[Music] our live recording is a trusted only to solid-state drives by Kingston technology revive your computer with improved performance and reliability over traditional hard drives with Kingston SSDs category 5 TV streams live with Telestream Wirecast and nimble screamer tune in every week on roku cody and other HLS video players for local show times visit category 5 TV welcome to the show everybody it's so great to have you here have you ever had a hard drive crash bro yes my hard drive failed this past week I'm filled filled um no I didn't have a backup but that's me in my scenario I didn't need a backup because I don't store anything on my hard drive oh ok so I'm ok mm-hmm my hard drive failed there was no backup oh there was like seven years of photos see my life is about central management of data so like this is how I'm able to use like a pine Book Pro to do video and yeah we talked about cells I'm remoted in through a VPN connection to a massive server that has I I scuzzy access to massive storage so I don't need any kind of storage on my devices so when my hard drive failed as I failed it it didn't take any of my data with it it just was a bit of an inconvenience I had to put in a new drive and and get back up and running get everything reinstalled but what was a little frightening about this particular failure uh-huh that I have never encountered in my entire career as a computer technician in my entire life is that when I walked in to my office there was a stench of melted electronics Oh No oh I don't have very good photos but what I have I will give you my hard drive caught on fire overnight oh yes so within the chassis of my computer which is like an aluminium yeah case there was a fire Wow yeah so when you think about so and then I'm thinking oh my goodness all the time I've never seen this happen before oh wow and there's nothing that I have ever done that should have caused that there's no there's nothing that I did to do that there's no there was no dust buildup no the computer is perfectly clean under my desk and is as never moved it's statically set up and it just was it was a cheap SSD I think and it literally caught on fire inside the chassis so the fire was contained the computer was ok thankfully but stunts like a beast no dough for about three days but the drive itself was so baked did you contacts no no I replaced it with a good Kingston heart yeah yeah I did and reinstall my stuff and you know I'm back up and running in a few hours come you didn't do this the first time but it really did make me think about all those times that I've thought about doing like wooden builds like maybe it was a really good thing that my computer chassis was made of aluminium yes maybe that and and fairly airtight to the point where not a whole lot of oxygen can get in once once it's expelled right yeah so like the burning didn't affect any of the other components no because it was in the in the drive tray so it was contained within the tray so so the tray itself actually had some plastic components as well those plastic components melted and dripped down Wow but the washburn it was like oh it was a fire it was a fire inside the case of the hard drive yeah the SSD and that's a crazy part is that it's an SSD like I I could see that maybe with you know traditional hard drive with my moving parts but an SSD to catch fire I would be really proud if it was like I'm moving parts thing like I worked that beast so I got it up to 15 billion rpm that's rent nobody must have burnt for a while it was pretty bad so so you did you get alerts ah this is just my desktop computer I didn't have names running monitoring on it or anything like that however because the board the it did make me think because the motherboard has USB ports on the motherboard yeah I think I might put a temper device in my computer chassis and a temper devices like a USB thermal sensor we did do that so imagine putting that in and then I could have gotten an alert from Nimes Linux that said hey your computer is a hundred and 40 degrees Celsius and would you have been like a mistake that would have been a little bit of a strange alert for sure however you can trust MEMS that the data is accurate so then you would have gone to see it in action brought some marshmallows yeah but thankfully it was contained because that could have impacted the entire office yeah but doesn't it make you think about like all these like builds that I'm doing and and some of them made of cardboard so I'm really kind of rethinking the materials that I use for my builds and and you know I think about kks be cases for for single board computers and how they're like solid steel mm-hmm then and fabricated steel and that just says quality to me and like that's gonna it's gonna protect me an event of like a short circuit or something like that I don't know what happened to the drive it was like an internal thing I've never had a hard drive catch matter no matter how are supplies I haven't I've never I've never had a fire like that yeah yeah I was the computer that I built on four years ago six months in all sudden and I'm like what is that spell yeah and then I went down with a computer and I realize oh it's smoked sure but I've burnt capacitors I've had things burst yeah but I'm talking this caught on fire like literally I was not from heat this was like a short circuit in the power lines or something whew within the drive the crazy stuff so so now I mean hey I've never seen it happen before but now I know it could happen really it actually did happen - Robbie what are the stats I want I think we should all try to simulate it make it happen oh yeah I wonder if there's a kid like there is some data as to what could cause an SSD to light on fire what's on the inside I don't think it's a very common thing what what's on the inside of it what is that you've got a PCB circuit board with with with memory modules yeah essentially and and some resistors and all kinds of little circuits and stuff but so something in there no there's no moving parts and some something in there short-circuited I think and maybe like 12 volt hit something else and decided to explode and catch I don't know the interesting is that it happened when you weren't in the office because if it happened while you were in the office you might have taken a while for you to figure out I might have been like okay my computer's on fire like you see what a smell died oh yeah brutal yeah you might have ruined your computer with like a fire extinguisher at that point maybe yeah it's probably good probably good well but an electrical fire contained within an aluminum boxes yeah hopefully pretty safe was in one of my wooden chassis why do I smell charred Hickory Wow speaking of burnt have you tried any healthy foods lately I am always trying healthy foods Jeff because I'm learning from the technology that I've invested in now my budget was a hundred bucks as you know so a few weeks ago we started looking at the various technologies like my fitness tracker like my smart scale that allow me to educate myself about my health to be able to lose some weight inevitably as kind of a side effect of that and I have consistent so so whenever I tell you how much I've lost it's it's only based on consistency so if I if I hit seven point six pounds loss and then I went back to six point I'm gonna I'm not gonna tell you seven but I've been consistently beyond of the seven pounds mark now so another couple pounds since last week and I've only been doing it for a month and it's just by educating myself but part of that Jeff is yeah eating a little well eating healthy but I've cut carbs as much as I can from my diet because I learned about the fact that I'm burning carbs instead of burning fat and it's working as really it actually is working so yeah I did like I've been using cauliflower instead of rice so ground up cauliflower yeah it's actually delicious so yeah so and it's like a rice substitute but there's no carbs so but it's just like a plate of vegetable instead of rice you can cut up some green onions oh yes mushrooms and stuff like that I would I'll have pizza once a like I get a cheap day once a week so I took my daughter for her pizza and we had like a cheese pizza and that's fun I also have started so now I'm at that point where I've kind of not plateaued I'm still losing weight fairly consistently but fairly slowly so one of the things in we have a Biggest Loser channel on discord and Marshman had mentioned that one of the things I can do to kind of accelerate things is to to sustain exercise in such a way that okay like if I run up the stairs yeah my heart rate gets going but then it's it settles back down but right I'm done well so do things that are gonna sustain a little bit more exercise essentially so I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary like I'm not really changing my life or anything because I've got to be within reason for the way that I live yeah but you know I gave my my 12 year old a piggyback ride at while we were at Walmart it works I'm I'm looking and I'm like holy cow I burned a lot of calories doing that I actually kind of started to get sore legs doing that because like he's 12 years old he's a big big guy and and so for him it was a lot of fun it was a great time for me it was like this is a great great way to sustain that kind of heart rate so that was something and then I took my youngest who's nine I took him skating last night so we just we found an outdoor skating rink here in Barrie Ontario and we strapped on the skates for the first time in a couple of years nice and and we skated for an hour and 15 minutes or so yeah it was fun and for him again so it for for the kids it's like this is great daddy time mm-hmm for dad it's great bad child time but also at the same time I'm I'm I've got that kind of side motive of am doing things with the kids that are trying to get me to be more physically active as a computer geek because I'm for your children that this fun activity stuff is actually fun right yeah yeah yeah if you're like I'll go outside and play and you don't do it yourself it's not as much fun as if you know dad's out there actually sure playing around and I was also surprised like something like finding an outdoor skating rink that the city maintains like they have a Zamboni at their outdoor skate skating rink like this is serious real-deal skating and it's free which was also tax dollars pay for it so you just go and strap on your skates and go and skate as long as you want it's open till 10:00 p.m. so for me it was like this is a really really cheap outing cost us nothing to go out so that was fantastic so you're living healthier I quite frankly I'm just not caring too much right about now but I will say fine it's very busy weekend yeah and on Saturday and Sunday my watch rewarded me for beating my daily activity goals I was like yeah because I had stuff to do in a house to clean there you go but it was good I will say though I think my steps are lower today last week I'm at 878 steps aside you have a car got forty five hundred seventy five hundred so that's lower than last week lower last week last week that was in competition well they cheat did you know I don't cheat well no we are the company today there has been some discussion and discord on what cheating really is I play video games and it ups my step count I know we're saying you're using this as a way to main like I'm doing with the piggyback rides I maintain that it doesn't feel like cheating to me did you use activity manipulation to when you're noticed I didn't know okay so what did you do this week oh this week I beat Crimson Fang tell us about it okay that's like a real workout yes well in virtual yeah as you say you have to clarify though what crimson Fang is okay so I have an a5 and HTC vive and I play a game called knockout League so in that game there's a series of competitors that you fight against and I boxing I was in a boxing match and they are tough they're beasts because they're not based in reality they can do things that I cannot do oh and I was really stuck on Crimson Fang like for a long time because she wears this mask and if you punched you slow the mascal bite you oh dear and I was and just like real box that's on fire based on reality the mask bite you and Mike Tyson didn't need a mask the foot and the fights last six minutes and oftentimes when I lose I lose like at the 5 minutes and 30 seconds so I don't have that staying power for the whole six minute round yeah okay so I had to really work myself up to the cardio of a six minute fight I don't understand how they do rounds of this against real competitors it was intense anyway so my next opponent is gonna be a long way off so was this like exclusively a cardiovascular kind of like yes like do you feel it in your in your in your everything no there's no there's no physical interaction right well you're holding onto the control right not that they have a lot of weight but you're also like swinging picking D king dodging so like it's a full-body deal like it's gotta try this sometime you have to try it how long ago did she build that computer two years ago a couple years where we're supposed to have like a next Wednesday very cool so however you decide I mean this is for me as part of my kind of New Year's resolution but my New Year's resolution is really just to educate myself that's how that's my approach and I am finding that by educating myself I'm learning more about how things work and I'm losing weight I've lost over seven pounds in the past month which isn't huge but for me I can see it in my face I can feel it in my body and and I'm excited about you know where I'm gonna be six months from now I feel like I'll be healthier yeah so will I pounds is huge don't know don't be like it's not huge that's huge it's a it's a great achievement for sure ya know and I feel great about it I'm not I'm not downplaying that at all I'm just like it's not like I lost 20 pounds in a week no no I'm just seven pounds I haven't done anything other than changed just my knowledge that's what about 4% for you seven pounds uh-huh don't make me do math today Jeff please don't say for me plate open pouch whatever whatever it is for you I just encourage you to like check out the technologies that are available if you've ever had trouble with with if it's weight loss or if it's like keeping the new year's resolution there's tech that's available like the fitness tracker like that scale that is encouraging me by giving the information about like BMI and stuff that I didn't know about before my metabolic age I've lost two years off my off my medical baggage so I'm now two years younger in the past month so that's huge so those kinds of things are really good encouragement in the end they'll help you to be able to achieve the goals just by educating you and and helping you to see how the things that you choose to eat and do are affecting your health so it's working for me so far so maybe it will work for you to get into Biggest Loser Biggest Loser on our discord channel so go on to category 5 TV join our discord under interact and and you'll see biggest loser there it's pretty fun I really want to get into the future well we've got to take a break first Jeff and then when we get back Jeff has got something for you folks so stick around I have three kids at home we all have devices my wife myself I've got a phone in my pocket at all times except at night when I need to charge it mm-hmm my kids each have you know we have a variety of phones that the kids share for video games and for chatting and things like that so there's always stuff hanging out of wall outlets ghom I've got a wall wart with a cable and people fighting over hey he's using my charger and yeah always it's just the way it is so Jeff you talked about a couple weeks ago how you've come up with a solution for kind of centralizing your charging station and it really made me think and I started looking and I found a pretty fantastic device that that I think you're you're going to show us today cord yeah so I mean you're right I do have another device it's not the G chord I bought it around Christmas time yeah and it is a six bank docking station that allows the kids to place their phones but we have again three kids but between them they have their old phones and their new phones right yeah they don't want to give up the old phones because well my minecraft files are not that old yeah so all in all I think there's like six phones and two tablets Center and it's like there's same deal Chargers everywhere and one goes missing and like this is ridiculous but we also had the issue of they were sneaking them at night I'm like we need a centralized location where it's like I know where they all are so we got this charging port and they all just sit there and so yeah it's been it's been great and so does this have that feature where if the kids grab it after 9:00 it zaps them nah no feature request that's what I'm telling the kids if you touch the phone after 9:00 while it's on the charging station it will delete everything charging station sounds like a great idea for me because it puts everything in one place in it and it gets rid of all the cable clutter yes can we see what you have here okay so this is from G chord it is a six port 10 amp USB charging station now I will say right off the hop would caught me off guard from the boxes at the side that says quad USB like but it's 6 port okay why is it quad USB it's because you've got different types of USB so there's a there's three piece 8 pin there's two piece micro USB and then one type see interestingly enough so my phone is Type C but mine is the only one that's type c within our household everything else is USB micro although there is one Apple device which uses the old Apple interface so you came with some cables it does come okay but I'm gonna open this up so I'm just gonna slice through that and place that over here so what do we have in here starts with I like that it's ten amps so you've got like one cable going to the outlet and you don't have to have like a whole bunch of charges right it's just one thing nice alright so it is a 6 port or 6 channel so alright to start with here's your various cables yeah okay so these are oh so it came with little short like one foot one foot cables these are I've got a USB C and two USB micros yep so they're just nice little short cables and I read your Apple connections ok so it came with it so these are just like for your Android phones yeah and then these are for Apple so if you are using this but if you are using this and all you have is Android 3 is not going to be enough so you need to make sure that you've got the right okay so when you buy this what do you do Jeff you buy some extra so we've got some nice color coated ones which my kids would absolutely love because then they'd be able to say well they've got the pink one I've got the blue one and you know solves everybody's problems based on the color coding perfect things you have to do to like stop fights at home it's crazy oh those are nice oh yeah there's a very nice or these do not come with it so you have to buy separately so whatever works for you so we got three with it well two USB micro and one USB see yes and then we've got a bunch just to pack a sort of pack here now everything they see is available at cat5 TV slash charger you're right these are nice yeah those these are like wound woven those nice cables but they're color-coded so the kids will love that all right so I have unboxed okay really what we have is you have the base unit mm-hmm is there a power cord I'll plug in the power cord while you're describing the power cord you have the instructions that are just not simple folow not a wall wart no just so you know okay so this is just gonna go right into your your outlet nicely and your plastic plexi dividers so these are like heavily sealed let's separate these puppies somehow I it's like air compressed oh they're vacuums yeah vacuum sealed oh my god here we go this one well it's not vacuum sealed they're just a cycler on either side yeah okay like you know someone feels vacuums this has got power now jack Oh perfect okay well I'm not gonna plug it in yet because I'm gonna be playing around with these but all right is there special way these go in does not look oh yes there is okay so you can't really see it but there's a little notches here which prevents you from putting this in backwards so if I do that it's not going in because there's a little yeah yeah nodules there then they go clicks then perfect all right grab another one you want me to help I can help you do that all right this takes three folks it's teamwork crazy how many invite some friends oh honey Chucky's does it take to put dividers on a cell phone charging station thank you all right okay so we can get two phones in there look at this team action though much faster for this is the one I struggled with okay getting these suckers in there I feel like if you're the person who changes the garbage at home and then you need to open the bag the new bag that's all stuck together you know yes sir all right last ones going in okay here we go all right USBC it has been assembled okay so right away what I can see on it you have your physical switch button for power yeah your connectors are all on one side interestingly enough so the one the unit I have at home the connectors are on either side so I've got three and three Oh what I like about that is it prevents all the cords from jumbling up on one side right this one they're all on one side so your device is gonna have to sit because it's a short cable with the charging port going that way so depending on any case you have on your phone or any anything like that it may cause problems but just for plugging it in oops of course it's USB you got to do it a pretty different way that's right yeah yeah so but it just sticks in quite simply all right the one for there's pretty simple tech folks but yeah it really I did a USBC for my phone perfect it's already connected to my phone because I thought hey we can actually try like see then see if it explodes or if it charges it's gonna do one of those two things yeah those are the only two options you're gonna learn one day the way to plug it in I know I haven't so okay so that is plugged in via charge or the actual power cable connects here to the side I do like that it's just a single power cord and then just a couple of yeah it is charging so I've powered it on yeah you can see that no it was off now it's on cuz the blue lights kicked on Oh neat I don't know if you can see that yeah you guys see that a little a right there I don't know if I if I were to dim the lighting in the studio here I don't know if you'd be able to see that a little bit better maybe yeah yep that's good okay the blue light now and when I turn it off I noticed that it's only the blue light is only on on the one that the two that are plugged in oh oh my god look at you you observe and fella so yeah okay so you've got the power and then the one that it's in plug in more that's it what happened so let's log everything and to connect sure connect I didn't get my phone what are you looking for see ya I only have one see all right you got to buy the right cables folks but there's like a mine the one well I'm using it on my phone threaded once those are all see a USB micro okay so you didn't get diversified pack okay yeah all right well let's test it this way if I move the connector to another port yeah cool look at that so you actually see the blue lights up Oh USB see as well yeah USB see sorry Sasha okay so in there it is charging this one has I believe built-in surge protection and stuff like that one of the computers so it has built-in surge protection it also has intelligent charging with over voltage overcharge and overcurrent protection nice mine does not have that and truthfully when I was looking for a banking station that wasn't something I was thinking of I just wanted to be lucky to have all the phones outer parts yeah exactly so that's a nice very nice feature and it is 10 and 50 watt total power what I don't see though is fast charge I don't see that either and it's a good comment because that's one of the questions we're gonna get so ya know it looks like it's just straight like just regular regular charge power yep now this particular one now I'm sure those exist but I mean we're talking about charging six devices simultaneously which is pretty impressive it's pretty good from a single power I also like the stability of this one Jeff it's very solid doesn't move now one thing I noticed about the one that I had at home for the life mate I can't think of the model or the brand that it is there's an ally out there like tell there's tons yeah search for them but what I wanted to check with yours is the gap between the placement spots so my phone has a bit of a dip on the back right where it yeah it is thicker and so your phone sits quite nicely it's leaned back when I put mine in because of that it sits up doesn't very much okay does that now I said matter former bothers them well what it does create a problem is if you if you're trying to organize all your devices succinctly it doesn't work as well if one of them is falling forward it bounces them all around especially because I owed your phones when you put them in the charger no but for the one I have at home I have to do it in a certain order because of the different case sizes as one goes forward they all follow knocks them out so ok aware of that like all these things you wouldn't even think about exactly because of the the gap I mean that's that's finger width that's it so it's not like it's a big gap if you have a table at your tablet's gonna sit fairly pretty snug yeah yeah so be aware of that but otherwise that's it that's a nice little okay the suckers small any guesses any guesses iPod first-generation no ice crazy yeah doesn't even like when they came with with like full touchscreen but that fits quite nicely but yeah I mean if you have a tablet or something it's going to sit a little bit higher and you could see like mine is back on and hanging that because that little knob is not there but if you had a tablet with a thicker case it's gonna sit straight up there's no give and the chance with that is if you accidentally bump it you could potentially break the plastic just beware yeah well yeah I guess I mean you're gonna find a safe place to put this kind of parasite yeah plain and simple so but it keeps it in a centralized location and allows you you know especially if you have multiple devices at your home to organize everything you have all your phones there you you know maybe you've got young kids it's like get off the phone that's your spot where you go this is the phone charging sport yeah it's not in the rooms at night it's a central location you know where every phone is and it's like this is kind of what I'm thinking like if if this works is a great charger which it looks like it's it's fantastic for this as a parent I'm gonna hide every other charger in the house yes and it's just here okay when your phone's dead put it on the charger I know because I because we've updated to one of the you know something like this at home yeah I have so many wall connectors now like what am i doing me more raspberry pi's that's exactly what yeah yeah so yeah that's right nice job it comes up one-year limited warranty which is kind of nice normal wear and tear seals abuse misuse not cover damage trying to see if there's anything else that's important to mention from the instructions I'm not seeing it mmm I like that it has the surge protection and everything else because your wall wart you're just how many times have you just plug your phone into the wall well exactly what happens if there's a power surge or something mm-hmm so that's kind of a bonus as well yep nice so yeah that's it it is the G chord six port 10 amp USB charging station specifically the black color there you go go to a cat5 dot TV slash charger if you're interested in that particular one or of course follow that link and then you can find various alternatives as well Amazon's kind of cool that way you'll see some of the other options that are similar but different if you need quick charge then I guess that would be really the deciding factor this one does feel like it's really like quite sturdy yeah and I say that like it really does feel sturdy you know really good I didn't even notice it's got like rubber grip pads in there yeah I felt that when I put my so you know which is kind of nice holds the phone in place mm-hmm so that's okay well I will say in having used one of these now there's one thing that makes me go you could take this to the next level that zapping feature well the zapping feature would be amazing cordless well court actually cordless would be kind of cool if these had cordless charging plates but no yeah to allow one USB that a lot that does data sync for a computer so all six would be plugged in you plug it into your computer and allow you want it to be a hub as well how cool would that Nora yes that would be a nice feature I guess I think that's a whole new level yeah but then every phone would show up is it as a hard drive when you plug in your your charger no but think about nightly syncs like you got all your family's phones hook up your family phones yeah that would be a neat feature I guess I'll be kind of cool I don't know if any of the devices do it I mean now that I've used one of these I'm like now would be a cool feature to have yeah next level yeah yeah you've gotta take a really quick break folks when we come back I'm going to be showing you an app that allows you to create app like browser windows on a modern Linux system stick around these days we're surrounded by things like Chromebooks Pyne book pros and and devices I mean the Chromebook is the perfect example of a device that utilizes the Internet as an app infrastructure right so I think about things like like my Google Drive and Google Docs and Google sheets and and and how those are very fast becoming my applications for doing things like document editing mm-hmm I don't install Microsoft Office anymore now right I use in my browser my Google Docs that's how I do it you even Microsoft like word and all that you can they've got online database like Outlook has gone into the cloud is like a browser-based thing but so these are all things that they used to be applications on our computer and now they're progressively becoming more and more cloud driven and that means they are accessible through your web browser but there's kind of like that old-school feel about having the native app on your computer having you know to do it in your web browser feels like you're going on a website to do it in the app feels like you're opening a program and and and there's less screen real estate that's wasted to things like the address bar yeah yeah bookmarks and that kind of rhyme example QuickBooks Online perfect I use that for an organization that I'm and it's funny because I have it installed on the computer yeah but then I can also login and and use it online on my personal computer looks exactly the same runs exactly this yeah but even psychologically within my head I'm like I would rather use the app right cuz that's the app it's a web browser and you've got the address bar and everything else so there have been applications and and browsers themselves have things like app mode and and abilities to create a bit more of a native feel to websites right so that they feel more like native apps but there's it's it's never really been solidified as a standard so what rises up and then fizzles away like Firefox used to have a great mechanism for doing this for creating an app kind of window for your for your browser sessions but it got discontinued so then it just fizzled out but peppermint OS has done something incredible with a tool that they call ice and ice is so what they call this is SSB which is a site-specific browser but the interface is really unique in that it it is specifically it's not a web browser that allows you to save an icon to your desktop that simply opens that website every time you double-click on it no it's it creates launchers on your Linux computer that look like the they look like a native application it repairs all of that browser stuff around the edges and everything else oh very cool but they've made it very very simple but I'm not using peppermint okay I'm actually using Linux Mint and on Linux Mint which is a debian derivative it's also it's based on Ubuntu and this will go for Ubuntu what what I want to show you is for any Debian based distro so that's Debian obviously we've been to mint linux mint so i'm on linux mint 19 and it's it's fine for me to do those thing this on any of those distros okay so i'm gonna jump into my web browser my current one which is google chrome and I'm gonna jump over to now observe this URL that I'm gonna type in here peppermint OS dot-com slash guide slash ice and when I bring that up here we go an introduction to site specific browsers they've got a great example there with Oh with the pixel editor which is a web based image editor but by using ice it looks like a native app on the computer really does how sweet is that the interface is stellar but because I'm not on peppermint OS it doesn't it's not available or come on my distro right however peppermint OS is open source right it's debian based if you've got a debian based machine you're able to install the things that they have open sourced and compiled for their distro on my distro so here I am on Linux Mint let's see if this is going to work for us so we're gonna grab the source from not the source but a binary packages from Launchpad dotnet slash tilde peppermint OS / plus archive slash Lubuntu slash ice - dev slash + packages and this takes us to the packages folder for the ice development from the pepper mint OS team and you see the latest version at the time of this broadcast is version 6.0 7.0 point 7 I should say so I'm gonna click on that and let's take a look at what we have here we've got packages and builds here's a build for amd64 so because I am on a 64-bit Intel processor I'm okay to click on that and download the build theirs the Debian package there and here it comes I'm gonna keep that file and then I'm gonna click on it presumably dpkg is gonna try to launch it and ask me what I want to do what is this web app integration for peppermint ice front end blah blah blah install package kind of love the way Linux makes installers these days that's so much easier than the default where you used to have to log into terminal yeah compiling from source I mean you can do that so maybe you're not on AMD 64 and you need to compile all right so that's done what's changed close everything out nothing's changed so I'm gonna click on here and I'm gonna type in ice and lo and behold there's an application now on my computer called ice and just like that I've got my simple what is it called SSB is a site-specific browser they call it a simple site-specific browser manager ok so it's this easy to create launchers and when I say a launcher I'm talking you know how onerous it can be to add things to like your internet category here let's say we want to turn YouTube into an app so let's call this YouTube and the URL is HTTP colon slash slash youtube.com and we're on the menu I'm actually not gonna put it in Internet even though it's a website I'm gonna put it in multimedia ooh wow what do I want the icon to look like I'm gonna try this use site fav icon I have yet to see that work it doesn't seem to work so what I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to click on my browser and I'm going to type YouTube icon I can jump into images I'm gonna click on tools I'm going to click on color I'm gonna choose transparent then I'm gonna grab a transparent YouTube icon that doesn't have a background I'm going to save that to my computer I'm going to throw that into pictures I'm going to make a folder called icons and save it there done now I have a file that quickly so go into my home into where did I put it pictures where's pictures there it is okay icons YouTube alright so now I've chosen the YouTube icon there we go notice it will support chrome chromium Vivaldi or Firefox so that's the back end it's going to use then it also so I'm gonna choose chrome because that's my browser okay it's detected that I also have Firefox on here but I don't use it create an SSB with an isolated browser profile that means that within this app if you will you are not going to it's not going to share the session with your real browser so I've logged into YouTube in Chrome if I don't have that checked it will also it will be logged in in the app so it's almost like an incognito mode a sort of but it will no it's more like its own profile okay so you can log into your youtube profile but it will only be logged in there so then similar so by contrast in chrome you will not be logged in right okay clear you can choose and and feel free to play with that setting see what what way you want it to be so I'm gonna say yes I want this to be an isolated browser with Chrome and I'm gonna go apply well again it doesn't seem to have done anything but if I click on my Linux Mint menu and I go into sound and video I now see a button called YouTube no way that garnet these things let's uncheck these things just because it does see because remember it's created a new profile right so I'm gonna say okay and now I'm gonna close that just because now that I've done that I want to show you from scratch now that I've turned off those things so sound in video YouTube it's not gonna ask me those things again okay so YouTube is now its own window its own app it's it's going to behave very very much like an app but it's using Chrome as its background as its backend right so if you find that chrome performs better than Firefox choose chrome if you find it's the use firefox right if you want to remove one of those launchers from your menu so say I want to remove YouTube I can actually go to remove tab in ice highlight it and click on remove and that will actually get it get rid of it you can do as many of these as you want if you want to add like a category-5 TV let's say maybe you want to do the live category 5 live so let's do that let's go live cat 5 TV so then whenever and you'll probably want our Icona if for the sake of the speed of tonight's demonstration I'm not going to do that right now but you already saw how to do that okay so category 5 live is under sound and video there it is up there again turn these things off oh I put like a underscore or something but it's still working so so now I've got a launcher for category 5 when we're live so when we're live boom there we go Wow Inception right that's super super easy well is that so it is super super easy really quick works really well it's effective and it's supported it's open source and it's available on any Debian distro that with a DB file it's already compiled for amd64 and I think you'll find other compiles there as well if you dig through right so check that out it's called ice and from the folks who bring us peppermint OS thank you very good thank you for that that's a great tool great yeah another thing you may want to add to your launchers is the category 5 TV news room yes yes yeah immediately in fact and now double click on it cuz it's time here's what's coming up in the category 5 TV newsroom Microsoft no longer sees PlayStation maker Sony and Nintendo is the biggest competition for its Xbox pot and you won't believe who they see as their biggest threat an artist trick Google into thinking that they were met there were major traffic jams by pulling a wagon filled with smartphones down empty streets arm is getting edgy with two new processor designs which bring swimline AI workloads to smart speakers and other Internet of Things devices and windows trust an abandoned driver code lets ransomware burrow deep into targeted machine stick around the full details are coming up later in the show this is the category 5.2 the newsroom covering the leak stop texting with a slight linux bias I'm Sasha Rickman joined this week by Jeff Weston and Robbie Ferguson some quick honourable mentions this week a hacker crew managed to temporarily take control of Facebook's official Twitter account the irony in a tweet posted on February 7th at 3:50 p.m. on the official app Facebook Twitter feed the attacker posted hi we are our mine well even Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter they then went on to advertise their services saying to contact them in order to quote improve your account security unquote our mind did not say how they got into the social networks Twitter account but no self-respecting hacker could would ever take pass up the opportunity to blast Facebook's security practices according to a draft research paper from the astronomers who are analyzing it a mysterious radio signal from space that was first detected in Canada appears to repeat at regular 16 day intervals the you the unusual signal which has been traced back to a spiral galaxy roughly 500 million light-years from Earth is known as a fast radio bursts aka FRB it has been fascinating astronomers since Canada's chime telescope first detected it in 2018 scientists have discovered hundreds of seemingly random one-off FRBS over the last decade but only a handful of them have been found to repeat now here's the thing this particular signal is not only repeating but it appears to be sent out at regular intervals the signal starts and let me just say this is not sci-fi this is really reality the signal starts every sixteen point three five days it lasts four or days and then fall silent for 12 days before starting up again according to the paper that is a recurring schedule the number of births within each four day blast varied each time according to 409 days worth of data that was compiled by chime the study authors say in their abstract quote our results suggest a mechanism for periodic modulation and disfavor models invoking purely sporadic processes in other words and this is a not a quote so the quote is over but in other words the signal is not repeating at random okay so they say that the source may be flickering at regular intervals or some other factor might be interrupting the signal blasts in a consistent pattern orbits come to mind for me like that could be part of it for sure but if their findings are confirmed the discovery would be another first in the early study of F R bees which have only been known to science for a relatively short period of time called the ultimate arm powered Nass Helios 64 is accepting pre-orders discounted for the first 500 Helios 64 is a full fledged linux powered Nath solution that offers built-in features that you will not find in any other product at this price point it supports up to 80 terabytes of data storage in five hot swappable drive bays plus support for a single m dot two for applications that demand extra performance for connectivity it uses the new multi gigabit speed standard on dual land ports they offer up to 2.5 gigabits per second throughput the NASS uses an arm 64 hexa core SOC it features 4 gigabytes of RAM and a 16 gigabyte EMM for OS storage and booting now it's an ass that's basically behaving like a Linux computer so because the helio 64 is open-source once it's released we're going to begin seeing distributions created specifically for this hardware the Helios 64 was slated for release as early as next month but with factory shutdowns due to the corona virus the first shipments will be delayed an ETA update will be provided by the company once factory lines are allowed to reopen in China but we estimate it to be late spring or possibly early summer pre-orders are discounted to just are you ready for this $285 to the first 500 orders and you can place that order now at COBOL dot io let's get into the top stories we're following this week Maker Sony and Nintendo as the biggest competition for its Xbox platform Phil Spencer Microsoft's head of gaming said he now considered Amazon and Google as his top rivals because of their cloud computing infrastructure he believes their transitional rivals Nintendo and traditional rivals Nintendo and Sony are out of step with the future of gaming he said quote when you talk about Nintendo and Sony we have a ton of respect for them but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward that's not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position end quote what cloud gaming players don't need to buy a games console instead the games are run on servers and huge data centers with the footage streamed over the Internet to a TV computer smartphone or a tablet it means players don't need to buy discs or download games and software updates which can take a long time Google entered the home gaming market in 2019 with its stadia streaming service the company's vast cloud computing business means that it has the necessary infrastructure in place but critics say the lineup of games on stadia stadia is currently sparse while Amazon and Apple offer games on their app stores and Apple offers a monthly subscription they don't currently offer a cloud gaming service however Amazon also operates an enormous cloud computing business and is rumored to be developing a game service Sony has offered its PlayStation now cloud gaming service since 2014 letting gamers stream more than 700 titles to a ps4 console or PC however it currently streams games in 720p resolution by contrast Google stadia can stream its games at up to 4k resolution NVIDIA has officially launched its GeForce now streaming service after months of testing and both Sony and Microsoft have already announced that they are still working on new games consoles for home totally demonstrates the shift yeah and how things are being how technology is being provisioned I feel old I guess in the fact that my brain doesn't get it like I don't understa locked into console mind-bending yeah well we've been sold for so many years that the biggest most powerful console is going to give you the best gaming experience now we're being told oh well you can do it on your phone you can do it on this little $100 device you can do it on anything oh and then you can transition over to your computer which doesn't even have to be a good computer it can be a Chromebook yeah what I think the difference though and I mean admittedly I have not explored Google and Amazon gaming services so I can't speak from first-hand knowledge but the ability to go offline is what separates the two oh yeah yeah but but maybe that's the ideas that were never offline anymore well and sure we are but do we really but when we're at that point are it's just we're always connected Jeff but they're always connected business you're right we are always connected but dives 860 that's an assumption of necessary connectivity I like we see this with our kids all the time they play games that are not online it's downloaded and that's it like sure minecraft is a great one for kids that are younger where they're playing Minecraft it's not going online I mean you could go to realms and stuff but the difference here is yeah if you're gonna go with the cloud-based computer gaming services you're stuck to a couple things you're stuck to what they offer from the choices and the graphics and all that kind of stuff which I think again I don't know from first hand would be subpar compared to what you can pull out of say you know an Xbox one ass or you know PlayStation 5 with with their graphics I mean I can't see playing like Red Dead Redemption 2 on my phone you can't you still it's from a technological perspective everything's going cloud yes but the the quality so you're saying will it look as good so the quality is not the video the video is your my TV is 1080p so it's 1920 by 1080p regardless of how powerful my system is or not so yet for some reason if I use a first gen we versus a Playstation 4 I'm going to notice a quality difference in the pricing and ensure it's a different system and so it is apples to oranges but what I mean is the power of that more powerful system even though my TV never changed resolution it's still the same resolution the video quality is still the same right ok but it looks so much better because that one is so much more powerful so now take that and put it into a cloud server where this cloud server is still streaming 1920 by 1080 P 2 to my 1080p TV mhm and yet it has so much power yes it's a multibillion-dollar system versus my little $400 right console right so so the the the resolution is not the bottleneck now our our Internet is capable of streaming 4k video in real time with no latency right that's incredible mm-hmm so now put it back and in there that is so powerful that I can do that on my cheap device yeah and on any device and I can transition from device to device I don't have to buy anything in particular to be able to use my games and the transition is happening but the transitions going to be difficult for people like me who still like to go to the store and buy a game and you and I actually kind of and if the business you take it with you and put it on and I hesitate even buying digital copies of games like I like to have the actual game but I understand that the future is is coming up quick I'm still gonna buy a PS 5 right I'm gonna also likely play games on stadia right yeah and that's that's an interesting point I want to just reiterate what you just said which is I'm going to also play videos on stadia stadia so I don't think that we're replacing that offline phone device I think we're supplementing it and say it enhance hey now okay you can you can also when you're connected to the internet play games that you can't play when you're offline that are like high-end yeah and that's where okay maybe this is just another another platform and we all have multiple plans that's right yeah I wonder if they'll have it like now here's the latency is too high for VR here's an eye we have got to be able it's gotta be able to track you with this right now so I mean like you've brought up VR which you know totally make sense yes what about things like framerate because you said 64k that's pretty good to me yeah I hear you but you're talking about the screen resolution I mean if your internet can't keep up it's gonna impact your gameplay do you remember when we used to be like oh I'm like I'm so bad yeah like in order to go back to lagging or my car my kids gonna go yes however consider this as and I know we do need to move on to the next story but consider that the very companies that are pushing the technology shift are the same companies who are controlling the introduction of like Google's gigabit fiber to the home right right so yeah if that's the case oh you know it's gonna perform well it's like you you you just know that that's what they're driving toward and and they're not gonna build a service that's gonna fail based on that this latency is a big thing sure sure because this is internet-based it's going to be it's going to resolve the cross-platform compatibility issues it's an interesting thing though because you have to remember that this is not game streaming this is video streaming we've already proven through YouTube and through everything else that video streaming is great these days yep there's no latency on videos like like really in real time if it was real time so they've created real time video streaming service that has the interactivity of controls and control doesn't take a lot of bandwidth no so it's like it's instant as long as you don't have high pings right as long as you don't have latency on your internet connection and that's the key thing and so they'll be driving ISPs to support their codecs and you'll see an evolution in that kind of thing very cool if you've tried stadia or any other cloud-based service comment below let us know if you've been contemplating it maybe post why you haven't tried it you know what's holding you up artist Simon wacker noticed something unusual at a made a demonstration in Berlin Google Maps showed that there was a massive traffic jam even though there were zero cars on the road soon enough wicked realize that it was the mass of people or specifically their smartphones that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street and then he decided to do it himself where Kurt says quote the question was if it might be possible to generate something like this in a much simpler way I don't need the people I just need their smart phones end quote so he borrowed phones from friends and rental companies until he had acquired 99 devices which he piled into a little red wagon the plan was simple over the course of a day a worker would walk up and down a given Street mostly at random towing his smartphone packed wagon behind him the effect wasn't instantaneous it took Google Maps about an hour to catch up but eventually inevitably record said that his wagon would create a huge long red line in the app indicating that a traffic had slowed to a crawl even though there wasn't any traffic at all he had effectively tricked the system into thinking a series of large buses was crawling back and forth Google said in a statement quote traffic data in Google Maps is refreshed continuously thanks to information from a variety of sources including aggregated and anonymized the data from people who have location services turned on and contributions from the Google Maps community end quote they note that while it had figured out how to distinguish between cars and motorcycles it does not yet have any way to filter for a wecord set up Weikart says quote what I'm really interested in generally is the connection between technology and society and the impact of technology how it shapes us end quote the hack is getting attention not only because it's fun but also serves as a necessary reminder that the system's people take for granted involve inputs and outputs and that they themselves are sometimes both it shows how simple it is to be it's how simple it is to fool a product in which people place a trim Bendis amounts of trust how this interesting there's a lot of fun but I love how the artist has found the spin to say hey maybe we're trusting the technology a little too much that yeah so much so that anyone looking at their app or using their GPS that's powered by Google services yes is avoiding those areas based on his little experiment right so when when I had first heard this story I thought to myself okay so four people are in a car like if you're carpooling and you're stuck in a slow section of the highway is it gonna show up way busier on the highway than it actually is it's completely yeah I I personally use Waze which is owned by Google it it's yeah it's I think it's the exact same well no there's some enhanced features that Google Maps doesn't he'll differently yeah but what I like about Waze is is that it is user input unlike a lot of Google Maps that is drawn by anonymous unit user data and things happening in the backend so ways builds off Google Maps but then you can add your individual components into it but I have at times how to phone call or text or something come in where it's like I need to respond to this so I'll pull over on the side of the road do the thing that I need to do and all sudden I get an alert on my phone we're detecting a slowdown oh you know are you in traffic how heavy is the traffic and I'm like pulled over and so I'll say no and move on this is this is odd Jeff is not texting while driving this is character for you but what what I could have done is gone yes heavy traffic sure traffic's flowing beside me well so I mean if there is that user element so I've never fully trusted the information I see on those services because I know that there is that user input data right actually today on my way to the studio I always use Google Maps I even though I know how to get here I always use it I like I like to be told what to do but Google told me to take the highway and I looked at the highway and I thought ah that's a dead stop and Google was pretty mad at me like it kept trying to correct me back to the highway but I was like I am taking the main road was it just that one spot and then it was fine after yeah there's one spot on the highway right now okay so this this opens up something though interesting about and I know we need to move to the next story but about proximity how specific is location-based services on the phone because like my kids play pokemon go yeah so when they're at home if they move from one side of the living room to the next their character moves with them yeah but when I'm sitting in the car I'm getting a bigger blip on the map and so I don't know if it can update as quick to my precise location it's probably lulling you into a false sense of like anonymity it knows exactly where you it know exactly where you're parked so then Google have not built something into the programming that it watches for the collection of devices and it goes there are 99 within this box that's not actual I think they will know okay we have got to take a quick break more of this week's top tech stories are coming up don't go anywhere welcome back urn has announced the Evo's view 55 and the cortex-m 55 for edge devices bringing an AI neural network accelerator to futures smart speakers light bulbs fridges and other IOT devices the more powerful of the two known as the cortex-m 55 is a general microcontroller grade cpu blueprint well the other names ethos yu55 is essentially an AI accelerator the cortex-m 55 is based on arms helium technology the ethos u 55 on the other hand is a novel architecture forearm and has been described as a micro neural processing unit or micro NPU for short both processors are available now to license and are intended to be used together the m55 running application code the u55 doing all the neural network mathematics in fast Hardware the senior director of the IOT and embedded team at arm says quote the micro NPU cannot be used on its own it needs to be paired with a CPU like the cortex m55 together the system delivers 480 times the performance compared to previous cortex-m generations working on their own end quote we expect to see chips using these blueprints early next year awesome I can't believe this is real life but neural processing units are now I know heart of an SOC like this is so it's just signed by to my what exactly an eighties mind like I remember when which Star Trek was it where they use the neuro packs what are they called oh my gosh one of the Star Trek's was an enterprise maybe where there's like Oh to have like telepresence yeah within the ship and like they would blow out and they'd have to replace them and they're like these gel pack things and I'm like that would never happen I think it was Star Trek I understand that what I remember watching that I think I'm Star Trek Enterprise and I was like there's no way we're gonna have that kind of advanced technology it's not possible this is like 15 20 years ago and now I'm watching stuff like this coming where it's like neuro networks I'm like oh my goodness every year there's a new possibility and I never would have expected this this is yeah yeah like so we're talking like the next gen of yes AI which is so crazy that these little chips can now process teraflops worth of information like it's I don't know what it really is but it's like ridiculous amounts of data having to do with AI right so that so the next thing is that the you know coders will be able to make thinking devices so those smart speakers with this and with this technology will be smarter the fact that there are two separate things like I'm surprised that well you have to have a CPU you have to have the ability to run traditional code yeah otherwise you wouldn't be able to like you wouldn't be able to as a human interact with it there has to be a layer for humans to be able to access the NPU yeah hmm otherwise it just blow our minds how quickly before this would be adapted for phones and Technology in phones right but I mean at this level I don't know like because that could change mobile computing sure it's gonna change a lot of sauce but the idea is that it's getting faster smaller yeah and more integrated that's the way technology goes and so we're seeing a massive shift in how data is processed because we're specifically looking toward AI not far in machine learning Arvest they're little pluses attackers behind one of the world's most more destructive pieces of ransomware have found a new way to defeat defenses that that might otherwise prevent the attack from Incred encrypting data installing a buggy driver first and then hacking it to burrow deeper into the targeted computer the ransomware in this case is Robin Hood known for taking down the city of Baltimore networks and systems in Greenville North Carolina Robin Hood can easily encrypt sensitive files once a vulnerability has allowed the malware to gain a toehold for networks that are better fortified the ransomware ax has a harder time breaking in now Robin Hood has found a way to defeat these defenses in two recent attacks researchers from security firm Sophos said the ransomware has used its access to a targeted machine to install a driver from taiwan-based motherboard manufacturer gigabyte that has a known vulnerability in it it's the same vulnerability that led to gigabyte officials discontinuing the use of the driver but since it contains gigabytes cryptographic signature the Windows operating system trusts it and allows it it allows it to run in the highly sensitive Windows kernel region of the OS without question whisks a benign but buggy driver installed Robin Hood then exploited the vulnerability to gain the ability to read and write to virtually any memory region chosen by the attacker the Robin Hood exploit changed a single bite to disable the windows requirement that drivers be signed with that Robin Hood installed its own unsigned driver that used its highly privileged kernel access to kill processes and files belonging to endpoint security products the advanced status of the driver gave it greater ability than other techniques to ensure that the targeted processes are permanently stopped there are other windows trusted drivers with known vulnerabilities that could be used in the same way of gigabytes drivers these include sign drivers from VirtualBox novel cpu-z and asus and while the gigabyte driver may be the first known instance of this type of hack it is it very well may not be the last and points to a need for Microsoft to reassess the way their certificate revocation procedures hmm that's tough mm-hmm because the the part of me wants to say Oh we'll just revoke the certificate anytime there's an exploit but remember that then that would nullify everybody's drivers right so this is all mole I mean as I'm hearing it this is like a new wave of Trojan attacks so to speak yeah that's what it feels like like you're coming in through yeah trusted source to get access is that not the basic principle of behind it or is it a whole different wave just feels like so they're using it as an elevated privilege tactic so they're using a driver that windows trusts because of the signature being valid so it's not a fake driver it's not like a malware it is a legitimate driver but it has a bug in it mm-hmm that caused it to be recalled basically but the Windows operating system no matter what version you're running still trusts the Installer for that driver because of the certificate that is applied to it and so the hackers are using that to then be able to elevate their privileges and do whatever the heck they want and that's the scary thing because how do you stop that how can you possibly stop that I think it comes down to where's your first line of defense I think the only thing you have to that you can look at is how did they get in in the first place was it a phishing scam was it somebody clicked on an email that had some file list malware that allowed somebody to run something resident in their computer is it that you have Remote Desktop turned on on one of your computers on your network and that's really easy to hack now I don't know how certificates work just because I haven't delved into that but does each certificate in each driver have its own like certificate identifier no the driver doesn't have its own certificate but the company that manufactures the driver does so that certificate says yes to Microsoft this is a gigabyte driver provided by gigabyte because it contains the certificate that proves that this is a legitimate driver from gigabyte so what if the certificate system changed in such a way that you have your your main certificate say for gigabyte but then you have your sub certificates for each driver roll out so that it identifies this drivers this subset yeah developer I feel like that's your you're giving me nightmares right now Jeff okay I like where you're going but it just sounds like a logistical nightmare as far as managing those certificates like it could just be a nightmare I think maybe some kind of an aristocrat is able to identify maybe it's a checksum that identifies known faulty drivers or deprecated drivers so that Windows could say yes this is a valid certificate however gigabyte has marked this certificate or this installer as bad it's got to be some kind of an identifier yeah that's the answer go wonderful big thanks to really Nash and our community of viewers for submitting stories to us this week thanks for watching the category-five TV newsroom don't forget to Like and subscribe for all your tech news with a slightly mixed bias and if you appreciate what we do become a patron at patreon.com slash newsroom from the category-five TV newsroom I'm Dasha Rickman and I'm Robbie Ferguson thanks for being here everybody that is all the time that we have I hope you have had fun a good week for you and we look forward to seeing you again