Good evening, I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this forum with Helen MacDonald as she discusses her new collection of essays, Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald's best-selling debut, H is for Hawk, brought the astonishing story of her relationship with her goshawk, Mabel, to global critical acclaim, establishing her as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. In her review in the New York Times, Vicki Constantine Cook observed, writing a great bird book calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen MacDonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor's fierce essence in her own with words that mimic feathers so impossibly pretty we don't notice their astonishing engineering. While the background of H is for Hawk is memoir, the book also features a shadow biography of T. H. White, an author best known for his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, who also wrote a book on goshawks which Helen MacDonald read as a child. I note that here because Ms. MacDonald conducted much of her research at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the repository of the T. H. White archival materials, a potent reminder of the power of historical records to illuminate the present. In Vesper Flights, Helen MacDonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private Vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen MacDonald invites us into her most intimate experiences, observing massive migrations of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's popular forests. It's a pleasure to welcome tonight's moderator back to the National Archives. Tom Putnam is the former director of the Kennedy Library and served as the acting director of the Office of Presidential Libraries before becoming director of the Concord Museum, home to a number of iconic artifacts from our nation's history, including for example the world's largest collection of objects related to Henry David Thoreau, one of the 19th century's most important and insightful nature writers. At the conclusion of tonight's conversation with Helen MacDonald, the Concord Museum will officially launch a new website that is part of a $3 million gallery redesign effort that received major grant funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. This new interactive and multimedia microsite uses artifacts and manuscripts to bring Thoreau's work to life for national and international audiences. Lastly, we are pleased that this evening's forum falls between two virtual film screenings featuring classic documentaries from the motion picture holdings of the National Archives in partnership with the 2022 Environmental Film Festival in the nation's capital. This past weekend, we aired Pair Lorenz's 1937 classic, The River, about the exploitation and misuse of the Mississippi River. This Sunday afternoon, please join us for a screening of The City, which was produced for the 1939 New York World's Fair as a call to rebuild America's cities in the form of planned communities. I thank all of you who are watching this evening for joining us at this special hour since Helen MacDonald is coming to us live from her home in England. Let me conclude by stating what a great fan I am of Helen MacDonald's writing and have enjoyed reading these new essays about observation, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us. It's a pleasure now to introduce Tom Putnam and Helen MacDonald. Thank you for tuning in this evening and a special thanks to you, Helen, for joining us to discuss really such a delightful new collection of essays. Again, I should note I'm coming from here from Concord, where we've also just opened a new temporary exhibit called The Live with Birds, William Brewster and Concord. William Brewster was a self-taught ornithologist at Harvard who did his field work here in Concord and we're doing that exhibit in consultation with Mass Audubon because William Brewster was the first president of Mass Audubon. But before we dig in and sample some of these essays, Helen, just tell us about the transition from writing memoir to using the essay form to captivate your audiences. Thank you so much. It's such a joy to be here and that was such a great introduction. I sort of feel I was too humble to speak. I'll try to do my best to be articulate and interesting. Yes, it's funny. Essays were always, I used to hate this word essay. It was a terrible fear of mine, mainly because I was the world's worst student at school. I would never do my homework. I would never finish essays. And I think partly that was just that I'm very, very disorganized person. So there was a kind of terror associated with the term. So memoir was, it was an extraordinarily long period that they just took to write because my father died in 2007 and I knew there was a story after that year with my hawk that had the kind of quality of myth almost. It was a sort of trip to the underworld and back with this hawk by my side. And I thought, this is a story that's bigger than me and older than me. And I want to write it. But I had to wait five years really before there was enough distance from that time to be able to write that memoir. And I think it's a book largely about love and grief. And I think that there are two different ways to write about grief. You can write in the middle of it like Joan Didion, for example, did in her extraordinary, you know, the year of magical thinking. That's a field madness. And then the ones where you have to you look back and you can treat yourself as a character and I had to do that. So that book came out and I remember, you know, being frightened of even sending the manuscript by publishers, I was convinced it was nonsense and completely content free.  And it became a success quite to my astonishment. And then from that, I began to be commissioned to write pieces, partly for very many different places, including the New York Times magazine. And at the same time I was on tour. So wherever I was on tour doing book talks, I would try and sneak off with my binoculars and do a bit of birding or nature sort of walking. And these all kind of came together into a series of essays. And I began to really love the form. And a lot of those essays are sort of refigured or rewritten here and there are lots of new ones. But basically, you know, cut to the chase, hello. What I love about these essays is that they are, they seem to be little kind of, they're very much like walks with a reader. There's always a reader rubbing my shoulder when I write them. And very often they are caused by something that I've seen or experienced or something that's puzzled me in the natural world or somewhere, you know, some analogous kind of frame. And I really want to puzzle them out. So I just try and work out as I write the essay, what is going on? Why do I think or feel or experience things the way I do? And that's really how they come about. And you really are a presence in the essays and they beautifully weave together both nature writing but also history, politics, culture. Talk to us about the weaving, it's in your own training that allows you I think to be so fast on both fields. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's not a, it's a more political book than I just for Hawk for a number of reasons. One of which is a very simple reason the world seems a much darker place since HSV was written with this sort of great, great rise in populism and all sorts of political, kind of the climate crisis becoming far more frightening, all sorts of things happening. And I was trained as a historian of science which is an amazing discipline to have been trained in. And basically what it says is, we are led to believe that science is a purely objective way of looking at the world. And of course, the way that science works, yes, that's how it proceeds. But the questions we ask of the world and the way we ask those questions are indelibly shaped by our society and our culture. And the way we value creatures and landscapes is also shaped by these things. And I always think of that the quote from Baudelaire, the greatest trick that the devil ever played was to persuade us he didn't exist. And that's what we do with nature. We're told that it's the one place free of human meaning but it's where we put all our deepest and darkest meanings. And I think trying to work out why we value certain things the way we do and why we don't value other natural things it has enormous importance in terms of conservation priorities and also just trying to work out where we are right now. I love the essay and it's the one I quoted when I invited you to the Numinous Ordinary in which you write that one encounters Numinous in those moments where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomenon. And I thought, let's start with human art and I say that opened actually with a painting. Swan's fill this book and tell us a little bit about the essay, Swan Upping and the painting that opens that essay. This is a really wonderful assignment I was given. I was asked by the New York Ties Magazine to write about Brexit. And of course, I did so by writing about one of the most bizarre and eccentric English nature rituals that is and that is Swan Upping. So Swan Upping is a kind of a yearly procession in small boats along the River Thames. All the swans in Britain are owned by the Queen, of course except for the ones on the Thames which are shared between, this is so England. They're shared between the Queen and two medieval trade guilds. It is what it is. So every year these boats with men wearing uniforms, red uniforms with swans feathers in their hats, they row down the Thames and they catch all the swans and they work out which ones belong to whom. It's apparently was renowned in the old days for being extremely drunken. But now it's quite scientific. They put sort of special metal bands and they do demographic studies on the swans. So it started with looking at this painting by the very glorious, the odd English artist, Stanley Spencer, who lived in a village called Cookham. And he did a painting of Swan Upping which involved someone carrying a swan by the river. And some of it was written before the First World War and those parts of the painting are very bright and shiny and sort of optimistic and sort of flat and beautiful. And then he finished it after he got back from the trenches. And those parts of the painting are very strange and muddy and dark. And the painting to me seemed to kind of symbolize a schism in the national moment in European history. And I saw that painting and did this just after Brexit and I felt again that there'd been this schism. So I went out with these swan uppers from Cookham on the boats and watched them do their thing and became totally absorbed in this kind of mythical, golden English era. It was like Agatha Christie meets kind of Downton Abbey. The whole thing was so glossy and these kind of political intuitions are very strong. And so it's really a sort of sense of accompanying these guys on this bizarre expedition while wrestling with what Englishness means to me and what it means to the country and where we are now. And there's lots of things, for example, there's a lot of talk about, immigrants killing and eating swans. And it turns out these are all pretty much mythical imagined kind of crimes. And but those reports still appear in the newspapers where the swan stands as the English body politics. So nature is a great place to look for stuff like this. I promise the archivist, I would ask a question to a book again about your archival research. So how did you stumble upon the history of that painting? Is that a well-known that he painted half of it before World War I? Or where do you do that kind of historic research? It's a really good question. So being trained as an academic for my sins, one of my favorite things in research. So give me a puzzle and I will instantly head to a library or now mainly just sort of sit on Google and order books and get very excited. So I knew of the painting, I looked at it online and I became fascinated by it. I ended up reading the biography of Stanley Spencer. And then that led to another biography of Stanley Spencer and eventually led me to this wonderful account of Spencer traveling to China in the 50s with a trade delegation or cultural delegation and having this bizarre conversation with Xihuan Lei, the Chinese Premier, and I'm sorry I'm going on but it's such a great moment. Oh, that's great. So he was this sort of chap in a raincoat. All these very great political people were on this trip and there was this weird weirdo with, he had his sandwiches in a little box and he had a raincoat. And there was a big speech where the Premier stood up and said, this is why I love China. And at the end of the speech, he said to all these assembled English people, how do you like, tell me how you like China? Do you like China? And Stanley Spencer stood up and said, do you know, have you ever heard of Cucum? Do you know Cucum? And all of the other delegation members were appalled by this, but it sparked this incredible conversation where the Chinese Premier and Stanley Spencer talked a lot about these specific things that happen in small villages. Both of them grew up in villages. They talked about looking after ducks and not wanting to be bombed and it was one of the most incredible diplomatic moments. And that made me start to think about how, looking at the small and the particular and the local can actually be quite a radical political act. So that again, the politics came out. But yeah, research is my thing. I'm like a dolphin in the surf when it comes to books like that. There's also a bit of serendipity. I think, I don't have a quote in front of me, but you're right. If you go out to have enlightenment, it doesn't come at all. But at one point, I think you're sitting on a park bench in a swan and swaddles up and sits next to you. It was very weird. You know, I'm not a, there's a lot more sort of spirituality in this book than I thought there would be. But there was this one time when I was kind of heartbroken for some terrible romantic disaster. And I was sitting by the river in Cambridge, feeling very sorry for myself, staring at the gray water. And this swan got out of the water and stomped towards me. And I was quite nervous. You know, these birds can genuinely break arms with their wings. I mean, they're very powerful. And it came right up to me and turned around with it sort of pressing against my side and then just sat down and went to sleep. And it was completely and utterly unexpected. And I got incredibly emotional about it. There's lots of emotion in this book. I just felt very, very full of gratitude. It was unexpected and beautiful.  You know, they really, they became real to me, I think, in that moment. Well, if swans represent the British monarchy, probably nothing represents the United States more than the Empire State Building, tell us about the SA high rise and what you did on the top of the Empire State Building. Yes, I went bird watching from the top of the Empire State Building, which is not my usual haunt. I've long been fascinated by migration. Bird migration is one of the great mysteries and astonishments of the world. And I know that there is a flyway up and down the east coast of America, which is just phenomenal, even today in the amount of birds and the amount of biomass that sort of carried. And a lot of it is very high up. So, you know, these birds fly so high you can't see them from the ground.  So I went up there and met this wonderful guy from Cornell and who studies, you know, the migration and watched birds uplit by the lights of the city below through binoculars. And again, it was very, very moving. You know, these birds were, they looked like trace of fire or embers coming through the air. And that experience, learning about that sense of what is in the air at that height completely changed the way I felt about not only the atmosphere and the air as a place but also the nature of cities. Because it turns out there's a whole new scientific discipline that studies the ecology of the air. It's called air ecology.  You know, there's tons of insects passing over our heads during the summer and all the animals that feed on them there's spores and bacteria.  So that was a very sublime experience even with a saxophone playing for half of it on the observation deck. I was gonna say there's a dark part of this story and it has to do with light. Tell us about the concern about light with these birds. Yes, so these birds, the way they navigate is extraordinary. You know, there's been a lot of work into how these tiny birds navigate north in the spring and then south in the fall and they use a combination of different ways of finding their way.  They use the gradients on the wind to locate themselves and they use kind of magnetic cues as well but a lot of them use light and they'll use the stars to navigate in the moon. And they become very disoriented by light, by human-made light.  I mean, anyone I think who's been after a big migration night in a big city alone, you know, in many parts of America have found birds dead on the ground that have hit windows. They don't understand glass. You know, it's not something flat surfaces that don't really exist like that in nature. So there's lots of wonderful, you know, movements to try and turn lights off on very heavy migration nights. And I think the most moving of all is the tribute in light sculpture in, as you know, the 9-11 sculpture or installation in New York where these twin hugely powerful beams of light are sent up into the sky to commemorate that terrible day. And those beams, the drawing birds like tractor beams and there are these, if you look on YouTube, there are these videos and you can see them there.  So Andrew Fonsworth, the man I went up there with actually is what part of a group that actually they monitor it and they get to turn the lights off every so often to let the birds of freedom from the light and let them go on. It's a very symbolic and moving and astonishing moment to witness. So let's talk about the title essay for flights and talk about swifts. First, there's a couple of essays about swifts but let's start with the first one. What does the term best for explain to the viewers what best for flights means? Best for flights. So it's a real term and it refers to these flights that swifts do. So swifts, as many of you know, are probably the most aerial of all birds. You know, most things like martens and swallows you'll see them perching on wires and on roof lines but swifts don't really land.  They can't really walk. If they land, they find it almost impossible to take off again.  So when I was a kid, you know, they were these birds that represented everything I couldn't ever get close to. They became these kind of almost transcendent creatures in my mind. And that's the flight to these every night they the birds will gather in on mass these extraordinary screaming wheeling flocks and they all ascend. I mean, it's such a magic metaphor and they ascend into darkness and people always thought they just went up there to sleep but it turns out that's not what they're doing at all because they come down again and they feed at night. They'll eat insects at night just like, you know in darkness. And scientists have only recently found out that these Vespa flights happen just before dawn as well and these birds will go up to maybe 8,000, 10,000 feet and they reach the apex of these flights precisely at the moment of nautical twilight. And what they're doing is orienting themselves. So they are profiling the temperature of the air as they climb and they're getting so high that the only wind that they feel comes from these sort of large scale weather systems. And also they can look up at this point and they can see the very clear polarization patterns in the sky that happen around that time and they can see the stars and they can see clouds and be 130, 140 miles out. So basically they're predicting the weather and they work out what they're gonna do next and they do that by watching each other and seeing where everyone else is going. And this became, as soon as they found out about it such an extraordinary metaphor for humanity. We all live our lives in the sort of complicated lower air with all those sort of taxing things that happen to us day to day. And this thinking about the Swiss made me think about how if we have the opportunity and we have the privilege it's important to climb higher and look at what's coming on our horizon and work together communally to predict and to fix problems. And I wrote this piece before the pandemic and now when I read it, it's all it seems to be about. It was published just after the pandemic began and it's difficult reading it now, knowing that the dark clouds on the horizon were a comfort. This is not an idea original to me but your essays similarly communicate with each other. There are themes that run throughout the book and it's really kind of a lovely thing.  Yes, Vespers are the last prayers of the day and some denominations and they just, it just means evening, you know. And I had my own little evening devotions when I was a child and I used to, it's still slightly embarrassing to say out loud. I used to lie in bed after a really rough day and to calm myself down and sleep, I used to count all the layers between me and the center of the earth. I used to go down, you know, cross to the middle and then I would count up through the sort of stratosphere and up and I do all the layers and I found this intensely calming, this sort of sense that there were all these spaces where there were no problems, no human things, nothing at all, but just to know that they were there, it was very, very grounding. So I think I had my own little imaginative sense when I was a child that used to ground me and make me feel calm. And now I just listen to audiobooks, which is a very different thing, but similarly meditative and similarly gets me off to sleep. In fact, so much so that I can't listen to the radio when I drive if it's human voices because I just feel like I'm drifting off, which is very dangerous. Well, let's turn to the other essay about Swiss, which is a rescue and tell the audience like your friend Judith and then that might set you up to do a short reading for us. Yes, Judith, dearest Judith. Judith, I'm very sorry to say, a very dear friend of mine passed away last year. She had been unwell and I feel so grateful to have known her and I'm very glad that I got to write about her. So she was this very quiet, quite precise woman who used to work, she's very English, but she worked for a while at one of the US Air Force bases in Britain in one of the offices there, but her special interest in love was natural history and she became a world-renowned rearer of orphaned swifts. And I got to finally got to hang out with actual swifts in front of me and hold these bizarre creatures and she would rear them and then she would release them. And these baby birds are astonishing as you can imagine, when these birds are in the air flying, they don't touch anything, they don't land, they don't read, they're not very sociable. But when they're babies, they are intensely cuddly, they're like kittens, they snuggle up against each other and they're constantly preening each other and she's keeping them in these boxes. And I had the opportunity to release one of these birds and I mean, I'd love, and may I read a bit? I'd love to read a bit about what it was like. Let's have a look. So again, very English setting, we went out onto the village cricket green to release them. And some people say that when you release a swift, you have to sort of throw them in the air. This is a very bad idea because if they can't fly properly, they'll just crash down and injure themselves. So what you do is you lay the bird flat on your palm and you lift it into the facing in the wind and you just wait. So that's what I was doing with this baby bird. It stares into the wind for a while then starts shivering. Anticipation, I think. Functional explanations. This bird is warming up its pectoral muscles already for flight. Emotional explanations. Anticipation, wonder, joy, terror. The sensitive plumes growing between the feathers of its wings and sleek sides are being brushed by the breeze, feeling their element for the first time. Nothing has visibly changed, but something is happening. Like an aircraft avionics system coming online as it powers up, blinking lights, engine check, check. But that doesn't work though, not quite as an analogy because what I am watching is a new thing making itself out of something else. There is no doubt in my mind that this is as much a transformation as a dragonfly lava crawling from water and tearing itself out into a thing with wings. On my open palm, a creature whose home has been paper towels and plastic boxes is turning into a different creature whose home is thousands of miles of air. Then the swift decides. It tilts the pug-sharp tiny tip of its beak upwards, arches its back and drops from my flattened palm making an aching series of stiff and creaky wingbeats. For five or six seconds, everything feels wrong. The bird is a mere foot above the grass and my heart is beating fast. Up, up, up, calls Judith. But nothing is broken. We're just watching a bird learning to fly. Hitching as if pulling into gear, swift starts to ascend, flickering up and up into a sky straight with evening cirrus. It describes one careful circle above our heads, then lifts even higher and straight lines it to the south. I look down at my palm. There's a little scratch on the meat of my thumb where its claws had gripped tight before letting me go. Gripped tight to the hand, it was the last solid thing the bird would touch for years. That was a great moment. And you've captured it so beautifully. Thank you. There's a lovely essay on nest, which you write. You observe, nests are always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human. And as the cup or the wall of a nest is raised, it raises questions about our own lives. And that, I think, piece that you just read. Okay, I'm gonna switch to now some general questions. Yes. And since I'm here in Concord, beginning with Thoreau, I mean, he's often viewed as this hermit and he sometimes gets dinged because he walked back into town to have dinner with his family. But he does represent this notion that the best way to experience the natural world is to seek private communion with it. And you write that that was when you were younger, you had a similar thought. But in your essay about solar eclipse, your thinking has evolved about whether one can only experience nature in these kind of private communion moments. Talk to us about that. It's very complicated, isn't it? It's very complicated. Yes, I mean, we're all as to that romantic transcendent as kind of tradition of having moments where you sort of see the world or see the natural world in this intimate, personal, revelatory way. And that runs through both British and American nature writing courses through it. And of course, practically, if you wanna go out and look for animals, it's kind of better to be on your own, isn't it? Because you're quieter and I remember as a child being furious, going out for walks with my parents and their friends and they just chatter away and I'd be like, ah! So there's a practical reason for going out there on your own. But I think there are difficulties with it. And one of the difficulties is a very simple one and that is if you go out on your own and you look at a mountain or a hillside or a forest, you know, it's gonna prove, it's not gonna, it can't argue with you, right? It's gonna just reflect your own assumptions about the world right back at you and it's gonna tell you that they're right. There are no other voices, no conflicting points of view that are gonna mess with your own. So I think, you know, and I think that the pandemic has also done a number on this desire to be on one's own with the natural world.   And I was thinking about that. I went for a walk a few months ago and I saw a song thrush, something a bit like a sort of speckled American Robin and it had just had a bath and it was kind of wet and preening and it was joyfully preening its feathers. And I felt this real pain that I was the only person that could see it. And I realized that what I was missing was sharing the natural world with others. And increasingly I feel that solitary nature appreciation is extremely important but it also has to be cut and, you know, meshed with communal experiences like that which are very familiar in the American tradition. You know, the whole notion of the sublime as something that you see with others is a very American tradition. So I'm definitely up for that. Yeah, definitely going out with other people now. It reminds me, I climbed about Katahdin this fall with my son and I'm a traditionalist. So you get to the top and you have your lunch and he gets to the top and he gets grumpy because there are all these other people up there. It's also quite a teenage thing, I think, in my thing. So I was very, we take in the view and then we hike down and then we find a pretty VISTA to have our lunch in a quiet spot and he's gonna have to do that. Did you have a Thoreauian moment of kind of horror up there on Katahdin or you, it's not like that anymore? Well, except how badly out of shape I am. But no, it was a beautiful day and it was snow covered when we were there, it was October but not too much snow until we got to the very top. It was a lovely experience. I'm gonna stick with this. Well, you have a H's for Hockey open by visiting Brecklands which you call broken lands or the broken forest and often many of your essays have to deal with this, again, this interplay between nature and humanity. A lovely essay about peregrine falcons and urban settings. Talk again about this mix between nature and humanity. Yes, I mean, I always think of how we don't like to, the quickest way into thinking about this always for me is thinking about wildlife art. If you go and look at wildlife art, you never see kind of industrial facilities in the background or street lamps or old cars or roads or anything, it's always this pristine, kind of perfect natural background. And I increasingly begin, particularly in this, the era that we're beginning to turn the Anthropocene, the notion that there is an untouched nature out there is dangerous. This notion that somewhere out there is a pure wild that somehow we can reach and interact with that we're always in a human world. And again, this fits with my desperate attempt to get across that when we encounter an animal, we're never encountering initially anyway, that a real animal, we're always encountering our idea of the animal. And again, I adore Annie Dillard, I love Annie Dillard, I just worship her work. But her most famous essay is when she meets a weasel and she looks into the weasel's eyes and the weasel looks back into her eyes and they share a moment, it's a really powerful essay and she talks about how we should all live like weasels, we should kind of go after what we want and grip tight to it and not let go. This is kind of faintly Nietzschean weasel that's sort of a country in my mind when I read this. And I think to myself, yes, that's what we think of weasels but maybe weasels also have kids and they have her legs and they sun themselves in the sun and they get lost. Like there's much more to a weasel than just that notion of will and domination and ferocity. And I think the real meshing between human and natural worlds that I'm interested in is the sense that always try and interrogate those meanings we've given the natural world when we encounter it. Because if you do that, if you can kind of hold in your head why you think owls are supposed to be wise, they're not. Why you think a hawk is ferocious? It's just a chicken with talons. Sometimes you can kind of look past those meanings and you can see something approximating the actual creature. And that can be a life-changing moment. You can see a creature who the entire world is different from them. They live in a different world from you. Their sensory world is different. What they need in the world is different. Everything is alien. There's an astonishing story by Te Chiang about this, about Puerto Rican parrots that live around, they're endangered, living around what was the Arecibo Observatory. This observatory desperately trying to find signals from outer space, radio communication with aliens and all these parrots that have culture and they have language and no one's interested in that, right? They're interested in interstellar kind of stuff. So I think this, yeah. So what might seem at first to be a bit of a weird self-absorbed obsession with human understanding of the natural world for me is really a clarion call to just try and look past them and see what's really there and understand, I think, that the world doesn't just belong to us alone. It's astonishing. The scale of it, the complexity of it, one teaspoon of soil can contain five billion microscopic cells, thousands of different species. We don't see any of that because we are human sized and we don't live very long. So I think this book very much is trying to sort of not only suggest that the world belongs to everything, not just to us, but we should pay attention to it and paying attention to it doesn't just help us love it and preserve it, but also can change who we are too I think for the better. It's a bit of a grand claim, but that's kind of what I was trying to do. Lovely. You've mentioned climate change and again the issue of diminishing biodiversity I was thinking of the rose famous line and wildness is the preservation of the world in reading your quote, you're talking about the condor. You say the condor is an icon of extinction. There's little less to it now, but being the last of its kind and in this lies the diminution of the world. Talk to us about your concerns about climate change and again, the essays are beautifully done and inspiring and a little political, but they're not polemical, you know, anyway. I'm very bad at that. I'm very bad at polemical stuff. I'm one of those people that can't be told what to do. I'll do the reverse. Ask my mother if you ever meet her, she'll confirm that. So I know I'm not very good at controlling. I'm not very good at yelling. I'm good at pointing at things and saying, look at this, you know, that's kind of what I do and trying to complicate and instill wonderment I think is what I do. The condor is a great example. I mean, I'll get on to climate change, but I always think of how our lived experience with the natural world, with animals is thinning more and more. And I'm as guilty as, I'm guilty of that. During the pandemic, I wasn't out in the forest. I was watching television and drinking ice cream out of the tub and crying on my side and playing on Twitter. I didn't get out as much as I should. But the less we know about animals and day-to-day experience, the less complicated they are and the less they mean to us. And sometimes a creature's rarity can basically mean all that it is now. So condors, I've had the joy to actually interact with those at the Peregrine Fund in Idaho. And they're really complicated, phenomenal animals. They're great, they're extraordinary. But in most people's minds, understandably, they're just the last of their kind. And that's such a flattening of what an animal really is.   It's the joy of not knowing where an essay is gonna go when you start it. And I was thinking about how I have all these symptoms when I have a migraine before the migraine starts. And they're very weird that I start buying banana milk and I eat beetroots and I get very tired and I don't like birdsong. They don't seem connected at all, right? And I never know that these are the symptoms of a migraine coming until the migraine hits. Even though I can tell you now, when they're happening, they become invisible. And I began to think about how climate change kind of works a bit like that. It's a very crass analogy, I know. But the causal symptoms, a bit like my banana milk and beetroot, are things that they seem so different and so unconnected that we don't realize their causal symptoms. Things like international kind of, the way that late capitalism has particular kinds of trade, the sort of supply chains, agricultural systems, various forms of like, those things are actually creating climate change, but we're not supposed to look at those. We're supposed to look at the fact we're not supposed to use plastic straws anymore or maybe drive a little bit less. It's always about individual consumer choice.  We need to rise up and fight for the continued existence of the planet. And I love to think about the way that we use the term apocalypse. We're living in deeply apocalyptic times. And the earliest meaning of the word apocalypse wasn't the end of things. It meant an unveiling of things that were there were hidden from our understanding. And I'm hoping that, you know, I mean, despite the world feeling more frightening and it's more full of horror than I'd ever known it, there may be some clear sight about where we can go. But we are, we're in very desperate times. Yeah, I'm sorry to be more hopeful about it. The book is very hopeful that there are moments of true joy and wonder that you convey. It's interesting you referenced the pandemic. So I ended up being in my hometown in Maine and my, our neighbors, we would kind of bake treats and leave them on one another's porches. But anyway, one day our neighbor Val left this book for my wife and I. It's my introduction to you. And actually I read it before I read H's for Hawkeman. I found out that that little town I was in actually makes a cameo appearance and H is for Hawke, Kenny Bunkport. Tell us maybe just a little bit about how a British nature writer ended up in a little fishing village of Cape Porpoise. But then you use it in H's for Hawke to talk a little bit about class and hunting. And anyway, I'll let you read it. Yeah, yeah, no. It's one of the great griefs of the pandemic. I mean, not great griefs, it's a small grief. There are terrible griefs everywhere. And I feel like I can't believe I just said that. But, but, but, you know, I have very, very dear friends that feel like family in, in, in Maine, in Canabunport. And my friend Aaron, I, I met when I was a volcano many years ago and I would sort of go back and forth to his house and a family and they ran an inn in Canabunport. And I, it was my first real experience of America. And I just fell in love with the place. And, you know, if, if I could live anywhere that isn't here, I think Maine would be the place. You know, I still sometimes wake up with the sort of memories of kind of, you know, blue jays calling and loons and stuff. I mean, it's, you know, it's possibly far away now. But, sorry, I completely, I'm getting so twisted. I'm gonna, I'll give you the quote. So you, you notice when you're in Maine, quote, hunting in Maine is not obviously riven with centuries of class and privilege. There are no vast pheasant shoots where bankers vie for the largest bag, no elite gross s'mores or exclusive salmon rivers. All the land in Maine can be hunted over by the virtue of common law. And locals are very proud of this egalitarian tradition. Hell yes, I think is the expression. So the hunting is really fascinating. As you know, phenomenon, it's extremely contested.  So, you know, that's hunting, right? Watching a bird do its natural behaviors is, it's hunting. And, and, and, you know, I was not stranger to death when I had Mabel. But yeah, the class system, classes, right the way through this book, you know, you can't write about England at all without, you know, bumping up against it, you know, whether or not it's like, you know, certain conservation organizations saying you shouldn't have painted model nest boxes in the shape of pubs and houses because it upsets the birds. It doesn't upset the birds. It's just not classy, right? So, hunting, yeah. So, so in this country, I was so used to it being something that only happened if you have rich.  It's like a sort of free range pheasant farm out there. And these really designed, these pheasants have been bred to be very, very small and they fly very, very high. So they're hunting to shoot. And it costs thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds to get a place on a pheasant, on a good pheasant shoot or a portrait shoot. And they really become opportunities for, you know, high status individuals to get together and have a day out. Whereas, you know, I think of walking up pheasants where it's just you and a dog or like, you know, a partridge or what a, you know, grouse in the, in the Northwoods, you know, much more like all the Aleopold would have, you know, been familiar with and many of my friends in Maine. That involves an experience of being immersed in the natural world that I feel has significant benefits. You become, I feel, part of, you have to understand, you have to have fieldcraft, you have to understand the way that the landscape works in your own consequential presence in it, which you don't with driven shooting at all. So I feel that, you know, yeah, I'd come down pretty hard on the side, on the side of that kind of hunting, not to say that the other forms don't exist in America, but certainly class has not left its mark in quite the same way. So we do have one question from the audience. It's maybe two questions. Is there a bird you wish to see that you haven't yet seen or a phenomenon related to birds that you wish to experience? So many, I didn't know where to start. So people sometimes say, what's your favorite bird? And I say my favorite bird is one I haven't seen. And maybe that's how it should stay.  I can't really explain this, but if you look on the internet, you'll see there these devastatingly dramatic creatures with kind of, they haven't got bare faces. They've got these sort of very fierce eagle-like faces with a long beak and a kind of little bit of a moustache here. And they stain their feathers orange by bathing in iron-rich streams and they're huge, they're absolutely massive.  Their old name was Bonebreaker or Lamiguy, a lamb killer.   So, you know, so metal as the kids would say. And I've never seen one and they are doing pretty well in some parts of Europe and you can find them in Africa. So that's the bird I wanna see. As for a phenomenon, I have always wanted to see oil birds, which are a very weird nightjar kind of with poor will kind of creature and they live in caves in tropical regions and they have a kind of sonar. They communicate through clicks and they're deeply weird and hard to see. And I think to recall that quite often people they go into these caves, there's a weird sickness that you get. So there's kind of, you know, Indiana Jones kind of mystery to them as well. So yeah, I think oil birds would be the one that if I could be adventurous enough to go find them, I would. The great question. So I have two last questions. One's about science and then one a little bit more maybe spiritual, so the one about science I'll give you the quote, it's your quote. We so often think of science as somehow subtracting mystery and beauty from the world. This vast stretch of sky, the gulls, the imperceptible ants is a working revelation of the interrelation of different scales of existence and it's a once exhilarating and humbling. Tell us again why science is such an inspiration to you. It's, yeah, no, absolutely. I think the Swift we talked about a little bit earlier are a very, very good example of that. I could stand on my lawn and watch Swift's overhead for forever in white a piece about them that would have been, would be, I guess, pretty, right? But I would not have known about Vespa flights and radar ornithology and aerial ecology and all these kind of ways in which the world has become an astonishingly complex and beautiful place in my mind without reading the science. You know, the way that, and there are some very good books coming out. I think I believe, you know, there's an astonishing Ed Young, for example, as it was written in a book which I had the privilege to read on animal senses and how animals live in different life worlds and, you know, how they encounter the world, you know, through all these different ways through sonar, through touch, through sound. And reading that book is not just a kind of collection of gee whiz moments like, oh my God, how is that possible? But also it's a real testament to the fact the only reason we know this is because science progressed enough, there's enough technological and, you know, theoretical basis to actually look at this stuff and understand what's going on. So I think of science and it's a very complicated phenomenon but without it, I think the world would be a much, much flatter place emotionally for me as well as intellectually, yeah. Well, let's talk about that emotional element because it infuses. I mean, the book almost has a spiritual quality, it provides the smallest or almost a bomb for our times. And I'll just do two quotes. One, an H is for hawk, you write. Looking for goss hawks is like looking for grace. It comes, but not often and you don't get to say when or how. And then the introduction to Vesper flights, you write. Every writer has a subject to them underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, or trail or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us. Maybe ref on that for a moment. It's true that there's a, that's my subject. And I write a bit about this in the penultimate essay in the book. I've always been very shy of talking about spirituality and, you know, coming big, big British. But what sort of taken me there to be much more open to kind of forms of spirituality in the natural world was actually, it was a formal problem I was having trying to write about nature. And it was that I was trying to write about experiences that I had using language that didn't fit. So I would try and write about these moments of grace with language that was drawn from philosophy or from, you know, literature, just didn't work. And I ended up opening some books, some, you know, elementary books on the theology of the religious experience, the quality of religious experiences on theology. You know, these are books that, you know, I should have read years ago. And there was where there was the language I needed. That was, you know, that these notions of numerous experiences where you encounter moments of something terrifyingly sort of big and, you know, really, really, really astonishing that is usually perceived of as the existence of the divine. And that essay is about, I think, about these moments where I think all of us have had them, hopefully, where, you know, you're out in somewhere and you'll see something and somehow it will, a little bit like my experience of the birds over the Empire State Building, you know, it can change the world at an instant and stop time, you know, and they can be very small things.  And I talk about how, you know, you can't go and look for those experiences. They're given to you and how that to me, again, isn't personally, I wasn't raised in faith. It wasn't a religious experience, but it's certainly a moment where the scale and astonishment of the world and the bafflement that I was born and I'm alive and, you know, to see it, to be there at that moment and see something like that is one of the most deep emotional experiences I think I have. I mean, it's all there, it's everything.  And we thank you so much. Thank you. Stay with us for a minute. We'll do this quick launching of the Thoreau website and then I'll like to thank you. Oh, I can't wait to see this. So we're gonna conclude as David Ferriero announced with a brief two minute video to launch a new microsite. It's been designed by Richard Lewis Media Group and the curatorial team here at the Concord Museum. As David mentioned with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We recently redesigned our permanent galleries here, but we know that not everyone, including Helen, can come to Concord. So this is our effort to take some of the artifacts related to Henry David Thoreau and share them with a national and international audience. So this is just a little demonstration of how this new website works. So Brian, let's roll the tape. My music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration of the climate is the snowshoes which lie about in so many garrets, now useless. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking. Again, that's just a little taste of the way folks can explore and Helen and I were talking about the importance of material culture and the importance of these artifacts being these in particular were saved by Henry David Thoreau's sister who donated them to what was then Concord Antiquarian Society and they are now proudly displayed in our museum along with Thoreau's death. So we welcome you all to come and we hope to check out that website again. It's Thoreau'sworld.org. But Helen McDonald, let me thank you. First, I know on your behalf we thank all the viewers who tuned in this evening and for shining a spotlight on the luminous of your writing where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomenon. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you. It's been an absolute joy and I should be all over that website looking at Thoreau's snowshoes and walking sticks and other objects. Thank you everyone. It's been a joy. And the book is best for flights. We hope you'll all buy it from your independent bookstore and be illuminated and enlightened as I was in reading these wonderful essays. Thank you and good night. Good night.


Ychydig, dyna i'w ddweud y ddweud o 64 Studio ar y cyfnod. Ac mae'r cyfnod yma. Rydyn ni'n ddweud y ddweud o 64 Studio ar y cyfnod. Rydyn ni'n ddweud y ddweud y ddweud o 64 Studio ar y cyfnod. Er yna y pethau'r ysgolwch yn y project a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r oedd y ddweud o'r oed. Felly, we actually do some type of software and publishing software, the main office is so vast and has been on the audience for a long time, so the 64 studio is a custom debut and distribution. It's a one disk install, the 1.0 version, which came out the awesome last year was a single CD ROM, The 2.0 version, which will be out since later this summer, is a DVD, but it's just a one-disc stick-it-in reboot. It precedes most of the installable questions that you can only get with Debian, which has been a part of our annual link-in easier for non-tabical users because a lot of people who want to use their computers in a crazy point are not particularly technical. They know the applications that they do everyday inside out, but IT in general is not their area. So we took the decision to design it for stability rather than to be on the bleeding edge the whole time. So not all the packages will be the very latest, necessarily, but they will have at least gone through some quality assurance testing over at least a month or so to make sure we don't put out a number to release that's got lots of, you know, short stuff that's crushing by deciding to find the thing. Our ultimate aim is to go beyond stability and to achieve reliability. In other words, the machine not only doesn't crash, but you can rely on it to do its job everyday. You know, when you hit record, you expect the audio to actually be on there, but it's not always the case with computers, of course. So we want to go beyond just crushing bugs and achieve that sort of level of reliability. Basically, we're looking to make a correct desktop that is as good as a deviant server is in its role. You know, you can leave it behind for a couple of years, you can come back and it'll still be running, and you don't have to deal with the machine sliding down or giving it some corrected in the way that Windows machines tend to do in explaining them over long periods of time. Because a lot of these creative users who are targeting, they don't want to be uploading new packages every day, but we're down with the new packages in there. Upgrading every few months, you know, they want to install a machine or have it still for them and probably never trust the software side of things until they get a new machine. So we try and automate everything as much as possible. And the final point on the slide is that the distro is absolutely free as in there. The nearest equivalent to 64 Studio again is probably Adobe itself Creative Suite, which is, you know, graphics publishing, audio, video tools. And that runs into, I think it's a couple of thousand pounds for the full version, you know, with everything in it per seat. And obviously that makes it very difficult to afford for a lot of people in the creative industries of freelancers. They don't have a lot of money on the starting hours, a lot of students, a lot of people who have the technology and will to use their computers creatively. But the high cost of proprietary applications is a barrier to entry. And it's fair to say that hardware has come down in price a great deal over the last 10, 15 years. But the proprietary applications in the creative sphere haven't followed students who are still just as expensive as they were back in the digital play teams. You know, given like a desktop launching application, it can be around 100 pounds per seat, not like that. And so students and free ones, people like that, don't get access to all the tools they can actually use. Particularly in education, what that means is you get colleges and schools spending a great deal of money on proprietary software investing in it, effectively. But they are still not able to put that full set of creative tools in front of the student or people, which is unfortunate. If you really default and install Windows XP or something like that, it doesn't have a great deal of creative tools on board. The one that has a printed board, so we think we've got something to offer from there. So, what is 6-2-1-2-0? It's not fork. It's actually freshly built on a continuous basis for the dead-end sources. We actually fixed bugs in the dead-end itself rather than the 10-2-3-3. So, our lead developer for Ian Van Iker is a DD, and he's on multimedia, and he's quite fixing bugs in dead-end packages every day. And then what we do is, all we want to make a release, we take a snapshot, or in the case of our forthcoming 2.0 release, it will be edge-based as a development release platform. And so we're fixing bugs directly in dead-end and rather than creating something separate from dead-end. We don't strip out dead-end logos or trademarks or any of that kind of stuff. We put CD in it so it's welcome to dead-end and hit F1 or enter to the school world. So, there are a lot of derivative distributions that strip out the D-word, the sort of logo from the whole thing to give the impression that they're creating something other than dead-end or super-end. It's not what we know, the right trademarks. We don't do anything like that. So, another point, it's not just a platform for non-free apps, because I was giving a talk in Los Angeles. Where there are approximately 5,000 artists using GNU slash Linux on a daily basis in that city. And we're working mostly for the movie studios and the TV production, that kind of thing. But the vast majority are using almost exclusively proprietary applications on the Linux space. So, we've got maybe retail enterprise, whatever, and then we've got MIA or Nuke, or one of those kind of applications, which is some of them are proprietary for the small specialist proprietary software houses. Others are in-house apps that have been developed by some of the movie studios through the rules here about using Linux. And they never actually get released to the public until, you know, proprietary or for example. So, when we decided to create this digital like two years ago, it was important just to have full roster of free software applications running on free software platforms. So, it's not just a free software leading to people walking out of these proprietary apps. So, it's not just about music software. That seems to have been the main emphasis so far. I think that's partly because the stock distros don't have a great deal of music software on that. And they don't usually have things like a real-time kernel and check all your server and so on. So, if you're looking to make music with free software, there's more reasons for using a specialist distro for music and audio. Like, for example, if you're doing graphics, then you can get packages for Inkscape, DMC, and Blender and user app from most mainstream distros without having to do too much systems with them. And, yeah, hopefully, as we were saying, the creative user base is not necessarily very IT literate and, say, probably never used it before, and they've used it on a web server or something, but never actually used it on a desktop. So, we're trying to make it as easy as possible. We're going to use it for the next seven or eight years. So, you plug in a digital camera and, you know, through Gbuzz, you get a G-thumb watch to import your photos. And it's all in that sort of ease of use. I've actually tried a few OS X or OS X systems and found, you know, the thing these have used has actually found me quite confusing and difficult to go to Bristol. I used to use them quite ten years ago, and the way that OS X does its menus and applications and launching where to find your files, I didn't actually find that intuitive at all. And so I think there's still some work to be done there to actually achieve a sort of, you know, golden standard of usability, but I don't think that will actually happen to themselves. One of the things we do, for example, is we changed the known default configuration around a little bit, so that instead of having the menu at the top, we put it at the bottom. Now, the top menu is obviously the known default that's what it went to use as an edge, but we actually looked at what people were used to and, you know, maybe 95% of the user base is used to having the... The start menu in the bottom left hand corner happens to just a, you know, thing on the icon that comes with dead straight forward display applications and you can find the one you want in the category and click on it. And that's how most people, having come up through Windows 95 and 98 XP, expect them to just do that. So that's how we did it. So, who are we? FreeEconarca is the statistical leader of the project. He's originally from Italy, but he's actually living in Berlin in London. Tim Hall is the documentation guy. He's a musician, a background that has come into free software through the Muni project.  Because I'm sort of the project founder, company director, I get to do the dummy user testing. So I, you know, I get a good result. That doesn't work when I make an edge, you know. You know, put a ticket on the website. You know, we've generated like 300,000 something tickets, I think, since we started. We've chained through quite a few of those. We've got fixes for most of them. I'm obviously going to do paperwork. So, you know, I think we're going to go on a deal, aren't we? Thank you. We have lots of people helping us in our music community. User district development community.  Other people are saying things like, oh, well, I found this problem. And here's a fix, which is great, you know, because we're getting that active involvement. And a couple of the projects that we package for the district, actually some of our users have gone on to become maintainers or co-maintainers, the first packages of packages, which have, you know, got un-maintained for whatever reason. To give an example, and slightly less obvious, there's a package in Nome for Tracking Times that are projects called Cnome Time. And it's not shipped by default with a lot of district. There's some slightly less, you know, obvious package. That's sort of not completely un-maintained, but, you know, development has slowed down a bit. And one of our users said, because he lives in South Africa, and they have, you know, the round of the currency, he said, well, you know, I'm a freelancer and I need to use Nome Time to generate invoices. So he noticed that the invoice-generating feature of that is actually quite handy if you're a freelancer has the dollar sign by hard coded in the invoice-generating code. So he actually worked up a patch to change that to a user of a settable currency symbol. But that's only a small change, but it makes that program now extremely useful for, you know, for the kind of people that we're talking to, many of whom are freelancers and need to track their project time and generate them in invoices. And that's a less obvious example, because it's not a multimedia application as such, but it's the kind of application that, once you get into it, it's so useful that you can't do without it. So you don't need, like, a full accounting system if you're one of our type of users necessarily. You just need to be able to track your project time in invoices and so on.  That's two, one German word, one French word. So anyway, how do we fund it? Well, we are a broad company, not for profit, sort of pure community project. And we've got a custom work offering that we have, and we've, you know, using the sort of platform that we've developed, building on that for various types of projects. Later in this year, we're going to be doing end-user support as well. So I guess people are actually coming in just saying, you know, I really want someone to be able to, like, answer my questions and so on. Because community support is great, but my questions are so dumb, you know, that nobody could be bothered to answer them all.  We need somebody to spend like three days on the work. That's, you know, community support has so many advantages, but it doesn't suit all people in all situations. And there are other people, like institutional users, you know, like ecologists at large times, where they feel better, you know, if they can have some, like, some paid support. And there are very few places where you can go at the moment for multimedia desktop support. You can get support from a bunch of them for your, you know, red hat or enterprise and so on. But there aren't any, sort of, any small, large media companies that are providing support services for the kind of software that we're doing. So we're also thinking about, seriously, about having any hardware-type website because you're going to, like, a PC world store or something like that. You know, is this, like, supported by getting an actual... I don't know. I don't even know if it's supported by Windows Vista, you know.  You know, you can go to an audio and make these USB audio interfaces and say, like, oh, doesn't that work with Linux? And they go, oh, yeah, yeah, it definitely works with Linux. There's some guy who did a driver somewhere, but, you know, they can't tell you about, like, kernel versions and outside versions or anything like that. They just know that there's Linux support for that or maybe if you use the right revision, you know, off the phone there and what do you like. So we're thinking about a website where we have things like this and you can just click on it by and you know that it definitely works with Debbie, that we've personally tested it. I don't know if it's useful or not, but I think I'll be happy to use it. So, the project's really where we're going. This is late in 2005 when we started on this one. This is the line-stracted media station. It's a very large workstation keyboard. It was the first instrument that was coming to be publicly launched as running Linux. Actually called Oasis, which is the sort of called one of the worldwide brand leaders in the system. They now also help doing Linux-based keyboard called the Oasis that's O-A-S-Y-S. But this was actually the first. Originally it ran, it approached that around Red Hat Linux 9, I think. It was going back about 3-4 years. The company switched to a stock Debbie in the store and so on. But the problem with making a dispara fit on it to an instrument like this, which is obviously not a standard PC. It has a PC motherboard inside it and it has a PC CPU, the artist and so on, but actually the PC's got a small touchscreen in the centre there and it's doing a full-size monitor. Obviously it's not a quality keyboard. So it's not altogether like a PC. So most companies in the road, there's another one that's worked at the Hartman Neuron which is also a new Linux base. So there's quite a few of these big sets now when you actually have a free software called. Now, the standard approach to this is to take a standard history like Debbie or Gen 2 or whatever and stick it on the machine and then get all your special apps you need for running the keyboard or the touchscreen or whatever, package them up with a giant marble.  So you run a couple of scripts and you overwrite all the defaults. The problem with that is when you've created essentially a fork because it's like a sort of a Debbie or Gen 2 version of whatever it is frozen in time at that point and then you've got a choice. You can update the underlying distro in which case the stuff that's in the table is probably going to break or you can leave the distro as it is and what you get is a horrendous thing out of date because as I say here when you buy one of these large expensive instruments you expect it to last for a great deal longer than PC's lifetime so PC's got 3 year lifespan laptop in 2 years of doing it because it will break in half but if you buy one of these instruments they are quite expensive and you might expect it to last as long as you're having an organ or you'll send you more back in the 80s so 10, 20, even 30 years is not uncommon. So the answer we came up with is to have a sort of a rolling platform that we keep maintaining for the distro and actually keep it up to date and package everything in depth so that what you've got is a custom delivery distribution that's tailored for this specific device it's not a it's not a fork but it's part of the tree mark of our main distro that was in some special settings because it was in a standard procedure and that seems to work quite well you end up with something that's pretty up to date with current distros whether it be adshore or whatever whatever it's based on and actually because you've got a new build being generated all the time and watching the breakages and things like that because the alternative if you free that distro in time nobody wants to buy backport stuff to a distro that's like 10 years old or it just wouldn't happen and so when we take a deviant a bit better on this instrument so that was more or less done now we've included that where late last year the small working at the moment it's about this is actually an 18 inch screen so the whole device is sort of that size I mean half the size of a laptop on average it's the first portable digital audio workstation for sure that is as far as we know it was running for itself and it's also the first sort of portable device that's optimized for audio so for example you get a standard laptop it has like an eighth of an inch mini jack with a pretty poor audio chip so on it because that's one of the things about a laptop manufacturer is cut costs on it so you end up having to buy an external box like this to actually get a proper microphone input so all this thing is a small one hopefully lighter not a battery life on the laptop and it actually has these kind of XLR sockets that will finish the panel so a proper microphone and the idea being that it's some smaller overall and more compact you don't have to have all these different wires that we've got going on here today to actually use it the idea being that if you're on a plane or something you can actually work on your project it's got no quality keyboard of course it's got a thumb pad on the right hand side and two mouse buttons on the left so you're actually holding it a bit like you would a small games console but you've got your headphone output and there's a back which you can't see there's the microphone inputs and the line outputs and the idea behind this is that you're working on a project on a plane or that's where we happen to be and then it's got FNA on the back as well and Wi-Fi and you can connect to the internet and upload your finished project to your studio server or your streaming website or whatever it is so this one's another branch of the distro that's optimised for this and it's a one question about the update so if somebody buys this instrument and does it get every year a CD with the update or is it done by a network? network, okay, yeah I mean both the media station and the tragedy it's both got FNA and user have to activate it or is it normal that if there's a new update available the instrument will just download it and it's not pushed out to the moment you actually have to run a distro upgrade on this one and what we'll probably have in the final question is just an update button we actually have a script called 64 studio-upgrade which basically does all your act get a distro upgrade and all that kind of stuff and it also pulls in any because we have scripts to reset configurations back to the default state so it runs the backup so it's basically like a pocket sized studio with the power of deviant in it so that's enough talking I'll do some showing this is our 1.4.0 development race that's actually a close-up of Steve Harris' guitar Steve Harris is the author of Jammin and a lot of DFP effects under the Ladsberg but because there's an extreme close-up so superficially it looks pretty similar to the 1.0 release which we're running on the machine by the window down in the middle but we've updated a lot of packages since then I mean the 1.0 release last September we were running a 2.617 kernel which is okay for most machines unless they're very new in which case it doesn't have support for the latest Saturn chipset things like that and we've made various bug fixes and tweaks and package updates since then so this will be the basically the 2.0 release which will be added later so notable updates actually we've got Arda 2 which is GTK 2 based rather than GTK 1 came out not long ago and we've got that in there this is another U1 that's an orbit emulator but not like a sort of a home organ it's a full-sized church organ so you can actually assign like banks of mini keyboards and foot pedals and a whole lot so you can do the whole you know phantom of the opera thing with that it's you've got the only things you do need a lot of keyboards to work with but that is a very very good project it's all done in the known software it's not solved at all because there are some Linux based church organs there's one in the World Trade Centre in New York that replaced the original church organ that was destroyed with the attack on the on the September 11th with a Linux based sample organ which is basically like a rack of 10 machines all running like these really big disc samples of real church organs but this one is all completely on the CPU it's all generated rather than sampled and it sounds pretty good so we've got a lot of things that were in the previous release like AMS which is the multiple synth running in the back there and all the sort of popular things like audacity and so on some instrument tuners instrument tuner and freewheeling which is like a looping sound and other things and it's what we've got the DSSI oscilloscope which is another handy tool and a date opting in Terminator X and we've also updated a new version of Inkscape Screwlist so we have general updates but the biggest advantage of the 2.0 at least I think of the 1.0 is the 2.0 is edge based whereas the 1.0 is not based on snapshot testing for my last September so in terms of actual package compatibility you know it's 2.0 because you won't have much less chance of getting a broken package and we also have security support for the first time we're now based on a stable release rather than testing it when we started Sarge was already 2.0 in terms of package numbers package unit versions to base on so we went with the snapshot up to another edge base so we're now based on the 2.0 but since we're talking about music today is there anything you can not use Jack? OK, I'll give a quick introduction to Jack most audio applications today have the approach of revving the sound card or the audio interface for its exclusive use and a lot of music applications on the proprietary platforms work the same way and don't let any of the other application use it now the problem with that is if you're taking a more modular approach we have lots of different applications doing different things they can't all access the sound card at once so you can go for a sound server now there are a couple of different desktop sound servers there's ASD and the Enlightenment sound server and KDE as well but Jack is somewhat different it's designed specifically for real-time operation the difference being that if you're running a serious set of music applications like a half of a second latency will be a big deal you don't want one app to be out of time with the other if you're just running like desktop sounds and like flash plugin or something like that there's no big deal so Jack is built for hard or close to hard real-time work so I just click on start button this is not actually the Jack server this is like a control application for it which we call Jack control it's a QJack tool and you can pronounce that or something called a jigger anyway so I've just pressed start and it's showing me up here real-time mode so that's good this is showing me my sample rate which is like contact disc sample rate and this is my DSP load so system is not exactly taxed here down here and then my connections are done this is my output so I've got playback 1 and playback 2 on this which are corresponding to left and right in this case if I have a multi-channel interface and 8 outputs there if I was running in ffmj I would also have 8 inputs running over the river side so let's start with the first Jack application there's a the Jack audio master in the place it's starting slowly for some reasons but it will get there this is a a dedicated application for processing audio in real-time mastering called in the audio world in the TV film mode it's called post-production but it's mounted to the same thing what you're doing is you're taking an audio signal and you're tweaking it up to make it sound better to make it loud and usually to make it clearer and so it will work on a variety of different sound systems from your giant club sound system to tell you something about this so in the sort of proprietary domain there are various plugins that do this kind of job and what jammy does is it collects all those plugins together and puts them into a single GUI so you've got one window I'll demonstrate how you actually use it with the very high so we're going to open a session I made already and because William's got one a rather shambolic and hyper-fersion so so so if I go back to my jack connections right now I've now got all my different arder tracks we've got separate outputs we'll see what it's like here all basically some of them we're going out to this is where it gets complicated arder's master bus in there and there oh there it is there we go that is actually connected to oh no no it's connected to jammy isn't it it is game copyrighted we've got all the different tracks in arder they're playing into arder's master bus that is going into jammy and then we're rooting the output of jammy and back to the sound quality so what that enables us to do is master our track in real time there we go we've got it's not connected to jammy interesting oh it's not connected to jammy yeah it's directed to it was earlier never deployed I'm sure I have that down here okay so jammy's not connected to jammy's it's going on soon what is it what is it oh yeah because it goes blue so you can't see that on the projector it needs to be the RTO there so it's getting around just the complicated one but it should work so you should save those sessions on this you're right to do that you should have done that you can save it it's a configuration so windows should we mix them the workspace yes there is another hatch way you can set up routes and save them when you call actually I'm not sure so if I set this up right you should be able to save that is so important they have to make up their own reports that's what I'm saying it's just a play I'm responsible for it and it's really the wrong time to press the solo button there we go because each of these tracks has an insert point so if I it is too much but for example when a studio is mixing a track like this it will do all kinds of tricks for making compression to actually make the instruments stand out better because these days if you're making music with a live band you can't achieve the same volume and clarity as synth based bands or using samples to generate two sounds so mixing is all about tweaking up stuff to make it louder harder so that's the kind of trick that we would use to track them up we go back through the track and transport them up another EQ plug in and there's a gate we've actually got a lot of noise on this track because these are the effects of the actual guitar button like here there's actually a lot of funds between which is actually spilled from our instruments and the guitar button's headphones where he's getting overdone and it's so loud in his headphones that you can actually hear it on the guitars so it doesn't just like it up loud if I go back to it quite a bit if I bypass that gate you will hear all the noise that's what Dave's got on his headphones you can hear it on the mic you can hear it on the guitar on the Marshall stand and you can find the loud headphones so it's on updated now and there's loads of lateral effects there's more than 100 so you've got EQs, limiters compressors reverb and delays lots of unknowns amplifiers oscillators phasers that's what I'm doing by the time distortions this is showing the frequency spectrum for this particular track I can actually do an automatic to extend out the volume the DSP figure is that this is all jack reports it's up here so obviously it's not doing anything at the moment but if I I mean jamming it is particularly CPU hungry by this standard it's doing quite a hard job it's doing a lot of real-time maths that would be the same figure that's not right it's definitely not 1.9% it's more like it's the better team 1.7% it's the same I think it's been I'm just doing the EQ voices as well it's where it's all in it's not it's not it's not strange that's a I think it's like the 1.4 gigahertz it's possible to arrange a churium 64 laptop processor so I mean I have dual-optron in my office and that barely breaks 30% in this kind of work but here I'm thinking of jamming which is particularly CPU hungry and one in my studio it's a single optron I already see everything about 50% so it can handle how do you manage the sound generated by the option by what sort how do you manage the sound generated by the dual optical machine oh, the noise the noise from the fans that is a problem, that's why I have only a single optron in my studio the dual optron in my office because the extra and process does make more noise ac wedi bod yn ddechrau, mae'n rhywbeth yn ddegol. Mae'n rhan o'r ddyn nhw'n ddegol yn gwneud y gwasanaeth. Felly oedd am ni'n ddegol yn ddegol, mae'n ddegol. Mae'r gwybod ychydig yn ddegol yn ddegol. Mae'r ddegol yn y gwasanaeth 35W, a'r ddegol yn 64W X2, ac rwy'n cwysig iawn. Ac dwi'n gwneud radio rwy'n cyffredinol mwy oherwydd yma. Rwy'n teimlo nhw'n cyffredinol, fe yma. Yn cyffredinol oherwydd eich dawn llym. A oedd eich cyffredinol, rywbeth, eich ddiwedd. Felly ar constraints, dyma rwy'n thrôl. Mae gael yn cydnod arンドfyrdd bachol. And there is actually two macro necessary hours. Here and it's running the Asa driver with the generic USB audio driver, because the good thing about these kind of devices is that, when they first came out they all had proprietary, vendor written drivers. And the vendors themselves discovered that it was a major pain so they actually started to make the devices more class- compliant. Mae'r ystyried o'r sgwrn amser, mae'r ddod yn ychydig o'r adeilach. Mae'r ddod yn ystod y Lennu'ch bobl yn ddechrau, mae'n ddod o'r ddod oes yn gweithio bod chyfnodol. Mae'n ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod o'n ddod o'r ddod. Felly mae'r holl sy'n amser o'r ddod o'r ddod o'r holl sy'n gweithio sydd gennymol, neu'r holl sy'n gweithio sy'n gweithio sydd gennymol. It adds a bloom panel on the front so with a green one. That one you have to upload�� waem. To make it work. There's no good reason for that other than that It's good. This is relativity of weld costs a piercing. About £90. ac mae'r ddarparu ei wneud, ond mae'n gwybod, ychydig y gallwn i'r un o'r ffordd. Felly mae'r ffordd yn y Gymraeg. Mae'r ffordd yn ysgrifetol yn yma, ac mae'n tyfu, ond mae'n gwybod, yn ymwneud eich gydag i'r ffordd, oherwydd yn ysgrifetol, i'r ffordd, i'r ffordd, i'r mhwyfiant, i'r ymarfer, ac yn ymwneud eich mwyfiant o'r ffordd, i'r ffordd, i'r ymwneud, i'r ffordd. ac ydych yn ddiweddol yn gweithio ar gyfer y dyfodol. Oherwydd mae'r ardal drwy'n dda o'r ysgolwch. Mae'r ddyweddol yn ddiyfodol pan yn gwneud i'r gweithio ar gyfer yr audience. I fod yn cyffredig huntingh wrth rhaid i ymgrifol, â'r amlwiydd dros y ddiwyddiad yn Caherfel Fredo. Diem ni'n rhan o'r nhw y gallu bob oth yr hyn ac mae'n gweithio ar gyfer y ddiwyddiad which we're based on that framework called BeBob. It's a freeob. It also supports the new And I've Diced to based firmware devices. What we can actually now do is take a like a Debbie Robert you've got sort of a box on the firebox. Stick in one of these interfaces and you can get it working out of the box. And the great thing about the Fata, which is a revision of a freeob, is that because it supports not only these original group of classical mind devices but also these new ones that come on the stream as well, is you can take two different firewall audio interfaces from two completely different manufacturers running two completely different chip sets and plug them in a sort of daisy chain between firewall and actually have the whole lot of work as one big virtual interface and are like, I'm going to have a proprietary network and drivers can't do that because they're all vendor-read and they're all different. So we actually have better, in a way, we have better support now than any other platform because of this federal driver. We've got the freebop driver in this version, which is supposed to be the first version, but obviously the federal user isn't going to want to put in later. The current state of firewall audio with this particular virtual administrator is that if you have a bebop-based interface that person must make one of the firebox from one small firepod, M-audio makes several, you just plug it in, and instead of selecting ALSA in chat control, you set up one of those. As we've got an interface here, and it shows the mobile provider, this is the onboard sound card, the laptop. Instead of selecting ALSA, you just select freebop, and you get firewire interface working just as we have on this one. And that covers, like, as I say, any of those original freebop interfaces because a lot of the manufacturers, although they have different brand names on their products, actually all by chipsets from the same smaller vendors, just like the netcars. So that's great because most of the products on the market now are supported by, for example. I mean, there are a couple of holdouts, we still have our own production firm on this and so on, but there is some reverse engineering going on, so even those can be supported by those. Any more questions? Yes, I think I've used up all my time. If there's anything anyone wants to see specifically, just come and ask me. I'll be here tomorrow as well. There's also a machine at the back there, which is, that's running this year, 1.0, and it's stable at least from last autumn, if you want to have a try on that. So, Ian, does anybody want to take a look over there now? I'm going to show you a couple of things on that. Well, this release, which is 1.40, the current release, is Edge, plus our sort of recipe for packages. What we have is instead of, like, hand-selecting packages all the time, we have, like, a recipe which says, OK, we want this synth, that synth, we want Arda, we want Jack and Janet, and these kind of things. And it pulls down those packages from a natural repository and into auto-hills, a nice old niche. So, you could replicate exactly the same thing, yourself, by starting with a natural store, adding all the packages and then having a real-time patch kernel, and then adding all the little tweaks that we've made, the scripts and so on. But they're just taking, like, a couple of days, and you can save this off the effort by just getting the install ISO from our website, installing that. It takes about half an hour because a lot of the questions are preceded. It speeds things up a lot. And then adding dead end packages from there. So, because this one is in sync with that, should I show you the packaging? So, you could do this off the... Well, you could do, but you shouldn't need to, strictly speaking, because we're keeping our distro up to date with Damian as well. So... What's the difference? Is it, sort of, co-instead of different? Well, it's not super different. What it is is some in-go-monar at Red Hat. We've been working for some time on our real-time patches for the 2.6 kernel. And we use those because to run them, Jack, in real-time, you have to have those. So, this is obviously synaptic. New setting of repositories. So, on this particular laptop, I've got... I've still got entries left over from the install CDI, actually, thanks to this machine, which was 1.3. This is our stable app source, which we use to write 1.0 upgrades and so on. And we also have this one, which I'm running on this laptop, is our testing branch. This is not Damian testing. This is our own testing branch, which is based on Edge plus backported packages. So, for example, we find a bug that's in Edge itself. We have a backport server, and we build packages against Edge from SID. So, it's the version that's in SID but built for Edge. And that keeps everything nicely synced up. And then, if you want to, you don't have to, but we actually put... These are pretty much our default packages that you get when you install the distro for the first time. You can just enable Edge, and then get all packages from Edge. I mean, I think the... Was it like... There's just under 1,000 packages at the moment in the 6th course to the old base install. So, that keeps it down to a manageable number that we can actually track and update. We try not to duplicate too much. For example, when we were looking for an instrument chain application, there were about five different ones to choose from. So, we went through all of them, and we found the one that we thought was the best, and we made that default. If you want one of those other four, whatever they are, that are up to Damian, then you just enable your Edge source and go and get it. What we found is that sometimes, you know, you go through that approach, and sometimes the best-of-free package isn't actually in Damian, in which case we make a Damian package, and we upload it to CID, and then eventually the product goes right down. So, also, of course, now we're based in Edge. You can use the security updates. This is something we wanted to have for a long time because although we've got a pretty good security record, nobody's ever complained about a major security or anything like that over the last two years. We want to keep people, especially non-technical users, updated with things like ISO updates and things like that. So, you know, because the people are least aware of security and the people who need it the most. So, we use Update Manager now, and you can set that to remind you, oh, you know that there's a new Firefox or else we use the package. So, yeah, that's pretty much the same as Damian. We're using a secure app in this release. So, a lot of these packages are straight from Damian. So, for example, this one is specific to people that are back into chipset, and it doesn't work properly without it. So, that's just, like, as is from the end. And then we've also got these packages here, which are all some dummy custom packages. This is our app data. This is our skill and stuff. Task cell. You know, and this is where a lot of the tweaks are in the utilities package as well. But we've made just to set things up the right way. It could be as simple as, like, enabling a menu entry or not enabling a window in a flat place in a hot tub. And then, yeah, a lot of these other packages are straight from Damian. There are a couple of exceptions. I think we, you know, up to Alasdair. Yeah, we do ship us a firmware, which Damian doesn't ship, because if you've got an RME sound card or some of the others, it actually needs that firmware upload to work with a free driver. Otherwise, it just won't work. You know, else it will get started in a day. So we took the decision to actually ship the firmware, because we, although there's a theoretical argument on whether it's, you know, it's free enough or not free or whatever, we thought that if we have a system that's, like, 100% pure and pure free software, but our target users can't actually use it, and that's not actually a step forward. So we came down on that side of the firmware date. And then, you know, I mean, I suppose it's a pragmatic review and prefer the system to be, like, 99.5% free software, 0% free software. Yeah, yeah, I think it is, it isn't on free, but you won't get it in the WMA.  You know, we don't think that's feasible for our target users, because if you've got, like, an RME interface, you've got a serious studio machine, and you pop in a 64 studio desktop, or a WMA, and it just doesn't work.  You know, you're not really going to use it again. So that's the approach for taking. So we've got a lot of different powerful things, like spell check and diction and things like that.  So, yeah, it's just under 1,000 packages in a standard install. We've only recently gone over a 700 megabyte install limit, which is why we switched to a DVD. It's about 750 meg. We tried to pack everything we can into that. We actually found, although some people said, oh, I don't have a DVD writer and I can't make install DVDs, we actually found that a DVD would write and install significantly faster when you're wrong for the same amount of data because of the higher transfer rates in a DVD drive. So, you know, it's a choice of, like, obsoleting a very, very old hardware, or having, you know, faster installs. We went for faster installs. Although we do, we took the decision fairly early on that although we'd originally intended just to support very new-est hardware by AMD64 CPUs and I'd like to be intel of the 64 ones, pretty soon people said, well, actually, I don't have an AMD64 issue and I'd really like to use this. And some people said, well, I've got, like, a college where we have, like, 10 AMD64 machines and we have, like, 50 32-bit AMD64 and we want to have the same environment running on both, so that when we come to upgrade the hardware later, we can just have a smooth transition. So that's when we started doing two ISOs, AMD64 and I386 ISO, which works on pretty much all 32-bit systems. That's running back right there was one of the 32-bit version because it's so 24. So, any more questions? We'll see you then.