One of my favorite Gen2-based Linux distributions is Redcore Linux. Now, Redcore Linux, I've taken a look at it many times in the history of the channel here. And Redcore Linux has always fascinated me. It's a really nice, easy way to get into Gen2. It has a graphical installer. It ships with the KDE Plasma desktop environment. It has some of its own custom tools. Now, they just had a new release just a few days ago. So this is Redcore Linux 2201. This is their latest stable release. So I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO and I'm going to run through a quick installation and first look inside a virtual machine. All right. And when I go ahead and try to boot into a live environment before we get to a live environment, we have a login prompt. So this has always been the case with Redcore. And it's always a case that I struggle sometimes with these distributions that require a username and a password to get into their live environments. But typically, I would say the login would probably be the name of the distribution. So I'm going to use Redcore for the login name. And of course, that actually does log us in. But now how do I get to the Plasma desktop environment would simply start X work? It does not look like start X is going to work for us. I wonder if it's a video driver problem. So let me get out a full screen here, Invert Manager. And I'm probably in TTY1, so Control Alt F1. Yeah, that's where we're at now. The actual desktop environment probably should have been launched in TTY7. So let's do Control Alt F7 here, Invert Manager. And you say I don't have a login prompt. So it tried to actually probably launch the login manager, SDDM, which would get us into Plasma. But for whatever reason, Plasma, I guess failed to launch.  So let's force off. And I'm going to try a different video driver. The video driver is QXL. Now that's actually not the video driver I typically use in these virtual machines. Usually I use Vert IO. So that's weird that QXL was chosen for me because I have it set or at least I thought I had it set to always default to using the Vert IO driver. Let's see if that makes a difference. So let me restart the virtual machine. Let's go ahead and get back full screen. Start Redcore. All right.  All right. So we launch into our live environment with, of course, KDE Plasma. So those of you trying out Redcore in a virtual machine, Invert Manager or VirtualBox or some other hypervisor, make sure that you have the correct video drivers. And by correct, I mean, technically any of them should work, but I've played around with this stuff in virtual machines enough. I know that sometimes when things are not working right, try a different video driver. I found that Invert Manager, at least the Vert IO driver is typically the one that gives me the best results. So now let's go ahead and install the system. So I'm going to click on this icon here. And of course, we get the Calamaris installer, the standard Calamaris installer that so many Linux distributions use. I'm going to go ahead and choose my language. American English is correct for me. So I'll just click next. The time zone, it has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm just going to click next. English US for my keyboard layout is the default. And that's correct for me. So I'm going to click next. And then our partitioning. Do we want to erase disk meaning give Redcore Linux the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine? Or do we want to do manual partitioning where I manually partition the drive myself? This could be useful if you've got some weird custom partition scheme you want to use or if you're dual booting alongside other operating systems, I'm going to choose a race disk. I'm going to let Redcore have the entire drive. Now, do we want to create a swap in a virtual machine? I really don't need a swap. But on physical hardware, you probably do want to create a swap. I'm going to do this like it is on physical hardware. So I'm going to choose swap to file. So it's going to create a swap file for us. Then I'm going to click next. Now let's go ahead and create our username and password. My username is going to be DT the name of the computer. This will be the host name of the computer. I'm going to call this Redcore Dashvert. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for our DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password. And now do we want to log in automatically without being asked for that password? No, the reason you create a strong and complicated password is for privacy reasons. So you have to enter a password to get into your machine. It just makes sense for privacy reasons. So I'm going to leave that ticked off. Now do we want to use the same password for the administrator account? Sure. That way the sudo password and DT's password are the same. That way I don't have to remember two different passwords. So I'm going to click next. And now we get our summary here. Location looks good. Keyboard layout looks good. Partition scheme looks good. So I'm going to click install. And now it's going to warn us that it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click install now and away it goes. This portion of the installation typically takes about five to ten minutes on my equipment. So I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once the installation of Redcore has completed. So the installation has completed. That took a little longer than most Linux installations where typically these kinds of graphical installers take me about five to ten minutes to complete. This time it took about 15 to 20 minutes. Once it reached the stage where it's got to unpack everything, where it's unsquashing everything that hung for a little bit, but it only took about I'd say 15 to 20 minutes. So not a terribly lengthy installation time. Now to complete the installation in the Calamorris installer we need to tick on restart now and then click done. And then it should automatically reboot the machine for. So that's what I'm going to do right now. And I've rebooted my freshly installed Redcore Linux and of course I got to the login manager. The login manager of course is SDDM, the standard login manager for KDE Plasma. Let's go ahead and login. Get a nice little welcome sound. I greatly appreciate that. Obviously Redcore being based on Gen2. Before we do anything we probably should update the system. So if I go into the menu system and I search for software, we have the Discover Software Center, but that's KDE Plasma Software Center, but I don't know if that's really going to do anything for us because Redcore has always had their own package manager essentially called Sisyphus, which is S-I-S-Y P-H-U-S. So look for Sisyphus and they have Sisyphus GUI. There is a command line interface to Sisyphus. You can open a terminal and do some Sisyphus package management commands, but they do have a graphical tool as well. And you can see I am syncing myself. I hope to finish soon. So probably going to take a minute or so for it to sync. Well, that actually synced rather quickly. And we have the options down here of upgrading the system. And of course that's what I'm going to choose. So let me hit that and I get a message here at the bottom of the screen. I am upgrading the system. Please be patient. And because this was released, I want to say it was released about two weeks ago and being rolling release. There's probably a lot of packages that probably need to update. So this may take a minute. And one neat little feature of this graphical interface Sisyphus is you do get like the terminal output here in the GUI window. So you can follow along with exactly what's going on. Otherwise, all you would have is just a hanging window saying I'm upgrading the system. Please be patient. But you wouldn't really know what it's doing. But here you can kind of tell exactly what's going on. Now this update has been running for about 10 minutes. And you can see it's emerging binary 40 of 355. So 355 packages need to be updated and we're just on number 40, right? So this is going to take a while being Gen2 based, source based, right? The update times can be lengthy. So I'll pause the video, I'll be back once this update has finally completed. And I've been letting this update run for about 20 minutes or so now. And it's still not even halfway done. And I really don't want to have to wait for this very lengthy update. And the reason I was going to wait is because especially when you're building packages from source, any package management stuff is kind of CPU intensive. And being I'm doing this in a virtual machine, I don't want all of the virtual machine CPU to be sucked up by this package management update that's going on. And then be trying to show you other stuff in the VM. And maybe things act a little slow or buggy. And I know that will probably be the case, but I am going to go ahead and minimize this window. And let's take a look around Redcore. Just know that if things act kind of sluggish or slow, that's because I'm running that update. And again, that's sucking up all of the CPU of this virtual machine right now. So let's go through the menu system and see what is installed out of the box here in Redcore Linux. So let's go category by category. So in the development category, we have the Qt5 designer. So this is for Qt developers. Very few people are going to need to touch that.  Now we have an education category and we have mathematics for subcategory and library office math is in that category. We also have a science category that also has library office math. Under games, we have Lutris and Steam. I'm assuming these are the installers for Lutris and Steam. So if I clicked on Steam, it's going to run the updating Steam runtime environment. Probably shouldn't run this also while also doing that update of the system as well. Yeah, updating Steam. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and cancel that. I'm really, I'm not going to launch Steam inside the VM anyway, but that is just a quick way to get Steam and Lutris installed if you need it. We have a graphics category. We have font forge. We have GNU image manipulation program. Of course, that's going to be the GIMP. Let's go ahead and see what version of GIMP we're on. Let me go to help and let's go to about. This is GIMP 2.10.32. So the latest version of the GIMP. Also under graphics, we have Gwynvue, which is the image viewer for KDE Plasma. We have Ocular. Ocular, I believe, is the PDF viewer, the document viewer. And let's see what version of Ocular we are on here. If I go to about Ocular version 22.08.1. Under internet, we are using Chromium for our web browser. Let's go ahead and launch that. Let's see what version of Chromium we're on. You don't find a lot of Linux distributions that ship Chromium out of the box. So this is version 106.0 for Chromium. Most Linux distributions typically they ship Firefox. It's their default web browser, the free and open source browser of choice for most Linux distributions. But Chromium is fully open source. So that's not a bad choice either. Also under internet, we have Conversation with a K, which is KDE Plasma's IRC client. If I open Conversation, would it default to the Redcore Linux IRC channel? It will. So it will automatically connect us to the Redcore channel over on Liberichet. That is a nice touch. I love when Linux distributions have their IRC clients automatically connect to their support channels that just saves us still. Because that's probably what most people would open that program for anyway. We have Q-BitTorrent for a BitTorrent client and we have the Steam installer also in the Internet category. Under Multimedia, we have GUVCView. This is a webcam application. It's actually a really nice webcam application. I use it on all of my machines. We also have Phonon audio and video. I don't know what that is. Let's open it. It looks like it's some kind of audio settings program because it's asking about the pulse audio sound server and things like that. I'm not really sure what that is, but it's definitely not a audio or video player. But we do have under Multimedia an audio player, QMMP, and a video player, VLC. So QMMP is kind of like a win-out clone, right? It looks very old school. Like the old school win-out that you would see in Windows 95 or Windows 98 from way back in the day, right? So that's a real blast from the past there. And then, of course, VLC is your standard free and open source video player on Linux. That's a cross-platform. I use VLC on Windows, Mac, and Linux, right? So VLC, this is version <IP_ADDRESS>. And of course, I say VLC as a video player. You could also play audio through VLC if you prefer. Under the Office category, we have the full LibreOffice Suite. So we have Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, and Rider. If I open LibreOffice Rider, which is the word processing program, let's see what version of LibreOffice we are on. Let's go to Help and let's go to About LibreOffice. This is LibreOffice<IP_ADDRESS>. Let's close that out. Under Settings, we have System Settings, which is your standard, like, control panel application, right? Where you can go and change things like appearance, workspace behavior, window management, and notifications and regional settings, things like that. Let's go ahead and go into the appearance. And let's see. So we're using the Breeze theme. I actually would prefer a dark theme. So let's change to Breeze Dark just to have a dark theme. Of course, if we're going to change to a dark theme, I probably would want a light wallpaper. So let's close out of that. If I right-click on the desktop, let's configure desktop and wallpaper. And let's find a light-colored wallpaper. So we have all the standard KDE Plasma wallpapers that you've seen before, plus the one red-core branded wallpaper, which is the default wallpaper. But since I want a light wallpaper to contrast my dark theme, one of my favorite KDE wallpapers has always been this one here, Autumn 5.5. I'm going to click Apply, and then, yeah, I quite like that. That actually is a really nice contrast with a very light wallpaper against the dark theme. Now, I wonder if Control-Alt-T brings up a terminal. So Control-Alt-T does not bring up a terminal. So let me search for console with a K. That is KDE's console. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in. Let's go ahead and check what kernel version we're on. So uname-r. And the kernel version may change because I'm running that update. I bet there's a new kernel. But the one that shipped out of the box when this shipped was 5.15.71. And of course, that is an LTS kernel. Now, typically, when I open these terminals, I'll also run H-top to show you system resource usage. I know this is not going to be an accurate representation at all, because I've already mentioned I'm running that update of the system. We're upgrading all of our software through the Package Manager.  So the CPU usage is through the roof. But that's because we're updating the system right now, as far as the RAM, we're using 1.3 gigs of RAM of the 6 gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That's probably twice as much as what it will use on a cold boot. But right now, we're using 1.3 gigs, again, because I'm running that update of the system. Let me go ahead and close the terminal here. And I'm going to go back into the menu system here. And let's go into system. And under the system category, we have the Vahi browser. We have Belina Etcher. Now Belina Etcher is a really nice application. So this is an application to burn USB sticks. And it's a really fantastic piece of free and open source software cross platform. It is an Electron app, which is partly why it's cross platform. But I think it's probably the best USB stick burner available, at least on Linux. Also under system, we have the Discover Software Center, which again, you probably are not going to use because they're going to have their own Sisyphus GUI package manager that you should be using. Dolphin, of course, is the file manager for KDE Plasma. This is just the standard Dolphin file manager here. Not much to see there. Also under system, we have the Info Center. Let's go ahead and click on that because that'll give us a little bit of the system information as far as what version of KDE Plasma we're currently on. We're on 5.25.5. We're on KDE Frameworks 5.99.0. Cute version 5.15.5. And of course, we're using X11. We're using Xorg, not Wayland here. And finally, also under system, we have Timeshift. Timeshift, of course, is a way to take snapshots of your system. What this will do is if something bad happens with an update. And because Redcore is a rolling release distribution, bad things can happen on updates. Sometimes an update will break things. And it's nice to have these snapshots where you can go and roll back to a previous working state of Redcore before the bad update happens. So that is essentially what Timeshift is. I personally, I don't use Timeshift, but I know many, many Linux users do use Timeshift as kind of, again, like a safety mechanism. For me, typically, even though I run rolling release distributions, typically updates this minor breakages, packages break or whatever. And typically, I try to solve those problems myself without just rolling back or downgrading packages or anything. But sometimes you just can't help yourself. Sometimes you run into a situation where an update breaks something, but because you depend on stuff for work, you need a working system right now. Sometimes it's nice to have those snapshots. And that's essentially everything that is installed out of the box on Redcore, the Sisyphus GUI package manager here. Let's see. Yeah, I'm still not even probably two thirds of the way with that update. So I'm just going to let that continue running. And I'm just going to put that in the background. So that was just a quick installation and first look at the latest release of Redcore Linux, Redcore Linux. I've always been a fan of it. It's a fascinating distribution, being that it's based off of Gen2, because there's really not very many Linux distributions that base off of Gen2. There's just a handful of them out there. And honestly, I think as far as Gen2 based distributions go, Redcore really stands out among the crowd. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Mimic Mitchell, Paul West. Why you all know me? Alex Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Angry, Diokai, George Lee, Marsh, Drum, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archim, Adore, Polytech, Realities for Less, Red Profit, Roland, Steven, Tools Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, I want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.


When you use a vertometer or lensometer, the first steps are to set the power wheel to zero, the axis wheel at 180 degrees, and the prism axis indicator at 180 degrees. Adjust the eyepiece until the target lines are sharp. Before mounting the lens, make sure the lens table is down and out of the way. Mount the lens so the convex side is facing you. Hold it so it looks to be centered against the lens tube. Now you're ready to take a reading of the lens power. Always keep both eyes open when using the instrument, otherwise you may get severe eye strain. Neutralize the lens by turning the power wheel until the target lines are sharply focused. Is this a plus reading or a minus? Plus. Remember that the black numbers mean plus. In school, you write down your power wheel reading. In an optical lab, you would check the reading against the prescription. Note that the power wheel is marked in one-eighths of a diopter in the lower range for plus and minus. Above three diopters, it's marked in one-fourths for plus and minus. Got that? Okay. What's this reading? If you said plus one and a quarter diopters, you're right. Looking through the eyepiece, you're able to accurately center the lens. Shift it until the middle line of each set of target lines crosses through the center of the reticle. The next step is to mark the optical center of the lens. Press down to ink the lens-marking device. Then press against the lens. Remove the lens. For this spherical lens, you only need the center dot, so wipe off the other two. Finally, mark it with an L or R as appropriate in an upper corner of the concave side. That completes the procedure for neutralizing a spherical lens. Let's run through it again with another lens. Mount the lens with the convex side facing you. And remember not to let the clamp spring against the lens. Turn the power wheel until the target lines are in sharp focus. Okay? What is this reading? The correct answer is minus two and a half diopters. Center the lens so the lines cross through the middle of the reticle. Mark the optical center of the lens. Wipe off the two outside dots and mark the lens. This completes the procedure for neutralizing a spherical lens.


And that is how I'm going to introduce my next speaker, Iselle Kokchou, who is the co-founder of Story, which is an app that allows any organization with a story, such as museums, art galleries, or zoos, to tell easily and directly to the public. So Story has over 250 clients, both here and overseas, and Iselle has always had dreams of entrepreneurship. She's helped to launch two successful restaurants before taking off to Turkey, that's her get-on-a-plane thing, to teach English for three months. All of this she did, by the way, by the age of 19. So when she came back to New Zealand, Iselle became involved in startup doing social and digital marketing, and she sort of, right there, realized that this was her big passion. And so she had this passion for creating and developing business ideas. And shortly after that, she met her business partner, Chris, and Story became a reality. So it's really, really difficult to ask somebody who is so young what they would ask their younger self. But I did, and Iselle's answer is that she would be fearless. And although a customer may say no for now, it shouldn't discourage you to go and see them again in the future and land that deal. And I hope she's going to mention the world of wearable arts in her story, but if not, I'll mention it later. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Iselle Cotchou. Thank you so much for that amazing introduction, and I'm so excited to be here today to share the story of Story and where we've come in the last two years. So the story happened in Wellington during 2012 when my co-founder Chris Smith and I were at Wellington Zoo. We were looking at a pelican and had all of these questions in our mind. How does the pelican fly? Where does it originate from? All of these questions. And when we went to look for information, we had this plaque in front of us that said very minimal, this is a pelican that does this. And we wanted to know more. We wanted to see photos and videos, and we knew that information existed somewhere. We looked on Google, searched for five or so minutes, gave up. It was too boring. We wanted something else. We wanted something amazing. We found a zookeeper, and he was telling us that he has all this amazing information, but it's all on his computer. And from that day, that really stuck with us, and we went back to the apartment and spent the last, the next two days, logged up in there, creating wireframes so that we could go back to Wellington Zoo and go to them with this idea. So a week later, we scheduled that meeting and we presented this idea to them that didn't exist yet, that we only had a few pieces of paper to show. And they were so excited for the prospect of this technology that they ended up signing a four-year contract a few weeks later. So with that, and with that validation, and to see their excitement and their passion to actually help us create this, we decided to go for investment. And it came to us from a very out-of-left, came to us very out-of-left field. We weren't out looking for it, but through the connections that we'd already had and through people hearing what we were doing and what we were starting, people actually came to us. So we were really fortunate to be funded by Gareth Morgan about two months after the original idea. And still at this point, not really a product. We knew that we wanted to be in the zoo and museum space, but we didn't know much about it. But the one thing we did know was that they had a bunch of information. They spent thousands of dollars curating this information. They have photos. They have videos. And what's the best way that we can get this to the world? So after doing some research in that space, actually, what we also did realise was there was two solutions in the museum market. One being the audio guide, which is the headset that you put on. And I'm sure that most people have used them, that you would also know that probably five other people have used them that day. And also the big headers.  So we knew that much and understanding that and knowing that they had a lot of content to share, we said, OK, let's build a content management system that allows these organisations to curate their content by themselves. They do the content creation best. We'll let them manage it. We'll let them edit it in their own time and for it to be seamlessly ported to users' phones. And then, so the mobile application itself. We wanted it to be seamless, live, real-time, going to the user's phones, you have visitors that are coming through those doors. And we wanted the information to be accessible by the user instantaneously. It was the age of the QR code. And if you're looking at our name, it's not S-T-I-R-Y. It's S-T-Q-R-Y because we wanted to use QR codes to instantly get you the information. We were starting. And for the most part, QR codes, it was that big bang right there. It was new technology. Our museums were totally excited about it and we were excited to be building a product like this. It became the complete venue guide for the user coming in, getting curated content, scanning the QR codes, getting the information. We started in Wellington. There was our home base. And I'm really, really happy that we did. It allowed us to validate our product. It allowed us to test our product. But we didn't stay in Wellington for long. And after four months of being in Wellington and building the first base of our product with the help of Gareth funding us and supporting us, we went straight to the United States. And with my co-founder, Chris, being from Seattle originally and working with Microsoft for three months, back when he was 16, it was the best hub for us to start in the Northern American market. And being in the United States, it was a very big change from what we'd been doing in Wellington. We had to be a lot more aggressive and we didn't take any nos. We went for the biggest museums and because this is such new technology and because in the museum market, I mean it's the home of old stuff. So historic, ancient things are stored there. So the best thing that they were saying, okay, well, yeah, we had to put on to hardware and then how long does it have to take to change the content on the hardware, like showing it to you and like three weeks later? Would that work? We're going, no, actually you can curate it that day and it'll be live in less than a minute. And so that was something that we had to do a lot of education around. But once we landed, that one big customer and that first customer for us in the United States, an actual first paid customer was the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. And they supported us throughout. They've still with us now, which is amazing. And they've sold us on to every person that they know and they couldn't have been a first launch customer, first paid real customer for us in the States. We really couldn't have picked a better market, the museum market being so legacy. But there are actually more attendance and this is a really, and we say this in all our speeches because it's still something that we are struggling to believe. But there are actually more attendance to museums and the US alone than all sports games and theme parks combined. So that's huge. I think NFL, NBA, Disneyland, there are more attendance to museums and it's huge for us. And there's also more museums in the United States than all Starbucks and McDonald's combined. And that's just museums and our target market was so much bigger than that, Art Gallery, Zoos, everything. We wanted every cultural destination in the world and we're pretty sad to have that. Story today, we've been going for 24 months. We have over 350 organisations including museums, Art Gallery, Zoos and we have over 250,000 users per month, unique users every month and that's been pretty steady for this year. We're working with some amazing museums, Asian Art Museum as you can see there, Tepapa. So Tepapa was, we spoke with them the first couple of weeks that we began and they said no. But with Michelle and what she just said earlier about going back in the future and landing that deal, we were so persistent and our goal was to get every single museum around them and so they'd have to come on board. So they had to say okay, we're the only ones now. I'm kind of ready. We have the Auckland War Memorial Museum. We're really lucky to have the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco and the new ones that have come on this year and the second part of this year have been the Smithsonian and the Getty which are the largest institutions in the world. So story in the beginning, we were all about QR codes. We were just a start-up and we still really are but we're able to, and because we haven't focused really and a lot of our investors have told us off of that for not focusing. It's actually been one of the best things for us. Over the last two years, we've trialled so much technology and we're really stuck with the ones that we feel are going to make us a better company. That's one being is the indoor positioning and turned by 10 directions. As you know, we've got GPS for outdoors. We want to create that experience that you get needing to go to a destination, going to dinner, finding your house, indoors where you go to the loo. You only want to see the Mona Lisa and we can give you step-by-step directions to that specific item that you want to see. We've been able to solutionise our product and we've already had so much feedback and so much interest from our museums in the States including the Smithsonian and the Kitty which have been really exciting for us but we feel that this application can grow into every single vertical and now it is that time for us to focus a little bit and really just hit it out of the park. With turn by turn directions and mapping we want to get rid of the QR code and make storytelling as seamless as possible. One of them being iBeacons and iBeacons are little bits of hardware that you stick along a wall and we can actually tell where a user is.  Here's the story for it. Without the user having to scan anything to search anything up, the experience is instant for them. Again, this application, we feel we have tons of verticals. We have to establish what those are now and hit it out of the park. The storytelling platform, and like I said many times, we have many verticals because every single organisation in this world has a story to tell and if they don't then they're not the right person to be on our platform. But as you all know, everyone has a story and the biggest thing that has resulted with building a big storytelling platform with a really easy to use content management system has been that we've been able to replicate it and put it into other markets, such as a comm system for Kiwi Bank, which we were fortunate to work on this year. And with Kiwi Bank, they've got an amazing story and they want to be able to tell their story to their employees on a day-to-day basis without posting up posters to a wall. They really want to be 2.0 and this is what story has allowed them to do. They've put on videos and images and texts every single day to keep their employees up to date and current with what's happening in their organisation. Thank you so much. Please feel free to ask any questions in the panel. And one thing that I will leave off with is fake it till you make it. And that is the biggest. Yeah, and we've done a lot of faking it to actually make it there. But that has been the biggest mantra in our team and it's allowed us to... Although we might not have the most complete product in the beginning, so in our two years, we sold our organisations the dream. This is really new technology, but this is going to be the next thing that your users want. And we promise that building your own app, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars is not going to be the answer. The answer is story. And we haven't had a single no except from Te Papa. We haven't had a single no in the last two years. We've had some maybes, but the next...after a month or two, they call us. And that's when that validates everything for us. And just one thing they didn't mention is team. So everyone said today how amazing and how important your team is. And that's absolutely true. Without our team, we couldn't have got here and where we are today with 350 customers and such a great reputation in the museum market. We employ entrepreneurs. We employ people that have passion and have drive and that are in the office with us until 2am. So my advice to other small businesses and people that are starting out would be to employ people that have as much passion as you. And sometimes it takes a little bit of getting under the surface to realise that. Getting over those barriers that people come up to me to interview. And just understanding that, hey, there is a real entrepreneur in this person. And everyone that we've employed to date and the people, the ones that have left have all started their own businesses. So I think getting into that mindset when hiring is really important. Cool, thank you.


U.S. Marines with battalion landing team, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, execute a squad attack exercise on Camp Hanson, Okinawa, Japan, December 19, 2023. Squad attack exercises reinforce infantry tactics and combined arms lethality. The 31st MEU, the Marine Corps only continuously forward-deployed MEU, provides a flexible and lethal force ready to perform, a wide range of military operations, as the premier crisis response force in the Indo-Pacific region.


Hi everybody, it's Sandy. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to do some maintenance and re-label my clean color pens and also talk about some coloring books and do some coloring. So let's begin. First the maintenance. These markers you may have noticed have super tiny letters. The names and the numbers of the colors are like super super small when printed on the marker and then even when they're on the labels they may be a little bit bigger in some cases but they're in a different location and they're flipped even left and right. All of that between my eyes and my graphic design sensibilities is making me nuts so I had to make my own labels and I also added a color key on the top so it has an accurate color representation as well and I'll show you how I did that. I took an Avery and 3M label sheet and it's just a return address label. There's 60 of them on the first page that have the number and the name of the color and then the other 20 colors are on the top of the second page already done those and then on the bottom here I'm just doing swatches of each color so I can punch a circle out to stick on the end of the marker on the cap because when I talked to the people at ZIG they said you store these either horizontally or vertically with the brush side up. I'd been storing them with the brush side down and I didn't notice any significant difference and I didn't seem to have adverse effects but I'm going to try storing them the other way and see if I notice any change whatsoever. So I'm gluing them on but I'm doing them four at a time and one of the reasons I did four at a time was because I realized when I pulled it up when I had just put the color on it I got marker on my finger so by the time you get the fourth one done the first one is dry enough to touch and to put on the marker and I'm just going to wrap them around. I'm being anal-retentive about putting my label number in the same place with the ZIG logo showing and wrap it around there and then after I'm done I'm going to put a piece of scotch tape on them. One of my Periscope viewers recommended potentially putting some of the Tim Holtz Distress Glaze on them instead and that could also work but it would be a whole sheet of stuff covered with Distress Glaze so it could get expensive so I opted to do it just with some scotch tape and the scotch tape is just barely wider than the label so it worked out just perfectly for me. Here is the coloring book that I want to tell you about I've been showing sneak peeks of these things on Instagram and Facebook and I haven't been able to link you to them because they haven't been available even Amazon ran out of them so it's an artist coloring book a little different than an adult coloring book and especially these because they have high quality drawing paper that they use and you can use different kinds of markers and pencils and watercolors and things on them. This particular book is taken from art from the Netherlands this company is in the Netherlands and they took famous artists that they have who have done paintings you can google the names of these and find the paintings online and then match the coloring I did not do that I just did all kinds of right colors because I was playing with my pens and coloring them in you can see how intricate their designs are and also how big this book is these are huge they take quite a bit of time to do but they're very relaxing and I'll be showing you how to how I color one of them in just a few minutes. This one I was playing a little bit with the water most of the coloring in this book so far has been done with clean color pen blending into pen but on the white white and pink flower I tried to use more water with it and as well on these irises I water colored the purple using the clean color pen and then layered other colors over top of it and I think it came out really really beautiful and also on the pink flower I did a little bit of water so this is drawing paper not water color paper just so you know don't do any like splashy watercolor paper with tons of water and here is my collection of pens I have them in a dollar store bin that I turn on its side and I use the handle as a little stand so my markers are at an angle and easy to grab not rocket science storage but they work you know if it works do it right so here are the colors that I chose to use for my tulip and I for the flower I decided to use all monochromatic colors I find that the I find that the blending works best with monochromatic so you're going to have your best success if you stay with things that are next to each other on the color wheel because that is the way blending goes same thing with a lot of other mediums so if you're having trouble with blending try making sure you stay close on the color wheel and you'll have a little better chance at success but here's the other feature of these coloring books in addition to having that beautiful drawing paper to color on they have printed these in half and half tone means the lines are more of a gray than they are a black so you can see they disappear as you start to color because they're so faint you can see them I mean the light is a little bit bad in here I am not sure how much detail you can see but you can definitely see the images but they do disappear so it looks like no line art by the time you're done this particular book is not for the faint of heart because it does involve actual coloring of flowers there are others in this line that I'm going to show you at the end of the video that are more graphical in nature and those who are drawn to that kind of coloring may find those a little easier to do than something like this but I wanted to show you this because they're just so beautiful I'm filling in the areas with all the different pinks and purple colors and just randomly blending them I'm not really worried about light source or anything on this I just want to add enough contrast so the flower starts to take some shape and I'm even going outside of the line so when I do this kind of coloring I'm just really relaxed about it I'm not going to stress out if I go over the lines because since they disappear I can just blend even further I can drag the color like I'm doing here past where the printed lines had been no one's ever going to see that so they're not going to know and it gives you a lot of freedom to play around with color play around with how the blending works if your pen goes outside the line outside of the image then you just extend the petal and make it a little bit wider to cover wherever your pen may a little mistake like super nice right I first picked up this coloring book by the way in Skagit County when I went up to the tulip festival this summer they had a number of coloring books by the same company and I debated getting a couple of them because I loved the other ones as well the more graphical ones but unfortunately I didn't think ahead I didn't think I was going to be excited about coloring in coloring books or have time to do so and I didn't buy them all and I have been begging everybody since then please somebody bring them into the stores I want more people to have access to them because I looked on Amazon and even Amazon had run out of them so fortunately for all of us and I'm so excited mine are on the way to me they are now available at Ellen Hudson so links are in the doobly-doo to this one and all the others that I'm going to show you in a few minutes but for now I'm going to turn on some music and let you enjoy some coloring because I don't have much else to say about this flower except to just color it want to do more of these kind of coloring book videos I just really enjoyed the process of just simply coloring for no reason no card to be made no painting to frame on the wall no thinking about a layout just color what's there I really really really enjoy this process however I don't want to be the crazy person whose channel suddenly gets transformed into coloring book lady so what I want to do instead is do a bunch of periscopes periscope is a an app that you can get for your phone or for your smart device and you can watch people who are who you're following do things now I watched Tim Holtz give a tour of ranger I watched Christina Werner open her mail there's all different sorts of people doing different sorts of things that are very interesting they're very short videos and they're not up for very long they disappear quickly so you want to have the app and turn the notifications on so it'll let you know when someone who's of interest to you is posting live and broadcasting so get the app links in the doobly-doo and I want you to let me know which of the following coloring books you would like to see some periscopes on because I bought them all I bought the entire line of them I don't usually wax on like like a little school girl about something in particular but I love this paper and I love the half-tone lines so much that I want to color like crazy now this is the Japanese designs book and I remember seeing this one in the store when I saw the flowers and I almost got it and didn't this one scared me when I saw it in the store because the patterns are really intricate but now that I've colored these flowers I think I could handle that and the Art Nouveau I think is just intriguing the shapes and the shading that can be done with them I think is going to be a lot of fun to practice my shading and I want to try some of that with watercolor and I also want to watercolor these Turkish designs because the cover the cover art on there just inspires me that watercolor can look really good in graphical designs that way now here are some postcard books that they have too so you can get a small format that you can actually put in the mail if you trust yourself to mail it and I'm buying them all I'm going to have them all so let me know in the comments down below what I should periscope and don't forget to subscribe here so you get more crazy videos from me be sure to pick up the template for the zig pens on my blog the link is in the doobly-doo down below and have an awesome day bye guys


Rwy'n meddwl. Rhaid i anglesu yhad o'n ddemol yw'r bellach? Rwy'n mewn i weld i litres o'n ddechrau i chi. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i'ch dod o'r syniad o'r hyn yn ym них. Rydych chi'n siarad y ffo'r hyn y bannid o'r hyn. Gweithio y gallwn gwybys hwn i ni dda, sydd y symbol offeron. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl ei wneud ymddangodd eich cwrs. Rwy'n meddwl i chi'n meddwl i chi'n wneud cyfrwyng maes ei fod yn rhan. Mae wych yn dda. My media work today is delightful image by the times with me as a Viking. I wear that at the weekends at hat, mostly for weekend wear. But I've been lucky enough to have both an academic and a media career over the last few years. I've made some wonderful programmes with the BBC on stained glass windows, on Viking Sagas, and I've just completed one on The Hundred Years' War, which should be going out in the next month or so.Ep dropped the first day in my capacity is the cost director for the undergraduate certificate in history of art. I'm incredibly proud of the cost and has been directing it for the last couple of years now, and it really is a wonderful costs in terms of the scope of what you can study. History of art is taught in many different departments across the country. But not all of them go into the medieval period and not all of them have the same approach that we do Mae'r perthynau sy'n gweithio'r awtodd ar y cyfyrdd yma o'i bod yn ymunoedd ar y parloedd hyn. Mae'n deallu ar y party yma. Mae gennym y tŷetau ar y cyfyrdd, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio ar ddigonol. Mae'r ddisgweld yn llunio'r ddweud. Rydyn ni chi'n fawr i chi'n golygu'r ysgolion ar y cyfyrdd yma o'r ysgolion. Fe'n ddigonol eich ddweud o'r cyfyrdd yma, a'i ddweud o'r ysgolion ar y cyfyrdd. ac mae'r e-mail ar y cwm yn ymddangos. Rwy'n e-mail rwy'n meddwl i'w meddwl i'r cwm yw'r pwysig, o'r gymdeithas i'r cwm yn gyffredinol i'r cwm. Mae'r cwm yn ei wneud i'r meddwl i'r meddwl i'r cyfrifiadau o'r newydd o'r cyfrifiadau o'r meddwl yma. Ond mae hi i gyrsio'r cwm yn ei gyrsio, a hi i gyrsio'r cyfrifiadau o'r mynd. Mae'n oed i gyrsio'r cwm, yn 45 minu yn ymgyrch yn ysgrifennu. This was my research topic, it's what I did my thesis on, and I'm fortunate enough that the certificate allows me to teach some of this as well. So it's one of the few art history courses where we go back as early as Anglo-Saxon and early medieval stuff. The big question hanging over this period is, is it art? I've got a wonderful example of what it assumes to be art, a beautiful three-dimensional classical statue. And then an example of the sort of thing I study, this is the full approach. And it's a difficult one because what we're dealing with, with the majority of Anglo-Saxon art, are smaller, portable objects. They usually come more under the heading of crafts than art. So things like leatherworking, boneworking, textiles, metalworking. But I think it is incredibly valuable looking at Anglo-Saxon artefacts as artworks because they are the creative output of these people. This is what they invest their time, their energy, their interest in aesthetics and beauty in creating. So I'm going to show you a few of my favourites today. But I wanted to really explain why I fell in love with what's otherwise quite an obscure art historical period. And it came to me through the literature. I studied literature for my undergraduate degree, and I had to do Old English. And I had this wonderful moment with three weeks before the start of term, where I'd been sent to something from my tutor to say, right, you must translate these poems in Old English before you arrive. And I thought, oh great, ye olde pubby, it'll be fine. I'll just knock these off and it'll all make sense. And I opened the guide to Old English up and had a small heart attack. And I encountered what was, to all intents and purposes, a completely different language. But a very, very beautiful one. And that time of immersing myself completely into the language really paid dividends. I fell in love with the literature. And there's a lot in Old English poetry that resonates for me, particularly the sound of it. So I was going to read you a little bit just because it is a beautiful sounding literary language as well. Ael is aeth o flitcha, aothan ritcha, on rendeth, worda ysgeaf. Word under heffanum, herbeth feolainna, herbeth freondlaina, herbeth monlaina, herbeth mylaina. Ael is aothan ysgeaf, gyd-al-wath-seoth. So the sentiment is pretty timeless. But I think the way it's expressed is so beautiful. And it flags up what really attracted me to the Anglo-Saxon period. Both these similarities with our own outlooks, these... Oh, I've lost the slide. That's helpful, isn't it? These shared human concerns, these things that have concerned humanity through time. But also the uniqueness of it, the things that make it so different, the sound of the language, the way that poetry is formed, the way it rolls on alliteration and rhythm rather than on rhyme. These things all really appealed to me and they got under my skin. But it wasn't until I encountered the material culture that I realised these things I was attracted to in the literature carried over into the daily lives of these people. They had a propensity for riddling, a desire to create kennings, words that are two different words brought together to make another word. So this is playing on meanings, these multiple meanings. And this was reflected in their artworks too, I started to discover. So here's just a few examples of art from the period. You've got the Book of Kells, amazing example of this incredible art of illumination and these spirals and swirls and also these interlacing beasts around here. Then you've got the Singlesham Buckle, which I'll talk about more in some detail. Me holding it, that's my hand. Amazing. The Alfred Jewel, which many of you as Oxford residents will be familiar with, up at the Ashmalion, a singularly magnificent treasure. Something else I'm going to talk about, the Sutton Who shoulder clasp. But what I realised was that with a lot of hard work and a lot of effort, there was a huge amount of rewards to be had from thinking your way back into this period through the texts, not just the poetry but through the prose, through the theological material that was coming out, the historical texts. But also understanding the language, how they spoke, how they wrote and the fact that this was a time where languages existed alongside each other, so Latin and Old English. It's not been easy over the last how many years to get closer and closer to this material. You have to have done Old English, the history of the English language, paleography, all these different skills and yet it is all about thinking your way back into that moment. What moment are we talking about? Well, we can think about it as the Dark Ages, that wonderful misnomer that I've used in the title, called the Dark Ages because to all intents and purposes there is certainly a dropping away of written evidence and written material with the decline of the Roman Empire. We could date it to around 420 when the Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain. But what happens on the back of the removal of the Roman governance is that different barbaric tribes, called barbarians by the Romans of course, but different barbaric tribes shift and move across Europe and fill in the territories that have been left weak and vulnerable by the withdrawal of the Romans. And the bit that I was concerned with is this bit here. So Roman Britain is left prey to Angles, Saxons and Jutes, these Germanic people who travel across the water and settle, quite notably settle in the British Ars. And it is a period of dramatic change. So Britain goes from being governed by Rome and having a Roman army present and people living in villas and congregating around cities to this wholesale change. There's a change in language so the vernacular becomes Old English. There's a change in the names of places. And there's also a big change in terms of spiritual outlook. While the Roman Empire had its state religion but at this stage it's very much a Christian, it's a state-sponted Christianity, that is replaced by this Germanic paganism, a wealth of gods including Thor and Freia and Odin. So there is a really dramatic change that happens around 450 onwards. And another change happens in this period that I'm interested in, which is the reintroduction of Christianity about a century and a half later. So I find this a fascinating period because it really is a point where the pendulum is swinging between these two extremes. On the one hand, Germanic paganism, tribal military leadership, the idea of living in wooden dwellings halls and not living in cities but living in villages and tribal collectives, but also this idea that they don't work in stone and they don't write things down. They're a proto-literate society. They're not writing in the same way as the Roman Empire did. And yet with Christianity coming, that magical date of 597, St Augustine's Mission, you have a reintroduction of all those things. The Roman Church brought stone with it, stone churches, stone crosses. They brought the Latin language with them and they brought this dependence on the written word. Christianity is a religion of the book. At its heart is a book, the Bible. And so in order for Christianity to enter this world, all these things entered in almost as alien imports. So it's a period of transition. It's a period of a lot of change, cultural, social, economic, but also spiritual and intellectual. So these are the two big, big landmarks. And the time that I'm concerned with in this lecture is just after this event, just after this moment here, when St Augustine sent by Pope Gregory the Great to come and bring Christianity to the heathens to convert them and save their souls. This sets in motion a tide of change and transition. So from about the years 600 to about 750, 800, you see this magnificent coming together of two very disparate people, two very disparate ways of life. And what comes out of it is some of the most magnificent works of art, I think that this country has produced. Things like the Lindisfarne Gospels, which are recognised internationally as some of the finest manuscript illuminations in the world. So that's where I've set us up chronologically. And in order to really understand what we're coming from and to around this period, it helps to start with possibly that most famous of Anglo-Saxon burials, Sutton Who Ship Burial. And I say this to my students regularly. It is like the Tutankhamun tomb of this country. It is that magnificent, in my opinion, the finds of that spectacular and worthy of study. And we are utterly fortunate that it's made it through the sands of time to us. I, again, came to it indirectly via the literature, but there's a passage in Beowulf that describes something similar and it struck a lot of people as unusual that there's this long passage about a man being sent out on his death in a ship. Because, well, there was some evidence to say that there was a variety of burials and this was one of the things that happened certainly in Scandinavia. There wasn't anything on the scale of Sutton Who to support this literary evidence. That wasn't until, on the eve of war, the burial mound one in Sutton Who began to be excavated by a local archaeologist called Basil Brown and it was on the insistence of the land owner, a woman called Mrs Pretty, who had all sorts of rumours connected with the lands, that there were ghosts out there, that it was this very sort of active spiritual place and she had people come in and do some divining with divining rods and they were all drawn to mound one. They were all saying this is where it's happening. You must get this excavated. She lived with these mounds, these huge burial mounds in her garden for a long time but on her insistence they started to excavate it and what they found was, as they began, Basil Brown was sweeping away the soil and he kept finding these rivets and they were all in rows. So, being a sensible man, he thought, well, these are obviously connected, they're leading to somewhere, we'll be systematic about it. So he swept back more and more and more and he realised he was probably looking at the outline of a ship because the wood had disintegrated but the rivets were left in situ. So he excavated more and more and suddenly the scale became apparent that this wasn't just some little fishing boat, this was an enormous seafaring vessel and this is a slide to show the scale of it but the most magnificent thing was in the heart of this ship which had been dragged up the bank and buried, that's no small feat. In the heart of this ship was a chamber, a burial chamber and inside the burial chamber was this array of magnificent finds. Now, it's amazing that these things survived. Basil Brown, when he began excavating, actually started in Mandwan and went down that he came across a robber's trench that had been infilled and he said, oh, there's no point going any further, they've had whatever's in here has come out. Robbers have got what was there, abandoned it, let's go on but it was only coming into the side that he realised the robber's trench had got within a few inches of the roof of the chamber and then stopped. So thank God they turned back and this was what was inside. Again, because of the nature of the soil, the body wasn't there but there's strong evidence on the placement of the items to suggest there was a buried body there but it's a magnificent glimpse into everything Beowulf talks about. The life of the hall, the wealth and the luxury of an Anglo-Saxon hall. So you've got things like cauldrons to prepare the food. You've got these feasting horns. These are made out of the horns of Erocs, a type of cattle related to the zebe that's now extinct and we've got the fittings for it and we can reconstruct them to give the sense of scale of these things and then these goblets underneath. So almost like the hall in miniature, the Lord and his lady with the retainers within and you get this sense of feasting in the hall. Also things like this collection of silverware. There are vessels here that have come from Byzantium. This dish in and it's the Amstasia's dish. It's the largest surviving single dish from Byzantium at this point and yet it's buried in East India at this time of such great change in transition. So the burial has preserved all sorts of things. Then you've got the weapons, the helmet, the shield, sword, spears, but other indicators of the life of the hall like the lyre. And enigmatic things like this whetstone. It's actually a stone that could be used to sharpen swords but it's not been used for that. It seems to be ceremonial, almost like the scepter, the urban scepter that we've come to associate with Kings and Queens Dow. And then the personal pieces of jewellery. The gold buckle, the purse belt, the fittings for the sword and then the shoulder clasps. So a huge array of items, each of which gives us a different insight into the culture that was responsible for the burial of this individual. The famous Sutton Hill helmet. It appears on many history textbooks and with good reason. Again, it seems to have been something that was ceremonial rather than useful. And it's a very vivid way of looking into this period and was looking into the face of someone from this period. Probably more, more like a crown, again, as part of a regalia, rather than as a useful helmet in battle. But very evocative. And the way that this dragon here with its teeth bared and its garnet eyes stretches across the nose with its wings out over the eyebrows. We can't help but make connections with Beryl from the button and dragons in there and the idea of dragon mythology from this period. You've got another dragon on the front of the shield as well. This one's got its sideways and it's got its teeth bared and its wings pushed in along its side. Alongside this hook-beat bird of prey, this eagle that would fly over the battlefield and pick over the bodies of the dead in victory. There's this powerful bird that was so present in battle. Here is a reconstruction of the drinking horns and these are some of those magnificent silver vessels I was talking about. But interestingly, the Sutton-Hinship Beryl is dated to around 620. And if you keep it in mind that Augustin and his missionaries were only arriving a decade or two before, there is something in this Beryl that suggests this transition and this change is happening. And that's these two objects here. These are baptismal spoons and etched on the side, on the arms of the spoons, in Greek of the word saulos and paulos, sol and paul. So there seems to be the suggestion of the conversion of Saint Paul on the road to Damascus that these are baptismal spoons given perhaps to this individual because he's converted to Christianity. It's a very complicated set of artefacts in here. So much of it screams Germanic, pagan, tribal, military. But then you've got these hints at connections with Mediterranean Europe, connections with Christianity. So it's sat poised on this moment of change in history. And it's a document of this transition. But for me it is so staggering from an art historical perspective. The objects could tell us an awful lot about the history, the economics, the contact that was taking place with the continent. But when you go in close and interact with some of these things on an art historical level, they open up even more insight, I think. This is one of my favourite objects, the Saturn Hughes shoulder class. But I had the privilege of being able to handle it back in the days where it was allowed out. And I nearly dropped it because I got so excited. Which is probably why no one's allowed to hold them anymore. But it is a staggeringly beautiful object. And being in the presence of it really awed me because it is so finely made. The person who commissioned this was someone with an awful lot of power and wealth at his disposal because it is made by the finest artists of the period. And no matter what has come up before or since, this is still some of the finest artwork of its period. For me it becomes interesting when you start to think of how these things are made. If I go back one, you can see, can I? You can see that the thing itself is about that big. It still works. You can take the pin out and the two parts slide apart so you'd have them on a shoulder class attached to a cape and if you pulled the pins out, the cape would be released. And it's in perfect working order despite being buried in soil for over a thousand odd years. But the thing that staggers me are these panels of closene here. So if we zoom in and have a look at them, some of these are sort of a centimetre unless these closens. But if I explain to you how they're made, it really is staggering to think that they're intact, completely intact. The gems remain in their closens. These things look as beautiful as the day they were made. The way they're made is that these gold fittings are created, each of which holds an individual gem. But to show off their virtuosity, I think, in terms of making these things, the artists at work on the Sutton Who treasures didn't choose a simple shape like a square or a diamond. They chose these stepped closens. Each of these steps is a couple of millimetres wide at most. So absolutely tiny detail to cut into. And that's fine if you're bending wire. That's doable. You can have closene fittings on rings now that you have to hold the gem in place. But what's staggering is they then had to cut garnets to fit into that space exactly. Garnets are a tricky material to work. It comes in layers like this. And you slice into it and then polish it so you get a gem that is thin enough to be transparent. And it chips easily. It's not the easiest thing to work. And yet each of these garnet gems has been cut into the shape exactly of the closene fitting so that it is held in place by nothing else. There's no glue. There's no adhesive. It is held in place by tension of each of the pieces pressing against one another inside these fittings. That's astounding in itself. But in the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, Diangelo Saxons took it a stage further. They're interested in chyroscuro, the play of light and dark, and this idea that you enjoy the play of light, the light on a weapon as you go into battle, the way that it catches it in candlelight and in different lit into environments. And yet, if you look at this shoulder clasp, it's quite a flattened object. There isn't an awful lot of opportunity to play on the potential of the gold and the garnet. So what they've done is inside each of these closene fittings, they've handed down a piece of gold so that it is some of them paper, absolutely, paper-thin gold. Then they've stamped it with a checkerboard effect. This is a stamp that gives the indication of it. And you can see, I think, looking at the slide, this checkerboard effect going on behind it. So if I tell you that each of those checkerboards that you can see is probably about half a millimetre across, you can think this is impressive stuff. They're making these imprints that are so microscopic. If I then tell you that inside each of those checkerboard squares is another checkerboard, then you get the sense of the magnificence of this thing. These are difficult to see with the naked eye. If you add to that the fact that they're working in poorly lit conditions, they don't have electricity, they don't have artificial light, this is incredible to me that these things were created. And all for this sense of the pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of the effect, as the light hits the garnet, it sheets through and then it radiates back off the gold checkerboard effect, filtering out and creating a sparkle. That's why they've done it. And yet it just astounds me that they were capable of doing that all that time ago. So they're absolutely beautiful objects in terms of how they're made. I'm very interested in symbols and what symbols mean to different people at different times. These things are also heavily laden with different symbols. So around the edges of the cosiné centrepiece you've got these interlacing serpents. If I go in on a close-up, can you see the eyeball there picked out in blue glass? There's the eyeball and here are the jaws opened up, biting on to its own body as it winds up and behind the other beastie. So here's the other one. There's its eye, there's its jaw biting, and it winds around the back of the other one. Two of these serpent-like beasts biting themselves. I suppose it's something we know even from childhood that Anglo-Saxon art has lots of interlaces in it, but it's this interlacing beast, these biting beasts that recur again and again and become a sort of a traditional aspect of the art. But there must be something behind these images and if we think that the serpent Jormunganda in Paganthology, the world serpent, surrounds the world and bites its own tail, and as long as Jormunganda holds its tail the world remains intact, but when that's released chaos ensues. So there is something about biting beasts that are biting serpents that may be carrying through from the mythology to the art, but nonetheless it creates this visual riddle, something to play with, something for the eye to tease out and enjoy. And so wherever you encounter these Anglo-Saxon artefacts there's an awful lot of pleasure to be had in tracing how they work and where one overlaps with the other. But the second new shoulder clasps are amazing for me because of these creatures up at the top. They're worn on the shoulders. They're worn most probably by a man, a high status man as part of a military attire. And the bores are functioning here in quite a symbolic way, but where are they? We have to find them and the eye has to tease them out. So if I show you that this is the eyeball, this outward shape here, and this is the snout complete with a little black tusk, so the snout is pressing down there, there's the tusk and this is the shape of the head. That's the bores' head. Then if you follow its prickly spine it goes over the thing and what you've got on the outside of the shoulder clasp is the curly tail. There you go. And it's little trotter here.  And its pair is over here. The eye has the snout complete with tusk. The spine going down to the curly tail. So they fold over one another. And it is a visual riddle again. It's something you have to tease out. For me it conjures up this idea of the Anglo-Saxon world as one where this is normal. People play verbal and visual riddles constantly. It's part of their imaginative world. And yet the bores here are probably functioning as symbols as well. They're only the shoulder clasp, they're in a prominent place. And it's easy to think of them as reflecting something about the wearer, the owner. And bores in mythology, in Germanic mythology were connected with the god of fertility. And in this case there's this sense in which maybe they reflect male virility, the power and the virility of the person who's wearing them. So there's many things to unpick from a historical perspective in these objects. They are very worthy of study by archaeologists, historians, people who are interested in what they tell us about the events that take you place at the time. But they are also artistically worthy of study. They are artistically beautiful. They're technically very accomplished. And they're abounding in symbols that can be looked at and that can be held up against the time to give us a sense of their meaning. So they're absolutely incredible. They're my favourite things. Gosh, I've had enough on time. I've got so many lovely things to show you. I'm nervous I'm going to run out of time. We're poised at a moment of transition. So Sutley here is a couple of decades into this Christianisation process that begins with Saint Augustine. These objects all date from around that time too. So this is another princely find. This is another in Taplow. Another high status burial. Unfortunately that one had been plundered quite a bit. So there's only a few items remaining to give us a sense of the beauty of it. But it would have been on a similar scale to Sutton here in terms of the collection of finds. Amazing use of gold and garnet on this one too. And here you can see the eyeball for the serpent that winds its way all the way around this interior. And this is on a bulkbuckle. And on the Sutton Who bulkbuckle too, there are serpents. And so there's again this connection with these repeating motifs, the serpents, the boars, the birds of prey. This one is a bit of an anomaly. This is the Finglsham buckle. And again I was extremely lucky to be able to hold it given that it's in the private collection of Lord Northbourne and really able to be encountered. But it's quite small scale. It's guilt. And in the middle we have something quite unusual for Anglo-Saxon art. A figure, a human figure. Well we tend to get a beast and birds. But in this case there's this human figure. He's got this tear drop shaped head which seems to be a way of representing Odin, or things connected with the god Odin.  And he's holding spears. These are all things that are associated with Odin. One of the ways of violating a pagan temple was to throw a spear into it. And there's this connection here with sacred spears. The two birds that could perhaps be his ravens, hewn and mywn, that were his symbols of thought and memory. So we perhaps have an image of the god Odin. But it's showing me that these pieces of jewellery were little canvases for artistic expression. They were the opportunity for Anglo-Saxon peoples to express things that were important to them and visually interesting to them. So these buckles have these sorts of motifs, snakes, garnets, something extreme that the fingers and buckle might have a figure. But something changes around the coming of Christianity. We've got a new motif introduced. And the motif comes from this long tradition of Christian art in late antiquity that's connected with this word here, ichtheus. If you take the first letters from the word ichtheus, it makes the sentence Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour. But ichtheus in Greek means fish. So the fish that we associate with Christianity, this symbol of the fish, comes from this sort of an anagram that's complicated, literary, playing on words. And yet what we end up with is something that we all recognise today as a symbol of Christianity, the fish. And that's got echoes in the gospels of the dividing of the bread and the fish as well. So the fish is a very potent and powerful symbol. But it's almost entirely absent from Anglo-Saxon art up until the year 600. Then a couple of strange little objects start to appear. So this one, the echoes buckle, very traditional on its front. You've got a double-headed serpent. We find those a lot on helmets going over the prow of the helmet. And then these knotted serpents either side. But on the back of the buckle, so facing inwards for the wearer, this funny little plaque has been attached. And it's a fish. So what's going on here? Is this talismanic? Is the owner putting a symbol of the fish on the inside to confer some sort of protection? That seems to change again when we come to this object, the Cremdal buckle. Because here, suddenly, it's all been amalgamated. We've still got knotted serpents going up the sides. We've still got gold and garnet. But here, in absolutely pride of place, this fish on the front. So we're looking at transitional art. We're looking at the introduction of new ideas and also new symbols, new meanings. And these objects chart that transition in some ways. I get very excited by this. It's like looking at a moment in history that you could read about in a history book and someone tells you this is very important, something really important happens. But when you see it visually like this, this is happening. It's real and it's filtering down through members of the population into their imaginative worlds. This happens with another important symbol, the cross. So prior to the year 600, this is dated to around 600, in my doggy, it's the earliest in the sequence. You've got things like this, pendants. But here, you've got it arranged on a triple, on a triplicate. The number three was very sacred in Germanic paganism. And this idea of three ravens or three birds of prey in a spiral is very apt. It connects a lot of things that were coming out of the mythology. But look what happens to it on the arrival of Christianity. We've got things like this, the X-worth cross, where the same technology and techniques are being used. It's still gold and garnet. They're made in the same workshops by the same craftsmen that are working on things like this. And yet now they're employing this new symbol to a new end to advertise the Christian sympathies of the wearer. And this one is interesting too. This is the Walton cross. And at its centre, something else that was unfamiliar to the young Glace Saxons, coinage. There's a coin that's been set in here. And there's been some interesting work done on this. It's a coin from the reign of Heraclicius. And it shows the cross on Calvary. Can you see a stepped pyramid there and then the cross? But it's been put in upside down. Now, it has been said that this reflects the ignorance of the Anglo-Saxons because they don't know about coins, they don't know about Calvary, they don't know about crosses, they just stuck it in, built this thing up around it. That doesn't rush with me, I'm afraid. Because this is a pendant. And if you think of nurses' watches, they're going to look at it like that. So this, in fact, shows quite a bit of insight on the part of the creator because they set it so that the coin and the cross can be appreciated when it's held by the person who owns it. So these things are all charting this trade, this change. And they flag up so many other changes. The fact that a coin is now being set, it's showing that international trade links are opening, but the Anglo-Saxon people are opening up to the world of the continent, of the Christian continent. One of the pluses of accepting Christianity. If you look at Scandinavia a couple of hundred years later, the motivation it seems for their conversion to Christianity was that trade was getting a bit difficult. Christians would only trade with other Christians. So these Scandinavian pagans would wander into a negotiation and they'd say, oh dear, are you a pagan? I can't trade with you. No, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, let's get going. And they had to make the sign of the cross to show that no, actually, they were all right. But if there are many aspects to conversion, it's not just intellectual and spiritual in terms of everybody suddenly changing the way they think about God and creation. There are reasons for it and there are raves and patterns to it. And the Anglo-Saxons show some of these waves and patterns in their artworks. Amazing Survival, the Saint Augustine Gospel Book, probably brought over, if not by Augustine, certainly by one of the missionaries that came following him. So part of that initial Christianisation and still a very important manuscript that's used when the new Archbishop of Canterbury, as we're going to have soon, takes up his position. And so much of it would have seemed alien to the Anglo-Saxons when they arrived in 597. It's a book. If you're coming from a proto-literate society, the book must be the strangest thing. I've tried to imagine it. It's like that Craig Rain poem about an alien coming from Mars. How do you encounter these sorts of objects? If you are not using written words and you are speaking in a vernacular that's not written down, the format of a book must be the strangest thing. It's held as sacred. It's supposed to contain the secrets that will give you eternal life. And in there, you open it up and it's page after page of this indecipherable script held within these covers. It must have just been a very odd object to encounter. Even more so, as the artwork within it was very unfamiliar. We're looking at classic late antique art. You've got a figure in classical guise and dress seated on a stella. And then these narrative sequences played out cartoon-like in this sort of comic book effect. Very much what we see in late antique sarcophagi. It's the way that a literate society makes use of its art. Christianity is, as I say, a religion of the book. If you're trying to tell a story, you create an art that reflects that, which is a narrative art in the sequence of your stories. So there's this narrative playing out. But in many ways, it's the perfect thing to take with you as a missionary. Because Gregory the Great ropes to Augustine and the Missionaries and said that there are ways to bring about this conversion. One of them is not to destroy the temples. Just make them useful for Christian acts. So just take the statues out and sprinkle some holy water and it's all fine. And then the other one was to educate through images. Use images to tell these stories. He was a big advocate of that. So we're looking at a teaching aid. We're looking at something that may have been poured over by the eyes of these very early Anglo-Saxons. It kind of gives me goosebumps to think that this was something that was actually useful in this process. I've got a wonderful riddle here for you to show that the Anglo-Saxons were a very strong literate society in terms of all literacy. There's accounts where a shop, a minstrel, could recite for days on end in the hall, could recite poems that he's memorised, that had gone in there and stayed. And there's something about being literate that actually makes the memory lazy. If you've written something down and you forget about it because it's done, we've got a record of it. Whereas if you don't have written texts you have to have a much stronger energetic brain retaining things. Where does your land end? Up by the oak tree, up to the river. That's it. This is where my plot of land is and don't forget it. So this idea that you don't have text to fall back on actually made for quite an active oral literate society. But one of the things that's interesting about what happens in the ways of conversion is certain aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture are held on to and protected. There's this sense in which the Anglo-Saxons have converted to Christianity. They have opened up their mind to the world of Rome and the world of the continent. And yet there is a sort of archaic tradition where they want to preserve their pre-Christian traditions. That's why Beowulf gets written down. It's written down quite a bit later and probably by Christian monks despite its content. But there is this conservation of ideas that takes place by the Anglo-Saxon Christians.  This one is wonderful I think. I won't read all of it but I'll give you a little bit mild English just because it sounds nice. Where is it? If I've written it down. OK. I won't do much more but you can see there's references throughout her being dipped in water drain out, stretched bare hard blade, the birds when stiff joy dart off into the horn's dark rim. Any ideas what we're talking about? A book. A manuscript. Excellent. This is it. This is vellum. And what this poem amazingly describes is this moment where you don't just get presented with a piece of vellum and start writing your ideas down on it. This was a creature. This was a living breathing creature. And the Anglo-Saxon poems have this great sense of animism about them. The idea that the world is animated with spirit that things tell their own stories. There's a poem I was hoping to have time to cover which I won't, which is The Dream of the Rude which is written on the sides of this magnificent Anglo-Saxon cross, the Rubble Cross, where the cross tells its own crucifixion story. It's the one that dies and bleeds. While Christ is this hero who just jumps on as this magnificent heroic death, this world view where objects can speak for themselves, this personification that takes place in them is absolutely fascinating, but again it helps me realise how these people viewed these objects. The idea that you chart what happens to the vellum, the way it's stripped, the way it's lain in the sun, it's so physical, it's so real and it makes the thing itself all the more precious because of the process it's gone through. Even down to this bit, a skin laced with gold, the bright song of Smith's glissons on me in filigree tones. So this is the covering of the manuscript with gold and jewels. It becomes even more of a treasure and a riddle like this, again it accounts for that event. But then when we look at the results, when we look at something like the Linda's Fun Gospels, that is why I think they are so magnificent. Something has happened in the minds of the newly converted Anglo-Saxon Christians where they've been faced with this new art form, the illuminated manuscript. They've taken their tradition of riddling, interlacing, chiaroscuro, contrast and they've applied all of that. They haven't ignored it. They haven't forgotten it. They haven't put it in the dustbin as something that was from their bad dark past. They've incorporated it into what's new about their outlook and the results are magnificent. So this is a carpet page from the Linda's Fun Gospels. Quite a large thing. And as you look at it, it's a bit like one of those magic eye paintings. You can sort of see the outline of the cross emerging from this horror vacui, this dense collection of interlaces. But as you look longer and harder on it, you can see the wounds of Christ picked out. You can see that there are birds biting themselves. And the birds in the Linda's Fun Gospels, some of them are so well executed they can be identified as particular birds that still live on the island now. So these interlacing birds are all part of the wealth of God's creation that's teeming behind this cross. And it's the first thing you would encounter before you read the Gospels. And I think what it's doing is it's preparing the mind for the sacred text within. It shows how closely they protected this idea of complex riddling imagery that something like this is the spiritual gateway to the sacred text. So if you think an equivalent would be something like an Islamic prayer rug, certainly the rise of Islam is taking place around the same time the Linda's Fun Gospels are being made and there's very possibly contact in ideas. But this idea that you take figures out you take narrative out that's all going along with this idea of concern over representing humankind in art, the iconoclasm concern. So instead in its place what you have are geometric or non-figural images and something like an Islamic prayer rug if you have a decorative pattern and you move further and closer you are meditating yourself into a feeling of spiritual awareness heightened spiritual awareness so these patterns they're not just pretty, they're not just decorative, they're functional, they're part of this opening up the text within and the art reflects that. What I find magnificent about Anglo-Saxon art is it's not text that takes primacy over image it's almost like image it's into text. So with these carpet pages they come here, you meditate, you ruminate and then the pattern flows over and it becomes the first letters of the word liba liba generatio so the book opens up from the image the two go together. I've run out of time I'm afraid I've got some more wonderful things to show you. The faints cast get the rubble crust but I don't have to wait for when you sign up to the certificate. So thank you very much for your time.


Israel is not the boy who cried wolf. We have been screaming from the rooftops for years, trying to wake up the international community but to no avail. If only this council would have internalized my words, it would not have needed the bone-wrecking explosions of last night's attack to wake it up. Why have you not used all possible means to condemn Iran and demand compliance? Why have you instead rolled out the red carpet for these genocidal jihadists? Why do you treat them as if they are interested in de-escalation when you know that the opposite is true? Colleagues, Iran's strategy has been crystal clear. Arm, fund, and train terror proxies across the globe to carry out Iran's murderous scheme of domination. But today the mask of Iranian deniability has been removed. No more hiding and no more bluffing. No more shirking of responsibility. Iran has attacked Israel from its own sovereign territory, publicly and proudly. The mask is off. This attack crossed every red line, and Israel reserves the legal right to retaliate. We are not a frog in boiling water. We are a nation of lions. Following such a massive and direct attack on Israel, the entire world, let alone Israel, cannot settle for inaction. We will defend our future. No more red carpet treatment here at the UN. No more appeasement. Today, the Council must take action. Condemn Iran for their terror, trigger the snapback mechanism and re-impose crippling sanction, designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror organization. Action must be taken now. Not for Israel's sake, not for the region's sake, but for the world's sake. Stop Iran today. The armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran carried out a series of military strikes on Israeli military objectives with thousands of missiles and drones. Iran's operation was entirely in the exercise of Iran's inherent right to self-defense as outlined in Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations and recognized by international law. This concluded action was necessary and proportionate. It was precise and only targeted military objectives and carried out carefully to minimize the potential for escalation and prevent civilian harm. These countries, especially the United States, have shielded Israel from any responsibility for the Gaza massacre. While they have denied Iran's inherent right to self-defense against the Israeli armed attack on our diplomatic premises, at the same time they shamefully justified the Israeli massacre and genocide against the defenseless Palestinian people under the pretext of self-defense. Regrettably, the Security Council has failed in its duty to maintain international peace and security. Russia proposed a press statement to denounce this atrecious act which was backed by China, Algeria, and many members but was blocked by the U.S., U.K., and France. Faced with such circumstances, the Islamic Republic of Iran had no choice but to exercise its inherent right to self-defense under international law. The Israeli Prime Minister's policy seeks to expand and escalate the conflict in the region to stay in power. Iran is never seeking to contribute to the spillover of the conflict in the region, nor does it escalate or spread the tension to the entire region. Iran has no intention of engaging in conflict with the U.S. in the region. We demonstrated our commitment to peace by exercising our restraint about involving the U.S. Army in intercepting Iranian drones and missiles bound for military target in the occupied Palestinian territories. This underscores our dedication to escalating tension and avoiding the expansion of conflict. However, if the U.S. initiates military operation against Iran, its citizens, or its security and interests, Iran will use its inherent right to respond proportionately. I thank you.


So this group was led by me and the participants are Philip Andre, Gaby O'Brenner, Claire Dye, Frank Phan, Mika Gay, Hunter Stoffelbeam, and Luis Rodrigo Urrutia. OK. Hi, everyone. If I go too far away from the mic, like wave or something. So we are at the Innoal Domain's group, so first we're going to find what our Innoal Domain is. So we're working on a manifold. So we think of a smooth surface and possibly higher dimensions. And we can look at the eigenfunctions of Laplacian on this manifold and ask, given some eigenfunction, we can define the nodal set as the set of points on the manifold where the eigenfunction equals 0. So these nodal sets will actually carve up our manifold. So we'll get these regions where the eigenfunctions are either positive or negative. And we call these nodal domains. So here's an example. So we have a torus. One nice thing about the torus is that you can actually identify it with the square by gluing the top and bottom together. Then you get a little tube. Then you go at the ends of the tube together.   And our four nodal domains are the four squares. So the theorem that we use as the jumping off point is the Courant Nodal Domain Theorem, which was formulated by Courant's Prize in the 1920s. And what it says is that if we're given manifold, we can list all the possible eigenvalues of this Laplacian in increasing order with multiplicities. So say if one came up as two different eigenvalues, one could be lambda 1 and lambda 2. And then we name our corresponding eigenfunctions with the same index. And the theorem states that the number of nodal domains for the function fj is less than or equal to j plus 1. So the number of nodal domains is basically bounded by its place in the sequence. So we pretty quickly specified just to the two torus. That's because we have these nice pictures. We can just look at squares. But also because we were able to pretty easily code the eigenfunctions, because they have very explicit descriptions, and we were able to play around with some code to get some intuition for what was going on. So some pretty simple calculations show that any eigenvalue of some eigenfunction will have the form k squared plus l squared for k and l natural numbers. And the eigenfunctions will have, or the eigenspace will have the basis cosine kx, cosine ly, sine kx, or sine, yes, sine kx, sine ly, and then switching x and y and pairwise products of those. So generally you have these eight different eigenfunctions. So just because of the periodicity of these functions, you can show that if k and l have a common factor, then you actually just get a tiling of the reduced case in your new nodal domain. So here we have k and l are 1 and 3 on the right, and 2 and 6 on the left. And we see that it's just a 2 by 2 tiling of the 1 and 3 case. So some of the actual number of theoretic properties of the eigenvalue can tell you something about the eigenspace as well. So in this kind of most general case, where lambda can only be written as k squared plus l squared in one way, so we have unique sum of squares, then you have the eight-dimensional eigenspace as we had before.  And if lambda can be written as some of two or more different squares, then you actually can get much larger eigenspaces. And so in each of these cases, you can think of, so if the dimension of the eigenspace is d, then you can think of the coefficient space of the eigenspace as s d minus 1. So the d minus 1 dimensional square. And so when we're looking at the eigenfunctions and perturbing them a little bit, we're thinking about moving our coefficients around this s 7 square, usually. So now we kind of focused on the dimension 4 and dimension 8 cases, because they're much more easy to understand. And now Rodrigo is going to talk about the k equals l case, because we were able to get a pretty explicit description of what those will look like. Good afternoon, everyone. I will discuss the k equals l case, which has been completely studied. We can either have 2k or 2k squared normal domains. If we consider k equals l equals 1, we have these eigenfunctions. Fix one of the coefficients, change the other one. We have four different cases. In the first one, which is the checkerboard case, we have four normal domains. And on the other three cases, which are just diagonal stripes, we have two normal domains. So now we consider the linear combination of eigenfunctions and proceed to find its zeros, the zeros of f. To do that, we need to simplify the expression, introducing a supportive variable phi, which depends on c and d. And then introducing s and t as constants that will help us to simplify the expression to get this. This example will learn a lot, because we were able to find an explicit solution, an explicit zero of the function. And to do that, we needed to restrict the value of t. First, when t equals zero, we get the checkerboard case. And when t is not zero, we solve for y. We end up with this function, which just maps to the diagonal stripe case we saw before. Then this is a null domain for fixed values of s and t. We start off with these null lines, the red curves. And we shift them up pi and 2 pi to obtain all the null lines on the graph. And this is just a diagonal stripes case. We have two null domains. Now Gabriel is going to talk to you about the stability of crossing points. All right. So another question we can consider when looking at this is stability-based question. So if we look at this animation, we start here with one crossing in the center point. And as we smoothly vary the coefficients, that kind of pulls apart and instantaneously smooths out. So the question is, when does this happen? And can we characterize in coefficient space the domains where we keep crossing? So how do we do this? So as was briefly mentioned before, you can identify eigenfunctions with points in the sphere that represent their coefficients. In this case, we're just going to work in the k equals l case, which is four-dimensional because it's easier for the sake of the presentation. But actually everything I'm about to do works in arbitrarily high dimension. So what do we do? We identify with the point in the sphere. And then we want to characterize crossings in terms of this function. It's actually pretty easy. It turns out that crossings happen exactly where the function and its gradient vanish at the same point. Why is that true? Well, it's actually pretty simple to think about. So the function is going to be 0 at this point. And then the derivative with respect to x is 0. Derivative with respect to y is 0. So if you move a little bit in either direction, you expect it to remain constant specifically at 0. Well, that's exactly a crossing of node alliance. So we have a nice characterization of crossing points. So what we do is we set up this kind of formal function here, this capital phi, which consists of our original function and its gradient. Well, why is that? Well, it's pretty simple, again, because the zeros of this function, where this function vanishes, is exactly where we have these crossings. So what do we do? We look at the differential of this function. If you don't know about that, it's just basically a derivative. And we've actually proven that in the general case, it is surjective everywhere. What does that give us? Well, it's actually a pretty nice result of differential topology that since the differential is surjective everywhere, we know that the pre-image of 0 under our function here, the pre-image of 0 is something co-dimension 3 living in S3 cross T2. Well, you can also think of that just basically a two-dimensional surface. So that's nice. We have a nice characterization. We have this nice two-dimensional surface. But there's actually something more we can say. So imagine you have your sphere here and you have a two-dimensional surface living in the sphere. Well, if you notice, there are a whole bunch of directions that we can move to get off this manifold, but stay within the sphere. And of course, those points that are not on the surface but lie within the sphere are exactly those points where our nodal lines have no crossing. And the functions that we're working with are pretty nice. So we don't expect to have any kind of cusps or anything. So what this tells us is for every eigenvalue, there is some configuration where you have smooth nodal lines, no crossings, no cusps, nothing nasty, just nice smooth nodal lines. All right, so if you want to find out anything, any more details about our work, Hunter has prepared a really nice note set that it'll be posting in the PCMI app after the presentation. And finally, I just want to say a big thank you to Dr. Matzeo and Phillip Andre for all their guidance throughout the project and PCMI for giving us this opportunity. Thanks.