promote them. Okay. I am going to read our little declaration so that we can get started officially. The time is now seven o' three and seen as a quorum of committee members is in attendance. This public hearing is being called to order. Welcome everybody to the November 28th 2023 public meeting not hearing of the Amherst Community Development Block Grant advisory committee pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 and extended by the state legislature on July 16 2022 and probably extended again since then but I don't have the date this meeting is being conducted virtually using the zoom platform the meeting is being recorded and minutes are being taken as usual and we'll just do a quick roll call so we have it on camera that we're all here I'm Becky Michaels the chair of the CBBG advisory committee and I'll go just in order Zoey you're next. I'm Zoey Suley, I'm a member of the committee. And Suzanne. Suzanne Schilling committee member. And that. And Matt Larson. Great. And Nate. Hi, name Hawaii a planner with the town. So we have an agenda tonight that has a lot of things on it but that we can probably move through fairly quickly and we will have time for public comments toward the end. And if people raise their hands as we reach that section we will call on you and bring you into the meeting if there's anybody here right now. So we can go ahead and get started just point up the agenda. So I guess first is announcements if anybody has any announcements. Yeah I'll jump in the the state increase the mini entailment grant up to 925 instead of 825,000. Great so what does that look like division wise. Oh I don't know I didn't do any of the math. I almost don't want to believe it because it just came came out of the blue last week and I don't know it just seems you know I know the competitive communities could apply for a higher amount so my guess is that's some many entitlement communities most of complained or made note of that and so they increased the mini award but I was almost I was almost going to I was expecting another notice to say that they were going to take that back and that was a minor percentage wise between non-social service and social service. The percentage would be the same so 20% social service that would go up by bit. Yeah I mean it's just that usually there are plots you know what the state gets is limited and so if there's 11 communities it's a you know over a million dollars now which if they have 24 million a year it's actually a million dollars is a pretty big percentage to go to minis but well great that's a nice announcement well we'll have we'll have no problem allocating it I'm sure exactly exactly great anybody else have any announcements they want to make okay great so we'll move on to a discussion of the 2022-23 grant startups specifically around site visits so Nate I'll let you lead in and then I do have a comment about site visits this week. Yeah you know the social services are getting under contract they started as of November 1st Valley CDC is doing a microenterprise technical assistance program which started December 1st or we'll start you know I usually schedule site visits I haven't yet so I was going to say that we if a committee member wanted to come they could it'll probably be virtually some might be in person but we typically try to have site visits at the beginning middle and end of social services and other activities and so that's where something that'll be should be happening in the next month or so. The one question I had when I was thinking about site visits was and it's probably something that we'll discuss going forward but if everybody recalls what we have now is the opportunity to be giving grants out to organizations that may have already received grants in that 22-23 cycle and I don't know that it would be a conflict necessarily to do a site visit with a place that's already gotten money but to sort of spend more time with that organization and and learn the ins and outs of what they're doing and I was thinking more sort of being on site and whether that would be something that we should wait to do until after we've done the allocation process this time around I think if it's virtual it's maybe less so but it was just something that I don't know if other people have feelings about that well in this cycle's pretty short so that timing probably could work since by the time we get through the applications and the holidays I mean we probably wouldn't unless it is virtual that's easier to schedule but it probably makes sense that that could work out and I agree that probably makes sense to not maybe visit someone that's in the middle of the application period unless it was something vital to the application that we wanted to observe in person a site visit could be beneficial too just in terms of the overall schedule too we got lots going on and you know December and January and February you know maybe some time in the spring yeah yeah we can do that I mean yeah typically I you know my startup visit should be sooner than later but so maybe Nate you should schedule it on your you know do what you would normally do and we'll just hold off and you know maybe do site visits that are more in person and actually seeing programs at work later on in the spring after we finish this round all right okay great um anything else on that in that area no no I mean I think um you know it's a two or one and a half year grant so the activities that are starting now can run through 2025 I think we have an ending in the summer of 25 but it is a longer performance period so the capital projects we have will be started until next summer probably hopefully the next summer plenty of time yeah I don't know the town we you know we like a few years ago we were really successful applying for grants and then we have you know the block grant now but we have two mass works grants and some other infrastructure grants and it's all it's really great to get it all and then all of a sudden you realize well wow we have six big projects we're supposed to be doing at the same time and yeah um all right so why don't we move then to the 2024 application process which um at our last meeting um we sort of talked a little bit about and um it's Zoe's first time Suzanne's second time um and what we want to do tonight is finalize as much as possible what the RFP will look like um and um you know we set the dates last time so we have that set but to look really at the at the actual RFPs and um the community development strategy that you had sent out Nate which is the 2022 is that I just couldn't remember if that was something that we create or that's something that the town does that is given to us can you just remind me yeah I mean it's a staff you know staff developed it but really it's it should be influenced by you know we're gonna have the public hearing on December 12th and then any you know any priorities that the committee comes up with or what we think might want to be changed in it uh so um I mean it's really limited to three pages needs to summarize you know both block ran eligible projects and kind of what the community um you know is invested in and then what are projects or activities that would be undertaken and so yeah I mean the way the the strategy is structured now is it mimics the chapters of the master plan so like housing um you know historic cultural resources and then we have a sustainability piece at the end and then um a few action items and so you know typically in that we have to identify the activities that we will then fund and so it's kind of a funny thing but um you know for instance we have kind of generic I was just gonna open the document we have generic things in the action plan like um support social service programs and we mention a bunch of them and we do that just so then you know and I mean it's not like we're trying to be too broad but really those are um you know what we identified as priorities so I think that the strategy could be updated after the hearing to you know if we hear things that maybe we change but you know I don't expect that it'll change much year to year it's kind of a it's still it's still a pretty current to me the only thing I saw in there that we might want to take out is under the transportation it references the valley bike share program and I think that's at this point kind of defunct or in hiatus yeah let me uh I'll highlight that but this was fairly recent so it's not like we're coming back to it three years later so I know yeah I'll do a quick closer read on it I know if there's anything that really jumps out like that I'll ask Stephanie about the bike share I thought we were trying to find another vendor but it might be that it's not yeah it might actually be kind of dormant for now and then um you know and then we mentioned the target areas and then we have our priority projects and we have you know eight of them and so I mean really what it would be too is we have a public hearing in December we can update the RFPs and this document if we think there's some priority for social service or something that we missed and then we hold the second public hearing to review the recommended activities in February and at that public hearing we also will also include updating the strategy too and so if we need to do a last minute effort and say oh well you know maybe we have to tweak a um a target area we could do that as well so I mean I you know if you want to look at it individually or we talk about it more tonight but I don't I agree it was written just I mean not even a year ago right I think it was finalized less than a year ago so and prior to that one had it been written is it something that does get updated pretty much every year or yeah we I think you know so originally it was um a number of years ago you could it could be six to eight pages and before that I think was longer and so we had an updated one in a few years I think for in the 2000 teens it kind of stayed the same for a number of years and then um probably for the 2020 grant or 21 grant they reduced the pages or and that's when I really um kind of updated it more thoroughly so the document itself has been around but I think probably this version is um I know Ben and I more Ben worked on it and really tried to update every category so I mean we mentioned like 2023 funds and other things so I feel like um it captures quite a bit of what more recent things that town's been doing yeah yeah so I mean it's really I I just kind of laugh I kind of laugh because the state's like oh you should update this every year and oftentimes communities say well you know we have a master plan that's good for 10 years I mean this is supposed to be like a mini master plan are we really going to change it drastically year to year right I think maybe some of the accomplishments can be updated but in terms of the goals like you know did our housing goals change or our transportation goals I typically don't or the activities to be updated you know but pretty much the priorities remain the same if I'm understand okay yeah yeah right so if for instance there's a proposal that comes in and it's like wow okay wow we hadn't really thought about this or it's something in North Amherst and we really want to make North Amherst a target area I think we could justify it you know there's the new library expansion there's work going on around WD Coles there's the mill district and so then you know we could say okay well wow we had a few proposals for North Amherst and let's make North Amherst a target area and we update the strategy accordingly um so the December public hearing is one of the bullets is that just to note that that's sort of where we will hear back from the community yeah and I haven't updated the webpage but I think we talked about you know trying to advertise that and you know committee members can also let people know yeah I'll get a public hearing notice going tomorrow I'll email it around by the end of the week to different organizations and get it online and I think we also talked about you're gonna email it up to the to the schools to the superintendent's office maybe to put it into the their weekly update and let families know yeah and the COSA newsletter and then also I think we were going to send it to the grant recipients and actually I guess anybody who's applied if they have newsletters to send it out to their constituents as well yes yeah great um so the RFP um and the review criteria um knowing that we will hear from people and organizations um at the December public hearing I think we can have kind of an initial conversation right now about um what the RFP looks like did everybody have a chance to take a look at it um against sort of similar to the community development strategy we actually rewrote quite a bit of this last year I believe and and sort of tried to update it by adding in equity adding in environmental issues as part of what we were looking for from the um in the responses that we would get so I didn't see from from my point of view other than you know dates and names changing because now you get to receive them again may not bend um the uh there wasn't a ton to me that looked like it needed changing um the one the one thing that keeps popping up in my mind and I don't know whether now it's the time to talk about it may be an initial conversation now and then it'll be interesting to hear from people at the public hearing is whether we want to make a decision about restricting who we would give grants to um by by sort of at the for at the outset saying we're not going to duplicate 2020 the two-year grant with with this one-year grant and so if somebody has received it received that two-year um grant then and then they would get another year um of money that would be overlapping with the same year so essentially you know two two um allocations going to the same organization in the same year um and whether we would want to make a decision i'm not advocating one way or the other but I think that's something that we could potentially decide and if we were going to decide that I think it's the the kind thing to do is to decide it up front so that we're not asking people to work on applications um and to you know put all that work into something that in the end we would say actually I think we're not going to you know duplicate um allocations so I don't know people have thoughts on that I do agree you know that we need to do this you know ahead of time you know if we if we if we are going to be setting criteria like that um however you know is the idea here that we will be funding um basically you know totally different activities that fall within you know the um you know the priorities or you know um if we are to be funding the same ones you know as long as they have a different you know uh component you know to the program I think we've talked about it before so I can go either way but I do agree that this needs to be you know laid out before I think if we had fully funded the projects that were requested um that would be a different story but I know that we didn't fully fund um the the request that we had so I would um you know some of the needs are very great for some of the applications that we received so I'd hate to cut something off if if it was going to really fill a need among the priorities um okay so yeah yeah the state wrote and said um you know I asked what we should do in terms of overlapping activities and they recommended we have we have our social service um contract start November 1 and then June 30th 2025 and they said oh just have the next year's grant start on July 1st 2025 and just say it's a continuation of the activity that way you could fund it um which which would be fine I think the um what it does is it pushes back the start date so you know the state would say that if you apply this spring they're going to try to get contracts going in the fall and so instead of starting it December 1 like we normally would they would start July 1 for some um I don't think that's a problem it's just you know it does that just sort of push off the problem I mean if then the next round of funding we have the same issue and that we're sort of putting everything ahead six months basically just to keep funding the same I think the next year we'd run the contracts July 1 through June 30th 2026 and then um or we could do shorter and I think it'd probably resolve itself but it might right it might push the problem off a little you know yeah I mean it's a pretty big decision I don't know um you know how you you know if you would say you wouldn't fund you know any of the five organizations if they apply yeah I guess my my concern would be that um you know we've we tend to have funded the strongest applicants so if we kind of take them off the table then we're left with judging by the typical you know prior years a couple stronger applicants that we weren't able to fund and then maybe a number of weaker applicants um so I guess I would hesitate to make that a hard and fast rule up front rather than waiting to see what comes in that's sort of where I fall as well um because I think we just we don't know what's going to come in and I think even though um the sort of general um priority stayed the same the general you know development strategy stays the same I think there are increases that we hear about in need in certain areas that are you know perhaps greater than in others um and I think cutting ourselves off from funding those um I don't think it's necessary to do it I just wanted to have a and I think um if it was we just needed to have the conversation and make sure that we made that decision so yeah and I think some of these organizations are large enough that um they're doing a number of tasks that we may have funded a but they're going to apply for b or c um so I I I would err on the side of um not cutting off any of those prior funded organization okay good it looks like we all agree on that and um and then we can have made that decision intentionally and we can read more the only 10 to 15 pages that's right we do we do limit the uh the page number and to be clear that was clearly not the reason I was raising this so um the types of activities um we had rewritten these and I think added some in last year um does anybody have any thoughts on that's um number five on the on page four of the I'm looking at the social service application um and so that's sort of the the um the list that that um the programs need to fall within and I don't know if anybody has any thoughts about adding anything there or any that wouldn't we wouldn't need to have anymore my recollection is that when we did this last time we didn't actually remove anything I think we sort of um tightened the language or broaden the language where necessary to to um meet more what we were really trying to do with the with the grants um but that they generally have been essentially the same I think for a public decades right I mean if there was anything else that can always fall under other but I think we're capturing what the needs really are still so that was really the only area that I thought we needed to have conversation around for the social service activity application does anybody have any other areas they want to raise in that particular application no that we did a good job last time updating it and it wasn't that long ago so exactly um Nate anything you want to bring up on that no I mean I think we'll um I think we have to update like you said some of the some of the some of the information you know I think the page limit and how we try to word that is important and we you know I know we've got it bold and certain things to really make sure people follow it and other online things um and my recollection is that people really did I is that I mean I don't yeah and I think I think having the you know the 15 pages and then the five for attachments is really helpful and I think it's I think it's important for two reasons one is you know it's less for you know really how can you succinctly submit a proposal in 20 pages less for us to read and then we in the town when we submit our applications to the state they limit our page numbers too so we can't you know we can't submit a 40 page proposal for one activity you know they want to see you know the three page narrative they want to see a budget page or two and a few things so even you know um so what what we incorporate into the request for a proposal really translates into what the state would want to see even in terms of some of the review criteria so we're trying you know we mirror that pretty closely so what the organization provides to you and then how you recommend them is also then what the state looks at so you know I think we get in that way we you know our proposals are ready to be submitted as opposed to having someone write more information you know after they're recommended or something we really I feel like we've created a pretty good process oh yeah I didn't I haven't you know I don't think yeah I don't think the state's changed anything so um I should I I'll make a note to just look at their their proposed changes were really minimal so I think all this would probably holds true and do you um so you'll go in and make the basic changes of dates and and all of that and then I was going to say I would offer to do it but you know those addresses and dates yeah that's fine and then yeah we can have the maximum amount I think you know what we talked about the last meeting is um typically we can recommend up to five social services it doesn't have to be five and then you know we build the budget up to 20% of the grant award so you know there's always a discussion about okay do we fund five is it three and we never have a strict rule of award there and so you know some communities will really say that they have one or two priorities and then that's really all they fund is it you know and we don't do that in Amherst and that's fine um so but some of it would be you know when it's when it is the proposal review time we can just remember that it doesn't have to be five or it could be five and you know sometimes it's difficult when you have to parse the budgets but yeah um but I agree I don't think we need to decide any of that now we'll wait to get see what we get right um for the non-social service activity application I didn't have any recommendations to make or changes and again we redid this one and it's more um yeah we just didn't get proposals I know staff's meeting next week to talk about it and I think I know one or two agencies might submit but I was surprised last year there weren't that many yeah I think that covers number three yeah I mean we I mean we did I said I did send what um the previous funding allocations were the different agencies as an attachment I'm pretty sure I sent that around right for everyone um you may have I also just noted it myself and so that I'll put I can put that online but that is something we can use when we review proposals yeah I think we'll absolutely want that in terms of handling great um all right does anybody have any other questions or comments or topics under the 2024 application process because if not then we'll move into um public comment is there anybody here for uh lab is here okay if you want to raise your hand sure you can unmute yourself thank you so much I do not have a public comment I was just listening into better understand the RFP process and as always just really appreciate the committee's uh deliberation and thoughtfulness so thank you so much thank you I hope giving Tuesday's going well for you watching it anxiously that's for sure thank you so much thanks for coming and yeah love your did your hand raise again or no my apologies I was trying to lower my hand three years and you think we'd all we'd all be experts at that now I'm all set uh have a lovely evening thank you guys you're just giving us high fives that's great but actually so Nate seen um love's still screen photo does remind me can we in the public hearing do what we did toward the end last year and have people come in and actually be able to see them yes yeah yeah we do that okay great yeah the yeah that's usually what we do is sometimes it takes a little bit more you know it's a delay to bring people in but it's way not that hard um and in terms of um people speaking just to sort of look at the the public hearing for just a minute out of order I guess um we have in the past limited people to about three minutes um which I think seems like a a good amount of time and enough for them to get to say what they want to say does anybody have any thoughts about changing that to either fewer minutes or more minutes I think that's pretty consistent with the other committees in town and it seemed appropriate I don't think we were cutting anybody off right yeah no it certainly wasn't like a hard fast no muting yeah I know the the planning board in town council they put the little countdown clock on the screen and then kinder and gentler than that we don't need to do that and then at 10 seconds it like beeps for the next 10 seconds to remind you that you're supposed to end soon so um yeah no I think three minutes is good you know we can we'll put on our notice that you know we always say it anyways that people can always provide comments through phone or email or any you know other correspondence so um and if we do receive that do we need to incorporate it into the meeting by anything about school committee right where they read everything out loud so it's part of that yeah sometimes I'll read it or I'll post it in the packet or I'll send it to you so you all have it so that mean that's as long as it's distributed to the committee um and then you know I think in the past I would have summarized if there was written comments okay great I think we have reached the end of our agenda it's almost too quick though I think we have to know do you want to chat are we getting paid by the hour yeah she did drywall I'll just make a lot of mistakes yeah no I um I was going to share the screen just quickly though I just wanted to um um I don't see yeah maybe it's here the uh so here's the list of what had been funded and you know we don't we don't um you know we don't have any rule about not you know being funded in consecutive years or anything but that's sometimes that's discussed and so I think this was sent around as an email so you can just see you know I went back a few years but I think that would be great if you could send that out I thought I I thought I did maybe you did I apologize yeah I don't think I saw it okay um not in that format I think I saw that and so okay um yeah and I think you know like Nat said usually we fund you know we rank the proposals first then look at the a funding amount but you know there's a pattern of who gets funded and I don't you know sometimes people comment on that and I think you know the response right is that it's a comparative review year to year or application process application process and so um you know sometimes we have you know different organizations apply and sometimes you know we get the same eight or nine or seven or whatever um I think the the um the non-social service activities is something that gets to be more difficult as as we keep doing projects you know the target areas are what we see outlined here and the eligible block groups are in green and so there's really not a large area in town that is considered a majority lower modern income households and to me that becomes the trickier equation is what you know what was what can what can be funded in these areas you know for instance we could fund affordable housing in North Amherst because it's uh directly related to the tenants will be affordable so that could work but you know if it was a road project up here where it's not income eligible then it's really hard to justify it unless we did income surveys for a particular street or something right and I actually remember somebody coming on and asking about sidewalks on Bay Road I think yeah they miss you yeah we've done income surveys before they're difficult you have to have a really high response rate I think it's like 95 of the households have to respond yeah yeah um but yeah I think that's um something we to consider you know you can let anyone know that this is the application process is happening anyway in the review criteria so I think what we had mentioned before this is just from the other year you know individually you would rank every category and then come up with your you can come up with a composite score for each proposal and then you what you would send me is all right here's my order you know one two three and for social services it'd be similar you know I don't need to see your individual scores or this table if for instance family outreach was your first one and this was your second one you would just send me that order and then that's what I would I would show the committee as we review proposals and say okay yeah it looks like you know three of you rank this one in your top two and in that way that just is the beginning of the conversation and so during the proposal review you know it is a public meeting so the committee does you know has to discuss its um you know all that in a public setting so you know most I think the last few years it's actually been done really it's been really good discussions and I think having this review matrix helps and then we you know it um I think everyone takes it pretty seriously so it goes pretty well in years past it wasn't as uh formal it would be like oh yeah I know that organization so oh goodness come on we're supposed to be doing a little more I found that rubric to be really helpful yeah all right Nate you were able to extend the meeting for an additional four minutes there is there anything else you want to say no but while we were talking oh yeah so you said you had it um yeah you guys said you hadn't received that email so let me I'll just send that um I thought I had sent it to the other the other oh no maybe I didn't I might have just printed these out from the website I can't but I'll send that out with all the attachments I think it was an email with a lot of attachments okay yeah I'll send it out again thank you and at least the four of you here could make December 12th yep yeah I know I haven't heard that people can otherwise I just if we don't have a quorum it would be a problem yeah well you Rika and Greg will join and right we'll group together all right great great all right everyone will thank you very much for your preparation and your thoughts today and we will look forward to hearing from the public on December 12th that one probably will be a longer meeting um if the past four tells anything um but always really interesting and and exciting to hear about the work that's being done um and so until then okay so I just one quick note so usually the 12th what we do is we have a public hearing to receive public comment and then that same evening we follow it immediately you know the same zoom meeting at the same meeting with a public meeting to discuss any changes we want to make to the request for proposals so if for instance you know a priority really seems to have um you know bubble to the surface or if we want to change some wording or something and so usually we have the public you know it's a a two-session to the meet to the evening um it doesn't have to be more than two hours necessarily but you know depending on how much comment we receive or discussion there is great all right thank you thanks everyone thank you all right have a good night thank you


Remember a time before television was completely digital? It wasn't that long ago, but many people seem to have forgotten about that analog signals were the standard. To the outside viewer, one might not know the differences between the two. I probably wouldn't have known the difference myself, if it wasn't for my parents' large antenna behind our house. It was the size of a car, and the space it required, took a good quarter of our backyard. My dad loved television, and his job allowed him to afford whatever expense for his addiction. I remember there was a TV in every room of the house, even in the bathroom. My room was no exception. The television was an older television cabinet, one of those ones with the TV built inside, and had the fake drawers. It was originally our living room set, but since that had upgraded to a 42 inch CRT, I inherited it. I guess he was tired of kicking me out of the living room when I was playing video games. Ironically, I never was much into television myself. It was never interactive enough for my taste, and I hated someone just telling me a story. Usually the TV in my room would be on channel 4 for my Nintendo. On rare occasions I would turn on to Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon, when I was particularly bored with jumping on enemies, but that was about it. I was still appreciative of the set however. I recall there were 120 channels on the dial of my TV. Because of the placement of the channels, it was easier to go backward to get to the channels that I would want to watch rather than going forward. However, this way there was a lot of what I called, ghost channels. They were mostly shows that didn't come in quite right. I'm not exactly sure why they were there. Maybe the signal wasn't quite strong enough, or maybe it had something to do with how it was connected to the antenna. Most of them were just static, where you could just barely hear any talking, but I could never quite make out what it was saying. Almost every channel from 80 to 120 was one of these ghost channels. I started getting actual programming around channel 80 or so, but Nickelodeon was 78, and Cartoon Network was not so far behind. Looking back, turning the channel this way, saved at most a couple of minutes of my life, but it made me feel pretty efficient as a child, even if I had to hear annoying static. But one of the stranger ones was called, Channel 1. The dial on the television didn't have the number 1 labeled. I've been told on some TVs this was the U channel, but I guess it functioned the same. It went from to right around to 120. However, there was definitely an audible click in between them. The channel was always just complete static. The other ghost channels would have an actual channel trying to push through. Channel 1 wasn't a ghost channel, it was a dead channel. No sounds of talking, no picture forming, nothing like the others. Just complete static. One of the other televisions in our house even had a channel 1. For some strange reason, I always felt bad for the channel, it seemed like it was forgotten. I'm not sure why I had a strange empathy for a television channel of all things, but I always slowed down as I got closer to it, just to acknowledge it was there. I guess to call it a dead channel was wrong of me though. Rarely there would been something on channel 1. I remember the very first time it happened. It was summer, and I was on vacation from school. I was watching Nickelodeon, until McCatnight came on. I didn't really want to watch a grandma show, as I not so affectionately referred to the black and whites indication that ran on the channel after dark. I was bored, and not ready for sleep, so I had started turning the dial to play a game of Super Mario Bros. 2. I was going past the channels, when I noticed an old black and white program flicker, right before I reached channel 4. As I said, there would be times where the other ghost channels would have something on them, but never have I seen something in Monochrome, and most definitely never on channel 1. I could have sworn that's where I seen it. I slowly turned the dial back bit by bit, until I got to that empty space. Sure enough, something was there. I don't remember any of the exact details at the time. I was fairly young and a bit confused, and my grasp on all the grown-up language was pretty limited. I remember an older man, black suit and tie, reading a sheet of paper, and speaking into a microphone with a fairly bland background. His voice seemed distinguished, and educated. At first glance, it was obvious he was a newscaster, but the things he said, didn't make any sense to me at the time. I vaguely remember he was talking about something with World War II. It was about the Pearl Harbor attack, and evacuations of civilians in areas that might be future targets. It was fairly serious sounding, and I recall being fascinated and confused. About two minutes into it, the signal faded back into the empty static. Thinking about it now, I would have been really creeped out that this happened, but my childlike wonder left me intrigued. It seemed fairly normal to me, since old shows ran all the time, and I figured why not the news as well. I figured Channel 1 was just an old news station that rarely ever came in. However, because of this rare occurrence, I became fascinated with Channel 1, and wanted to see what else would pop up. I sat there, watching the static for an hour, but nothing happened. Disappointed, and almost lulled into sleep with the white noise, I went too bad defeated. However, that moment made me obsessed, seeing something else on this secret channel. I felt like I seen something that I wasn't supposed to see. Or something that no one else had ever seen before. It was as if Channel 1 acknowledged my existence in return. When I was bored, and didn't feel like playing video games, I would turn the TV on Channel 1, just to see if anything else would force its way through the dead static. It drove my parents crazy to have me listening to that harsh white noise most of the time. It eventually drove them to the point where they would demand that I either change the channel or turn it off, threatening to take the TV away if I didn't. Humorously, I remember getting the talk from my father, because he thought I stumbled on the scrambled porn channel, only to find out that wasn't the case. But they never believed me when I told them what I saw, claiming that Channel 1 didn't exist. But despite these threats, I intently watched. Most of the time with the sound turned down, just enough that I could hear it. Their reprimands inspired me. Them telling me not to watch it, even denying its existence, only made the curiosity worse. I watched it for weeks over that summer. Most times it would be nothing, but eventually my efforts paid off. I recall for more incidents of something coming up on Channel 1, after that day that I remember seeing that strange newscast. These events were a week or two apart, at completely random times of the day. Each of these only lasted for a minute or two before they faded away. The first one that I saw was a cartoon of all things. Through the faint static, there was an image of a sun, that was breathing fire on the land, causing the water to dry up, and the plants to die in cartoonish ways. There was no voice acting, only a narrator that talked over the show. I could barely hear him through the static. From what I could tell, there was a Native American village, that was dying from the heat of the sun. A Native American boy tried to give animals water, but all that was left was a drop. Before the plot could develop any further, the whole thing faded into static. The second time, was the newsman again, this time talking about a rather terrible story of a young girl, who was murdered in a park somewhere in California. He made brief mention of the scene, of how her body was discovered into different locations, though the details were intentionally vague. He made mention of a police investigation, not turning much of anything, and he demanded that if I knew anything about it to contact the authorities. I remember he said something like it was a Black Daisy murder, or something to that effect, before the scene faded into the static. The third one, was what seemed like an old weather report. I remember someone, besides the newscaster, talking about how the cold weather was great for the season. He mentioned the low temperatures and the snow falling. It was a very stark contrast to the humid summer heat I was dealing with. I honestly don't remember much of this, because I believe this one came in at 3 am, and I only caught it due to the static cutting out, and waking me from a dream. It was Doctor Who and the Sensorites. The last broadcast I caught though, it was rather disturbing and different from anything else I ever seen. For then, everything I had seen was at least recognizable, but what came across the last time was too frightening for my young mind. It was some older man in a nice outfit, and a monocle looking thing in his hand. I distinctly remembered he spoke with a thick accent of some kind. However, the static distorted his features where I could not see any face. But what was worse were the creatures he was talking with. They had distorted skulls, long faces and slits for eyes. I don't remember seeing noses or mouths, but their skin was leathery and dark. I figured they were aliens of some sort, but not having any exposure to sci-fi, they looked like burn victims. The static was just thick enough that I could not even make any details to relieve the stress in my mind. As a child, this vision scared me so much that I remember leaping out of the bed turning the TV off as quick as I could. I ran into my parents' bedroom crying, trying to explain what I just saw. They didn't believe anything I said about Channel 1. They played it off as it was just static, and my eyes were playing tricks on me before berating me about watching Channel 1 again. Since then, I had always gone the long way around the dial. I made damn well sure that I stayed away from Channel 1 as much as possible. Unfortunately, I didn't use that TV for much longer, as I had gotten a new TV for Christmas that year, as well as a Super Nintendo. Undoubtedly, they bought this for me to alleviate the issues I had with Channel 1. This TV didn't have the ghost channels, and not even a way to access Channel 1. However, the old TV was still in my room, due to it being fairly useful as desk to put the new TV on top of. Besides, that TV cabinet was roughly 600 pounds, and my parents had no desire to try to drag that thing out of my room. For a long time, the TV just went unused, and Channel 1 was completely out of my mind at this point. It wasn't until 15 years later, that old TV would be used again. I had inherited Dad's flat screen TV from his room, after he got yet another upgrade. It was nice, but it only had composite cables, no plugs for an RF adapter. By this time, analog on televisions was being phased out for digital, so there was less and less need for those coaxial cables. It didn't really bother me, because every other console I had supported it, outside of my old Nintendo. I knew there was a composite cable option, but I never bothered investing in them. But one day, I just had this urge to play Super Mario Bros. to again. I just plugged in the TV cabinet, and plugged in the Nintendo. It was simple, the old Nintendo RF adapter, as well as the antenna cable, was already in the back. I had no desire to move the heavy TV to unplug it, even after all these years using it as a desk. However, since my dad had moved onto digital cable, the only channels that were coming in, were the analog channels anyone could get. The huge antenna in our backyard was still functional, so the quality of the signals were fairly good. Curiosity consumed me as I browsed through the channel, to see what we were still getting. After some clicking through more than 100 dead channels, there was one I needed to check. It was a good long time, before I had even considered looking at it again, and I still vaguely remembered the creepiness of it, but now I just dismissed it as childlike imaginations, as I was told it was. I turned it to channel 1. On first glance, it was nothing but static, but there was something different in this static than it was all the other dead channels. It was harsh, almost scrambled. There was a strange, constant sound coming through. It's hard to explain. It sounded like someone was talking underwater. Every couple of seconds, an extremely high-pitched sound would come in and slowly fade, like the sound your ears make when they are ringing. I intently watched for a good minute, trying to make out what was going on. I could see the video, ever so faintly through the static. In my mind's eye, it was the news reporter, with the paper and microphone as I had seen about long before. I humored at the luck of stumbling upon something on channel 1 after all these years. As I said, it was 15 years since I even looked at it, and I remember spending weeks worth of time for the random two minutes of content, quite literally a million in one odds. The signal grew stronger, it became easier to make out, and eventually I was treated to a fuzzy picture. However, as the picture started coming through, a sense of dread washed over me. It looked like the reporter, but something was deformed with his face. It looked disproportionate. His head was large, I'd say roughly one and a half times the size of a normal human, making it very easy to see details despite all the static. It had a shiny, rubber texture to it, and was expressionless. His lips were barely moving, and the eye sockets seemed dark and empty. It was as if he was wearing a cartoonish mask of himself. I was confused at first, but then the whole face just changed expression. This time looking angry, the mouth seemed to grit nonexistent teeth, and the brow furrowed with a stowel. The mouth grew wide, like a snake and hinging its jaw, then slant shut, and his face turned completely neutral again. It seemed wrong, it wasn't quite a mask, or a puppet. It was like someone was wearing skin that didn't fit. His movements were exaggerated, his head bobbing up and down repeatedly as he talked. It wasn't in any sort of rhythm or motion, but completely sporadic. His hands were moving the papers in exaggerated motions, as he flipped through them. On the papers, it was complete scribbles, ran haphazardly across the page. It seemed like as if someone was imitating a caricature of the reporter, like a parody or satire. As he spoke, the strange reverse gloving and harsh static coming through. A screech that sounded like a roar of a robotic elephant, came piercing through the static that caused me to freeze in fear. It was then, I noticed the other proportions. His hands were dangling. It was like the skin was hanging off the bone, and had no real muscle structure to it, bending and folding nearly flat at some points. His pinky not moving at all, just dangling loosely. Two fingers, the index and the thumb, were longer by a good inch. His limbs seemed unusually long, with his four arms disappearing behind the desk, and his arms sloping all the way down. Even his body frame was disturbing, resembling long, merely rail-thin proportions. He looked at the camera, and you could see these strange-looking eyes, just gazing right at you underneath the mask's dead eyes. I then realized that wasn't entirely in black and white, but I could see these cyan-colored orbs behind the slits, like the whole studio was washed from color, rather than broadcasted in monochrome. His hand suddenly twitched, and shook violently. Then static over to the image. I was enthralled, but frightened. My hand was still on the dial, frozen. I wasn't quite sure if what I was seeing was actually happening. Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, and I was just seeing things through the static. I remember exhaling violently, as I had forgotten to take a breath the entire time that was going on. My mind tried to reason with itself. Maybe I just witnessed something and took it out of context, like I caught the last end of a Saturday night live skit. Hell, maybe I just imagined the entire thing. But just as I started to calm down, I changed the channel. I heard a voice that had been lost to my memory. It was the reporter. There was no image available, just static, and the voice was faint, and barely intelligible from the noise. I had turned the volume up full-blast, just to make out what he was saying, for some reason, feeling like he could explain what I just saw. His words were broken, with at least a second's worth of pause between them, and the tone from one word did not match the next, as if someone was using a sound board. Even after a decade later after hearing it, I remember it clearly as yesterday. Good morning. Danger. Killing. Everyone. Earth. Time. Twenty. Twenty-one. Everyone. Evacuate. Twenty. Twenty-one. All. Dead. Good night. There was a loud, screeching roar, followed by complete sound garbage. Painful, ear piercing gibberish. Probably because I had the TV on full-blast to hear the faint speech. Then the signal just cut out completely. Normally, there was a small fade-to static, but this was an immediate feed-cut. A feeling and nausea and worry overcame me, and I felt my tongue pull back into my throat. I had trouble comprehending what I just saw, my mind racing miles per second. I had gripped the dial so hard that I had shattered the plastic casing underneath my fingers, and I didn't realize that I was bleeding. I had let Channel 1 stay on for over an hour with the loud static, just to see if I could hear anything else, but nothing came up. I left it on for days, weeks, months. I had bought a DVD recorder to record when I slept and while I was at work. For almost a year of my life, I had spent hours with both televisions on. One watching what I missed, and one watching what might get to be. I dreamed in static. I had nightmares of these horrible, disfigured proportion doppelgangers of the newscaster. My entire life was consumed by this television. I was hoping, begging to hear anything. But despite my efforts, that was the last time I heard anything from that Channel 1. My parents, which I was still living with at the time, became so concerned that they forced me to see a psychiatrist to explain it to me. He said I had some sort of psychotic episode from stress that my mind had made up the whole event. Not once did he reassure what I might have seen could actually happen. He told me to quit watching Channel 1, but I refused. He tried to put me on medication, but I refused. He eventually ordered me to take the TVs out of my room, telling my parents that I shouldn't be allowed to watch the TV and supervised. Again, I refused. It wasn't until my father eventually smashed the old TV, and burned it while I was at therapy, that my search was forced to stop. I had spent time looking up what might have happened, searching forums, doing research, anything I could. The most common explanation I got, was that some of the old TV waves are sent out to space, and sometimes they come back if they bounce off a planet or something. That explained why I might have seen those old news reports, but I never got a good explanation on what I saw that day. My mind tries to wrap around the possibilities, but I never found any answers, other than people who seem even crazier than I am. I've been told that it was aliens, warning us about some asteroid coming to the Earth, with the government trying to cover it up. Some told me my TV was possessed by a demonic spirit, authoring me prophetic knowledge. Some told me it was a message from the future, appearing through a wormhole. And many told me that I was lying, or that I was crazy. As if it was just some story I wrote for attention or to just scare people. I'm not sure what I saw, I just know I've seen something. Something that maybe I shouldn't have seen but did. Or maybe it was something that was meant for us to see, but many just neglected the unlabeled channel. A channel that was completely removed from most TVs after that. I believe channel one was trying to communicate something to me. Every now and then, I desperately want to see what's on channel one, to hear any messages that might have been left out there, like some twisted obsession. But now analog TVs are a thing of the past. I couldn't even replicate the same setup anymore, at least not without hundreds of thousands of dollars. It might be impossible now. I just want to know if there were any other messages meant for us, things we might have missed. Thousands of minutes in my life go by, and each one containing a possible message, a warning that I might have missed. A narrative that I needed to hear. I wonder if the change to digital was with best intentions for us. Was it just because of better quality pictures and less frequency pollution? Or maybe something was seeing us, seeing our society filled with violence, murder, killing our planet. Seeing our fingerprints passing through empty space, only for someone or something to pick up like years away. Or maybe the change was to prevent us from seeing what they were sending back.


Okay, thank you, welcome to this talk. I will share with you my little expertise regarding a project I did to let's say control my house, my home. It's a project started long ago and finally reached OpenBSD. This is via this project that I meet the OpenBSD and I will explain all my projects. So first of all, my name, Vincent Delft. You see my blog website, my company website. And if you want to reach me, you have my email. So I will explain which component I've used to monitor my home. The lessons learned since 1988, so it's quite a long time. And the problem I had with Linux because I've started with Linux and why I choose OpenBSD. And then the next topics are quite recent. If we have time, I will go through them. So first of all, the components and the objective. So it's a monitor my home, my house. I'm using infrared captors in different homes. I have the concept of zone so you can activate the zone and deactivate the zone. Like for example, the garage. If you have animals, put them in the garage and you activate the rest of the home. I would like to have a system which send SMS and also receive SMS. So I can activate the zone by sending SMS from my mobile. And I received events on my GSM too. I have scenes. I have a small web interface where I can look at the log files, some details regarding the different events. And I have web camps. So I would like also to see from any device what's going on around the house. And for sure, I have also an objective to have a cheap solution. Budget is not unlimited. So let me share with you the outcome and then I will explain how I came to this outcome. So first of all, OpenBZ for me for this project was the best system amongst the different I've tested. Very flexible. It runs on very different kind of hardware. I've implemented recently a read-only file system which is really great. I will explain why I did that. The main page, very complete, awesome. Big thanks to the OpenBZ developers. It helps a lot having a feature. But explain how to use the feature is really great. The upgrade system. So every two years you have a new release. You have a very simple system to upgrade your machine. We have also the C-spatch which allows to keep your machine safe and up to date in terms of security. This upgrade is very straightforward and first time right. You really can apply. It runs. I never had any issue with that. It takes a little bit time, but it's mainly because of my internet connection. It's not linked with the process itself. I've talked about C-spatch and I hear and I read some remarks regarding based this dying. It's no more an option for today. Don't listen to those guys. Try OpenBZ yourself. Make your own evaluation of the system. It's really a great system, a great operating system. And at the end I keep it. It's for me, for my point of view, the best system for this project to monitor my house. So if I go a little bit into the details. At the beginning I was using this card. It's a card from a company called Velman. It's no more produced. It was in 1998. Basically I have 16 IO ports.  And I connect this card to my system via a parallel port. Then I have a small GSM device to send and receive the SMS. I have a small, a small board. Currently I'm using an atom board. It's because of power consumption. Cheap and low power consumption. So it's perfect for this kind of usage. 4 GB of RAM is far enough. A small CPU. And I'm not using this for the moment. I will explain why. I'm using a small axis camera. I've bought them on eBay. They are working quite nicely. And for sure a reliable operating system to make this system running 24 hours a day. 35, 30, 165 days per year. So you have to have something which is reliable. On the software side. I was forced to use the I386 systems until OpenBusiness6.0. I will explain why I've changed. I'm using an HTTPD server for the web, the lock. The lock file I'm presenting via a web interface also to display the image of the camera. The camera is the axis camera as a motion detector. So it sends a picture when there is something changing in this area. And send those pictures on an FTP. The demon that runs on the operating system. I need a C compiler and I have a bunch of Python scripts. I will explain. I've developed on the Velman board a C program to look around in, in, in and out of the API. And to look at those IO if they are open or closed. This was easy to develop. Very simple to build. In fact, it's a big loop which look at all those I.O. and check their status and read them or set them if you want, for example, activate the sirens. This was nice, but there is a but, and I will explain a little bit later why I put the but here. There is also another package which allow you to manage the SMS. On OpenBSD, you just have to type package at SMSTools3 and you have all what you need. There is a configuration file. You just have few parameters to update. The device on which your SMS device is connected, so the serial port. If you want to do incoming, the CS convert is for the character set. Then the initial command, the AT plus CHUP is just to hang up on current connection if there. And then you have to develop a small event handler, so a small script which will be triggered when the system received an SMS. I will explain that a little bit. So this small program received two parameters, the received, saying that you have received an SMS, and the part where the SMS resides. An example of SMS is this one. So you have a lot of information coming from your providers. And the most important is the last element. So you have the length of the text, blank line, and then the text you have received. In this case, I received an SMS with the word status. If you want to send an SMS, you just have to put a file in this directory. Whatever the name, you can choose the name of the file. Just put the file there. It will be taken by the SMS daemon. You have to respect this template, at least you can have more elements, but you have to at least respect this. So the destination, which is the same device you would like to reach, a blank line, and then the text. And you have to limit to the 120 character, I think. For the web server, at the beginning I was using a small program called FAP-WAS, which is a Python, a kind of Python library, which allow me to easily display some element. I'm now using the HDD-BD provided by OpenBSD. It's light. One of the key elements in all this project is to have something which is light, because the board is quite small, but HDD-BD is perfect for this. And I'm running it in a short environment, so even if someone finds my machine, he cannot break it. This interface does not allow you, for me, to configure the alarm, so security-wise it's not possible via this HDD-BD to break the system. If your provider does not allow you to have a fixed IP address, you have to make a solution with dynamic DNS like, for example, free DNS. You have to install a small script, for example, every five minutes, which will update the free DNS website concerning your IP address, so you can always reach your web interface. Oops. So for the camera, it's just a normal situation. You just have to configure the camera that they sent a picture to your FTP server, so you just have to provide the IP address. You just have to also provide the user ID that the camera can use to put those files on your OpenBSD machine, so a couple of commands like I've presented there. You can have multiple cameras, two cameras, but you can have as many as you want. So my lessons learned since 1988. The time I spent before each upgrade should not be underestimated. In fact, it's one of the biggest pain in this system. You always have a package which upgrades and breaks your system. A library will change its position. It's no more in the same place. I had a few problems with the board after six, seven years, so such kind of cheap machine running 24 a day, a full year. Well, it's not perfect. It's not ideal, so be prepared to replace the board every six, seven years. The weakness part in this system is the power supply. So the small device will transform your current in 5 volts, 3 volts, something like that. This element is very weak, maybe because the boards are cheap. And this weakness is most probably the consequence of the other element. I don't know.  I had an EPS in the beginning, but I removed it.  Every two years, I have to replace the power supply. Then you have also the infrared captors. It's also an element to look at carefully, because you have to clean them at least one year of, yes, once a year you have to perform a good cleaning. And in the big loop, I've explained to capture the IO of the different captors. You have to be smart enough and take into account the false alarm. This is a quite difficult element because you have maybe animals, which trigger a captor, and you don't want to generate an alarm and activate the sirens. Maybe you have some small insects. So if your captor is pointing to a radiator, the fact that the radiator starts, it could also trigger the captor and generate false alarm. So the loop must be clever enough to avoid such kind of alarms. In the beginning, my neighbors were quite annoyed by the sirens, which start in the middle of the night, and always when I was in on holidays, so quite difficult. So this is why I do not forget to have the possibility to manage your system from remote having SSH. It's the best option via a smartphone. You have application. You can connect to your machine, and you can manage it directly from the mobile. Or via SMS, you can send SMS commands to restart the process, to reboot the machine to whatever you want, generate, exclude a zone, for example, from the monitoring. And also, an observation, it's not always a good idea to use old machine for such kind of system. Old machine will use old technology, which consume a little bit more power than the new one. So if you want to keep your electricity bill low, it's better to buy new boards like the Atom, for example, which is optimized in terms of power consumption. So my story is this one. At the beginning, I started with Slackware for about four years, so as from 1988, at that time I was playing with such kind of device. It was a pain to install Linux, about 20 disks to install the Linux system, but it was working quite well, quite reliable. And upgrade, upgrade at that time, upgrade of Slackware was a little bit difficult and required a lot of effort. So I immigrated to Red Hat. I keep it about three years, but then I had also some difficulties with the package and the RPM package, which generates some situation where I'm forced to update my programs. The library moved from one place to another one. It was not perfect. So it is in the time of 2000, so maybe they found solution today. And then I've used Gen2, which was for me one of the best systems. So quite reliable, upgrade not so difficult, quite predictable. The biggest problem was that you have to build from source. And this board was the only one with the I386. So when you have to upgrade, it takes one day, but it runs. It runs quite nicely. I also observed that during this about 10 years, I had two disk crash, two times. I don't know. I've never understood why maybe the manufacturer of the disk is not good enough at that time. I don't know. It's just an observation. Then in 2009, there is a small gap of two years, if you look carefully. But in 2009, I've tried the OpenBSD. It was quite easy to install. The upgrades are fantastic, really easy. There is no so much variation within the system. When you have a feature, it stays more or less always, it stays as it is, small upgrades, small add-ons in terms of feature, but the main aspect remains. So for such kind of project, this is really, really great. OpenBSD is secure by default. And as I said, the man's page is very, very useful. So it was kind of an ideal situation. But in 2013, I see in the mailing list that it was said that the IO perm in B, out B I was using, was not forcing to be implemented on the 64-bit system. So I'm saying, OK, I have to continue with the 32-bit. But then in 2016, they decided to remove that also. So OpenBSD 6.0 was a decision for me to move away from this old board and to buy a new one. So since I do not have any more the possibility to interact with my board via this API in B, out B, I was forced to buy a new one. I bought this from a vendor called Dencovi. It's a very small board. If you look at the size of the internet port, it's very small. And I have 24 IO on this system. It's not, the cost is quite acceptable. And I've used this system, but not directly. So I'm using what we called Optocoupler. It's a small device which allows you to connect a system like a sirens, like infrared captors. And if you have an electrical problem on this device, it will not break the board. It will break the Optocoupler. So it's a kind of protection, electrical protection for the board. So I've built a new loop. I did it in Python to look at all those ports, all those IOs via SNMP get command. And you can interact with the board via SNMP set command. So it's quite really, really simple to implement. The same logic to avoid the false alarm. So quite simple. The SMS tools is the same. FTP-Demon is the same. HTTP-Demon is the same. So really one component of the solution was rebuilt. And now to tackle the system, the problematic regarding the power cut and the possibility that when the machine boots automatically when the power is back, is that you have a file system check. And in some cases, this file system check asks you a question, which is a problem for such kind of machines. And the only possibility is to have a direct connection to the machine to answer the question. So my idea was to remove the right option on the disk. So build a system read-only. There is a very good project called FlashRD, which tackled this problematic. But instead of using FlashRD, I've built it myself. And to build such kind of system with OpenBSD is quite simple, in fact. What I did, I did a normal installation. So you start your BSDRD, so the process which allow you to install OpenBSD. I plugged in a USB stick. And I ask OpenBSD to install everything on this USB drive under the same folder, under the same file system. So everything is installed under Slash. So I skip the recommendation, the default provided by OpenBSD. Then once the installation is performed, I boot from this USB drive and I change FS tab like this. I don't know why the color. So what I change, I change the parameter which says that this file system is read-only. The rest remain the same. And I had three lines for VAR, Slash VAR, Slash DF, Slash TMP. So there will be a memory file system, so MFS. I provide a link to a folder where the system can find the different files. And I allocate a certain amount of memory for this file system. So the file system will become read-write, but in memory. There is no link with your disk. So then you have to provide information in those two folders. So just copy what you have in Slash VAR into the new folder. The same for DEF and for TMP, I don't need files. So it means that when the machine will boot, those Slash VAR and Slash DF will be seen by the kernel as normal file system, but they are in memory. With the information, you can find this CFG Slash VAR. So very simple to set up. The only recommendation I have is just to have at least four gigabytes of RAM for this. I'm able to boot from USB 2 port on a lot of different ports, both. I don't know why for USB 3, it doesn't boot. Maybe it's my fault. I don't know why. OpenBSD is not booting from those USB. I have to check that. So there are few elements to take into account. If you want to make some changes on your system, you have to put back the system read-write via the mount command, then you do your change, and then you put back in read-on-leave via amount minus UR. If you would like to add some files, for example, via the pkgadd command, then you have to update your Slash CFG folder. I'm doing it via everything you can do what you want. And if you want to keep your log files, maybe you have to execute this command once every hour, if you want, every day, for this project, I'm just doing a sync every day. And for the rest, OpenBSD sees the different folders exactly like a normal OpenBSD system. So it's quite easy. And via this system, you can really shut down the machine. You can kill it. You can plug out the power cable. The machine will go down. You plugged in. If you have configured the BIOS, it will boot up immediately. No file system check, nothing. It just boots normally. For me, it's really the perfect situation. And for sure, I have a disk attached to the board where I put the picture from the camera. And for this system, I could have issues when the machine boots. I could have file system issues, but it's just the picture from the camera. I prefer to have that damage. And my house is still monitored and controlled. And I'm using this system since about three years without any problem anymore. An observation. Since 2009, I'm using OpenBSD, so I never had a disk crash. Why? Because I had no idea. Maybe the manufacturer is doing better disks now. Maybe it's coming from OpenBSD. No idea. It's just an observation. And the future idea is to have some power over the internet devices. So my different camera will have just one cable today they have two. One for the power, one for the network. So this will facilitate the possibilities and the setup of the camera. So this is the conclusion, this is the same slide I showed before. So for me, OpenBSD is by far the best system for this project. It's really simple, light. It can run on many different boards. Easy to tune, easy to adapt. Easy to upgrade, which was one of the pain. And it's secured by default. So for such kind of project, this is really a good feature. Voila. And that's it. So if you have questions, yes? Have you heard of OpenBSD before you tried it, like when you were doing red hats and stuff like that? Did you know about OpenBSD then? Before? This would be the question before, because there are the people on the internet. So the question is did I heard about OpenBSD before this project? Yes, I heard about OpenBSD. I was aware. It's a system existing since long ago, but I never tried it before. So this project was a trigger for me to have a look at OpenBSD. And when I tried to configure and to set up it for this, I was amazed or simple it is. So now I'm using OpenBSD for NAS, for laptops. All machines are OpenBSD. My kids are using OpenBSD. It's just my wife. She stays with Linux, but all the rest are OpenBSD. And the second question? I was going to ask, what made you try?  It's the best, the best thing you have to do. It's quite simple. Just use an old machine and perform the standard installation. The standard installation will use the whole disk. So don't imagine to have dual boot at the beginning. You can, but it requires a little bit of configuration aspect. But if you want to keep it simple, dedicate a disk, do the installation, and then you have the package add command. You can add what you want. It's very simple. Other question? Yes? I wanted to ask if your SNMP was a trap event instead of calling it. Have you investigated instead of evaluating the SNMP traps instead if you receive an event? Yes. So the SNMP trap exists? Oh, sorry. So the question is, am I using the SNMP trap feature on the small then-covy board? I've looked at it. The problem is that you receive different kind of message more than what I expect. So you have to filter them. And I was a little bit surprised that some event have a small delay. And this is a problem for me. As I explained, I have to be quite smart to detect the false alarm. And the time is really a key element. For example, if I have an alarm on what captor, and let's say within 10 seconds another event on another device, it means that someone is walking inside the house. This is not a false alarm. If I have one signal, and then 15 seconds, for example, and another signal, it's something like a false alarm. So the timing is quite important. SNMP trap was not the best way to have such control on the timing. So I prefer to pull them manually, manually, within the loop. Another question? Did I convince someone to give a try to open BSD? It's a question? Yes. I'm not a developer. So yes, I can share it. But I don't know. Yes, sorry. Sorry. I repeat the question. Does the code I did is available somewhere? The answer is no. Maybe I could. But I'm not a developer. So it's not clean, for sure. But maybe someone else can improve it. So yes, I could. I could do it. I don't know if there are other persons interested in such kind of a project. No idea. But why not? I could think about that. And maybe in the future I can push the code on a GIT app repository. I'm not a developer. So I'm not using CVS. Do you still have happy neighbors? Yes, they are much more happy now. The two, three first year was a little bit difficult with them. I know they are much happy. The logic is much better. Okay. Thank you.