Hi folks. Morning, Mandan and Pilots. Hi. Good day to anyone who it's not morning there, I guess. Just covering all our bases. Yeah, you know, I want to be time inclusive. I guess. So it's been a busy couple of weeks at Reclaim. You know, started the semester for a lot of schools. I think a lot of folks are busy right now. How are you all doing? Yes. Yes. You are. You are doing. Yes. Pretty much. It's going. Actually. Yes. No, it's, it's going pretty well.  If anyone has, who's watching has sent me emails in the past couple of days, you may have received an automatic response that says, it's the end of the month. You'll hear from me in a week. Because it's the end of the month. I'll hear from you a little bit. Very, very considerate of you to send those out because for me, it's just like, oh my God, it's been a week. I'm sorry. I meant to reply. Well, it's, it's actually sort of on topic because it's something that I started doing. Maybe not a year ago, but it's something I started doing a while ago. Because of the roundup because the last week, the month is for me, the time of let's focus on the roundup. And so I started putting out that auto responder so that I didn't have to stress like the idea of if you are expecting something from me, I might get back to you. I might have time, but if you don't hear back from me, here's two other places you can send this and someone else will get back to you. See, it's a sliding scale of considerateness. Yeah. You have an automation setup to make sure everyone receives that message. Amanda apologizes and I just don't respond to email very quickly. So sometimes I apologize. But so, yeah, you know, it's like, it's not an end of the month thing. I just, I just, I just typically check in on email once a day and sometimes I don't get back to things in a couple of days. So I think for me too, and we will move on, but like I don't just check email once a day. I have my email open pretty much all day. And then I just see things come in and I'm like, Oh no, I can't respond to that right now. And then I just feel that stress all day. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's open. I can see the number. But I don't spend time on it more than usually unless, unless I have a lot of it to get through. Right. But I do a frankly insane thing, which is that I have a recurring task every day in a sauna that is just email inventory where at the start of the day I go through my inbox and I write down all of the people that I have to respond to. And then that's what I work off of. And if your email is not in that list, then I'll get to it tomorrow. I could not live my life that way pilot. Frequently, I don't actually do that, but that's what that's for. Might be throwing our hand a little bit with that. We can't all be pilot. That's the thing. No, there can only be one. Yes. I'm not setting up weird and redundant systems. Who am I? Cool. So, so, uh, well, I'm glad we're all, you know, hanging in there. Um, and, um, today's stream, we wanted to talk about kind of kind of look back on. Well, it's interesting. So, uh, we're going to be looking at ghost and newsletters and ghost. We've had a flex course on this before. Um, it was almost a year and a half ago at this point. Oh, no. Yeah. Hurts my brain. Um, so we're going to kind of revisit some of it. We're going to kind of fully set up ghost. Um, and just a little, um, demo newsletter. Um, we're also going to talk about this. The context for this is two things. Um, really one thing, but kind of two things. The main context I think is. Hey, it's been a bit. And we think it's worth revisiting cause we're using this tool even more than we were a year and a half ago. Um, for various things that reclaim. So we'll talk about that a little bit. And so much so that we're actually going to rerun, uh, sort of updated version of this flex course later in the spring. We just put it on the calendar. It just was announced in the roundup. Um, and so that we're really excited to kind of do a, a more in depth revisit of ghost today is going to be a little bit more, how are we using it? Reclaim some technical refreshers. And then also talking about the second thing, which is, you know, we're, we're, um, if, if, uh, folks who are watching this, you know, around the time we are streaming this, um, sub stack is having a bit of a moment. And sub stack is the, um, proprietary platform that makes it really easy to get started. Um, the newsletter you don't have hope. You don't need to have hosting or anything. Um, it's free to use.  It's, it's a platform. Um, and sub stack seems, I haven't used it, um, personally, but it does seem to be a, you know, a nice, easy to use tool. Um, but they're having a whole, uh, breakdown with content moderate moderation right now, which is kind of the same story we've seen. I don't know since social media started, maybe probably before that, that's as long as I've been paying attention is, is like social media stuff, but I'm sure content moderation and topics around it have been a topic of the internet since, you know, at least the web, I have to imagine, but. I mean, just look at the chance. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Um, so we kind of wanted to sort of, we felt like it was a good, you know, timely thing in that context of like, look, you know, just as a reminder, and we're not, we're not going to, we're not going to lecture anyone here too much, but I'm going to take 30 seconds. Um, and say, like, just as a reminder, like when you, when you use open tools that you can self host and you can, and we hope you self host them with us, but there are other choices. That's the whole point, right? You can host them other places too. Um, they put the power back in your hands. You don't have to be at the whims of.  Um, so, um, we're going to focus on ghost today because it's probably the most direct. I think, um, open source tool as an alternative to substack. It is a blogging engine. It's a, it's a CMS, but it's very focused on the newsletter experience nowadays. And also the entire, like people can sign up and you can have paid newsletters if you want them. All of that stuff ghost does out of the box. Um, so that's kind of why we're focusing on it as an alternative. And it's really interesting to see other, uh, publications leave substack for ghosts now in some of them are leaving for ghost has their own hosting, um, service that you call ghost pro. Um, it's very much like wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Right. Like you can use. I was going to say that's, it's interesting to me because the idea of saying, well, we don't like substack as a platform because they're hosting our stuff and we don't, and we're not really comfortable with their content moderation policies. You get the choice to say, okay, well ghost is also a hosting platform. I'll go to them and their content moderation policies, or to say, you know, you know, I'm not really interested in using them as a platform, but I do like their, the tool tool. Yeah. And you can change your mind later, which is the really cool thing.   But you do have to kind of set everything else up from scratch, like because there's no open version of substack that you can move to. Um, you know, if you're using ghost pro, their hosted service or ghost on reclaim cloud, and you decide you don't want to have a business relationship with, you know, us at reclaim or ghosts, the company, um, you can pick, pick up your ghost site and move it to another host that in, in its entirety and point your DNS and your readers will shouldn't even notice. Um, so that's the, that's the advantage here. Um, this is a little bit of a, you know, don't take my word for it kind of thing. Like again, we, we love working with people. Um, and we love that we have kind of, um, a small but passionate community around some of the stuff we do at reclaim, but like the, when it rubber comes a road, you don't have to take our word for it. You can host these tools anywhere, right? Yeah, that's something that I talk about with clients sometimes is then, cause we also, um, I guess for people who are stumbling upon this, one thing that reclaim does is we work with higher ed institutions to provide hosting platforms that they can then offer to their community. Um, and, uh, sometimes we talk to people who are saying, well, how do I keep my, like as compared to Squarespace or Wix or we get people who are coming to our shared hosting saying, well, why, why should I use WordPress instead of, uh, Squarespace or Wix? And the answer is kind of just, well, if in six months or a year or two years, you decide that you don't like Squarespace or Wix, for whatever reason, you don't have a lot of options to leave. But your option is to start over someplace else. Yeah.  And that's fine. Easily. And we make our stuff. Yeah. That's the thing. It's, yeah, sure. Use Wix, use Squarespace. It's a great, great tools. Really, really helpful for some people, but you don't own your stuff. Yeah. You just don't. And that's the ability for us. The ability to leave is core to anything. The ability to leave being a good and relatively easy option. Yes. You have the ability to leave Wix and or Squarespace. And if you own your own domain, right? Like if you have a domain name and you've pointed it to those tools, well, that's a little bit better, right? Like that's certainly better in that you can still have the same address and space and you're just now just using a different tool to, you know, make the website. But I would say going even farther, you know, in terms of time investment, maybe money spent on the platform, having something that you actually own and can fully, you know, move someplace else and not change even very much of the content or none of the content. It's just better, you know. So that's also now got me thinking about the idea of hosting on a free subdomain of sub stack, which, you know, we also offer free subdomains. You don't have to purchase a domain to host with us. And I think that's pretty normal for most hosting providers. Just to say, yeah, there's a free option.  That's odd. Well, but, but I'm thinking about the idea of if you're going in and you're saying, all right, I can get a sub stack domain, but sub stack subdomain for free. Then you do run into the issue of saying, all right, well, how do I take my stuff out and put in ghost? How do I make sure people can find me if I do move to ghost? You can't set up a redirect because it's not yours. Yeah. So that actually, so one thing I wanted to mention before we kind of get into to ghost itself a little bit too is I put in the discord and I'll put these links in again because I have them handy, but a couple of weeks ago was like, hey, is anyone else kind of following the inclusion and to be clear, like I don't think sub stacks going away. I'm sure people will continue using it. Hopefully all the people moving for them will put pressure on them to make content moderation decisions people like, but you're never going to please everybody. That's the whole point. And our argument is you don't need to if you have choices, you know. So anyway, so a couple of examples. Platformer news. Yes. So a couple of examples. The first one here is from platformer, which is a big, big newsletter from Casey Newton, who's been like a tech and platform journalist for various places for a long time. And he went he and I think a small team went independent a while ago. They had been using sub stack and now they're on ghost. And so it's kind of this example is interesting to me because this is a pretty high profile newsletter. A lot of people pay for this. And the content that it covers is tech platforms and content moderation and social media stuff. So it's a big it's a it's a big and well considered and well thought piece on this, the space, basically. Another one I think is interesting is Molly whites has has does amazing work around a lot of different things, but specifically like Web three and cryptocurrency and Molly moved the forget what the actual. Yeah, it's just called citation needed from sub stack to ghost. And the cool thing about this write up is it gives it gets into a lot of the stuff we're talking about here too, including like I like that I'm not on a VC backed platform and all this stuff, but also goes way into the tech to and like all of the specific steps that needed to happen to move kind of seamlessly. And this is actually one thing I really like about Molly's writing is blends that really, really seamlessly. So that's really cool. I'll put that link in discord to. And then this is actually not about someone leaving this is just someone saying like, I'm on ghost and I like it. And I mostly just put this one in because I've been following Matt virtualers blog blog almost as long as I've used RSS. So it's another good I think take on all of this stuff. So yeah, and it also links out to a few other things. So hopefully that kind of gives a quick overview of our current context. I don't know if if many of you have other things to add on on sort of sub stack versus open alternatives before we kind of get into ghost. I mean, I just think and not to beat a dead horse, but it's just kind of like, I think people, it goes back to social media platforms as well where it's just you hold these one, these one platforms, this one tool, this one company, this one person or institution as like, when you give them that much power and you by putting all of your eggs in that basket, it's just kind of like, you're not going to be happy with everything that one one you never could know. Unless it's you. I love about your point Taylor of just like, if you like, you're not going to institutions or organizations are not going to keep everyone happy. They're just not, it's not possible. And it doesn't mean that they're always going to be like morally wrong when they do that. It's just like, people should have the option to just do, do them, you know, and so, and I think that, yeah, we have the option. I'm not saying people don't have that option, but I think that people will be less disappointed when they come to terms with that fact of like, you know, maybe I should just own own my presence and my stuff online. And so that I'm not constantly searching around for who's matching my values right now. It's like, I do. So I'll, I'll do it. Yeah. And it's going to change. And obviously you weigh that to sit. It's a decision you have to make when adopting almost any tool or technology, right? And or I should say it's a decision. I hope people make every time, you know, and it's not always made, I think, but it's something that I think is really important. Sorry. Well, I was just thinking now, even in a very large scale thing, sometimes we talk about digital project life cycle and archival and things like that. And what it means to have an exit strategy or to have an idea of what sunsetting your project will look like. And I'm thinking now about the idea of like, okay. You host on ghost.org and then decide that you don't like them. You move to self hosted ghost where you have more control. And then five years down the line, 10 years down the line, maybe ghost says, hey, we're not developing for this project anymore. It's open source. So people can fork it. And presumably you can pick up and go to the fork if you need to, like there are WordPress forks of like classic press, I think is one there's, there's different forks of people who said, I don't like what the direction that WordPress is going, I don't like that they changed the editor or something. They forked it and they kept developing it. And if you don't like sub stack or wicks or square space, then you one can't leave if you don't like their business practices, but two, if they shut down for whatever reason, maybe the venture capital money runs out, you don't have a way to go. There are no lifeboats even. Yeah. And, and in the, it's just about opening up your options in that way. And you're going to need to weigh these things at every tool or technology you need to adopt, right? Like, and, and we at reclaim, you know, again, our vested interest here just to be, I don't think anyone will be that confused who's watching this, but like our vested interest here is we can host these tools, right? So we want you to, to use open tools because you can host them with us and we try to make it easy to host some of these tools, especially because some of them aren't that easy to host. So, you know, ghost here is a good example. It's not the worst thing to set up in the world, but if you want to set it up from scratch on, on like, say you have a box in a, you know, a machine in your basement, it's, it's, there's kind of a lot to do. Not that I think a lot of people are going to do that, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point of like, you need to set up a database and you need to set up ghost command line tool and you need to set up a reverse proxy for HTTPS and all this stuff. So we're going to talk about how we can make that easy. There are other places that make it easy to just to be completely clear. And I think we may have the easiest one that I've seen, but, but I also haven't tried every single host. So the, the, but it is important to make that, that to evaluate that at every step, right? Like we are talking to you right now in two places, very much on purpose, on YouTube and on a self-hosted peer tube site that we, you know, host and maintain. And we do that. We, you know, we could say, you know, ah, we don't need YouTube at all, but to be perfectly honest with you, that's where people are. So we participate there too, you know, but our, our hedging, our, we're hedging the bed of like, but we do really want to own and control this stuff. So we're going to use, sorry, owncast is our live tool we use for the live stream. And peer tube is the, the archive basically of that. And so we use both. And to be honest, we typically push people to the, our self-hosted ones because we want, we want to kind of keep pushing that boundary experiment, see what it's good at, what it isn't. And now it's kind of the place for us, especially live, right? Where if you're watching right now, I don't well, maybe, maybe pilot Amanda are, but I don't monitor YouTube's chat at all. Like we're not even over there. Typically we are kind of all in on art. It has a chat, but I don't really look at it. It comes through, cause we use stream yard for our streaming. It comes through our comments in here. So we can see it, but we are not on YouTube. Like we're not looking at the YouTube chat. It's just like, if it comes through, you know, that aggregator, we can see it. But yeah. By the way, for posterity, putting up links to our own cast and peer tube in the little subtitle thing. So yeah. And you know, and to be honest, we're going to have a stream too on even just like how we do streams. Like I think probably more than one to be honest, that we can go into more detail. But my point is to say, you know, not at every step of the way do even us always pick the open tool because I think it's important to look at and understand what you may be giving up by not going with an open tool. For instance, while we have, you know, own cast is our open self hosted thing for the live stream. We use discord for the chat. That's not open. Right. We can't host that. We are at the whim of discord, but that is a that is a choice we made because we're because it's a messaging tool. It's complicated. There's a lot of like integrations and things we need. And also we made the bet that maybe people are more likely to keep discord open. Possibly they're using it for other stuff and we want to be part of it. So there are times to make these decisions. We use StreamYard to produce this stream. We also use open tools like OBS. But for us, if we if StreamYard did something terrible business wise for us tomorrow, we could drop them and you all would barely care. Right. Like because we could just use a different tool to produce the video. Right. So the visuals might change a little bit. They would probably look different. But it doesn't have much impact on our ability to make video, to be honest with you. Like we can sub that tool in with something else. So, you know, these these I think it's important to evaluate these things. What you can, what you might lose when you don't have ownership over a tool or how it's, you know, the future of it or and anything like that. And that's it. But it's not always straightforward. Right. Cool. So let's talk about ghosts a little bit. I have the ghost website up. This is the 25 minutes and we're going to talk about ghosts. We'll start talking about ghosts soon. But to be fair, like that's what this stream is about. Right. This stream is about. I mean, it's literally called revisiting ghost and that newsletters amid sub stacks implosion. Right. So we'll have a whole new flex and everything there is still completely relevant, but we are going to update it. And today I wanted to specifically have the conversation we just had. So I'm really glad we did. So, yeah. So this is this is the, you know, the ghost company as a company, their website and talks about the open source tool and they're hosting, they have pricing for it. It's not super cheap to host with them, especially when you look at some of the things that they're offering. So their cheapest one, nine dollars is it limits you to how many members and how many people can sign in and even what themes you can use. It's a little bit like the cheapest WordPress.com things where they kind of put some limits on all that stuff. And yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But this is sort of what their pricing looks like. I will say if you host ghost and reclaim cloud, we see it in the three to five cloudlets plus a public IP means you're going to pay less than $20 a month, maybe less than $15 a month, depending on how much traffic and how big your site is. So we are between the two cheapest ghost plans. The cool thing though is there's really no limitation to the features. You can have as many users as you want on ghost if you self host it. So we do have a pretty good support article on how to get started with it. And we are going to kind of basically go through this article really quick just to show on video what this looks like. So I did link this in discord too. But basically ghost is pretty easy to get started with on reclaim cloud. So you can go to the marketplace, you sign in and go to the marketplace under content management, ghost is an option in the marketplace as a pre build installer. Then you give it an environment URL. So this is a nice temporary URL before you map a domain name that you can use. And then we are going to pick it up from basically here and I will show the rest of this live. But the article does go on and mention how to set it up and how you can update ghost, how to set up mail, especially handy for both password resets and things, but also newsletters and how to set up a custom domain. So we go through all of that here and we even go into like, hey, if you want to know a little bit about how the under the hood stuff works, you can update ghost manually with these Docker commands if you don't want to use this button. It's a button you can just click on it. I don't know why you would, but I like kind of showing folks how things work when we can make it happen. And anyway, so going over to Reclaim Cloud, I did literally before the stream, just to save us a little bit of time, I hit the button to install it. It does take about five minutes to install ghost, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more. So this is what you'll be left with is once it's done, it'll say, cool, here's your new ghost site. You can visit it here. You can set it up here. You can zoom in a little bit and you can point a domain name with this IP and this links out to the article. The reason I can't zoom in is the way this box works. If I zoom in it, oh, never mind. I wasn't saying it's going to go off screen, but I guess that's not true. So, all right, so if I click on this, I can set up ghost and I'm going to do that. I'll call it my neat newsletter. This is one thing I will say about ghost is that you do have to immediately go make your account. Yeah, you do. Technically, most tools like this do work this way, but we can automate around a lot of that. WordPress actually works that way if you install it manually. But I couldn't tell you the last time I installed WordPress manually. So, the problem is the automation here is done by me and I don't have all of the hooks into ghost that we that say install Tront does or reclaim cloud and reclaim press do for WordPress. So, anyway, I can close this. I don't need that anymore. But, oh yeah, I forgot to actually hit the button over here. So I'm going to hit create account and here we go. It kind of gives you a little of what we're doing here. I am going to point to domain. So before I do much more here, I'm actually going to just go check out the homepage. This is what it looks like by default. I'm going to point to domain using my cPanel account. So I should have logged into this ahead of time, but that's okay. And so I'll go to the zone editor. I'm going to do an a record as the instructions tell me I should wait. Did I scroll past it?  What? No, I didn't do it yet. So oh yeah map a custom domain. So it says you'll likely want to map a custom domain. You don't need you don't need to so a that IP address is emailed to you but also visible at any time. You don't that's just to help people get started. So I also realized that I just said a record is when I met IP address because I'm a parrot. So if I open this little thing here that's the IP address same one that it told me about just just before and I can copy that. I'll make a new a record paste the IP in there and we'll call this my neat news letter . The reason I'm giving it such a long sub domain is I've probably used newsletter.jdn.me like I don't know 30 40 times as I it's when I develop the installer so there may already be a newsletter.jdn.me somewhere in the global DNS system. So for the sake of making this simple I'm going with a rather weird thing. So if I go there right now it's not going to fully work. What was it my neat I don't even remember what I just put in I have to now look amazing. Is it my neat something there it is. Okay. So if I go there right now it's going to be like whoa whoa whoa whoa that doesn't work but we know it's pointed at something because we're getting a page. So now we have to tell ghost about the domain because it doesn't know yet. And go up sorry domain configuration and I can just paste in the domain name that I've set up a DNS record for make sure you don't have any spaces before and after or a period or anything like that and I'll hit apply it'll take a few minutes and depending on how you do things you may have some browser caching situations but yeah it is it is now restarting and setting up the new domain name so if I visit there it's now it's almost ready but it doesn't have a HTTPS search just yet it'll work on that and between when I said that it's already got one so it does the search automatically yeah but it does need like I have to give it like 15 seconds and I'm very impatient so now we are at this new domain name neatnewsletter.jdn.me so that's probably step one is giving your ghost newsletter a domain name but to be perfectly honest you could play around with it just using the Reclaim Cloud URL for a long time you don't have to specifically map a domain to it if you don't really want to the next thing we should do is set up mail and there's actually two things to do here which is this is actually new and it's kind of a bummer but there's now two places to set up Mailgun unfortunately one is used for all of ghost's normal functions which is like password reset emails and stuff like that and the other is used specifically for sending email I think they do it this way to be like more efficient and like with the Mailgun API but it is a little bit weird and it also technically means that you can have like you could use two email services you could use one email service for like password resets and one for your newsletter I don't know why you do that but maybe there's a reason so if we go back to our our set up document here we also have some instructions on how to set up Mailgun so basically we're just going to use this add on and we can put in our details so the first thing we need to do is go to Mailgun so Mailgun accounts are free to make and I would recommend you use the pay as you go option Mailgun it's like it's some really inexpensive per block of a thousand emails that you pay per month that you use the cool thing though is they don't bill you until you send a thousand emails in one month so I've never been billed by Mailgun because I'm not doing really high volume stuff we use quite a bit of Mailgun stuff at Reclaim so we do pay them but I think given the amount of email we send out to you know invoices and all of that stuff you don't really pay that much as a company for the service it's really affordable unfortunately Mailgun only support sorry Ghost only supports Mailgun right now for newsletter so it is required but it's a great service and I would highly recommend it and I do expect in the future they'll support other email providers too alright so I've already logged in over here I just need to refresh my page I already have my Mailgun domain setup when you initially make a Mailgun account it'll walk you through how to do that I'm not quite sure why that's not working but what it does not that important to do is go to SMTP credentials and add a new user and hopefully this works I'm not really sure what's up with Mailgun right now so I'm going to give I'm going to call this ghost newsletter and then it's going to say how do you want to create a password automatic is fine oh my gosh I just realized I am getting weird I'm in the wrong domain here that's what's going on newsletter.jaden.me but for Mailgun okay that's much better I was accidentally looking at our reclaim stuff while signed into a different account so that's weird that Mailgun even had that bug but whatever ghost newsletter great so now I'll hit create and it said hey a new password has been created click copy I will do that I'm going to go back over to reclaim cloud and hit mail setup and I'm going to need to do paste the password in here it's a super long password the username is just this entire thing it actually gives you some of the details here so I'll paste that in I'll use the same from address that sounds good to me the host is smtp.mailgun.org so I'll paste that in and then it says alright what ports I guess I'll doesn't really matter I'll do 587 and then the service and transport this is a little bit weird but you do have to type this in smtp and smtp then I'm going to hit apply this is the part that is mail wizardry that I don't understand so it's now put that information into ghost for password resets and things like that the next thing I need to do is to also make an api key for mailgun and this lets the newsletter functionality actually work so I'm going to go back to mailgun here and it says sending api keys and I'm going to hit add sending key and this is all documented by the way on ghost actual documentation like from ghost.org because this is just the api key part is just every ghost setup would need something like this so I'll make this newsletter api key so I'm going to copy this I am of course going to delete these after we do this stream because these are all things you wouldn't want to share with folks so now I'm going to go over to my ghost site and oh I don't I'm not at the right domain name that's from before what was it oh I just have too many tabs open here my neat newsletter whoops sorry about that now I'm in the right tab if I log back into my ghost site and go into settings and then where is it I should remember this newsletter sending so it's got a bunch of newsletter related settings here and then under mailgun it says hey you need an api key so I'll hit edit and then I'm going to paste in that api key I got from mailgun I have to pick my region there's two regions of mailgun so I'm in the US region and then I have to give it the domain name that I'm using in mailgun which in my case is mg.jdn.me but this would be whatever your domain in mailgun is set to and so that's it the mailgun the mail configuration is done if you've never had to deal with mail like important mail you're probably like that was a couple steps just trust me this is a lot better than it often is mail is kind of hard email is kind of hard on the internet in terms of making sure things don't go to spam and stuff like that the cool thing about using mailgun is that kind of becomes mailgun's problem they make sure that emails are going to be configured correctly so that they don't go to spam of course unless you send spam email in which case they'll still go to spam but so our ghost site is configured we are now ready and we can use it and ghost itself is you make posts and the cool thing is I like that ghost is kind of all in the box I also like there's no plugins to get or configure or anything like that it's all just part of ghost that's also a downside in that ghost doesn't have some features that wordpress does that especially that wordpress can add with plugins but I think especially for something that's really focused on newsletters this is a really good balance of functionality and I will say from our perspective at Reclaim we're not finding ourselves missing stuff that we at least not regularly so it's a really nice tool yeah especially because this is basically the same thing that you've already said but because ghost is so focused on being a newsletter platform it's not really a site builder wordpress is a blogging platform you can do newsletters through it but it's also a site builder that people use just to make websites ghost is like if you're not blogging or sending a newsletter why are you here so one of the nice things about wordpress being open source means that there are plugins that can extend it in the ways that you might need to build your website in the way that you want but that's not as much of a question with ghost just noting in the discord chat there are templates so there are themes that you can use for ghost and they're a little bit different than wordpress themes though so like a wordpress theme is a lot of bearing on the functionality of the site whereas ghost themes are simply going to change the way the page looks they can do less but that also means from if you're learning ghost you're not going to get that shock to the system in wordpress where sometimes you pick a new theme and it's like oh this theme has all kinds of different configuration options and again I like that a lot of the time but on ghost all the themes kind of work the same if that makes sense so I can go in here and go to design and branding and then customize the other thing also about this is that I mean I haven't done it but it's been on my list for a long time is that ghost themes are more accessible I think than wordpress themes in terms of building your own yeah technically we're running on a roundup technically in like the strictest technical sense we're running a theme that I made but it but all it is is I took a ghost theme I copied the folder and changed like four lines of HTML in it but that's kind of the beautiful thing is because ghost themes are just they're technically called it's a templating language I think called handlebars but it's really just HTML and CSS like there's no like oh my theme doesn't support this version of PHP or in ghost case it all runs on node that's not really a thing with ghost so you can more confidently make kind of manual changes if you're comfortable with HTML in ghost and it's super nice we're not going to log into I don't want to log into our roundup site because there's people's emails there and I did not take the proper precautions to make sure we don't dox people basically but but basically you can actually you know what I could even demo it if we have time but when you're changing a theme so if I go right now I'm just looking at the basic theme you know color but I go down here to change theme there's a bunch of themes right in here you can also upload a theme into this interface so like I literally went into ghost and zipped up the theme you can probably also get these from like github or something they're all these are all open themes and I just made the changes and uploaded the zip file to ghost just like actually a very similar to wordpress in that way so and in our case I we just had some very small things we wanted to change but you can do a lot with it I used to run my main blog on ghost and I did spend some time customizing my theme and it was pretty simple I it was in interesting between something interesting between wordpress and like a static site generator in terms of how easy it was to kind of hack on as someone who like isn't afraid of changing HTML but isn't really a developer either so yeah that was really cool and there are other themes in here you also can from the settings of ghost do tons of stuff related to like customizing your like sign up flow and what that looks like and how that works which is I think really kind of nice again they keep it relatively simple but I even like that they have nice handy links like direct links to sign up and like if you have tiers like if you have you know pricing tiers for your site you can set those up and get links to them directly it's a really interesting balance of like focused but also giving you some good options yeah so one thing I wanted to mention here I'm gonna put in just a couple members so you can export and import users from CSV say they're members like for who would receive your newsletter their importer is weirdly good like you can kind of give it just like any CSV file and it will say cool how do you want to map this to like the things we need which is I didn't expect that that's really awesome it's nice it's also there's two things that I've experienced with their importer which is one it does pull in everybody well obviously pulls in everybody pulls them all in as members but if you one if the person's already in if the email is already in there but you say like oh my name my email is email at newsletter dot jayden dot m e or something but my name has changed and the CSV has a different name associated with that it'll just go oh I know that email I'll just change the name I'll just fix that and the other thing is ghost has two ways of its members can receive your emails or its members can be members of the site who've opted out of receiving emails nonetheless and if someone is in that CSV if email dot newsletter dot j dot m e if that email is already in there and that person has said listen I want to be a member but I don't want to get the email updates re-importing them is not going to change that setting yes yeah it's going to respect their unsubscription which is crucial you need to do that and it kind of it's kind of one of those things ghost does this quite often where it like you you think of like I tailor I'm like but actually even this specific thing happened when we first started using the roundup we would import like you know lists of people who we know are like administrators of domain and zone stuff like that and pilot was like oh I'm going to re-import that list and I was like pilot don't do that you're going to re-sign up everyone if they signed out and you were like no it just handles that and I was like what no way so it has tons of little details like that that really make it easy to manage I think yeah for context it's our admin newsletter so what we do is once a month we take an export of all of the people who are in our admin database and there's some churn there we get new people we get people taken off but if someone is on the list and has previously been on the list but opted out you know they're going to be in the CSV but it doesn't matter ghost is going to as you said respect that choice yeah so a couple of weird things about ghost I will mention is um especially if you're coming from other CMS like WordPress there is like there is like a specific about page and you can change this but this is like its own weird custom thing but every other page in ghost is just a post that you mark as a page basically a ghost has a little checkbox when you're making a post where you're like nah this post is a page which it's not that big of a deal but like I just again coming from WordPress it just kind of breaks my brain a little bit so I'm just we're not going to do much in here but let's first newsletter email well I don't know first email and ghost editor is I love it actually it's again somewhat simple but it's pretty easy to use and it doesn't it has most of the functions I like I really specifically like that ghost has mark down blocks built in that are really good so and by that I mean if you are mark down connoisseur as many of us are it supports pretty much all of the mark down stuff and it also is really hard for the the reader yeah sometimes I've seen systems that let you do this kind of thing where you can have non markdown and markdown and the markdown stuff will look different like it looks it doesn't get the same style apply to it and stuff like that this you can switch back and forth seamlessly it's really easy so that's cool I really like their image tool because it has a really simple way when you upload an image to do both caption and alt text it's huge yeah so easy and it's right there like it's right in the editor I really like that that wasn't always the case by the way when I used to use ghost I had my own like HTML snippet I'd use for images because I frequently want to caption an image with different text than my alt text and it didn't allow that that's something they added so super cool but I'll just for now I'll just kind of put some basic yeah whoops garbage text in autofills that's a tool I use a okay a text I don't have an image tool on my Mac to do that okay that's not a I was like wow ghost really does have everything yeah this is this is also we recently updated the version of ghost that we were using so this is new ish to me in terms of like email call to action I don't think they had that before they've added some new blocks yeah it looks like they have even like a specific like this is really cool too they have a specific mail merge type stuff a built in and then it says this is only visible when delivered via email which is that's cool feature so I don't know that we're using that that's gonna be really useful for everyone who is leaving sub stack exactly yeah so we'll just post this for now but the cool thing is when you can click the sidebar you can you know change a URL you can change like the date and things like that you can have post access be members only paid members only so members just anyone who is in your member list that we were just looking at before and by default you can disable this but by default anyone can sign up to be a free member but if you had paid memberships you could limit to that or you can get granular and say there's specific tiers we're just gonna make ours public but you know that's the thing you can do this is also the that ghost differentiates between member and member with subscription going back to that thing especially because members in ghost they're more like users with the subscriber role in wordpress in that you also like being a member doesn't get you access to the admin interface necessarily like that's a ghost has a separate thing those are called users in ghost whereas in wordpress it kind of mixes them together a little bit so that is one difference ghost also for commenting you do need to make an account on the ghost site that's one thing that is both a blessing and a curse on wordpress you can allow comments from just anybody and you can use like a kismet to manage blogs spam and stuff ghost you have to like specifically sign in to make an account to comment on the site which is I have mixed feelings about I think I can see why they do it that way but there are also other commenting systems that sometimes people use with ghosts that are a little bit more open anyway you can also go through here and like edit the metadata and how it will look on search engines and on I refuse to call X on Twitter and Facebook and and then I like that that's all kind of visible right here I love that they have like a little keyboard shortcut thing as a keyboard shortcut fan I love when people place this in an easy to find spot but I think we're ready to publish this beautiful beautiful blog post and I'm gonna hit publish and this is another thing I really like so it says cool are you here's what we're gonna do you can publish and email it you can only publish it or you can send it as just an email they won't show up as a blog post on your site this is I like how simple that is to do there's also sorry you continue maybe you're gonna say this already but you can also choose who it goes to right so you can have different subscriber tiers you can also have labels in ghost so separate from tiers you can like tag people and for our go setup I have a tag that's just called test and it's a way for me to just send a test email to like me and actually I think I'm the only one on there right now but but you know any number of us that reclaim could add ourselves to that test label and that's really handy to just get a test email basically and then you can also schedule it to go now or do it later this I will say is becomes counterintuitive I think we've run into this pretty recently with the new log we've run I want this to be published at a certain time like next week 9 a.m. on Tuesday I want this to come out for one reason or another but I think it is a little bit scary to go hit that publish button without knowing that there's going to be a last checks section so this is good to know if you are new to ghost there's going to be a last check section and that's the section where you say when you want it to come out because otherwise we've yeah so I'll hit publish and hit send and it says cool you're done it's being sent I'm going to check my email and yep let me sorry I don't want to you don't all get to see my email so I'm going to pull that up really quick and bring it into the stream but I have to do that specifically but here we go and this is what it looks like by default so you can actually modify this email template too but it is just a really nice simple template by default and you know got your unsubscribe link in here and all that kind of stuff so this is another template I like how simple for a self-hosted tool they make it really fast to go from I have nothing to I have a newsletter that works this is also in terms of when you're writing things up I'm thinking about the full post or the full site editor or something not that they've got that in WordPress when you're writing your blog post it looks almost exactly like it's going to publish it it's got all the formatting in place the ghost editor doesn't do that so if there have been times when I've been writing and I've been going like is this going to look how I want it to look it is going to look how you want it to look on the site and I think that the email might change some stuff but stylistically at least for what we use it's going to come out looking pretty similar to the styling of your actual site there has been many a reclaimed community chat talking about full site the site editor and full site editing on WordPress that ghost doesn't do as good of a job in terms of the editor looking exactly like your page is going to look you should preview especially if you're doing something kind of complicated that being said I think ghost does do a really good job of your post is going to look I have not yet seen a post that looks meaningfully different from the email content which is honestly significant because it's email formatting and stuff is kind of weird it is all technically still HTML but the way you do that in email is so different that it's not a given that this stuff just works out of the box but in our experience for ghost anyway it really does work pretty seamlessly including like gifs and stuff like that yeah so that's it we did it we had a whole talk about self hostable tools and open tools and we published a nonsense first issue of my neat newsletter so yeah I'm going to call it a good win do you all have anything before we kind of sign off we are a couple minutes over time but no I got a head out so this was a great stream though and I appreciate the chat that we've all had in discord I loved to start the day off with some open source tea so thanks Taylor for sure see you all see you


Hello, welcome to this week's edition of This Week in Civil Engineering, also known as TWICE, a weekly news show focused on providing civil engineering professionals with the most important and relevant industry updates. I'm your host for this episode, Danny Lu. I'm a Child to Civil Engineer specialising in Highways and Infrastructure in the UK. I also run Civil Engineering Mental.com supporting graduates and pursuing a professional qualification with the Institution of Civil Engineers. You can find all of the episodes of This Week in Civil Engineering at TWICE.News. That's TWICE, T-W-I-C-E.News. References to all of the stories covered will be in the episode show notes. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to the TWICE playlist to receive weekly episodes. Now it's time for What's Happening This Week in Civil Engineering. Now it's time for This Week's News. You are about to hear excerpts from the stories referenced. Links to all of the full articles can be found at TWICE.News. First, let's cover the biggest breaking news stories from this past week. might affect civil engineering companies and professionals. Firstly, traffic signals in Vegas could soon have a mind of their own from skipdiscount at govtech.com. Officials are already able to virtually monitor activity in Las Vegas parks in real time, freeing up staff to handle other needs. But in the future, traffic signals in Sin City could have a mind of their own, predicting when auto volumes will increase and adjusting accordingly. These were some of the smart city initiatives laid out by Michael Sherwood, Chief Innovation Officer for Las Vegas, during a virtual public sector panel discussion Wednesday at the Dell Technologies World Conference. The smart parks initiative is an effort to use technology in the form of cameras, sensors and communications devices to glean how parks are being used and when. In areas like transportation, Las Vegas has been on the cutting edge of deploying technology to support connected vehicles and intelligent traffic management. The city is exploring future iterations of traffic management where signal controls are directed by large caches of data related to traffic volume so that the signals could make real-time predictions and modify accordingly to create smoother traffic flows and less congestion. It's great to see technology being tied into infrastructure and transportation in creative ways. Next up, let's look at an interesting story from Arizona. Dish soap helped slide New Fourth Street Bridge into place in Flagstaff from Adrian Skaeberland at azdailysun.com. It took several hydraulic jacks and about 14 gallons of blue dawn dish soap to slide two concrete three and a half million pound bridges into place according to the engineers who designed it and the construction workers who built it. That was the news at a gathering of state and local officials Monday, celebrating the completion of the Full Street Bridge expansion project, which used an innovative technique to complete it in a matter of days instead of months. Performing what is called a bridge slide, construction crews built two sections of bridge just to the east of the old structure. The two sections were then set into place over course about two days, said city project manager Jeremy Degator. That process doesn't use wheels or a crane. Instead, hydraulic jacks slowly pushed the bridge into place on steel runners that run on a temporary rubber and Teflon pads, Degator said. Once it is in place, the Teflon pads are replaced by permanent concrete ones. The project expanded the bridge to accommodate four lanes on the Fourth Street and a potential future widening on Interstate 40, which runs under the bridge. On top of that, the project expanded pedestrian access on the bridge, building in a dedicated sidewall and multimodal path separate from the road. The total cost of the project for the both bridges was $13.9 million, although the city of Flagstaff pitched in some additional money for the cost of the pedestrian paths and to make the bridge more handsome. Another example of creativity being used on a civil project, not everything you need to complete a project is in your textbook. Dish soap certainly wasn't in mine. Next up, US news in civil engineering. First, how we could be saving $4 billion in building energy costs without any renovations from Christine to Saint at FastCompany.com. Our buildings have a big environmental footprint from their construction to their daily operation. In the US, residential and commercial buildings count for about 40% of the country's energy use. A lot of that energy it turns out isn't even necessary, it's just being wasted. By just changing the way buildings control their lighting, heating, cooling and appliances through smart energy analytics, a four-year initiative by a Berkeley lab saved $95 million per year in energy costs across 6,500 buildings. Energy management information systems, EMIS, includes sensors, meters and data analytics software to allow building operators to see exactly when and where energy is being wasted. When Sprint implemented this at its headquarters in Kansas through the Berkeley lab effort, the company saved $400,000 in energy bills and more than 4.7 million kilowatt hours of energy a year. When Stanford University installed EMIS software at 315 housing and food service sites, its electric bills went down 5% and its gas bills by 10%. Saving the university's residential and dining services $451,000. If commercial buildings nationwide adopted these EMIS technologies and best practices, Berkeley lab says the energy cost savings with total $4 billion. This means drastically fewer emissions and fossil fuel use. Along with the monetary savings, the Berkeley lab campaign driving annual energy savings of $4 trillion BTU, a measurement of heat energy. $1 trillion BTU is equivalent to 500 hundred ton railroad cars full of coal. This sounds like an interesting market for civil engineering firms moving forward. Next up, North Carolina, Department of Transport, completes six-year widening project on a major mountain highway. From Stephanie, Stanta Stacey and Brittany Whitehead at WLS.com. North Carolina DOT officials announced a long-awaited completion of a widening project on a stretch of major highway in Mitchell and Yancey counties. The project has taken almost six years to complete. The eight-mile project spans from US-19E from its intersection with NC80 in Yancey County to the multi-lane section of highway just west of Spruce Pine in Mitchell County. The previous two-lane roadway has been turned into a four-lane highway with a grass median that matches the first 21 miles from Yancey State 26 in Madison County. As the only east-west corridor in Yancey County and the major east-west corridor, it would allow people to get to where they go faster, safer, with less commute time. Additional drainage, guard rail, design improvements to the alignment of the roadway, signage and pavement markings bring the highway up to modern safety standards. Wright Brothers Construction completed a roughly $65 million project. Next up, some career inspiration for you. Let's take a quick break from the news for this week's civil engineering career inspiration. You will never know everything, therefore make sure you always ask questions. Don't be afraid to admit that you don't know something and always keep learning. Now let's get back to the news. Next, let's move on to some international news in civil engineering from this past week. First up, we're headed to Europe. Femon Belt Tunnel will be the world's longest immersed tunnel from Jacopo Prisco at edition.cnn.com. After more than a decade of planning, work has begun on the world's longest immersed tunnel. Descending up to 40 meters beneath the Baltic Sea, Femon Belt Tunnel will link Denmark and Germany, slashing journey times when it opens in 2029. The tunnel, which will be 18 kilometers long, is one of Europe's largest infrastructure projects, with a construction budget of over 7 billion euros, that's 8.2 billion US dollars. By way of comparison, the 50 kilometer channel tunnel linked in England and France, completing in 1993, costs the equivalent of 12 billion pounds, that's 15.5 billion US dollars in today's money. Although longer than a Femon Belt Tunnel, the channel tunnel was made using ballroom machine, rather than immersed in pre-built tunnel sections. It will be built across the Femon Belt, as straight between the German island of Femon and the Danish island of Lolland, and is designed as an alternative to the current ferry service from Royby and Putt Garden, which carries millions of passengers every year. Where the crossing now takes 45 minutes by ferry, it will take just 7 minutes by train and 10 minutes by car. The tunnel, whose official name is Femon Belt Fix Link, will also be the longest combined road and rail tunnel anywhere in the world. It will comprise two double-lane motorways, separated by a service passageway, and two electrified rail tracks. Besides the benefits of passengers, trains and cars, the tunnel will also have a positive impact on freight trucks and trains, because it creates a land route between Sweden and central Europe, that will be 160 kilometers shorter than today. It's very interesting to see how advancements in technology and construction methods are helping complex projects to build faster and cheaper. Next up, let's head to the UK. High Speed One becomes the country's first renewable powered rail, from Reuters staff at UK.Reuters.com. Britain's HS1 Railway Link to the Channel Tunnel is the country's first train line to run entirely on renewable energy, with wind and solar powering the trains between London and the Kent Coast, the operating company said. Britain has set a target of building a net zero carbon transport system by 2050. HS1 is owned by Infrared Capital Partners and Equitix Investment Management. It's great to hear about projects like this one here at home in the UK. On that note, let's cover a few infrastructure-related stories, starting with some general news about infrastructure project schedules amidst the pandemic. Infrastructure projects speed up amid COVID slowdown from Lisa Brown at Globes.com. Accelerated construction timetables from San Francisco and Los Angeles to New York meant major infrastructure projects were completed weeks and months ahead of schedule. The slowdown in the economy was an opportunity too good to miss for many large construction projects. In response, accelerated construction timetables came about with fewer people, planes and cars to work around. While the pandemic was and continued to cause grief for many, it is a positive to see that some much-needed infrastructure works has been able to be completed ahead of schedule due to the circumstances. Next up, Minnesota Governor Tim Walsh signs $1.9 billion public works bill from Jesse Van Burkill at StarTribune.com. Governor Tim Walsh signed a $1.9 billion public works infrastructure private package into law Wednesday touting the jobs it will add. The measure included historic levels of state-backed borrowing for public projects known as bonding. Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development data show the percentage of people participating in the workforce fell to 68.4% in September, the lowest level since 1978. The law includes an element that hasn't been part of past bonding measures. Under equity appropriations, the bill allocates money for communities that have may have been left out of the funding process in the past. That includes $5.6 million for a family and child services facility in the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, $3.8 million for Native American Community Clinic in Minneapolis and $2 million for the Among American Farm Association to Buy Farmland. The bonding package also has provisions aimed at ensuring local governments follow the state's workforce participation goals and equal pay protections for communities of color women as they hire contractors for the publicly backed projects. It's good to see funding like this made available again in the midst of a pandemic that has really devastated the economy worldwide. And last but not least from New York City, Link Slabs used to prevent joint leaks on rehabbed Bronx bridges from Don McLeod at EquipmentWorld.com. A $204 million rehabilitation project recently completed on a major expressway in the Bronx created jointless bridge decks by using Link Slabs of ultra-high performance concrete. The process is designed to prevent water from leaking from the deck to the substructure which deteriorates over the bridge over time. The slabs replace bridge deck joints which are a major source of deterioration. Water leaks through the joints over time corroding bridge girder bearings and supporting structures. Debris also accumulates in the joints which can hinder deck expansion and cause further damage. The slabs of ultra-performance concrete are used to connect the ends of prefabricated deck sections over the pier. It is steel fiber reinforced and includes super-plastic sizes to reduce water content in the mix. It is also stronger and more durable. In 2017, the New York State DOT reported it had retrofitted 15 bridges with Link Slabs. Designed for the ultra-high performance concrete Link Slabs was developed by the New York State Department of Transportation's Office of Structures. Again, an example of how we continue to get smarter rendering design and construction will have emphasis on longer lasting projects. To wrap up, here's an inspiring quote to motivate you for the rest of your day. The Dalai Lama said that if there's no solution to a problem then don't waste time worrying about it. However, if there is a solution to a problem then don't waste time worrying about it. So stop stressing and enjoy your work. There you have it. That's what's happening this week in sub-engineering. You can find references to all the stories mentioned at twice.news and all episodes are also published in video on EMR's YouTube channel at youtube.com slash engineering careers. Remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And of course, YouTube for the video version. This is Danny Loone signing off. See you next week. Now go and be the best civil engineering professional that you can be.


More VoIPa monitoring we got Oleg here who's gonna tell us about CP3. It is his first ever public presentation So please give him some love and encouragement Thank you guys Thank you guys. Thank you for coming I'm going to tell you about yet another voice all right be monitoring and troubleshooting system called CP3 You might be heard about tapir Sorry louder. Oh Okay, you might be heard about tapir tapir is previous version of our system and But I'm pretty sure that for most of you it will be something new today. Now. Let me introduce myself That's all you need to know I'm agafox everywhere in github and in social media But a bit more I have been designing and developing and distributed systems different distributed systems as developer and architect for more than 10 years and last six I'm spending my time in telecom Telecom did lots of great stuff last couple of decades, but it's obvious that you know, we need to update and adopt telecom to modern technologies and to modern Stacks just to make it Up to market. So that's what I'm trying to do all the time in CP3 as well and on my previous On my previous places. So now let me start from a scary story It's called just 3261 There was a company There was a company who built a great pretty good voice over IP provider service and at some point they just they just realized that they have something like 20,000 messages per second and Engineers who designed originally and who built all these systems. They're spending most of their time Just you know trying to help with customer support tickets because Customer support tickets is a simple thing like I I had I tried to call from a number to be number and I Had no success. What was the problem and this call was when when was this call this call was Something like three hours ago, but when exactly I don't know maybe 15 20 minutes difference just imagine now that 20,000 cp messages per second and 20 minutes It's a good amount of data. So this company is a store TCP dumps and they rotated it by time and by size and then They tried to find and correlate CPS session on every I mean all correlated to this all related to this call Information it from these TCP dumps. So it wasn't saying Another thing this company They didn't have much of budget, but they asked us to help we decided to help and the first thing We did of course because we are lazy engineers We tried to make a research. What do we have on market? What do we have in open source? Of course, and let me recall they had a simple requirement Release pull engineers and make support team responsible for troubleshooting. It's easy, right? Just a number be number and time. That's it We did deep deep deep research by deep research. I mean that we looked far then second page of Google Then first actually and that's what we found so far It was Oracle Paladin. It was Homer And it was white monitor. So it's three solutions unfortunately, we didn't have much budget to deploy any of these and We took Homer back then it was Homer 5 and unfortunately 20,000 cp messages per second They couldn't handle it in open source version because it was my school and it was far. It was two years ago That's why The only one thing we could do is we created monster we created tapir and This monster did the job. So tapir was able to deal with any amount of data without like any problems But okay, it was restricted. It was Developed for particular case, right when you have like a number be number and date. That's it So we made poor engineers happy Yes, and they kept going and building new business logic and customer was happy as well Tapir was tapir is based on lots of open source frameworks and libraries and projects for capturing for processing for Storing data, so We couldn't to do not pay back to communities. That's why we pushed tapir on github. I still remember that night when we gathered these guys we We had some beers and we did this get push and we started waiting for glory and growing community Next two years it was two years ago next two years We didn't sleep we didn't eat because we were fixing issues and working with pull request Because it was crazy and now I'm proud to say that we have the most start telecom project ever I Think you can do like this here Okay, that's how we dream reality is a bit different reality is a bit different so After two years we have 36 stars. I think that 35 is from our friends and 36 is from my mom And But the worst part that we had only one open issue and it was like a question and something like this So without marketing you can and in open source nothing without marketing But we truly wanted to make the project good What we didn't give up as you understand that's why I'm here now We just took a break. We kept working on our main projects and main activities and meanwhile we were collecting information what else voice over IP providers like different but mostly like big-size providers want to have and want to let's say see in our type of products and Collecting this information came to simple requirements number two So release poor engineers make support team responsible for travel shooting release poor support team and make computers responsible for monitoring to prevent travel shooting so it's easy What could we do We did see three see three the next version of tapir and now it will be like Original I know it will be the name of brand and product We are going to work and develop. So let me introduce you Let me give you some technical details because I was explaining some stuff so far This is our architecture diagram Pretty common for any Monitoring platform Absolutely, I mean it's a typical thing. You just can change names and that's it. So captain kind of stomach it captures data it It's a doctor so it encapsulates different protocols from I Mean network like row protocols from salta and sense information and internal protocol to salta Salta is a beating heart. It's an engine. It's even driven pipeline Based on okay, all our product made written in Java and Java based Languages for instance now new version of see three written on Kotlin Kotlin is the language from JetBrains guys behind Intel G idea So Salta is pipeline and it's responsible for Retrieving data from different sources. You can see that we can grab data from third-party sources like open sieves we switch hysterics and Salta aggregates correlates all call related information partially correlates not fully and Sends data like metrics to third-party Monitoring to influx DB because we use influx DB and to MongoDB tweak is our brain because we correlate information only partially because you can't correlate it like Fully and you can't correlate it not all not all information comes in real time That's why tweak makes lots of work aggregating In other part of information and hoof is just a beautiful UI That's it. I skip database layer because I want to spend one more slide on it For payload we use MongoDB and we optimize that a lot Mongo distributed and chart by itself So it actually has a very good performance, but to be able to handle Any amount of data we do lots of tricks. I mean kind of best practices first of all for seep We do a couple of levels of partitioning partition on partitioning level one we separate Information by seep methods like by seep calls and seep registers on partitioning level two we Separate data on call index because you don't need actually to index every message you have for instance If you have 100 trying why do you need to index it or if you have at the same time? Why 100 trying has the same fields like from to whatever so that's why we Have index created originally from initial methods with some additional information from another methods and also we have partitioning by time Because without partitioning by time you can't actually build a good monitoring system. So all these optimizations they help us to Have search agent and such a nice feature like advanced search It's a new one because as I said tapir Was able to search only by number like a number been I were number and daytime here If you see advanced search new dashboard where you can search by any type of information you want Here it is. It's a Real example from production you can see that engineer he looked in the beginning. He looked for seep register and State unauthorized he found out that okay. I see some anomalies. He put Collar mask in seep register and he found out that okay, somebody is just doing registrations every five milliseconds Just you know Increasing number and then he just checked that okay all these things comes from the same I Source address. So it's a fraud detection. I mean it's a real case of troubleshooting of fraud detection I just changed numbers of course But to realize that you have some issues that you have some Anomalies on your network, especially when you have 20,000 seep messages per second or some hundred thousands You need metrics you can't live without metrics and you can't have only for instance average code duration or Okay, you can have even average code duration and ISR is metrics But you need to have multiple dimensions you need to have ability to see what are the average code duration or different metrics Let's say for particular customer for your Interconnection partner, whatever because you can have a partial Disruptions on your service and you need to know about this. So that's why seep 3 Correlate collect and correlates metrics by any dimension. So you can say, okay, I want to have it by Trunk I want to have it by user agent. I want to have it by this or that you can have it here and Here is the real example of our customer company telly stocks They are C pass provider Who is working on restcom platform and they have They have installed restcom platform on Amazon in three different regions in us in Japan and in Ireland and You know till the time they asked us to Provide them some metrics some information about their service. They already had Something like environment with requirements. For instance, they had infrastructure as a code project where we sensible they deploy all these services in cloud and The things that they already had data doc as monitoring system So what we did we just provided them part then part of seep 3 Integrated with data doc How did we do you see under seep 3 you can see this logo? It's a Java framework called Micrometer and this is actually adapter for any Like literally any no almost any almost any time series database you want to you you can Think of for instance this micrometer can send metrics to data doc to parameters to influx db to elastic search to New Relic Whatever, whatever you choose because let's say that in our world now Integrations are like a new feature. I mean you need to provide flexibility and the integrations so Now it's a demo time Yeah dangerous demo So the things that As you know, we started from okay, I need to do something to make it visible right? Can anybody help me because I think it's Okay, nice Okay, so We started from github project as you know and it had no It had no success That's why now we want to build our community around demo project. So we have demo seep 3.io. You can log in there Okay, you can log in there and you can actually try it by yourself Okay with artificial data for now, but we are going to implement And put all our new features on the under this project So I think that to try is even better than to see it on github but github version is coming to so you see simple search is something that we Think is good for support teams because it's something that Replies on most of the customers tickets. You have this advanced search Okay Okay, you have this advanced church where you can search by method by anything you want IP address list of hosts It's again the same thing Unfortunately for demo we did only one leg, but we will add more information and you will see pretty much The good picture with correlation of all legs and all methods Currently it works only with seep no RTP and RTCP And also you can check out the technical dashboard. We just put it As an example you have ISR average call duration call attempts by different states Average call duration by direction whatever so it's just a showcases We will add more showcases and also we will add business dashboard, which will show you like different business metrics because When we realize that okay, we have all informations about network exchange we can use it for business as well We can show you some business insights and this is great Now let me try to get back you see some code Here is our roadmap We are going to release github version soon after that we will be working on DPDK capturing because now we are working on RTP and RTCP and When we talk about 20,000 ship messages per second, it's insane amount of media and Lip pickup actually we use originally wrappers over lip pickup is not capable to deal with this thing. That's why we need to Go on the low level and use DPDK DPDK is toolkit for capturing information directly from Network card I mean from network card buffer without Routing to kernel so after that we are going to implement machine learning we have metrics We have different dimensions and we can predict anomalies and actually even now within flux DB and different Plugins for it. You can have something like time series Metric analysis and everything and we are going to introduce more of UI improvements That's it for I think next may be three four months And actually that's it at all. Thank you. Thank you for Any questions I can share this This is too short for question Actually, I have stickers also if you want because I It's my first presentation as a speaker, but I love I love Conferences and I am a sticker addicted person So I have a proprietary system and we want to make some monitoring and what what kind of Exports do you support? I mean What should I export to the system in order to have these stats? Can you repeat the question Like Okay First of all, we are capturing from network, but if you have a proprietary protocol Okay, we can make an integration because we have our internal protocol and in addition to this We okay, we can't do not take advantage of open source and we can use For seep at the moment we can you can send hip with these three. Yep So in future maybe it will be for RTP and RTCP as well because guys did a great job integrating with other platforms, so We can't we can't do not Take this advantage Okay, so somehow related until we get there Is there any like a docker image or virtual machine that someone can just take and run and Sure in a month and as I said, we will release an open source version and it all will be with docker and also We are working on uncivil part where you can just deploy components Whatever you need. I mean because this system Has different components and you can deploy it with uncivil scripts or puppet chief, whatever you need Data ingestion is based on pick up files Packet captures right now. It's a live capturing or pick up files. Yes. What about encrypted traffic? You can't decrypt it. Okay, so that's the use case and enterprises. It's a good question But we have it only in our roadmap at the moment Because other other data sources Use a chest Okay, what are they? The things that we are a small team and we are working on thank you for a question. We are working on features based on our customers requests and Okay, yes, when we will be big and fast-growing we will implement SSL or if our customer will ask it we will do it for him, right and also If we talk about different connections, there are a plenty of choices because for instance, we were thinking about integration with SS7 protocols because some of our customers are close to mobile operators and we are good in Camel and in diameter, so If they will ask us we will implement this as well at the moment we have road map, which I just showed you and We are trying to move very fast and just to have new and new requirements from our customers. It's just like this. I Have I Have one more question You're saying that you are using have three Is there on your road map to also support other kind of Messages like besides seep like logs and stuff like that And RTCP. I mean you said are you are going to support RTCP? Yes, we are going to support RTP more because it's interesting, but you have elastic search Why do you need us? I mean We are more like, you know experts in terms of Real-time communications in terms of voice over IP. So the thing that all these metrics you need to know how to What actually metrics you need to how to how to aggregate it what to extract and where to put and we want to be experts in this case We don't want to You know compete with elastic search. It's not I mean So you still can use elastic search for your logs and you can use this thing for voice over IP Thinking of attaching a context with a call that's that's why


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here. Today I am back at it with another Fortnite news video and some of the newer debt and mine files I'm going to cover are absolutely insane and will change the game massively. But hey you epic people, do you want to win some V-Books? I am giving away 2800 a week. To be with a chance of winning some, simply drop a like on this video, leave a comment down below and winners will be picked and announced next week via a youtube direct message. So good luck guys. Also credit to Fortnite Intel for this info, a great source for all your Fortnite needs. Their twitter can be found linked within the video description. All items you will see and hear of in this video are confirmed by the way. They are from the same files as those that have been recently released. Some don't have images but others do. So let's get into it and we're going to start with the airstrike. Yes you guys heard that right, an airstrike coming to Battle Royale. Now we know of the airstrike in the save the world game mode and I'm guessing this will work the same. Now as for how old peace some might say this is, as I know some people will be saying that, there will obviously be indication of the airstrike coming in so you will have enough time to escape.  The weapon will be called the airstrike laser, mark a location to deliver an airstrike with a 4 bomb payload. Having this will allow you to direct this airstrike to any location you want. Obviously though I'm not allowing you to use it from unlimited range but I'm probably guessing up to about 200 yards maybe as that would be great but we will see people, we will see. This will be of that legendary rarity by the way. But yeah guys how do you feel about such an addition? Me personally I think this might come with one of the limited time game modes and maybe return in the future. After initial testing by us has been done and feedback given, I doubt they just drop this straight into the BR mode, I really do. Next up we have the dirt burger helmet, a core flip mascot helmet that protects from a single instance of critical damage. This obviously helps out being one shot by a sniper or a shotgun, a useful tool in my opinion and this is of that rarity. Next up we have a backpack which increases the inventory size. The amount of increased space here though is unknown at the moment but I'm guessing we'll at least get an extra few slots for sure. This is of that rarity. Next up we have the beehive grenade, now this lands epic. Now we actually don't know how this will work but if I had to guess I'd say maybe it's like a seeker grenade so if you get this into a small closed space where your enemies are hiding they will have no choice but to abandon the ship for sure and this is of that rarity. Next up we have something called a big poppy, a self-inflating balloon that demands personal space. This I imagine would work in a way of like say if you fall into your death you could pop this thing and it will save you maybe or it could be used to push others back when they're getting a little too close to comfort, we will see. Next up we have the bottle rocket, here's a grenade bang bang, this I believe will either come with its own ammo or maybe you'll have to load it with grenades you find. Using this though will know that give you more accuracy and range on those grenades. Rarity here is unspecified. Next up we have C4, toss an explosive charge that can be detonated with your alternate fire or by shooting the charge, rarity here is uncommon. We then have this concussion mine, deals damage and slows nearby enemies when triggered. This I'm certain will be some kind of trap, maybe a wall or ceiling trap. We then have energy crystals, not to be confused with healing crystals. Because of the subtitle here I believe these may increase movement speed of some sort for a set period of time. Rarity here and these are epic. Next up we have the gas grenade, hills a stink bomb, better clear out. This one is the much anticipated alternative to the smoke grenade and it's of that rarity. Listen to these people, the golden ticket. Take a second ride on the battle bus and redeploy. So this is of that legendary rarity and it basically gives you a revived token, a real game changer for sure. Damn! We then have grapple, has healing properties, gets some health back. It's of that legendary rarity. We then have the m80s, hills one m80 explosive for a small bang, consumes on use. These I feel would just be like small grenades, maybe they drop in bigger quantities. Rarity and these though are unspecified. We then have pop-up grenade and pop-up grenade two times two. Cover in a bottle, emerges a cover to be used while fighting your opponents. These are also unspecified in rarity. We then have the mimic bomb, place a decoy chest, which is triggered when an enemy player comes within range. This is something I called a80s back.  It seems I was right.  While this I don't know what to think about. I mean we all know what the real life Moab was and it was devastating. This I feel won't quite be as strong. There definitely will be some kind of drawback to using this as there should be, but it will be interesting to see how this one comes into play. This is of that legendary rarity. We then have the slow grenade, create a zone of slow motion for all nearby players. This would be great to use on people trying to escape your mitts and it's a rare item. We then have the supply drop signal, throw a signal to mark a location for a supply drop. This I think is obviously a decoy. You ain't going to be able to call in your own supply drops I believe, but I mean it's a possibility. We will see. This is a legendary item. Given the fact it is a legendary item, probably actually, probably, there's a supply drop you can call in for yourself. We will see like I said. We then have this Telian Head, teleport to the grenade. This sounds awesome, but where do you get teleported to? How will this work? It's got me curious for sure. And lastly people we have the rare Tesla Totem, Zappa Totem that slows and damages enemies. Sounds interesting for sure. So guys, quite a lot of new things coming. Some really interesting, others I'm not too sure about. I'm quite certain though here many of these items will be introduced with their limited time game modes coming soon also. And if you don't know about those, I did a video covering them. If you missed it you will find it linked within the video just for the eruption. But yeah guys that is it for another video. Quite a lot to discuss. So get discussing down below. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you did leave a like really does help me out. Thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully people I will see you on that next one. Always in the wrong where we stand.


Welcome to another question of the month video. This time I will deal with the questions and comments that were posted by our YouTube channel community in March 2013. And as usual I will present the answers using the active board behind me whose content can be downloaded via the e-lecture library on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. Here is the first problem. In the video introduction language and linguistics I said that language is used oral auditorily. The criterion oral auditory is part of Richard's Hall definition which we took as a starting point for the definition of language for didactic reasons and since speech or spoken language is the most important mode of communication. We know that there are different views about language and the inclusion of other communication systems such as modern sign languages. Maybe we could say that an oral auditory language more commonly known as speech is the prototypical modern use of language among humans and that the others such as sign language are less prototypical types. The next question is about cardinal vowels. A common in the video basic segments of speech vowels one. The guy has a few large mistakes. Well apart from the question itself obviously here someone has a different idea about the production of cardinal vowel number four. So let us look at it more closely. Cardinal vowel number four is defined as a vowel with a maximum opening of the mouth with the tongue flat and low in the mouth and this is the result. Let's see whether this is a reasonable result of cardinal number four. In the language index of the virtual linguistics campus we provide you with the option acoustic vowel charts where you can access among others the cardinal vowels produced by three speakers. Daniel Jones, Peter Ladifogat and myself. Well and here is our cardinal number four. Let's start with Daniel Jones. Now the next one is mine. And here is Peter Ladifogat. And I think you can all hear that Ladifogat's cardinal vowel is more back than the one produced by Daniel Jones and by myself. You can also see the frequencies that are displayed when you click on these cardinal vowels. So I think that Jones vowel and my vowel is pretty close to cardinal number four whereas Ladifogat's is a little bit more back. This may be due to differences in our vocal tracts but all the auditory result is that Ladifogat's cardinal number four is for me too far back. By the way the ash symbol should not really be used when you argue about cardinal vowels. Any argumentation about cardinal vowels should involve the properties tongue height, tongue position and lip rounding and not any additional phonetic symbols. Here is a phonological question that has already been discussed in the video English in England Beyond RP especially the role of estuary English. Now is estuary English a dialect or just an accent? This is a perfectly legitimate question and it is very difficult to answer. Wikipedia for example contradicts itself in saying that estuary English is a dialect of English widely spoken in the southeast England and later that it is a working class accent. Perhaps we should stick to John Wells' definition who said it is standard English spoken with the accent of southeast of the southeast of England that is an accent. Theoretically the borderline between accents and dialects is clear. Now here is a standard. A standard can be defined in terms of its phonology morphology syntax and in terms of its lexis or vocabulary. Accents ideally differ from the standard only in terms of phonology whereas dialects also deviate from the standard in terms of morphology syntax and lexis. But can a variety differ from the standard only in terms of pronunciation? Probably not. There are always some specific words or particular morphosyntactic patterns which are confined to the variety. For this reason many linguists prefer the term phonological dialect whenever the focus is on phonology rather than morphology syntax or lexis. Using this more flexible term estuary English can be defined as a phonological dialect of standard English. Let's move on to morphology. In the e-lecture structural typology we introduced a triangular representation of classifying languages structurally. This representation combines two ways of classifying languages morphologically. The general parameters analytic versus synthetic where analytic is synonymous with isolating plus the integration of the two synthetic language types agglutinating and fusional. This distinction goes back to Bernard Conbury's book Language Universal and Linguistic Typology. In this book he says an analytic language is a language with a one-to-one correspondence between words and morphs. So typical languages such as Vietnamese and Chinese. A synthetic language by contrast allows the segmentation of its words into morphs. So if you want a straight line then it should be here. The straight line analytic versus synthetic. But if we look at the way languages segment their words into morphs, the two languages German and Turkish for example, where you could argue that German is a little bit less synthetic than Turkish, then we have several at least two types of synthetic languages agglutinating and fusional. So if we want to combine the analytic synthetic parameter with types of synthetic languages, we need a triangular representation. We cannot say anything about analytic languages in terms of how they segment their morphs because they don't do it. But if we look at synthetic languages, we need a differentiation between the two main synthetic types, agglutinating and fusional on the basis of their segmentability. Agglutinating, high degree of segmentability, clear cut boundaries between the morphs such as in Turkish, whereas in fusional languages the whole situation is less clear cut such as in German. Note that there are also polysynthetic languages that is languages where a large number of different morphs can be combined to form words. These languages such as Greenlandic constitute a dimension of their own. The next question concerns the video sense in the series Semantics and Pragmatics where several viewers would have loved the idea that I also introduced types of synonymy. I didn't do it because the video would have become too long. So let's do it in a very concise manner in this particular video. Here are the conditions that can be used to define absolute synonymy. Two items are absolute synonyms if all their meanings are identical, if the respective items are synonymous in all contexts and if their meanings are identical for all dimensions of meaning. The best candidates for absolute synonymy include pairs such as Groundhog and Woodchuck, Pullover and Sweater, Bipedal and Two-Footed. They emerged in different subgroups of a speech community but are known to a larger community. Partial synonyms are also identical in meaning but fail to satisfy one or more of the conditions of absolute synonymy. The English adjectives big and large for example have one meaning in which they are synonymous. This is a big large city so it's the size parameter but if you look at other contexts then they're not synonymous anymore. I will tell my big brother I will tell my large brother well in one case you have the size H parameter two in the other you only have the size parameter. Finally two words are labeled as near synonyms if their semantic similarities are more salient than their differences. The borderline between near synonymy and non-synonymy is much less clear than the distinction between partial synonymy and near synonymy. Ordinary or specialized dictionaries such as Roger's thesaurus well you see the logos over here list many words as synonyms which are in fact near synonyms thesaurus list dictionary and so on. More examples can be found in the unit sense on the virtual linguistics campus. Let us now look at some more general problems. Meanwhile our community has grown enormously hence it is not surprising that more and more comments come in including more and more requests of this type for example could you provide e-lectures about Daeglossia present-day English versus Spanish Phonology or e-lectures about isolated languages such as Basque. Well I feel very much honored and it'll be a great pleasure to satisfy all these needs. However as you may guess this will take some time. First we'll produce those fundamental e-lectures that are required for a solid linguistic background and those we need to support the virtual sessions on the virtual linguistics campus. Later we will produce more specific e-lectures maybe these too. Here is another interesting comment. Sir it's wrong to throw your own phonological laws on any other languages or IPA facts. Well I must admit I do not understand this question. It was asked or it was associated with the video vowels and talks about consonant and I must admit I don't understand it. So let me make a suggestion here. If questions or comments do not make sense at all we ask the contributor for clarification. This can then be done via email to our email address info at linguistics-online.com but should not be added to the video itself. It only confuses all the other viewers. Another problem is that we have comments in languages other than English. Well even in my mother tongue German. Well this one means in short why don't you offer your courses in German. Well my answer to this particular remark is simple the virtual linguistics campus is an international platform. Our carrier language in teaching has always been English. And last but not least we are part of the English department of Marburg University. And finally our classes are for the world and not just for one country and one language. For these reasons we will no longer address comments written in languages other than English and kindly ask you to use English whenever you want to post a comment. And then like all humans I make mistakes. Not surprisingly at all. Meanwhile our channel hosts more than 50 hours of linguistic materials and honestly have you ever seen a human lecturer that did not produce a single mistake within 50 hours. The only difference between video lecturing on YouTube and private lecturing in class is that there are far more people who can see you and notice a mistake. I think this is great. In a lecture attended by let's say 50 students perhaps no one would have noticed that I put Shakespeare's death to 1618 and not to 1616 or that I had Jackson Town in Missouri and not in Mississippi or that in labial continental consonants the lower lip and not the lower teeth are involved. So thanks that you discovered these mistakes. And then there are even more severe mistakes such as forgetting a diphthong in German. For words such as ua and nua as the comment correctly posted. In fact some Germans would say or some German linguists would say I should have added yet another one as in words such as klar and bar. You remember all the r words in German that are problematic for German learners of English. These mistakes need correction either directly or by means of a video of this particular type. So again it's your control that assures the quality of this channel. Well that's it for now. As usual I'd like to thank all our subscribers and users. Here are those whose questions and comments I tried to answer. Their contributions which are sometimes lengthy discussions as in my e-lecture about estuary English help us to maintain the quality of our channel and are useful for all of us. And comments like this one here I especially motivating. Not surprisingly I like comments of this type. Super enjoyable lesson you are very clear and concrete with the explanations. Thanks a lot for sharing. And if someone like our subscriber Brian Colbridge says your team's contribution to the world is priceless we feel really honored and at the same time motivated to keep up this level. So once more thanks to all of you spread the word use our videos in class for your preparation and so on. So see you again in the next questions of the month video or in any of our future or already existing e-lectures. Bye bye.