So if you want to tell me about it, okay, basically, what happened was I got a got a contract with we got a contract with the Marine Corps. Yeah, I went to I went to my distributor and ordered my product. I was one of the first people to the table to get the get the pricing for it. So when I came to pricing for it, I was given a price that was that was way lower than what than what it really was a mistake on their end. So everyone else who applied got the right price. So they had a higher price, of course, and then I won the bid because my price was incorrect. Now, when you say everyone else that apply got a higher price. How is that? Well, no, no, no, no, not saying they got a higher price. They quoted me the incorrect price initially. But how do they do that? I'm not sure they said it was an interim said it was an issue on their side. And that's why they met they worked out a deal with me to try to give me a discount on some of the product. Once they once I tried to order it later on, they told me this is this price was incorrect. We're sorry we made a mistake. And now they're trying to give that they went ahead and push it through which the VP and everything and got me some pricing discounts to keep them to kind of level it out to make it more make me steal competitive. But yet not. So who is the company that you got pricing from? It was Dale. You got it from Dell. You got from a third party vendor. No, they'll directly they'll federal. It was a quoting issue. It's something wrong with their quoting tool. They quoted me wrong initially. So it was a it was a it was a customized bill for for for some high class and high performance laptops. So the bill information they got sent over them didn't send over them correctly from Ingram. They quoted wrong back to Ingram and Ingram told me the wrong price.  You said you got it from Dell. Now who's Ingram? Ingram. Ingram is the it's my distributor. Okay. So that's what I'm saying. That's why I asked you to get it from Dell. But how did you? No, no, the Dell federal works with Ingram. Right. So you got it from Ingram. I got the price from Dale through Ingram. Because Ingram orders the actual bill from Dale. So Dale gave me the wrong information back to Ingram. So what I took took us to the customer to the end user was the wrong price. No, no, I get that. I'm trying to figure out because normally when you do order these kind of things, you get it from a distributor. That's why I'm confused is how you got it from because you keep saying you got it from Dell, but then you really didn't get it. You got it from Ingram. Okay. Yeah. Your quote says, what does your quote say on it? Ingram is Ingram. Right. They'll federal, you know, so yeah, we got to be clear. Okay. If you pay, if you write a check, who are you going to write your check to? It's going to be Ingram to get to pay there. All right. There you go. So Ingram got the wrong price from Dale. Yeah. Yeah. And you have it in writing. The price was wrong. No, no, no. You have the price, the quote in writing. Yes. The original quote is in writing. See what happened was they originally ordered 18 of them. Who did? Marie Court? Marie Court did. Okay. So then they had, because they had that 32 gig option and 64 gig option. Yep. So what ended up happening was they said, when they first asked for the 18, I got the wrong price on the 18. So when I went back to get the 55, when they wanted 58 of the 64, they told me we can't honor this price that we gave you for the 18 for the 54 at the time. So they basically told me that I couldn't, that the price wouldn't, wouldn't, even though the quote was still supposed to be good, they told me they couldn't give me that price. So I fought with Dale and basically that, well, through Ingram we fought with Dale and they basically were like, we can, we can try to push something through cut through there with you, the 18 at that price. That's what, this is what ended up the end, end all be alls that they gave me the 18 for the price they originally put. Okay. Okay. But the other 40 they gave me for the regular price as opposed to everybody else who came later at those amended and they, they beat it. They got the regular price all the way through all 50, all 58. You understand what I'm saying? All right. So the task order was to provide 18 of one and 40 of another set. Well, no, it was supposed to be 58 total. Okay. So 58 total. So then why did you say, why did they give you 18 at the right price? I mean at the, at your, at the, your quoted price, the original quote was for 18, then it got up to 55 when it got refreshed, 58, whatever. Okay. So the government originally put it out for only 18. Yeah. And then they updated that to go up to 58. Yes. Okay. So that was, so you got a quote for 18. Yeah. The government said, okay, we want to buy more was that they issue a PO or for the 18 or no, never just, no, that just during a process of the, during the process. Yeah. Okay. Or the process of the solicitation, they went and changed the amended it. They amended it. Okay. Before they ever awarded anything, right? Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay. So now we've got our price for 18 of these items. The government says, Hey, we want 58 now, right? Yeah. Okay. So then you go back and say, all right, go back to Ingram and say, look, we need the quote for 58. Yeah. Right. And then they gave you a revised quote that showed 58 quantity for X dollars. Yes. Okay. So let's talk. How much was it? How much were they? Where they were the 18 or the original. Originally they, originally they told me there was 1800 for the, for the, for each laptop. Okay. That was the mistake. 1800 per. Okay. And then they came back and told me that it was a, but later on when I went back, they told me that there was, the bill was incorrect. So they told me the price was actually 4,000. That's before any markups, by the way. I mean, I can see why you won, right? Exactly. That's really, there's no brainer now. Yeah. Of course I would, you know, I, I'm at half the price. Yeah. And now I have to go back and tell them the bad news. So I'm like, I'm, I'm feeling like I'm scared. It's going to happen. I don't know. So. All right. They quoted you 1800 from anger. For, for the 18 or for the 58. 18. And when I went out and went out, but I'm sad for the 58. And writing on a piece of paper. What did they quote you?  The price was good for the same different quantity. So I was told. That's what I was told. No, well you haven't writing. They see me. They send me a spread sheet with it on there. What do you have in writing for your quote? Well, the last quote I got was before the 18 man, they told you 100 bucks a piece, right. Did you have the question? I said it was good, the quote, the price was good, good for the same different quantity. So I was told that's was I was told. No, what are you having, writing. 800 I got a quote back for that and once I got that one back now we didn't run into no any issue until after I any issue until I I went to go have it ordered So when I went I know I know but I'm saying again if Right now In writing you have a quote for 18 of these at 1800 bucks I have a quote I have a quote for 50 58 open for that surprise as well No, you didn't say that you don't have it. You said you said they told you it was still good for 58 Yes, the same quality was still good for that. Yes But did they have but in on writing on a piece of paper if you had to show somebody Does it say the 58 for each 800 bucks with a total amount? No, it doesn't yeah That's what I'm afraid of because I mean even if uh, because you know if these people If they hadn't given you that they I they would have honored it because You could I mean you could sue them for for that Well, what they what they said was what here? Del CTO does have a rule today. They pretty much got lawyers and pretty much like hey, whatever happens happens Sorry price could change at any time. So that's not that they no, no, that's not true That I disagree with that if they give you a writing 58 times 1800 Which is a dollar amount Then they would honor that price I disagree Well, that's the reason why they were able they went ahead and did what they did on the back end though No, they're just I mean to that that's just them being nice um I'm telling you And and again, like I said when I came into the conversation I already kind of suspected this but I you know, I want to hear it out It's very rare that I find a case where someone has something that's written in stone and writing That the companies go back and change Very very rare that that happens. So that's why I was that's why I get I mean, I'm happy you told me the whole story I was listening. Well, what I was told by Ingram was that the price When they quoted the price it's just a bill and they tell you to build the same 18 18 Thing was the same for 58. So they say the price But I and I agree with you, but let me ask you this. Do you have it in writing for the 18 at 1800 dollars? Yes, okay, so you could get the same thing for the 58 That's what I was supposed to be. That's what I was told. Yeah. No, not what you were told You should have the same I need a document that says 58 times 1800 equals this is the amount that I'm paying you guys plus freight taxes shipping handling dot dot dot dot dot dot Like I said, you ordered off amazon. Okay. Okay. You get what I'm saying. So, um Listen I think that You know, you did a good job. I don't think you did a bad job. I'm not knocking you I'm happy You know part of going through this stuff is having these kind of experiences. So I'm not, you know in any way Condemning what you did. I learned what you're saying. No, no, I think you did a great job I'm not I think that So, you know, again because a lot of people don't put their self out there at the end of the day Again, like I said, if you could you you could only fulfill the 18 um And you can't fulfill the other 40 of them then um You know, I mean, that's what it is. That's all you could do. You can't But I have I had the p.o. So I got the p.o. I signed the p.o And now 58 For 58. Yeah, so basically now they're I have to contact them today until I mean you can't you can't honor it because um of Let me ask you something. I mean you are they willing to give you something a writing saying acknowledging they made a mistake No Why not if everyone told you this they told you that they're trying to help you out They it's a computer error Are they willing to give it to you in writing so you could go back to the the government and acknowledge that Probably them. I probably could get something from Ingram. Not probably could you hey I would say Kids I would get on the phone my Ingram guy and say hey look, I you know, I can't go back to the government um and good face and state that um You know, this was a this you guys error or I'm it because it's going to appear. There's no I made the error So without anything in writing from you guys, how could I go back to what leverage do I have to go back to them to ask for Because I mean you you're not going to eat it Yeah, so so tell me this though. What what so what should I when I go back to them Will they do they usually re reacons Chancellor P on reissue it or will they just why would they do that? I don't I don't they could possibly want to do what if that was your strategy to bid low To go back and get the contract so you can go back and pump the price up What what is my strategy? What if that was your strategy? Oh, that's not my strategy. No, no, no, but how do they know that? I agree That's the issue people some people have a strategy of going in underbidding the job Just so they can once they win the job they can go back and bump the price up Okay, so so so they won't so you don't think they'll really do it or just cancel it. You think I think that you should get a letter from Ingram Acknowledging the error That you can take back to someone. Um your your point of contact at the government That person has someone to answer to That person has someone to answer to and um Your word means nothing What's in writing is what holds all the weight Okay, so my recommendation is go back to Ingram Um and Dell have someone write you up something if they're even willing to do that which I Uh, you know, I suspect they won't but it's definitely um if if everything that you're saying is true and that they um committed to Providing 58 at this price and at the same time they agree Right now is that they made a mistake and they erred because of the computer glitch whatever the case may be then they should not have uh any reservations about Coming forward in a letter a statement Saying that this is what happened. This would occur um And that we do not hold this particular person responsible Because he provides he was given misinformation and therefore he passed on misinformation and they can they now Um, can no no they cannot or no longer Honor the price that was originally quoted Okay so So if if if for some reason so is there any in the past? Have you ever seen where they've redone the p.o. Or do they just they don't they don't ever do that Okay, so let's look at it from the government standpoint. I'm the government guy You come to me and say you tell me your story. That's the same thing you told me And I go, okay, mr. Siemens not a problem. I said, um I respect that What evidence do I have that they made a mistake? Okay, you know if I am able to get that evidence. Well, you think what can happen from there How about let's get the evidence first Yeah Let's get there for minutes I mean if you if you don't have the evidence You're just telling the story Okay, so what what what's the worst-case scenario that you've seen in the past that if so if I was I mean the worst-case scenario they cancel the contract It's okay What will I just ban the board or anything like that? Something like this?  This is one division within of A whole battalion.  That's my main thing because I still can deliver this I just Yeah, listen, I'm gonna tell you something. I would not tell you to eat that difference There's no way am I good conscious?      I mean, I trust me.  He's you know, but Um, I have been honest and people can only respect me for that You know, whether they like the situation the decision that I made That's a whole another story, but will they say I was dishonest Um and the transaction they can't say that so again, it sounds like to me That um, you know based on what you've told me That again, it was uh, I'm a it was an honest mistake. Could it have been avoided? Absolutely Um, but that comes with experience and you can't gain experience by sitting on the sideline Yeah, okay. So I mean, I I just wanted to make sure my biggest worry was that I was going to get the Bored and stuff like that. Now listen, do you know How many Of these large companies out here screw the government They screw the government and take advantage of the government. They overcharge. What about the people that overcharge medicare or medicate? They still doing business with the government They pay a penalty and they keep going. What about the people that say they're going to hire subcontractors minorities Hub zones and they don't do none of that stuff Again, they pay a penalty and keep going if they even pay a penalty. They say, oh, we're sorry. We made a mistake Like uh, this guy said to me this is like a fart in the wind You like look two years I appreciate you getting on the phone with me, man. I appreciate this.  I mean, I got other contracts pending And so even just just a quick question about the barman if you were at the bar They want me to borrow Well, if you were but is that that only I don't know for for people who do that when they happen I've seen it on the website So one question for you is this but the people the people that you've seen the bar man Let me tell you they really had to screw up bad. Like they I mean they had to do some really intentional bad stuff Okay, like they I mean these people literally they went out into fraud the government Okay, they did like they they were sitting at home or in their office saying We fund a screw the government and they knew it and they did it anyways Yeah, okay, that's the people got the part like so, okay So so that's more of a I was on some criminals I'm also criminal slimy stuff. I'm I'm gonna do it anyways because you know what? It's worth this 10 million dollars and if they catch me whatever I'll do my time That's who gets the bar. Okay. Okay. Okay.  You might cancel contract somebody gonna say hey, don't do business guy look Listen, let me tell you something I've worked with agencies. They changed people 10 times. You know, that the the third person.  It's it's incredible and and you know Um, I hate to say it but it's just true is that Look, some people already forgot the real estate crash Yeah I mean they are they back. Listen people back overpaying for properties to get right now today They forgot the real estate crash. They back to overpaying for properties And you know, throwing their money down a toilet all over again, and then I say, oh my gosh, no one told me But I'm look but hey man, you know, I'm looking to I'm looking to work with you man on some other stuff possibly maybe some uh Some kinds because I don't do construction But I was I was trying I was seeing a lot of good situation ways that people are trying to put me on too But I'm not a construction company, but I want to I'm thinking about subbing out and trying to like the stuff You've been talking about subbing out the people who are no man. Listen. Like I said, hey Again, I invest my time with people who invested me. So again, you know, I tell people I just got a guy signed up for the course three days ago He turned out he worked at Honeywell and Schneider Electric. He was the head of IT division for Europe and Asia And um, within two days, I put him on a conference call with a team to go after a 10 billion dollar contract billion billion yeah Because he had because he had the prerequisites So he had to pedigree with the the big company behind him to be able to do it But he didn't expect that but again, like I said, when I get to know people and they come into my circle Of the people that I interact with then What I'm going to do for you man is I'm going to sign up and get your whole course But I've been watching you on YouTube.  I mean, I've heard of Felicia, you know And people I've never watched any of her videos, but I've heard about her Yeah, so I mean but think about me. We're gonna we're gonna do some business man I appreciate you getting on the call with me because I got a lot. I'm an IT guy. I'm big and IT and are you really? Yeah, so I mean there's a lot of IT stuff out there floating around. I've got a lady right now I'm trying to go to gsa. So, you know, my thing is Sign up for the course and I'll introduce you to the people that's already on gsa 70 schedule The gsa stars to it vehicle. I mean, we've got a dc mastermind What all the people do it they're all the ic space all of Okay, we've got 29 companies that all they do 30 some got 30 employees. Some have 70 employees. Some have 40 employees Um, and I could put you in that circuit like that. Well, I have I have zero employees I'm a monster all by myself. Hey, I'm an IT because basically what I did was I learned everything Necessary to build myself to make it automated to where I can make it happen.  I'm like listen Go out and bring this company to the table.  Then I would trust that you could do be the liaison between the agency And the actual people doing the work so you can oversee that So you're not going to make any money doing it hands on just like what they tell you in the e-myth Revisited book like if you try to be the baker and and run the bakery facility like the story You're not going to make any money. You have to become you have to want to be the person at the top the leader So again, not um all you've got to do like one of my guys in that group I told myself listen go out and get 30 resumes for IT people 30 resumes you don't need to people just go get 30 resumes now what you could do once she has those 30 resumes um The next time someone that I know gets a IT contract and needs to staff the contract I'm going to tell them to call you because you've got 30 people ready to go And you could staff the contract so now you went from Nobody right to to having a 30 person So so basically what I do man. I'm doing I'm doing procurement, you know laptop desktop servers deal equipment I'm a deal federal and deal deal commercial Vendor I'm licensed to authorize on that but I'm also trying to get over into uh I also have staffing companies well, so I'm trying I'm so that's the other part I'm trying to really raise in but I've been trying to go through like MSPs and things like that to become Actual uh work with like, you know tap fin the big ones and stuff like that for major companies But uh, I know there's IT IT contracts and things of any gsa and things like that for staffing. I'm just trying to get So I'm so I'm trying to get get in so I'm just getting into this So I mean I've been doing this about I've had to come about two years I made a little money like joint recruiting and stuff like that Okay, and this I got my first IT contract with marine for so I'm so I'm learning myself I'm going through the fire right now. So I'm learning Listen, listen, listen, there's nothing wrong with that. Like I told you earlier.  I think that what you did was great.  No the insurance company on one of them covered the attorneys for me Okay, they covered the attorney's fees The second one because it was construction. I had a bond They wouldn't let me do it because I had a bond on it that the bond was supposed to cover everything So the insurance company wouldn't cover it was like a one of those clauses in your insurance If you've got a bond the bond takes precedence But the bond a company only wants to settle with the with anyone who's threatening ensues So they could care less about you, but they'll pay all the claims, but then you still have to pay them ultimately Okay, so you still owe them to right so you owe them so whereas insurance Will protect you right and at the end of the day you won't owe anybody any money The bond will just pay everybody out and then send you the bill Okay, so it's it's different in that regard which is why a lot of people don't like The bonding side because even after you've you've made all these money in your life you could go out and get a back project and You know get wiped out Yeah, and it sucks But but again, that's not a hearing over there.  Just just to just relax 997 Okay, i'm gonna do half of one of your laptops But you know, yeah, so i'm you i'm also using the funding company to do it so p. O funding company to pay for everything That's good. So you've learned a lot So yeah, so i'm not i'm not doing everything out of my own pocket. So no, no, that's but that's great That's that's the way it should be Like i said i wouldn't worry about this look go get the letter from angrom um Tell them listen tell them look i don't want no discounts.  Give me something of writing that I could go back into the government and fight with And then that way we could still try and we could still try and keep this contract in place if not The whole thing's gonna be dismantled and we're gonna be starting from day one which again They don't care because you know, they're a billion dollar company Okay, you know, but Let's see if they want to save face. Let's see if they want to be uh, honorable Yeah, you know, I I just feel like they lawyer it up real quick when they when I when they saw what happened They were like, oh, I said, well, uh, we gotta talk to the lawyer, you know We don't see what's going on. I'm like me. I said I said Dude, I said what I said y'all sent me this information. They're like, uh, well, who's sorry? We're sorry about that. They like, you know Send me something in writing that I could take back to the contracting folks and state that this is what happened Maybe they'll take pity on us No guarantees I'll see. Well, that's too. Thank you, man Take care brother I appreciate it. Um, I'll be in touch with you though, man. I'm okay on facebook So I'll get at you man. All right. All right. That works. Take care. Good luck


Hi everyone, Joe for JaspiesCaseBrakes.com coming at you with 2019-2020 Panini Noir Basketball 2 box Random team break number 23, Jordan from a fresh case Right there Yeah, a lot a lot of big hits those sneaker spotlights everyone loves so pretty excellent stuff big Thanks to these folks for getting into the action appreciate the people bought spots straight up Thanks to the people who are a congrats to the people who won spots really appreciate it All 30 teams are in let's roll. Let's rando snake eyes two times easy one and Two mix it up a little bit here. We got Josh down to Nick After two one and two Sixers down to Pacers All right, Josh with the Sixers zoom in with the pistons Kyle with the Mavs Josh with the Rockets and Thunder TJ Leonard with the jazz Alan Agee you got the Cleveland Cavaliers Daria with the Sun's Kyle with the Bulls James with the Nets Sean with the Bucks Eric with the Wizards Kyle with the Kings Alan with the Grizzlies Nick with the Clippers Michael with the Hornets Catherine with the Hawks Derek with the Pelicans Alan with the Trailblazer Yancy with the Heat Michael with the Spurs Alan with the Lakers Sean with the T Wolves Alan with the Celtics Yancy with the Warriors Daria with the Nuggets Knicks for Yancy James with the Magic Sean with the Raptors and Nick Coba with the Indiana Pacers So let's get all this on one page. Let's sort by column B now trade trade trade if you want the trade at your own risk I'm gonna flip screens just for a second. We'll bring it back to that list right here. Let's pop this case open Let's see which two boxes. We're gonna do We're gonna go one two three for the top two boxes and four five six for the bottom two boxes We're gonna select that die right there one two three four five six and it's two We're gonna do the top two boxes right here and these two We will save for next time Whenever that may be tomorrow So we'll put a couple X's right here. We'll put back right here any trades No, no trades TWC trade window close Let's print let's rip Yeah, Derek you got randomized the pelicans Let's see if these two are the right boxes There's the print out hot off the presses. Let's see what's in here folks Now remember the the inner boxes in this noir But are kind of terrible So hopefully there won't be too much of a struggle to slide the cards out of here. It's a design mistake, but Hopefully we'll get that solved Next time this comes out the cards kind of catch on the inside of the box. There we go Kind of catches on the On the inside of the box right here, which is kind of bad So we try to do our best to slide those out right here. Let's get the frame on top We use this blank card right here And the frame is Dirk Nowitzki D-Box right there 20 out of 25 for the Mavs Kyle the Mavs We've got Fred Van Vleet 33 out of 99 for the Raptor Sean Maddock. He's a free agent Sean Maddock. Once again, there's Cam Reddish five out of 99 Hawks Catherine with the Hawks And if you look carefully other different additions to Harry Giles 61 out of 99 Jumbo materials For the Kings that's gonna be for Kyle Doug McDermott to 99 six out of 99 jumbo materials for the Pacers Nicoba jumbo material LeBron James Alan with my Lakers. Thanks LeBron for the championship. I appreciate that 61 out of 99 Out of 98 61 out of 98 That's awesome. This is rate 23 as well Now remember LeBron autographs are exclusive to upper deck So anytime you see a LeBron card or even a better yet a relic These relics carry a little extra weight on the secondary market We got Josh Richardson 41 out of 49 auto noir for the Philadelphia 76ers That will be for Josh We got not love these sneaker spotlight. There's Steven Jackson 12 out of 99 for the Warriors Yancy with Golden State. It's pretty cool. Nice couple more to go. We've got Spotlight signatures the glove Gary Payton 92 out of 99 Seattle supersonic stuff goes to okay. See that'll be for Josh and Thunder and The last one here is Kobe white nice 90 out of 99 Rookie order for Kyle and the Bulls Oh, there you go, Yancy. That was one of Yancy's favorite Warriors back in the day Steven Jackson. There you go, man Now he's part of your collection. All right. Good start. Let's see what we have here in the second box There we go Think that's a base card on the bottom it is once again blank card Miles bridges to 25 for Charlotte Michael Two cards here, there's Jordan pool 87 out of 99 Yancy and the Warriors Got more Warriors more Jordan pool different version 60 out of 99 Bowl Bowl 47 out of 99 Jersey Denver that's gonna be for Dario That Kyle Lowry to 99 Jumbo material and a one-of-one Hassan a white side Nike swoosh Yancy no check that that is Allen with the trailblazers and Portland trailblazers one of one Nike swoosh All aboard the Big Head Express Allen Nice, you know set that maybe snap a picture of that looks pretty nice We got Quinn cook critically acclaimed autograph. He gets a ring to out of 99 That'll be for my Lakers Allen with that one a few more to go There you go Christian Latiner You ask for it. You got it Eric 58 out of 99 and then we've got Nikhil Alexander Walker 38 39 out of 99 going to the Pell's And that'll be for Derek and one more left. Maybe his teammate it is in focus cam reddish 18 out of 99 Atlanta Hawks Catherine with the Hawks and there you go boys and girls Very nice to box break the next two are gonna be in the store on jaspy's case breaks calm Check it out and we'll see you next time for the next one. Bye. Bye. Jaspy's case breaks calm. Bye. Bye


2018 M, and it's been a lot of years since I even thought about that. In 2017, we released the M, and things started to change for us in a pretty positive way. The 2017 was the first time that I kind of took what I learned basically over the course of a year in an actual true CNC, and then applied it to make changes and make something new. Beginning in 2017, six or seven people. We had one real CNC machine and two kind of small, basic hobby CNC machines, you know, that we got from Tormac. But we only had one real CNC machine to actually do production, and that's where the 2017 and 2018 M's came from. So this is pretty exciting here. We are making M stems, but we're making 2018 M stems. We had 1,500 square feet of like shop space, and we had roughly like four machines in it, you know, which occupied like everything. When it came to changing the machining for the 2018 M, what did we really change? Well, the kind of answer didn't change. The tip we added an extra set of grooves around the same spiral, so that was actually one of the simplest things that we could change. Where we spent the most time was in this grip area. So we moved the logo right next to the airport now, instead of on the other end, and we put this nice texture. That's the sound of the texture right now. It's like, you know, it might be nice to have maybe a little grip section here where the logo was last year. So we started with this cool kind of spiral pattern. Then we ended up with actually a straight cut pattern, which is just kind of fun and different. Almost like knurling, but not quite. So gave it a little bit more of a tactile grip than we had on the 2017. And then when it came to the tip, we decided to make it a double triple helix instead of just a triple helix. So there'd be a little bit more of an air path for air to flow between the cap and the tip. Originally kind of engraved kind of an M shape on the back of this one, but this one didn't quite make it into production. We just ended up going a little bit more simplistic. We've changed the design a little bit, and I think made some very nice noticeable improvements. That'll bring some additional value to this product. And at the same time, we didn't have to substantially increase the cycle time because as we continue to learn about our machines and find new and better ways to do things, we're able to make a better quality, more complex, more functional product in about the same time. Just as we were starting to work on the design for the new 2018 M, I was able to successfully sign a lease for the building that we're in now at Gene Street. Moving to this facility and whatnot, it was kind of like the beginning, really. This is our new shop. Just signed the lease, and we started cleaning up and painting the building in January of 2018 and started moving everything over.  That was a pretty big deal for us that day when we literally moved almost our entire business over the course of one day. So the M became a really important part of our company come 2018, and as our first reason and our first trip to go to Europe as a company, we took the M to Spannibus. It was a really exciting moment for us doing demos in Barcelona, showing people the M, doing a few giveaways, and at that point working with what was our largest account in Europe, it was Vapo Shop. They were gracious enough to give us a spot in their booth, and we worked the show and we sold M's, and it was an absolute blast. In general, the response for the 2018 over the 2017 is, oh, the airflow is a little bit easier. Well, that's what we're aiming for when we add another airflow channel. 2019 M happened. I think we started working on that in, it was later than I wanted it to be, but I think it was January of 2019.


But I am behind on a couple of things. Now my semester is really flying as well. And I promised you some practice questions. So by tomorrow morning, I'll have some practice questions for the exam on B-space, promise. I am now starting to get more questions about what will be on the exam in terms of my strategy for what I will cover. I'll address that one more time now. And it's the same as I said in the beginning really with regard to the fact that the most important topics are the ones I cover in the lecture. And the book is most important where it overlaps the subjects in the lecture. But the reading is required. And anything I don't cover in the lecture that's in the book, I expect you to know about it. But it's going to be heavily de-emphasized, if addressed at all, OK? So that's the story I'm sticking to. I'll focus on conceptual understanding. You don't need to memorize species names, dates of so and so's birth, things like that. It's about concepts and it's about understanding. All right. I'm talking about moving into ecosystem ecology today. And then Wednesdays, what's today? I have no idea what today is. Today is Wednesday, right? Friday's lecture will be an extension of this focusing on bigger scales, moving up to the whole global ecosystem. So really, we're going to have an ecosystem ecology one here and an ecosystem ecology two on Friday. And hopefully, you can see how we're working in the framework of the levels of organization concept. But first today, I will want to continue with our look at food webs and finish that material up. Consider the length of food chains within food webs. And the constraints on the lengths of food chains. And then we'll get into ecosystem structure and metabolism. And finish, hopefully, with some discussion of experimental ways to study whole ecosystems in the field. And I won't talk about ecosystem studies in the lab very much, but those are extremely important as well. So I used a different diagram at the end of the last lecture in talking about the Antarctic marine web. And I stressed the importance of krill, these tiny crustaceans, at the base of this web and how they sustain a trophic web of incredible complexity and diversity with some of the largest organisms on Earth occupying this web. It's not only the krill that sustain this ecosystem. The krill have to eat, and they feed on phytoplankton. There are other herbivorous plankton that are also consuming these primary producer phytoplankton along with the krill. And those plankton also feed things like squid and fish. This fish compartment, as you might imagine, it has a bunch of species in it.  There's a penguin, but there are a bunch of kinds of birds in this compartment. So we summarize a community and an ecosystem by compartmentalizing it like this and then linking the compartments with these arrows that represent flows of energy and materials, energy and nutrients, in the form of food. So this is a trophic web, if that is our focus on food. Trophic just really refers, the root refers to nutrients or food or something like that. So you can basically think of it as synonymous with food. It's a trophic web. It's a food web. You can take various perspectives on this web. An ecosystem ecologist will be more focused on the physical and chemical foundations of this system. But a community ecologist or an ecologist emphasizing the biological perspective might focus more on the natural history of the component organisms and their interrelationships in these dynamics. And both perspectives are important. In the history of ecology, they've been somewhat divergent and bridges between the ecosystem ecology component and the community ecology component are very important and still need to be formed in many ways. So we can look at these things as functional groups in terms of their natural history. And I just want to give you one term because it's an important one in community ecology that I haven't mentioned before. And just make sure we haven't missed it. The term guild, you may have heard that word guild outside of science. It's been adopted into ecology from human society, human communities. Guilds in a medieval context are these semi-cooperative groups of workers that focus on a particular craft in common. And they come to terms of relationship that ideally help each individual in their practice of their craft, whether it's whatever that craft may be. It's a guild. And so in ecology, we've borrowed that term and we can define it as a group of species that use a common resource in a similar way. Now, you sometimes see that the definition of the guild would stop here. But this final component in a similar way is really important to the definition of the term. So let's think about that bird compartment in the food web diagram. You're going to have your penguins that aren't flying at all, right? They're just waddling around and diving into the water and swimming after fishes. But then you're going to have a large number of birds aerially foraging and diving for fishes. So you're going to have birds diving from the sky and you're going to have birds on the water surface swimming beneath the water. They're all eating fishes, right? They're all eating fish. Let me say my ichthyology friend tells me I must say fish when I mean a bunch of individual fish, but I must say fishes when I mean multiple species of fish. So I try to follow that so I don't get in trouble with him. A guild, if we define these organisms that occupy these groups as foraging in a similar way, those would be two different guilds, the birds that are diving from the sky versus the birds that are swimming from the surface below water. They're foraging in a different way. And in that sense, occupy different guilds. They're all eating fish, so we can put them all into one ecosystem compartment potentially with one arrow from fish to all those birds. But if we're thinking biologically and about the natural history dynamics of these systems, they belong to separate guilds. And that suggests different relationships among them within each guild. It's a really interesting focus of study. And I'll come back to it a little bit in a later lecture. But I didn't want to leave it out entirely. So when we see a diagram like this, we recognize that there are various ways to look at it and interpret it. Many perspectives on the same system. So let's talk about food chains. And my daughter saw this one this morning and said, oh, it's a big fishy, eating a middle fishy, eating a smaller fishy. And that's exactly what it is. That's the classic, rather toothy fishies, I guess. But that's the classic idea of a food chain.  And often, that's the way it does work with those types of size relationships. But not always. We could think of a group hunting type of fish, piranhas for a very popular example, may school and eat something larger than themselves. So it's not always a simple size relationship like that. But some of the time it is. So these food chains, we need to develop a few new terms. And here is an example of a terrestrial chain and a marine chain. At the base, we have the primary producers. In the terrestrial environment, it's usually plants. And in a marine environment, we speak of the phytoplankton, algae, plants, bacteria, various kinds. These are the autotrophs. I won't go to the board just not to interrupt, but that's A-U-T-O-T-R-O-P-H, autotroph. We said trophic meant nutrient or food. Auto means self. So an autotroph is something that makes food itself. Of course, it's relying on an external energy source in the form of the sun to make its food.  They eat solar energy, if you want. Then we have the organisms that eat them, that eat the autotrophs. And these are all heterotrophs. So hetero meaning other. These things all eat other forms of life. They all need biological forms of energy, biochemicals. And these are synthesized by the autotrophs and then taken in by the heterotrophs. And we have these different levels that form within a community and ecosystem. And they're more or less discreet, these levels. But we can distinguish this first order of consumers, the primary consumers, the herbivores or the zooplankton, depending on which type of ecosystem you're in, and then various carnivores, secondary consumers, tertiary consumers, quaternary consumers, secondary carnivores, tertiary carnivores, if you want. And then sometimes for these topmost carnivores, if they really don't have any consumers themselves, if there's nothing really that eats them, we sometimes talk about apex predators at the apex of this hierarchy or this chain. You know, killer whale. I don't think there are many things that eat an adult killer whale, maybe other killer whales, I don't know. Or a grizzly bear excluding humans. There's not much that kills and eats an adult grizzly bear. But things are not as simple as these chains. If you think about our food web diagram, it's a whole bunch of chains linked together. Thus the web idea, a bunch of chains linked together into a web. But one of the consistent characteristics of food webs is that many organisms are omnivorous or multi-trophic. They eat from not just a single compartment, not just along a single chain.  So a snake may indeed eat a shrew, but it might also occasionally eat insects, like grasshoppers. I'm not sure a rattlesnake could be bothered to eat grasshoppers, but many snakes do. Both mammals and first-order insects. So that's omnivory and that's very characteristic of food webs. So food webs have incredible complexity as a result of this richness of interrelationships. Let's think about causality in food chains and we can distinguish between bottom-up forces and these are forces that act from the autotrophic base or indeed from the energy source itself, like the sun, via perhaps the nutrients and minerals in the ecosystem that the autotrophs themselves are using. And they act up the chain in a bottom-up sense in terms of the cause and effect relationships of these dynamics. Against that we can note top-down dynamics where changes in the populations of these higher-order consumers influence the lower-order consumers and may act all the way to the autotrophic base and indeed to the physical ecosystem. I doubt the activities of these hawks are ever going to influence the sun itself by their dynamics, but they might indeed, in striking ways, influence the chemistry of the soils in these local systems. In those types of top-down dynamics, we sometimes speak of a trophic cascade and these two direction, I mean, of course these types of forces can coexist in the same system. You have bottom-up dynamics and top-down dynamics and ecologists try to tease them apart. In the trophic cascade, something interesting to note about them, trophic cascade working top-down, is that the effects on the subsequent levels are reversed in the influence that they have on population numbers and biomass at those subsequently lower levels. So you might imagine that something that increases the hawk population, like, say, more nesting sites. If more trees are available as a result of people not cutting down the dead old trees but leaving them as a result of some decision to do so, the hawks might have more places to nest in these old snags, these old dead trees, and hawk numbers might increase. But as a result, the rattlesnake numbers will drop because there are more hawks to eat them. And with the drop in rattlesnake numbers, the shrews and field mice go crazy and there are lots of them. And now we have memory of Darwin and Darwin's famous example of the food chain and the sense in which even that chain articulated then had hints of this type of cascading effect of alternating forces along the chain. Here's a really dramatic example based on data from a study in Utah, a rather stunning example. I hope it holds up because it's just in terms of the validity of the data because it's really incredible. I've modified the figures a little bit, but what we're talking about is the fact that in Zion, up until the 1920s, you had lots of mountain lions. With more and more visitors, tourists and human activity in the park, mountain lion numbers dropped. And so here we have two columns that we can look at and we have a series of levels that you can think of in basically in terms of our trophic levels with the physical ecosystem here at the base. And we have two columns, one which shows areas or times in which cougars are common and the other when cougars are rare. So when human visitors in millions per kilometer are high, the cougars are rare. When the cougars are rare, of course, as evidenced here by the amount of scat, the amount of poo of cougars, there's very little cougar poo when the cougars are rare, of course, and there's a lot when they're common. And the deer numbers are high when they're not around, the cougars are not around, because there's nothing eating them and they don't have that check on their population growth. They're lower absent low when the cougars are present. Deer certainly can coexist with cougars, they just exist in lower numbers. Where the deer are numerous, there's very little recruitment of new cottonwood trees, which are a favored plant for these herbivores. And where there's little recruitment of the cottonwoods, there's very high levels of erosion along the banks because these cottonwoods, which are stream loving trees, don't hold the soils together and during high water levels, during storms, there will be runoff of the soils and loss of minerals and nutrients into the waters and they're carried away. Look at the effect that the cougars and perhaps the humans are having on the physical structure of the ecosystem all the way down here at the base. And the consequences are not just those for these organisms, but in an area that has cougars, mountain lions, cougars, pumas, catamounts, American lions, they're all the same name for the same cat, the same kind that was found here in Berkeley. There's a shrine to that mountain lion I just saw and shout at conceder if you want to go leave a memorial or your remembrances, you may, leave a flower. Yeah, same type of cat, this is the cat spread all over this country and indeed into South America, a very widespread cat that goes by many names, mountain lion, pumacan collar. Where they're present and common in Zion now, you get stream systems that look like this as a result of these food web dynamics. And it's not only that you have more cottonwoods, but you have more stream side vegetation, cat tails, rushes, you have more amphibians, frogs and toads that live here. So it affects in a striking way the whole system. If you want, what are the cougars, what role are the cougars playing in this system? They're keystones, certainly they're not common, cougars are never common. As you, these higher levels, along these higher levels as we see, organisms tend to be less and less numerous as you go up levels. And cougars being an apex predator are never common, but look at the cascading effect they have on this whole system, just incredible. Suggesting that they're a keystone species here. Slide I was playing with, I spent a little too much time on. I wanted to think about how many linkages there are in these systems. This is a freshwater ecosystem, it could be in Europe or North America, where the phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton, zooplankton by minnows, the minnows by perch, the perch by pike, and the various larger fish by osprey, say. Think about the number of linkages here. You have your autotrophs, you have your first order, consumers, second order, third order, fourth order. The pike, that's a, pike get very big and they'll eat a perch once they get big enough, but they'll also feed here.  The tiny ones might even eat from this compartment. And that's important to think about. As organisms grow, they shift in their trophic relationships. Think about a crocodile.  But when that crocodile is an adult, it's going to be eating antelope or something like that. So it's going to change in its trophic dynamics as it grows during its lifetime. Heterotroph is just a consumer that relies on other organisms to eat. So it doesn't make its own food. So it relies on pre-synthesized organic compounds. It doesn't synthesize those organic compounds itself. I was told that I missed a couple of hands last lecture that were up and that I just didn't see them, so please wave if a hand does go up. So how many links do we have here? Well, one, two, three, four. Or one, two, three, four, five, maybe? Now that would be four. One, two, three, four. Or if the osprey is so big that it eats a small pike that's eaten a perch, maybe you could add a fifth. But four or five links, that's usually, that's usually all you see in a community, in an ecosystem. Food, these trophic chains tend to be pretty short. You can get exceptional circumstances where you see a couple more, but not too many. Why so short? What limits them? I'll just put a, I'll just focus on one classical hypothesis and in your advanced classes you can learn about other hypotheses for this and the debates about them. But I'll just give you the classic one, sometimes called the energetic hypothesis for what constrains the length of food chains. So food chain length is limited by the inefficiency of energy transfer along the chain. It's a very old idea. It goes back at least to Charles Elton, animal ecologist, Charles Elton. And there's a lot of support for it. So I'm just going to focus on that one for you guys to understand. And I'll start to develop the basis for an understanding of it now. In talking about ecosystem metabolism. So we can take one of our more complex food webs and simplify it further according to the new terms we have. Driven by the sun, most systems, most ecosystems on earth are powered by the sun. There are other ecosystems powered by other energy sources. Someone give me an example of one? Hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean based on some chemical cocktail and heat that's coming from within the earth. Yeah, that's a good example of one. No sun shines in those depths and it's driven by a different source of energy. But we focus on this type because it's by far the most common. So solar energy is what's used by the primary producers in generating their mass. In the process, much is lost to heat, radiated away as heat. And that's not recoverable by the system. That's dissipated by the system and lost. But the mass and the materials synthesized in a compartment like this are recycled in the system through trophic relationships. Much of it going directly to the herbivores. But if not directly eaten by the herbivores, if this tissue dies, it goes into this very large compartment that we call detritus. And the detritus, this is just your hummus layer in a forest or your, yeah, it's a massive component of these systems that in a food web diagram often will just be left out. But this detritus, this detrital base, this base of dead organic matter is itself consumed by a huge number of microorganisms that themselves might be eaten by primary producers. So in a way, a new food chain is starting here in a real way on the basis of dead organic matter, on the basis of detritus. And a zebra that dies from this herbivore compartment would go into this detrital box. Say it was just, it died naturally, it drowned, it would, and was missed by the crocodiles, it would end up in this detrital box. And then maybe the vultures find it. And so the detrital load can enter this system in various ways, it's an extremely important component. So one thing we wanna highlight here is the recycling of matter and the dissipation of energy in the form of heat. Yeah, so if you want to measure, if you want to measure this system and its dynamics, you need, you can choose a currency, you can choose a common currency that works across levels and energy works quite well in calories or jewels, jewels of energy, that could be your currency because all of these things are reducible to the jewels of energy that they hold and can potentially provide. Or you might focus on carbon, some element that forms a basis for the growth and existence of the elements of these boxes. You might use another element, but carbon is so abundant in all organisms and in each of these boxes, calcium might be used in some systems where it's very important. Carbon and energy measured in jewels are often your currencies. So from the sun, contributing this many kilocalories of energy per meter squared per year, less than 1% of it is synthesized by autotrophs. The amount synthesized on land is roughly equal to the amount synthesized in the oceans, even though the oceans occupy more than twice the area on the earth's surface as the land. So your terrestrial environments are more productive per unit area than the oceans, but less than 1% of this energy is being captured. The rest is bouncing around is radiant heat energy. So of that 1% that's captured, fully 55% is respired and lost from the system by the autotrophs. 45% roughly is assimilated and available for along the chain or available for the processes of growth and reproduction of the organism itself, what I just said, huh? And there's your energy that enters the next level, broken down by the amount entering, the grazing component and the amount entering the decomposer component, highlighting what I just suggested about the very great importance of the detrital compartment here, relatively speaking. Yeah, so sorry, but net primary production, we can define your familiar with your gross wages and your net wages if you've had a job. Your gross primary production is the amount is the amount of this energy synthesized by the autotrophs, but the net primary production is that gross amount minus that lost in respiration. So we can distinguish gross and net primary production and now I have to click through my builds and realize that these studies of metabolism go back to the individual organisms. We're summing across individual organisms when we look at these whole system dynamics. So an individual organism like a caterpillar, if it takes in 200 joules of energy in the form of the leafy material that it eats, most of it's going to be lost to e-gestion to just pass through the system and unassimilated. And a bunch more lost to cellular respiration. The chemical energy needed to drive the biology of the organism and only a small components left for growth and reproduction. See these inefficiencies of transfer of energy across into when an organism eats and then when that organism is eaten, how much energy is lost along the chain and someone who wants to use the metaphor of organisms. Organisms are like leaky buckets and I often think of that when I watch my kids eat. It's very dramatic examples of they're leaky buckets. Not only is it in terms of e-gestion but should we just drop stuff? Crumbs get stuck in our flavor savers and it's just an inefficient process. This, I hope I have, yeah. This is what can account for one of the major aspects of the structure of communities in the form of these pyramids and also our energetic hypothesis for why food chain lengths are relatively short. They're short because of the inefficiency of energy transfer. There's not enough energy to sustain the higher and higher trophic levels. There's only so much energy in the system as assimilated by the autotrophs and it's pretty much lost after four or five lengths. That's that classical hypothesis that explains much of these data pretty well. There are alternatives. So one of the things you see in these systems characteristically are these types of pyramids where if you gathered up all the autotrophs and checked how much energy they contained, it would be a small fraction of what was available in the sunlight but as a result of that inefficiency of transfer, you have this rough amount, 10,000 joules say. And then according to these next levels, there are orders of magnitude less, 10-fold decreases in available energy as you move along the system as a result of a roughly 10% efficiency of energy exchange. This gives you a pyramid of productivity, a pyramid of production, but also a pyramid of numbers as measured by numbers of individuals or biomass. Here's a bog system in Florida where there's 809 grams of autotrophic material per square meter, but much less at these higher levels. It's not exactly 10%, but it's certainly the shape of a pyramid, I think. Yeah, well, it's the shape of a hierarchy like that. Yeah, you can see why the pyramid metaphor is used. So your book provides a nice example of one test from Australia of the energetic hypothesis based on a direct manipulation of tree holes. Trees often have holes in them. Those are fully functioning ecosystems in there as a result of the detrital matter that enters. You have food chains that develop in these tree holes of microorganisms and small insects and things, occasionally an amphibian or something like that. So what they did, you can read about the details in the book. I've presented a somewhat different diagram from the one in the book. It's a little richer than the one given in the book in Campbell. This is from Crabbs textbook, textbook by Charles Crabbs. I should give credit there based on this study. So the productivity of these tree holes was manipulated by excluding the amount of litter that could fall into those holes. The natural baseline litter fall is called high here and then it's manipulated to a low point at one one hundredth of the natural level of litter input. Litter just being another term for detritus, right? The number of species, the species richness in the tree holes decreased relative to that amount of material input. And the trophic lengths of the chains, the longest chains or the average number of links in the chains also was seen to go down from somewhere between four and five on average to down to somewhere between one and two with low input. So if you reduce, if you limit the size of that basal compartment, you have this bottom up effect on the structure of the chains and web. No, sorry, the litter's being eaten. The detritus is being consumed by the microorganisms. Just like in that one food web diagram we had where the detrital box was linked to the microorganism box. They're feeding on that dead organic matter and then other organisms feeding on them and other organisms feeding on them. So here's your typical pyramid of biomass. I'll give you this slide and it's an important thing to think about. Won't go into the details here. But note that in some aquatic systems, you can have an inverted pyramid of numbers, biomass here, where your zooplankton, if you gathered up all that zooplankton and weighed it, it would weigh a lot more than your autotrophs if you gathered them all up and weighed them. And isn't that a violation of what I've just been talking about about your pyramid of numbers? This type of inverted system in an aquatic environment. I can let you think about that and this gives you a clue as to why that might exist. So the study of these whole ecosystems, as you might imagine, is really challenging. For one thing, they might exist over huge areas. For another, they involve a huge diversity of organisms, a bunch of different kinds of organisms. We tend to specialize, right? If you're good at bacteria, you might not be good at elephants. There's just not time to be good at all these things. But a community ecologist and an ecosystem ecologist does need to be something of a jack of all trades when it comes to understanding the natural history of organisms. It makes these fields very integrative in that sense because one has to be general in their approach. And hopefully not so diffuse that specific problems can't be addressed. It's a very challenging field of study and it's often whole teams of investigators that are involved. And that's the case in this experimental forest area, very famous in New England, New Hampshire, Northern New Hampshire for its studies of whole ecosystems. You have teams of workers there from several universities that have been studying these things since the 60s where they have pretty much full rein to do their work along with the forestry service. And they can do these massive studies in conjunction with forestry. For example, they can... This area was important in our understanding of acid rain and the effects of clear cutting forests on ecosystem dynamics. What they could do is watch after a clear cut where all the trees are removed from a section and compare that with an area where the vegetation wasn't clear cut completely but selectively logged, where you go in and you take your desirable trees out but you don't just level everything down to the naked ground. And compare that with a water shed, one of these areas of capture of precipitation and water that's distinct from the neighboring system as a result of the geological underpinnings. You can see how this is a cavity in the slope here. This is going to be its own water shed with its own stream system, separate from this system. So you can compare these systems and compare it back to the originally vegetated system. And if you have an apparatus like this at the bottom of the water shed where you can capture all of the water leaving that system as flowing water because they've all run as little creaklets and rivulets into this larger stream that are now exiting the base of the water shed at this point. You can imagine, you can monitor the chemistry, for example, of this water and compare a clear cut water shed to a selectively logged water shed to one that's unmanipulated. And look at the influence very, in a very quantitative way of the influence of these logging practices on water chemistry. Or if you have this apparatus set up and you haven't manipulated this community at all, what about changes in climate patterns or the phenomenon of acid rain? You don't hear that much about it anymore, but it was a big, big deal in the 70s and 80s. Still a big problem where pollution gets into the atmosphere and mixes and is deposited through rainfall into local ecosystems. Those chemicals, those pollutants make their way into the systems and part of the metabolism or at least part of the circulation and the dynamics of exchange in these systems and then they exit the system here. So one can study inputs in the form of the precipitation. At the top of the water shed, you can imagine there would be a collector collecting precipitation to analyze the chemistry of the rainfall. And here we have our collector at the base to analyze the chemistry of the effluent. And then you can study the various components themselves. You can sample from the trees and from the organisms in here and start to study the ecosystem as a whole. All right, I'll let you go.


So today I wanted to talk to you about the five biggest productivity hacks that are apps. These are the main five apps that I use and when I say apps I mean on the computer so they can be Chrome extensions or programs or stuff like that. But basically the programs are apps that I use to help me with my productivity. So number one is one that I've talked about. I think I talked about in my first video ever and it's called Boomerang. Boomerang is an add-on for Gmail and I'm not sure if it works with other emails but either way it works very well for Gmail. And what it allows you to do is first of all to schedule an email for later. So you can write an email now and click send but have it sent later for whatever reason you might have. For me the main reason is when I finish a translation and it's done and ready but I'm still kind of you know I'm always a bit paranoid in case I missed something or something like that. So this gives me time if I have time later on maybe to revisit or look at it. But if I get engrossed in something else and I'm working on something else then I know it'll get sent. I don't have to worry about it. It also has another great feature that lets you send emails again. So what it allows you to do is basically send an email and if the person doesn't respond it'll send the same email two days later four days later whatever you want. I use this for payments. When someone doesn't pay me and I send an email saying you owe me money then it'll automatically if the person doesn't respond it'll send the same email again two days later or four days later or whatever I program into it. So definitely check out Boomerang. It is a great add-on for an email program. Along those lines and just as a quick bonus if you use Gmail then you have access to inbox. It should be there at the bottom right corner somewhere. So definitely click on that. I like the that comes automatically with Gmail I think. Let's you do something that I use a lot which is to basically put an email to sleep. If there's an email in my inbox I don't want to deal with it later but I like having my inbox clear at inbox zero then it'll take the email out of there until a certain time 6 p.m. or tomorrow. I don't have it clearing my inbox until then. And I almost forgot another thing about Boomerang is now they have Respondable. Now I did make another video where I talk about Respondable so I'll just link to it here and won't waste your time talking about it now. So number two is Rescue Time. What it does is once a week it gives you an overview of what you've been doing, what you've been spending your time on, whether it be websites or what programs you've been using. You can give different scores and valuations to various different programs so you can see how productive you've been that week and what you've been wasting too much time on and what you've been good at. And it's a great overview of the week so that you can become more productive in the future and it measures your time and how you've been spending your time because what gets measured gets managed. Self-control. What it does is it basically blocks out certain websites and programs for a certain amount of time. If I know I have to work on a certain translation for the next two hours, three hours, then I'll set up self-control for three hours.  So you can set it up to block whatever you want. So during those two, three hours, during that time block, you can get work done. Number four is Dropbox. Now Dropbox is the one you're most likely to have heard of. I use it most often for backup. If I'm working on a translation, I've been working on it all day but it's not finished yet, then I really get paranoid about just leaving the one and only copy on my desktop. You know, this is my work, this is my livelihood. I keep a folder in Dropbox called work in progress and that's where I put my work in progress, just so I make sure I have another copy. Dropbox is basically that. You can backup whatever you want on your computer. There's a free version. There are other programs as well in addition to Dropbox which are basically online cloud storage programs. I don't, I use Dropbox but you can use anyone you want, see which one works best for you. But you should have some place preferably in the cloud where you can save all your work while you're working on it. And number five, last but not least is Evernote. Evernote is wonderful for everything. Any time I think of something or I have an idea or I remember something to do, I'll write it down on Evernote. Evernote also allows you to save webpages, save pictures and a slew of other things and it's just the easiest place to keep things so you don't have to keep them in your mind. I never trust my mind to hold on to things for too long and so Evernote works that way. If I have something that I can think of or that I see or any other idea or website or whatever that I want to bookmark or save, it goes automatically on Evernote because then I have access to it on my phone, on my laptop and everywhere. It all syncs together and it's the greatest place to just keep track of everything so I don't have to hold it in my mind. And that's it. Those are my five hacks that are apps for productivity. These are the five apps that I use the most and that are most important to me for getting my work done. I might have missed something. If I did, feel free to let me know because I'm always interested in learning about new ways to get stuff done and stuff that can help my work life. Otherwise, I hope you found this useful. If you did, please click like and if you want more advice, more tidbits, more tricks and stuff like that that have to do with freelancing, then click subscribe and there'll be more videos coming. Thanks!


Hello and welcome to Disruptively Useful, the web series I just made up where I try to teach you how to build disruptively useful stuff. Today I'm going to teach you how to 3D print with recycled plastic using a machine I call the trash printer which is operating right here. The neat thing about the trash printer is that it is a 3D printer that prints directly from recycled trash plates instead of filament, processed filament, so you can just shred up any kind of trash. I'm currently using polypropylene which is number five which is one of the most common recyclable plastics and these used to be old test tubes and I have them all shredded up and you just feed them into this hopper here and it's like a little funnel and a auger pushes the material down through a heated tube and this gantry moves it around and makes 3D printed projects. I've been working on this project for a couple of years now and I just made this, this is a 3D printed out of trash mushroom lamp that I'm going to be raffling off to anyone who supports my patreon before the end of the year, my patreon is patreon.com slash disruptively useful, so if you want to win this you can support this work and potentially win a mushroom lamp. Today I'm going to show you how to build the extruder portion of this project. This project is basically has three parts, there's the extruder part and then there's the gantry part which is the robot that moves it around and you can use any, typically this is a machine that's designed for CNC cutting wood, so any large format CNC router that has a couple of inches of z travel can be made to work in this way with this extruder, but not everyone knows how to do that and so I'm going to start by showing you how to build the extruder head which you can use with any CNC printer or a gantry if you know how to do that and then if you don't I'm going to teach you how to build this particular gantry which is called a mostly printable CNC, it's a semi open design by V1 Engineering and it's a really low cost easy to build 3d printable gantry and then in the final version I'm going to show you how to do all the wiring and all of the software to actually get it to print stuff. So today we're just going to focus on building the extruder and the extruder is designed to be low cost and easy to make out of readily available materials or easy to fabricate parts. So the whole design is based around just parts that I could find at a hardware store, I work at a hardware store and stuff that is readily available at Home Depot or ideally a local hardware store means it's accessible to a lot of people and usually for low cost. I actually found this plumbing fitting at a used building material store for one dollar and if you got it new it would be like four or five.  These are an array of pipe fittings that I've used in order to get different nozzle sizes and trying to use very accessible parts. So for example this is a four inch, half inch MPT, four inch long, half inch diameter MPT, plumbing fitting from lows, stainless steel, going to a reducer that goes from half inch to one eighth of an inch MPT to a hose bar that ends up being a quarter inch. And this one is a five inch long brass half inch pipe with a compression adapter that goes from half inch MPT to quarter inch compression with a one inch length of a quarter inch copper tubing. This one is a larger air hose fitting that goes directly from the half inch to a hose bar and this one is actually a pex hydronic heating or water fitting that goes from the pipe to the coupler to this fitting. And so I encourage you to play around with what seems interesting or workable to you. There's a lot of experimentation that can be done here but of course we're just going to focus right now on what I know works and then once you've got that going you can start experimenting from there. Okay so keep going with the parts here. We've got a screw in high temperature thermistor. We have a hot end, an aluminum hot end. This is the same hot end that is used for typical 3D printer nozzles and we just have to modify it slightly for the larger nozzle. This is a 24 volt barrel cartridge heater DC for our typical 3D printer. These are some connectors. Your connectors may change. I'm using Anderson PowerPool connectors but a number of connectors will work. It kind of depends what you have and what you like. So we've got a DC one and an AC one. This is the second thermistor. This is just a simpler one. It doesn't screw in. It just sort of slips in. This is a 300 watt 120 volt about one inch diameter barrel heater. This is a three eighths inch wood auger. Very typical. You can find these at most hardware stores. A 12 millimeter plumb coupler, shaft coupler. And then you'll need a couple of wire knots for your connections. You'll need these laser cut spacers. You can find the files for these on Thingiverse and on Hackaday. And all of these parts are really easy to cut. I cut them with a laser cutter with a glow forge. And these hold the pieces together. So you will need access to a CNC cutter or a laser cutter. You can 3D print these parts, at least the top parts. But these ones are going to be in contact with hot metal. So actually wood is kind of an ideal material because it doesn't get soft and the heater doesn't get so hot that it will melt. So wood is a really good material. You can make one of these with a hole saw and just some woodworking tools. If you don't want to do the laser cut route or you don't have access to a laser cutter, it's just faster. But you can find these files online and use them as a template to use what you have around in order to do that. This is a laser cut adapter that I made. I had a really hard time figuring out how to go from the stepper motor to the shaft coupler to the auger. And so I just laser cut these adapters that go from the 12 millimeter shaft coupler to the correct hex size for the auger. And then I think I did the one thing that I forgot to mention here is this stepper motor. This is a NEMA 23 5-1 planetary geared stepper motor. So it has a gearbox in here that slows it down ups the torque and helps it push the material down. This is sort of the minimum viable powerful motor that I've found that will work. And it's still kind of pushing it. It skips sometimes. I wish it had a little bit more power. But it definitely does work. And so these are about 70 or 80 bucks on Amazon. And this part alone costs about the same as everything else together. So the whole bill of materials here should come in at under $150. And let's get building. Oh, so of course, before you start building, you need to have some tools on hand. It's designed to be built with relatively simple hand tools and power tools. Things people tend to have. But you'll need a hex wrench set, a 1 eighth inch drill bit. This is a, it's the one size up from a quarter inch. I believe this is a 9 30 seconds drill bit, a four millimeter tap, a set of locking pliers for adjustable wrench. This is a nipx adjustable wrench. And this is really nice because you can use it as a vice. I recommend these, but they're kind of expensive. Any vice grip should work. And a ratcheting nut driver with a three eighths inch nut. That's about it. So the first thing you want to do is assemble the bottom assembly. There are two parts of the bottom assembly. This goes from the pipe flange, which will hold the barrel in place to inside of the plumbing fitting. And then there will be two of these bolts that come up through it that will hold the whole thing together. So the first thing you can do is, and I'm actually I'm missing a spacer, so I'm going to step off camera, need this one. So first thing you're going to do is thread the long bolts through each of these holes so that they all stay together. These are the eight inch 420 hex bolts. And then there's this piece, the final piece in the bottom assembly is made with hex shapes cut out in it so they fit these heads just perfectly. And that will space it out so that this can go on top. We only use two bolts for either side and I found that's sufficient. So now once you have these nested in there, you put the pipe flange on top of it. That keeps those from falling out. You take the two inch quarter 20 bolts and you put them into these sort of slightly smaller inner holes. And then again the flange here or the spacer will hold this hex nut in place so you can tighten it from the other side. So you put that down like that and that lets you attach this pipe flange with these quarter 20 wing nuts. And I like those. Doing it this way makes it so that if you ever need to take this off for whatever reason, which let me tell you will happen, it makes it just easier and quicker to do. So now you have this assembly and it's not going anywhere. And you can take one of these assemblies and you can kind of pick which one. I think I'm going to go with this one. Four inch stainless steel half inch amputee barrel. I always I think four which is a little bit on the low end. I would kind of go up to four and a half or five and I'll get to y in a little bit. But you're just going to screw that in there like that. And you don't need to do this any more than with your hands. You don't need to use a tool to tighten this because the plastic is in molten up here so it doesn't really matter. It just needs to be secure enough that it doesn't unscrew. This connection needs to be a little bit more secure. I recommend you use a tool like this to tighten that down. This one's already tightened so I'm not going to do that. So now you have your whole bottom assembly and you can feed that up through into the plumbing fitting. And now you have these bolts coming up and you can get to line up with the top assembly. Top assembly you've got your motor and you've got these ring spacers that will go around the body. This cylindrical shaft of the motor. And then you can use two or three of these. These spacers you can use as many as you need and you can use it to modulate how far the auger is pushing down into the barrel. You really don't want the auger to be going all the way down to where it's getting melted because once the plastic is melted it's a lot more viscous and we'll put a lot more back pressure on the motor. So you really only want the auger to go maybe an inch or so down into the extrusion barrel. It's just to move to catch the material in the hopper and move it down into the barrel so that that material is what creates the forward pressure on the melt zone. So you can use these spacers to modulate how much space there is there. But I use three of them. One is probably the minimum necessary. And then you've got this one that couples to this motor plate here with two four millimeter bolts. Again I'm going to step off camera because I forgot those. Those going here you screw them on to the motor and sort of start them with your fingers and then once they're in there you can screw them down with your hex wrench. I only use two there's holes for four. Two has been fine for me but if you want to use four go for it. All right so now the motor is hooked to these spacers and these will make it so they sit perfectly inside of the plumbing filling. So I've got to make sure these holes line up. There's one. All right so all those holes line up and hopefully you know I always forget this step. So the next step before you connect the top to the bottom you want to put on the auger and so we'll take this plumbing fitting shot coupler and we'll tighten it down onto the shaft of the motor. Again this is a 12 millimeter and if you have any clever ideas of how to do this in a more elegant way I am all ears. This is the best way that I've found so far. So now you've got that shaft coupler on there and you can put these little wooden spacers that fit the plumbing coupler on there. This will sort of work down into the coupler hold it nice and tight and I like to you don't need to do this but if you can get a small magnet I have a small magnet just stick it to the end of the drill bit that will hold it to the metal of the shaft and it just makes it a little bit more less likely to fall into the shaft. Once you have material in it the screw motion will actually push the auger up a little bit so this is really just for setting setting it up but you want to stay in there it should press fit if you have a little magnet it kind of ensures that it will stay in there and so you can then press it into that so now you have your top assembly with the screw all right and if I have done things correctly you should be able to get this to line up with that so now it's mostly connected these laser cut parts make it very easy to do that then you'll take these two these are quarter 20 coupler nuts and not just regular nuts although you probably could use those these ones are nice because they're a little bit thinner and longer so they're easier to get down in here and so you can sort of start on my hand and all these are going to do is keep pressure against it sort of pulls the two plates together so they hit these two flanges on the foaming fitting and that holds the whole thing together and once these are tightened down it will keep the whole thing from rotating or doing anything crazy when the motor is under attention so start those with your hands you want to make sure that the two bolt holes are arrayed in such a way that they're not blocking via the passage of the material through the hopper so you want it to be that way all right and then we'll take the nut driver the three-eighth nut driver set it to tighten and just tighten these down now we're mostly assembled extruder so now we have to do a little bit of work on the wiring and the heater systems this is the part that requires the most fabrication of this build I've tried to make it as easy as possible with readily available parts and using tools that people mostly have access to and but the one thing I haven't been able to get around or design around again if you've got brilliant ideas please jump in but what I do is I take this is an aluminum hot end block and you can get these for very very very little on amazon they're made for typical 3d printers and there's this threaded hole here for the nozzle that's usually where the filament feeds through and then there's this hole here for a barrel heater and so by modifying this I can get one of these to slide over the nozzle this is one that's already assembled and it will slide over around the fitting and then that gives you very precise temperature control right at the tip which is really important for adhesion and good flow and all that good stuff so I'm going to just put this into these grips these are very high pressure reserving grips and I'm going to not do what I said that you should do in your in my documentation which is you should definitely use eye protection but I'm just going to show you and take this and that was with the 930 seconds bit and that just widens the hole in there so it will fit around uh the hole there or the nozzle and then you're going to need to change your bit to the 1 eighth inch bit and then you're going to take the same hot end and you're just going to make a little bit of a hole sometimes there's already an existing hole which you can make an existing hole down into the nozzle hole that's one eighth of an inch so that you can tap it and screw it around the nozzle to secure it in place so finally we're going to take this is a four millimeter tap I think it was like seven dollars at the hardware store and you just put it into that one eighth inch hole that you drove and you screw it in if you get some resistance you pull it back what that will do is tap out the hole with a four millimeter so you can screw in a four millimeter bolt let's see if I can demonstrate four millimeter bolt this quarter inch or nine thirty seconds hole that you drilled out allows it to slip over the quarter inch nozzle and then this four millimeter hole that you drilled allows you to put in a tiny little bolt that you can just screw and tighten with your fingers and that keeps that aluminum hot end in place so what's that in place I'm going to do the rest on this bit not this bit because I think you get the idea so then you can take your 24 volt DC barrel heater you can just slide it in there there will be a bolt here that you're going to want to tighten down you'll get the idea there and then you're going to take your barrel heater and you slide it down you can also if you've already put it on you can slide it up and over and if you're using half inch barrels half inch fittings this will tighten very nicely around that so you want this to be as far down as possible right there towards the nozzle so there's enough space here that this can act as a heat break and then you're going to slide this up around the fitting like that stays in place and then you can take the slide in thermistor and this one mine fits right in here and then you can just screw it down and tighten it so now you've got that going and then this is a screwing thermistor that has a barrel connector or a small screw for it it's made to fit this type of hot end all of these will be pre tapped with these small little ports that you can put this thermistor in whichever one works any of them is fine the one closest to the nozzle is probably best but choose whichever one makes sense so now you've got your tip thermistor your tip heater you can slide this and then this is your sort of bulk heater and your bulk thermistor and slide this over that you can tighten it down and now you've got your final extruder assembly i did this all on this uh barrel and not this barrel because i realized that this is a different nozzle and it's slightly bigger so i wouldn't have to use a slightly bigger drill which i don't want to do right now for time purposes but you get the idea this goes on there and then i just use these wire nuts i'm going to try and do as much of this build with wire nuts as i can uh because they're simple and they're effective but you can just connect the heater with these wire nuts there's that the DC heater already has a fairly long cable that you can also wire nut onto here this is DC but it doesn't matter um what the polarity is because it's just resistance so it doesn't matter which one is black or which one is red you've got your extruder ready to go the one last thing you can do is you can take your bigger drill bit and you can take this PVC fitting you if you drill a hole right here right underneath this line little offset from this circle that lets you get a tool in here and undo the shaft coupler if you ever need to take the whole thing apart it's just a little hole that gives you access to the allen key that's on the shaft coupler that holds the auger in place um and just one final note about the auger i'm using a uh three eighth inch one i believe you can also use a seven sixteenths but you don't want to use a fat like a half inch one or one that fits perfectly in the barrel you want it to be a little smaller than the barrel because if you use one that fits perfectly it looks cool but it has a tendency to sort of catch pieces and bind and so you want one that's a little bit shorter than the barrel because its only job is to move the unmelted material into the barrel not to actually extrude the melted material which takes a lot more force so that's step one part one of this three part series of how to build the trash printer and if you'd like to see more of this you would like to see more useful documentation how to do or build open source things um please do consider supporting me on patreon it's patreon.com slash destructively useful and if you do that before uh new years before the end of the year you will be entered in a raffle to win this nice light up mushroom lamp that's printed out of trash so thank you for watching and i will see you next time


So Variety Listed what they considered to be the 100 greatest films of all time obviously American films You know what was not on the list Not anywhere on the hundred Schindler's list. Oh wow geez the Exorcist Nice one flew over the cuckoo's nest Scarface Rocky Return of the King Which was nominated for 11 Oscars and won all 11 Oscars and last but not least the one that boggles my mind the most Student of the year. What about Jumanji 2? It was on the list. It was on.  It's up Corbin. I'm right. They also picked psycho as the greatest movie of all time Really? Yeah. Yeah, that's their number one. I mean you can list it but like it's definitely in the top 100 But it's nowhere near the greatest film of all time Yikes Yeah, that's where you smoke and crack at variety. I'm Corbin. I'm Rick and subscribe Yeah, if you haven't done that like do it like it share it with the world Listen to us as you go night night Oh Having a moment. Yes today Warming up your hands to touch yourself in another way. Yes. Yes Always do that kids prevents shock factor So our dose of toast Oh, is this what I hope this is what I think it is. Yeah, our dose did he post on it on Instagram? Yeah Okay, so I didn't even look at the other pictures because I saw the first picture and I thought okay shape shifter So this is just a motion. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. This is just a motion poster. Obviously. This is just they just released it But it gave me vibes of when Gary Oldman played Winston Churchill That's exactly what I thought when I saw Pankaj's Instagram, and I was like this man's obviously going for his Oscar, but he's playing Our Dosti of Dost is he's playing say this guy right here. Uh forgive mispronunciation guys But this is him playing Uh How did they Shriya tell Bahari Vajpayee And I thought it said Bansali studio, but it's not Bansali. No, it's not but it's a new film coming out I believe this next year some time And he's playing a real-life character and the reason he's our Dosti of Dost's was because he was the first interview Where we were called Dost by our Dosti of Dost's and it's directed by Ravi Jad Jadhav Comes out December of 2023 December is the actual release date. Yeah. Oh, man. That whole year But this guy was a I believe a politician, but I think people said he's similar to like And I believe it was Prime Minister, right? But he's similar to The like the a tool Oh, yeah, like I think he was either on one part. I don't know which party he was but like you like had no people say he had no haters Every he was beloved by all right Whether that's true or not. That's just what people have told me. I know nothing about the man I'm just excited that bankage is doing a biopic. Yeah, so he gets to fully transform into a different character I'm noticing here. It shows that he his uh birth Was in December. I wonder if that's one of the reasons they're making it a december release to honor the birthday. Maybe maybe Yeah, uh, there's a million reasons why you wait that long to release a film. So that's what he looked like So i'm looking at pictures of the of the man Of a tall a tall, right? Yeah, and forgive mispronunciation. Yeah, uh, I just I just wanted to get a general Look at the man before we see pankaj. Sure because they it's kind of just showing his whole transformation In this little motion poster. So Here we go That barely looks like pankaj. It does. Wonderful. Wonderful works by the makeup. Yeah, wonderful job. That's one of the the prosthetics or I think some of the unsung heroes Of a lot of performances like what obviously that he was a legendary Vfx prosthetics man that did Winston Churchill for yes, gary oldman. He went out of retirement specifically to Work with gary oldman. Yeah, I think of I think you were corral and fox catcher. Oh, yeah Just that that slight transformation is so incredible But he I mean from the pictures. Yeah, he definitely looked a heck of a lot like him And I it's I even though I it'd be cool One of the reasons I'm excited is one to learn a little bit more about a guy that I know zero about yeah and to also see Pankaj in a because I don't You guys can tell me. I don't know if he's played a real person before He did who the reporter with it in the film. He did with uh, um, Rajkumar The uh, not the Rajkumar was the reporter Oh, wait, that wasn't him. That was no was. Yeah, that was no was then you took it sound like con film No, no, no What was the film with Rajkumar and the gay teacher? Uh, that's Manoj. You think that's Manoj by my bad. Yeah, you think you're my bad my bad. Uh Has he ever played well Obviously, we haven't seen everything that Pankaj has done I don't think that his character in newton was real was he I don't know I think it was just based like obviously they were telling like the what really happens, but I don't think it was I don't think it was a specific person. Yeah Because that that's a challenge in it of itself. Oh monumental one Um, because everybody I mean if he's a beloved figure in india Everybody knows might know his mannerisms might know the way he talks Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you're gonna be judged on even more levels than if you're creating your own character Which is why at Kamaskar time almost always The performance that is the portrayal of an actual person from history Typically gets the wins because there's an added level of difficulty in Conveying the person without doing an imitation. It's extraordinarily It's one of the most difficult things to do with the craft is to portray someone who either did exist or does exist and there's Even even someone for example that we don't have Virtually any footage of like an Abraham Lincoln when Daniel Day Lewis did Lincoln Um, there's still a lot of imagery. Yeah of him So I I remember that was the first picture I saw. Yeah, and I thought I don't want to see anymore because I'm sure we're gonna react to something And small makeup will talk about this all the time is the the most Like like a lot of stunt work some of the smaller work just a stair fall or other things Small cuts small markings and the continuity of those things are exceptional So was he similar to apj in terms of like Because the he's the apj is obviously we've seen many videos of him and uh beloved he's a beloved guy right who Literally every time we do videos like he had no haters right a common thing that people say right and so I heard similar things about him But I know zero about him right as well Right, uh, so you guys can tell us like if there's if there's stuff we should react to like if he had speeches or whatever I'd also I'd also love to know if part of the Delay and release is simply the amount of prep time pankaj wanted to Get this ready and be able to dedicate it because he's a very In very high demand. We love to talk to him again. Yeah, love to talk about this And uh the the process it would take to uh portray a real person Um, and I would assume like you said expectations on This would be very very high because this is such a beloved person. Yeah And leading up to it obviously would love to watch some videos about the actual man Yeah, and learn and see how much justice is brought to the telling in the film Yeah, absolutely. So you guys let us know any other information We need to know on this if you are excited if you think his transformation is good It does he look like the man to you, uh, and any other information we need to know down below Josh