This show, it's me, John Park, and it's time for John Park's workshop. Thank you, everyone, for stopping by. It's so great to see you. And when I say I see you, well, I see the people over in our Discord chat. Ah, whoa, black hole, hold on, let me fix that. That thing just went all weird. That's weird, why did that one go away? Let's try tricking it. Nope, it's decided that it doesn't like that layer. Hold on. Off to an amazing start here today. Here we go. We are mere moments away from having that work again. Also, I see we've got some people over in our YouTube chat. Hello, Debo Desa says, JP sounds a bit rough. Is the audio quality coming in weird? It looks OK on this end. Or am I just sounding rough? Let me know. Is it technical or is it personal? One second. OK, we're getting closer. Window. All right. Honing in on it. Discord. Hey, there we are. That was worth it. So look, there's our Discord. Johnny Bergdals says, I'm testing out my new status lights. Top left LED indicates that I'm streaming. That's cool. Way cool. And Andy and C Grover say the audio sounds OK. Thank you. That's good. What's going on? The intro sounded rough. Maybe you just don't like that song. I don't know what's going on. So how about that news last night? Did everyone tune in for the Ask an Engineer? Right at the end, Lamor and Phil dropped a little knowledge. They are going to be having a baby. So I'm going to be, I'm so excited for them, first of all. And thanks to everyone for wishing them good luck and congratulations. That is exciting, exciting news. If you're just hearing this for the first time, yeah. They're having a baby. They've been working on this little project for nine months or so. And the shows. There's going to be some changes to which shows happen when and who's doing what. Main change, the one I want to mention right now, is that I'm going to move this show to the Wednesday evening time slot. So the same time that you're used to watching Ask an Engineer, we're going to have John Park's workshop Wednesdays, 8 PM Eastern time. So I will maybe do some adjustments to the show, too. But largely, it'll be this show. And then we'll all look forward to the return of Ask an Engineer once there's an extra engineer in the world, once they've had a chance to get to know their new human and start up the shows again. So I don't have any, I don't know when that's going to happen. I don't have any dates for that. But this show, I'll send out emails and stuff and we'll update some of our little bots over on Discord if you're going to ask the robot when the shows are. This show, John Park's workshop, will be Wednesdays and there will not be a Ask an Engineer for a little bit. Also, just to give you a glimpse of what we're doing today, I'm going to do a little bit of a tour of some of our usual things, coupon codes, Help Wanted, a little recap of my product pick of the week. I do not have a Circuit Python parsec this week, so that one's not happening today. And then I've got a sort of show and tell I want to do with kind of a Gear Report Plus, Gear Report Bonus type of thing. And then a project that I'm working on, a software project that's kind of cool. So let's see. Let's get started with a coupon code. Today's coupon code is ScanLines. So if you want to go find some cool stuff to get in the store, head on over to the Adafruit Store, throw some things in your cart. On your way out, type ScanLines. I actually don't know if case matters in our system there, but I did it in all caps, both here and when I entered the coupon in our store thing.  That's good on any of the cool, new, interesting things that you could get. In fact, let me pop open a window. Right here. And let's take a look at some new things. You may not even know if you are looking for new stuff, we have a new product section. It shows up both on the front page, and then you can click on View All New Products. You can also go to the products menu dropdown and head over there, View All. Sometimes that section isn't there. And take a look at some new products. We have more and more of our displays that are going to be, what is it, iSpy capable. So iSpy, if you're not familiar with it, is that little ribbon connector on the edge there near the corner, or near the quarter under that iSpy logo. It's a cool logo. That little flat ribbon connector will enable you to make all of your connections instead of using the breadboard-spaced, PCB-spaced header pins there. You can travel all the data you need for the display, for SD card. I think iSquared C is on there as well. So that 2.2-inch 18-bit color, that's a lot of color, TFT display has been updated with this form factor using the iSpy connector, which I am very excited about. So that's one of the many things that you can head on over to the store, throw in your cart, we have 30 of those in stock right now, and get 10% off on your way out. So use this code, ScanLines, and that's how you do that. That is also only good on real products, real goods, physical things, atoms, bits that get shipped in a box to you, not on software gift certificates or subscriptions, so just on real stuff. Alright, that's the coupon code. Help Wanted, if you are looking for work, if you are looking to hire someone, if you are looking to get a temporary gig, a full-time gig, you will want to check out jobs.adafruit.com. Oh good, this window is here, my software is showing me that it wasn't, but in fact this time it is. What's going on? If I could only find my arm, I don't know how vertical, they don't say, but head on over there if you've got these kinds of skills. They're going to be using extruded aluminum for construction, pneumatics, electric motors, electronics, or do we know in Raspberry Pi, retail display design and building, and agricultural irrigation, really cool, so if you are a handy person with those types of skills and you're looking for work, that is an interesting one, area2farms.com. Go and check that out at jobs.adafruit.com. Let's see, oh I'm sorry to hear that, someone said that we're buffering a bit today. Do I have the robot, the cool robot buffering, like Phil and the Moor had last night? They were getting like one frame a second, I'm just making things up, I'm not actually, that's me pretending, but they had some cool buffering going on, I'm a little jealous of their buffering, I want to plug in for that, a little filter. Seems okay, normal service has been restored, oh yeah, you know what, I see a little warning going on in bitrate, oh it's not too bad, bitrate's not too bad for YouTube. Alright, next up on Tuesdays, I've got that right there, let me just flash back and forth between them, because that's good for you. JP's product pick of the week that happens on Tuesdays, for now my plan is to keep doing that at the same time, that may shift as well just because I usually do prep on the day before this show, so if I'm doing that show and then the next show the next day, but it's at night so maybe I'll have the time, who knows, but normally the plan is, what I've been doing up until now is product pick of the week show on Tuesdays, and during that show I like to take something that's a new product or an oldie but goodie, a favorite, something we have in stock, we try to be careful about that, make sure we set aside a bunch of them, usually a hundred or two of whatever it is, we'll hold that in reserve to unleash the excellent new products team, especially Jelly, shout out to for help with that, Jelly's been doing a lot of great helping with planning and plotting and scheming, making all this work, but we pick something, we slash the price, usually in half, and then I do show, 10-15 minutes, show you what it is, do a little throwback video to the release, the new new new, when LeMore originally released the item, give you a half off discount, show you some demos, this week's product pick was this one right here, and here is my little recap, so take it. The mini analog thumbstick and the breakout, they have a ground power and the analog per axis, slot neatly into the board there, where the two sets of three there are, and then all of those are broken out to the plus, y, x, and minus. I've taken a QDPI RP2040, and I'm essentially running power and ground and two analog pins to each joystick for ADC pins, which we have on the QDPI, and then I've also run a little I squared C OLED there, and you can see as I move these little thumbsticks, I get some values that I've written there, as well as a little moving dot, and I have this sending out MIDI, I'm not going to demo that part of it, but it's essentially sending out some MIDI CC values on four axes, two per, and so this is really straightforward to use in both Arduino and Circuit Python. The mini analog thumbstick and breakout. That was it, that was a product pick. So, let me know what you do with those. I know someone said, DJ Devon3 I think said that they had purchased like 10 of them, so I'm curious to see the wild keyboard you're planning to make the entry device that uses 10 little thumbsticks. I guess those are thumb and finger sticks at that point. So like I mentioned, no Circuit Python parsec today, so we'll skip that, but now let's get to this. So this is pretty cool. This is a gear report and a plus, a gear report plus. So you can see right there, that's that little Sony Trinitron I got last year, picked it up on the side of the road. Well, I have a very fertile neighborhood, as far as picking stuff up on the side of the road, because this is what I got now. I picked this up last week, I can't point, there we go. This is a 20 inch Toshiba CRT television, and it's a beauty. It is at the really the apex of CRT technology, roughly it was made in 2006. I think this Sony was in the late 90s, so another 10, 15 years of development. Really nice flat screen. I have a new little camera here to point at, and let me pop a little me up in the corner, and I'm going to adjust that camera. Let's see if I can do that without ruining everything. So how about, is that, yeah, oh, it's a little dark, but there you can see it. And I've got it dark because I want to show you the screen picture. So here's the deal with this. This, oh, there we go, that's a little better. This has something that I'm excited about that the other old TV doesn't have, which is actually two things. It has S-video input instead of just composite, and it has component video, which is even better. But what I'm going to do, what I'm going to show you is what happens here when we do a little comparison between composite video, where essentially all of the color and luminance data are traveling down a single line, versus S-video, which breaks those out, because the color is on one, and I believe luminance is on the other, sharpness-wise.  So I've got a little clone Super Nintendo here, plugged into it. You can see that right there. So that's a, not an emulator, that's a chip, and I've got Super Mario World here. Right now it is in the, what am I seeing there? What is that view? I don't want that view, hold on. I got so confused by many cameras right there. So let's change this one to a little main cam. There we go. So you can see actually I have my iPhone filming this, because the iPhone running camo, which is a camera thing, is actually dealing with the refresh rate of the CRT better than some of my other cameras. I'm just going to shrink this view a little bit and throw it over here. There we go. So I've got the color pushed a little bit. I think that's actually because I adjusted the gamma over on the camo app. Let me just noodle with that a little bit. That's maybe a little better. So this is, I'm going to zoom way up in here, and I'm going to now adjust focus. Okay, so pay attention to, by the way, you'll see this is, I think, I have a shutter frame rate of 30 frames per second. Actually, I'm just going to switch that. No, let me leave that alone since that's working. The refresh on the TV I believe is 29.97, and that's why you see that one little sort of bright scan going through. The frame rates are not exactly matched there. But this is composite. And it's not bad. I mean, this is a gorgeous TV. It's a nice job with this signal. And one of the things about these TVs is they tend to be fast. There's less lag with these than your typical modern TV going through HDMI and some of the processing that happens there. So these tend to be coveted both because they're nostalgic and because they are really fast, really responsive. So if you look at things like the letter L here, look at the black outline around the L, and it's kind of bleeding into the L there a bit. Again, picture looks really, really good. I love it. But what I'm going to do is this little Super Nintendo clone has an S-video output, and it just outputs both over the composite and the S-video pretty much all the time. So I can go ahead and the TV will need to do a little dance, but I'm going to go ahead and plug in the S-video and give it a second. Boom. There we go. So now I actually don't even need to unplug the composite, but yeah, that's definitely not the composite. That's the S-video. And you can see we get gorgeous sharpness. This is one of the best pictures I've seen. I think it looks better in real life than on my video there. I'm going to go back it out a little bit now. But really impressive sharpness when you go between the composite and the S-video here. So let me, let's see, can I adjust? Let me see if I can adjust Zoom other than... Oh, here it is. Yeah, so let's zoom. Oh, that's actually... Yeah, we're getting a little more A-patterns. It's very, very tricky to... Oh, that's not bad. There we go.  So I'll do that again. So watch that. It's going to flip a little, I think, when I make the change here. So I'm just going to yank S-video. And then... You can see it's just a little muddier, a little softer. Still a really great, great image. Really good-looking colors, for sure. But the S-video is a big change. Some people will do modifications on these consoles or the real ones to get composite out and RGB out. I haven't tried that. What I've heard from a lot of people is that that is better even than S-video, but not as big a change. Not as market a difference as what you get with going from... Whoa, let me get that out of there. Going from composite over to S-video is really a nice upgrade. So that's my little gear report there. Very excited to have found that. If you look into this, a lot of people are... Retro gaming fans are excited about picking up old TVs. You tend to be able to find them, get them cheap or free, take them off of someone's hands. I recommend that before going down the route of trying to buy one fresh because they're now priced accordingly. People will be charging 250 for a TV like that by calling it a retro gaming TV. By the way, actually, one other neat little trick I'll do. Let me just adjust my camera. You will notice that by filming straight on, you tend to get a better picture with less of these more interferences. I just rotated the camera a little bit to see my Sony there. Here is... I can plug the composite into the Sony and it'll keep sending the S-video to the Toshiba. And you can see it's still a really handsome looking image, in my opinion. Okay. Or not. Oh, I think it was...  There we go. It's hard to do apples to apples just because this one's a much smaller TV. This one has a really tight pitch as far as the pixels. Even with the camera close up on it, you can tell they really are close to each other. I think this might be Aperture Grill. Actually, I'm not sure if Trinitron does that. But anyway, you can see colors are really good between the two. Fairly closely matched actually. But me looking at these, everything's just got a little bit of a softness and blurriness on composite. And boy, is it super sharp on S-video. So thanks for indulging me on that. I'm just excited to share that and I've been having fun playing games on it. It's a fun setup. All right. So let's... I'm going to turn those off so I'm not distracted by those. I'll leave the camera there in case we have any questions. I want to bring that back up. I am in the process of getting an actual Super Nintendo and I managed to pick up one of these... Where'd it go? Did I lose it already? It was sitting right here. I swear. Oh, there it is. I managed to pick up... This is actually another part of the story. So this is the connector that Nintendo used for Super Nintendo, N64, and GameCube. So they call this their AV Link. So that's the little proprietary link. And this was really smart that they did this because kind of future-proofed themselves for a number of generations. One version of it connects to just composite video there, but you can also get a version of it that has S-video and it's a nice thick shielded S-video cable. Same connector there. They just have enough pins in there. I forget. It's like 12 pins or something that they can do. I think there's even a composite maybe that was... or a component rather that was for GameCube maybe. So they've got one connector there and then different wires. These are usually 40 or 50 bucks on eBay. I got one for about 20 bucks because they said that the left channel audio was broken. And sure enough I had to... this one I had to splice the... remove this insulator and re-splice the wire. It had just taken some damage there. But now the audio works on both channels and the S-video looks great. So I'll do some experiments with that as well. So that's my happy story there. And let me know if you've got any thoughts, questions, retro gaming things. Alright, so moving on. Next up what I wanted to talk about was this. I showed this last night on show and tell, but I'll do a little re-look at this. So I've got the... oops, I don't know how to ask for video. SD card rather. This is a pie gamer. And I've got battery on there. I've got a little speaker on there. And flip the power on. You might hear that. It sounds a little quiet except for the game over sound, which is super loud. So this is using Microsoft Make code arcade and their collaboration with Marvel for the Black Panther Wakanda Forever movie that's coming out. They created some assets and tutorials for making your own game using characters from the game. So here you can see I've got Shuri and I've got her moving around. I'm just going to try to avoid getting shot for now. I don't have a cheat mode or anything.  But the thing I'm excited about with this is the parallax. So if you see the background, I've got four layers of images in the background, like a multi-plane camera and animation. Oops, we'll restart that. I have a sky and cloud layer that's just barely moving. It's moving the slowest. Then I have the sort of far buildings and hills. And then I have mid-ground buildings and the greener hills and some of that brown road kind of thing. And then I put some foreground of just like some broken up asphalt or something like that. And I did all of this using their asset, and then I kind of pulled it apart and I wanted to show you how to do that and a couple of other tricks in the game. I'll show you actually if I can actually shoot at, I think Namor is the bad guy here. These little rings. Yeah, take that. When he gets hit, he jumps to a new position. And I'll show you the code for that. This is all done with, there we go, we are safe. All done with block programming. And we're also going to do some modifications to this. So let's start off with, let me jump over to make code, switch to that and get my camera out of the way there. Whoa, there I am. There we are. So in Make Code Arcade, I haven't used this in a while and I was excited to see some updates and exciting new features and one of them being this extension called Scroller. And what I'll do actually to show how it works is I'm going to make a little bit of a change here.  So in my start block here, what I'm going to do is simply take a big chunk of it and move it to its own loop and then essentially disable the other loop just so we can look for now at just the scrolling. So on start, all this is going to do now is scroll and...  Let's go back and look. What did I... What did I do? Oh, I have a forever loop that's trying to run. Let's see if that's enough. This should work. There we go. So I'm going to make this full screen now. One thing I noticed is that this actually runs a little better on the microcontroller in this case than it does in the simulation here. You'll notice there's a little bit of stuttering and stuff that's happening here. Probably that's browser stuff is what I'm going to guess. The big excuse of browser stuff is happening. But the scrolling is actually smoother on the real device. So here you can see it. I've got the cloud layer. It's moving just at a very slow rate. Then I'm going a little faster on that distant hills and buildings, even faster on the nearer buildings and the greener hills and then the fastest on that foreground element there. So this is a... If you're not familiar with it, this is a technique called parallax that's used particularly in animation, 2D animation, and video games, and it's a way of conveying perspective because distant objects, thanks to our stereo vision of our tiny little separation, we have barely any interocular separation, but far stuff looks basically the same from both eyes. Near stuff looks wildly different if you just blink your eyes left and right. So that's the parallax effect in a nutshell. And the way I'm doing this in here is, first of all, I went to the extensions plus sign here. If you go to extensions, you can add something called scrolling or the scroller. And since I've added it, you can see it's there now permanently in this instance of MakeCode with this game open. And the way that it works is, I create a series of layered images that have transparency, have some in most of these layers, have some sections that are essentially knocked out so we can see the thing behind it, just like little layers of construction paper, let's say, that are cut out like mountains and a sky and some bushes. And then we, after creating those, we can set them to scroll automatically or based on other inputs in the game. But in this case, I just have them scrolling automatically all the time at different speeds. So I'm going velocity x of negative one for the farthest layer, negative 20, negative 30, negative 60. So we get faster and faster the closer we get to the camera or what's sometimes called the z-depth away from the camera. And I'm not moving them at all on y. So they're only sliding sideways. If you look at these images, when you click on them, you get the little pixel art viewer here. And I think I can zoom out a bit. So there's the sky layer. The zoomer's getting mad at me. Here is the next layer. Now some of this stuff is blocked. I don't really need a lot of, from the lighter green on down here, that's never seen. But just, I'll show you the way I made this. I didn't have any reason to get rid of it. The next layer forward is just these two buildings and this hill and a little bit of that brown again. And then finally that nearest to camera layer is just this little vague broken up ground or road or something like that. Let's add to this. So if we want to, just to see it moving, I'm going to grab a red brush and I'll make a little red circle here. And then this will reload. And there you can see. So you can see that's kind of pinned to that road layer and it travels with it and it loops. So basically as soon as a pixel gets off the screen to the left side, it loops back around, which is what makes this work. You need to make your artwork support that. Otherwise you'll see, you'll notice the effect of it. You can also make much wider art. So you can make a whole scrolling level that you never loop or you can make just something that repeats less often by making it wider. So if I want something to loop, let's go ahead and erase this. By the way, also nice changes since the last time I used this, a lot of nice changes to the pixel art here. You can copy and paste now, which is actually how I did this.  So let's make our wavy line here. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to set, whoops, set down. It doesn't want me to draw off the screen. Come on, there you go. I'm going to set down what looks like the loop point. So this is seamless. I think those match. And then I can do anything I want in the middle. I may be off by a pixel, let's find out. There's not a way to offset this that I know of in the paint package here.  Or if it's off by a pixel, that's okay actually in this case because it probably just looks like the curvature there. So that's the way the parallax works. Delete this. I think I can use this selector. This was one of the things that was a great improvement. You can grab stuff and scale it. I think you can delete it. Yeah, just drag and delete.  It's not Photoshop, but it's pretty excellent for an in-browser all in one. So that is the scroller now. If I zoom out here, I'm getting smart alecky remarks from Todd. I said, wait a second, what's a pixel? I will not. I will not take the bait. So let's see also what I wanted to show. I'm going to just reconstruct this bit here and bring back these two forever loops that are running. A lot of this stuff, if you go back and watch some of my Make Code Arcade videos or look at some of the guides or the tutorials from Microsoft on Make Code, it'll explain how some of these other things are working. One really nice new feature is the play sound, which you used to just have some canned sound files. Now there's a little synthesizer engine in here. So if you click on the play sound block, which you can get just by heading over to Music, and you'll see here's the play sound that just these were the canned sound effects, and all those. But now you can use this sort of synthesizer sound block, and you can play it back right in there. You can change the waveform, and I'm going to go just to the most basic I can here. If it'll let me, this should just be a continuous tone, and you can have it change pitch over time. You can tell it how long to go. So let's say a second. So that's going from 5,000 Hertz down to zero basically. Anything below 20, I'm not going to hear probably. And you can also have the volume change over time, sort of like an envelope, although it's just linear, simple. So there you can see it just faded out, or you can have it ramp in. And you can also change the interpolation type. So the curve, I think this is just for the frequency, I'm not sure. You can see, yeah, it's not for the volume envelope. I'll leave this all cranked up. But you can see here's a logarithmic curve versus more of a other shape, exponential curve, or linear, which is continuous. And then you got different wave types. So we had that sine wave. Here's the square wave. Cool sounding. Let's get the, let's just have that be a continuous tone. It's doing something. What effect is it doing there? That's interesting. It sounds like it's got some PWM something happening. There's a saw wave here. Let's get that a lot lower. You'll hear a lot of these harmonics. Nice. And there's a triangle wave. A little softer fewer harmonics. And noise, which is great for explosion sounds, hit sounds. All right. It sounds like a bomb or something like that. If you make a nice high-pitched one and make it short, it's good for a little percussive sound. So really cool sound engine. Very excited about that. It also has a gallery, so you can go pick some presets and figure out how they made them. I like that. So if we go and look now. Oh wait. I think we have to double-click it. Yeah. So here's the water drop sound. That's a sine wave. 150 milliseconds, raising from 200 hertz to 600 hertz. And then the volume is tanking off quickly. Cool sound. So of course there are much more fully featured synthesis engines and web versions of these sorts of things online, but this one's built right in to make code, which is fantastic. So now you can see we've got a play sound that's going to play that little water drop that I think I can undo and get back to the one I had in there, which was this. And that's my sound when one of the Shuri projectiles hits Namor. And then when you get hit, when the player gets hit, we have this sound. Ow, hurts more. So those are two really cool new features that are the scrolling effect with parallax and the new sound little synth engine there. Really cool. Love those. And then the other thing that I added that I've just started to add now, and this was the more suggestion was some NeoPixels. So I've got one of these NeoPixel strips that has a three-pin JST connector there. And you can see the three-pin connectors. We have two of them under here. So I'm going to plug into D3 and give you a down-shoot view of this as well. And I'll open up the NeoPixel reel a little bit there. So let me find my down camera about this one. So this is a little dark down here, but you can see a little NeoPixel strip there. So to use these, I've done two things. I have gone into extensions and added light plug-in, which deals with NeoPixels and dot-stars. And I've added the feather plug-in, which gives us the pin-outs that are necessary to plug into one of the pins, in this case D3. So here are those two... I was testing this before the show. So here are those two blocks. You'll see they're grayed out right now because they're not inside... They're not going to run. They're not inside of any kind of a loop that's running. So I'm going to go ahead and put these. These are setup blocks. I'll put these right at the beginning here. Sure, right at the top, let's say. So now, when I upload the code to the board here, so I'm going to plug this in over USB, now it will attempt to light up this NeoPixel strip. I told it to have 30, I think that's accurate. I think there's a 1 meter or half meter with 30 pixels on it. And so I'm going to... Inside of Makecode, you can see here I'm doing a pick hardware. I'm going to tell it I've got a PyGamer. Then I will connect to the device using WebUSB. You don't see this window here, but it just asked me to pick a device and I see PyGamer available. And now when I hit download over USB, there's a little USB symbol, so instead of it just putting a UF2 or a PNG on my desktop, it will flash the device. So I think we'll see this go to the bootloader screen here. So this is what you're used to seeing on any of our devices that have a TFT built-in or screen built-in when it's ready for you to drag on a UF2, except it's programming it right over WebUSB inside of Chrome. Look, now we've got our LEDs lit up and it lit up the whole batch, so I think that was right. I think this is a strip of 30. In fact, I'll take it off the reel here. Let's see them all. So now they light up at the beginning.  So how about we'll look inside of the light and then in more. So I've got strip animations. So if I grab a strip animation here, how about when we shoot? So when I fire, this is my A button, all the stuff that happens when I press the A button, I will do a comet animation, let's say, for about 200 milliseconds. And to make it a little more obvious, I will turn the strip off at the beginning. So maybe we'll just see it turn on so we know that it's working and then we'll turn it off. So I will, first of all, I'm going to change that color. Let's make this purple. And then how about after the title stuff, I will set that off. And to do that, I'll just set it to black. Now this is stuff you can't verify inside of the simulator because we're doing hardware stuff. But now I'm going to go ahead and download that. Jack in the shop says dang them late. Hi Jack in the shop. Welcome over on YouTube land. So now it's reflashing the board and we should see these light up purple and I think it won't go black until after the titles run through.  So while it's doing the function off to the side that I made called title, those were on and then it turned to black. So now when I press A, you can see it, it's trying to run through frames of that animation. Okay, so this was not a good choice, but so I want something else for that. But you can see they're still just sort of blue and purple until I press the A button and then they light up the animate. So let's pick a different, let's see if any of the other canned animations because those are the easiest will give us what we want, maybe Comet. I'm going to actually close the, stop the simulator and just hide it just because I don't need to see it for this stuff. So here in my animation thing I will do, oh chase rather, yeah that's what I wanted. Let's see what that looks like. So I'll go ahead and download that and then if not you can use Photon which is a different animation library for LEDs inside of MakeCode so I can customize more so I can have a strip of color flash through the whole thing. Hello, Sir Prince a lot. Just got in, welcome. Over in our Discord chat. Okay, so it's booting up and it'll turn it off and here we go. Yeah, so I think what I'd do here is either let it use these animations and then when I release the A button I could have it turn them off or we could customize our own Photon animation. So I won't do that here. I'll build that up and I'm going to put together a little guide on how to make this and the code. And let's see, I think that's it. That's what I wanted to show about this. Let me know in the chat if you've got any other questions about how to put the game together. The tutorial for this, I'm trying to think what URL will get you there. I think maybe if you just go to MakeCode Arcade. Yeah, just go to arcade.makecode.com and you'll see there's a Wakanda Forever, Black Panther Wakanda Forever tutorial. This is great. I won't do it for you now but I went through it. It shows you how to build a real simple game, a different game than this one using these really cool assets that are available for some characters. And one other thing I noticed too, I think this was not available last time I used MakeCode Arcade is you can now do scaling on your art assets, which is great. So if you create an asset or get an asset that's say 16 by 16 pixels, you can just have it pixel doubled or more. You can kind of go up to whatever you want. I don't know if it cares about powers or two. I used them. So you'll see here this is the character. This is 16, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I think it's 24 pixels wide and maybe that same height. I have a scaler that's just bringing it up to 32 pixels. If I want a really huge character on here, I'm just going to scale it up. You can see this actually in real time here. I'll now have a huge Shuri. Namor doesn't stand a chance. Also actually a little easier to hit. Hey, look out! And that seems to run great real fast. I made an attempt to do some real time scaling and at least the way I tried it, it slowed it way down. So I'm not so sure about that. It might just be pre-scaling it before you play and then it knows what pixels it has. But a really cool feature because if you've got a piece of art that kind of works but at the wrong size, you don't want to redraw that and you used to have to do that. Now you can use this scaling. There's a couple places to do this so you can look around inside of sprites and then I think there might be an extension for scaling as well. But there's some scale stuff you can do in here too. So really cool new features. Great job. Let's see, I think that's it for that. So that's the project I'm working on. And what else? I want to remind you thanks to our CRT find, my CRT find over here. I decided the coupon code this week is scanlines.  So just head on over to the Adafruit stores, throw some cool stuff in your cart and then type in scanlines and the coupon code on the way out. That'll get you 10% off and that's good on any real stuff. So you can't use that on software or the gift certificates or the subscriptions.  Now that Phil and Namor are going to be out for a little while, you can find this show right here, same place wherever you're watching it, except it's going to be Wednesdays at 8pm Eastern time, the same time slot as you are used to seeing Ask an Engineer, except now it's going to be Ask a Bachelor of Arts, namely me. So I'll get my pipe and smoking jacket, I guess, and run my show. I don't think I'll make any huge changes to the show, but let me know if you've got any particular stuff you want to see me talk about, take part, deal with, build, whatever. Software stuff, hardware stuff, we'll be doing all that just on a different time slot. So with that I will say thank you everyone so much for stopping by, thanks to our Discord, all of our good people over there in the Discord, as well as our YouTube chat, glad to see a bunch of people in there hanging out, and that is going to do it again. So I will see you next week, Wednesday evening for Adafruit Industries on John Park, and this has been JP's, no, this has been John Park's Workshop. That's the one. Thanks everyone, bye-bye.


The Ministry of Health, Wellness and Early Affairs has received confirmation from the Caribbean Public Health Agency of 12 cases of the COVID-19 sub-variant XBB1.5 in St. Lucia. This sub-variant of Omicron has been circulating in China, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and also other countries in the region. The cases are distributed in most districts in St. Lucia, although the northern and central regions of the country are most affected. We estimate that this variant is already widely distributed across the country at this point. Seven of the cases received are male and five are female. The ages range from five to 74 years with one hospitalized case. At present, we have sequenced about 13 sub-variants of Omicron circulating in country. Based on its genetic characteristics and growth rate estimates, XBB1.5 is likely to contribute to increases in case incidents. There is also evidence for increased risk of transmission, and it seems more resistant than earlier strains to antibodies, reinfection, and vaccines. Symptoms range from the typical cold symptoms, such as a cough to shortness of breath to cases that require medical attention. Other symptoms include fever, chills, fatigue, muscle or body aches, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. These symptoms typically last five to seven days. The symptoms of this new variant has become less severe due to prior infection and immunization. Persons with this COVID-19 sub-variant are also at risk for long COVID, which causes a wide range of health problems that can last for weeks or months or longer. Vaccination and staying up-to-date on COVID-19 boosters remains an effective form of protection from serious illness, hospitalization and death. In addition to COVID-19, there are other respiratory viruses in circulation, which may possess similar clinical presentation to COVID-19. In several countries, there has been a steep increase in cases of influenza and respiratory sensitivity to the virus. To reduce the impact at this point, the following measures are advised. Keep healthy and build immunity by consuming healthy foods daily, such as fruits and vegetables, increased fluids, and regular exercise. Maintain sanitary measures at home, at work, and at school. Ensure regular cleaning and disinfection of surfaces and cough etiquette. Persons with chronic health conditions are advised to ensure compliance to medication to keep their condition controlled. Mask use is strongly advised. All symptomatic persons should wear face masks if interacting with others or in public. Persons with symptomatic should be managed based on their symptoms, with panadol, cough syrup, increased fluids, and rest. If your condition worsens, visit the nearest wellness center or private health facility. Children who are exhibiting active infections should be kept at home until they recover. Ensure face mask use if they interact with others. The influenza and COVID-19 vaccines are available at all wellness centers and especially the high-risk patients advised to get them. The Ministry of Health, Wellness, and Early Affairs will continue to monitor the situation and provide guidance as needed.


The Allgäu Public Observatory lies amidst the picturesque landscape of southern Germany. As night falls, a team of scientists and engineers prepares to field-test a very cool piece of technology, a laser guide-star unit which will soon be on its way to ESO's Paranal Observatory. This is the ESOcast. Cutting-edge science and life behind the scenes at ESO, the European Southern Observatory, exploring the ultimate frontier with our host Dr J, aka Dr Joe Liske. Hello and welcome to the ESOcast. Today we are at the Allgäu Public Observatory in southern Germany, because this is where a team of scientists and engineers from ESO is testing a brand-new laser guide-star unit. What's that you ask? Let me explain. Now we've all looked at the night sky and seen the stars twinkling. Now the stars themselves, of course, don't do any twinkling. The twinkling is caused by turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. As the starlight crosses the atmosphere, it encounters different pockets of air with different temperature and pressure, which bend the light in different ways, thus causing distortions. In fact, you can see this effect often in broad daylight, whenever you look towards a distant object on the horizon on a hot day. Now the twinkling is all very pretty and even romantic, but for us astronomers it's actually a real problem, because it means that our images are blurred and less sharp than they could be if it wasn't for the atmosphere. So what do we do about it? Essentially, we need a method to cancel out the distortions, in effect to untwinkle the stars. The way to do it is to bounce the starlight off a mirror that is slightly deformed in exactly the right manner to cancel out the distortions. But how do you know how to deform your mirror? As Iso's very large telescope observes the sky, a specialised computer can pick a bright star and constantly monitor how it twinkles, deducing the atmospheric conditions above the telescope many hundreds of times a second. The computer then sends commands to a series of devices attached to a mirror in the telescope, bending and flexing it precisely in time with the atmospheric turbulence, cancelling out the distortion in the images. So for this correction process to work, you need a really bright star in the fuel of view of your telescope. But bright stars are very few and far between. And remember that the VLT was designed to image only a very small part of the sky at any given time. So for most observations there just won't be a bright star in the fuel of view of the VLT. So what do we do now? Well, we make our own. 90 kilometres above our heads in the upper atmosphere is a relatively thin layer of sodium. If you fire a powerful laser beam into the sky, you can make these sodium atoms glow, thereby effectively creating an artificial star for the computer to lock onto. In 2006, Iso installed the Southern Hemisphere's first laser guide star on the VLT. This system greatly improves the telescope's power, meaning that the VLT can make even sharper images than Hubble for certain types of observation. But this existing system has limitations. It can only create one artificial star at once, meaning it can only correct the telescope's vision for a small part of the sky at any one time. It's also very bulky. The equipment has to be kept in a separate laboratory and the laser beam fed along an optical fibre to the telescope. Based on the experience obtained with this first system, ESA engineers have been working to build a much improved new laser guide star unit. So Domenico, this is it. This is the laser. It's incredibly small. It fits in the back of this small telescope. That's amazing. Yeah, so this is what we've been working on the R&D for the past five years to make a 20-watt laser very compact and lightweight that can be mounted directly on the back of the telescope. So we had to develop fibre lasers first and then develop this kind of laser heads. So you've just said it's a 20-watt laser. That's quite a bit of power, isn't it? Yeah, this is the power we need actually for the next generation laser guide star systems. And right now, for example, in Paranal, we have about 5 watts in the sky. So this is quite a jump in power. Is the laser beam that comes out at the end of this telescope, is it dangerous? What happens if I put my hand into it? If you put your hand, you'll feel warm. But you don't have to look into the beam. Okay, so it won't burn my hand. But what about airplanes? Is it dangerous for them? It's not dangerous for the equipment, so for the airplane. It's dangerous for the eyes of the passengers. And this laser is above the maximum permitted exposure. So we have to avoid the planes across the beam. In fact here, where we are now, we have obtained a no-fly zone above us so we don't have a risk to hit a plane. The new device is more reliable, easier to maintain and much smaller. In fact, as we've just seen, the whole unit fits into one small package which is easy to mount on a launch telescope. Because it's so much smaller, up to four of these lasers can be installed on a single telescope, correcting the VLT's image over a much wider field of view. So what's happening here in Germany is that our team is testing the new prototype to make sure that it works perfectly before it gets shipped to Paranal. The facilities here at the Algoi Public Observatory are perfect for this. And what's more, they're only a short drive from ESIL headquarters. Laser guide stars like this will be crucial for the forthcoming European Extremely Large Telescope, which will use adaptive optics routinely. The telescope will be many times the size of today's biggest telescopes which should mean much sharper image quality. But this great image quality will depend on how well the adaptive optics and the laser guide stars work. Pioneering new technologies like these will make a big difference to the world's most advanced observatories of the future, especially the EOT. This is Dr Jay signing off for the ESILcast. Join me again next time for another cosmic adventure. While we were filming this episode, we got a stark reminder of why ESO's telescopes are located on the mountaintops of northern Chile and not here in the hills of southern Germany. Thankfully storms like this are not something you ever see at Paranal.


Good evening. This is Malo7, one of the most famous and recognizable faces to star on Valve's catalogue of video games. Across the last two decades, he's accumulated what amounts to a small cult following. And he's become more popular than some of Valve's actual characters. But who is he? And what is his story? Malo7, as an asset, was developed for Valve's game Half-Life 2 sometime in either late 2001 or early 2002. It's based on the likeness of a man named Michael S. Smith, of whom very little information is known about. There are leaked cut assets with him assuming the role of a lowly worker for the Combine, or as part of the crew for the Borealis ship. In the final game, his character can be regularly spotted as a generic citizen, even as one of the first faces you'll spot after G-Man finishes his opening monologue. But there are also some named citizen characters who use his model. The first and most memorable is Boxcar Joe, who first appears in the Root Canal chapter. Joe and his Vortigaunt friend take refuge in a red cargo railcard they've fitted with a carpet, a couple mattresses, a map of the canals, and a television. Joe explains that he's in charge of keeping a lookout for station one, which he lets Gordon pass through his outpost to get to. However, after leaving, Gordon quickly finds out that the main camp is already under Combine occupation, and sadly, we never hear from Boxcar Joe again. Interesting to note is that Joe and his Vort accomplice can both be seen watching a TV broadcast of G-Man, but they shut it off when they notice Gordon in the room with them. This casts some interesting questions about how much Joe knows about the G-Man, but I guess it doesn't really matter since he all but certainly gets slaughtered by civil protection moments after Gordon's departure, just like every other minor character in the game. Before we move on, I want to mention Ross Scott's rendition of this scene in Freeman's Mind 2, where his portrayal of Gordon gets trigger-happy on Joe's Vort friend as a result of PTSD from the events of the original Half-Life. It's a subversive, funny, and memorable highlight of the series. The second named character in Half-Life 2 utilizing Male 07 is Sandy, who appears in one of the most popular and often referenced scenes in the game. In the chapter's sand traps, Sandy is seen tending to his injured friend Laszlo, who gets tragically killed by Ant-Lion shortly after. Sandy is the one who famously dubs Laszlo as The finest mind of his generation. These bits are pretty memorable on their own, and you might imagine they're a pretty big contributing factor to the model's popularity, but it's actually after Half-Life 2 that Male 07's story starts picking up. For starters, you might not know that he appears in the Counter-Strike series. Indeed, his first appearance outside of Half-Life was as a dead guard on the Counter-Strike source map DE Train, which was added to the game on February 24th, 2005, and the same model was reused on DE Nuke a couple years later. I'd attribute the first driving factor for Male 07's popularity in the community, however, to Gordon Froman, the goofy protagonist of a popular early Garry's Mod webcomic called Concerned, that started in May of 2005. Concerned is a light-hearted, fan-made prequel to Half-Life 2, in which Froman traverses all the same areas from the game and constantly gets mistaken for Freeman, even running into characters like Alex. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's cute, and well put together for its time. A trailblazer in Male 07 culture for sure. Of course, Male 07 briefly reprised his role as a generic citizen in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Half-Life 2 Episode 2, shortly after, in 2006 and 2007. And there was also going to be a Male 07 character in Episode 2 called Nigel, who would appear during the Hunter Chopper boss fight, but he was ultimately cut. Now, while Gordon Froman might have been the original wacky Male 07 fan character, Concerned will always live in the shadow of Half-Life. Full Life Consequences! On January 23rd, 2008, Male 07 debuted as Gordon Freeman's Blaker brother, John Freeman, in this massively viral Garry's Mod machinima series based on a notoriously bad fan fiction. I would give a full-out synopsis, but I don't want to spoil anything about it in case you haven't seen it. Full-Life Consequences was such a big hit that if you approach someone who's been in the G-Mod or Half-Life community for any meaningful length of time, there's a good chance they can belt the opening scene out to you by memory. Hey, do you remember Half-Life Full-Life Consequences? Yeah, absolutely. Do you by chance remember how that opened? Can you belt out as much of the intro as you remember? John Freeman was working in an apartment, no working in an office building. It was really one of the game's earliest viral inside jokes. Making its waves across the internet just a couple months after Episode 2's release. There was even a viral video called Furries in a Blender that remixed various clips from Full-Life Consequences into a techno track. But I'll warn you, watching it will instantly warp you back to 2009.  I made a mistake. Apparently Furries in a Blender is the name of the artist that made this song, not the name of the song, so my bad. It was eventually discovered that the original fan fiction was a troll, and not the work of an eight-year-old child like a lot of people claimed. But that doesn't really have any impact on the videos themselves, nor their legacy. I have to kill vast and bullets too slow. Full-Life Consequences is a staple of Gary's mod history, and if I'm being honest here, I'd say John Freeman is the number one driving force behind Mellow 7's popularity. But we're not done here just yet. Another popular example of Mellow 7 was Stanley from the original 2011 Half-Life 2 mod, The Stanley Parable. This mod swept the internet due to its novel concept, that being a game in which all branching endings existed once rather than as separate timelines. And it was eventually remade as a standalone game that proceeded to go even more massively viral. With the release of the Stanley Parable HD remix in 2013, Mellow 7 was swapped out for a new original face, which also carried on to the ultra-deluxe version that released earlier this year. I still can't believe they retconned him out. Justice for Stanley 07. In either January or February of 2013, Mellow 7 became the mascot of popular quasi-retired Gmod animator Das Boshit, and he remained such to this day. I interviewed Das Boshit a couple months ago, by the way, so check that out if you want to know who he's been up to lately. From 2014 to 2017, Mellow 7 may not have had many memorable roles, but his face was certainly cemented in a lot of people's brains around then, since those were some of Gary's mods' most popular years. The latest blip I recall involving the old guy was the creepy Gmod guy getting off the floor video that went viral in 2021 on the cusp of the whole Gmod-era G era. You're up to the Gmod. By the way, if you didn't know, this video is made with the stop-motion helper add-on and a quick jump cut. You can tell by how the player's health changes. Anyway, what's the point of this video? Well, I suppose there's not much of one, other than, I guess, helping new Half-Life fans understand why this model is so popular. I also think it's pretty funny that there's an ongoing minor cult following around a random guy named Mike, who probably forgot about this gig 20 years ago. I hope you enjoyed the video. He went on the platform up to the roof and got on the motorcycle. Yeah, something like that. Uh, I can't give you my license. The pants were dead. The pants were dead. Yada, yada, yada. Zombie ghosts, you get the idea. You shouldn't come here. Oh, you shouldn't. How could I forget that part, dude?


How's it going everybody? Dato Doi here with another Dragon Ball FighterZ video, and for this video I thought we'd cover the top 5 characters in Dragon Ball FighterZ, at least in my opinion. As always feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree with anything I say in this video. This is a very debatable topic of course so I would love to hear all of your thoughts on this. Before we get into the real heavy hitters though I do want to go into an honorable mentions list of sorts, just to name a few we have Android 21, GoTanks, and Super Saiyan Vegeta. Android 21 of course has a lot of good damaging tools and can really control the neutral with her long reaching normals. Honestly if I was listing all of the things that made her good in neutral we'd be here for a lot longer than I think an honorable mention needs time for, but yeah she's really great in the neutral. If you play this character you should excel at locking down your opponent's space and eventually leading into a big combo. GoTanks is here simply because of his re-stand efforts, his insane block strings, and out of all these characters I feel like GoTanks could have made top 5 if I gave this list a little more time as we watch the meta develop. Super Saiyan Vegeta has always been a pretty solid character by himself but what really made him great was his assist and with the nerfs to it I feel like he has fallen down the tiers at least a little. The assist is still godlike and probably the best in the game, but it's nowhere near what it used to be so that puts Vegeta comfortably in my honorable mentions list. As these are just my honorable mentions I really don't feel like they need to be tweaked in any way. They're plenty strong enough as it is and they don't really break the game in any way so I would be perfectly fine with just seeing these characters stay the way they are. With the honorable mentions out of the way we can finally get to the top 5 starting with of course number 5 this one was the hardest I was trying to decide between two characters that being Goku Black and Android 16 and in the end I decided to go with Android 16. Clearly because after the nerf he's no longer what he used to be at all in my opinion. The hard knockdown changes really took away from his mix up and it just feels like you're fighting a really fair and balanced character now and the reason he still gets the number 5 slot over Goku Black is that I feel like he has a lot more grimy stuff. Don't get me wrong I expect a lot of people to disagree with me here and that's fine because I feel like if it were a different day and I just faced a really good Goku Black I could probably see myself going the other way on this one but as of right now I'm going to say Android 16 still has a spot in the top 5 and Goku Black gets booted back to probably 6. As for what I would change really the answer is not much they already got rid of a lot of what really bothered me with Android 16 as a character and a lot of what made him feel unfair was the fact that any time he touched you he could practically get a free hard knockdown and follow it up with that mix up it was a really annoying thing to play against. Now that that's gone really Android 16 doesn't bother me as much add to that the fact that they took away the projectile armor on his 5 heavy and down heavy and you're looking at a character that feels like a much more toned down version of what he was in the past. And as if number 5 wasn't a hard enough choice I also struggled with picking a number 4 this came down to in between number 4 and number 3 and in the end I had to go with number 4 being Bardock he's a character I have a lot of experience with so I can probably talk about this character the most really what Bardock specializes in is good block strings great damage highly effective when you utilize with assist can cover a lot of screen space using his 236L easy sparking to death combos and a whole lot more really the only thing this character truly struggles with is his poor range game that is easily made up with the fact that you can either a cover it with assist or be just really make sure that you're super dashing when your opponent tries to fire any normal key blast and make sure you're constantly being aggressive and on the move when they're firing beams just make sure to block and not get hit of course but other than that Bardock should serve you extremely well now as for what I would tone down with Bardock I got to say there's a lot of areas you can go with this you could do something to change the way his level one Saiyan spirit works that would kind of make the character a little less fun though so that's not really a nerf I would like to see you could change the way his auto combo works to allow for not so easy pickups after combos but I feel like that's only solving half of the problem really he can still just convert with two medium and really if you have to take drastic measures you could probably go with a little less frame advantage on Bardock overall if he catches you in certain moves you are going to have to block for an even longer amount of time but other than that Bardock is just a character that really excels with the system mechanics in Dragon Ball Fighters so I think he's always a character that we're going to see hover around at high level play after Bardock coming in at number four we have Kid Buu coming in as the third best character in Dragon Ball Fighters this guy is just a monster when you're blocking against him he has an insane amount of mix ups and great tools that allow him really serve as a great team player which is a really weird role for Kid Buu of all characters to serve but regardless he serves it very well his assist serves as an amazing lockdown tool really once your opponent blocks it they're in for a wild ride his DHG is amazing his level one brings them up into the air and then back down and for certain teams that allows them to get off two level ones with the same character resulting in huge damage setups his candy beam places him from all the way across the screen and if it lands right on top of the opponent really easy conversions there I've already covered it but I'll say it again the mix ups with Kid Buu are insane certain setups are going to leave you scratching your head as to how you just got hit by that and once he hits you he can lead into even big damage by himself and of course this character with sparking glass is just a whole another nightmare to deal with really if you see Kid Buu on the enemy team I would probably suggest trying to get him out of the way first if that is of course an option for you as far as changes to the character that would make him feel a bit more fair there's not too much that I can actually suggest here a lot of what makes Kid Buu so oppressive is the fact that he's very ambiguous in terms of his cross ups so maybe addressing that in some way could help out of course you could always hit his assist but I feel like that might not be the best way to go about doing things in this case maybe changing the way his level one scales combos or just the way his level one operates might be a way to go about things but because of my lacking experience against Kid Buu and playing as Kid Buu really I don't know what the secret would be to making this character feel a bit more fair overall coming in at number two we have adult Gohan the man the myth the legend himself this character has been running rampant at high levels of play mostly due to how effective he is on block and how easy it is to mix somebody up with adult Gohan of course he also has the added on bonus of having really good combos as well but like I said most importantly he's good on block and he can mix people up really easily and this is mostly due to how fast and ambiguous he is whether he's going high or low if he crosses you up and holds down key he's the only character that can fast fall and then he also has a light that hits low first really quickly and of course added on to that when he's hitting you low he is in a standing position because really he's just stepping on your toes so really it's hard to block if you're not already predicting he's going to go for that now in the last patch Gohan did receive a couple of pretty sizable nerfs he can no longer get a hard knockdown by using his ex backhand slap which is very good and his ex legs don't entirely lock up the opponent now if they wanted to nerf this character even more they could easily lock up a few of the things he can do now behind some of the leveling up mechanics he has as of now it's mostly just for one bar you get access to everything and then for more bars you get a little access to a little extra damage on the side where instead they could unlock it slower over the cost of more bars or if they want they could just remove his fast fall or change up the way his lights work that hits low all of these things would hurt gohan uh how much would be the question and finally at number one we have sell the definition of perfection pretty fitting character choice overall if they were going to make a top tier uh much like the lore sell is comprised of a lot of different elements all of which work together very well to create the perfect fighter he's got a little bit of everything he's got good vanish combos he's got a good assist he can help out with the team but also makes great use out of assists he can easily get people to the corner keep them in the corner get huge damage off of corner combos and has great supers to dhc into his block strings and mix ups are also very strong and you have to consider that when you're playing defense against him and overall it makes the character a very well rounded character in my book and well rounded in the sense that in some of these aspects he's better than a lot of other characters where in others he's at least tied with them to nerf this character i don't think would really be too hard all you have to do is take away at least some of his tools or at least tone them down in some regard uh that could either be block strings mix ups supers really anything they want to target they can target with sell and pretty much get away with at least making him a passable character just not as high tier as he as he is right now and with that said that's my list for the top five best characters and dragon ball fighters again i do want to stress that this game is very well balanced any character and any team can win against even a team comprised of the three best characters again let me know your thoughts on who the best characters are in this game and let me know down below if you'd like to see a video like this but covering the five worst characters and instead of how they can be nerfed we can replace that with how they can be buffed while you're down in the comments if you like this video and channel make sure to hit the like button and subscribe i'm dato do ya and i'll see you in the next video


Hi, if you have a calathea mosaica and you see that the edges of the leaves are brown and crispy, this video is for you. There are many possible factors that may be causing the leaves of your plant to brown and be crispy and dry. And in this video, I'm going to talk about the four most common ones. The first one is lack of humidity. Now as you know, this is a calathea, and calatheas are tropical plants. This one specifically comes from Brazil, so they love high humidity levels. In my experience, my calatheas will thrive and be happy only if I have them at a level of 50 to 60% humidity. So if you see that the edges of the leaves are browning and drying, this may be a good sign that your calathea needs a little bit more humidity. Some things that you can do to increase the humidity for your plant is to place it on a humidity tray or close to a humidifier. I also have all of my calatheas together because they help each other with humidity levels. One very important tip related to humidity that I can give you is not to place your calathea close to a heating vent or the AC, because the air tends to be really dry there. The second possible reason for your leaves to be browning and crispy at the edges is under watering. This plant likes the soil to be moist at all times. Now, note that I'm saying moist but not super wet because we don't want to over water our plants. But yes, we want to make sure that the soil is moist at all times. So what I recommend is that you have a stable watering schedule. So the way that I do this is I always have a reminder in my cell phone so I have a reminder twice a week just to check the soil of my calathea mosaica. And I generally water every week or so. Of course in the winter I water less often because the plant goes a little bit more dormant and it's not growing so actively. So the best advice that I can give you is to always check the soil. Check it before you water. And the way that I check is that I stick my finger inside the soil and once I feel that it is drying out then I water. So yes, always remember to keep the soil moist at all times. The third possible reason for this issue is the water quality. Now although this is the calathea mosaica so it's gonna be easier to care for than other calatheas. And I can tell you this one is not as dramatic as other calatheas, it still prefers good quality water. And as a calathea it will tend to be more sensitive to tap water. This is because depending on your location tap water may have some chemicals or some minerals are very harsh on your plant so it is always better to use other types of water like distilled water or rain water. But of course if you don't have access to this and you prefer to use tap water you can still always filter the water before you use it for your calathea. This is what I do because the water here is really harsh. Or you can place the water in a bucket and leave it there for 24 to 48 hours. In this period some of the chemicals will evaporate so the water will not be so harsh on your plant. And the last reason is light. Now you may know that this calathea will be happier in brighter light conditions than other calatheas. For example the calathea medallion or the calathea rufibarba they tend to prefer lower light conditions but this one will be happy with bright conditions. But of course too much direct light may be very damaging to this plant. So always avoid direct light and try to provide bright but indirect sunlight. Of course if you have any other experience or you have encountered other factors make sure to comment below. I cannot show you that the whole community will appreciate it and if you are on this video and you would like to see more possible reasons make sure to go down to the comments and see what other people are saying. And as always I will see you in the next one. Okay, ciao!