Rwy'n cael ei ddweud am yw'r maes o'r maes o'r cyfrwysig, ac mae'r cyfrwysig wedi'u cyfrwysig ar y cyfrwysig o'r cyfrwysig, y dyfodol yn y cyfrwysig, unrhyw yw'r url yn ymdweud arall. Oni'n ymdweud, maes o'r cyfrwysig, ddod o'r rôl yw'r rôl, mae'n amser i'r defcon i'r cyfrwysig, ac mae'n rhaid i'r cyfrwysig o'r cyfrwysig. The then came back to recon village last year to tell people how not to do that because of what he did the first time. Now he's back again. He loves coming back to our village and we're really pleased to have him. Without further ado, I'm going to hand over and enjoy. Perfect, thanks. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody. I just want to say, speaking out of a smaller village, not that it's a small village, but speaking out of a smaller village, it's really intimate, it's really awesome and I like to see my audience. Dw i'n ddweud, mae'n fath i'r gwaith. Yn ddweud, rydw i'n ddweud i'n edrych yn ddweud. Cefnodd yn gwlad mewn Twitter. Mewn gwneud y ddweud, mae'n ddweud. Mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud. A wneud wrth ein ddweud. Yn amddir i'r rhwng ar ddweud, oes ymlaen, o'r rhwng i mi? Mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud. Mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud, mae'r ddiwedd fel i gyfnod y Dragan Mwlawn. Rai, yn ni'n hyn? Rwy'n ni! Dw i'n ddryf yn bwysig o'r cofawr yn Gwyrd. Dwi'n cael bod yn ei ddod i, mae'n ddod! Rhaid i'n ddysgfrifio mewn, yw unrhyw yrhaith a rhai i'r ddryf. Rhaid i'n tellaf. Rhaid i'n 2,600 ddryf, ac mae'n ddysgrifio ar adrwydd Cynchop Lohglu, here in Las Vegas. Rhaid i'n ddysgfrifio mewn, rhaid i'n ddysgfrifio. Rydw i ddim. Yn ymddangosol, yna hynny'n dweud? Rydw i ddim. Rydw i ddim, yn ddweud. Rydw i ddim, yn ymdyn nhw'n ddechrau. Abertyd yw'r O-Synth. Dwi wedi'n gweithio'r defconnors a'r oed? Goed, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r old-timer. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r jokw. Roeddon ni'n gweithio'r egg-timer? Roeddon ni'n gweithio'r egg-timer. Roeddon ni'n gweithio'r awr i'r oed? Mae'r amser yn g늘 popeth o hwnnw... ...fynies o ESME? Rydyn? fo ddiwedd presy wedi bod gentlyn gennym eich grei? Roedd o wneud e Children Begin boarding塊 o ddyn sy'n mynd, enw o'n gwahave... ...odio yn hoffanego iaeth.... ... blaip yn Gaul dow? Mae gelagol iddiwg o'i siarad declined yma. Mae'r hoffaon o'r cymrozge, ychydig ond hyn.  I'm doing this for educational purposes only, right? And here they are actually. So, I ain't no lie anus, that's been a joke for the past couple of years. I am not a lawyer, I am not a stalker. I ain't no lie anus, sounds better that way I guess. So again, I'm not here to make life difficult for anybody. So use whatever you learn today wisely. And of course again, this is for informational purposes only. All right, so some caveats before we get started with the actual meat and potatoes. I went into this research not knowing what I would find. I wasn't like looking for something specific. I just kind of aimed my code cannons at it and I wanted to see what was going to happen. So yeah, there was no particular target. I'm not trying to target anybody specific, no stalking this year. And this is just, there is much more to do in this space. This is just scratching the surface. So hopefully with the help of you guys, we get something done. But after the research, what can I tell you that we can expect here? Well, there is porn, there's porn obviously. There is username enumeration, password enumeration, and we'll get into that a little bit sensitive docs and so on and so forth. And thousands and thousands of various media files. That's kind of the fun one. That's just fun to watch. Okay, so let's define a URL shortener. So a URL shortener, of course, you're taking a very big long descriptive URL and you're shortening it into something that is shareable. So you can share it among, let's say, Twitter or text messages or it's just something very quick and easy, something that's memorable or at least easier to remember. But all it really is is a 301 redirect for your like HTTP codes. These are just a 301 redirect to a different URL. So knowing that, we can follow it back. We can follow it back to where the original link went to. Now I chose as good as my target, that's is.gd, as the URL shortener for a couple of reasons. There's no membership required in order to shorten a URL. There's a consistent slug length. So what I mean by that is a lot of URL shorteners, maybe their slug length varies in size. So you have a URL shortener that only used five characters, maybe some that used eight is good, only uses six. No more, no less. I feel like there's a Monty Python joke in there somewhere. I won't attempt it, but. So a six character slug length, it's always going to be six characters. And so there's also advanced shortening features which makes this easy and low hanging fruit. So things to consider, of course, rate limits. I did check the terms of service for as good. And you can scrape all you want as long as it's only one link per second, per machine. So yes, every hour then you're basically able to scrape 3,600 links and so on and so forth. So what is that, 8,600 per day? Something like that. But yes, 3,600 an hour. So terms of service, of course, if you're going to use is good as a URL shortening service, they have some things that you'd want to mind, of course. No spam, no child pornography, of course, thankfully. No malicious content. So you can't like URL shorten malware if they detect it, they'll disable it, et cetera, et cetera.  All right, the maths, because there's always maths. Now, no, I'm not British, but I do love the area. I've never been there, but maybe I love the culture. So okay, like I said earlier, all of the slugs are six characters in length, which means if you, and they don't use special characters either. So no plus sign, no parentheses, nothing of that nature. So you're looking at capital letters, lower case letters, and then zero through nine as your numbers. So if you take a look at all that, that's 62, that's 62 character possibilities in each space. So 62 to the sixth power, which gives you about 56 billion links, closer to 57 billion links actually. Now no, not all of these URL shortened links are actually being used, and we'll get into that in a second, but this is the entire space. This is exactly what can be shortened. And of course, if you have a lower pronounced, a lower case word, like zero A through Z, zero through nine, it shortens that to about two billion, okay? So we're kind of whittling away of the possibilities, or we're trying to whittle away from population size to a sample size. Now, is good actually has some advanced, advanced URL shortening features, such as lower case word pronounceable. Okay, what exactly does that mean? Lower case word pronounceable is just consonant vowel, constant vowel, constant vowel. It's not actually a word, it's just what they consider word-pronounceable. So ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba sounds like a, a sult that hog for $35 a bit. I wish I could do auctioneering better, but it made the joke better. So the word, so the lower case word pronounceable character set is either you're starting with a vowel or you're starting with a consonant and going from there. Felly mae'n ddweud ar FBABABAA, ac mae'n ddweud, mae'n ddweud ar ysgol yw'r ddweud ar 5-2.3 miliwn gweithio. Mae'r ddweud oedd yn ddweud o'r ddweud. Yn cael ei ddweud? Yn y gweith yw'r ffroed, mae'n gweithio gweithio gweithio'r ddweud yn ddweud a'r ddweud yw'r ddweud. Yn ddweud, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud ar y cyfrwyr i ddweud yno i ddweud a chderwch byddwn i'r munud i dim. Felly, y maen nhw'n gwahor yw cyd-feydd y ffosig hwn. Mae'r ffosig hwn yn garf場id ar hyd i ddim yn ysgrifetau ac phir ydych oedd y brwymedd yn ysgrifennu. Mae'r ffordd gyda'n cyfwyd, ond mae'n meddwl. A'r bwysig heddiw ym neglectau a gwneud ar gyfer y bwysig yw negledd. Yn eu pethon yw'r bwysig, ac mae'n ni hefyd yw ei fod yn ddechrau. Here's an example of the scrape as it's going on, I just took a screenshot. I let this go on for about a month and a half on three computers. Could I have done it quicker? Yes, but it was kind of cool to watch it as it computed.  For a month and a half it was better than watching a screen saver at least. Ac ydyn ni'n rwy'n meddwl ychydig yw'r link ar gyfer y dyfodol, mae'n ddweud y dyfodol newydd, y dyfodol yn ychydig. Llyfrgelladol yn y dyfodol, mae'n gwneud yn y cyfnodol gyda'r ysgol. Mae'r rwy'n meddwl https. ond mae'n dyfodol ymwyng iddynt yn ddweud. Ac mae'n ddweud hynny eich bod hynny. Mae'n ddweud hynny'n cael ei ddweud yw'r wath. So, y bwysigol, y host yw'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod, ychydig yma, y 404 erer. Y ddweud y dyfodol y script, yn ymweld y cyfnod o'r meddwl, a'r cyfrwyr y cwrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yn ymweld y data ac yn ymweld y cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr. A dyna'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr, yw'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr, a'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr. Gall efallai engor' cwrwyr ym un pi或n? G garde y cyfrwyr yw'r cyfrwyr yn ymweld y cyfrwyr o galungu yta o gwmdeudid targaent o santhe o le'i ddweudio. A er ffawr consider yr oly���ол. felly unrheith y gw podsion y ddyneddill hynd da. Yw'r hyn ymweld y cyfrwyr. A dyna'r dod cyfnod o ryf Chrysglwyr. Ond doon, agai ein plryridogi yna'r cyfrwyr, ryf wedi'i ddydd hynod y liian gradually cen y gorydd yn ymweld y cyfrwyrnu, fath o phrygu, oes o ddylch arwain o'r 228000 linklawn ar gael erbyn, a os yr oedd gael 9, nifer 10%. A o'r unrhyw un pwyddaeth 1,3 miliwn linklawns o'r enhyrchar o'r LinkedIn— o pob o ddyn na, ddyn, maen nhw'n bod yn fudda'r cwesti arenol. Ar ychydig, oed yn ôl o'r 0,01% gael yr ondyn, oes yma yn ymgheithio sefydliad bell ymlaeth. Ac wnaeth angen i'w ddyn ni'n credu wedi bod ni'n iawn o'r dweud Let's look a little bit at the data, which I'm sure is is the interesting part, right? So what you're seeing here on the absolute right side, the white text is the entire count for how many of particular links were there. So what I mean by that is at the very top you see 141,444. Those are 141,444 unique links that are referenced in this scrape. At the very bottom you're going to see one link, but that's referenced 66,000 times. So maybe that's an interesting point of data to take a look at. And it actually is. We'll get into that in just a second. And it varies from the top all the way down. So you have two links that are 35,000, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how that data goes. I tried to graph it. Didn't work so well. Got to work on that. Now here's our media analysis on the stuff that we've scraped. So we have JPEG, APKs, ZIPs, MP3s, C, that's C source code, PNG files, PDFs, EXEs. We found a lot of stuff here. When I say we, I mean me and the voices in my head. But yeah, so this is like a media analysis of exactly what we found. Again, the text on the right side is the actual data counts. Now again, I've only used native Linux tools. So we're talking like cut, sort, unique, stuff that you'd normally find on a Linux computer or a Unix. Now what we can do though with this data, because I've saved it into a text file. So every URL that was resolvable, I saved into its own URL or sorry, its own text file. So now we can make that searchable. Now what do we search for? We can search for keywords like username equals, password equals, invoice. And you'll, you'll find exactly what you're looking for really. So, and also of course at the very end of the file you can search for Excel type of file endings.doc. You can find anything specific that you're looking for as far as like, you know, the PDF file format, those types of file format. And there's the screenshot of, this is an invoice from February 12th, 2018. Of course the username, the email was kind of blocked, kind of blocked out, at least you know it's from Gmail. But they did, that did have an address along with first and last name. So it's a good starting point. Now what does this actually infer for us? Like what does it, what does this tell us? Okay, well is there stalking potential? Probably of course. We're, we could potentially uncover people of interest. And I could talk about that in just a second with that screenshot at the bottom. And of course the link on the right side is why was this particular address or block reference 46 unique times? Now, do we remember that one link that was referenced 65,000 times earlier? That's the map, that's the map address that was linked 65,000 times. Now why? Well it's not a particular house, I've already checked, it's not one house, it's actually that block. So why would that particular block be referenced so many times? Now we could explain it away such as like a realtor using is good or it could be something else. It's just very interesting to see that kind of data there. But let's talk a little bit about the person of interest on the bottom. First name is Natasha, last name of course blocked out but it's referenced five unique times and that's because it's five unique Natashas with that same last name. Is this a person of interest? Who is this? Is this a celebrity? Is this an unwanted celebrity or somebody who doesn't actually want to be in the space? This is the stuff that I found kind of just as I was going through the data. This is the interesting part, it's almost like ocent by accident, right? I'm not exactly looking for somebody specific but there it is, right? So this is just some of the interesting data points that I found. So what are the next steps in what we're doing here or what I'm doing here? When I say we, now I'm including everybody here. We could scrape the entire character set of is good. We can also scrape, we can apply this methodology to other URL shortners such as Tiny URL, Bitly, you know, all these other things. The only thing that I would say is these other services use memberships or they ask you to kind of sign up and so I didn't get to see exactly as far as do you have to use their API? Could you just use other means, et cetera, et cetera? But that's something that I'd like to explore. So any questions on this so far? Goddamn, that was quick. Yes, question on the map data? Map data specifically? Yes, there's actually a lot of map data, like incredible amounts of map data. So is good, well specifically is good, is used for a lot of map references. There was a lot of one offs though. So it's just one link that referenced an address. But to answer that question, yes, they were pointing to houses, houses that you can easily then pivot to like an assessor's office search to see first and last name of that address and so we can go from there. Now I didn't go down that rabbit hole, but I see that there's that potential there. Also, kind of funny thing here.  Also another piece of interesting data. There was about 388 references to porn, that's like X Hamster, XXX, X and XX, Pornhub, and that's just because I searched it not because I was told to. So there's that, I mean there's a treasure trove of information here. The most interesting thing I found though actually, I thought I had a better screenshot of it, was the invoices. So the invoices that I saw there, you had first and last name, you had how much they paid for said service, you had their email address and you had pretty much every piece of information you would need to maybe start some sort of campaign against that particular person. But again, the problem is not the problem, but the issue here is that I wasn't targeting anybody specific. So it kind of just, this is kind of just information that I happened upon. So take that as you will, but that is there. So yes. Yes, I found it once, absolutely. So I found it once by accident. I found a password reset link and I was trying to find it again, but it seemed like it was going to work.  I'm sorry for the people who are watching on TV. The question was, did you ever see a URL that was posted to a password reset link or something that logged you directly into an account? And the answer is yes, that was there. Not directly to the account per se, but to a password reset for that account. That's something that I found one time going through and I know I can find it again. I just haven't yet, but it is there. So another question. Oh yes, Mr Muffins. Oh, absolutely. Well, so actually in the URL shortening service, in Isgood's terms of service, they warn you, they tell you straight up, look, this is going to be public information. They tell you, do not share your personal information, do not share anything of that nature. Obviously we all read the terms of service. So Isgood already knows that that's an issue, but it is there. It's in the terms of service saying don't do that, it's still being done. Also, one thing that I didn't include on the slides here, but I wrote an image loader. So what I did was I took all the URLs that had JPEG, PNG, all these different types of media files, and if you run it, it'll load a new picture every second. Some of the images are not safe for work.  Just, you've been warned. All right. I love answering questions so we can keep going with this. Mr Muffins. Yes, absolutely. I just made it public a couple of minutes before the talk. So if you want to take pictures there, there you go. That's the URL for GitHub. And my other stuff. In fact, I'm starting a new campaign, a new Twitter campaign. Hashtag roast my code. Go ahead and do that, please. I sincerely mean it because I'm not a coder by profession. I just kind of throw code together and see if it works. So please, hashtag roast my code. Questions? Final size as far as link count, or? Yes, I do. So this is funny. So when I generated the links, I actually generated 56 billion links. And just that text file alone was about 15 gigs of just six characters every line. And that was the entire space. So I was like, ah, that's a lot. So I cut it down to the 2.3 million. And as far as size, again, earlier we had a statistic about only 228,000 links. We're actually resolvable or we're resolved. And so I did save that data. And so actually, thank you for this. But another interesting piece of information here with OSINT is we can see which companies are using these URL shorteners. Because I did see a lot of URL shorteners or URLs shortened from the same company. For instance, postimg.cc, as an example. They use it to show video games that they have for sale on their website, as a shortened URL. So that was an interesting piece of information. Mr Code. So it spits back the unshortened URL and then I would go in and just categorize the data by what it found. It was just checking where it left. Yes, so it was only checking the headers to answer that question. So yes, I didn't download all the information. I just saw where it went to. And then it was up to me to take a look at that data and then look at that. But I know the cool thing about this, too, is that I found a whole bunch of PDFs. So if you guys want to play slide karaoke later, I have a whole bunch now. Or at least I can get them pretty quickly. All right, let's keep going. Questions? Yeah, we can keep going. Yes, over there. This is another. Thank you guys. I love this discussion. So the ransomware, again, if is good, actually detects on their end that a link is malicious, they'll block it. And so when I go to the URL, it has this big warning, warning malicious, malicious. And so I didn't actually see that. By the way, all this was resolved in a VM, so I was okay with going to these URLs. But yes, by the time I got to it, it's not like I was downloading ransomware or malware or anything of the sort, including viruses and whatnot. So I hope that answers your question. So I wanted to say something off that point, but the whiskey made me forget. Question? Not that I've seen, but I didn't go through every single link. This information will be available to you upon request, actually. So the code is there for you. But if you want to talk, we could talk further about exactly what I found with specifics. I'm not trying to burn any sources here or whatnot. So yes. Any further questions? All right. So if there are any further questions, I will be down at the heart bar for however long you guys want to talk to me. I like to talk to people. That's my favorite part of the conference. So if you want to keep continuing this conversation, we definitely can. And I'll get off stage now. Thank you.


Recently, I did a video where I ranked various telling window managers that I have used in the past and I did a tier list ranking of like 11 telling window managers and that was a really fun video. That was the very first video I had ever done in that tier list format. So today I thought I would do another one. This time I'm going to do a tier list ranking of text editors. I have 14 text editors that I've used enough that I feel comfortable that I can break them down into appropriate tiers. So let's get started. So let me switch over to my desktop and once again, I'm just going to do this using GIMP because GIMP of course is free and open source software and I've already got my tier list image that I created the other day for the Tiling Window Manager list. We're just going to use that exact same tier list. So we're going to have five categories, great, good, okay, meh and yuck.  I'm going to create a list of the text editors here and let's pick a different color. Let's go with white for the text and let me paste those there. Oh, that's a really big text. Let me make that quite a bit smaller. So these are the text editors I'm going to be ranking.  And of course I picked these 14 text editors because I've actually used these. I know these well enough that I feel like I can rank them. Of course, there's many text editors out there. There's a hundred of them, right? And I haven't used many of them or if I have used them, I haven't used them enough to where I would feel comfortable giving them a ranking. But I feel pretty good with these. So let's start in alphabetical order here with Adam. Let me go ahead and create a new layer here in YMP. And what layer is Adam going to go in? I have to put it in this Yuck category here. So let's go ahead and add Adam to this category. Let me make the text a little bigger here so you guys can see that. So why is Adam going in the Yuck category? Well, for me, it is here for one reason. Mainly, it is an electron app and it is very, very slow and buggy. When you launch Adam, it can take forever and a day for the program to actually open. I'm talking about 30 seconds to a minute and, you know, that's just not acceptable for people that use text editors all the time, you know, just having to wait a minute every time you want to open a text editor that that's just not going to fly, right? The fact that that it's an electron app is an issue when, especially being a text editor, why does it need to be an electron app? I know a lot of people write these things in electron because cross platform compatibility, it makes writing your application for Windows, Mac, and Linux all three platforms easier. But at the same time, you do sacrifice a lot when you create these applications using electron. So for me, Adam is mainly in the Yuck category because of speed and performance and stability, right? As long as it's as slow and unstable as it currently is, it has no choice but to be in the Yuck category. Moving on to the next editor, we have Ed or Ed and we're just going to stay in this Yuck category because Ed has to be in the Yuck category because for those of you not familiar with this text editor, because most people probably aren't familiar with it, Ed was a text editor that was created back in the 1960s and computing was very different back in the 1960s. Many computers didn't even have displays, you didn't have monitors hooked up. You typically didn't edit text, you know, the way you do it now where you edit an entire file, Ed is really a line editor where you feed a line of text into Ed and then do whatever editing you need to do and then Ed back in the 1960s would actually print out those changes for you. It was really designed for a completely different era of computing. Ed is simply not appropriate for modern text editing. Can you do it? Yes. I know enough about Ed to where if I had to use it for simple editing of config files, I can do it. It is not a fun experience.  You're not going to write your next novel using Ed. You just wouldn't do it. It would be extremely painful. You'd probably end up having like a whole lot of stomach ulcers by the time you get done with a project like that using the Ed editor. And the next editor we're going to rank is Emacs. So let me create a new layer. I wonder where Emacs is going to go. I'm going to put Emacs in the great layer because that really is the only appropriate place to put it because Emacs pretty much can do anything. When you talk about flexibility, customization, extensibility, Emacs literally can be anything. Whatever you can imagine, Emacs can make it happen. And in terms of extensibility, Emacs is really unrivaled with anything else in this list because of the nature of Emacs. Emacs is an eLisp interpreter, Emacs Lisp interpreter. And because it's the interpreter of its own programming language and that everything is written in that language, it makes it a very unique situation where pretty much any piece of code you write using Emacs Lisp, that particular language, well, Emacs can interpret it for you, right? So you can write your command line programs and GUI programs or whatever. You can write these Emacs specific programs and it just, it offers you a level of power that you just won't, you won't find that anywhere else. One cool thing about Emacs is you have the traditional Emacs key bindings, you know, the key chords, which usually involve the control key, you know, control X, control S, and yada, yada, yada. Then you also have evil mode in Emacs, so you can actually get Vim like key bindings. If you prefer that, and that's what I use, you can use traditional like CUA bindings. You can do even cocoon like bindings, I'm sure. There's probably ed emulation layers for Emacs if you wanted to do things the ed way. Emacs is, again, it's got so much to it that I've done plenty of videos about Emacs. I won't spend too much more time on that. The next text editor we should talk about is Genie. Now which layer is Genie gonna go in? Well, let me create a new layer, because I'm going to go ahead and put Genie in the good layer. And why is Genie going in the good layer? Because Genie is a very easy to get into IDE. It's a little more than a text editor that's got some extensions to it. It even has a nice Vim emulation plugin that you can activate if you prefer Vim key bindings. It has a syntax highlighting and line numbers and a lot of things that you would expect in modern text editors. But Genie is also very new user-friendly, right? Because it's got traditional toolbars and menu systems, and anybody on day one can figure out exactly how to use Genie. You can figure out pretty much everything there is to know about it, and it's just a fantastic program. And the next editor in our list is gEdit. Let me go ahead and create a new layer for gEdit, because this is going to be the first text editor that I place in the meh category. So why is gEdit just meh? Well, it's a very, very plain basic text editor. It has some extensions available, but there's not a lot of extensions out there, right? It doesn't have the same kind of extensibility. It doesn't have the same kind of extension ecosystem that things like Emacs and the various flavors of Vim, it's not going to have that kind of thing going on. If you're used to really plain vanilla things like Windows Notepad, for example, it's just a text editor and not much else. All it's designed to do is to give you a way to edit some plain text. gEdit is okay, but once you demand more out of your text editor, you're going to want something better than gEdit. Next up, we have gVim. Now there are three or four different vi slash vim related programs here. gVim is the first one we get to alphabetically, and it is by far the worst one. So gVim really, I have no choice but to put it down here with Adam and Ed. So the reason gVim goes in the yuck category is because unlike Emacs, which has the GUI version, which most people use the GUI Emacs, Emacs can also be run in a terminal if you need to. You know, if you don't have a graphical environment available to you, then you'd have to run Emacs, you know, at a TTY, for example, where vim is the opposite. Vim is really designed to be run in the terminal, but there is a GUI version that they also develop called gVim. But unlike Emacs, where everybody uses the GUI version because it's fantastic, you know, with the variable fonts, font rendering looks really good. You know, of course, you can display images and stuff like that because it's a graphical program. gVim, it's just really bad. It doesn't look good. Nothing looks good in it, images and variable text and all of that. And it's really kind of a gimp version of vim. It is, it's so bad. Like you never meet a vim user when you ask them, you know, what vim they use, whether it be vim or neo-vim or vim emulation and something like Emacs or Genie, you never meet a vim user and they say, well, I use gvim. Like, that would be the last thing you would expect a vim user to actually be using because, again, it's just, it's not good. And I think part of the reason it's not good is because the same people that develop gvim or the people that develop proper vim, and of course, they don't probably spend any time at all on gvim. It seems like it's more of an afterthought. Next up in the list is cacoon. Now, let me go ahead and create a new layer because this is going to be the first editor that I'm going to place in the okay layer. Now, cacoon is very similar, actually, to vim. Vim and cacoon share a lot of similarities. The one thing I will say about cacoon, the key bindings are slightly different than vim. Things are in a little different order as far as the key bindings, which makes switching between vim and cacoon kind of tough. So if you're going to learn cacoon, learn cacoon. If you're going to learn vim, learn vim, it is kind of hard to go between the two different editors because it gets really confusing. But in many ways, a lot of the really great things that vim gets right, cacoon also gets right. It's only going to be in the okay category, mainly because cacoon lacks a lot of users. And because of that, it also lacks a lot of the plug-ins that things like vim and emacs would have, where you can literally go find thousands and thousands of plug-ins and extensions for some of these other editors. Cacoon is kind of lacking in that department. But just the base cacoon package, even without really extending it or customizing it or configing it in any way, cacoon is a very capable editor. And I would be happy using it full-time if I needed to. Next up on the list is Kate. And Kate is going to go down here in the meh category, right alongside gedit. And the reason it's going to go in the category down here with gedit in the meh category is a lot of the same reasons why I put gedit there. Kate is kind of just another text editor. It really doesn't do anything special. It's kind of plain, limiting, has some extensions, kind of like gedit. You can extend it in some ways, but not the kind of ways that you can, some of the other editors on this list. And for that, Kate and gedit, they're just another text editor, right? They're really not much else to say about those particular editors. Next up on the list is micro, which is another terminal-based text editor. And micro has to go in the good category. It's not going to go into the great category because micro is still kind of your typical plain text editor. You know, it doesn't have the same kind of really cool fancy key bindings and macros and command modes and things that things like Vim and Catcun and Emacs have. Micro is a much more simplistic text editor, but it does come with some extensions as far as syntax highlighting and line numbering. Think of micro as nano, except nano, if it was actually designed to be good. Micro is nano on steroids. And if you're currently a nano user, I strongly urge you, for some reason, you need a terminal text editor and for whatever reason you've been avoiding Vim. I think you should learn Vim. But if you're a nano user, definitely check out micro because I think you're going to be amazed at what you can do with micro. I've done a video on micro in the past. Check out that video. Next up on the list is what we were just talking about. Nano, and I've already told you, it's not as good as micro, but how much worse is it than micro? I would say quite a bit worse. I think nano has to go in the Mac category. Much like G-Edit, much like Kate. Nano, it's just a text editor. Not much else to it. There's really not much to say. Yes, it has a few extensions, kind of like G-Edit and Kate. It's not extensible to the same degree as most of the other editors on the list. So it's just math. What really hurts nano, in my opinion, too, is the key bindings that are there for nano. The key bindings don't make any real sense. I've never liked the key bindings.  Now, luckily, nano gives you a cheat sheet at the bottom of the screen to tell you what some of the important key bindings are. But they're not like key bindings you've ever used in any other text editor or any other program period, right? So mentally, you're gonna struggle learning those nano key bindings. And honestly, if you're going to learn key bindings, you probably should just learn a better text editor than nano. Next up is NeoVeam. Now, NeoVeam is basically a modern version of Veam. Not that regular Veam is still being developed and probably most Veam users actually do use regular Veam. NeoVeam is a modern fork of it that is designed really to, I guess, be an improvement on Veam because instead of using Veam script, which is the scripting language that Veam invented for you to write plugins in and extend Veam, NeoVeam chooses to be extensible with the Lua programming language. So you get a proper programming language that you can actually use to extend NeoVeam. But honestly, NeoVeam and Veam, other than the different languages as far as what you're writing your plugins in, they're essentially the same editor. There's not enough difference between NeoVeam and Veam for me to really talk about them in a different way.  NeoVeam and Veam both belong up here in the great category right alongside Emacs. I think that's the most appropriate place. And what makes Emacs, NeoVeam and Veam in the great category all three because they all have the same qualities is the fact that you have these fantastic key bindings that you can move around a document very, very quickly with their key bindings, the fact that you have macros available, which makes manipulating really complicated things with the text. Like if you wanna every third line do this, you can actually set a macro to do that. You have command mode where you can run certain terminal commands, for example, and get the output placed inside your document, yada, yada, yada. They're really fascinating features to all three of those in the great tier. That is why they're there. Now, moving on, we have Notepad QQ. Where is Notepad QQ gonna go? I'm gonna put Notepad QQ, and that's my surprise, some people. I'm gonna put that all the way up in the good category. Now, Notepad QQ is interesting because it is another very plain text editor. There's not a lot to it. It's not extensible, you know, which I know I docked a lot of these down here for not being extensible. But what makes Notepad QQ kinda interesting is some of the features it does have. It has this really neat feature where when you have various tabs open in Notepad QQ because you can work with tabs, meaning you have different files open. They're all tabs. But say I've got like 15 different tabs for 15 different documents that I'm editing and I just closed Notepad QQ, I don't save anything, right? Well, you don't get a warning or anything.  No, Notepad QQ doesn't care. You know why it doesn't care? It's because when you open up Notepad QQ the next time, it still has those documents with all the changes there, even though you never really saved them, it still has how they were when you last edited them. That's a really neat feature. Really for that feature alone, I can understand why a lot of people love this particular program. A lot of people also with Notepad QQ, the reason they use it, it's only got one D in that dummy. The reason a lot of people use Notepad QQ is essentially it is our Linux fork for Notepad Plus Plus because Notepad Plus Plus is a Windows-only program. So someone wrote Notepad QQ for Linux and in many ways it mimics Notepad Plus Plus pretty faithfully. And we're nearing the end of the list. All we have left is Vi and Vim. Vim I've already placed. Vi will be the last one. Where does Vi go? And for me, Vi kinda has to go in the okay tier here. So, let's see. Vi, you know, that's the old OG editor, right? It's almost as old as Ed. Ed came out in the late 60s. I wanna say 68, 69 Vi came out in the very early 1970s. So again, very ancient text editor. So Vi is actually designed to be a proper text editor where again, Ed is designed to be strictly a line editor. So Vi you can actually use. Now the reason I dock it and say it's just an okay editor is because Vi does not have the same kind of features that proper Vim has, right? Because Vim remember actually stands for Vi Improved, right? It's a better Vi. So if you're gonna use Vi really just use Vim or Neo Vim if you prefer if you wanna, you know, config using the Lua language or Evil Mode and Emacs, right? That's all much better options than Vi. Vi typically is not something people choose to use. Vi typically is the editor you use on Unix-like operating systems when it's the only editor there. Which is often the case. You will often remote into a server and when you get there, the only system text editor that's actually installed is Vi because Vi is almost always installed on a Unix-like operating system. So if it's there, if it's the only thing available, I'll use it. Do I like it? No, I would much prefer if Vim was installed out of the box on servers but most distributions don't do this. I know for example, the Boontoo server, they don't install Vim out of the box. I believe Vi, Vi might be there. I know Nano is there, but Nano, Nano's even worse than Vi in my opinion. But yeah, again, these are more of like emergency editors. Like if you have to use them, it's a good idea to know how to use them but you know, the great tier, right? These are the editors you actually go and install if you can, right? Now just briefly, because I know I'm gonna get some comments in the comments section below and why I chose these particular editors and why there's some notable exceptions missing from the text editor list here. It's because I don't know enough about these to comment on them. So I know people are gonna ask me specifically about Sublime Text, the IntelliJ Editors and VS Code. Well, let's start with Sublime Text and all of the IntelliJ stuff. All of that stuff is proprietary software. I use free and open source software. Everything here is free and open source software. That's what I try to stick to in my personal use and it's what I try to promote on this channel. Sublime Text, I know has millions of users out there and I know Sublime Text is probably a fantastic product. It is proprietary software. Therefore, I've never used it. I don't know anything about it. I don't plan on ever using it. Now VS Code is a Microsoft product and in its early days it was proprietary. Now it is actually open source software but the proper VS Code that Microsoft distributes the binaries that they distribute from their website are actually licensed under a proprietary license rather than free and open source licensing. Also, proper VS Code has some telemetry which may or may not be an issue for you. For me, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. I know it's a big deal for a lot of people but there is a fork of VS Code called VS Codeium which removes the Microsoft telemetry and it's actually proper free and open source software. I would have no problem actually using VS Code or one of the free forks like VS Codeium but I never have and having never actually used it, obviously I can't give yet a proper ranking on this list. So this is my ranking here of these 14 text editors that I've used enough that I feel pretty confident that I can give them a fair ranking although I know many people are gonna disagree with my rankings in the comments below and that's fine if you got some thoughts or if you wanna share your rankings on your favorite text editors, share it with us in the comments below. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe James, Matt, Maxim, Michael, Paul, Wes, Wanya Ball, Homie, Alan, Armored, Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, Dylan, Marstrom, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Maduro, Polytech, Realiteats, Perlust, Red Prophet, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want more videos about free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. I really trolled you guys with that thumbnail.


In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. No-Till and Prime Spur, where did that come from? It's not no secret code or anything like that. As I talk today, maybe you will come up with what I'm trying to say. And if not, I'll tell you at the end. It's no big secret or anything. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about putting spurs on your tennis shoes or anything like that. And I'm not going to talk about seeing the foot doctor because he had some type of problem that way. But anyway, Dr. Ward kind of hinted at it a little bit in one of his slides there. So we'll get on with this and go forward. But why do we do tillage? Do we think about that at all? What's the reason? And is it sort of a purpose? You know, just make us feel better? You know, I was raised on a farm in Eastern Minnehaw County. The family's been there over 100 years and much like most of you in the room. And I sat in that tractor seat and dropped that jizzleplot on the ground and felt the power of the tractor. And you know, there's a lure to it, isn't there? But I think we really have to question this and why we're doing this. Is it really to prepare to see that? You know, is that why we're doing it? And so I'm going to talk about that. And maybe it needs to make us feel better as I just talked. And but really, why do we loosen the soil up just to pack it back down to make a firm place to place our seed? Does that make sense?  And so I'm just going to present some of these things to provoke some thinking and some thoughts and why we do things. So I really think it's because Dr. Ward said it himself. I think what we're using is we're reacting to that. And I got just two examples here. I tried to be not be colorblind. I got a green and a red up there. And it just really has a lot to do with the type of equipment we've been we have available to us really, isn't it? We loosen it up so these two things right here can pack it back down. Isn't that right? And so, you know, the system we have is powerful. Our ag machine we have in the United States is paramount. I mean, it's a powerful thing. And, you know, we're not criticizing it in any way, but we have to think about the system and why we do these things. So next slide, you know, do we really need all this stuff? And it just seems in my history of being on the farm in the late 70s and early 80s and the size of equipment. Of course, farms are getting bigger. I realize that too, but it seems to me that the bigger our combines and our grain cards, the bigger we've had to make this stuff. Okay, and these things here.  And I think the presenters today are going in a way or are leading us to topics and things to think about that that are leading us to think away from these things. And so, and then I put this up here, it's kind of a controversial issue now. And I remember the days where we talked about zone tillage, you know, a very popular topic for many meetings and did some research on it.  And now we have the exact opposite, don't we, a lot less. And really isn't it pointing to what we're really all talking about today? Reducing tillage and going to no-till. The switch gears is a little bit something that I've noticed in the last three or four years, all the bailing that's going on.  I can't fault the livestock producer that has to provide for animals. That's totally understandable, and I get that. But I do see a lot of semi-trucks going down the interstate at 75 miles an hour going full of bails. And then they're going somewhere. And so, what are we doing when we're doing this? And I've got some statistics here. Dr. Jansen at SDSU reported that residue bailing has increased from about 16% in 2007 to around 50% in 2010. Now, do we have any more cows or livestock to date than we did back then? And so, we get calls, what's the value of our crop residue? We can measure the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and the sulfur and all the other nutrients in it. We can kind of come up with a number and give you a value. We want to put a dollar value on it. But it's really worth more than that. And I think you're hearing that today. Just to show you the value of organic matter in the soil, it was part of a study back in the late 90s. And it was a study not to research this, but sometimes we can glean from studies other things. And so, what I did here is I plotted the check plots where we didn't have any treatment. It had full nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium applied. So it was like the other plots in the study. But what I did is we didn't measure organic matter in these plots. And it varied across the study. And so, we can just see clearly the influence of soil organic matter here on the x-axis of this graph, its effect on corn yield. And we did it in another site, too, up by Aberdeen or Chelsea, South Dakota. And we could do the same thing. And it's quite striking. And really, when you look at the graph, you know, it's going the same way and even about the same yield levels. I'm not implying that you're going to see these results if you improve your soil organic matter like this. But it demonstrates and shows the direct effect of the importance of organic matter in the soil. So, I sat back there this morning and added a slide to my presentation. And Jason Miller, I'm going to say, he requested it. And he was so happy that had done this. And it's a very simplistic approach. And other soil scientists could beat me up all day about this. There's assumptions here. But at some point, you have to choose a number and go with it. And so, what does it take to increase your soil organic matter by 1%? Well, we know that the acre furrow slice of soil is about 2 million pounds right there. And we take that 1% and that's about 20,000 pounds of what we call stable organic matter. That's not raw plant residue. That's stable organic matter that's going to benefit soil aggregation and other soil properties. So, how do we determine what it takes to get that? Some say the conversion of raw plant residue material to stable organic matter anywhere between 10% to 20%. There's a place that you could probably find some literature that would deviate from that. So, in this example, I used 10%. So, just a simple ratio here. We need about 200,000 pounds of raw crop residue per acre to increase about 1% soil organic matter. That's a lot. So, all those bales you see going down the interstate are taking away from that, aren't they? So, I got a simple rotation here. Very optimistic yields, I think. 200 bushel corn, 75 bushel soybeans. Wouldn't you like to have that over here? 80 bushel wheat. Okay, so very optimistic, of course. But then again, I chose the 10% conversion. So, there's a little trade off there. But over a three-year period, those yields would produce about 20,000 pounds of raw crop residues. So, a simple math that 200,000 pounds that it takes divided by the 20 to get 10 years. But it's a three-year rotation, so about 30 years to get 1% increase. And I've heard the talk and those that claim, you know, gee, I went to a no-till and my organic matter went up 1.5% in, you know, four or five years. So, how can that be? Or how can this be? And what we attribute that to is the change in the system and sampling depth and sampling variability is huge when it comes to measuring organic matter and the test itself. But the math shows, and we know, that it takes a long time to build organic matter in the soil and to build soil period. So, it's an important issue. So, what does no-till really do to the soil? Here I have a couple pictures of the soil surface. The one on the left here is long-term no-till in excess of 20 years after soil needs. So, not a lot of cover on the soil. And I kind of fell into this by accident because here, and I apologize, it's not very easy to see, but there are earthward casts all over this picture, okay? It's alive. And in one time, I was out in that field after a rain and it was twilight, the sun was just setting and the ground was moving. Literally. It caught my attention. And there were so many night crawlers out there you could hardly believe. I just, you know, this is really impressive. And then over here, I have a picture of a soil surface, soybeans also, where they have been doing a lot of intensive tillage and they bailed it. And so, we could just see the difference in the general appearance of the soil surface. So, which one is going to exchange air, water, and other gases better? It's easy to tell, isn't it? This one on the left. There's hardly any soil structure left in the one on the right. So, these improved soil properties that no-till can lead to are soil aggregation of the soil particles clumping together by the effect of, you know, the critters and the biota in the soil as Dr. Lehman talked, they're holding and helping to clump those together. That leads to better water and air movement in the soil. Soil structure is leading, this is all leading to soil structure where we have these aggregates warming together and to beneficial soil structure. And what does that do? It improves the strength of the soil. It makes the soil so that it can help the soil so it can bear more load. Its load capacity is higher. Some say, well, it's so hard. Well, that's what you're experiencing, is you're experiencing the soil's ability to bear more loads. And I'm not advocating getting the 1200 bushel green card out there, it's just a better thing. Carbon and nutrient storage. Dr. Ward talked about the Hainey test, of course. You know, improved organic matter. We're improving our phosphorus exchange. We've been talking about that a little bit. The microbial diversity we've been talking about, the activity, the micro-asyl fungi, of course, acting as those root extensions. Just the residue cover itself, the armor or the protection over the soil. You know, the reduced water loss and erosion, and we're just protecting it. And another topic you wouldn't even think about, and being in the soil testing business a little bit and taking thousands of samples, I know I'd much rather sample a no-till field than a tilt field any day. And so it leads to better consistency in your results. A no-till soil sample is so much better that you get an accurate six-inch sample. And I think that will lead to better management in the soil testing. Temperature moderation, we're not going from these extremes. And so that aids in the microbial activity of nutrient conversion in the soil. You know, I think in the drought year, some of the soil temperatures got really high on the surface.  And so temperature moderation is important. And again, the earthworm diversity and activity, moving the soil around and digesting whatever they digest in their system, and that's beneficial. So what does a long-term no-till look like? This sample here or this picture is taken from Al Miran's farm in Kirk, South Dakota. He's been no-tilling about 25 years. And this is in the drought year, so it was really hard and dried out, of course. But we see the aggregation here and the roots that are growing in between those aggregates. You see the holes, the old root channels, or earthworm channels. And so we just see the benefits right there versus if we would have tilled that soil and took all that structure out. I have a friend, I guess you can call him, kind of a relative in a way related to the Bly family. Down the tree, quite a ways. But he was an inspiration for my dad and I in our farm. We started no-tilling as well. In fact, I think we could both say that we were listening to Doyne quite intensely many, many years ago. But I asked Stan why we no-till. And he says, I'll tell you why we no-till. He says, you remember the spring of 2012? I said, sure do. He said that the cord like crazy, didn't it? Now that was the drought year. But in April, we had some really intense storms coming through. And he says, you remember all those gullies and all those neighbors' fields? I said, sure do. And he says, that's why I no-till. And of course there's many other reasons, of course. But basically, he said he had a neighbor come by. He said, Stan, just check in your field to see if they washed like ours. And they didn't. And he says, see, that's why I no-till. In fact, Stan told me last week that he's told people that if he has to give them no-till, he's done farming. He's just done it. So that's how important it is to him. But what I have here is an aerial photograph of some land. And there's a quarter section here that's no-tilled. And hopefully it may be sticking out to you there. But there's some things about this no-till quarter that are different from the surrounding farmland. This very hilly farmland can have up to 12% slope in some places. There's some terraces on this picture. And there's some very obvious features. This field here, you can see the terraces in it. They're old terraces. The producer now farms straight over them. They were probably 40, 50 years old, made for a four-row planter and now with the big equipment. It's no problem. But what you also see in this field are these rails coming down, down the drainage ways. And when we got that intense rain, it just couldn't hold it. It just went. Those rails are, while they're showing up on this photograph, they're 6-8 inches deep, 6-8 foot across some places. And so that soil let go. But the no-till quarter is the one right next to it. And these are grass waterways here, right here. There are two terraces there that you can see. This field here is full of them too. And you can't see them. This was taken in August of 2012, right in the middle of the drought. And you should be able to see them, like you do over here. But you can't. This is corn. This is corn. Soybeans. This is soybeans and soybeans. This is over 20 years of no-till on that quarter. You can see some differences in shading there, which you should be able to. It's very sloped and everything. But all in all, it's a lot more either looking, isn't it? And this is the middle of August. It's just making it through. There's extra water there. And the management is totally different. Conversing to this field here, that's also corn. You can see it giving up. The corn is just done on some of those side hills. This field over here, especially too, it's just done. I realize it could be different hybrids. I realize it could be different climbing hills. All in all, it was pretty much done on the same time. But just some visual evidence of what's going on. Another thing that we don't think about a lot is something that's been called timid erosion. And Dr. Schumacher, Dr. Lobb in Canada, Dr. Lindstrom, ARS, others, many others. And it's not a new thing. In Europe, they discovered this a long time ago. And it's nothing more than moving the soil down the hill with tillage. And that's erosion. And when we think about precision farming and all that we can do farmed by the square foot, this is a big deal. It's not so much encroaching on your neighbor, on water quality or anything like that. We're just moving soil off this hill down the hill down here. It's within your own field. But you're decreasing productivity in one place. And you probably are decreasing it there too if you think about water and water management and so forth. And so till down the hill, the soil goes with you a certain distance. And if you turn right around until the exact track up the hill, it doesn't come up the hill as far as the soil. And I think what you think about that really makes sense, doesn't it? And so it's a real thing. And so my buddy Joe and I, standing right there, once in a while we would have time from our work to go goof around a little bit. And this is one of those days where we found a field on our farm. And this is not a very big hill, but it's there. And we have grass here that's probably not been farmed down. We really don't have any records of it being farmed. Actually the original homestead was just right over here on this hill. And it was just, there's some huge trees here. But in the corner it was used as a pasture. And we really don't know if it was ever farmed. We don't think it ever was. But the field, 80 to 100 years of tillage there, 20 years of no-till. But what we did is we set up three sites. You see the flags here that I have circled. And at each one of those sites we took some cores. And bear with me, this is no budget research. We're just having fun because Joe and I like soil. And we like things like this. But what we did is we took cores at each one of those flags. And these are small cores I realize they're hard to see. But in the middle there is a soil core. You kind of see the difference in color as you go down, especially with this. And so at the top, the middle, and the bottom of the hill, we took a sample in the grass and one in the tilled. And I drew a line here or an arrow where you can see the dark soil colors. So in the grass you can see it goes down to the bottom here. That's quite a ways compared to just right across the fence in the tilled where it was tilled for a long time. In the middle part of the slope, the grass is a little bit less. The depth of the dark soil colors is a little bit less, not much, but a little bit. And on the tilled soil, you can see here in the middle part of the slope that the dark soil colors go down to about here. But then right in about here there's light soil colors again. Light soil on top of dark soil. And so what's happening is the darker soil from the top or the shoulder landscape position is over topping the better soil on the middle landscape position. And I'm not advocating tile drainage, but I was in Wisconsin on Farmer's Field Day there about cover crops. And the father and son are advocate no-tillers right now. And they have a tile drainage business. But they admitted that the reason they went no-till is when they started installing drain tile, they noticed all the light colored soil on top of the dark colored soil. And it convinced them just down in there that something had to be done. And that's what's happening here. And so you go down to the bottom of the hill, we've got obviously dark soil all the way down. But over here on the tilt side again, there's a lighter soil material over the darker soil material. And so you think about those implications about what we're doing that tillage is really going against us, isn't it? And I realize this is a hill. If you have flat fields, it isn't an issue for you. But there's other issues there, windy erosion and such. So how does no-till yield compare? I like to go to literature and what others have done. And so this is just a simple literature review across all these locations. Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, Indiana, Tony Vine here, some data from Indiana, Ontario, Illinois, wherever I could find it. And I just plotted the no-till yield versus the conventional till and the strip till in here also. And you don't see much deviation between those at all, do you? And I got the average over here. No-till's a little bit slightly last because I probably had a couple locations where there was maybe a little bit of a problem. But you don't see them jumping out at all. So the reasons for tillage just aren't there. How about in South Dakota? A lot of the research that I was involved with, Dr. Gelderman and Jim Goering and Howard Woodard had a tillage component in them. And so I took that tillage component out and plotted the yields of corn and beans comparatively here and instilled the same thing. Not huge differences at all. So you're wondering, well, then why don't we no-till? You know, why haven't I tried it? I tried and got up. I was thinking about other problems with it. And one of those might be fertilizer placement. I don't know. It could be. So I tried to pick out some things. And a study at the Southeast Research Farm and in Brookings, both locations, longer, not exceedingly long no-till, a 10-year cycle there of no-till, but just a comparison of placement of phosphorus, okay, C-PAN versus broadcast. You can see here essentially no difference between those two. This is an average over soil test, of course. A nice response here, though, to phosphorus. And so that broadcast performing just as well. And it could be the fungi in the soil. Is that what's helping here? I don't know. We didn't measure that. Other locations that we've had phosphorus placement in no-till, Brookings County on soybeans, BAN versus broadcast, nice response to the phosphorus rate. Broadcast maybe slightly less than the BAN, but all in all pretty comparable. With spring week, no-till spring week here in Brookings County, similar results. So there's a little data for fertilizer placement. But I was at a soil fertility conference a year or so ago and Dr. Fernandez in University of Illinois, not with the University of Minnesota, though, did a soil sampling study. And he compared no-till broadcast to strip-till broadcast and strip-till deep-band, five and six inch depth. And he wanted to measure the effect on soil testing and where those were P and K was at. And I can't show you all the data because there's too much of it. But the summary showed that deep-banding the fertilizer reduced the surface-to-sub-surface P and K stratification ratio, therefore increasing the soil test in the subsurface with the fertilizer application. So by and large what he's saying is the crop was still taking the nutrients out of the soil surface. Even though in the strip-till where they were putting it deeper, you know, you would think the plant roots would go for that. The majority of the phosphorus and potassium was taken out of the surface of the soil at the top, two to three inches. So on our farm, this is the planter that I set up back in 1991. I remember the evening I sat in the living room with my dad and my uncle telling them about what I just heard about, no-till and what did we do. Being a young graduate student then and so forth, they thought I was just crazy. You know, this young kid didn't know what he was talking about. And I remember my uncle saying, well, you're going to have to plow at some time, aren't you? And I said, no, I don't think so. And so this is the planter we set up and basically fertilizer issues here. We put nitrogen sulfur in the saddle tanks and we had an opener here that we placed at five inches from the row. On the planter, we had our PK and Sink, full rate, 30% was put on the seat. I split it and put 70% in that, our on with that, that culture that put the nitrogen and the sulfur on. Because at that time, you know, we didn't have the data that we had about broadcast phosphorus or no-till. And so we just thought we got to get it off the ground.  And so that's the planter we had. And since then, these have come off. And all we do is we put a little starter on with the seed and we're in a broadcast program. And it's working. I believe the approved soil properties with no-till and the biota in the soil are getting those nutrients to the crop. Along with the data that I've showed you, on placement is important, I think.  Certainly the banded applications are better. But if you're managing your phosphorus soil soil test levels at the adequate levels, then the maintenance of that is probably okay to put that out as a broadcast application. So other tips for no-till success. I believe it starts right here. I drive around the country. I can relate to Dr. Ward. Just driving around, looking. And I see this all the time. And I kind of cringe. And I realize why it's happening. These big combines, these big heads. You just can't throw it out there. But really when you think about it, we need to have this look like this, don't we? So we can do a better job of planting into that. And the soil temperatures are the same. And everything is just more even. And you can have better results if you handle your residue in the fall much better. Our biggest challenge on our farm was the sidewalk compaction. And this, we have silt loam soils.  Dr. Nathan Mueller, our new agronomist at SDSU from northeast Nebraska, silt loam soils just like I got, says the same thing. Never did so much rotary honing when he was a kid.  Those surface crusts were just monsters. And so when we went to Nontel, this really resulted in really the biggest challenge. And one year, we just couldn't get rid of that side wall on the see-for opener there. I couldn't get rid of it. I had tools there on my planter that I thought were the best. And this is just a picture of it. The side view here, you can see the wall of the trench right here. And then another picture of the same thing. What the roots do is they try to get through the bottom of that trench and they break out and then they go wherever they want to go. And so that was the biggest challenge. You may have different soils that you farm. They may be more forgiving than ours, but there may be other challenges, right? And so you know best what your challenges are. What I was using at the time was this little poly wheel that went on the closing wheels here and tried to push a little soil in the trench, right? And that's basically all I knew about. We didn't have the internet then, so we could do a big search and find all this equipment and stuff. Just word of mouth, right? And so that's what we did. And it did work too bad. That corn, this picture here, it yielded fine. Probably could have been better without those conditions, but we got through it. And then it went to a thermal closing system that ran at an angle. I'm trying to get a picture here, but this is off of video and it's dusty. But basically there are star wheels that run at a high slope to the seed trench and they just cut the edge of that trench off. And a former South Dakotan developed that and is now in Kansas now. And that was the next thing I came across that I thought could improve my condition there. And we since changed planters and we couldn't get these anymore and so I changed again. And I've got those same star wheels that are in at an angle here. But I put them back on the planter as they would be put on there, but I put wedges in there. I can throw it a little bit. I can throw, not throw, but gently push the soil a little bit in over that seed furrow. And then my chain comes along and it just fills it in really nice. But the important thing I think and Matt Hange from Kansas and others I believe will support me in this is that seed firming is really important. You want that seed in the bottom of that seed furrow so they're all the same depth and you get really even emergence. And so this is my system. The colter's only there for planting soil even in the corn stocks. That comes off for corn. I just moved a little residue when I planted my corn and that's my planter that I use. But today you've got more tools. You've got the internet. You can get on there and if you type planter clothing wheels in Google you've got hundreds of options, don't you? And so there's a lot more we can do and have available today. I'm not advocating any of it because I believe that you know what your problem is going to be on your farm and hopefully what might solve that. So in conclusion, I thank you for your time and if you have any questions I'll try to answer them there. But that prime stirr spurring is only, it just means the first step. And so think about that and cover crops are really important too. I've got a lot to learn on that but I think we get the tillage right. We're really doing the good things. You said on your farm you just put a little starter down. What are you doing to get the bulk of your nitrogen out there then? Are you broadcasting that? That's all broadcast. So you try to time it when there's some moisture coming to get it rained in? Aren't you at risk of losing some to the atmosphere without it? Yeah. It's broadcast urea. It's put on just before planting. I like to put it on in April when we're catching some more rains. And I kind of end you with with my person that runs the broadcaster, you know, gee it's going to rain. I'd really like to have you get this on. I realize that's not totally possible in all situations. I have put your yeast inhibitors in there so I feel like I'm not going to catch any rain to kind of give me some more time. Okay. Yeah. Your plan has been a little bit like ours. You talked about soil strength and low tail. Will you go back to ground and come down with tractor tires? With that tractor tires? Well, I believe that I've got the soil is can bear more load. And so I don't believe. I have some compaction probably. There's compaction in every field. And even in conventional field because it's right at the bottom where you run that disc or whatever you're running. So, you know, I have it. I did some bulk density measurements a few years back and I was convinced that yeah, bulk density is higher than in conventional field. We know that. But I felt I wasn't going down. It wasn't getting worse.


The following is a production of New Mexico State University. Today we return to the Arboretum at Flagstaff, located at 7,150 feet above sea level. I spent some time at the High Mountain Herb Display with environmental educator Wade Albrecht. Wade, I see you've got the shoy milkweed here. That's one I didn't expect to find in an herbal garden. It's a fine specimen to use up here in Northern Arizona for a variety of reasons. One of the main things I like it for is that it attracts a lot of insects and butterflies into a garden. And if you zoom in on this, you'll see that there's a number of species that you could locate. Some of them are very tiny, but they all are driving or utilizing this plant as a food source. And in fact, this plant also provides a niche for the monarch butterfly, superb habitat, food source. It lays its eggs on it, and oftentimes in the late summer or early autumn you might find a chrysalis on there. I've always thought of milkweed as a very invasive plant. I notice you've got it here with a mint, which is also invasive. Purposeful intent in our design here, because mint actually has the capacity to almost out-compete any other plant in the herb garden. It looks like a milkweed does pretty well, though. It fights on its own pretty well. Right, right. Which mint is this? This is peppermint, and peppermint has a lot of uses within the household, including herbal teas and, of course, potpouris and just a wonderfully fragrant plant to have in the garden. And one of the characteristics of this plant, should you be in doubt as to if you have a mint on your hands, is to grab the stem and kind of just roll it. And if it's square, if it has four sides, you probably have a mint. I notice right next to it here you've got marjoram. That's another plant in the mint family. Yes, it's a wonderful plant to have, particularly along the borders of your herb garden, or in a rock garden type capacity. The form of this plant, you can see it has a nice mounding effect, very dense growth habit, a terrific plant to have right up front in your herb garden. And it's just a wonderful culinary plant that should be a staple in everybody's kitchen. And I see you have some other bright plants right over here. Yes, we've got a ceremonial plant by the name of Maltese Cross here, but more importantly we included this in our herb garden for color. And the red color of this flower attracts hummingbirds as well as a number of other birds and insects to the garden too. I bet the hummingbirds really do like that, but I see you've got a lot of other colors here. Yes, we have a lot of yellows and blues in this garden as well. I really do like those blue flowers that you've got. This is Clary Sage, and Clary Sage is a plant that is problematic in some parts of the country, but as you can see it's in the southwest. It can be a beautiful inclusion into any herb garden and can be controlled. So people should really know about the plants they put in their gardens. Right. You know I saw a plant in here that's one of the most petable plants in the garden. One of my favorites as well. Let's go see it. In the garden there are plants to look at. Occasionally there are plants to touch. We have to affect all the senses in an herb garden. This one definitely is tactile. Yeah, it's a terrific plant for color, touch, and visuals I think along borders, in rock gardens. It has many applications. And then another thing we just learned while ago, it has a square stem. What family might that be? Must be a mint. Wait, thank you so much. You're welcome, Curtis. It's a great tour of this herb garden. Glad you enjoyed it. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.


This paper reviews the use of computable general equilibrium, CGE, models in low-carbon policy analysis. It finds that CGE models are used extensively in climate policy analysis, focusing primarily on economic impacts but also beginning to include social and environmental impacts. The models are becoming increasingly complex as they attempt to capture the full range of impacts from different types of policies. There is a need to further develop these models so that they can better reflect the complexity of real-world situations. This article was authored by Kanchin and Shihui Zhong, Jessin Zhu, and others.


I am John Morioki, a postdoctoral research fellow based at the Cambry Welcome Trust research program in Kenya. My area of research is nutrition and infection. I mainly focus on ion deficiency and infection. I previously showed that ion deficiency affects one in two African children. Infections are a major cause of hospital admissions and death in African children. The interaction between ion and severe infection is complex and possibly bidirectional. For example, pathogens require ion to grow and multiply and ion is an important component of immunity against pathogens. Ion deficiency is treated using ion supplements. However, there are safety concerns regarding giving ion to patients, especially in populations where infections are incident. This is because some studies show that ion supplementation increases the risk of infection. In a paradigm shifting study, we asked the opposite question, that is whether infection itself causes ion deficiency. To answer this question, we used a novel innovative approach called medirian radicalization, which is a natural experiment that uses genetic variations that are randomly allocated at conception to proxy modifiable environmental factors. In our study, we used sickle cell trait as a genetic variation. Sickle cell trait is known to protect against malaria. If malaria causes ion deficiency, then individuals carrying sickle cell trait who are protected against malaria are also likely to be protected against ion deficiency. That is what we found. Overall, an intervention that prevents malaria by half would also reduce ion deficiency by half. Thereby, killing two birds using one stone. Although ion deficiency has been associated with infection or poor clinical outcome, we still do not know whether it is ion itself or the improved ion status that is associated with infection. To answer the question, I am applying medirian radicalization in two steps. The first step involves conducting the first genome-wide association study of ion status in African children to identify genetic variants that are associated with ion status in this population. So far, I have identified novel African-specific mutations that are associated with ion status or ion deficiency in African children. The second step will be to identify the genetic mutations in large-case control studies of severe malaria, tuberculosis and bacteria to determine whether genetic variation in ion status also influences risk of infection. Our study on malaria-causing ion deficiency is an important finding and has major clinical or public health implications in that it highlights a shifting in thinking away from the safety concerns of ion supplements to malaria control to prevent ion deficiency. Our genetics work also provides some evidence linking ion deficiency and vitamin A deficiency such that if you are vitamin A deficient, you are also likely to be ion deficient. However, we need studies to show the effectiveness of simultaneous supplementation of ion and vitamin A in comparison to ion supplementation alone. Afrika is home for high genetic and environmental diversity and there are novel variations that are only seen in African population. However, Africans are still underrepresented in a grobo-genomic databases. Our work on the genetics of ion status, we have identified novel African-specific variations that are shared with ion status in African population.