Welcome to this presentation. I know we are running a bit late, so I tried to keep this brief. Everybody has the time for lunch and so on. As an introduction, my name is Mikku Lammih. I'm for working in AppCloud Finland as a Senior developer. I flew here from Helsinki. Our main office is located in Helsinki, though we have a location here in Singapore as well. People usually fly from Sinti to Hell, but I did it the other way. I've been working for five years in the cloud. I'm doing all kinds of mostly bagging stuff. Unlike many of you here, I'm not so hardcore PHP developer, but I've done that also in the past. I know something about PHP. Anyway, our goal is not to be the PHP provider, but the general hosting provider for all kinds of developer related projects and, of course, production hosting as well. I'd like to talk today about a bit of scaling the IO performance, especially in the cloud hosted environment. Because usually people in the cloud when they talk about scaling, it's about CPU or RAM, but rarely about the IO operations. Nowadays, of course, we have lots of different products to help to scale the IO, but the basic problems still remains. I will show you some basic information about this and some examples and some demonstration of how our products can maybe help with this. As a part of my history with PHP, well, as many speakers were already mentioned, things were a bit different years ago. My first touch with PHP was when I was doing my compulsory military service in Finland 15 years ago. We had this opportunity to end up some sort of special operations groups after the basic training, basic military training, and I somehow ended up doing the PHP programming for the Finnish military public affairs division. Back then, there was a heated situation in the world politics. There was actually a crisis ongoing. The US-led coalition was invading Iraq and Finnish defense colleagues wanted to create a special website where they could put up some analysis about the situation where military specialists could write updates about what's going on and so on. We conscripts working on the website development. We had like two weeks' time to set up entire site from strats with a built-in CMS system. This was 15 years ago, so tools were a bit different back then. We used PHP 3 and basic lamp stack for that, but we didn't have really much clue about scaling the website. The thing was that before that, most of us was only familiar with some PHP hobby projects, but this website, since it was the official website of the Finnish defense forces, it was mentioned in the public news, in the television and newspapers, and suddenly it became very popular. It got lots of hits, and we were suddenly faced with lots of scaling issues, lots of performance issues, and we had very limited resources. We had like three physical servers, just one for the database and two for the web front end, and we really had much clue about how to improve the performance, but we improvised a lot and learned a lot in the short time, and those experience were quite valuable, and they still think that some of those principles apply. But what we couldn't do back then, we couldn't just add more resources like more CPU or more RAM or more servers in the line, because those were all physical hosts. There were no cloud hosting back then, no virtual machines. It was just plain hardware and operating system running on top of that. And of course, we didn't use PHP for any actual military stuff. We didn't program weapons with PHP. It was just this public website telling about the specialist analysis of the Iraq crisis situation. So what's so great about cloud nowadays is that it's so easy to scale things up. You don't have to actually configure every new physical server or install it, or put it to the racks or anything like that. I don't have a photo from the past. This is just truly 20 years ago in our small company. It wasn't that cloud. It was different company back then. We were doing web hosting 20 years ago, and it was basically like this back then. It was more like running stuff from your basement. I remember when we got our first rack and we were about, now we are professionals, now we have racks. Before it was just some more or less desktop computers doing stuff. So scaling up website was a bit different challenge back then. Nowadays, you could just go to your cloud provider and click some new servers, and that should do it. But is it always enough? Well, to define the scaling apps in the cloud problem a bit more, this might be a bit naive definition I'm going to give you. I know that many of you are very experienced developers and probably have faced this kind of problems before. But still I'd like to kind of focus what your problem here is, because at least from our provider, our perspective as a service provider, we still see many of our users running quite old applications. Applications that have been built with a test and proven lamp or lamp stack, but they are built more or less as monolithic apps, so they don't scale that easily. And here's probably the reasons why. So here's the basic setup. We have a server which has resources like storage, CPU and RAM. Then we have the application software. Here I'm simply putting it as a lamp stack. And then we have the actual application, which is written in PHP. You can of course think about layers in a bit different manner, like web server being on top of the application code. But anyway, I guess you get the picture. So here's the basic app. So this could be like a Magento website or WordPress site from our perspective. We got hundreds of them running on top of us. And usually when the customers encounter a spike in the traffic, what they first do is that they increase the flexible resources, CPU and RAM, because of course many of these have been things that we need to have more RAM or we need to have more memory, and that will make app go faster. Well, in some cases it will. Some applications scale up this way, even without tuning any configuration parameters. Like usually when you scale up your RAM, it doesn't help immediately unless you configure your web server or PHP or MySQL to use more of it. But in any way, this is a sort of easy and nice solution. And then what if this is not enough? Well, then we have always option in cloud to just duplicate the server, put a load balancer in front of it and run two instances, or even three or four or five. That should do it. Well, of course if your application is capable of running independent instances, it will work this way. But what about if you have shared data that needs to be accessed from any of these instances? Then you need to have some sort of shared IO, some sort of shared storage, and that creates a totally new kind of problems. Then you can just put additional instances. So IO is nowadays maybe, people think that IO might be a bit of outdated problem because we have so much caching going on, like everything can be stored in memory, memory is cheap. Why do you need to think about disk when you can have 100 gigs of RAM in your server and keep everything there? Well, in some cases you have more data than the word of 100 gig. What about if you have one terabyte of data that you need to access across your friends? I don't know what kind of website that might be, maybe some very popular cat photo site where people could write their cat photos and comment them and so on. But we've seen applications that actually have quite huge resource needs and applications that have gone this big without their developers realizing the need of the scaling at least in the early phases of the architecture design. So basic IO program usually is that you have to satisfy IO, you have reads and then you have writes. Reads usually consists a larger part of the application usage. Here in the reads, I guess they're also doing any sort of file system operations that gives you status of the files like getting the latest modification, timestamps or anything like that. And writes could be either writes from your application or it could be database writes, but still something that you have to persist and then be available to other processes to read. So writes or reads are usually like you have static resources like images or CSS data or cached content and then dynamic content that needs to be every time read from the disk or from your storage because it could have changed and you just don't have the latest copy. And writes here could be also dynamic data that you get from your application, from your users. And then you have logs. Logs here could mean anything that application or the underlying application stack and server software writes, but your application doesn't immediately need to provide new content for the clients. So it could be access logs, it could be error logs, it could be database replication logs, anything like that depending on the configuration. What is common with it is that it will stress the underlying storage. It will mean that you have storage operations going on which might then in turn slow down the read operations where you are reading data for your application and its customers. So in some cases, of course you could probably minimize the writes like in production system don't write any debug logs or keep the application logs and server logs in the separate storage or send them over the network, but there could be use cases where you just have to write things down in quite a detailed manner. For example, you might have some legal requirements to log every user coming to your website and have detailed access logs. There are so many different use cases that it's not easy to give a simple solution that would work for everything. So usually if you want to improve the IO performance, it's about reads and in that sense, having more caches will usually help a lot caching the data so that it doesn't have to be read from the disk every time. That's the common solution, but it doesn't help with the writes. What might help is to direct some of the writes to the separate storage. Here again, when the image has logs, I mean all kinds of data that application doesn't need immediately like it could be database binary logs or anything like that. So that's easy solution. You have separate storage system that handles part of the load like separate log disk in your virtual server. That's quite easy setup and it usually will help up to some point, but not forever. Adding more caches on the read side will, of course, again improve performance, but still if your application is write intensive, no matter how much caching you do on the server data side, it still comes down to the fact that if you get lots of new data that needs to be written down and available immediately for the other processors reading the data, then you have a bottleneck and it's the IO bottleneck. No matter how much CPU you can put on, no matter how much RAM you can put, the disk is still the underlying impacting thing here. So, of course, you could do multiple servers and have shared storage like there's many, many storage available, good old NFS or GlusterFS systems that provide multiple servers read and write access to the same storage at the same time, but still the storage is a single storage and it has limited performance, limited IO capacity. So if you have more clients accessing the same storage, it will not improve the performance, it might actually make the situation worse. So that won't work too much. So then there's some common tips for sharing the IO load. Again, I suppose this is nothing new for you better still I'd like to go through this because at least with the existing applications there's no easy way of doing this usually. So most common way is to sort of divide your data. Use partitioning or sharding, which means that you separate your data to different physical entities, totally independent units based on some sort of key like user ID or product ID or whatever unique ID that might be. So in this example we have three different independent storages and then we have a sort of storage director which gets the applications key. In this case it could be the user ID which is divided by three and then we get the reminder models and use it as a director. There could be more advanced setups like hash keys or multiple composite keys or multi-level sharding and of course many database products do this for you. You don't have to think about this maybe. That again depends on how your application is built. Are you building a new application from the strats or are you probably trying to fix some legacy old application that has lots of internal data structures, lots of dependencies between. In this case it might be useful to actually know how the databases do this. Go to the details and think about yourself maybe. You could do this also without a database. You could use this kind of setup with just for example if you have lots of small files that you have to store and serve. You could use this kind of sharding architecture with the files as well. Just use the file name or metadata as a key. Well of course it gets complex with this kind of setups. It's not easy to set up and it's not easy to maintain. So before going this kind of setups it might be worth thinking about what are the pros and what are the cons doing this. Well pros, you have smaller units of data managed or it will give increased performance and then you can do fetching data in parallel like getting data from multiple different storages at the same time which will then result faster combined data performance and then you might have four torrents but having this kind of setup doesn't automatically imply that it will be four torrents. It's a totally different story to create another density than create just the better performance. This is like same thing as the good old hard drives and right disk setups. You could have performance or you could have redundancy but doing both gets expensive. So cons then, well it's indeed more complex to setup so more work needs to be done, more servers to maintain configure and so on. So if you are not the administrator for all this maybe you have suppressed this, I've been doing this for you or DevOps team, they might be annoyed to setup more complex system but that always depends on the business case requirements. Yeah and the joins are of course slower. If you have data that needs to be fetched from multiple locations and data fetching from location B it's dependent on data fetched from location A and these are stored on different bag ends then the partitioned or sorted architecture really doesn't help that much. So it depends on how do you choose your data sorting strategy. If you choose your keys in the wrong way it might be that the setup might actually be slower than having just a single storage bag end but it depends, it needs some kind of testing and tuning and doing it maybe many times over. Iterations are usually good way to improve performance and then there's also risk for having part of the data unavailable if you have multiple different storage hosts one of them just might go down and depending on your application it might still work with partial data but some of the data might not be available. I suppose everyone who's ever used Facebook has seen sometimes that there has been some glitches where not all the user profiles are available and I suppose of course Facebook systems are far more complex but the basic reason is that some of the bag end storing some user profiles have not been available at that moment. So that kind of things could happen. Well tools for setting this up. Nowadays we have lots of modern OSQ databases which provide a shouting options by default like MongoDB, Cassandra or even Riddice. I won't go into details of how to set this up and each of these have a bit different strategies and each of these have a bit different pros and cons but one thing is that these are maybe not so much used with PHP I think these are more like just with the Node.js or Java but with PHP at least with the legacy applications we still have more like traditional databases. Just a quick handgrip how many of you have implemented any OSQ databases with your PHP applications? And how many have you used like traditional databases like SQL or Postgres? That's what I would assume. So only smart parts have used this. So they are not automatically better in the sense that they provide shouting functionalities there's of course always a use case and of course basic use case for doing this is that you have a massive loads of data and massive loads of data that needs to be constantly written if your database consists only like 100 rows there's of course no need for going all this but if we are talking about hundreds of millions of rows or data entities then this might be handy. So these traditional SQL databases they do have some tools for setting these kind of sharded setups up and nowadays at least well Oracle has some built-in tools but as always they are expensive MySQL and its derivatives have some third-party products that can be used to set up those kind of clusters and I think Postgres also has some kind of sharded partitions to support nowadays but they are not so built-in systems that with those other kinds of databases So if you have legacy application that's using old database well not old database but traditional database then changing it to use sharded database Sharded storage architecture might require quite a lot of re-engineering and at that point it's important that you know your app and know your data and even more important it is when you are building something from the scratch Good question is that should everything nowadays be able to scale to like a web scale Should you build your every application in a way that it should be capable of handling 100 million users from the beginning Probably not There's no point of doing early optimization two months but still I think traditionally PHP applications have not been built two months with this in mind So if you are writing something totally out of scratch it might be a good idea to think about how to set up your data how to make it so that it doesn't have two months dependencies if it would be split to multiple different storage pagents at some point So if you are building a new app from scratch it's of course architectural decision to do it that way and if you are modifying some legacy app then it might be worth digging actually how it uses data and would there be some use cases that would benefit from doing some sort of optimization in this sense and then there's of course non-blocking IO options I'm sorry if the previous talk about React mentioned this help to some point but not with the multiple rights So then we come down to part that what if it happens that you just have some legacy application or even a modern application with a sharded databases this architecture that has been scaled up to the best possible but it still won't give you enough performance Well luckily there's option that you could have faster storages available even in the cloud So here's first from our sponsor So app cloud is a growing hosting provider we provide services in the infrastructure as a service model So in customer responsibility it's usually setting up the operating system and the applications and anything that runs on top of them we don't provide a lampstacks by default we provide just Linux servers and think that the end users usually know how to configure them best and we focus on the underlying hardware underlying virtualization and underlying storage and try to make it as fast and good as possible We have currently eight data centers around the world one here in Singapore, two in the US and rest are in the Europe Now if you got our promo code and try to deploy a server you might notice that deploying a server to for example Singapore or US locations might take some time and we are aware of this and we are working on this and I promise that during the rest of this year this will be much better but we also have nice features like built in complementary private networking between each of the data centers so you don't have to set up anything extra or pay anything extra for having communications between the servers that also might help with creating applications that scale and communicate with each other over the private network and we have of course good 24-7 support available and here's some pricing information you can find more on our website but let's go to so about how we can help you with setting up applications we have some resources like our API documentation then we have a collection of how-to articles and then we have our application libraries one in PHP and others in other languages available in our public GitHub so I'm next going to show you some short demos let me change the view so we have this nice feature called initaliation scripts which helps you to set up some basic things on your server on the first run so I created one that will set up a very simple LAMP stack server this is probably something that you don't want to do in production you probably want to do instead like setting up the basic Ansible host there and use that instead but just for the demo purposes how to kick up PHP LAMP running application in short time and this so let's deploy a new server this won't take too much time hopefully so I'm going to deploy it to Helsinki too let's use just 40 cheapest plan for a moment Helsinki prices have a bit additional extra compared to our other data sensors because production costs there are a bit more higher so we have lots of built-in templates which means that you don't have to actually install the operating system you just select X in template and I use the search key and then I use this Inescript here okay let's get up it should be up and running in about one minute in the meantime let me show you the IO demo so we provide quite fast storages by default for every customer and just to show you how fast they are I'm showing you the FIO tool which is used to benchmark IO first against my own laptop here so this is my local disk here in my own laptop some of you might be familiar with this one this tool like it's most important thing here in the random writes is to measure how many different random writes you can get from the second and here you can see that my local MacBook Pro performs about about 60k IOs per second which was quite good much much better than traditional spinning disks much much better than your user cloud hosted server but let's see now I think we have our server up and running let's check it might take some time okay yeah, it's up and running and here we have LEM stuck installed there already so let's login I used root logging by default you could of course define other users as well so server has my SSH key already deployed in and here we have the latest LEM stuck installed just like I specified previously so let's install FIO here as well I should have put this also to that installation script so it would be in there by default but no matter it will be there in no time and then I have to find my cheat sheet to copy the FIO command here so let's run this same test here on the cloud server and we can see it's performing about the same or even a bit faster than my local MacBook Pro server and this is the performance you can get with our $5 per month servers with the storage so how does this translate to actual application performance well if you have a server that does lots of IO requests like storing the data database or writing data from database it will be quite significant improvement compared to some traditional spinning disks here I have other server which uses our older storage bag end it doesn't use max IOs this is different one so if I run this here well it's capped to 1000 IO apps per second which is of course much slower but this is like performance you might get in many other cloud hosting providers for your storage and if you set up a complex application like Magento Soap it will truly show up how this translates to the actual application performance so besides of the user interface you could also set up servers from the API here's an example in XML format how to create server from API here's the same script same script here so let me just finally show this so this is output from our API it started to create a server and it will be up and running in few minutes with the same kind of setup as the previous one so I think time is getting up here if I would have more time I would like it to do the actual Magento Soap demo but it seems that setting up the Magento's from the scrubs in short time was a bit too complicated because I haven't done it in a long time and surprisingly latest Magento was not compatible with the PHP 7.2 by default I suppose there are people here who know how to set up this in like switch of your hand but for me as a bag end developer for like bag end infrastructure developer it was a bit too much in this short time anyway thanks for listening I hope you got something out of this we have a boot over there in the hallway so feel free to come talk to us and ask about our systems and services and we also have some swag to give away and of course we have the $50 credit for new users if you register now so thanks for watching and hope you enjoy your rest of the conference thank you


My question is, how to pass exam without study? Oh, Narendra Singh? How to pass exams without studying my wish and my blessing is... my wish and my blessing is you should not pass because when you say how to pass an examination without studying, what you are saying is, how to get a certificate without knowing a damn thing about anything? So, if you become a doctor, without knowing what you should know, you passed and became a doctor. We don't know how many lives you will take. Without studying or without knowing what you should know, you became an engineer. You build a Kolkata bridge. Before anybody crosses on that bridge, it collapses on people's heads, taking lives. We don't know what other disasters you will cause. What has happened to you is just this, you have empowered your ego and enhanced your desire.  This is what you need to do. This is what education is about, this is what life is about. But unfortunately, you think education is about passing an examination. Education is not about passing an examination, education is about learning. It looks like the world has forgotten about this. So, those who want to pass examinations without studying, those who want to win without playing the game, those who want to be honored for things that they have not done, these people will achieve one thing.  This one thing they will achieve. Because if you want to live, you must involve, you must empower your intelligence and competence. In doing something to the best of your ability, there is fulfillment in this. There is joy in this, there is life in this. In passing an examination without studying, in winning a game without playing, in being honored without deserving, there is only ego satisfaction looking around at people who have failed and feeling little better than them. As I said, for sure you will die without living. If you think passing an examination without studying is a success, dying without living is definitely a super success and you will succeed. What? Narendra Singh Dhoni or Modi? No, this is champion of everything. One who wants to pass examination without studying is a champion of everything.  If you are a champion in something, there is enormous striving in becoming a champion of something.  And when you become a champion of everything, it means you don't know how to do anything. Yes? You don't know how to do anything? It's my wish and my blessing. All those who don't study must fail. All those who do not know how to play must lose. All those who do not deserve are not honoured in this world. This is my wish. This is my blessing. So you just came to the wrong guy. There are people who will bless you. Don't worry, don't study, my blessing is there, you will pass. I am not one of them. You just came to the wrong place. What? Champion of everything? Hmm? If you become known, that's good. If you want to be champion of everything, life will get you in so many different ways. If you fail, it's good. At least you know you are not fit enough to take the next step. Yes or no? If you lose a game, you know that you are not good enough. Yes or no? That is the idea of failure. That is the idea of passing and failing, that to know whether I am fit enough to take the next step or not, not to fool the world. You can fool the world.  That's the biggest problem. So Narinder Singh, not Dhoni, not Modi, there's enormous striving behind those names. Let's leave it here, otherwise I'll get more nasty. Because I don't like people who pass without studying.


It's been interesting to live in Madison for a year after living in Appleton for 25 years. This probably doesn't come as a shock to you, but in places like Appleton, an I-roll often accompanies any mention of Madison. There's a sense that Madisonians sometimes see themselves as living in a superior place. You know, amazing lakes, lots of culture, wonderful restaurants seen and lightened views, sometimes the perception is reinforced when we outstate folks meet Madisonians and they give us a look like, oof, Appleton. So sorry, you have to live there. So no doubt much of this dynamic says something about Appleton and other outstate folks as well as Madison folks. There's kind of an inferiority complex that's likely part of the equation too because actually this is an amazing place. The lakes are beautiful. Haven't had much chance to do the restaurants or the culture, but I'm sure they're great and there certainly are a lot of enlightened folks here. Well, that's Madison shifting our attention to Unitarian Universalism in the United States. I have long thought that the primary sin of American UUs is hubris, along with hubris's close cousin, self-righteousness. In UU congregations, there's kind of a sense sometimes that we are superior to other people and that's sort of just below the surface or above the surface. I call this spiritual Darwinism. Like social Darwinists, we misuse Darwin's theories to assert that because we have banished superstitions, we are the more fit people spiritually. I saw a variation of this work in my partner church work, so a variation of this in my partner church work. So many American UUs have a sense of superiority in approaching Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists partners in places like Transylvania and the Philippines. Once they get more educated, we seem to think they'll know better. They'll get rid of some of those sort of superstitious viewpoints. Hubris is a good label for this. And the truth is, we are not superior spiritually. We and our overseas partners are beautiful, flawed people, doing our best to develop and live our beliefs. We stumble. We make mistakes. Sometimes we learn. We do wonderful things. We are whole people made in the image of the divine, but also prone to making mistakes. So what I have to say to you today, FUS community, is that as Madisonians, as Unitarian Universalists, as members of one of the five largest UU congregations in the country, housed in an extraordinary landmark building with a beautiful addition, Hubris might be something you have to deal with every now and then. It feels like you have learned a lot about your congregation during these past three years. You have been in a liminal period, betwixt and between what you were and what you will become. Ministerial transition, especially after a long stable successful impactful ministry, is a liminal space. Lemon, the Latin root for liminal means threshold. In a liminal space, you travel from familiar space across a threshold into space that is other. You have experiences and then you return to your old space across the threshold. But you, and often your old space, or at least how you experience it, have changed.  The picture I have in mind of liminal space is a pilgrimage that I observed many years ago in one of the most sacred Hindu sites in Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southeast coast of India. The temple that I saw is a shrine to the deity Katharagama, a guardian deity in Sri Lanka, probably the most important Hindu deity there. For those who have an interest in the Hindu pantheon, Katharagama is a manifestation of the God Skanda, one of Shiva's sons along with Ganesh. Like many pilgrimage sites, the Katharagama temple is surrounded by water. Pilgrims need to cross a narrow body of water to enter the temple. This can be done by walking over a bridge or as is the custom for most pilgrims bathing in the water and walking through it. This passage over or through water symbolizes leaving the everyday life and moving into this liminal space. While I was there, I observed a pilgrim go into a trance during a ceremony venerating Katharagama. She started dancing wildly, speaking ecstatically. I've never seen anything like it before or since. Through a translator, we talked to her brother who explained that she was temporarily possessed by the God. For her, it was a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to this temple, and for her likely the only time in her life where she would have an experience of possession. Her brother had no doubt that when she crossed that water out of the temple site and returned to her home, she would be forever changed. Her ecstatic experience in that liminal space of the temple would immediately impact and shape her for the rest of her life. Another example of that kind of liminal space in a sense of pilgrimage is the first movie in the Star Wars epic. In that movie, Luke Skywalker leaves the familiar. He travels into this liminal space that is full of danger and opportunity and possibility and he returns changed forever. So we learn a lot about ourselves in liminal space. As I saw this pilgrimage in Sri Lanka, as I saw in that in the Luke Skywalker story, liminal space is full of possibility, opportunity, and also danger. First Unitarian Society has been in liminal space for these past three years. Of course it looks pretty different from the pilgrimage I witnessed in Sri Lanka. I'm guessing no one here has been possessed by a deity. But structurally there are similarities. What was before ended? You've been in this unfamiliar territory that has had moments of possibility, opportunity, and danger. It has been hard. Some of the folks who were here at the beginning have left and are not coming back and let me say they're adults and they can make that decision. I'm sorry about it, but they can make it. Others have stepped back but are planning to come back at least to check out things, get the new layer of the land at FUS this fall. Some of you stepped into deeper, more significant roles during this time and some new folks joined even during these pandemic months. Now no doubt the pandemic exacerbated all these dynamics of this liminal period. The pandemic of course upended just about everything in our lives. Already in different territory, suddenly you as a congregation lost so much that has been a continuity for FUS for so many years, most notably your access to this building. The danger in the tumult of ministerial transition was greatly magnified by the pandemic. Not only did you lose a part of your identity that has centered for 60 plus years on strong senior ministries, first Max Gabler's and then Michael Shuler's, you also lost for an extended period of time the identity that this landmark building has given you for the last 70 years. A lot has been stripped away during these three years. My guess is that some of you have been disappointed in at least some of what's happened during these three years. I'm guessing a fair amount of you felt at times disappointed in one another in this faith community. Some I'm sure have felt disappointed in yourselves. In short, I'm guessing this has been a humbling experience for many of you and for this congregation as a whole. And that's not a bad thing. As Unitarian Universalists in a flagship UU congregation in a city prone to hubris, experiencing a little humility can be helpful to a congregation's spiritual and emotional health. I think in many ways it's a gift. I want to share about another gift this time of liminal space has given you. So you have a reputation in the UU Association of being somewhat cold and aloof. And honestly, this is how I experienced FUS when I occasionally preached here during my years in Appleton. I also had a sense from afar that staff here sometimes felt treated in a cold and consumerist way that the congregation's relationship with staff was characterized more by expectation and entitlement than gratitude. All of this was the biggest point of hesitation I had about coming to FUS as your interim minister. And so I braced myself when I got ready to come here last summer. And I did not need to. My experience with you has been completely the opposite of what I expected and feared. My experience has been exponentially more characterized by gratitude and warmth than coldness and aloofness. Gratitude has been deep. It's been palpable. It's been everywhere. You have been incredibly hospitable and welcoming to me. You have been forgiving and gracious about my shortcomings, my mistakes, my learning curve as a new interim minister. Nowhere was your gratitude and warmth more evident than in that incredible celebration we had of Reverend Kelly's 20th anniversary. So what happened? Perhaps your reputation was overstated. But more significantly, I would guess the humility of this liminal experience as well as the gratitude you felt to staff in each other when FUS continued in spite of physically being closed somehow changed and opened your hearts. A huge lesson of the pandemic for many of us has been to take things a little less for granted. Most of us could not even imagine 18 months ago how challenging it could be just to go to the grocery store, we could not imagine having our church building closed for months and months and months. So here's the challenge for all of you as FUS crosses the threshold from ministerial transition and a closed building in these coming months to a new ministry team and a reopened building. You got to hang on to this humility and this gratitude that you've experienced and expressed so generously over these months. It will be so easy for all of us to fall back into the old negative habits that the pandemic stripped away. Nothing in my view will be more important as you journey back into your old changed life together than to hang on to that humility and that gratitude. Nothing will be more important. And one more thing, make space for joy and for having fun together. What most struck me in this whole process we just went through of creating a relational covenant was the hunger that so many of you have to have this be a joyful space. No doubt congregational life is serious business. We come together to make sense of life, including and maybe especially the difficult parts of life. We come together to grieve, to be supported in grief. We come together for solace when we are struggling. We come together to be reminded of important learnings and values that we momentarily forget. But we also need a place where we can come and celebrate and laugh and play and have fun. We need a place where joy can pop up at any moment. This is a great thing that many of us who are white have learned from black and indigenous and people of color that bringing joy to the struggle is necessary. It is a tool for survival. So FUS friends, stay humble, cultivate an attitude of gratitude, make space for joy and related to these things. Stay open, keep learning and growing. Bring curiosity to FUS with you. Build on the rich, rich legacy of the past and move forward into your next beautiful chapter. You are ready. You are ready. Go!


So I've been wanting to do a video for a little while about purchasing laptops. This is a question we get all the time. I want to buy a laptop. Which one should I buy? Not as easy of an answer as you think. People just assume because we work in the tech industry that we just instantly have an answer for that. And there's not an easy one. Part of the problem is, it's kind of like saying, which new car do I get? Until a car's been out for a little while, do you know if there's any problems with that model? You only can base it on a previous reputation of the company. And unfortunately, from Dell to HP to a lot of companies, and HP's even resulted in class action lawsuits, they've had wonderful models, and they've had other models that failed. And they failed miserably to the point of the class action lawsuit. How long did it take to find out? Quite a while. The laptop's barely lasted a year. So from the new model released to, hey, that's a crappy laptop, we know in the end which ones are crappy, but from the beginning, from the brand new, don't always know. But there's at least a few things you can go by to determine whether or not it's going to be a decent purchase. Now, I'm going to talk about, we have refurbished laptops here. One of the things about the reverse ones is people go, Tom, how do you sell this refurbished Dell laptop for as much as I can go buy a brand new one at a big box store? Because when these were new, these were about 1500, and it's all about how they're made and the speed within them. There are laptops for sale less than $300. I've seen some on sale at Best Buy for like $229 and Walmart for $229. They're really horribly slow. As a matter of fact, they're substantially slower than this four-year-old Dell that's sitting right here next to me. It comes down to the components they use and end to build quality. A lot of it's a race to the bottom because consumers want something cheap. They look at them as disposable. The problem is they're unhappy with them as soon as they buy them because they're just right out of the box slow. Now, I'm going to get into a little bit of design here. Now this is based on one of the cheap ones, and the whole, this is the bottom panel. There's no metal in here. That's actually why this whole piece over here is missing is the system cracked. Just opening the lid back and forth caused fatigue and caused all the plastic. The plastic's that brittle. It just shatters apart. It's that high-impact ABS plastic that doesn't have a ton of flex for this. It's pretty rigid, but it doesn't take much to crack these, and that's what happened. It's just breaking it right here. These cheap laptops, they don't have this.  The hinge attached to a metal frame to distribute. Now it's still made of the cheap plastic. You can see it's real flexible. You can see I could probably break it, and there's a lot of flex in the frame still. Matter of fact, you can see the whole frame flexes quite a bit without the top on because they rely on a plastic on top in there to kind of build rigidity of it, but there's also no metal in this. So these screws are pressed in at the time of molding, so you have these kind of floppy screens, and that's what leads to screen breakage really easy on these. So if we take something like one of these Dell's, I know this is an older model and it's kind of ugly. This is one of their business class ones. How there's no flex. Matter of fact, I can tilt back on the screen and it picks the laptop up. There's not a lot of give. It's really solid, but design wise it's a lot better. Now I have another one that I've got taken apart already, and that's this one here. And this is what they look like on the inside. You see these are referred to as heat pipes. We have large heat sinks in here for one to help distribute the heat. You don't see that in the cheaper laptops, and this low-no will be though it's a better one. The heat distribution system is this tiny little fan. It's just not, it's not very robust. And the business class ones, first, much larger fan, much larger heat pipes. And the heat pipes are what help bring the heat away from the internal components to the vent on the side and vent it out. The other thing you notice, there is a lot of metal in this. The whole thing has metal inside of it. It's plastic metal. And even where it's plastic, instead of being a flat plastic, they have it structurally beveled so each one turns. So it's got this entire structure to it to hold it all together. So this is just a substantially better made, because even with the cover off like this, you know, there is just no give. This is a dead one, so I'm trying to break it. No give, which means, let's pick it up by the screen. It doesn't give. It doesn't crack. The plating, the metal that the hinges actually go into are super solid. And because of that, this was a more expensive to build laptop because, well, as we know, you print things out of cheap plastic, they're inexpensive to build. When you start making them out of metal like this, they are very solid. It's going to hold up. It's going to be able to take a lot more damage. A fall off the bed is less likely, but not completely unlikely to break it. So you end up with these better, higher quality boards. The heat distribution, everything about them is another notch up. That's why used. Four-year-old use one of these still goes for three to $400. I have an HP Elite Book. It's a five-year-old laptop that is still faster than probably half the ones you can even find at Best Buy and the reason why is at the day they built it, it was a very highly specced laptop. My laptop was 2,200 new.  I usually buy them refurbished myself and wait till the price comes down a little bit, but they're substantially faster. But people think you have to go out and buy a new one. That only depends. The refurbished ones, if you get like an i5, is going to be substantially faster than a 229 one that you found at the big box store, even though it's four-years-old. So this is just kind of my quick overview of why you shouldn't get some of the cheaper laptops, especially because they just don't hold up.  I'm like, yeah, kids can be a little rough on them. And they open and close them. They take them to all their college classes. These hinges on these cheap ones just won't hold up. If you're open and closing, open and closing, they're so soft. They're such that it's a race to the bottom. They've made them with such cheap plastic, they won't hold up. But you take something like this. Yes, it's heavier. Well, metal's heavier than plastic. But the solid nature of it, the rigidity and everything, makes it a better purchase that's going to last you longer. And if you buy one that's faster, even though it's a few years old, it's so faster than any other computer. So that's kind of short summary of why you can buy refurbished computers that are better than brand new ones and why you should consider them when you're looking at a purchase and why we sell them used for 300 versus why you can go buy a brand new one at whatever Black Friday sale for $1.99 coming up. So that's, like I said, my idea is I just want to cover that with people so they can have a better picture of why we recommend these laptops and what the differences are between them. Thanks.


When you when you when you put this project out, what what inspired it I just gotta be me. This is my life I don't need yours homie. I can have my own wife. I just gotta be me When you when you did this, you got a new project out gotta be mine gotta be me gotta be me When you when you when you put this project out, what what inspired it I just gotta be me.  I don't need yours homie. I can have my own wife I just gotta be me and thank you for our shirts, too Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely wonderful. Thank y'all the inspiration for that is really man, I was in a transition in my life recently still going through it and Trying to better myself as a man not trying to see that's that's that word for what is that opportunity for me to not better myself So let me take that out my vocabulary. So better in myself as a man and Making better decisions that I used to make Like I said used to be so quick off the top And now just don't let things affect me How they used to the way they used to but what happened is always in our lives It's always something that happened that made us change our perception of what we the track we're on. What happened that? Struggle fell off the game fell off life broke Homeless When you say homeless how homeless could people say homeless and Me saying homeless is not my home. I always God will provide somewhere for me to go. Okay, right? But if it's not my home then you're homeless. Yes, okay Because that means that I can at any second the whosoever home it is can kick you out. There you go. Wow Okay, so um, you are on the road to Better yourself. Yes, and how long has it been since you started that journey? Oh I think I kind of started it before I realized I started it But as far as me literally like, okay. Yeah, I'm on this different. I would say probably about maybe Close to two years now and one thing I always tell people, you know The easiest way to better yourself is to help others better themselves because by doing so You actually helping yourself. I agree and people don't realize it. I agree with that totally. Yeah Yeah, so how was your journey going and what have you been doing to better yourself and with doing so Are you trying to do so through the music as well? Yeah, I don't know It's a process. It's like I ain't trying to go cold turkey. Mm-hmm You know, I used to just I had to be in the streets no matter what Why I Some of it was because trying to get what I needed to get some of it just because I was addicted to the shit and I I need to be out here Even though what I don't need to be No, I'm saying I was at that point at one time. How hard is it to give all that up? Well, that's what I'm saying. I've Pretty much did that pretty much to I mean When you leave out your house, you know what I'm saying and you go to work or you go to school Or whatnot this and that, you know, it's some form of street element there You know, it's always a chance that some type of BS can happen. How hard is it because I was just speaking to someone earlier and Especially being in this industry and I see a lot of young kids are a lot people are still deep in this industry And it's like the street or that what you're talking about go hand-in-hand with the industry How is there anyone is it possible to do this industry without the street? Um, is it possible anything is possible? With God anything is possible. Is it gonna happen? I don't think so, but not especially not with the rap music because the rap music is set up and designed To attract street culture Right, it's set up in design for that drugs money sex partying jury Vacations back to the club strip club throwing money and Each element complements each other in that industry, right? See rock music country music They ain't got a word about them kind of elements. That's why them artists be old still making money Wow, yeah, we on boss talk


You too Team keep it clean. What's going on? It's engraving here with another video and In this video We're here to talk about our boy Blake Blake Bortles Who just signed a new three-year deal worth 54 million dollars 54 million dollars But it's not only just worth 54 million dollars. It's worth up to 66.5 million dollars three years worth up to 66.5 million dollars When I first saw that I Said wow But even rewinding before this deal came out. I remember and good evening everybody coming through I thank y'all for joining me. I know we just this came out like three hours ago, but we were out we went at home and Couldn't stream about it, but we're here now but Three years 54 million dollars. I appreciate that cowboy X factor. Thank you Three years 54 million dollars now Before maybe like a month ago Well Yeah, Superbowl was yeah, maybe about a month ago about a month ago Always say jack signing Ravenfields for QB over Blake Bortles. They'll be nice special. Hey, you know gotta sign me for 54 million dollars Just give me 10 male. We'll be good. I Mean, you can even give me five be straight. I'll be a backup. I'll be a backup too Send me the Jacksonville. I'll be straight man. That's like five hours from here. I Can come home if I need to for something if I if I forget to bring my Xbox to play it while I'm Practicing to be a backup quarterback. I could just fly home real quick. Come pick it up and go back ain't nothing but Anyway, the the Jaguars they paid Blake Bortles 54 million Four over three years. I mean for three years, but anyway, I appreciate that Shane. Thank you But what I was saying about a month ago The Jaguars they said that they said that they were gonna stick with Blake Bortles as their quarterback. They said that They said that they said that they were gonna stick with Blake Bortles as their quarterback When they said that I was like, okay Cool, they said it but they didn't really put anything behind it and there was really nothing There was really nothing that them saying that there was nothing riding on that They didn't there was no pen to paper. There was no contract. There was no there was nothing all there was was a word But now they actually showing that this is their guy This is their guy and I see a lot of people saying that this deal is bad. I See a lot of people on Twitter a lot of people in here right now saying the deal is bad The deal is horrible. The deal is terrible Blake Bortles got overpaid blah blah blah and my thing Blake Bortles he Over his career he has not been the best quarterback in the world But he has definitely improved and in the playoffs He should be 3 and 0 right now. He should be 3 and 0 They beat the bills No, wait a minute. Wait a minute Excuse me. Did you see what he did to the Steelers? the Steelers Did you see what Blake Bortles did to the Steelers? He had to make some throws they couldn't just ride linen for that the whole game. They couldn't ride the defense the whole game Blake Bortles did his thing in that game. That's playoffs. That's when it counts the most and then They should have had a win against the Patriots too if not for some terrible cause They should have had some win they should have had a win against the Patriots Now the bills game yet.  He should be at least 3 and 0 in the playoffs right now He should be at least 3 and 0 but he showed that When it matters the most He'll show up And he showed up he showed up against what's it called the Steelers He showed up against the Patriots and those are two teams that people Counted the Jaguars way out of those games Way out of those games They counted the Jaguars way out of those games. They didn't even give him a shot But Blake Bortles gave him a shot so with this deal Jaguars got some cap room I'm not really mad at this deal I'm not really mad at this deal They show they want to stick with that guy And they they are committed to their guy I Love that one that may be the best that may be one of the best comments that I've ever seen on a Blake Bortles video Or any quarterback video. He said he earned it without crying about it. That's great That's it right there That's it. No other QB on the market that really had a shot at the championship. He did I mean He he earned it man. He earned it Blake Bortles. He may plays with his arm and with his legs I see a lot of people saying Kirk Cousins. They should have went after Kirk Cousins If you I mean they could have yes But if you got a guy took you this far Your defense took you this far. You got a guy that you trust and you you giving them more Lee way with the plays He's starting to let them loose a little bit now with the play calling and whatnot They just they going for it now they trust in them they trust in them I got I don't really have a problem with this deal. I ain't got a problem with it. I don't I Don't have a problem with it They think engraving 510. I'm like, yeah 510 511 Go solid 207 Still has got a weak defense Still has got a playmaking defense though and that playmaking defense ain't make no plays against Blake Bortles man so We'll see man But yeah, this is not It's not a it ain't a bad deal to me. It's not a bad deal to me. It's not Blake Bortles is not he's not trash. He's definitely not the best of the best, but he ain't trash And I think what the Jaguars are paying for is for what they is I think they're paying for their future What they're looking forward to from Blake Bortles coming soon I Know they don't think he's the best in the world because they don't they don't allow him to They don't give him play calls like he's the best in the world They don't give him play calls like they trust him D aka convince a watch the bills game. Well, how about you watch the Steelers game? How about you watch the Patriots game? Watch those? Was he telling me to watch the bills playoff game watch the other two playoff games watch those So I mean that's They'll be fine and it's not like The thing about this deal Both of those defense garbage No, still his defense wasn't garbage Patriots defense wasn't even garbage But it's cool, man. Everybody entitled to their own opinion. That's the thing about this channel I love when you all come through y'all give y'all opinion. I love that. I respect it. Love it not give mine but um the thing about this deal with Blake Bortles getting at least 54 million from the deal is that it's only three years It's only three years. That's it It's not a five-year deal. It's not a six seven-year deal. It's a three-year deal three years Three years So most QBs when they sign their big money deals, it's for like five six years a hundred-something meal But the Jaguars they said no, we're gonna take it slow three years 54 mil, I think they said like 26 something 26 something mil is guaranteed But it's not bad. It's not a bad deal It's not It's not a bad especially especially these days For the going rate for quarterbacks Appreciate it. I'm convinced but especially these days The going rate for quarterbacks is a lot more than this So the fact that they got them for three years 54 mil Hey, it's not bad man. It's not bad It's not bad exactly one. He said that won't hold them back when when they need to sign other players It's true This is not a bad deal. So I'm happy for Blake. I If the Ravens don't make the Super Bowl next year Then I would I would not mind seeing the Jags make it and win it Oh, Terry else at Texas went into division anyway. Yeah, can't forget about the Sean Watson that guy look great Alex said only half the deals guaranteed. It's built on incentives people need to calm down There you go There you go, and I have to look at all the ins and all the incentives to see how he can hit that 66 0.5 mil because that would be the max that would be the max But we'll see man Exactly Kendrick Davis said sure isn't a bad deal just in case he bombs just in case he bombs out So it's like say for instance Blake Bortos comes out has a great season Okay, you got him signed for two more years say for instance. He has a decent season Hey, you got him signed for two more years. Say he comes out and just is terrible. He's garbage. He plays like trash Hey, I don't know what the cap implications would be if they cut them But three years 54 male three years 54 male Ain't bad man straight up ain't bad And me so I could say the Super Bowl next year either gonna be Pat's versus Eagles or Pat's versus Packers Hey, we'll see too early all season is just it just came about I mean all season ain't I mean it started and it's starting to get a little drama field now, but It's starting I'm pretty sure his incentives have to do it QBR yards. I don't know. I gotta check it man I gotta check it still as a winner Super Bowl next year. We'll see fireball. We'll see I thought they were gonna get it this year I did. I thought they were gonna get it this year. I thought um Especially once they met once they made the playoffs and once they um, I Thought they were gonna beat the Jaguars. I thought it was gonna be Patriots and Steelers for AFC championship game cuz that's what the NFL had wanted so bad I really thought that was gonna go down and I thought the Steelers was gonna be in a Super Bowl I really did But it didn't happen and oh trust me. I wasn't complaining. I know I wasn't complaining But here's what it is man. Yeah, man. They're here. They check here. They are calling out these Super Bowls early Somebody even said Pat's versus 49ers That'd be a little dramatic Super Bowl. Oh boy. They have story lines for days They have story lines for days Todd Haley is He said Todd Haley is going for now there's a chance. Oh Todd Haley Todd Haley Todd Haley Todd Haley Todd Haley Todd Haley Oh, any soccer who's another he said that they should fight Kevin Colbert because he's a Steelers fan He said they should fire Kevin Colbert because he doesn't want to sign any defense Joe Hayden was a good pick up for y'all. He was a good pick up um Who else did you guys get?  I mean they were threat this year They did the thing is what they go 12 and four. I think one 12 and four Rams did their thing this year. I was proud of Rams They did their thing this year. So shout out to the Rams, right? WC said Jags ain't going to no Super Bowl.  They should have the game they they should have put the Patriots away on that fumble by um, Was it James White or Dionne Lewis? I forgot which one of them it was but when Miles Jack picked it up and took it back But they blew the whistle there. Oh, that probably would have that probably would have been it that probably would have been it Jack it should have been the Jag was in the Super Bowl Should have been Jags in the Super Bowl straight up man The play called boy was so bad man. It was so bad It was so bad It was so bad No, they did Jags Jags did they should have won that game but Bad calls killed it Bad calls killed it.   Should they really be doing that? But they were confident man they were confident and They show why they were confident because they had that that that swagger that confidence and they had a defense that did it They had the offense that was doing enough to do it they were doing it man but It's all good man. It ain't that fail Get that's the nature of the business. It's all good. So That was that man. So shout out to the Jags Me I don't think it's a bad deal at all. I like the deal and They stick in with that guy they They like Blake and I'm sure Blake really loves them right now Because he's getting paid handsomely. I believe what what a rookie deals like How much all rookie deals now for quarterbacks in the first round not nearly as much as they used to be but How much are they now? I don't even remember but Whatever he did whatever he made in his rookie deal Now that gets multiplied So go for Blake bottles Jaguar sticking with that guy They won consistency and that's one of the that's one of the best things when if you can get decent If you can get consistency in a good way, it's one of the best things in the NFL If you can get consistency in a good way, you don't want to be consistently bad But if you can get good consistency So that's what they're hoping for but It's cool, man. It's cool Anyway, appreciate y'all Thank y'all. I love y'all Y'all look great Y'all a lot of fun Not gonna make any promises that I was thinking about streaming mad and I don't know if we're going to or not yet But we'll see So I'll see y'all in the next video. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already So your notifications on if you haven't already Now leave a like on the video if you haven't already click that thumbs up button Appreciate y'all Thank you. Yes team keep it clean. I love y'all and I See y'all in the next video. We out


One of the most important pieces of software on any Linux distribution is the login manager, or they sometimes call it a display manager. What is a login manager? It's the screen that you see when you first boot up your computer and it asks you for name and password to get into your desktop environment. It's really important, especially if you have multiple desktop environments or multiple window managers installed on your machine, because the login manager, other than you entering a name and a password, it also allows you to switch between all the various desktop environments and window managers you happen to have installed. And that's important for me because I have like 15 window managers installed on my main production machine. So a login manager makes sense for me because it allows me to easily switch between the various window managers, you know, whatever I feel like logging into that day. One of the most common login managers is a program called SDDM, which is the simple desktop display manager, I believe is what it stands for. It's the default login manager for KDE Plasma and LXQ, but SDDM can be used as a login manager for any desktop environment or window manager. And it's one of the most common ones today. Let me switch over to my desktop and let me pull up a virtual machine here of Manjaro because this is Manjaro KDE because it's KDE Plasma here. The default login manager here is SDDM. Now, one of the very cool things about SDDM is just how themable it is because literally you can change anything you want to about a login manager like SDDM because you can configure it. If you have the proper skills, you can actually move around the date and time and your avatars, you know, the little pictures. If you take one with a webcam of your user, you can move around the text boxes for username and password and things like that. You can move the shutdown buttons and you can actually re-themed the shutdown buttons and just everything about SDDM is configurable. And I thought it would be really cool to configure my own SDDM theme for my DTOS script, which is a script for a post installation script for Arch Linux. And it installs my Xmoned desktop environment and the fish shell and Doomy Max and all of that. And I thought it would be really cool to have a theme for the SDDM login manager that gets installed with DTOS. So I have never actually been a SDDM user because for years I always used LightDM as my login manager. And the other thing is SDDM is a cute application. I've never actually played around with cute theming or anything like that. So this was going to be a real challenge for me. So the first thing I did was I went to the AUR and I looked up SDDM because I wanted to see how many SDDM themes were in the AUR. And apparently theming SDDM is very easy because there's like 30, 40, maybe 50 SDDM themes to choose from. So I noticed that there was one here called Solarized SDDM-Theme. And if I go to their GitHub page, you can see what this is. I think they have a screenshot. It's a very simple theme. It uses Solarized Dark for the colors. And when I saw that, I thought, man, that is really cool because the other day, you know, I made, I've made a couple of videos actually in the last couple of weeks about color schemes, specifically about the DOOM 1 color scheme and Solarized and Groovebox and all of that. I have nine different color schemes that I use in DTOS. And I have all nine color schemes available in DOOM Emacs, in the Alacrity Terminal, in my X-Mobar panel, in Kanki. And I thought it would be really cool if I could have all nine of those color schemes available in my SDDM theme. So I actually spent several hours each day for the last three days working on my own SDDM theme. So what I did is because I didn't really know how to theme this properly as far as the config, I actually took the config from this particular repository, Solarized SDDM theme. And of course, I edited quite a bit for my colors specific to my color schemes that I wanted to use. And he had some artwork here. I didn't use any of the artwork because I figured I would create my own artwork because I was going to have to create a ton of different images because I wasn't going to just have one background image. I was going to have at least nine background images plus you're going to need some of the images for your shutdown logo and your reboot logo, the little icons you see on your login manager that reboot the system if you click on it. So let me switch back over to my desktop and I'll show you exactly what I did. I'm going to open a terminal for this because I want to be able to zoom in. So you guys can actually see all this and I created a new GitLab repository for I called my color scheme multicolor dash SDDM dash theme and if I do an LS you can see I created some directories here PNG SVG and XCF depending on what type of images I was creating XCF if I CD into that that is the default image format for gimp. So if I LS you see I have nine different XCF files each one based on one of the nine color schemes that I want to use and I include the gimp XCF files for those that want to edit these files it makes it a lot easier to have these images as XCF because I've got various layers that are still in the images that you can play around with again it just makes editing the images easier. Now of course I need to export all of these to ping to a to a proper ping format so there are the nine pings and if you guys want to see these in full size let me just open this inside SXIV here and we'll make this full screen I'll get rid of the bottom border there and that is the doom one color scheme and that's going to be the background image on my login manager. Yeah I'll have this color scheme here this in this background image and then we'll have the date and time somewhere over here and then we'll have the username and password text box over here and if you need to change amongst different desktop environments or window managers there'll be a drop down menu in the top left hand corner so that's the doom one image I created and all I did was again I since I saved these as XCF files it's very easy to change the colors inside gimp so once I had the doom one color scheme of background image here created it was very easy for me then to go ahead and create a image for Dracula so let me go ahead and hit in on the keyboard here inside SXIV in for next that is the Dracula background image and that's the growth box dark background image and that I believe is the monikai probe background image that is definitely Nord and that's oceanic next this of course solarized dark and oh my goodness that's bright solarized light and of course tomorrow night so all nine of the color schemes you know that I've already had available and so many of my other programs inside DTOS now we're going to make sure that our login manager screen has background images or each of the nine color schemes so let me CD up a directory and this is the main directory for multicolor dash SDM dash theme clear the screen here and do an LS and of course I've created a read me and I've already made package builds for it for arch package builds and I've already made a package build and uploaded it to the AUR so you guys can already install multicolor dash SDM dash theme from the AUR if I go back to my browser I think I was logged into my AUR login here and I've got three packages currently listed in the AUR I don't have my own repository of arch software of course in the DTOS core repository so I don't package too much stuff in the AUR but I thought the multicolor SDM theme was a good package to throw in the AUR it will also be in the DTOS core repository as well so here is my GitLab page for the new multicolor SDM theme repository and then of course I need to make sure that all of this gets installed and enabled by default in DTOS but let me show you for those of you that don't want to install DTOS how multicolor SDDM theme works so if you were in a arch based Linux distribution for example since we already have this VM up of Manjaro KDE let me go ahead and log in and if you just want to install this from the AUR let me zoom in all you need to do inside a Manjaro they use Paru as their AUR helper so I'll do a Paru dash capital S multicolor SDDM dash theme actually kind of interested if this installs correctly because I just finished working on this within the last 30 minutes or so like it's gonna be my first test really with this so let me enter my root password and it just installed multicolor SDDM theme now that doesn't mean the theme is active and enabled it's still going to use the standard Manjaro SDDM theme because there's config files that you need to edit so typically that config file that you need to edit for SDDM it'll be located in one of two places it'll either be located in user lib sddm sddm.conf.d it'll be listed in that particular directory I know that's a long directory they'll be like a default .conf in that directory on many distributions here inside Manjaro it is actually slash etsy slash sddm .conf and that's actually kind of nice you get to type a shorter pass I'm going to do sudo vim slash etsy slash sddm .conf and what you need to do is find the the theme section and there will be current equals and then name of theme and by default in Manjaro they're using breath 2 what I'm going to do I may actually want the breath 2 theme back in future videos but right now I'm going to create a new line here and I'm going to do current equals multi color dash sddm dash theme and then write and quit and now if I log out of kde plasma here so I'm going to click on leave log out log out it'll kick us back out to the sddm log in manager except now it should be using my multi color sddm theme and by default it's going to use the doom one colors and there you go now it doesn't look quite right because the screen resolution is off I've got a 1920 by 1080 monitor but the the resolution is much smaller yeah I was even zoomed in a little bit there it's more like a 1024 by 768 or something so a very small resolution makes it kind of scrunched up but you can see how it kind of would look on a proper size monitor you have your username and password boxes here get your time and date which is usually centered above these boxes but everything's kind of scrunched up unfortunately in this VM and then you have a drop-down box where all your sessions will be listed if you have multiple window managers or desktop environments selected now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to log back in and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to uninstall this because I want to see if this gets installed correctly if I run the the script for DTOS so I'm going to do a sudo pacman dash capital R for remove multi color sddm dash theme let's go ahead and remove that and since we remove that we need to make sure that I go back into the slash etsy slash sddm dot com remember I didn't delete the line that had the breath two theme so let me go ahead and uncomment that and I'll just delete the line that was setting multi color sddm theme and now everything is back to the way it is on a fresh install of manjaro kde plasma so now let's go ahead and run through a DTOS installation let me go back to a different workspace here because I want to show you what I added to the DTOS script here enable sddm for login manager it installs sddm it enables sddm well first it disables whatever display manager you have said if you have one then it enables sddm as your login manager and then if there is a file on your system at userlibsddmsddm.com.ddefault.com that's a long path but if that file exists I'm going to copy it and make a backup of it and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and with said replace current equals whatever current theme is currently set to and I'm going to do current equals multi color dash sddm dash theme now that of course is only going to work on uh systems that use userlibsddmsddm.com.d slash default dot config what well manjaro kde we already know uses slash etsy slash sddm.com so I may have to actually add uh add some more information here I may actually what I need to do probably just to cover all of my bases I'm actually going to copy all of that and I'm going to paste the exact same thing except this time let's go ahead just in case because distributions will have that config file in various places just in case they have a etsy sddm.com let's make sure that we change that all right so I added this new section so if either one of these files exists we're changing the current theme in those files so let me write that let me export that to the dtos shell script and then of course I need to push this to my get lab so I'm going to cd into get lab dash repose dtos and just quickly I'm going to do a get add dash you get commit uh editing slash etsy slash sddm.com is going to be the commit message get push and now let's actually go ahead and see if we can run this dtos script and then everything works correctly so I'm going to do a get clone https colon slash slash get lab.com slash dwt1 slash dtos now let's cd into the dtos directory if I did it in ls you will see a script there called dtos so do dot slash dtos to run the script all right you get some welcome information just hit okay four times it's adding the pgp keys it added the dtos core repository to this installation of manjaro because many of the packages have to install from the dtos core repository because I package about 30 of my own programs now at this point and it's going to install 347 packages I'll pause the video I'll be back once the installation has gotten further along all right it looks like it's getting close to finishing the package install and then once it finishes installing those 347 packages with pac-man it has to run through an installation of doom emacs as well the doom emacs portion of the installation actually is the longest part of the install it's going to take five maybe 10 minutes answer yes to both questions that doom emacs will ask you so stay close to your keyboard during the installation because you will have to answer yes a couple of times and the installation of doom emacs is almost complete there's that second yes or no question do you want to download and install all the icon fonts yes we do all right now we're very close to the end of the dtos script it needs a root pass word for something so give it your root pass word so it can recompile xmonad and then it allows us to choose our default shell our default user shell I want to be using the fish shell so I'll choose one and then it says enable sddm as a login manager so we got that message so hopefully that worked and then it says dtos has been installed do you want to reboot your computer sure now if we had a another login manager previously enabled it was disabled with the dtos script sdm was enabled and then we edited the sdm config file assuming it was in one of those two places in our script that we were searching for files and then changing the current theme from whatever it happens to be set to to multicolor sdm theme and by default it's going to use the doom one colors so that is the background image let me show you how to change from the doom one background image to one of the other eight color schemes so let me hit ctrl-alt-t here inside manjaro to open a terminal and let me zoom in here and what i'm going to do is i actually logged into plasma instead of the xmonad desktop I should have let me go back I really didn't want to do this in plasma all right now that we're back to the login manager let me go to the drop down here and actually select xmonad and now let's log in just to make sure that the dtos script actually worked yeah we have my xmonad desktop let me do a xrander-s 1920 by 1080 to get a proper screen resolution uh and all of that looks good it's we still got some weirdness going on with the background i'm going to set a random background image just to fix the wallpaper and i'll go ahead and kill all khaki as well since the khaki's out of place since we changed the screen resolution there so dtos does look like it's working correctly let me launch a new terminal here and this is the alacrity terminal and sddm themes anytime you install an sddm theme it needs to go in slash a user slash share slash uh sddm slash themes if i did a ls in that directory that is where all of your sddm themes need to go and you see multicolor sddm theme but we have five other themes we could choose from including breath two which was the default theme that manjaro was using so if i cd into user share sddm themes multicolor sddm theme you will see there is a config file there that theme dot comf and then do sudo vim or nano or whatever text editor you're comfortable using theme dot comf and it's going to ask for a root password and this is the default theme dot comf you see background equals ping slash doom dash one dash o one dot ping well there are eight other pings including dracula and we really want to go crazy gruff box dark not my favorite theme but i'm going to change it for now let's write and quit that so writing and that file there that one theme dot com file in the multicolor sddm theme folder should actually do what we wanted it to do yeah it kicks us right back out to the login manager when i quit and there is the gruff box dark wallpaper and let me log back in i'm going to terminal let me run that x ranger command one more time i'm going to up arrow a few times because i want to cd back into the multicolor sddm theme directory and sudo vim theme dot com one more time just to verify that everything else is working let's do a solarized dark right and quit that quit out of x monad and there is the solarized dark so again nine different options available with multicolor sddm theme so there are three different ways you guys can install multicolor sddm theme depending on what distribution you happen to be running so let me go ahead and go back to the gitlab repository for my theme and i think i have a section here for installation so in arch linux those of you that are using the a u r just install multicolor sddm theme from the a u r for those of you that have the dtos core repository enabled or you're actually using dtos you guys will find multicolor sddm theme in the default repository so you can just install it using pacman now those of you that are not using an arch based system or dtos you guys what you're going to have to do is just clone this repository all you need to do is get clone this repository and then remember where the themes go they go in slash user slash share slash sdm slash themes that's all you need to do put this repository the folder that it creates put that in user share sddm themes then find the sddm.comp file wherever that default comp file is you know whatever it happens to be on your linux distribution and edit current equals make sure it says current equals multicolor dash sddm dash theme and that should work on any distribution that should work on a boon-two mint and fedora open susa whatever but i haven't tested it out on anything that's not an arch based system because i i don't run uh any non-arch based systems but i would assume that that should work on every linux distribution now before i go i need to think a few special people i need to think the producers of this episode gave james matt mitchell paul scott west of commie allen chuck commander angry curt dyokai david dylan gregory hyco lee maxim michael mike nitrix urion alexander peace arch and fedora polytech raver red prophet steven and willie these guys are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon they're the producers of this episode and i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen i'm going to show you a bunch of names here on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because without each and every one of these guys i couldn't make these videos i couldn't spend time creating cool things like multicolor sdm theme if you like my work and want to help support me please consider subscribing to distro tube over on patreon all right guys peace


The bottom-up synthesis method remains the most widely used route for large-scale and low-cost production of carbon dots, CDs, but recent advancements have led to significant changes in structure and properties, prompting a new classification of CDs called carbonized polymer dots, CPDs. CPDs possess unique polymer slash carbon hybrid structures and properties, and this study provides insights into the effects of synthesis on their structure slash property features. The synthesis methods of CDs are also summarized, and the impact of bottom-up synthesis conditions on CPDs is comprehensively analyzed. Additionally, this research offers critical perspectives on the future development of CDs in various application fields. This article was authored by Chun Lai Xia, Shou Jun Zhu, Tang Lu Feng, and others.


Only Bernie Beats Trump! Only Bernie Beats Trump! Only Bernie Beats Trump! Only Bernie Beats Trump! Only Bernie Beats Trump! So we're making a sign to greet the delegates as they come out of DNC, And well, the sign we went, we've chosen to go with, is Sanders beats Trump. Now, we were focused first on President Sanders, but the narrative that the DNC and Hillary are promoting is that this is all about beating Trump, the less of two evils. Except in every single poll that's put out, Hillary loses. It's Sanders that beats Trump. Now, we love Trump because we love Bernie because of who he is. But we're gonna deal with this. We gotta play a little bit on their turf. So their story is, their story is we gotta beat Trump at all costs. Well, who's actually the only person in the race doing that? That's Bernie. So your narrative that you've been spinning to us for the last 15 months is about to work against you. So you want to keep Trump out of office, it's Bernie. Yeah. We need to get money out of politics. We need voting reform. We need to completely redo. How voting system works. It's not working at all. That's it. I'm never gonna see them again. Get it? Get it? Because you're like right. I stream online, YouTube. Yeah, the convention live streaming. Roll call. Bernie Sanders is about to be the next president. I mean, I hope he does. Well, so far, 16 votes for Bernie from Alaska and what? And six for Hillary. So far so good. And a 50-50 for Alabama. So it's through to you. I told you she could. I already knew she had a big Samoa vote. American Samoa went for Hillary, so. Six votes for a truly great man, Bernie Sanders. We are happy to vote as 84 votes for the next president of the... State senator myself, or I'm gonna support whoever runs. I mean, I can campaign with the best of them. I can go door to door. I can speak. I can let them use my property for yard signs. Anything I can do to support somebody who supports Bernie Sanders. Policies. I already know what the next step. When after last night, after Bernie basically capitulated, he fell on his sword last night as a warrior for his country. That's what he did. I came outside and I called my son and I said, you need to run for city council next year. There's an opening in the seat. That's what we do. We elect officials. We do everything we can to support them. If people here are not willing to do that for whatever reason, they're willing to go find people who can use their voice to elect progressive people. It's gonna start from the ground up because that's what happens. Trickle down economics doesn't work. Trickle down politics obviously doesn't work either. So that's kind of where we are.