back up. But every year I get an echocardiogram and I go and I get my blood checked because I am on Coumadin. So I get blood levels checked, get all the vital signs that I get, EKGs done. And it's just important to follow everything that your doctor says once you are diagnosed with heart disease.  And hopefully spread awareness like we are and to just be together and to make a difference in someone else's life with what you have gone through. What you have gone through and everybody else, if you just spread the awareness and just go along with it and it's just, I'm just lost. But anyway, I encourage everybody to get your vitals done and to go ahead and just live life to the fullest once you get through those bumps. Thank you. And we know when we understand the statistics regarding heart disease and stroke that we probably got several survivors in here. So at this time, I'd like to take a moment and recognize other survivors in the room if you would please stand. Thank you. And at this time, we want to, we want to get to our picture in a second. I did want to just share a couple things that we are doing at the city and just make sure, like I said, you know, it's one thing to come out and be here adorn in your red and bring awareness. And we are doing that. But we also know having awareness is the first step. Taking action is where we all want to be. And so again, we at the city recognize that we've got to all take control of our health and do action. So please make sure you are here at this wonderful day party here in this amazing facility, the Charles R. Drew Wellness Center, the city of Columbia. Here we provide lots of activities. So before you leave, please stop and find out what we have here at Drew Wellness. We have activities. You've got classes. There's informational sessions. We do partner with people to do cooking classes. You've got the indoor and outdoor tracks. So these are all opportunities. So please take advantage of it. I also wanted to remind everybody that City Hall is going red in recognition of Go Red for Columbia. So if you are on Main Street, when it gets dark, please stop and see City Hall red. Take a picture. Share it on social media because as we do awareness, we get it out to others. The other thing that is new this year, and I wanted to invite you guys or you ladies and the gentlemen who want to certainly support us. Starting in March, we will at the City of Columbia be starting what we're calling Walking Women's Wednesday. We're inviting you to join us here at Drew Wellness Center on the first Wednesday of each month at 12 noon and start walking. Taking just more steps during the day is a great way to increase your heart health. So we want you to join us here. We'll have dynamic women from around the city coming and leading the walks every month. So join us on the first Wednesday of each month beginning in March. So before we close, I wanted to recognize a couple of our partners. We do have Prisma Health who has always been an amazing partner to us and their new mobile unit is outside and will do some health screenings for us. But I wanted to recognize Ms. Regina Brown and Mr. Vince Ford from Prisma Health. You guys please stand. Thank you so much for your continued support and partnership and everything that we do. We have an amazing hospital system here in the Midlands area and we couldn't do all the programming we do without them. I also wanted to recognize with us today, we've got representatives from our school district. We've got my amazing husband, the chairman of our school board, Jamie Devine. And Commissioner Yolanda Anderson is here. And we thank them for their partnership as well. Prisma One is doing amazing things with our young people, promoting heart health, healthy lifestyles, activity, eating healthy. And we know that sometimes we as parents don't always do the right thing, but if our babies are coming home and saying that we need to eat more green or we need to exercise a little bit more or my nine-year-old who likes to challenge her mommy to planks, because in PE they challenge each other to the planks, we're going to incorporate those into our families. And so they get that information from the leadership that is at Richland London. So we thank you guys for always working with our babies and making sure that they are learning what they need to with heart health. So let me tell you a little bit about the day party before we take our community picture. So as soon as we take our community picture, you are here. You're invited to stay here as long as you can. We know some folks have to go back to work. But the day party, we wanted to do something a little bit different. And we wanted to give you the information we always do, but we want to make it fun. So we have here, we have our vendors. We've got Southeastern Institute who helped us last year. They're back. They're going to be providing massages. So I know there's going to be a long line for that. So part of your heart health and taking care of yourself is to decrease your stress factors. But that includes taking time out for massages. So please go and take a massage. Also I mentioned Prisma Health will have health screenings. The mobile unit is right outside the door. And then we also have Cooperative Health here who has some information. And then our city PR department has a lot of information about what we're doing with the city. So please go by there, get your massages. Over here we've got our Go Red photo booth. We want to ask you please go to the selfie station, take a picture, post it on Facebook or Instagram. Make sure that you're using our hashtags and share. Again, this fun, but we want to get the information out. And the more you share your pictures and stuff, the more people will know what we're doing and take control. And then of course we've got our amazing DJ here. So we'll be able to do some dancing. That's also heart healthy. You get your moving, so we'll have that going on as well. So with that I just want to close by saying again, I can't thank you enough for being here. Being here is our first step, but we want to continue every day to elevate how important it is for all of us to take control of our lives. Whether that is eating better, that's moving more, losing weight, managing your other risk factors like your cholesterol and your blood pressure. All that is so very important because we are all very precious and we've got to take more control of what we're doing so that we can live long lives. For people who weren't able to join us this year, we're here every first Friday of February, which is National Wear Red Day. So we'll continue to do that. City of Columbia will continue to elevate our profile to bring education around this issue. But the folks who are here, we want them to share their pictures on social media. So if you weren't here and you see pictures on social media, you like them and share those as well because it sounds really funny to have a selfie booth and share them on social media. But what that is is another way to bring awareness because as the larger our reach is, the more awareness we're bringing to Go Red Columbia and our partnership with the American Heart Association. And then starting in March, we're going to start Walking Women Wednesdays, which we'll meet at Drew Wellness Center at 12 o'clock on the first Wednesday of each month to have a walking club. Just get out walking with folks in your community, get to know new people, but also utilize each other as accountability partners so that you are taking steps towards better health.


What are TEFL course hours? If you have been researching TEFL certification, you will undoubtedly be aware that there are many different options on offer, with a wide range of training hours mentioned. Unfortunately, as there is little standardization within the TEFL world, individual course providers are at liberty to provide any format of training they see fit, which can often make it confusing for potential trainees. So within this environment, how do you know which course is right for you? The first thing to consider is, what do you want to achieve with your TEFL qualification? What are short format TEFL courses and who are they aimed at? One ever growing opportunity is to spend some time helping others in a developing part of the world by volunteering as an EFL teacher. In many areas, there is a huge demand for qualified teachers to provide English language instruction that will allow people to move out of poverty by entering tourism-based job markets. In order to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for these positions, a short format TEFL course is usually sufficient. At ITTT, we offer a 60-hour introductory TEFL course that is specifically designed for this purpose. What are standard length TEFL courses and who are they aimed at? Although there is no definitive length, the general consensus of employers worldwide is that a TEFL certificate of at least 100 hours is desirable for teaching jobs that offer a good salary. Our 120-hour TEFL certification is designed to cover all the most important areas of teaching theory which should enable you to confidently apply for jobs all over the world. If you want to widen your options even further, you can undertake an in-class TEFL certification course that also includes observed teaching practice. ITTT operates in-class courses in dozens of worldwide locations which provide a minimum of 120 hours face-to-face training on the theory of teaching as well as 6-10 hours of teaching practice with genuine language learners in an authentic classroom environment. What are advanced and specialized TEFL courses and who are they aimed at? If you have already completed a standard certification course and want to extend your qualifications, a diploma certificate is the logical next step. The addition of a diploma to your CV or resume is a sure-fire way to expand your job prospects and increase your salary and responsibilities. Our 250-hour TESOL diploma is a great choice for anyone looking to move their teaching career forward. Another way to move your career forward is to branch out into specialized areas of EFL teaching. The main two areas that have grown considerably in recent years are in the fields of teaching business English and teaching young learners. To break into these fields, you can complete one or both of our 50-hour specialized TEFL courses that are designed to build on the knowledge covered in the standard certification course. Can a TEFL course be completed quicker than advertised? It is worth noting that while most courses have a specific label that represents the typical hours of study required, this figure is by no means absolute. The amount of time it takes to complete a specific course is largely down to each individual student. If you are fully dedicated to your studies and determined to finish as quickly as possible, it is certainly possible to complete the training in considerably less time than stated in the course literature.


Hi everybody it's Sam here thank you for watching today so I'm going to show you how to put together my 6x6 twist and pop dies so if you haven't seen the dies this is the card that you can create. Now this is actually a vertical version of the dies but I'm going to do the standard I guess horizontal version but you can see just how cool these are. Now I haven't decorated any of the fronts these were all samples but the one I'm going to do today I will do is another one so this is the more in the orientation that you would know so it will be able to stand you can see there all the lovely details and then this one I love that one with the meadow and then that one which is a little bit of ink blending and stamping and then this one which has got one of the background stamps there so that's the card that we are going to be creating today so let me show you how to do it. Okay so this is the die set you get a lot of dies in here so these are all your garden theme dies and then on the back here is the card blank dies and the mechanism now this one will go through a standard die machine however your plates on the standard die machine are just over six inches nearly six and a quarter this is six inches wide so it's going to be sitting right on the sides however this is the dies to make the card blank so if you've already got your own card blanks and you're probably not really going to use these dies they're just frames the mechanism ones are these ones here these are the main ones and they're going to fit through any standard die machine because you can see they're not very wide okay so if you have a smaller die machine and you're worried that this isn't going to work if you're as long as the mechanism goes through then you're going to be fine and this one here is your mat layer for the panels so I'll keep those two out I've already gone ahead and cut the card blank which is a six by six but like I said you can buy these from the shop so I've got that one ready then I've gone ahead and I've got my background here now you want to do all your mats on the card on your card blank first before you stick the mechanism down now I'm using one of the scenes from my new paper pad and I'll just show you it there it is there okay so I've kept more of the bottom there because that's where the mechanism is going to go so you get to see all of that design so I've die cut that one using the mat layer that comes in the die set but you can also cut this by hand if you do want to use that and then I've done another one to go here and then I've also done another one to go on the front and on the back and we'll get to that shortly but obviously when you're getting yours ready you want to cut all them at the same time so I'm going to stick these two down I'm going to use my kalal glue okay so I've stuck all them down I've actually done the ones on the other side as well because the back here is where you'll write your message this is going to be the front and then they open up the card to reveal the pop-up piece so then what I've gone and done is using the same green here's I've die cut the panel using this die here and then I've die cut the main mechanism using this die here okay now I recommend a 220 card stock and you kind of you want to be if you can using a color core and all that means is that the whole of the card stock is the color that you see there the other kind you can get is a white core and you would see on the side of your card you'd see white the reason I say get a color core is because there's a lot of folding going on with this so if you were to get any cracking if it's white then you're going to really notice it and white core tends to have the coating of the color the die whereas if you've got a color core if it did crack at all you're not going to see it but this is a nice weight because it's strong enough to hold the mechanism like the pop part of it but it's soft enough to be able to handle all of the folds that we're going to add now another little tip as well because obviously the die has put a score line in there but sometimes you find with dies when they're putting in score lines they're not as kind of compressed as you want so I find by just going over those with my stylus which I'm just looking for here so I'm just finding a track on my scoreboard I'm using the three inch just move the stylus down hold it there if you've got a little marker down here then you can just use that as a guide and I'm just going to line this back up with the three inches here I mean you don't have to do this but I think if you everybody's got different cardstock so I just think for anybody if you are using a white core then I would definitely recommend adding you know just going over the score line there and then again I'm just popping my stylus in there and just lining that up like so and just go over that because what this does when you're scoring you're you're compressing and squashing the fibers so you're spreading them out so they're ready to be able to then you know fold it just takes the pressure off but it's exactly the same but I've just gone over a little bit more then what you want to do is those that you've now just if you have just scored you want to fold them so they're mounting folds like so and then these are going to become valley folds and then as you bring it down you want them to sit next to each other like so okay so you'll have this arrow shape next you want to decorate this and I think it's easier to do when you've got it flat so what I've gone ahead and done is I've die cut four of these white panels using the die there and I've taken this sentiment from one of my favorite damp sets and it's this one here it's card making magic I've just used that one there you see it's been heavily used but I'll pop that one on there so I'm going to have that one I think I'm going to pop that one there then I've got this one here that I've stamped the fence which comes in the stamp set this is the coordinating stamp set and this one is called the garden delights and then with these either end I'm going to add the grass so these are dies that come in the die set because you've got two of them here so I'm going to have one there and I'm going to have the other one there I'm just going to lay this all down just so you can see it's nice to just play around and start kind of just placing things where you would like them to go and it's easy to then change until you're a hundred percent and take a photo of it you know in case you forget once you take it all away you know you've got it there for reference like so then I've die cut the butterfly I'm going to have that one there and then I've gone ahead and I've die cut the watering cam I die cut it in gray and then I die cut it again in the silver and I just paper pieced it and I'm going to have I think I'm going to have it under the grass like so and I'm going to have it offset and I'm just going to trim that bit off and then to go on there I've got I've got the really cute little Colin Caterpillar he's going to sit just there so that's kind of the scene in that one and then this one I've got the bumblebee which I've die cut and I've just coloured it in and it's using that die there but also what you get is this die and these are your little kind of bee or butterfly trails and they're just little dashes that will die cut into the card so what you want to do with these is kind of position where everything would be and then kind of lay this on the card so it's going to be like that because the bee maybe come down a little bit further like that so it takes up more of the card stock so then I can remove that remove that I'm just going to hold that in place or tack it down with a little bit of tape I'm just going to run that through my die machine okay and now it gives you that really cool effect so when I stick that on there and I will stick the bee just at the end at the end and then the grass over the top hopefully you can see that there I think it looks really cute then I've got all these bits for decorating the inside here so I'm going to get all this stuck down okay so there's my little scene created on the panels next we want to pop this in so with this one what you want to do is you want to fold it so that you have an M shape so you're going to do a valley a mountain make sure that's all stuck down and then finish with a valley so you'll have an M shape okay then what's going to happen is you're going to pop the folded sides are going to go inside between these two so it's going to sit on top of the bottom one here and underneath the top one make sure your open side is facing you now sit it in here and you want the point to sit just up to the school line you don't want to go over it because obviously this won't close properly just make sure it's in the middle bring it up now the key with this and even I still get it slightly off is you need to make sure that this is completely parallel and that this is all kind of you know it's all straight um it you may still be just a millimeter up slightly here and down here or up there even though it looks straight and even when measuring because I do recommend liquid glue you can use double-sided tape but I think liquid glue is better because it gives you the wiggle room but saying that when you then get to close it there's nothing to say it doesn't move a little bit when you push down so you're always going to get and all that will mean is your card will slightly rock when it's when it opens up it doesn't at all interfere with the mechanism so you know don't worry about that um but I have had some where I've got them bang on and it's like a joyous moment but don't be disheartened if you don't because the card still works perfectly but what you want to do pull with it in between these two pieces bring this right up to the edge okay and make sure it's between these two okay so I'm just trying to keep everything straight and then I'm just going to grab a pencil or a pen and just put a little mark just there okay and this is so you know where to put your glue you're not going to see any of this try not to move it pinch it together and just flip it over and just put another mark there and then you take it away and then I'm just going to use my glue here just cover because that way you're putting the glue in the area that it needs to go in because you don't want to be adding glue to any other areas on this because you run the risk of it sticking when you close the card down so just keep it within that area and then just lay this back down so again make sure the open end is facing you and make sure you've got an even overhang it's all about keeping it balanced but that all looks good to me and then I'm going to add my glue I'm going all over here and just make sure you get it right into the corners and I said this when I done all my demos don't brush this you want to make sure you get it nice and secure again make sure that opens facing you and then I'm going to sit this back down just make sure it's all straight and then I'm going to pop my glue on the top so I'm just going to use my finger just to get it right up into the corners there and then just close it and now don't lift it until you're 100% of that's completely you know secure so I'm going to just leave that there and whilst that's drying I'll show you what I'm going to do with the decoration on the front I'm just going to put my little magnet tidy on it there so I've got these three ovals here just different sizes and I've got the relax from the die set and these are designed to cut into the card stock so I've made sure this oval just fits the relax there so I'm going to run this through my machine okay take that away pop this out you want to keep the negative so I want to keep that piece now you can obviously keep these as well but like I said we've made them so that they die cut into the card and then I'm just going to take out the center of the either and that's it okay now I'm going to stick this back on the green so it pops and then I'm just going to fill in those negative pieces there okay and then I'm just going to add a little bit of glue in the center of the R and just pop that in and then just a little bit on the either okay so now you have your relax and then I'm going to pop that one onto that so I'm keeping the front very basic because these cards are designed to be displayed open so you know don't spend too long really on the front that's my personal kind of feeling on it anyway just because you know it's not really going to get seen but you want it to still you know be nice for the person when they open up the card so I'm going to pop the butterfly so it's just a nod to kind of the design of what's inside and then I'm going to grab some foam tape and I'm just going to pop three on the back there and then I'm just going to pop that one in the center and then I have this one here which is from just one of my a stamp set in my stash so it says relax today is all about you and I'm just going to again pop a bit of foam on the back of that so that's the front of the card and now I'm pretty confident that that's right it's nice to be able to do this in my leisure and not have the pressure of TV because you only have so long but now when you open it up pops out your lovely panel there with all of the images on so now you can see that it stands guess there's a little a little bit there but nothing you would notice so now I've got all these lovely pieces here so I've got the wheelbarrow and I've paper pieced the wheelbarrow and you can use the wheelbarrow as a stencil so let me just grab it here so you can see you've got this section here so I die cut it in this brown cardstock and then pop it in the die and then just use a brown ink and a little blending brush and go over that section there and then it will give you that design and then I just die cut just the circle in black and then paper piece that there that's a hole punch silver piece of cardstock and then I just die cut just the end of this in silver just to make handle but I'm actually going to be trimming that off so this now is going to go on the bottom but what you also get is these flowers so you get this die set so what I've done is I die cut them all in green like this and then I die cut just the tops of the flowers in white and then I coloured the centre of the flowers using so I know some of you will have the Arteza ever blend and it's the yellow ochre I've just die coloured that in the centres and I've actually also put the glossy accents so you can see they're shiny in the centres so just if anybody's unsure about paper piecing so you just die cut it like that don't worry about all the bottoms and then you just snip off that bit and then I'm just going to grab my glue do those ones as well just a little bit of glue and just literally paper piece it back over that design there so again just take off the tiny bit of the bottom on that one and then you get that cool design and now I'm going to stick these behind the wheelbarrow so it looks like the wheelbarrow is full of daisies and it looks so pretty I love doing this I'm just going to run a little bit of glue just on the bottom there and I want to have it like this now what you do need to take into account whenever you're going to add anything when this closes that's worked out perfectly actually so what happens is when this comes down it may just swoop across the cardstock but can you see when that comes down it's actually going to swoop across the wheelbarrow which is nice and smooth what you wouldn't want is maybe that a bit lower and it would catch on the top of the wheelbarrow like maybe like that can you see so just kind of place things play around with them but that is going to yeah that's going to be fine there so I can actually come down a bit a little bit lower so I'm just going to pop that one behind there so there's little bits of the grass showing and then pop this one down the bottom how nice is that and you could put that on you know all kinds of cards out lovely on the front of a card with enjoy your retirement or I love my allotment or there's all kinds of things love my garden whatever you want to do but that's going to sit perfectly in there and that's going to close really nicely so I'm just going to grab a stronger glue and just pop that all on the back okay I'm not worried about the flowers sticking down I like that they are lifted up you see they just all move around I think that looks really nice then I've done the same with the the rake here so just die cut it in the brown craft card and then I just die cut the end in silver I'm just going to use my glue and that's going to go like so and then I've got the little ladybird here so I'm going to have so I don't really want to put that maybe that could go there because again just check yeah that'll be fine so I'm going to pop the ladybird just up here and then I've got the snail and again I've just used the snails die as a stencil and you get this pattern here and I've just put some glossy accents just on the shell so again just pop a bit of glue on the back and I'm going to have him let's have him just oh just running along the bottom there like so so that's everything inside of the card so now I'm just going to flip it over I'm just going to trim off that piece and that piece again just make sure it's all stuck down okay so again you can see now that closes up perfectly and there's look at all that I just love this little arrangement at the bottom so now I'm just going to turn it over and I've gone and cut the green using the die and then I've just cut this piece which I'm going to stick on there but before I stick it down I've die cut the tree and I've just put some little nouveau drops in the center there and then I've also gone ahead and die cut this long one here you could also use this as a belly band to secure this just die cut a couple of them and stick them together but this can also go in this panel section so it'll go across there and I will show that in future tutorials or on the other styles that I've got but what I thought I would do here is have this because this is where I'm going to write my message I thought I'd have the fence just a bit of it I'm going to trim that off and I'm going to have just the tree there and then I can write my message on that section there so there you have the back already if you'd be able to write a message you could stamp something there as well but now I have this really lovely card perfect for any garden lover retirement great masculine makes as well and you open it up and you have that gorgeous design inside I think it's turned out really nice I love all of the little details I just love Colin the caterpillar I love the trail here from the bee the grass detail and I just love that watering can the wheelbarrow there I just think it's really nice you've also got a spade you could add the spade in which is just here so there's so much and again you will see me use these across my other card designs as well so this would look really nice on the tower card on the slider the wiper card there's just so many fun ways to use this set so there you have it so I hope you've enjoyed this twist and pop card for me today remember as well you don't have to just keep it in that horizontal orientation let me just bring back in this one here so that's it with the vertical you can't have it displayed open as much that way you can I guess you could kind of have it like that it would work but um obviously this one does stand up like so but I'll just bring that one in just so you can see the two different orientations that you can you know have this card and you can see the wheelbarrow there with the flowers just coloured you don't have to add the the centres or do them that way and I've done the relax over there you can see the heart trail there with the bee and then these are the stamped bee images and the butterfly that come in the stamp set and there's the spade there that you can see as well so just so many different ways and um arrangements with this dice set it's lots of fun so I hope you've enjoyed this I've already had lots of really lovely feedback people that have this set and they're enjoying it so yeah I hope I continue to inspire you so thanks for watching and I'll be back at you very soon bye


Do you value your privacy? If you do, you should be running a free and open source operating system like Linux. Proprietary operating systems like Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iOS, they do not respect you, the user. I've made many videos in the past discussing the privacy benefits of Linux over the proprietary alternatives like Windows and Mac, and I get a lot of resistance from people. In the comments section, especially from Windows users, Mac users, DT, you don't really know what Windows is doing to its users. You don't know if they're really data mining us or spying on us or key logging us. No one really knows how can you be so sure that they're doing all this nasty, nefarious stuff to us. Well, yes, I guess I can't pinpoint exactly what they're doing to you because they're hiding it. But here's the thing, I can give you a bunch of real world examples of how Linux greatly benefits you as far as privacy over the proprietary alternatives such as Windows and Mac, and that's what I'm going to discuss today. So let me show you some tangible benefits, some real world benefits that you'll immediately spot. If you've ever used something like Microsoft Windows, I'm going to show you some stuff on Linux that will really make this click as how Linux respects you. So let me switch over to this virtual machine of Ubuntu. I'm using Ubuntu as an example here, but this could be any popular Linux distribution. I'm just using Ubuntu because Ubuntu is the most popular Linux desktop distribution. Typically, when you install Ubuntu and most Linux distributions, when you run through the installation, they ask you, do you want to connect to your online services? Do you have a Google account that you want to connect to or a NextCloud, Microsoft accounts? Maybe you want to connect to social media stuff like Facebook and Twitter and things like that.  If you don't have these accounts, we don't care if you sign up for them, right? We're not asking you to sign up for them. We're not forcing you to sign up for them. They don't care if you don't have any of these accounts. It makes absolutely no difference to Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not making any money if you don't have a Google account or a Microsoft account, right? They don't care. But if you've ever tried to install something like Android, you have to have a Gmail account, right? To connect to the Android operating system when you go get a new phone and register, you have to have a Gmail account. Even if you're not a Gmail user, you're going to have to create a Gmail account just to activate your phone. That's crazy. Same thing with Microsoft. You're running through these Windows installations. They want you to connect to all kinds of Microsoft accounts, accounts you didn't have before trying to install Windows, but Windows makes you set up those accounts. Why? It's because the more services that you're tied to with them, the more they can actually spy on you, data mine you. They know everything you're doing on your computer and that way, the more they know about you, the better they can serve you, ads, the better they can sell products to you because at the end of the day, you're not a computer user to the proprietary operating system. You're not a user. You're the used. They're using you. And I know I can't be the only one that hates when these proprietary operating systems basically force me to sign up for these accounts that I don't want because you know as soon as they ask you that and they trap you into it, you know you're getting played. Everyone watching this knows that that is shady as hell and no one should be forced into signing up for these kinds of accounts. Well, you don't have to worry about that on Linux. The other big way that Linux respects you and your privacy is the apps that are installed on Linux. If I go into the app menu here, the apps that are here, they're all privacy respecting. They don't track you in any way. All the apps on your Linux distributions, they're typically free and open source applications. So if they were doing anything scandalous to you, anybody can look at the code and could figure it out. You would know about it, right? Also there's no Crippleware here. There's no just bloatware. There's none of these trial software programs that are installed on Linux. One of the things I love when I install Linux is all of the applications that are installed, they automatically just work out of the box for free. They're constantly updated. I never have to worry about anything where if you've ever installed something like Microsoft Windows, half the stuff that is pre-installed on Windows is trialware. It's programs that are just going to work for a few days or a few weeks and then you have to actually pay for the program or they stop working. So most of the stuff that's installed on Microsoft Windows is not really applications. You're going to use long term. Most of it is stuff you didn't want anyway. Again, Microsoft is actually just trying to sell you stuff. Obviously, the reason they have this trialware stuff is because they get a cut of the money, right? They're trying again to use you. And if they can't get you to actually purchase software, sometimes in their software they will include banners, pop-ups, advertisements of some kind. Sometimes they'll include ads in their start menus and things like that in the browsers. And Linux does not do any of this stuff. You're never going to be served these banner ads and pop-ups. You're never going to be annoyed with Linux because Linux being free and open source. If a Linux distribution treated you like this, well, you would just quit using that Linux distribution and move somewhere else. And Linux distributions know this. That's why none of them treat you the way Microsoft Windows treats its users. Microsoft Windows treats its users like that is because they know you can't really go anywhere. At least that's what they think. But that's not true. You can go to Linux. One of the things about the proprietary operating systems like Windows is sometimes some of the tracking and, you know, a lot of the spyware and stuff that they have installed on their operating system you can't get rid of. They really don't tell you it's there. Even if you knew it was there, there's no way for you to rip that stuff out of the operating system. If there was a way they would try their best to prevent you from doing that. But that's not the case with Linux. If I actually get into the menu system here in Ubuntu and let me open the settings manager here and in the left hand column, if I go to privacy, you see they even have a privacy dedicated settings manager here. For example, Ubuntu by default, I'm sending crash reports back to Ubuntu to help the Ubuntu team improve on some of their development things like that. But if I wanted to turn some of this stuff off, you know, I could turn off connectivity, location services. I don't have any enabled out of the box. But if I did, I could turn them off after enabling them file history and trash.  I could set up a screen locker, turn off our own notification like you can do a lot here inside Ubuntu and any Linux distribution settings that are really not there for you guys that are using the proprietary alternatives.  Like if I wanted to install Ubuntu and actually have an encrypted drive and encrypted file system, meaning it's password protected, if somebody stole my computer, stole my laptop and tried to access information on that drive, they couldn't actually get into it without the password, the pass key, whatever's locking that device, because I can set up encryption because Ubuntu doesn't care, right?  They're not trying to read what you're doing on your devices anyway, or some of the proprietary operating systems, they really don't want you to encrypt your stuff because they want to be able to read it easy.  And of course, the biggest reason why I love Linux over the proprietary alternatives is the fact that I can get updates. I can get updates every day. I just, in this case, I could open a terminal and type the command to update or there's a graphical update center here in Ubuntu if I search for update, if I can spell the word, right? You know, the software center here is actually going to go and search for updates for me if there's any available. I could install them and they're just free. All my applications just get updated to the latest versions for free. I don't have to pay anything, right? They're not locked behind a paywall. Like some operating systems and how that's really dangerous, not just for privacy, is for security. For security reasons, you want to be on the latest software. You want to have the latest kernel and the latest web browser because so many things, so many hackers are trying to get at you through the browser, right? You need up-to-date software. And the last thing you want is for your operating system to be holding you back from those updates. Ultimately, I use Linux because I know it's not funneling all of my information back to some evil corporation, right? Because that's what Microsoft's doing, right? They're data mining you. They have a file on you. They know everyone that's ever had any kind of Microsoft account, anybody that's ever used Windows, anybody that's ever registered for Windows, they're keeping up with you.  Same thing with Google. I know, especially in the open source community, a lot of people like to imagine that Google is our friend. They're not. If you have an Android phone and Gmail account and all these other Google accounts, trust me, you're being used by Google.  They have a file on you. Ultimately, I know some of the comments on this video. I'm going to get a lot of hate about being paranoid and, you know, if I didn't have anything to hide, why do I need to worry about privacy? Yada, yada, yada. You know, the same old tired argument some of you guys have, but I showed you tangible examples, right? Because at the end of the day, do you want Candy Crush ads in your operating system? I don't. And I bet you don't either. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Dustin Gabe, James Matt, Maxim, Emmett, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. When you bought homey Allen, Armored Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Ringerie, Diokai, Dylan, Greg, Marshall, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archon, Vador, Polytech, Realiteats, Red Prophet, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons. Over on Patreon without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, privacy respecting software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. Linux doesn't force me to buy a antivirus program.


and welcome to Disc Alidieta. Hey everybody and welcome to my desk. It's me, Lady Aida. This is my desk covered and all sorts of stuff, including some floppy drives, which we'll be talking about shortly. Do you have any news or updates, Mr. Lady Aida, before we get to the next one? Lots of shows this week. Look to Hack a Day. I think we're doing a hack chat this week. Oh yeah, we're doing a hack chat. Yeah, so look for that and more and let's kick it off. It's under this this week. All right, so this week on my desk, we've got all sorts of floppy drives. I'm getting back to a project that I worked on, kind of a word, COVID part shortage time, which was integrating, interfacing with floppy drives. And this is like a laptop floppy disk and this is a desktop three and a half and this is an Apple. And I also have a five and a quarter floating around here somewhere, probably will fall in my head later tonight. So floppy drives are kind of neat. You can, there's a lot of people with floppy disk collections from like the 90s and it'd be really good to be able to get all that data off. And especially for like archival reasons, historical reasons, like I know my parents have a bunch of stuff on floppy. Now I'd love to keep that around because floppy disks do degrade like the magnetics start to, they can flake off or they can slowly become de-magnetized. So, we did this project and go to the computer where we wrote a bunch of code in CircuitPython and Arduino to kind of start the process of interfacing with floppies. And we did a bunch of videos and we're gonna get back to it. We just took a break basically like all these parts came back into stock and so we wanted to work on all those and all those redesigns. We did like 400 redesigns. Another thing is that the original code for the floppy stuff was all gonna be with a SAMD51 and like as I say like almost every video I can't get SAMD51s until 2024 like mid or late 2024. And that's like their current estimate which means, you know, whatever. I'll probably get some here and there but for the most part everything has to move over RP2040. So, you know, we did the floppy feather wing which was kind of just me getting like, okay, let's get something going so we can easily test it. And it's got a two by 17 header on one side and on the back it's got level shifters because floppy drives are all five volt logic and five volt power, we'll talk about in a minute. And so you need to, if you wanna interface with a three volt mic controller like the RP2040 you're definitely gonna want to have your up shifters kind of like Neopixels, right? You wanna go from three volts up to five volts. And that's where the 245 series comes in handy. Each one of these does eight bits. And, you know, floppy, you can look at some of the previous videos, but floppy disks are not, they have a very weird interface where the data streams out in this encoded bit width format it's very low level. And so you do need to have a very fast processor or PIO, which is why the RP2040 is actually really great for doing floppy interfacing stuff because you can use a PIO to read in these variable bit widths. It's kind of like reverse Neopixel, like the data's coming in and it's like, you know, a wide bit and a low like a, like it's up and down, up and down. And it's not like Manchester encoding, but it's like the width of the bit within the cycle tells you, the width of the pulse within the cycle tells you whether it's a one or a zero. So timer inputs are really good for it, but again, PIO will do the job as well. And then there's, you know, you have to step the motor and you have to set the direction and you can set which side, which head you want to read from. So a lot of pins are required to do this so that we got the floppy featherwing out, you know, a couple of months ago and it definitely works. Here it is, you know, plugged into your standard floppy drive, but there's a couple, there's a couple of things that while this was good, I wanted to do more. One, the floppy featherwing was hard-coded. The way I set up the direction was it could only read from, sorry, it could read right from diskettes, but it was meant to be connected to a floppy disk drive. It couldn't emulate being a floppy. And that's something that could be kind of interesting too. There's a lot of devices, you know, for example, I've worked with knitting machines and like a lot of knitting machines like the old Brother KH series require floppy drives. There's actually like a not insignificant number of old machines that expect you to have a floppy disk drive connected up to them. And so I know you can buy floppy disk emulators, but you know, I thought like, oh, like I really like doing open source hardware and making sure that we can have forever hardware, like this would, will always be able to be emulated or read. So even though you can buy this sort of thing off the shelf, I thought it would be kind of cool to re-implement it. So one thing about the floppy featherwing, like I mentioned, it can only connect to a drive, it can't act like a drive. Another thing, it isn't good for connecting to laptop floppy disk. So let's go to the overhead roll fast and I'll show this because it's kind of interesting. Okay, so you didn't know. So this is your standard, this is kind of handy, you can tilt this over and I can, you can see, pardon me, let me just get this. Okay. So this is your standard floppy interface. Right side up. So you see that this is a paper phenolic PCB and there's a little notch in it and there's even one pin missing, although most cables don't have the extra pin there and it's hard to hold it still. And these are the interface pins, so IF 2 through 34, so it's a two by 17 connector and every other pin is grounded.  And then you also have the power, just kind of nice here, it's connected these three and a half inch only use five volt, they don't use 12 volts, but the larger disc drives do the five and a quarters use 12 volts and five volts. So even though this one only has five volts here, it's not uncommon to need 12 volts as well. Laptop floppy drives are much smaller and you can even see, you can see this beautiful little stepper motor here, which is used to feed the head back and forth. And then there's another spinning motor, it's very flat, but there's a very flat motor over there, which spins and also uses five volts, but instead of having this big chunky-ass connector, it has this, I think it's 24 pin FPC one millimeter pitch. So it has a slightly different connector, but it was interesting, it's actually easier to get laptop floppy drives are much more available than the chunky PC tower style. So I also wanted to make sure that the board that I designed has a connector for the laptop style and the five volt comes through here as well, by the way, which is a kind of handy, you don't need a separate connector for them. And then in addition to that, I also wanted to support weird drives like five and a quarter Apple style. So I've got this, I'm sorry, a little dusty, but this is in a clear case, which means you can really see the dust. And it's just got this custom controller, which is beautiful designed by Waz. And then on the end, it's got a, I don't know, two by 12, I think, two by 10 connector, which has, I think, plus minus 12 and five volts.  So you don't do like direction and step. You're like, hi, I am like toggling each pin. And then the data streaming out similar style as the laptop or desktop style. And then a couple other, probably control signal pins and whatever. So I wanted to also connect to these. So this is another connector. And then while I was there, I was like, you know what? Like maybe I'll also have it be able to connect to SCSI. Discs, IDE, I feel like you can get IDE to SATA converter. So like that's not much value, but SCSI could be useful. So back here. Okay, so let's go to the computer and I'll show my draft so far. So it's really like I've just been slowly putting things down, you know, thinking about it. So the size of the PCB is the size of a standard floppy disc, you're gonna have inch floppy. So I've got the laptop flop. So this is the, no, I'm like what, how many pins is it? 26 pin, one millimeter pitch laptop connector. This is your standard two by 17 IDE floppy drive like your standard PC floppy disc. And this is SCSI, which is like 50 pins. By the way, do you guys remember that? It's an 8080 style. So it has eight bits of data, read latch, write latch, IRQ, busy, whatever, all those pins. It seems like, oh my God, 50 pins, but every other pin is ground, which, you know, they didn't have differential, they didn't use differential signaling at the time. So instead they would just ground every other pin to avoid having crosstalk. And then this is the, I think this is the maintenance lock amp 350211. So this is the standard connector used for powering like disc drives and floppies. And we have these, these are called like, I think I call them molex IDV, oops. So they're like this connector, right? Which is your standard. This is what this plugs into that connector. And what you can do is you can get, it's easy to get like splitter. So this is a splitter that goes from that power connector to floppy, but you can get ones that are like multiple ones. Basically it's an adapter because this is the floppy disconnector, you know, ground, 12 volt, five volt. And this is the, you know, molex to Berg. Although they're not, it's not molex. It's like apparently amp, I don't know. It's a very weird, the names of these are not consistent. Anyways, but you can get these, these cables are easy to get. So I thought I would put this connector on here. I was going to actually do a right angle one. It's just, just to kind of remind me not to forget putting this power connector here because it'll stick down, not up, but I put this here just to kind of give me the placement. And then I have to do, there's going to be like a lot of level shifting. Like obviously I'm going to share, there's not enough pins to do all of them at the same time. So what I'll have to do is kind of interleave whatever pins, so you obviously don't get to floppy in a SCSI and a disc too, all at the same time. You'd pick whichever one you want to connect. And then I'd have enough GPIO on here to connect to, definitely to connect to SCSI because don't forget you lose four pins to the QSPY interface. And then you need two pins for I squared C. And then I want a micro SD card micro SD card. I thought I had a couple of ideas. One, if you're emulating a device, obviously you could have your files on the micro SD card. But I thought it would also be kind of neat if it did standalone floppy disk greeting, because normally what you do is you connect this to your computer and then you run grease weasel or whatever on your computer and it sucks the data off and it saves it to your disk drive. But I could see there situations where you're like, look, I'm going to go to a place and maybe I don't have, I want to do a lot of them. And I don't want to get, because you only have one kid to your computer at a time. If you want to do multiple in parallel, you can't do it. But these standalone, maybe with some buttons, you know, you have some buttons here, you could control it. And then there's a STEM IQT port here. You can connect an OLED and, you know, or maybe I could like take advantage of the Scheddy connector and you can like connect a display that way somehow or something. But then when you plug in your disk drive, you can say dump the raw data or dump the IDE, the PC fat, you know, red data or try to read it as fat. If you manage to read all of it without any CRC errors, cool. If not, then, you know, I can go and get a raw data dump. So that could be useful because you can put any size micro SD card here for a lot of storage. And then Neopixel and I'm going to have like some LEDs for three volt, five volt, 12 volt power. For the disk two, I'm going to need to also, yes, two by 10. I'm also going to need a negative 12 volt power. I think it's, yeah, it's plus minus 12. The negative 12 is not like a high current output. It's used for biasing the trimmer that is like used for tweaking like either the speed or like the offset. There's like this trimmer on the board because they're sort of like, what's the 12 volt used for?  So I'll need 12 volt high current because for big disk drives, the motor is usually 12 volt, five volt high current, negative 12 volts, like not so high current. And then of course, three volt for the RP2040 over here. So I'm still, you know, working on it. Kind of thinking like picking and choosing the components. You know, Neopixel, Stemic UT, I think I'll have enough GPIO for all this. Like I haven't like really started doing serious noodling, but I'm pretty sure there's enough. One thing I did is I wired up the micro SD card as SPI or SDIO because I thought that could be handy if you needed high speed reading. Now, usually don't get higher speed writing with SDIO because the write speed of a MMC, of a SD card is based on how fast you can erase blocks on the internal mic controller. So, you don't get a lot of benefit for doing SDIO for writing usually, unless you have like a high speed card, like a card that's designed for high speed erasing like for cameras, but for reading, it could be good. And if, you know, we did verify that this pinout works. Like you can have the SPI and SDIO pins interleaved and you can use either one with the SD card. And then, you know, put eight megabytes of Q-SPY flash. Maybe if you're doing just a couple, you're reading like one disk, you could read it and save it to the internal flash memory or you could like emulate from internal flash memory because we have really good support for that. And then, yeah, I think so that, you know, it's kind of nowhere near ready. I mean, for the, I got to start wiring up these. This is a, again, because I want to have it be bi-directional, you can either read or emulate. I need to have a full three to five volt bi-directional translator. So, I've used these before, the 74LVC HT series. So, you get two power pins, VCC A and VCC B, and it can do high to low. They're probably wondering, why don't you just use a TXB-0108? Doesn't the TXB-0108 do everything? No, the TXB-0108 does not handle pull-ups. It freaks out and I'm not, I think the TXB-108 and friends are very, very cool, but they're not good for a situation like this where the direction should be fixed. Like you, it shouldn't auto-detect which direction because again, it'll be weirded out by pull-ups. It's weirded out by signals that aren't like purely digital and I think sometimes when you're reading, you've got these 2.2K pull-ups on the floppy and I think like it's just gonna be freaked out by them because a lot of this is open drain. And the TXS series is also like kind of weird. So, I'm gonna go with this and just I'm gonna have to manually control the direction. And I might have a switch, like a mechanical switch. So it's like, hey, do you wanna have it emulator mode or in reading mode, like interfacing mode and then you can switch between the two of them. So the goal here is just to have, you know, I may not get every interface working in both directions, but the idea is to have like a truly open source hardware, easy to manufacture all in one board that kind of does every retro interface. I don't know, maybe I'll throw on some headers. You can do like a Commodore 64 interface too, which is like your, it's very weird. It's not, it's not any of these lower level interfaces. Anyways, so, you know, kind of like poking and prodding and it's gonna take me a couple of weeks to get this together because there's just a lot going on. Now, the thing I was thinking about that would be super freaky is if I have two extra GPIO, I could put a USB type A port and then you could plug in a USB key because that can be kind of fun too. Like if you're doing emulating or dumping of floppy disk images, you wouldn't even use a micro SD card. You could dump it straight to a USB key and then pull it out and like, you know, plug it into your computer or so because we've got USB host working with mass storage on the RP2040 pretty well. So some kind of weird stuff. So lots of pin configuration is gonna be needed, but I think these are the interfaces I'm gonna go with the laptop. Two by 17 floppy, two by 50 SCSI, so two by 25 SCSI and two by 10 disc two.  All right, so that's some floppy stuff. Any questions, Phil or? Keep going. Keep going. Okay, cool. All right, well, let's go into the great search and we'll talk about the five volt power supply. The great search part too, by Dick Chiqui and Ada Frude, every single weekly data user power of engineering, I hope you guess you find the things you want on dickchiqui.com. Lady Ada, what is this weeks? Great search. Okay, so I'm working on this board that's going to interface with floppy disk drives like this one or like I don't know if you think this. Apple II disk two. And these are devices that need a lot of power. They need five and 12 volts and they need them at a couple amps a piece because they're driving motors, spinning them around very fast. And you need to have a good clean power supply that's five volts and 12 volts. And, you know, historically, you could get these power adapters that would give you both five and 12 and they would actually plug in even directly into the disk drive itself. But those are actually kind of expensive and they're very specialized. And so I thought in this design for this board that's going to interface with disk drives, Apple II or floppy or whatever that instead of trying to like get this custom source five plus 12 volt power adapter, what I would do is say, you just provide me five volts, sorry, 12 volts at three or four amps you can get 12 volt, three or four amp power adapters or USB-C can provide 12 volts at three amps as well. And I'll give you the three, I'll give you the three, two to three amp five volt output as well as that 12 volts. And then, you know, you're good to go. You don't have to have a good dual supply. I'll generate the five from the 12. So let's go to the computer and I'll show. This isn't the final design but I wanted to sort of draft it out. So you'd have your 2.1 millimeter DC jack and again, you can get 12 volts power supplies very easily. I'll add an E fuse here. We'll cover that probably next week on the great search about how to do E fusing because I want to make sure that people don't plug in more than 12 volts into here and accidentally, you know, put 12 volts into the motor because I don't want to have a buck converter also for 12 volts and I don't want to have a SEPIC. I don't want to spend the extra money when I'd rather have a fuse and just be like, hey, just make sure you use a 12 volt. I won't let you use anything else and then I'll give you the five volt high current as well. So there's USB-C, but again, USB-C does not, even, you know, yes, if you have a power delivery setup, you can kind of guarantee getting five volts at two or three amps, but I'd rather just again, generate it from this chunky 12 volt power supply and use the USB just for communication to the computer and not try to use it for power input because again, you need a lot of current. You need like two amps, one amp, but let's say two to be safe.  These are very, very common. I'll give you about one amp, 1.25 amps linear and they come in your standard Saat 223 or Saat 89. They're very inexpensive. You can see they're about 10 cents a piece in quantity, but, and they come in fixed as well.  Show you a couple of options. Yes, the AZ-5, 10 cents a piece and they work great. You know, you can get one amp out and the voltage drop is pretty minimal. I think it's yeah, about 1.3 volts. So definitely we'll get you current out of 12 volts. The problem is that any amount of heat we're dissipating out of this is pretty high. So you're 12 minus five, seven volt drop times, you know, 1.2 amps. Okay, eight watts. You're not gonna easily dissipate eight watts from this little package.  It'll give you five volts, one amp maybe from like seven to nine volts, okay? But not from 12, even though the voltage rating can go up to 15 and that's something to watch out for. Like when I was younger and I was starting out, I was like, oh, it says I can do 15 and it'll give me five at one amp. Like it should work, right? But just because the technical limits let you do it, doesn't mean the thermal limits will match. So for this kind of situation, this is where you wouldn't want a buck converter. This is a perfect example of you want a high voltage convert to low and you can't dissipate that much power. Also it's a bit of a waste, right? I have to provide both five and 12 volts to, you know, a disc two power, Apple disc two floppy drive. So I don't want to like linearly lose two amps from my 12 volt power supply into the five volt regulator, even if I did have a gigantic heat sink because I still need two amps from the 12 volt as well. So, you know, if I use a buck converter, I can draw 400 milliamps from the 12 volt. I just need a less power, less big power supply. So cost, power, everything savings, the buck converter's the way to go. So let's look at a DC-DC buck converter and what you got, there's a lot of options. So there's just FYI, don't forget, they're switching controllers and switching regulators and switching converter. Like there's like a lot of things that sounds very, very similar. So these converters tend to be modules and there's nothing wrong with using modules. Sometimes you're like, I don't want to go through like getting inductors and stuff. You can get this chunky module from SparkFun or you can get this plug-in style and there's nothing wrong with these. They can be very inexpensive. However, I want to keep it low cost and the power requirements here aren't too high. So let's do a regulator that will also regulate the output. The controllers, by the way, usually you need to connect up a separate transistor and these are often used for extremely high current or extremely high voltages where you need the transistor to be specced for some, maybe 40, 50 volts or whatever and you wouldn't get that with a regulator but 12 to five, that's pretty common, by the way. Like you're gonna see there's 1000 options. So the regulator will give me a regulated output. So many options, 30,000 and a lot of them are in stock too. So let's look at only the active ones and let's look at the ones that are normally stocked and let's exclude the marketplace one. So this gets us down to like a paltry 7,000 options. Okay, and definitely there's tons and there's in stock. It's amazing, it's a beautiful thing. So we want surface mount because I'm gonna pick and place it onto this board. I want it to be definitely not negative. I want it to be positive, but sometimes positive or negative, whatever. I'll just select all of these. So all positive and then I want, I only need one output. Although, it could be interesting if I did need a lot of current at three volts, I could get a dual output that would give me 12 to five and 12 to three, but I don't actually need that much current at three volts. I'm gonna just toss an LDO on there. To convert the five volts to three volts because I only need like at the most 50, maybe 100 milliamps. Not worth getting another more complicated buck setup going on. Okay, so let me apply. I didn't even get rid of that many, there's so many options. Okay, so the next thing is do I want synchronous rectifier or not? So normally I would say, oh, I don't mind putting a diode in, I'll show you the freewheeling diode. You know, I picked this old design that I had. So like this design with the TPS 510, there is a freewheeling diode here, but it's another component and these are not inexpensive. They're 10, 10, 15 cents. So let's go with, yes, let's do a synchronous rectifier. Why not save one component? Also means usually there's a true disconnect between input and output, usually, at least it does with the boost converters. Okay, and then I definitely want not boost, I want buck only, so select those, okay? There's really, you know, almost everything will do what I want. Voltage input, the minimum. Well, it's gonna be 12 volts input, so let's make sure that I can handle 12 volts or less. And then input maximum, let's make sure the maximum can be, oops, 14 volts or higher. I don't know, 150 cares. Let's see if that, okay, now we're getting down to 2,600. Let's look for only ones that are tape and reel. Just, you know, I'm gonna put this on the pick and place and we'll get, you know, avoid the did you reel and cut tape version or tray versions, okay? And I think like that's pretty good. Voltage outputs, they all kind of cover five volts. So, you know, I mean, again, this is like one of the most common converters. All right, so let's look at the pricing quantity for 1,000 pieces. I don't like to give me a sense and get 2,000 options. There's a lot of options, so you don't have to worry about that. Oh, and then current output, duh, forgot the most important thing. So the motors on these, they are usually spec'd for one amp, but you know, I wanna make sure I have plenty of space in my power budget. So I'm gonna make the current outputs or the switch output be two amps or more because while this is this floppy, these floppies are one amp, there could be older ones that are less efficient and they could spike up and maybe draw like two amps. So let's do two amps and up, I don't know, 50 amps is kind of the bunkers, but we'll see. Okay, so now, now we're doing good. Okay, so lots of in-stock options and one thing I noticed is there's a couple of, you know, popular winners here. There's the AP622 series from Diodes Inc. And notice that book covers are really inexpensive, like 13 cents, 10 cents, about the same price as the LDO, which is another thing. It's like by the time you add the heat sinking to your linear regulator because you have to get a separate heat sink, it could be the same price as just getting, this is a synchronous buck. So all I need is the input capacitance, output capacitance and a couple of inexpensive passives to set the output voltage and, you know, an inductor. But the inductors are usually, you know, maybe 10, 10, 15 cents. This is very inexpensive. And there's a lot of good options. There's three volt out, sorry, three amp out, two amp out. I did see like there's a lot of like, there's the TPS562202 and then the TPS6227. And I was like, what's the difference between these two? And so I opened up the data sheets because I was like, I was like, expecting this to this week. And I was like, what is the difference between these two? So a lot of it is the accuracy of the output feedback and also the frequency. These are 580 and of course, the lower the frequency, the more efficient, but the bigger the inductor. So if you want a small inductor, you'll want higher frequency, but usually get lower efficiency. So it's a kind of a trade-off, but 600 kilohertz isn't too bad. And also the voltage range input and output. So this is 4.317. These are actually kind of very similar. I don't even know what are the differences between the two? And then, yeah, I don't even know. Soft start, hiccup mode, non-latch. I don't know the difference between the two. These two, pre-bias function. I don't know. You can also check out on TI. These seem like almost identical. This is that thing. I wish there was a little bit more clear what the differences are between the two. But the second digit, so there's 5.6, which is the TPS 5.6, which is the series. Two is two amp, three is three amp. So at the same price, they also get a three amp version, by the way. There's also this, the 62201. You see the datasheet. Yeah, so this output output range is 0.76 to seven volts. And this is 0.8 to seven. So like this, this light, they all, clearly they're all very, very similar. They have the same vets inside and the same kind of configuration and pin out. But they have slightly different pin numbers. I don't know. Some of them maybe have different compensation on the inside. All that looked pretty good though. I think, you know, I'm one of the people who I definitely can be convinced by what the crowd is doing. So actually decided of all these, I think the diodes one is good, but I kind of like this one just because these two, because both of these have like 100,000 and 20,000 in stock. So they're very promising. You could also go to the power designer, which is what if you want like more specific component selection. And what I put in here is the VIN like 10 volts to 14 volts and the output five volts and then 1.5 amps. And then let's just say low cost. And the TI web bench will generate, you'll actually, you'll see the same part number show up but it'll calculate for you, your inductors, the capacity that you want for ideal stability and the feedback resistors. Thankfully, you don't have to compensate the design. So I'll let this run in the meantime it'll generate the designs. But I think that this one is kind of what I'm gonna go with the TPS 562202 or 2201. And you can see here is the, my screen is very small, but you can see it generated of this same family, the 563, 563, 564, so it goes up to four amps. It likes to, I will say that the TI web bench looks to kind of give you a bigger than maybe necessary power budget. But you can follow this and you can see like, you know, entire bomb cost of like 51 cents. It's a really good deal. These are also higher frequency chips. It looks like the 5622 is of the 202. But they're all good. I think this whole family will probably work quite nicely. Very simple, very small and fairly good efficiency at V out five volts, you know, up to two amps, about 92%, which is about as good as you're gonna get. So yeah, I think that this is what I'm gonna go with the TPS 5622 series. So I'm gonna get this into my design. Then next week, we'll do the EFUSE for protection of this chip to make sure that you don't get more than about 12, 14 volts coming in. And that's a great search. All right, thank you so much for joining us this Sunday. We'll see everybody during the week. There's the floppy drive on the computer. That's right. See everybody during the week, we'll have to post some more. Thank you so much for supporting us and an independent open source hardware company in New York City. We very much appreciate it. Bye everybody. Bye everybody. Have a great week.


A former Bemidji resident has died as a result of injuries suffered in an automobile accident. 29-year-old Jennifer Lovering died on Wednesday in Minneapolis. According to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Lovering was struck by a vehicle while she was trying to dig her vehicle out of the ditch on Highway 5 in Eden Prairie on April 15th. Lovering is a 2007 Bemidji High School graduate. She starred in Track and Field in Cross Country while in high school and also competed in both sports at the collegiate level at Augsburg. A GoFundMe page is still active for Lovering with the funds going to her twin sister Jessica to help cover funeral expenses. Funeral arrangements are pending.


Item Number- SCP-2986 Object Class-Safe Special Containment Procedures- SCP-2986 is to be kept on Floor 9 of Site 88. Any person wishing to use SCP-2986 must have approval from personnel with at least a level 2 security clearance. Any objects recovered within SCP-2986 are to be housed in a secure locker adjacent to the chamber. Description- SCP-2986 is a cardboard box that was originally utilized in the delivery of a Whirlpool Refrigeration Unit addressed to Jupiter, Florida. When SCP-2986 is entered and sealed, the object will take on the appearance of the interior of a space-faring vessel. Technology within the vessel is beyond that of current human development, but appears to be designed for the use of humanoid individuals. The vessel can be exited through manual operation of a decompression chamber located in the ship's rear, while outside of the vessel, one is subject to vacuum. There are no stars visible from the vessel's vantage point to indicate its location. Everything on the side of the spaceship reads Voyager. The vessel is capable of moving at speeds faster than light and appears to have an unlimited fuel supply. Despite this fact in years of testing, no other object, life-forms star, or planetary body has been found within SCP-2986. Three corpses were discovered inside the object upon recovery. The ship's crew were listed as Pirate Jimmy Billings, deceased at 55, Sarah Ackerman deceased at 55, Captain Billy Abraham deceased at 56, and Mary Jones, missing. Written records by these individuals indicate that the vessel encountered various life-forms during the first 12 days of use by these individuals, then sparingly for seven years afterwards. There is no record of an encounter for the remaining 43 years. The cause of death for Sarah Ackerman and Jimmy Billings appears to be a single gunshot wound to the head at close range. Billy Abraham appears to have committed suicide by firearms soon afterwards. No sign of struggle or evidence on any of the three bodies. The vessel's operating system utilizes a variant combination of Spanish and Chinese. Several written and recorded logs in English have been recovered from the computer system that originate from the vessel's deceased occupants. No audio logs belonging to Mary Jones are recoverable from the computer records. The following is the most recent log, which references the individual. Pirate Jimmy Billings log day 4958. If we turn around, maybe we can find the Gorblacks again, or the Pufferkins. I can barely remember them, but I know they existed. Billy says it was all a dream, that it's still a dream that will wake up one day. He says, we just have to keep going, but Mary agrees with me. She says she's going to talk to Billy tomorrow. Addendum A. Missing person reports from Jupiter, Florida indicate that Billy Abraham disappeared in 1965. School records, however, indicate that the remaining individuals continued attendance until 1977.