The Cube at IBM Impact 2014 is brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Paul Gillan. Paul Gillan, back we're live at IBM Impact with The Cube, SiliconANGLE's main platform. We're here interviewing IBMers, customers, analysts, all kinds of people about what's real and what's fictional about the cloud and mobile and big data and all the hot topics that are being talked about here. And I have a delighted today right now to speak to Matthew Webster as a senior software engineer at IBM. And this was a trip back in time for me because I started in this industry, in the technology media industry back in 1982 when it was all about IBM 360 and CICS was God. And it was what ran the biggest, the biggest mainframe installations in the world. And so when I saw CICS turn up on the agenda for The Cube today, I thought this is a great way to get back to a technology that people really don't talk about anymore. I haven't heard CICS mentioned in years, but it's very relevant in the age of the cloud. And your group is finding the new role for CICS in the private cloud environment. So why don't you tell us what that is? Absolutely. So we're celebrating 50 years of the mainframe this year and CICS has been around about the same sort of time, 45 years. But what's meant that CICS has still been relevant, we call it CICS in the UK, CICS still relevant. I always hate to kick, I always prefer CICS, whatever. During that whole time, what's kept CICS relevant is that it has been very good at embracing all of the technology advancements that have taken place during that time. So we've had support for web access for about 20 years. We started supporting Java 15 years ago. So CICS is an environment which hosts compiled applications like Coval, PL1 and C++, but we've been supporting Java 15 years. We've had support for web services inbound and outbound for about 10 years. And then in the last five years, we've been doing a lot of work around mobile as well. So it's really about keeping up with the changes, technology advancements, the business challenges that our customers have and also the whole social and development processes that customers and developers use. So that's what's kept it being relevant. We'll get into that, but I'm going to ask you to back up for just a moment because I'm going to assume that many of our viewers don't know what CICS is. So why don't you give us a basic definition first? So CICS is an application server that runs on system Z. So it runs applications written in Java, but it also runs applications written in compiled languages like Coval, PL1 and C++. And so what's tremendously advantageous about that is that for customers, applications and their data is everything, that is their business. And for us in CICS, it's about the application. And so a customer will have written an application that performs a very critical part of their business. And when new challenges come along, whether it be the web or web services or mobile, they want to be able to leverage the functionality that they have written that they have tuned that is reliable. They can't replace that with something else. So here you have an environment where you can actually modernize those applications. So provide rich web-based interfaces to those applications for back-office staff or provide direct access to applications from a mobile platform. But you can still keep that core business logic that's been tuned and refined and reliable over many years without ever replacing it with something else. So it's an environment that can host both the modern and the existing reliable applications in the same environment. And we should point out that the kinds of companies that use CICS are banks, airlines, telecom companies. I mean, we're talking very, very large processing environment. So basically, if you have a bank account or if you use a credit card or you withdraw money from an ATM or you travel with an airline or you have an insurance policy, it's very likely that any of those transactions that you engage with, kicks will be part of that activity. Maintaining the systems of record, your bank account, your insurance policy will be part of that. And what you're doing right now is you're helping some of these very large companies move from the mainframe environment to a private cloud environment. How does that differ from traditional mainframe? So it's still a mainframe back there, but what we're trying to do is to bring some of the qualities of series and experience that people would expect of a cloud, a private cloud environment to a traditional mainframe environment. And so when we embarked upon the most recent version of the product, we look, we give us a scorecard. We say, okay, what do people think about cloud? They think about being able to rapidly provision applications. They think about being able to access those applications from anywhere. They think about an environment that can host multiple applications at the same time, a resource pooling environment. They think about being able to measure the resource consumption, because cloud is all about pay as you go. So you need to measure that and charge the right people for the usage. And they also think about an environment that can scale to demand. So with mobile, things can scale very rapidly. So it's about providing to our customers that kind of experience with a mainframe environment, with a traditional transaction processing environment. They're also thinking about a virtualized environment, I presume. Oh, actually highly virtualized. And so one of the key, so we gave ourselves a scorecard and we did pretty well, but there were some areas that we felt were room for improvement. And one of the key ones was about how quickly you can provision new applications and new versions of applications. We felt this was really, really important in the mobile age. A lot of you, customers for banks and other businesses, their relationship with their bank is through their mobile phone. And if that doesn't work, they have many, many ways of expressing their opinion of that bank and that mobile application. Many of the apps- Hashtag fail. Well, they can go onto Twitter, they can go onto Facebook, or they can rate the application on the web store that they bought that application. It's very important that our customers can monitor the experience that our customers are having with that application and also to be able to respond to it very quickly. So I'm very excited at this conference to be able to talk about the latest version of Kix. So in April, we announced Kix Transaction Server version 5.2, which will be generally available in June. And one of the really exciting features that we've been talking about with customers at Impact this week has been the ability to be able to host multiple versions of an application within their same cloud environment. And you think you might say, well, why do you want to do that? Well, the best way of being able to bring a new version of application into your environment is to be able to run two side by side. Absolutely. And that's something Kix has always done very well. That's right. But now, what we're doing now is to say, well, to try to minimize the resource consumption, you can install different versions of the same application within the same environment. So you can say, okay, a subset of our users, they can get the new version. They can try out the new features. This is a mechanism that many of the web-based companies use. We're going to provide that for the Kix, the Kix customer. And really, so it really is virtualization. I mean, it's running multiple virtual machines. Absolutely. Now, we understand why a company that's been running CIS for a long time would have an interest in maintaining that environment. Is there a play for new companies as well? Are you selling new Kix licenses? Oh, absolutely. Especially in some of our developing markets around the world. So, especially in the Far East, you've got rapidly growing economies over there, particularly in China. You've got a population that more and more of them are getting a bank account. And so you have banks that are growing very rapidly. And what they've done is they've looked at the way that our customers have used the ICS as an environment for running banking. And so we have been successful in attracting new customers in those new markets. So yes. And what might be the alternatives they would look at? I mean, why might they choose CIS? What alternatives would they look at? So IBM has a number of products for hosting applications. The obvious one is WebSphere application server which runs on a number of different platforms. And so for those customers that are starting out new, running applications in Java, of course, there's an obvious choice that WebSphere has been the platform of choice for running those applications. But there's very much complimentary because you have a number of platforms that you can run WebSphere on, provide very rich interfaces to those applications. The key thing here is, is that we provide very sophisticated connection mechanisms to allow those new applications to connect into Kix. So if customers already have Kix, they can connect into that from WebSphere. But if they don't have Kix today, then we have other products like WebSphere where they can host those applications. CIS was written in the age of the 3270 terminal when you had a dedicated connection, you had a persistent connection. And of course now there's no persistent connections anymore. How have you evolved the platform to be able to handle this much more fluid and unpredictable connectivity connectivity environment? So we have to look at all of the uses of the product. So we have the people that actually run and administer the systems. We have back office staff that actually use the systems on-premise. And of course, obviously we have customers that are now expecting to interact with customer, with their businesses through either internet access or through mobile. And so again, while users are not likely to connect directly into Kix from a mobile, there's products like WorkLite, which we'll have seen a lot of talk about this week at Impact. And so WorkLite is a mobile gateway that allows you to manage the device relationship, to manage the diverse set of devices that you might have whether it's an Apple or an Android or Windows. And then WorkLite, we have just announced a number of specific features around mobile that it makes it much easier for someone that's deploying a mobile-based application that's managing it through WorkLite to connect that into Kix. So you're actually dealing with some of that diversity of platform with the connect traditions, the notification back to the client, that's the response proof of something like WorkLite. And then that can connect to Kix to access the systems of reference. So that's the way we deal with it. One of the big announcements at Impact was the cloud marketplace. Will CICS be interface to be available through the cloud marketplace? So maybe if I'm here in maybe five years time or then I'll be able to say yes to that question. So right now, the cloud support for Kix is very much about on-premise private cloud. That's where we're starting. The customers that we have, that's the business that they're in, whether it because of regulatory constraints because they're in the finance sector, or because that is the business they're in in terms of very skilled at deploying and managing those environments. So we just want to kind of bring to them the expectations you would have of cloud. But that means that we're getting ready for some point potentially in the future where we would be on the marketplace. Maybe new banks that are born in the cloud. They want that kind of reliability. So that's a very exciting announcement about what we're doing in the cloud with IBM, with the cloud marketplace. But that's not somewhere where we are with Kix, but five years time, maybe when I'm back here, we'll be able to talk a bit more about that. Matthew, let's give you the last word here. We have less than a minute left. What message do you want to leave for our viewers about the relevance of CICS in the world of the cloud? Well, I think I'm tremendously excited to be here at Impact this week. We are responding to all the demands that customers have of their software environments, whether it be cloud, whether it be analytics, whether it be mobile. And we would encourage customers out there that have CRCS to take a look at our latest version and how it can help them to deploy mobile applications and take a bus to that. And as IBM has always been known for, a company that does not leave customers behind. And I think seeing a CICS representative here at a cloud mobile analytics conference is further evidence of that. Matthew Lebscher, thank you very much. This is Paul Gillard, IBM Impact cloud on theCUBE. We'll be back after this message.


We'll be talking about how you can come up with niche ideas for your business today on The Journey. When trying to determine your niche, think about a pain point, right? Think about what is that one thing that you are known for, that you are so much better at than all of your competition, and just focus on that. That's your niche. There's a famous saying out there that says, you can't boil the ocean, and it's the same thing as a freelancer with your products. You can't serve everyone. So finding a niche is finding a specific subset of your customers or the products that you offer and just focusing on that. So you want to take a look at your skills and see what you're really good at. This should include some base knowledge and even some trends, things that are really popular in the market today. So let's say that I make pottery, and I offer everything you could ever want, right? But let's say the majority of my customers actually buy my vases because I have a really cool design and people love it, and it's just the way that I do it is super unique. That's my niche, and that's what I should focus on. I like that scene in Ghosts with Patrick Swayze on the pottery work.  So you need to take a look at what your audience wants, but also what you want to do and focus there. So not just about the money, you really need to enjoy what you're doing. So one thing that you can do when you're determining your niche is you can create a persona for who is your ideal customer. So let's say my ideal customer, he's an urban client. He's aged 25 to 35. His name's Billy.  And so I can use this in any time that I'm developing a new product. I'm always relating it back to that customer that I am trying to serve, Billy. So now you're going to need content, content, content and more content. But the content needs to be specific to this person that you're after. Billy. Billy. You need to realize what does Billy look for and where is Billy looking for it? Billy's a young guy. He's probably not on my space, right? Don't go there. Maybe not even on Facebook. Let's say Billy for the most part is only on Instagram. That's good to know. And another thing to think about is how is Billy consuming this media? You want to think more of just then blog posts, but you also have infographics, tutorials, videos. Podcasts. Exactly. So the next thing you want to do and you actually should consider is collaborating with other people in your industry and in your market. So if I make ceramics, I shouldn't see everyone else who makes ceramics as competition, right? Because I have my specific niche. They probably serve a different niche. So it's in our best interest to partner and collaborate so we can get to each other's markets and audiences and share the wealth. The key is consistency. What you put in it is definitely what you get out of it. And especially once you start to monetize like your website and your blog, it'll make everything that you're doing now so much worth it. With that being said, check out our other videos where we talked about some of these things and creating an email sign up list, creating your own blog. We got you covered. We would love to hear from you in the comments below some of your ideas of your business. Be sure to like, subscribe to this video and hit that notification bell so you can be notified of our next video. And with that, until next time, this is The Journey.


Brother has been one of those issues where all the decisions are taken by people who know very little about them. This is not new in politics, but it can sometimes create a lot of problems in the more technical dossier. It's a bit like nuclear energy. You can't live without it and you don't really want to live with it, and drugs is a very similar thing. The European Commission and the European Union institutions have been looking at drugs iawn? It goes back much longer than people think. It goes back to the 1990s. There was a drugs unit in the commission then. The European monitoring centre for drug and drug addiction was set up at that time because the European Commission and the EU in general realised that precisely it was a subject that we didn't know enough about and we needed to do the tobiwyd, llawer i fod y llefydau nhw, ac wrth gwrs. Ieithaf, oes bwysigogau cyfnodau i mi, sef rwyf yn dda i. Those noth a newydd o'r ddechrau. There is an EU instrument that deals with that, which is the council decision on the very ynghylch, ymdryg, ysgrifennidau, ystyriedau yn gyffredig, ac ymdryg, ac yn gweithio, ymdryg, ac rhai wrth gael arwain, yw'r hyn sydd i'w cymryd. Yr Ysgrifennidau, 2005, 387JHA, ymdrygiadau a'r Ffarr. Mae'r ddefnyddio'r drwyf yn y ffridd, ac yn y ffridd, yw'r ffridd, yw'r Ffarr, yw'r Ffarr, yw'r Amserdam, yw'r Amserdam Tridio, pre-lisman, when the EU began to deal with crime, with police matters, with judicial matters. So we have this council decision at the moment and in 2010 it was up for a reassessment. So the commission did the reassessment and came up with a number of conclusions, what was wrong with it, what it wasn't doing as well as we were hoping. One problem with the council decision is that it has a one by one approach. In other words, you can only, the commission or member states can say, well, here is, for instance, methadrone, let's assess methadrone and see if we place it under control. Now that takes one year, which clearly is a heavy system, only one substance at a time, and it takes too long. It's a reactive instrument, new psychoactive substances. You can start the assessment and then halfway through you find that the substance changes because they change one component of it and you have to start it over again. So that doesn't really help. It's an on and off instrument. You start the procedure and then you go all the way or you don't start and you do nothing. So here again, it's not very flexible. The last thing we found out after Lisbon, we needed to change the legal basis, which was a bit difficult. I believe that the European Parliament is now challenging one of the findings of the council on 4MA, I believe, one of the substances because the council and the parliament quite rightly says that the commission should clean up the legal basis of this instrument. So the commission is now working on a successor instrument, a new proposal. How is it doing this? It's not thinking this up on its own. It's meeting with experts on the new psychoactive substances, user organisations, policymakers, stakeholders, the European Forum on Drugs in town at the moment. The commission is looking at a number of key issues. One of them is how to improve the actual risk assessment phase of this to make it both more flexible and lighter. It's important to maintain the evidence base of this approach because one of the risks, one of the risk, political risks of controlling new psychoactive substances is that you may do it simply because it's politically expedient or that there is a lot of pressure in the media to do it, but that is not a good reason. Another thing the new instrument we'll be looking at is how to adapt EU decision making on this to the diversity that exists between member states on particular substances and the way the law deals with them. We also need to look at which substances need to be dealt with at EU level. We're dealing with things at EU level, however you do it, it's quite expensive, it takes a long time, so if you have one substance which is only a problem in one country, it's probably not worth doing it dealing with it at a European level. We also need to be able to speed up the process when a substance turns out or it's thought to be particularly risky. On the other hand, we have to avoid criminalisation of users, some users of these substances are using them and don't even know that they are illegal. That is another thing that needs to be looked at. What we're trying to do is find a middle ground also between, as I said, between the on or off system that we have at the moment, between doing nothing or going right for criminal law control justices. Finally, an important point is to avoid restrictions on some substances which are perfectly legitimate, which are used in the industry, the paint industry or something, but which, back into another way, are sold as legalised or news side factor substances. So, if you start banning them with criminal law orders, you're creating a lot of problems for industry, the market and so on. The proposal that's going through this system at the moment is also looks at the ways of building in gradations of intervention. You don't always need the heavy hand of the state or of Europe, which is banned wonderful substance depending on whether it's risky or not. It is looking at health protection, if you like, consumer protection, because people will consume these things. As I said, some of them are legal. If I want to make pills out of some paint I have in my house to paint the wall, nobody can stop me, but I do need some consumer protection. So, what about the purely criminal aspects very quickly? There is a school of thought that says whoever is selling this stuff is basically a criminal. I don't really believe that. I think particularly in Western Europe a lot of sellers are just people who are trying to, as they say, explore the boundaries of legality. We all do that at some stage and almost every day if you're driving a car or something. We're not necessarily dealing with organised crime here. There is organised crime. You know that. I believe that their involvement for the moment is still relatively limited. We know that some of this stuff is being made in China. Organised crime is mainly involved in the sort of repackaging, reselling, and the logistics of it. But a lot of the problems are local for the moment. We've identified, I believe, about 250 substances, something like that. As far as I know, about 15 are a bit of a problem of selling well, a bit of a real problem in some countries, because they've been used not as something, as a recreational drug, but they have, I believe, in Romania in some countries. They are being used as injecting drugs. They are replacing other drugs and that obviously is a completely separate issue. Very important, Europe has, the EU, has, I think always, since the 1990s, had the balanced approach and the evidence base as its two cornerstones of policy. Without that, we're lost. I think if we let go of that, you get what I would call American situations. I think that it's very important that we stick with that. As I've already said, it's important not to be spooked by the media or by, I'm not saying you're present by politicians, or by commissioners, who can get votes or get attention by being tough on drugs. We've got to abandon this, we've got to abandon that, because we know it doesn't work. It's been tried and it doesn't work. The interesting thing is that, as far as I know, there is no correlation between, let's say, strict anti-new psych active substances legislation, and youth or other, the correlation is often inverted. The stricter the legislation, the more people will go and look for the substances. It's not always true, but it's true in quite a number of cases, and it's something to remember as well. I think I'll leave it there. I think there are plenty of people around the table who know more about this than I do, so I'd be very happy to answer questions, but I'd be even happier to listen to some of the real experts. Thank you very much.


I really didn't think I'd be able to cram another one of these videos into this year. I felt like I had gone through all of the best that eShop had to offer for 2019, but late November, early December had other ideas, and there has been some of the best releases we've seen this year in the last couple weeks, enough so that I have another 10 games to talk about. In fact, one of these games... I'm pretty sure it's my favorite indie eShop game of the entire year. Like, right now I'm working on my end of year video for my top 10 favorite eShop games of the year, and this one might be number one. Although I have so many favorites on this list, I'm gonna start with a favorite, end with a favorite, and have a bunch of favorites thrown in in between. This might be the best one of these videos I've done, and I know I say that every time, but I think I really mean it this time. But again, all of that. In fact, I've already forgotten it all. I don't know what it was, and it's totally not because I'm filming this on a completely separate day. And by the way, this video is sponsored by the power in my hand. Raycon. That was a lot. They're perfect for when you're running around and doing things, cords always get tangled, and when they... That does not happen with these suckers, baby. This is what would have happened if I had done the Ring Fit Challenge while wearing Raycon. I would have been a little something like this. These are really stylish and discreet. In fact, probably a little too discreet, because when the amazing bass is pumping in my ears, Taylor Swift with full bass. Oh my gosh, T-Swizzle! They're already noise isolating as they are, so just having them in your ears, it's hard to hear stuff. These little bad boys sound just as amazing as the top audio brands I know. The latest model has six hours of play time, not to mention the little cradle they sit in acts as a power bank. Who knows how long the battery could last? And they come in a wide variety of colors. Just look at these pretties. And Christmas is just around the corner, whether these are for you or maybe a gift for someone else.  Thank you, Raycon, for sponsoring this video. And if you don't mind me, I'm going to go back to listening to some Nickelback. Raycon might want their earphones back. All right, are you ready? Three, two, one. Like the video or I'll toss my switch again. My first of many favorites today, Alien Isolation. This port to the Switch is actually incredibly cool because for the first time that I can think of, this Switch version of the game is actually more impressive kind of than the PlayStation 4 version. Now, I'm not going to get into all the mumbo jumbo for this. I'll just link the video that Digital Foundry did below, breaking down exactly why this happens. But yes, while the frame rate is 30 and not 60, like on PlayStation 4, the image quality is actually much cleaner and it just looks better overall. What else can you do, man? What secrets do you hide?  That's a testament to how great the Switch is. It's to make this even more exciting, Alien Isolation is actually a really fantastic game too. You know the franchise, you're in space, stuck on a ship with an alien sneaking through corridors and trying to stay alive. It's terrifying, horrifying, spruppifying. It's one of the best horror games of all time with so much attention to detail. This is one of those rare occasions where a movie has actually been captured perfectly within a game. The AI of the alien is scary good. In fact, it's so good that IGN gave the game a 2 out of 10 because the AI was too smart. That's how you know it's an awesome game because IGN said it wasn't and everything IGN says is typically... Remember what I used to play with swords in my videos? I wondered why I stopped. Stop! Star Ocean finally makes its first ever debut on a Nintendo Switch system with Star Ocean First Aperture R.  It hasn't had the same success in the West that other Square Enix RPGs have had, but Star Ocean's time has come, dang it. I actually wasn't even aware that First Aperture R is a remaster of a full remake of the first game, so it's really a perfect place to start your Star Ocean journey. But I'm not totally sure what's new here. I take a guess and say the fully voiced characters in both English or Japanese as one and the beautiful animations would have to be another. I love the battle system. It's a real-time action gameplay that you don't usually see in games of this style. You have full control over your character while the other characters just kind of do their thing. There's a lot of different options and story parts here with 10 different possible party members. There's a lot of content in this title and I'm really enjoying my time with it. Shovel Knight! I'ma claim to be the biggest Shovel Knight fan, so I was shocked to see a fighter in the franchise drop on my eShop. Apparently, it was a stretch goal on the original Kickstarter for the main game and now it's finally here. Wow, I really hope this was worth my weight of finding it on the eShop and then downloading it the same day because as I said, I'd never heard of it before, but... So Shovel Knight's showdown is what would happen if Smash Bros. made Shovel Knight character Smash Fighters and then removed all the other Smash Fighters and also made Smash Bros. 8-bit. So it's Shovel Knight Smash. It's what I'm trying to say. Each character has a very unique move set and plays quite differently while still feeling very true to the original game. Similar to Smash, sure, you can just mash buttons, but you're not gonna get very far against an opponent who actually knows how to play the game. It even has a story mode. Showdown is really well-flashed out and even not being a Shovel Knight super fan, I really enjoyed this fighter more so than most Smash Clones because it actually felt different and offered a lot of new and fresh ideas. Next up for the Switch, we... I'm just kidding. This thing's a pizza. Yeah, I guess I can't talk about Shovel Knight Showdown and then not talk about Shovel Knight King of Cards, which is the newest and final DLC to the Shovel Knight series that released the same day as Shovel Knight Showdown. Again, even not as a super fan or anything, I really love how much life Shovel Knight has had ever since its release. And in this new DLC, you play as King Knight, a man of royalty and high esteem who still lives at home with his mummy. Most of the game has platforming traditional to the series, but with some card game mechanics thrown into the mix. The card game is honestly pretty fun. It reminds me a lot of the card game mini game in Final Fantasy IX with an added element of having to collect gems. For the platforming parts, you have a new mechanic called the Spin Jump. You can chain this sucker on as many bad guys and objects as you want, and that's pretty fun too. It's even used for platforming later in the game and the way the level layouts have you seamlessly chain together attacks and platforming is just brilliant. And hey, if you already have Shovel Knight Treasure Trove, you can download both this DLC and Shovel Knight Showdown for free. You have to pay for it. Oh, y'all aren't ready for this next one. I have a soft spot in my heart, which is something I say too much for this next game. I think that for me, that just means I love this game a lot and I had great fun playing it. I really, really enjoyed playing through Ashen with my friend on Xbox earlier this year. And I never expected this one to find its way to switch, but I'm glad it has, because now it's one of the most unique games on the console. It's a Dark Souls-inspired game that you can play in co-op as well, obviously, because I already said that's how I did it. We found a lot of these enemies brutally difficult and the checkpoints on death would send us all the way back to the start of the dungeon and we'd have to slug our way back through the last hour of grinding. The bosses would take us an entire night to beat while pulling our hair out. And yeah, we loved every freaking second of it. The exploration is probably what I enjoyed the most, with the scale of the world being so much larger than it initially appears. Visually, this game is just wonderful and full of secrets. On the surface level, it appears as a color-muted, almost minimalistically designed game. And I mean, the characters don't even have faces, but that just makes the moments when you find a new hidden city or step out into an expansive, gorgeous, brand new area that much more breathtaking. Lots of different weapons to craft and choose between side quests and respawning enemies. And I never got tired of this giant goddess emerging from the depths.  So don't let it get buried in the e-shop and become a Switch hidden gem too. I cannot recommend this one enough, especially if you have a friend to bring along. If I had a dollar, for every time a game released on Switch that I would never in a million years have expected to release on Switch, I guess I'd have at least one more dollar because Tropus saves the universe. Oh, that's a game I didn't see on a Nintendo system. I, as an adult, was very excited to play Trover Saves the Universe when it launched on PlayStation VR. As I had already played and thoroughly enjoyed the other VR games made by the Rick and Morty show creator Justin Rowland. And Trover was absolutely the best of all those three games, taking elements from both the previous games and mashing them into a more cohesive action platformer adventure. It has the exact same kind of vulgar sense of humor that you can expect. Each other!  But there's also an option to switch to a kitty-friendly version of the game, which I never tried, but I assume it would be less...  Gross. Here's the thing, though. This video is called E-Shop Games Worth Buying, and while Trover is on the e-shop, and I do believe it's a game worth buying, funny enough, it's not a game on the e-shop that I would recommend buying off the e-shop. What I mean by that? I would stick to the VR for this one. The humor in this game alone isn't worth the $29.99 price tag, and for me, the VR aspect of Trover is what really made it something special. They worked with the VR to build many unique and fun elements that are just totally lost outside the headset. And the ridiculous world and its characters are better experienced in first person. From your floating chair, which actually acts as an integral part of the story, it's kinda lost when you're playing Switch in handheld mode lying down in bed. Again, this is one of the best VR experiences I have had, and one of the most mediocre Switch experiences I've had. All right, this one's interesting. Dauntless. A free-to-play game? Well, that's gotta be worth it, right? Let me get to it. Now, the most beautiful, sweet, charming, wonderful intellectuals watching this video right now have already seen my 10 free games on Switch worth buying video because they're perfect. You're perfect. Unless you didn't watch it. Then you're not perfect. Anyway, in that video of free Switch games, I reviewed Dauntless. It's obviously a free-to-play game. So go and watch that if you want to see me actually review it. But why am I talking about it again? You might be asking right now of all times. Like three days later. Well, because since then, I've actually spent like $30 inside the game and I figured that I would talk about whether I felt that was worth it or not. Interesting concept, right? Let's do it. So I bought in-game credits to buy the Hunt Pass and some items to help me on my adventures. And I have to say that, yeah, it was worth it. I put about 20 hours into the game so far. So for $30, I can pretty safely justify that purchase. I have a cool weapon skin for my sword, new stylish armor and emotes. And it did make hunts easier as I had loads of potions to drink to power me up. For a free-to-play game, this one packs a big punch. But I will say I'm getting to the point in the game where I kind of feel like I want more. And that's why I wanted to do this follow-up. I'm already fighting the same beasts again and again, trying to craft armor sets I'm missing, and I don't really feel like there's an overall point to me doing any of it. I'm still having fun with the game going on the hunts. I'm just wondering what's it all for. But even if you just get 20 hours out of the game, hey, it's free. I think that's a pretty solid time. And I don't regret the money I have spent, but I wouldn't recommend going too crazy early on with those micro-transactions. Okay, this next one is for you die-hard retro fans. Xenocrisis is a top-down arena-style shoot-em-up. Kind of like Smash TV was, and I have to say, we have a lot of retro-inspired games being released these days. And usually, if they're done right, they typically end up feeling like a fresh take on the old days. But nope, Xenocrisis ain't a fresh take on anything. In fact, it plays, looks, and feels like one of the best Neo-Gio games to come straight out of the 90s, man. And it's frickin' radical. Honestly, y'all don't even need to hear me talk and blab about it. All you need to do is see, hear, and experience this game. If you still ain't convinced, then this game just ain't for you, and there's nothing I can do to help you hit it. I love this game, I think it's fantastic. Whenever I sit down and figure these videos out, because I make so many of them, I usually end up with a maybe pile that goes list to list, and every time I'm filling up those slots, if I get to eight or nine and I'm missing a game or two, I'll dive into that maybe pile, and maybe one of those games will finally make it onto the list. But a game that's been floating around that maybe pile for at least the last 10 videos this entire year is The Wardrobe. Honestly, I'm just sick of seeing this one in my maybe pile. And it just had a new version of the game release on the eShop in October called Wardrobe, the even better edition. So hopefully finally this was enough to throw it into the list. Well, I'm talking about it. The new version includes, I have no friggin' idea. The trailer doesn't tell you, I check the description for the better edition on the eShop and Nintendo's website. I even check Steam. I have no clue what's better about this version of the game, and at first I thought maybe I'd stumbled upon some kind of scam until I realized you can't even download the old version anymore. And in fact, this even better version is just the old version that's been updated. So technically if you bought the old version, your version you have now should say even better edition. Having said all that, I still don't know what's even better about it. Regardless, it's a charming game with a fantastic hand drawn art style. That was my initial draw to the game, other than my love for anything point and click. It's a solid game. It's not breaking any boundaries. I mean, it took this long to even make it into the video, but it's fun and it has some great comedic moments. And I like putting point and clicks on the list. So I mean, I guess I'll just bottom with the barrel. No, that's me. The whole reason I made this video is because the tourist dropped on Switch and I fell friggin' in love with this game. And I just, I had to make another one of these. This one guys, as I said, could honestly be my favorite eShop game of the year. I don't know, that's a big call, but I friggin' adore the tourist. It's jaw-droppingly gorgeous. Smooth as butter to play and a perfect example of what makes indie games so exciting. It was first announced during Nintendo's August edition of Indie World. The tourist is a Switch exclusive that boasts a beautifully perfect blocky art style mixed with realistic lighting and world elements. With a huge focus on exploration and puzzles, tourist is breathtaking from the very first island to the last. The first island has a small shop, some huts and a dungeon where you discover your path to find other dungeons on islands scattered across the world. As you travel to each new location, you'll find rainy forests, beach parties and a shopping island with stores that allow you to buy music, more travel pamphlets for new islands, an art gallery where you take photos for the creator based on hints and clues he gives you for what he wants to put in his gallery.  Finding all these picture locations throughout the game, snapping the photo and then seeing them up in the art gallery. Like my photo, it's so clever. And this island even has a little arcade with working arcade machines. I planned initially to breeze through this game in one sitting for the review, but I got stuck in this arcade for hours because the guy out front met me. All his money, I couldn't beat his high scores and screwed that Billy Mitchell wannabe I'm going to. It took forever. I'm talking hours for me to finally conquer the F-Zero clone and don't even get me started on that brick break bull honky. It's frustrating. As legitimately mad as I was getting, trying to get my name up on all these arcades, I can't tell you how much fun I was having with these games inside the game. The world design, the music and audio design, lighting and art design and gameplay design are all a perfect 10 for me across the board. I was completely lost in the world of Taurus during my stay. The dungeons were so unique with puzzles that finally had me stumped for a while. When you've played enough puzzle-based video games, you start to see the way to solve puzzles before the games even managed to set up the premise of the puzzle you're supposed to solve, but Taurus managed to keep me guessing. Even the boss fights were puzzles that had to be solved as you can't attack it all in the game. There's even side quests, as well as other real world mini games like surfing or soccer. There's like a point and click style element to it too where you have to take certain clues between the islands to unlock different things and pads. So clever, it's just a brilliant little game. Oh and about the game being smooth, yeah, it runs perfect 60 frames. There's no loading screens whatsoever and the game even boots up from start menu and gets going in under 10 seconds. It's amazing. I wasted no time 100%ing this game and I'm so glad they left it open for a sequel. It's perfect, it's perfect. Like for what it is, it's perfect. I've said this once! I've said this a thousand times! At the end of the year, on the very last day of the year, I upload a video celebrating this year in indie game releases. I do my top 10 throughout all these videos I've done this year. I pick my 10 favorite games. It's really fun. It's a chance to look back at not only the games that came out throughout the year, but my channel and how it grew throughout the year. So I hope if you're new here, you'll subscribe, stick around, maybe check that video out. And if you've been here for a while, thank you. I love you and I hope you're looking forward to it. Like the video, subscribe. I don't know what that noise was, but...


I don't know if you can hear that humming. Listen. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? No, I've listened to this for years. What I normally do is I have the volume on full blast. It cuts it down quite a bit. And I just keep the volume, you know, on this thing. Pretty good, though. Okay. But recently it's just been bugging me more and more and more. There's only a second part today. At least, a bit of funny thing is going to be this side. I need to sort it out. But I'm going to take it apart and we're going to see if we can clear up that horrible buzzing sound because that is really driving me nuts. It's all I can hear in my head at the moment. And it doesn't really matter, you know, even over here. You can still hear it. I've got some other speakers in my bedroom. But I'm going to bring in and I'm going to put in this place while I do all this. But the problem though, God, is it's a mess. There's a lot of cables. You can't really see that very well down there. Because there's none of the light down there. But there's a lot of wires. Even though it doesn't look that bad there, this panel is hiding most of the mess. This is part of the speaker wires. And it's tangled up with this, which comes from the solar panel. There it is. You still can't see any of that. The computer. All cables down there, but they're all tangled up. So I'm going to have to sort of switch all this off, pull this table forward a bit. Just pull it forward, you know, about a foot or something, shift all this stuff out of the way.  Get those speakers out. Put the other ones in.  I've got stuff I've got to build over there as well. Get it out today. But I've got to do these speakers because like I said, they're dropping that. I shall come back when I've got them out. And this dad as well. I also wanted to get them out and still keep the computer on. So I can get around where I left off. Now I'm going to go and get the other speakers because these are out. The wires are out. It's a little bit of a tangle. Like I said, I just pulled the table forward to get myself, you know, speaker size at the back. So I get in amongst the cables. My old computer there. I'll say it's old. It's a fourth generation i7. Even though the case, I've had it for, I don't know. It's all metal. It's like a server case. There's so much metal in there. It helps with cooling. And I've probably had it about 18 years. Maybe even a little bit longer. And I'll keep it as well because the door's broken and it will fall off. And there's nothing left in the front there anymore. Just that actual drive there is my operating system drive. You can see it. It's a laptop drive. Probably going to clean. I mean, I do clean it. I take the sides off and clean out the insides periodically. Make sure there's no dust build up. But like I said, there's so much metal to it. It's really, really good for keeping everything cool. So that's what I keep it. I think the case cost me about 60 quid on my first bought it. What will I do with it apart from scrap it? That means all that metal I bought will just go to somebody else to make money from. Yeah, after them.  Probably give it a bit of a dust.  And then so I can put this on. Well, I take these apart and I don't think there's going to be a problem in there. It's going to be in this unit here. I'll get a bit of a better picture on there. 12 watts, I reckon. It's heavy. It's good and heavy. It's a good solid lump. I don't really want to throw it away or anything like that. Even though I've had these for such a long time now. Yeah, it's probably a capacitor or two. But again, I have a look and see what we can do with it.  Okay, so these are the little Logitech speakers I'm going to put in this place just for now. A bit dusty. But this is something I didn't notice for these. I'm a little listened to this. That's when you first switch them on. That's, you know, we'll just turn the tone to halfway. It does need a clean because as you start turning it gets really stiff. About halfway, it's the stiffest. What a pop. These are still just... I am actually going to leave this like this. I'll put this on this wire. And I'll put it around the back of the monitor. And I'll just pop this speaker basically over here. And I'm just going to leave it like this and pull these out. Clear some space over there. And it hums more out of this speaker, which is the non-amplified side than it does this one. So, as this one's got all the weight in it, and the amplifier, whatever it is, it says it's a 12 watt, 50 hertz, that you can hear. Speaker. So, let's unplug and take it apart. I don't think I'm going to really necessarily need to take this one apart because this is just, you know, wired off there. This one is the one. Looks like the six screws. Hopefully, you're going to be able to get to it. I think that's an input. I didn't realise that was there. Well, that will come in handy. That will come in very handy. Because what I was thinking was I might end up making a couple of elevating some infos and put them in my little mission speakers on my bench here and set them up onto my computer. Which means that all the music that I have on my computer, including the access to the CD drive, even though, well, yeah, it would just make it more convenient for me to be able to play music. And then I could put these on my bench here which will take up less space. Nile it up a bit. There it is. There we go. I shouldn't have done it on the bottom before. Okay. Right. Now, I really need to keep an eye out for capacitors in case there's anything in here. I'm going to disconnect the speaker because it looks like I can. Maybe I can disconnect it. Let me see if I can get a better look. I'm going to take that out of the way. That's that. Let's just have a little look at this. Okay, so it's a 4-ohm speaker. 5 watts. Funny, isn't it? Because on the case it says 12 watts, and it says 12 watts speaker. Okay. Let's not start bishring. But there you go. That's the first. What we've got inside. There's the volume control and headphone jack and the little LED in the power switch. That's good you could do. You can probably just connect these. It's actually worth this kind of number. I'm going to get them out of the way. There's a little recording series. It just says Sony Volume PWB, which I presume would be power board. It's a horrible flux there. I'm going to clean that up with a bit of alcohol. And then here, and then we've got the retract fire. All diodes. There's my fuse. And we've got this cap, which doesn't seem to be terribly bad. You can just slide that out now. You don't have to undo these. You just screw these down here. And these are, they look like, they're just Phillips. That's good. Phillips Crosshead. I don't know what the difference is between the two, but make sure some of you tell me or just give me a thumbs down for the same long thing. Yeah, I bought myself a little helicopter. It's got one of these little Sigma XC5s. Dash 1, the new version. I've also been looking at the Sigma XX8. It's G. That looks pretty cool too. Okay, this is those four screws. I'm going to chuck those in there. They'd be the same as it was. Yeah, they're all exactly the same length. So that's good. Be careful of that. That's good. It's quite a good of a... That's now locked here. That's the amount of sort of space they give you for fracking them out. Now interestingly, look, there's one. There's a shield here. Wow, look at this one. And there's a... Oh, sorry, it's not a shield. It's the heat sink for the chip, for the amplifier chip. I don't know what it is. It's a... Oh, it's a LA4601N. I'll have to have a little look at that up. I'm sure I've got one of these. I'm sure I've seen this in like a TV. So anyway, this is the one online. This is the one out the speakers. I just decided to look in my own collection of PDFs because whatever I've got PDFs is what I've got. And I typed in LA4, and it came up with an LA4282, which is the same thing. It's a 2 channel, but this is 10 watts monolithic linear IC. So it's the same pinout. It's the same everything, except for 10 watts. Sanyo again. The maximum supply voltage is 45 watts on this. Maximum output current, 4 amps. 25 watt dissipation. And so these caps here, probably the ones we're going to need to replace, there's a bunch of little tiny ones here. Just trying to see if I can see anything visually.  These are ours, these caps. Oh, I don't know if you can see in there. They say Alma. I don't know if you can see that. Alma. And they're all Alma. This one in here, I can't fell on. I need to get my microphone mask. There's a single cap in there. I wish I could see what the camera could see properly. The whole drug built. There you go, you can see that now. There's a single cap in there. Let's look at these ones here. Yeah, these are all Almas. Let's see what's on this. Let's try to see what's on these black ones here. SME. I don't know if that means anything to anyone. AC primary area, danger. Danger, danger. Nothing really obvious. It doesn't seem to be any sort of swelling in the caps. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 caps. 18 caps. Everything's got, you know, snot on it. It's holding down. Every cap has got a little tiny bit of snot. Let's see what the diodes are. It's called 2A02 from what I've been seeing. 41.4. Y, Y, Y, 41.4. Yeah, sorry, I only want this baby's home so much. This is a 10-micro farmed 50, 50 volt cap. I think it says felon. It's got like a pound symbol for the first character of the first letter. Then elon. D-L-O-N, yeah. But it looks like a pound symbol, a British pound symbol, like that, but not with the two strikes going through, just with one. So it does look like an F. But I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't think we have to look it up or something. So that's what we've got in our homes. But why? But it does definitely have the same 12 watts on the back flap. Yeah, 12 watts. You can see that, you should be able to see that now. 12 watts. That's a 5-watt speaker. About 4 ohms. It's quite heavy. It's pretty heavy for the size of it and quite surprised how heavy it is. I can see why the whole unit weighs so much now.  So obviously when this is put together, when there's a bit of a port on the back, this is put together so there's no vibration. So, you know, they're not the cheapest of speakers. I know, you know, I probably wouldn't have spent that much when I bought them. I can't remember, it was such a long time ago. It might be worth actually cleaning them up, because it's metal. It's not so... I mean, that one's a lot lighter, but that's only because you compare it with this one here. But you can compare it with this. This is like heavier than this, but that's because it's got the case as well. And it's not exactly thin, too, rather than the case. So, it's got to make it out of... That is pretty thick. Six little screws, not going into the metal, so it's not like that, it's plastic. But still, that's, you know, restrained there. Metal restrainer. LA4601M. So, 46... 46001M. LA4601M. I don't know what to do down here as well. Okay, 46001M. So... Well, what I'm going to have to do then is... I suppose I'm just going to have to take out as many of these caps as I can replace. I'm not sure what all these little fellas down here are. I'll try to figure out how nice I can look at these. What the value of that? It's a 16 volt, come back. 16 volt, 22 microfibers. And I'm going to assume that they're all the same. And that's, how do I say, 50 volt, 10 microfibers, isn't it? It's a 16 volt, 1,000 mics, these big ones here. And that's a 3. 3,000... Yeah, 3,300 mic, 25 volt. Oh, I lied, they're not all... This says Nichicon. I know you can't see it from there, but it does. It says Nichicon. I'm looking at the colours as well. I'm all thinking about it. Yeah, so I know some good stuff from there. Well, yeah, well, it's not the cheapest of the cheap, is it? Not the cheapest, the cheap Sony amp. So the board's Sony. It says so here. See that? It says Sony. Okay, can't tell. Fuse, I don't know if use is good, because it still will work. Can't tell. It's a slow, it's just regular fuse, isn't it? 0.25 amp, 250 volt. Okay. So these are Nichicon VRM range. I'll be seeing that's what that means. Then we've got some 4.2 peak interference. Microfarad, sorry, a whole bunch of these 4.2 microfarad, these ones are here. 16 volts, but they're all Alma. They're all Alma, so sure, not too bad. So I suppose that I need to take out at least some D-part, okay? Because I like these traces. That's where it's been. Then you've got like this additional bit like these, but obviously they've been soldering afterwards anyway, so they've been wanting something. Okay, well, that's as far as I can get this minute in time, because I'm going to start the soldering side of these caps and do some tests. So I'll probably have to replace quite a few and I haven't got all these, so I'll have to see how easy it is to take them out. There's nothing, well, there's a whole bunch of surface mount resistors as well. That's going to make life difficult. Well, I don't know, because they're already all tiny, solid joints, so I should be able to get in and around them. But just for now, I'm going to put that back in now. And I have to go on a hunt for some capacitors. See if I can actually sort this out. I'll just put them down in the old repair section. Moving on there. We've already seen that's going to get like that. I'm not going to push that back in too far. I'm going to put that drill screw out of the way, that power board, and just dump that in down there. And come back to this. So I'll shoot back in a little bit.


If your cursor is showing problems and acting a little different, then I am going to tell you how to fix it all. Number 1 is that you have to update your driver. You need to update your mouse driver which you can do either by the convention method through the control paddles or simply download advanced driver updater. This software can work in an amazing way as it will update all the outdated drivers in one go including your mouse driver. Hence, you can update the driver through this and even update any other driver present in the system. Turn off mouse power management. Type device manager in your start menu search bar, browse down to mice and other pointing devices. Select, then right click your mouse input and select properties. Open the power management tab and ensure allow the computer to turn off this device to save power remains unchecked. Next is go to the mouse option again in the control panel. Click on the pointer options and in the pointer option if you find that the height pointer when typing option is checked then all you need to do is uncheck this option and click it apply and ok. So that's it guys, try these methods and let us know if they have worked for you and don't forget to subscribe to our channel.


So Dusty says, since upgrading to Monterey, I have had this issue happen twice. The search in mail just refused the search. I would enter a term or email address and no results. I could launch Safari, go to my web mail and search the web mail interface before we get a single result. The first time I went through several painful steps and something in them fixed that including forcing Spotlight to re-index, rebuilding my inbox and even deleting my mail account. Honestly, I don't recall which one fixed it. I did it again this morning and found this article, which we'll link to. And it has several of the steps that he used before, but it had one that I had not shut down the app and relaunched while holding the shift button. This worked. I guess that clears the state. And it may never work again, but wow, that was simple. So, okay, I didn't know about that. Huh, yeah, okay. So I have this problem, I would say maybe once a week. And for me, the solution has been quit the app and relaunched and that usually frees things up and then search works again. Holding down the shift key, if memory serves, that is also the way to tell the app to forget about open windows, right? Like there was that whole thing that came up, maybe it was a Catalina, I don't know, a couple of OSes ago, there's this feature where you can be in the middle of pages or whatever and quit pages and relaunch and all your docs come right back up, even the untitled ones, right? Like the ones you hadn't saved. And I think holding down the shift key cleans that saved state out to Dusty's point. So, but it must do other things too. So this is interesting, I'm definitely gonna remember this for the future. So yeah, I love this.