hello welcome to
category five uh coffee break
uh it's uh 14th of february 2021.
it's already 2021 that's crazy otherwise
known as 2021 but i'm
trying not to say that but that's how it
works anyway
so uh welcome to doug who's over here on
my
uh on my right-hand side or my left-hand
side or whatever side we're on
and then down here uh uh which way that
way crap
there it is this soul booth
hi zombie it's like the brady bunch
and peter is here but i don't
i don't have any video or audio from him
so
um i hope he joins at some point
so oh there we go
i'm hearing hearing noise okay good no
problem
let's have some video from you peter i
hear audio from you but i just need some
video
all right here we go yay
all right peter um i want to let go
first sir
because uh you did not get much of a
chance to talk last week so i'm going to
let you go first
you were showing off a um you were
showing off some
[Music]
uh uh a machine-generated
voice uh generation or something
what's that about no no that's uh
they're taking my original
uh voice and using an algorithm
to take out all the horrible uh grungy
noises
in my voice so your voice as it is now
with the valve in or no
when the valve ring out uh okay i need
to show you the rig
you only heard the the unprocessed
version
uh i need to show you the process
version which that's a lot better
uh uh so how are you how are you
processing that that voice how is that
how does that work
uh i recalled it uh as an audio file
another hold on a dog
i recorded an audio uh voice at the
moment
can you bring your camera down just a
little bit peter because all we see is
your hair
yeah your camera your camera there we go
there you are sorry about that and
yeah okay okay and uh i record the order
into a white
form uh a wife uh and then i processed
it
using some uh some software
and then i recalled it
and then play it back nice
similar to what robbie does i think
after after
what i do is i send all this audio and
video to
to robbie and he pre-processes it or he
post post-processes
to get rid of peaks and valleys in the
in the sound and equalizer volumes and
stuff like that
i guess you're doing something similar
no little bit more than that because uh
because the way my valve works is
normally user uh
your larynx do to vibrate and
uh i've got no larynx i've got nothing
there
okay uh i've got all this i got all the
uh
uh wave changings up in my mouth
otherwise mouth feed lips
etc
but uh there's over the back of my
down my throat is called a tea muscle
which is a big wrong rubber band
so it it the way for me to actually not
uh sign wave like the the vocal chords
it's either
more rectangular or more triangular
properly
and uh so it acts like the vocal chords
then right it's what vibrates
as well because they've got this sort of
50s modulation on top of me
so i'm trying to
it took a long time for 20 years to do
it
but can you you can't do that in real
time though can you
i mean you have to record it process it
and then play it back well that's what
we're thinking about the electronics
that's where i i might need some help
from somebody
uh uh and to build in something uh
trying to design something
uh uh it probably might need something
like a um
well and not not to apply rolls required
something could be better than a lot of
people i
would think of the process in power
because you need a lot of processing and
around the algorithm uh
on there and uh use the audio card on
that to to keep
contingency uh in real time at the very
least no matter how strong your hardware
is you're gonna get some kind of a delay
because it takes some finite amount of
time
to read it for the listener
it will be about one second i reckon
right right because these these headsets
or this headset is a noise cancelling
headset
and um the noise cancelling headset
always has some kind of
a hiss to it because i'm not sure why
you're arching your hands like that is
there a reason for that
okay i
good luck with that when's that gonna
happen i don't know
like they keep saying that because of
god without that didn't get it
a bit painful sometimes so yeah i tend
to definitely as an exercise
right right right okay don't worry
don't do that he doesn't need to be
climbing his mouth come on man
he doesn't need to be doing that bloody
plus monkey weather outdoors i'll tell
you
i know and i've been looking at the
weather it's pouring out there
or it was a little while ago i i i lived
in
down hampshire on top of the towns uh
that's like guilford
and it's quite quiet up there and it's
quite bleak
as well and a place called the
book in 1985 it dropped to minus 15
degrees
that's fahrenheit right or is that
celsius
oh
[Music]
where my arm was and then at the top
there was about 700 feet
and there's a one in three hill and i'll
tell you
[Music]
yeah i always worry about that when it
gets really cold here or it doesn't
really get that cold here it can get
down to freezing
the cars are usually okay because
they're in the garage
but the but the airplane doesn't doesn't
like really cold weather it's hard to
start
no no no this is that but uh this was
that there's a freak
conditions in 1985 this was i don't
think scotland's got the record now
did you know mr throw and i died you
know he died
it came from uh i feel a joke coming on
here i can tell i can see it's coming
you've got something coming i know what
you're up to peter
watch it carefully i'm i'm hovering over
the mute button man i'm ready
hey yeah he came from poland and
uh we've come to blind stuff we've done
for jeremy bulbs he came from poland
said in the thing
and uh he um he died of mushroom poison
picking mushrooms
okay all right
okay great way to die
oh well you know if you pick mushrooms
and you don't know what you're doing i
don't know if there's some sort of a
joke behind there but i don't get it
i'll let that go there wasn't a joke
fahrenheit was alive a lot earlier than
that though i didn't know he was that
there
also yeah yeah i opened the wikipedia
page and
um it was um that the temperature scale
was uh
launched in uh 1724. ah
okay i knew he was around a lot longer
than that
so if he just died it was about time
all right so boo you're you're next sobu
because i know you've got pizza coming
so
yeah and usually i
um call in a pizza order and then i
drive downtown to and to pick it up but
uh
in on monday this week and i was i had a
an appointment
in in the town and then i couldn't stop
my car
so i had i fixed my um
charger and
plugged it in for two hours it didn't
help but then
and then i i borrowed the charger
from my neighbor and let it sit for four
hours
it also didn't help so the next day i
called
the uh tow truck uh i i have a
tow truck as part part of my uh uh
insurance policy and uh they couldn't
start it either so they um
yeah um uh tuesday tuesday or wednesday
it's um
they will be fitting a new starter so
was the end was the motor actually
turning over or was the starter not
actually turning the motor over
no it was i just heard it and then i
click
yeah usually that means the battery is
just dead and replacing the battery or
charging it up with it yeah the battery
is new it was was new um
half a year ago okay
okay yeah well if it's not the battery
then yeah
also can't get it to start any reason
you're pretty much done for at that
point yes right yeah so it's um
between five and six hundred dollars uh
yeah ouch wow
yeah yeah it's not that much here i'm
pretty sure
i'm pretty sure it doesn't cost quite
that much what other news do you have
sobu
um yeah and uh today i was
in the computer association i'm i sit in
a unix
based up um we have um
a server and yeah we call it um the name
of the server it's a
video it's a virtual server where we
have a mumble it's a
uh an audio type uh uh like this
but only know only uh
no video and um people have used it to
have our
uh uh monthly board meetings but uh
last time that they lost two times when
we
had meetings um two people i started to
have their problems
logging on because of uh deactivation of
their
old encryption
i've seen that at work or at least a
couple of jobs ago
where um one of our servers talks to
another server
and um uh they upgraded
the the destination server
and oh no they upgraded the router
and uh then all of a sudden the uh
all of a sudden the router stopped
passing traffic for that
for that old uh for the old um
uh um uh crips encryption keys
so yeah with the old encryption protocol
so yeah i've seen that seen yeah and uh
yes i upgraded we upgraded that from uh
debbie online till then and then debian
and then that was all that was uh needed
oh nice okay yeah
all the um mumble uh
um yeah the older um
1.2 uh series uh had the
didn't have it didn't support uh tls
what uh 1.2
so yeah yeah or it supported it but it
defaulted to a tls one
and that was enough for uh some clients
to
nope i'm not doing that because yeah
yep yep yep i think even
even prior to tls wasn't it ssl prior to
that
and i think the old i think the old
client was using ssl and that's
that's what was well maybe it was tls
1.0 but
yeah she didn't last one at
20 years old okay it probably was tls
one then
yep nice mr doug
oh fun mr doug what have you been up to
um not much just working the
computer that i normally use for this uh
coffee break needs a new fan so i've got
to find time to replace that
have a look at robbie's old um there's
an old
uh cat5 tv um yeah uh episode about
replacing the fan
so yeah i think he found a screw in his
fan somewhere
i think he'd literally found the machine
screw in the fan somewhere so
[Laughter]
yeah i i i don't know where it came from
he might maybe he sucked it up somewhere
i don't know but he didn't find it so if
he
found our screw in his if does that mean
that fan was it's good
yes oh yeah yeah yeah oh absolutely yeah
oh yeah yep yep
you stole that for me salvo
i knew you couldn't resist yeah so
here's here's my news
i have been um i've i'll see if i can
shine that on there there you go this is
a
pine phone i'm looking at the back of it
so you can see that it's a ub ports
edition phone
and i got it probably a few months ago
um
and it came pre-loaded with uh ubuntu
um mobile so ub ports is the ubuntu
edition
which i like but there's a lot that it
doesn't do
one of the things that i needed to to
work would be
outgoing phone calls incoming phone
calls
uh texts in text out right
and i needed for it to be able to sync
to my local cal dev and card dev
uh server in order to make it do that
um i ended up finding a script online
that allowed for it to um
uh to sync up caldaven card david and
that worked
but then um i found that
it would not identify when an incoming
call comes in
even though that number that that the
incoming call came from
was in my kaldev correction card dev
contact list
it would not identify who it was so i
thought well this
this is no good and in addition
uh you the ub ports edition is really
built for folks who are
used to android or iphone or whatever
that is
a lot of the workings underneath are all
hidden away
you don't get to play with you don't get
to play with any of the stuff
you know under the covers like the with
a terminal or any of that mess
um so apt doesn't work
um so you know basically
i thought you were pick holding i
thought you were holding up a sign there
peter i thought
oh great buddy that looks like a circuit
diagram to me yeah
very nice so i went through
to mobian because that's one thing you
can do with these phones
you can take the back off
install an sd card and boot from a uh
um another image and see
what you and you know
instead of booting from the internal uh
you know emmc
a drive that's inside it so i tried that
and it was slow understandably because
it's running off an sd card which runs
about
a quarter of the speed of what the emmc
runs
how fast it can run on the emmc but it
looked a whole lot better than what i'm
that than what i than what ub ports did
mobian looked a lot more like what i
expected the pine phone to be that is
basically
a linux box that lets you
take and take and make phone calls and
text messages and all that
but it also suffered from the problem
where it won't
identify incoming callers
so i thought well that's no good i so my
choices were to go
big through the
telephone stack to figure out how all
these hooks worked
or to just try another distro and see if
i could find one that worked and i kept
seeing
all over the place oh by the way i use
arch linux
i thought well okay what's this arch
linux thing
so i thought all right well i'll try it
yeah i mean i tried it i tried mobian
and
it was okay let's try arch and see what
else work right out of the box
and um it it now identifies incoming
phone calls
takes phone calls even from a deep sleep
so even if the phone's been asleep
all this time one of the problems with a
lot of distros
is they keep the cell phone modem
running all the time
so when you keep that wi-fi and cell
phone modem running all the time
you burn a lot of energy out of the
battery right and so
typically typically these won't stay
alive on battery more than a few hours
hours
maybe at maximum um
but when it you know these
uh both mobian and um arch linux
both shut down the um
the internal uh cell phone and wi-fi
modems
but crucially
arch linux will wake up the phone
on an incoming phone call even if it's
in a deep sleep
and it will still answer the phone
mobian does not
or at least the version that was on this
phone that did not
so what would happen is that mobian um
would shut down the internal cell phone
modem
when the thing went to sleep which was
great for battery life because now it's
not burning all that energy from the
radios
but um then i would try and call it or
somebody would try and call the phone
and it just wouldn't respond
the phone would not wake up well that's
no good i need the thing to actually
answer phone calls when they come in
that's kind of important it's a phone
that's what it's for
so mostly my first uh
phones i had i had 20 years ago i had a
an erickson 318 um and it
um i used that as a uh
an alarm clock uh after i discovered
that uh
i had the no loan set and then i forgot
i had the alarm set so i turned the
phone off
and then the time came for the alarm
ring
it woke up and i had the alarm and when
i
closed the alarm it went back off so
that was the only phone i had that uh
the phone
it was not in the deep sleep it was
turned on it was turned all the way off
and it like
and it woke up to during the alarm there
yeah i have not yet tried
i've not yet tried go ahead
yeah it tends to keep the the modems
alive
the radios alive when it's on the
charger i mean put it on the charger
when you go to bed you know
oh yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what i
do but as i said
before i installed uh arch linux
i'd have to put it on the charger all
the time because it would only run
for maybe six hours or so on the battery
but now with with arch linux and mobian
ii
i'll give my due credit um
it would last over a day now easily
in standby but so i wouldn't have put it
on the charger all the time
now it looks like i can just
run this during the day normally and
then put it on charger overnight but i
still wouldn't be too far away without
it with it
i wouldn't be too far away from a some
sort of a power source at any time
because
you know if you use it a lot and i think
this is true even with android phones if
you keep the screen on a lot
um then it burns through the battery
pretty quickly so yeah
it is what it is so and i'm still still
exploring it still bringing out what to
you know what it works but what's really
cool is i can ssh into it
and and use it like a regular computer
i'm looking at i'm looking at getting
in fact it's on the way i'm getting a
dock a usbc dock for it
and i'm going to plug a keyboard a mouse
and an hdmi cable in
and i should be able to plug it into the
bottom of the phone
and charge it while i'm using it like a
regular computer
now don't expect any performance now
this thing is going to have about the
performance of the original pine book
i believe it has the same processor as
the original pine book
so don't be looking for any kind of
performance now
but it it amazes me that i can just
run it i can ssh into it and run
programs on it
even desktop programs with the
with the usb-c port it should
share the display you know the hdmi out
should just
activate the display just like an
extended display like windows does
at least that's how i've seen it done on
on youtube so
so it must work right it's on the
internet so it must be right
but even if it's slower than one thing
you could you know
that one can do when one has a computer
with ssh and so on
is that um like this is that um on a
slow device
if you ssh into a big fast uh
system and then launch a desktop problem
on the uh
fast system then it would display on on
your
local device and it should
perform as if you were on the
first system look how small that screen
is solder you really want
to run a desktop oh by the way
one of the things that this that i see
on the
on youtube all the time with these pine
phones
is the really big icons and i don't know
if i can show it to you because um
because uh i've done the tweak on it
you can go into settings on mobian
or on arch linux
i don't think you can do this with ub
ports but if you go into settings
and then look for the display option tap
on that
you have the option then to switch to
100
resolution instead of the default 200
percent
as as it comes out of the box at 200
percent the icons are huge
the text is huge and you don't get much
real estate on the screen
yeah yeah but if you um if you switch it
to
the 100 size or resolution
everything shrinks down to half the size
obviously because the screen
becomes effectively twice as big and you
can
display regular desktop
programs and you can run regular desktop
programs like evolution for instance
on that dinky little screen it's quite
surprising
you can't do it while it's at 200
because it's just
that just not enough real estate on the
screen so
none of the youtube videos that i've
seen show that
show that setting being used i don't
know why you have to have really small
fingers though when you
do that because the buttons are really
small and you have to be very precise
about where you push those buttons
so all right so that's why
i'm going to come in there now i've got
one of those i've got to find it i don't
know where it is
okay what's that got a combo that's why
i use a cotton bud
a cotton bud yeah i never thought of
that yeah i've got some of those i'll
try it
so yeah i'll try that okay that's about
it can you believe it it's been
nearly 30 minutes that's crazy robbie
likes these to be 25 minutes so i'm
gonna
go ahead and get ready to close it down
so
thank you all for joining in thanks for
thanks for a fun
after a fun day and uh happy valentine's
day for those who care
and for those who don't have a valentine
i was assigned that i posted
on the discord a few discord servers um
um it's a a road sign somewhere in in in
one of the highest in the u.s
a road sign which said no valentine's
see but the seat belt will hold you
so what will hold you the seat belt yeah
nice nice yeah that was on facebook
yeah nice okay
thanks again enjoyed it doug sober peter
thanks very much enjoyed it man have
have a good evening
afternoon whatever it is in your place
and i will see you later
bye bye bye
[Music]