and you can check that out and we'll be back to our usual antics next Wednesday. There'll be a show and tell as well as an Ask an Engineer as usual, but this was the Ask an Engineer Takeover Wednesday yesterday for the unboxing. So who's got a Memento? Who got an Aida Box 21? Who's got projects they're working on? I'd love to hear about them. I was glad to see actually at the end of the show yesterday one of our viewers, Bear, was able to reset the boot loader and that solved an issue they were having, a belief with the LED ring color. So yeah, tell me all about it. Got really two main things I want to do here today. So one of them is a kickoff of a new project that I'm going to do. It should be a fairly, I think it'll be a fairly straightforward one. I may design a 3D printable mechanism for it, or I may publish a Lego downloadable instruction in Bricklink link to get the parts, depending. I have a sort of prototype version of it up and running today using some Lego and Lego Technic, but we'll see. It might be fun to do as a 3D printable thing. What is it? Well, wait and find out. I'll tell you in just a few moments. And then the other main thing I wanted to do was a show and tell. This is one that I've been excited to show and tell for a while now, but I wanted to wait until we did the eight of box unboxing. And that is the vintage titling letters that I used for a bunch of the memento stuff. In fact, let me throw an image up here that you can see of what I'm talking about. Go grab the main title images I used. Where are you? You should be right here. This one I'll do. Yeah. So, this is someone asked, I believe it was DJ Devon 3 asked about what software was used to create that thinking it was CG, but that's actually some real physical letters that I photographed in this, your earth using, in this case the iPhone, but most of the images I did with that, whoops, were with a, well, there we go. Most of the images I did were shot on memento yesterday. This happens to be one that I had shot on an iPhone. But these are some ceramic letters that come from a company called Mittens. And they were made back in the 60s. I think that was 50s and 60s were the heyday. And in fact, that is going to be our coupon code for the day. So I do have a coupon code. That's it right there, Mittens, because that's the weird name of this company that made these letters. So if you want to go get something from the store today, throw it in the cart, on the way out, check for the coupon code field and type in Mittens, M-I-T-T-E-N-S. That'll be good until midnight tonight, east coast time.  That won't work on software gifts or subscriptions, but it's good for stuff. Anyway, these letters right here, these are one of a number of typefaces that they made for use in movie titling, especially for eight millimeter home movies. You needed a way to create a title. You put your camera on a down shooter. You set up a little title and you shot a few seconds of that. That's what would play at the beginning of your reel. Go get that developed. And they also made signage for buildings. They were here in California actually, so they made signage inside department stores, signage outside buildings. Actually really letters is what they sold. And they developed some typefaces based on existing types. Some were created pretty much from scratch for their needs. So let's take a look at them. First of all, here's a little set of these groovy things. You can see here I've got, that's quite a warm cast on that. Why is that that warm? Let me back off of the white balance here. These are not like that. There, that's kind of more what they look like. Neat little ceramic letters. You can see here they have a rough surface on the back. The rest is fairly smooth. And you can see those little flaws and imperfections in them there that you sometimes pick up, which I think helps sell the idea that these are real and analog and physical in the real world.  They get dirt. This one has just a little bit of dirt in the corner there. And the idea with these, you can see they're floating all over the place, right?  They also made ones with pegs on the back. And they were formed, I believe also, I don't have any of those, but they were formed into the backs of the letters. It was a consistent pin and they could be set into like a little sort of foam and velour type of mat to get them where you wanted. But I imagine that was a little more difficult to get things lined up because with these, you'll just use a, typically I'll use a little ruler and get them lined up and spaced properly. So what I'd love to do is show you the boxes of these I got. I got two different types. So here is, switch this camera here, so here is Mittens Professional SLT3. I think that's smooth letters because this does not have the pegs. I think the peg ones say PLT. Three was the typeface. They only made them in like one font size for this use, but so typeface three is the one that I have in here. Sanded back letters, three-quarter inch, upper and lower case, and a bottle of Mittens Stickum. Zoom in on there because gosh, this is a handsome label if I've ever seen one. Sanded back letters, upper and lower case, one bottle Mittens Stickum movie titlers. And I'll peel the, take the top off of there. Zoom out. Look at these. Look how gorgeous. So these are upper and lower case. I used these for some of the title sequences for the cards in the in the Aida box unboxing. This also has some nice punctuation numbers down here at the bottom. And you can see we've got their sort of rough texture there. I don't know how well you can see that actually. My light is a little blasted out. Sorry. Yeah, that's gonna be hard to pick up. There's a little bit of a rough texture on the back. And look, here is, believe it or not, a bottle of Mittens Stickum that has not dried out. I have not opened it. I'm terrified to open. I think I may just leave it as it is, but it's some sort of a sort of a liquidy rubber cement type of feel, I think. Some of these letters you'll see have the residue on the back of someone who used it without cleaning it off. And it looks kind of like a rubber cement to me there. Or contact cement, that kind of thing. I noticed in the chat, see Grover said those letters were school photographer staples in all my grade school photos. They had exposed metal pins for attaching to grooved felt tile boards. Yeah, right.  So that's it. These gorgeous letters. You can see they came up with some very clever space savings for some of these letters where they figured flipping them, you could get more of this letter P by flipping them side to side, some of them like these T's are all tucked in nicely. I think I have that H somewhere, and I have one cracked letter N. It got cracked in half and I may try to glue it. Actually, this is a U and I think they're identical to the N. So if you want to say, you know, no, you can pretty much do it because you have all the N's and all the U's and a whole bunch of O's there. So that is this sort of smaller whimsical typeface. And then I have the other set. And I believe I got these in the maybe $60, $70 range plus shipping. I found them on eBay as well as Etsy, typically eBay sellers are going to be a little cheaper than Etsy. These are somewhat readily available. I think a lot of these were sold and so a lot of them exist. So this is the Smooth Letters 2. It looks like someone bought this at some point for $7.50 for amateur and professional titles. And again, now this is just uppercase, you can see in this set. And we have letters and numbers and just a couple punctuations. There's a question mark and an exclamation point and then you'll use one of your precious two period squares at the bottom of those. And then we have a couple of commas that you could maybe use as a set of quotes, two single quotes. I don't think there were more. I think this is a complete set. And then anything you see missing from here is because I spelled Memento and a couple times an Adabox. But look at this, look at this gorgeous K. My gosh, that's a beautiful face, sort of a Deco style, streamlined, modern style, gorgeous. This S, very distinctive with these hard diagonals and then the curved top, so square on the inside, really beautiful. I did find a digital typeface someone made based on this and I can't remember what it's called now, but there are some similar, very similar existing types, but this one has some unique little, look at the Q, has this little diamond point in there, absolutely love it. And again, what is up with the miraculously still liquid mitten stickum? I am terrified of whatever is in there. It's a cool-looking bottle too. Yeah, almost all my M's were done in by Memento and I had, this was empty when I opened this this morning because I had used the Memento letters in two different places during the unboxing. So yeah, cleaned it out, brought some of the N's, E's back there, but yeah, M in Memento eats it up quickly. So yeah, 021 for Adabox 21, just one X remaining, there's one over there, some numbers. So that's my show and tell. That is for you, DJ Devon 3, I don't know if you're here today, but you had asked about that title and that's how I did it. I shot that on the wood base of this photo enlarger. I also did some experiments with casting some blurred slides, negatives from the enlarger onto some letters, came out cool, but it was creepier looking than kind of the mood we were going for, so I didn't end up using those, but those are the beloved Mitten's letters and I'll probably try to find other uses for those because they're just so handsome and so such a joy to use physical type like that. If you look, let me just jump over real quick to the internet here. This, if you just Google Mitten's titling letters, you'll see a few people singing their praises, you'll find them for sale a bit. If you go to the images, there's an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston of a bunch of Mitten's, they're photographs of Mitten's type in drawers, so here's a nice set of them probably for someone who created signs inside of a store or for photography or whatever. Look at that. This is inside of a department store display here. Fontes Cabel, condensed, beautiful. I'd love to find the rest of them. Okay, so for their signage outside of buildings, they had a, and even on the interiors of departments in a store and that sort of thing, they had a bunch of different type sizes there, different fonts for the face. Here's some nice cursive styles that they had, beautiful. They are the only ones I've found that are made of this sort of ceramic, plastery, ceramic material. You will find plastic letters out there as well. That's actually, initially this search started with Phil Turone saying, hey, maybe get some letters to do some tiles with like refrigerator magnet style, and we'd actually used refrigerator magnets in the fun house unboxing, and so I wanted to find something different, and I ended up looking into these gorgeous letters. So he says, the stick would need a hazardous material warning today, no doubt. It's terrifying, right? Some nice says, then along came Trajan Pro and everything changed. Oh boy, let's not get started on Papyrus. That's that. That was the letters thing. So thanks for coming along for that ride, and it was fun to have an excuse to be able to play with these, particularly just showing with the Memento camera that the lighting, the color of the lighting, the direction of the angle, some hard shadows can really, really look beautiful. I've got my little, just a tiny little bright light source here that we can use to create some nice hard shadows with. All right. So I should mention, by the way, if you're somewhere like Twitch and Facebook and you're wondering where the chat is, and I was just looking over there and talking, who am I talking to? That is our Discord. So you can go to adafruit.it slash discord and you can jump into our Discord server and look for the live broadcast chat channel. That's where the chat is going on. And then like I said, sorry, since I've been busy with prep and setup and doing the unboxing yesterday, I didn't set up a Circuit Python Parsec, so I'll get back to that next week. But I would like to kick off a new project and that is a automatic watch winder. So what's the deal here? I have this is a Seiko automatic auto winding watch, not terribly expensive, but it's a similar type of concept as watches ranging from 100 bucks maybe on the low end for one that can auto wind up into all of your Omega's and Patek Philippe's and Panerai's and Rolex's. A lot of watches that are analog have an auto winding mechanism. This one's kind of neat because they've put a clear back on it so you can see what the heck that even is. I'll turn this light back on. And so you can see when it's hard with the band, sorry, but you can see there is a sort of half circle pendulum right here. I'm going to focus a little better for you right there. That is a sort of counterweight that moves. You can see it sort of swing there. It just moves as you walk around in your regular day. You can see the face of the watch there. So it has a day-date function and then it has a fairly smooth sweeping second hand. And this is on the low end. These are 200-ish dollar watches. So it does not have separate winding. You can't wind it with the stem. The only way for this thing to wind, just to keep the cost down and simplify the mechanism, is to wear it, which is great. As long as you wear it, it has about a 40-hour reserve on the mainspring. So there's a coiled spring that gets wound by just wearing it. And then as it it runs the watch, it unwinds that. And so you're just kind of in this constant balance of using the thing and wearing it. And kind of every time you swing your arm, move a little bit. That little mechanism, which is actually a bi-directional auto winder, which means either direction that it swings, it has a little pinion and a little ratchet that grabs and winds or reverses the direction of and winds. So it's always winding in one direction. And the mainspring. So super cool. Only problem with it is if you don't wear it for a couple days, because it's only got a 40-hour power reserve in it, at best. I think it's less than that, honestly. It will then lose time. Stop.  So your time is going to be wrong. So if you have other watches you want to wear, or if you just forget, you've got to go reset the watch. Not a big deal, but kind of a pain because it's a day-date on there. So that's the bigger pain is you kind of have to go through three little steps to get the day and date right again, as well as the time. I live with this without too much problem. It doesn't really bother me, but I thought it would be kind of fun to build a watch winder, which is something that people who have big collections of auto winding watches are particularly interested in. But you can also get single ones. And it is what it sounds like. It is a mechanism that has a way to mount the watch. And then it has a very slow motor, which will rotate it a few times an hour, reverse it if you want it to. And you'll set it to something that isn't keeping the spring fully wound. You kind of want it going through it's a bit of its length there during the day. That means you can just keep it plugged in and empowered. This is also all absurd. I was talking to Todd Kurt about it earlier.  So yeah, it's all ridiculous. You don't need it. But it's a thing. It's a thing that's out there. And I'll show you here. I'll show you what a typical watch winder looks like. Here we go. How about that right there? So these are single watch winders. And these are nice ones. These go for like $300. That's more than my watch costs. So I certainly don't really see myself getting that, but it is a nice one. You can also get these sort of, if you have huge collections, you can get these insane safes and stuff. So yeah, the watch world is wackadoo and it gets nutty quickly. But you can get cheaper ones. I think there's probably not a huge difference in the price range, inequality with the different price range of these things. All it has to be is a motor that can turn it. Now you don't want it to be a loud motor probably. You may want it to be a little bit controllable as far as how many times and how fast it's turning and can it go in both directions. But I figured a decent stepper motor, like you find in all your 3D printers, like these ones that we sell in the Adafruit shop. Let me find one for you. Stepper. Right there. So this kind of $14 stepper motor, or let's see, I think this may be, yeah, that may be the one I'm actually using here today. Although that says it's a 12 volt and I think I have a 5 volt stepper running. I don't know if it's that one. But any simple stepper motor is probably going to do a great job at being able to turn your watch fairly reasonable speed, especially if you're able to gear it down with a bit of gearing or pulleys or belts. And they're fairly easy to control. So I decided, yeah, let's do this. Let's put together a watch winder. And to keep it simple, Lady Aida suggested, hey, what about using make code? You haven't used that in a project in a while. You're really doing very simple stuff, like maybe no user input, just when you turn it on, it turns for a prescribed amount of time in one direction, pauses, turns in the other direction. This is really simple sort of logic loop stuff that you can do with graphical programming inside of make code. So in fact, let's take a look at what the code for something like this will look like. So I'm jump over to make code here.  There are a lot of other ways we have motor shields, we have feathers that have motor add-ons that'll do steppers, stepper drivers on their own. So there's a lot of ways you can go about this. I'm going to use a cricket. If you want to use the cricket in the makecode.adafruit.com, you just have to remember to use the beta. This morning I went and looked and I was like, why do we not have the cricket extension available? That's because you need the beta. I think this will always be in beta, but makecode.adafruit.com slash beta. And then you can go into this extensions and pick cricket. And I've already done that. So that extension set exists right here in the menu. You can see I can click on that. And then you could drive servos. You could do this with something like a continuous rotation servos. Well, that would work very, very nicely. Motors, you can't drive these too slow. They tend to be a little noisy if they're just simple DC motors. Again, you could make it work for sure. I'm using down here this little stepper section. We have a couple of options. We have a stepper that's plugged into the four motor ports. So we have two essentially H bridge motor drivers. Those could be used to drive two separate DC motors bi-directionally. Or this extension, let's you just plug in the four wires of a, is it a unipolar stepper to be able to drive that? You can also use the drive section on the cricket. I'll show you what these look like in a second. Either of those, you're just saying, how many steps am I going to move it? That's kind of the only thing you can do with it. You can't do micro steps or this and that. You're just going to grab what you got there, but it works well. It's straightforward. So here I have, this is going to move in 10 step increments forever. You're more likely to say, let's move 4,000 steps and then we'll add a little pause maybe for a second and repeat. That would just turn, stop, turn, stop. Or you can throw in a negative and that will run the stepper motor in the other direction, duplicate this. So it's going to go, flip, go, flip. Yeah, and it'll do all those steps before it gets to that pause. So it's a very sort of linear logical thing. So I've programmed something like that along with some lights into the cricket over here on the work bench. So let's go take a look at that as well as the little mechanism I built. And actually I'll let me go back to, for a second, to one of those commercially available winders, just so you can see I used this mounting as a bit of an inspiration. Because the question is, how do you get the thing to hold onto your watch and do what it needs to do? So if you look at these little things here, these are a couple little sort of roughly wrist sized with a bit of padding on them or spring loading block that you just wrap your watch around if it has a strap or if it has this kind of bracelet, clip it onto there, and then it just plonks into the kind of hole in the front there and it does its thing. This one, by the way, has, if you look at the back of it, has a couple knobs on there, and that is for, I believe, they have just presets for the revolutions per day is what they call them, like 650 revolutions per day, I think is a typical number. Let me see, I think it's listed in one of these other photos. Yeah, turns per day, 850, 650, 750, 1,000, 1950. I don't know how you decide what you want your watch to do. And it can go either only one direction, only the other direction, or both directions every x number of minutes, I think. I think the other knob on there is if you want it to beep or something like that every so often to remind you that it exists, I guess. But anyway, we are, so I'm inspired by that idea, but like I said, I wanted to prototype this in LEGO Technic when I started out since I was using a stepper motor. At first, I thought of using a little toothed belt, pretty typical, if you look at any of the camera slider projects the Ruiz brothers have done, we'll use this type of toothed belt, which is great, they don't slip, they don't really stretch, easier to work with than chain, come in different lengths, and then you can attach that between essentially gears, pulleys, get your gear reduction that you want or translate the power over a distance. So that was one thought, but it's kind of cumbersome and there's a lot of fabrication that you need to do. And really, when you're wanting to build something like this and you don't have the means or the time or the energy or the money to do a whole bunch of fabrication, machining of things, your options tend, at least for me, to come down to either use LEGO and Technic parts or 3D print, design something and 3D print it. So I'll explore both, but today what I've got since it's so much quicker is a little LEGO mechanism and you may actually recognize this, I built this a little while ago to do a motor driver demo and I had built a neat little gear reduction here, a little Technic gear reduction back, and I'm not going to pull this fully apart, but back here you can see I've got my stepper motor, I have grafted one of our, I think it's a TT motor to Technic axle adapter, it doesn't really fit on the shaft of this stepper, so I had to grind it out a little bit and hammer it on there, but it's on there really well now. One nice thing is that this stepper has, happens to have spacing that is the same as the side beam pin holes on the anti-studs on a Technic, so that's how it's actually mounted as I have, let me get you to get you to view that there, it's all black nylon screws on black plastic, sorry, let's see, but right there you'll see this is a Technic beam, like this sort of thing, and it is one, two, three, four, five spaces apart, I have just some nylon M3 screws, and I was able to put four of those, so that's how I'm able to kind of get this thing itself to lock into the LEGO world, and then having that shaft adapter means that it's going right into this whole gear train here, so power transmission and gear reduction that allows the stepper, which already doesn't move that fast to move a heck of a lot slower and with more torque to be able to turn the thing. This is just, there's plenty that can be done to improve this, but it's fairly stable, this is locked in there fairly well, it wiggles a little back here, and some of that is because the shaft is not perfectly straight on there either, so that will spin this little motor here, sorry this little coupling here, if I turn that on you can see I've got my circuit playground express screwed into Cricut, Cricut has a 5 volt 2 amp DC power supply, which is both running the logic on my Cricut as well as powering the motor, you can see here the stepper is running in these four wires into the motor driver section, so rather the motor section, not the driver section, I probably shouldn't have had the lights go off because that keeps making me think, oh did it like brown out, but no I just told it to turn off its lights when it stops, and you can see yeah it's since my shaft is a little off-center it's kind of wobbling the whole thing, you got a lot of give in this this plastic here, you see that wiggle waggle back there, but it's decent enough and we get a good slow turn here on this little shaft coupler, and then what I made for actually rotating the watch was again a little sort of specialized-ish technic part with a fairly rigid axle to pin coupling, and if I turn that off and set that in there you'll see right now I'm getting something like a I don't know 100 degree 120 degree turn and then it returns, so I want to set that to go much much further, do multiple revolutions in one direction, take a break, go the other, and part of that is that calculation that you'll do if you research what's a good speed to use on your watch so it isn't always wound fully, so you need to give it some breathing room so that it'll run, and so then if you take something like a big squishy rubber tire on a wheel here, which fits into there with a little bit of squishy breathing room, this happens to be about the right size to wrap the watch around, it did have sort of a wedge-shaped piece I was using, I don't think I'll need it, but I was tightening it a bit with a little wedge shaped piece, but if I take my watch and wrap it around there, you can see it's a little loose but it's going to get clamped in by setting it into here, and so there it'll sit and that's fine, that'll turn the thing, ideally it might be that it's parallel to the face of this, I'll experiment with it, but I think I can see the little pendulum counterweight there turning, so this this will work just fine, so let me set that in there, this is a longer axle than I wanted to use, but it was the one that had on hand, so I put a few Technic pin holes for it to run through to give it a little bit of stability, and obviously there's some friction there too, it'll turn that on, and there it goes, it manages pretty well, it's not a super heavy watch, but you can see I've kind of got horrifying amounts of distance between the heavy weight on the end there and the shaft, and yet it works fine, I think that would probably last just as long as the $300 winder, if I'm being honest, and I can tilt this up so you can see the face doing its thing a little better, wobble, wobble, wobble, turn turn turn, but quite quiet, you know, the stepper itself is really nice and quiet, the plastic gears also on the LEGO Technic are pretty quiet, so all I want to do actually is just update this to rotate more, so let's take, I'll show you how that's done, I'll take power off of there and I'll bring it with me so we can just kind of test it in real time, bring the whole thing over here, and if you haven't used this sort of Cricut setup before in a while, you will power the Cricut, and you can still safely run USB to the Circle Playground Express in order to feed it, let's go to this view, the data that you need to feed it, so how about you're there and you're there, I'll hide this out a bit, and I can throw a little miniature me over in the corner, okay so let's take our letters, click click click, these make a satisfying noise, I am certain these would shatter into many pieces if I drop them on my concrete workshop floor, so I've got to be a little cautious with them, so let's set this under here, so I've got a power strip for that 5 volt 2 amp, and then I have a USB to plug in here, so you see even though I didn't turn the power on on the Cricut, which has its own power switch, the power from USB is running the Cricut Playground Express, so I flip that power on, it'll actually just start running, so you should see the winder doing its thing, should, is this, okay I think that was in a programming mode just by plugging it in, so I'll actually do that again, so I think that's now kind of in a bootloader mode waiting for me to connect it to this session, so this is running in Chrome, I think you have to run in Chrome to be able to do the web USB firmware updating, not certain but I think so, so I'll click on pair device, pick the Cricut Playground Express, you didn't see that pop up, but that just selected this device as what this web USB make code session is connected to, and let's, yeah so I don't have that that code, we could drag it off and into here if we want, how about, so C Play boot, current UF2, I'm dragging it into my Chrome browser, so that was the UF2 that was sitting on the Cricut, rather on the Cricut Playground Express, just dragged it to the make code window and boom there it is, which is pretty sweet, I'm not doing anything on start, so I can ditch that, I want to change these, how about yellow when we're paused, I can lower the brightness actually, so let me bring back a start loop on start, light, set brightness, let's do that at about five, the steps I'm doing right now, let's do about 5,000 and then negative 5,000, and if I hit download it should, crossing fingers, compile that UF2 and put it onto the Cricut, it says downloading, it also says that sometimes when it's stuck, so let's see, okay so it downloaded the UF2, it didn't put it on the board, but I can I can drag it on there myself, okay so now it's programmed it, okay so there's enough clearance there, so you can see now we're going to get I think a full-ish revolution, maybe even a little more, boy it looks stylish with that dirty technique wheel sitting there, yeah I like it and we can put bigger delays in there, we can have it turn multiple times in one direction, any of that, you can control just by changing these values, you can also give it a bit of an interface, we've got the the buttons, we've we've got a selector switch, so you could if you wanted to inmate code say I want to go into a mode where it'll let me increase the number of revolutions and do the math necessary for that, so all that stuff you can really simply grab things like on button, a click, increase some variable that is going to be you know multiplied by a thousand and that's going to be or by five thousand, that's going to be how many revolutions, you could use neopixels as color updates, so really a great platform, it's nice to be reminded of it, I haven't used it in a while, but Circle Playground Express and the Cricut together inmate code really easy, it's essentially getting familiar with what blocks are available and then figuring out the logic puzzle without worrying about the syntax, so it's really just the logic of how you want to code the project and and then upload it, so it is it is pretty straightforward, I can see the batteries on this little light have died, that's why that keeps getting dark over there, the question I just got over in the one of the chats was curious about the torque of the stepper motor, will it turn the watch without that gear reduction, and it will, it's pretty fast honestly, if you look at the fastest small gear there, that's how fast it's going, so that's whipping the thing around pretty quick, but I believe I tested with just the shaft coupler that I had for connecting to those timing belts, the tooth timing belts, and it was able to spin that way, so it is actually pretty torquey little motor, it just needs more clearance there, and a little further, a little better, there we go, so that's the complete prototype of the contraption, and I will play around a little bit to see if I can do a sort of straightforward elegant design in as few Lego parts as possible, but even better is see if I can do a pretty easy to 3D print mechanism that'll allow us to still gear it down without getting too complicated. If anyone has any thoughts about that, let me know, it's kind of this age-old problem of these types of maker projects is if you're not going to start doing fabrication and milling of parts, how do you build something that's kind of custom and bespoke like this with a toolkit of things, and that's why I always find myself returning to Lego Technic, it's just a great system for this kind of stuff, but I'd love to know if you have other go-to recommendations for these kinds of things. Let's see, yeah, let me know if you have other questions, let me bring up the, I'll look over in the chats, the two questions here, does make code let you change the step or speed? It does not that I know of, I don't think there's an advanced, yeah, I don't think there's an advanced cricket section, so if you look in the main cricket code here, you've got servo stuff, you've got motor, which you can control motor speed, but again, if it's just a basic DC motor, you can't get that slow, you can get about, I think, to 25% speed on one of the yellow TT motors before it stalls, and then if you put any torque on it, I think it'll stall even sooner. Yeah, the stepper choice is really just the number of steps, so if you did this in Circa Python and Arduino, you could get more granular for sure with the code there, so I'll leave that as an option for the user, you can code any of the cricket boards or pretty much any of our boards that you could run make code on that I'd be likely to use for this project, you can code in Arduino, you can code in Circa Python. A nice choice too is the feather and excuse me, the cricket feather wing, so you can plug pretty much any feather into there. You can go as wild as the Raspberry Pi cricket add-on, I don't remember what we call those anymore, pi plate, hat, something. Other questions, someone was asking about Memento case files, oh okay, yes, so that was a question based on 3D Hangouts. Excellent question, I think they're asking about this really cool Memento case that I believe Noah and Pedro made for use in their video on the Memento, which I apologize they didn't get a chance to play that during the unboxing because I'd covered a lot of that material already, but this is a nice case, they sent me a link to it or just sent me the STL files and I think they're planning to publish it and just haven't yet, so that was a nice one because it kind of covers the wiring and gives you a diffuser for the LEDs. 3D printed base clip for the Memento that I had, oh yeah, I can publish that one, if you want, that was me, I think literally just boolean difference on the one of the Ruiz Brothers cases, this is an earlier version of it, but yeah this is a very very minimal tripod mount, two screws, that's kind of a nice one for, you need to make one of those kind of clips into even so you don't have to screw it in, but yeah, these kinds of things are handy if you're going to be doing stuff for Memento, for any stop motion, time lapse, focus rack stuff, macro stuff, yeah it was not a snap clipped thing, it was just a minimal version of one half of a case with just two screws, I think that's it, yeah, okay, so that's my project kickoff there, that's my ode to Mitten's letters, once again if you would like to grab some stuff in the store today, you can go ahead over to Adafruit.com, look for some cool products, some new stuff, some old stuff, some, some of the crickets might be in stock, I don't think this one is right now, this, the cricket for the Circle Playground Express unfortunately, but you, if you're thinking of getting a jump start on this project, if you think you might want to make it, one other idea that I don't have an Apple watch, but LeMore wondered if something like this might be useful for fooling the pedometer or your Fitbit or something like that, I don't know if those use just rotation for anything, or if it's all based on sort of that step type of motion, so we might need a more complicated mechanism to do something like that. Yes, Sea Grover said, since precision isn't needed, a TT gear brushed motor would work and they're noisy, yeah, not for the nightstand, yeah, that was, I came to that same conclusion, Jan, I plugged in actually one of the blue metal gear motors and boy are those things noisy, they're geared down a lot, which is why I tried that first, and then I put in one of the yellow ones, and yeah, they're quite noisy, but the stepper is pretty quiet, I have to say, especially if you encase it in something, you can get it down quite quiet. Todd Bot, does this watch winder work on the watch app on my phone? Definitely, yeah, just put your Apple watch in this thing and it'll stay, you don't ever need to charge it again. All right, that's going to do it for today, thank you all so much for stopping by, I appreciate you, and we will be, I think, doing a deep dive tomorrow without Scott or Tim, we'll be back on Tuesday with a new product pick of the week, and then on Wednesday we'll have show and tell and ask an engineer, so that's going to do it for me for today, thanks everyone for stopping by, for Adafruit Industries, I'm John Park, and this has been John Park's Workshop, I'll see you next time.


All right, glad to be here. And today I'll be talking about open source accessibility testing with the tool that my team at Carthage is building for PurpleHeads. So before I do that, I'm going to just give you a short introduction about myself. Can you guys hear me? How do we need to push this tree? OK, I guess you're mine. Thank you. Bill, huh? Thank you. What? Thank you. We are reminded that accessibility is true. Yes, you should be making a microphone, right? Thank you. So a bit about myself. I mean, yep, let's introduce. I'm an engineer at Carthage. Myself, I've been working with computers since I was primary school. And I had a visual impairment. And one of the reasons why I'm working on accessibility is so that I hope that our services that we build can be more inclusive and accessible. Oh, right, OK. That always happens. OK, so my favorite topics include DevOps, DevSecOps, Quality Engineering, as well as recently accessibility testing. Yep, and on one type of topics, I do talk about inclusive employment, especially employment, employment of persons with disabilities. So actually the last speaker probably talked about accessibility testing, but regardless, why accessibility testing, right? Firstly, accessibility testing as previously mentioned, and as you know, it's about making testing to ensure that your websites and mobile apps are friendly towards PWDs. And one form of accessibility testing is this thing called automated accessibility testing. Automated accessibility testing aims to help it's a kind of software testing to help you uncover and ensure that applications that develop are accessible to PWDs. And for common types of disabilities include color-blinders and those who are vision impaired. So probably a lot of vision impaired just use things such as screen reader as well as keyboard. And these PWDs use these assistive tech tools not just to access the web and to use the mobile apps. And these services today that we roll out, chances are they're not. If you don't test for these people, they are not accessible. And what my team and I are working on is to create accessibility testing to proper hacks that aims to help you crawl through at least the entire website very quickly, right? You have five minutes at a time to install proper hacks, try it out, crawl the entire website. Are you better yet, right? If you want to make sure your websites, especially like new websites, are continuously tested, you can use accessibility testing as well in CI-CD. And some of the benefits. Well, automated testing actually helps you to make it, you know, make part of your optional requirements. It is not already so. And today you can use automated accessibility testing to help catch accessibility testing issues early with that. And of course, you can categorize accessibility testing to issues such as color contrast issues, things such as improper headings or lack of headings, and you can not catch all these recurring issues and categorize them. And what we support is the console app as well as the interpreter. For those who run it, you can say get up, get back. And we are actually trying to shift a bit more towards the user side, the designers and now everyday users are trying to change the version of it as well. So much about what this tool can do, but how can verbal heads really help? They just tool. So I give you this scenario when a person who is working on your app is not able to understand things such as your shopping cart, your shopping cart research button or your checkout screen is not intelligible to the reader, doesn't read out what exactly the online items are correctly and what happens to that? Well, verbal heads can ask at least if you have done proper accessibility testing with verbal heads, you could find that actually some of these code issues are already flagged out like the partnership in labelled properly or your text should have proper headings. And you can actually pick up on these issues and hopefully with the tool you can actually categorize them by WCAG. WCAG is the web content accessibility guideline. It's a lot to be unpacked so just Google it and you realize that there's a lot of different standards out there, but WCAG one helps you unpack accessibility issues in different categories of issues and you can find out what exact issue the user is facing with their basic website. And with that one of the selling points of verbal heads is you can scan it across pages. Your files is great, but you can use it on one page. It is quick scanning. Every time you use or refer to a page on an X screen verbal heads can help you to do that. And I'll show you how you can do that even for websites that require interactive access. You need to sign in and with that I hope that people will appear and then planning all the issues flagged up and planning as a security roadmap. So the text is purely open source. You can choose various methods of crawling as well as playwrights to help automate the workflow of scanning accessibility. Crawling is for crawling and playwrights is for automating or writing your tests. If you are a functional tester or quality engineer, you know that you can write quickly record tests and then using the same tools out there. And the report we use as core. And most of us say report HTML that we use to help us generate that report. And for the core environment, you can run it across this. You can run it on node and you can run it on GitHub as well as talk. Some of the features briefly alluded, you can crawl a website for accessibility issues. You can then scan the pages either as a website, like a URL or you can provide a website. If you have a new website just throw in the website. And lastly the fun part you can record your own flow with our custom flow feature. All that will be reported through using as core and up to WGCWCG guidelines. So this is an example of the console app. All you do is just once you install it, just run the Ending Node application which is the code index. It gives you a series of prompts for the user to understand what they want to do and do a crawl. And then type in your URL and you can scan whether you want to scan in desktop or mobile and you can start scanning your website. You can scan about 100 pages in less than a minute depending on your type of laptop or period. Then you get a very brief report like what is the accessibility and what kind of accessibility issues are there and we categorize it according to the S4 engine like whether it's critical, serious, mobile etc. And then you can download a report. The report looks like this. It tells you the website. Again how many issues are there or unique issues and exactly the HTML and the issue tied to the HTML elements. So it looks like that. If I zoom in it gives you the impact rating the WCAG clause as well as the description of the issue. And then the page you can click on the page to bring you back to where you were to find out where that issue is as well as the HTML elements so you can do your highlight and inspect element. If you need more help you can just click on the shortcut there and it will bring you to help guide DQ University that lists out very comprehensively what issues about how you can approach it, how you may fix it. So for the people who are developing things like e-commerce sites who are behind our login screen you can use our custom flow feature that allows you to scan a website by recording a series of actions. So this will allow you to scan websites where they are known in certain cases where you need to fill in the form first and then for some pages also there is a new website today where this thing got a single page architecture where the mirror hasn't changed so people can also handle that because we use image based scanning to interview whether there is a lot of HTML elements changed on the screen. So same thing you go to our console you select custom and choose the format of the scan in this case you do a test of scan and choose the website that you want to scan and in a few moments time you open a browser, it's not an ordinary browser this is actually by play right that we use, where you can notice and highlight over elements and every time you interact with an element be it a mouse click or a keyboard type it will record a series of steps. So say here I'm just searching for accessibility and graph text on the website happening and here is the flow that I want to scan right so that I went through different pages actually went through my form element notice that I have to create a search button before the form element appeared so that indicates that new elements on the page and then what happens is we have to then run, scan and repeat that series of actions for you and as it does it's actually scanning the entire page for accessibility issues right and then you have the same format of the report as we saw earlier so how can you start without a simple application you go to our report tree just search for four heads probably one of the top page one of the search you can also scan this QR code for quick installation guide so one of the challenges for non-tech info is how do I you don't understand why is this package management tools so we have packaged a zip file that you can literally just download and double click a command or shelf with file and you will load the entire shelf for you so you can run the command line with everything in stock for you and of course lastly for those people who work in the software development team you want to bring the test scripts that you just recorded you have to bring the crawler into your dev environment how can you do that so we have as mentioned we have our we support Docker so we have a preview or rather we have a Docker file which you can use to build an image and then you can just deploy it either in your favorite or in the same command line right so that's about the tool that we are working on if you have any questions I'll be around for my time left for Q&A and if you'd like to find out more about the work we do I'll scan the left QR code for the proper page on our software development portal and on the right you can link that with me on this here I'm wondering if there are codes open for submitting to request if there is anything that you can craft with yes you are open too if you take a look at the PR and see what makes sense I've got a question that's curious does this make you say you can when you want to test you can have it test as if you are looking on a mobile device yes does that mean a PWA site will be exactly that scenario so you simulate a PWA site as well exactly so if I may show it on the screen do I have to adjust the screen sharing so that audience can see what's on the screen I will go on alright okay great so I'll put the mic down here so say you have a PWA app right you have a URL to the page you can expose and point for it then you can just enter the same thing here you can choose mobile and if you use the CLI you can choose a lot more options like down to the view pod you want to test for the user agent that you want to test for I'll just give the same website this is actually running against an iPhone 11 user agent with the user agent and rendered yes you can so we have the entire list of user agents presented on the repo page so you can choose from there as well this is exactly how fast it all works okay


Welcome, we now have, hello, Don, Don Federico from Boston, the Boston Bar Association President, and Marilyn McNamara, she's President of the New Hampshire Bar Association, and finally Paul Manzioni, Manzioni, President of the New Hampshire Association for Justice. Thank you, I guess I'll start. Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and what I'd like to talk with you about today is really some of the things that the Boston Bar Association has been doing in an effort to support the courts. The Boston Bar Association is an association of more than 10,000 lawyers, judges, and law professors in the greater Boston area. We have a three-part mission, one of which is access to justice, because properly functioning courts are critical to access to justice, and courts cannot function properly without adequate funding. We devote a great deal of our time and attention to trying to help our courts secure funding. As you heard from Chief Justice of Administration and Management Robert Mulligan earlier today, in recent years we have not been particularly successful in persuading our legislature to level fund or increase funding for our courts. The Massachusetts Trial Court's budget has been repeatedly cut since 2008, and the cuts have cost the Trial Court tens of millions of dollars. To cope with the severe cuts, the court has had in place a hiring freeze for several years as you heard earlier today, and has been unable to replace the more than 1,000 employees who have left for retirement or for other reasons. Although the remaining judges and staff have soldiered on, they have done so under very difficult circumstances, and we're very concerned that they cannot do so indefinitely. The Boston Bar Association, along with other bars, has therefore stepped up its effort to help the court secure adequate funding, and I'd like to describe for you some of the initiatives we've undertaken and how our thinking about them has evolved somewhat over time. Let me start with our written reports on the court budget, and I am going to describe a number of materials that we have prepared that are going to be submitted as part of the record in these proceedings. The reports are included. For the past three years, the Boston Bar Association has developed such reports. Copies of these reports are included in the materials. The 2009 and 2010 reports were prepared by task forces we comprised for that particular purpose, and those task forces included various bar leaders, including past presidents of the Boston Bar Association. For 2011, we took a slightly different approach. We enlisted the services of our administration of justice section to gather the data needed and to prepare a draft of the report, which the BBA staff and I put into final form before we released it just a few weeks ago. Each report has had a different emphasis. In 2009, we focused primarily on the numbers. In 2010, we gathered anecdotes of issues facing particular litigants in the courts to try to humanize the issue beyond merely a statistical reporting. This year's report takes even a different approach, a higher level approach that provides an overview and analysis of what has happened to the courts, why it has happened, how the trial court has responded to the crisis, and what is likely to happen if minimally adequate funding is not provided. In preparing our reports, we followed certain guidelines. First the report needs to have accurate numbers regarding current funding levels, the number of persons employed by the courts, case loads and clearance rate. We've always been able to get those numbers very readily from Chief Justice Mulligan's office in the trial court and other sources within the judiciary. We also in the reports have attempted to play out in a general way differing scenarios based on whether the court gets the funding it needs. We also pay very close attention to the timing and distribution of the reports. We aim to release our reports before the House and Senate release their numbers and while there's still time to influence the debate in the legislature over the final budget number, we disseminate the reports electronically to legislators, judges, and we can file bar association members and members of the media. The reports are accompanied by news releases that function as executive summaries. And the reports and news releases are also posted on our web pages and broadcast by email through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. One advantage of having a bar association publish a report like this is that we can say things that need to be said but that the judges really cannot be expected to say. For example, it's easier for a bar association to acknowledge the impact that severe budget cuts are having or will have on a court's performance than for a Chief Justice who bears responsibility for running the courts under even the most difficult circumstances. A well-written credible report takes time to produce. It's also important to very carefully select the persons responsible for the preparation of the report. At the Boston Bar we've had reports drafted by partners at law firms who have their ears to the ground and who have access to plugged-in members of the judiciary for purposes of acquiring data and testing certain basic premises. Two key contributors to this year's report were a retired judge with significant experience working in the executive branch at a high level and a lawyer who had more recent experience working in the legislature. We also are fortunate to have an excellent government relations director who worked for legislative leaders before joining the BBA. Of course we're not content to rely on the published report and this year we've made the case for court funding in a variety of additional ways. Through the efforts of our communications director the day after our report was released, we also were able to place an op-ed in the Boston Herald talking about the difficult situations the courts are in and the need to support the courts. Putting it in a way that the lay public hopefully could understand and appreciate it. If you go on the Boston Herald website you might find it and you might see comments from people who are not particularly fond of the courts and it did remind me of the remarks when I heard Professor Tribe speaking. I think what he was saying was exactly right. There are people out there certainly who don't care enough or think highly enough of the courts to put it mildly to want to support them. But hopefully that's not the general public and we believe that the op-ed has had an impact. I will say I received calls from a number of judges after we placed it, thanking the Bar Association for doing it and I understand it also has created a little bit of a stir in the state house with the legislature. We did this because we know that merely creating a report for the consumption of legislators does not draw enough attention to the critical issues at play nor does it even begin to give rise to any public sentiment in favor of court funding. We believe that there is an important public education component that needs to happen in order to get our elected officials more invested in funding the courts and we view that op-ed as a first step in that process. We also strive to make our message clear to our members repeatedly in a variety of ways in order to enlist their support in contacting legislators to lobby for court funding. One example of that effort again in the materials that will be submitted is an email that was sent to members just this week urging them to call their senators to advocate for a number of amendments to the trial court's budget including two amendments that would restore millions of dollars to that budget. We believe that this sort of grassroots effort is an essential element of our strategy to move the needle on court funding. We communicate this message to our members in a variety of other ways. For example our members receive a weekly email alert called BBA week which keeps them informed of pressing issues including court funding. Our government relations director this year also started a blog on public policy issues which again includes a description of legislative developments regarding court funding. As mentioned previously we occasionally send strategically timed email alerts to all of our members in an effort to summons them to action by calling their legislators and this year I used the president's page of the Boston bar journal as a vehicle for reminding our members of the need to advocate for the courts when they are under fire from other branches of government as we have seen happen in a variety of ways in Massachusetts this year. I'd like to conclude with three general observations. First the courts have no natural constituency. As we explain in this year's report and in our op-ed piece the electorate generally does not care enough about the courts to lobby for their funding. The public has little understanding of or sympathy for the courts and most are likely to be much more focused on funding for such items as jobs, education and health care than on court funding. Again I think Professor Tribe very accurately described one of the problems that we face in trying to advocate for the courts but I think there are other issues as well. The public simply in general does not think about the courts very much and does not care enough about the courts to put any kind of pressure on their elected officials. The public, most people deal with schools on a daily basis, people deal with job issues on a daily basis, people deal with health care issues frequently, all of which make their way into the legislature in one way or another. But most people deal with the courts very rarely and many of the people who do are in situations where they would not want to support the courts, criminal defendants for example. The second concluding point I'd like to make is that our experience in Massachusetts is that only a minority of our legislators are lawyers and that minority is shrinking. We thus not only have to persuade them but we also have to educate our legislators about the important role our courts serve. We also need to know who the lawyers are in the legislature, particularly in leadership positions who can help us make the case for the courts in the legislative debates. Finally, we have to be clear in our message as some of the witnesses said earlier today, that the courts are not just a state agency or an expendable service but that the judiciary is an indispensable co-equal branch of government on which we all depend for the peaceful resolution of disputes for public safety and for the preservation of our liberties. We need to communicate and repeat this message at every turn as too many people in the other branches of government and the public that they represent still do not fully appreciate the importance of our courts and the need for a strong, stable and independent judiciary. Thank you. Questions? I believe we're going to ask questions one at a time, correct? We have in the past done the whole challenge. Okay. You're the chairman. You're the aunt, right? Stick up. What do you want to do? I'll fight to the death just to work your decision. Let's go ahead and have the all three testimony. Thank you. Thank you. And good afternoon. I've been limping around the place today and so the real purpose of my being here is I'm trying to find a personal injury lawyer who will represent me in a car accident two weeks ago today. So I'm good. I don't think I'll have a problem. No, but I do. Thank you and good afternoon. As president of the New Hampshire Association for Justice, I'm grateful to be able to be here this afternoon and to be part of this task forces work. The New Hampshire Association for Justice is also proud to be in support of the work that this task force is doing. Each of our members of the association when he or she signs on a test to our mission as an association for justice, which in general is to assure that justice is brought to anyone who has been damaged by the wrongful act of another. And so this idea of access to the courts is integral to the mission of the New Hampshire Association for Justice as it is to all association for justice throughout the country. So we are particularly interested in this and particularly interested in being as helpful as we can be to your purpose. Several years ago, the American Association for Justice, who at that time was at luck, published some materials to its members, and it was a time when the idea of jury trial was somewhat jeopardized. I mean, it's constantly jeopardized from our perspective because we're constantly faced with the idea of legislation both at the federal and state level of so-called tort reform that threatens every now and then to perhaps eliminate or otherwise hinder or do away with a person's right to jury trial. And so this is a subject about which we are very sensitive and have been a part of for many, many years. But particularly several years ago when this issue was particularly heated, the American Association for Justice published some literature and along with it some slogans. And one slogan in particular is one that I've kept with me and thought about a lot. I've used it in trials to emphasize the importance. But I think it's a very important slogan for us to think about today as we think about this work. And that slogan is that without justice, there is no freedom. And without the jury trial, there is no justice. So if we slightly modified that for our purposes today, without justice, there is no freedom. And without access to the courts, there is no justice. So I think this goes to the Chief Justice's from Maine's remarks this morning about it's not just the courts, it's our democracy that is at stake here. Without justice, there is no freedom. I think of my father who fought in World War II and all the others who have come after him. And most recently, this concept of freedom particularly here in New Hampshire, our license plate is live free or die. Without justice, there is no freedom. Without access to the courts, there is no justice. So I think that kind of encapsulates to some extent the importance of what the task force is doing and what we as an association of justice in New Hampshire do as part of our regular mission. And so that's why I think working together is so important for this. The other thing that I bring to this particular issue is that in 1981 when I was admitted to the bar in California, and I've been practicing in California since then and have kept my license active, and I've practiced in New Hampshire for a number of years as well as in Massachusetts. And I can tell you that in California, particularly back in the 80s and all through the 90s, when you filed a lawsuit on behalf of an injured person or plaintiff or someone else who was wronged and for whom you were seeking justice, you knew automatically it was going to be five years to get that case to trial, five years to get that case to trial or to get some kind of recourse. And of course the insurance industry on the other side of the case was well aware of those delays. And if you think that cases can resolve voluntarily through a settlement process, without the threat of an immediate trial date or at least resolve in a way that is just, it is extremely difficult. And so therefore the ability to resolve cases is lost because once a lawsuit's filed everybody involved in the process knows it's a five year process. There's no incentive on the other side's part to think about a reasonable resolution of the case until they have to unfortunately is a common experience. And so I represented hundreds of people, for example, who working families where both spouses were out working full time, every day in full time jobs to earn enough money to own a home, to buy a house and to afford the mortgage. And there was a time when I had a lot of people whose houses were literally falling apart. They had been negligently constructed. It was a very easily proven fact in this particular case. And so I brought claims for these homeowners. Now the largest financial investment, everything they've gone out and worked full time for are tied up in this mortgage. It's the biggest financial investment, probably the largest asset in real people's lives. Every day they come home, they see the problems, the cracks in the walls, the doors that don't work. Whatever the problems were, they wake up in the morning, they see it. They live with this day in and day out, 24 hours a day. First thing when they wake up in the morning, last thing when they go to bed at night. These are real experiences for these people. I had people who had small children and they'd say to me, we want to landscape the yard and put up a swing set and we want our children to play in the yard. Maybe we'll put in a pool. Whatever it was they were going to do, and of course they wouldn't do it, because the house is falling apart and they can't put good money after bad. They can't borrow against it. They can't sell it. They're stuck and so there they were. And I thought, well we can get remedies for all these folks. And I brought a number of lawsuits for hundreds of people at times. And of course California and the Case winds its way five years through the process. And in the end, some cases took seven years. And in the end when there was ultimately compensation for these people and I was able to send them compensation or meet with them and give them compensation, they would look and say, you know, the kids have graduated school. They're off in college. The whole purpose of what we were trying to accomplish, the whole purpose was lost. Was absolutely lost. And it was lost because of the delay that it took to get these cases resolved through a legal system. Now that's just one small example. I've had clients who have died during a lengthy medical malpractice case and never got to see the benefit of the outcome of their cases. I have had that experience firsthand. When I came to New Hampshire, as a result of the tremendous efforts and great work of a, I guess, a task force comprised of members of the bench and bar, New Hampshire had tackled the problem of delays in getting cases to trial. And when I began practicing here, shortly after that, you would get a case to trial within one year from filing a complaint. Within one year, I remember Judge Perkins, as one of the judges, talking about how proud he was to have been part of that force where it got, and for someone coming in from a place like California where it would be five years automatically to be able to get my clients into the courtroom with one year, I can't tell you how great that felt, what a tremendous accomplishment that was in the state of New Hampshire to be able to afford clients justice within a reasonable period of time. And so I can say, from a person with firsthand experience, that now that's lost. That one year of getting cases into court in the state of New Hampshire is not only threatened, it doesn't exist anymore, and it's being threatened even more and more as access to the courts because of financial cuts and budgetary problems dwindles. We're now back in a situation where it's looking more and more like California. And my message to the task forces, don't let all places become like California was or probably still is, because I know firsthand what that means in real life and real time to people who are in need of a resolution. The old adage, justice delayed is justice denied, which is what we talked about this morning for me, has been a reality. And more importantly, for hundreds of my clients over the years. It was, in listening to Professor Tribe today, I think that I greatly appreciate and respect the comments that one of the things that will help to get the court system improved and get support financially is to help the image of the lawyer, to take away those reasons why there are so many lawyer jokes. But I can tell you nothing would help that image more than a lawyer's ability to get justice for a client. Because when I hand people compensation after six or seven years of them waiting, there's probably a lot of lawyer jokes that they can think about, not only that would apply to me, but to the process. You cannot raise a lawyer's position and esteem in society where you're working within a system that fails them and the clients feel of you that you weren't able to do anything meaningful or that the system doesn't do anything meaningful. So I agree, we need to raise our image and one way to raise our image is to show that we can deliver. We can deliver on justice through a system. I'm glad to know that there may be no more furlough days in New Hampshire, but the lack of judges can be just as devastating in terms of delay here. And so to just bring it to a local level and picking up on the idea of offering perhaps a potential helpful solution, at least on the local level as far as New Hampshire is concerned, I would be very interested in picking up on the work of that previous task force of those judges and lawyers who worked so hard years ago to get cases to trial in the state of New Hampshire within one year. And I would be very interested in seeing the details of what they did, how much of it was financially driven, how much of it was accomplished through other tasks and means, and pick up where they left off and see if some of what they accomplished then could be built on now under different circumstances but still be useful. I think it would be awful to see that work go to waste, and I think they have something to say that would be useful to all of us. And I would like to see, at least here in New Hampshire, to work with them and see if what they've done couldn't be revised and used again today. So I'm glad to be here. I speak with firsthand experience of where this could end up and where it might go unless the work that we're all trying to accomplish succeeds. And I thank you for all of the hard work. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Monsioni. Now, Ms. McNamara. Yes, thank you. I'm Marilyn McNamara. I'm the president of the New Hampshire Bar. I am fully responsible for the beautiful weather that we had today. Do you believe that? I've got two swamp land. I am an attorney at Upton and Hatfield here in Concord. I've been in the bar for, this is my 34th year. I spent about eight years fairly recently being the director of a legal services corporation program here in New Hampshire. So I have a point of view and I will express it more likely than not. Try to stop me. I want, first, I want to give you a little context of New Hampshire than I want to perhaps complain bitterly about lack of resources and other issues. I want to talk a little bit about law and culture and maybe a tiny bit of ancient history and then get on to what we are doing in New Hampshire that is truly innovative and exciting and hard and also to talk about possible other solutions. I know many of which you've already heard but which I would like to add to. I want to give you the context of New Hampshire which is a rather unique state. If you've not been here before, I hope you appreciate the fact that we do have a bit of our own culture. New Hampshire is among the wealthiest states in the country. It is among the oldest by age. We have a median age actually higher than Florida. Our crime rate is very low. We are well educated. We have access to excellent medical care. There is a hospital on every corner in every city. This is true. Quite, not quite. But even for very low income persons, our state is recognized as being one of the healthiest and safest places to raise a child. We have a very high level of volunteerism and get very high marks for tolerance of other cultures and people. Possibly not Yankees fans, but otherwise we are a very tolerant place. By agreement with our governor, our judges passed through a non-partisan selection committee, nominated by the government, and by the governor rather, and approved by an executive council for a period of term lasting up until their 70th year. We have no income or sales tax. Now's the time to buy if you're here in New Hampshire. By reputation, we are flinty, frugal, and independent, and there is sufficient evidence to support that characterization. You don't need a helmet to ride your motorcycle in New Hampshire, although your child does. You don't need to purchase car insurance in New Hampshire, unless you have previously failed to pay for damages from some accident that you did in fact cause. Seat belts are just suggestions if you are an adult, and the state motto, as you heard, is live free or die, and every year, a certain number of people live free and then die. Now we claim here in New Hampshire, this is the bitter part, we claim to love liberty and personal freedom, but in our state, the branch of government that upholds the constitution of our state protects our rights and assures us equality of opportunity under the law, is cutting back staff, scheduling into the next year, closing its doors too early and too often, rendering orders and opinions that cannot be repaired. Colleagues report to me, temporary support order, hearing scheduled so far out that homes are foreclosed, and I know of children who are eating from food pantries whose parents make, or whose supporting parent makes over $100,000 per year because there is no support order and the obligor will not pay. Children eating from food pantries because the court system cannot put orders in place for obligors to pay. Those orders are written but not processed for weeks and they often come too late for true relief to be useful. The filings are lost in the crush of paper and sometimes never to be found. That's an inconvenience for lawyers who can document the filing but devastating for self-represented litigants who may not know to keep good records. This is based on anecdotal evidence from lawyers who say I've been told I hadn't filed something, I went to the court, I had my documents with me, I showed the court, they found the filings. It's about a level playing field and what we cherish or not, and we should cherish the level playing field. It's a sacred place. When you watch television and you watch the football stadium and all the folks rolling out their canvas and baseball players, baseball diamonds, where they roll it out and roll it back and watch for the rain and make sure the field is good. The field has to be level, it's important for the sport if you will. Law isn't a sport and yet our playing field deserves at least as much attention to being level and fair so that everyone on that field can be heard properly and get fairness and that's not happening. It's not happening here and it's not happening elsewhere as well. We've been raised to value fairness but we don't seem happy to pay for it. Those who seek justice within this judicial system are judged themselves for raising an issue, for not working it out, for insisting on judicial processes and this level playing field. For doing what the Constitution says we have a right to expect. Having the ability to have a dispute judged and processed and dispensed with is an American expectation. It's a right that we have and in this little corner of the universe there have been courts within the 17th century for 400 years of courts in Massachusetts and the colony area. That's how much our earliest settlers valued dispute resolution. I know that there were 400 years of courts because I've seen court records and I'll just give you a couple of quick examples even though they're kind of interesting. John Emory, Kittery Main, Find for providing aid and comfort to the Quakers. Suzanne Pulsifer Find for her husband was Find because she wore a silk bonnet to church and that was apparently wrong and of course the most egregious example unfortunately of Justice Gone Wrong, John Proctor hanged as a witch in Salem and again in the 17th century. We have valued courts even when they've been wrong or crazy or had values that we now no longer support. That's the history of this area of the world and what we're seeing now is it's not there anymore. It's not there effectively at this time. Here's another interesting feature of the New Hampshire Constitution if you haven't had an opportunity to read it you should perhaps. Article 14 of the New Hampshire Constitution says every subject of this state is entitled to a certain remedy by having recourse to the laws for all injuries he may receive in his person property and character he may obtain right and justice freely without being obliged to purchase it completely and without any denial promptly and without delay conformably to the laws. That's not happening here but let me tell you how we're working on it. Among the most interesting and innovative solutions is the consolidation of the district court, probate court working with the legislature a body we often complain about is being rather frugal working with the legislature statute was passed that enables this very innovative consolidation to take place the expectation is this consolidation will reduce costs by studying how people work and how they are able to produce their work we now know that it is more efficient to have people at the counters only to answer questions for people who pop in but to otherwise direct people with questions to a call center and that's something that we will be working on another issue we meaning the court system of which I'm not a part but nevertheless we will also be working on having some of the paper processing occur outside of regular court hours so that those individuals can work on paper without being interrupted by telephone calls or visits to the window in fact tests that have been run on this issue demonstrate I want to say a three fold increase in productivity people in the court's clerk's offices are left alone to do their work not answering phones and the like so the call center is very exciting there have been other innovations as well we've unfortunately lost a fair number of staff through layoffs that's not good and we're not happy with it but the effort is to get more consistency in the courts to pay the clerk to one clerk to oversee a number of our courts and then have others beneath to actually take over the day to day decision making and the like so that all of the courts are operating consistently consistency with consistency and operating well these are kind of dicey we don't really know how everything is going to work at first it will be perhaps confusing to people you walk into court are you in family court you know probate court district court no one will know we're lawyers we're against change so it will take some time for us all to settle in but that we think is going to truly save the state and the court system a fair amount of money the other items when you have asked about well what are the solutions in my view case assessment is a very important way to determine what if any services need to be rendered to a particular case at a particular time because my field is family law for example lawyers used to do all of the case assessment people would come to their office sit down they would tell you all their story you would tell them what to do or not try to work things out and move it along that doesn't happen so much with self represented litigants those are the people who are really slowing our court system down quite frankly case assessment means finding out what is needed and then providing only the services that are required rather than asking people to go through the same process from one beginning from the beginning to the end of the process if they don't need something they shouldn't be getting it or don't need to have technology and then increase in the use of technology I think has already been discussed and our court system is working very hard to get up to speed moving toward I think an electronic filing environment and I think that you know that too will help us in terms of efficiency we've talked about you know video conferencing for example although we are a tiny state for many of you it feels pretty big to us and it would be good for us to be able to do a lot more video conferencing in some matters of less substance perhaps I believe in and strongly would support as does the bar robust civic education from kindergarten through 65 or 80 civic education that is clear directed goal oriented and tells people what they need to know about the value of our court system and how it works as a family law lawyer I interview many people you would be shocked perhaps to learn how little people understand about court systems and about the way justice operates I also believe that our educational system needs to continue to support critical thinking skills and life skills to help people stay out of the trouble they slide into when they don't have the skills needed or the knowledge needed to for example enter a contract enter a marriage by a car and otherwise become consumers in our economy those are my general comments and I'm happy to take questions as we all are thank you Ms. McNamara questions Paul we did this at lunch but it struck me that the only segment of the bar that has been traditionally intensely involved in political activity are your ancestors in ATLA and yourself and while you and I might have slight differences towards this how organized are they are you and how successful have you been in your focused goals well here in New Hampshire we've been I think very organized we've met with Chief Justice Delanis in the very beginning after she was appointed I and some of the officers of the association met with her which we felt was very important of course to get a perspective of the court as to what we and the court hope to achieve and so that through our lobbying efforts which we have as an association and we are very proud of the lobbying that we do on this topic particularly we're very well organized in that regard and we've made efforts in conquered at the legislative level to try to assist the court in getting funding legislation passed last year we did it under the leadership of our past president and our executive director came up with alternative funding ideas as did Chief Justice Broderick at the time to present so that we weren't just going up there with a lot of complaints about lack of funding we were trying to go the next step and actually suggest ideas as to where funding might be gotten but of course like everything else it gets very political and if you identify sources of funds there are going to be other people who are going to want those sources as well surprise and those efforts while good I think didn't quite succeed but in short the answer I think we're very well organized we're working closely with the courts we have with the justices who are forming this new court the circuit court we've met with them as well justices King and Kelly to see what that's all about and to help them particularly among our membership to support that idea if indeed that's the way to go so no we continue to do that and I think that's another important purpose of our being here today too because to have coordinated efforts and as much information as we can get and understand as we go forward with the legislature I think will be very helpful Mr. Federico you highlighted something I think is becoming increasingly apparent your statement about the courts don't have a natural constituency and you furthermore pointed out I think several of you that even when they win their participants in the system may not be happy and of course we understand they're people who lose so one of the things that I thought you might help us with in expressing is that you've developed an ongoing grassroots continuing commitment to communication with the legislature so how successful is that what can we learn from that and are there any other specific proposals about communication that you think work well sure you know I was speaking actually during the lunch break with Chief Justice Mulligan about this it often doesn't feel like we're successful because as you've heard our efforts the court budget continues to get cut but as Chief Justice Mulligan put it we may not feel like we're having a direct or immediate impact but long term the situation first of all would likely be worse if we weren't doing what we're doing and long term hopefully we will have an impact the one thought I have we are I think really just beginning the approach of community outreach beyond the bar that I described when I mentioned the op-ed piece I think we need to do more of that that's a very long term solution and I don't even know what kind of difference it will make but I think we have a duty to really get out there in the communities and make sure people outside of the legal profession have a better understanding of the courts the other thing I would say is this and we have done we've actually done a fair amount of this in Boston engage the business community I heard comments earlier today about the business community having some understandable concerns about prioritizing courts above other things but I really think that the business community needs to be very much engaged in this effort we have a group of very committed general councils in Massachusetts and I think you start with the general councils and some of the leaders within the Boston Bar Association are general councils of major corporations in the last couple of years they have put together letters signed by a hundred general councils of businesses in Massachusetts to the legislature to advocate for court funding once you get the general councils engaged you can then hope that they in turn will get the CEOs engaged and the politicians who are controlling the budgetary decision will listen to the CEOs so that's another strategy that I think this is an issue you know Mr. Madera I think was addressing a question of the trial bar the plaintiff's bars involvement in these types of issues I think the plaintiff's bar and the general councils share this concern that our courts be able to resolve disputes and resolve them efficiently and with some expediency and I think that would be the next thing I would recommend doing thank you very much I'm afraid our next panel has a time issue so we need to conclude with your remarks but thank you all very much for coming