LINUX Unplugged - Episode 82: Ubuntu MATE Gets Legit | LUP 82

Episode Date: March 4, 2015

We round out our SCALE13x coverage with a few more exclusive interviews, then get an update on the fast growing Ubuntu MATE project.Plus a look back at Gnome 1.0’s release, Firefox OS on a pocket watch, the great wearable debate & much more!

You see Valve has a new VR headset? Yeah. Yeah, yawn. VR is dead. It was never living. Ouch. Alright, well... I can envision a day when we have a VR headset and my wife is sat there

like in some stupid jewel popping game or something in 3D on the sofa and we never speak to each other anymore because she's got this fucking stupid or maybe it's the other way around and it's me i don't know yeah i don't know though i felt that way too and then i got an oculus and i changed my mind yeah the thing about vr is i can remember going down to piccadilly circus in like 1992 1993 when i was a student and put in this you know 15 pound headset on my head

and paying five quid to romp around in some line art 3d world and it was kind of interesting and kind of impressive for the day but ultimately yeah just something yeah but now yeah but now you could have one in your house, right? So that's one big difference. The opportunity cost of you playing with it is you picking it up and putting it on your head, right? Yeah. The hardware will be lighter and will fit your head better

despite you having a massive head. All true. All true. Going to torpedo you in a minute, but keep going. Go on, keep making a big target for yourself. There is also the fact that you can now get immersed in games like well let's pick an easy target minecraft where you can spend six hours yeah minecraft yeah big targets getting bigger and bigger it's easier

to shoot go on then go on then shoot me. What's wrong with sitting there playing Minecraft for six hours? The VR today is sexier hardware and sexier graphics, but it's the same shit we were doing 20 years ago. It hasn't actually moved the needle. Right, but it wasn't. It's just the same stuff. 20 years ago, it was the Nintendo Virtual Boy. That was shit. No, no, no.

I'm talking about the stuff you could stroll into and use. But think about it. What's different about VR now? The graphics are better. The headsets are lighter. The resolution is higher. But it's the same experience that they're trying to sell us that we were looking at 20 years ago.

Just a bit better. Right, and they were ahead of their time back then. They were way ahead of their time back then. Well, yeah, but why aren't we now? Why aren't we thinking why aren't we 20 years ahead of the time now? Why haven't we got things that are pushing the envelope that

are a bit shit and a bit rubbish because we haven't got the hardware and the equipment to deliver on what we want to do 20 years from now. Just improving on what we were already doing 20 years ago. Rubbish. By the end of next year, by the end of 2016, so we'll get the first gen ones out,

first gen being Oculus, second gen being Valve. We'll get these ones out of the way this year. Next year, you'll go on Alibaba and be able to buy cheap commodity VR headsets. Super cheap. I mean, come on. you gonna what are you gonna do with it well by then there'll be shit loads of games in steam because valve are bringing this to market yeah a shit load of shit games is what i envisage is what it's going to look like 18 months from now right but i can sit on my sofa and i can be immersed in a game and my kids can be watching tv well whatever game it could be minecraft you can't say that shit

20 million nine-year-olds can't be wrong well i'll tell you what popey when i've played it i'll let you know whether i think it's shit or not oh you haven't played it yet no never right i'm gonna categorically dismiss your opinion apparently it's like lego but i actually do lego in real life your fingers hurt and my i've been playing minecraft all day and my fingers don't hurt well okay so i've spent the weekend helping to build a 20 foot tall rocket out of 330 000 pieces of lego right how can minecraft compete with that uh because i'm gonna write that as shit well what i've built millions of people could come by and and see my server and drop by and help and contribute yours is a photo on a on a dead social network google plus that that nobody's ever gonna see

yeah but then again the whole of north hampshire community is engaged in building this absolutely epic rocket out of Lego which is the real world and it's real 3D and everything and the definition you wouldn't believe the quality of the graphics it's like it might be analog but it's really good can you change can you change the theme can you change the skin yeah yeah we're doing at the moment in red white and blue but you know you could do it in just black and white or you could do it in puce, cyan and yellow if you really wanted to. But you'd have to rebuild it. You couldn't just press a button and make it look different. Yeah, but think about it.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to tip over a 20-foot rocket built out of 330,000 bricks of Lego? I mean, just imagine the destruction. Have you ever wondered what it's like to blow up a house with TNT? I mean, that is just as much fun. No, no, no. That hasn't crossed my mind. That's happened. You're not as deranged as I thought you were, Wimpy. You really are. I'm disappointed. What about the Microsoft HoloLens, where they're going to overlay over your environment? Now,

come on, that is kind of useful because you just like take something simple like you're taking a part of pc and you open up the case and maybe all of a sudden you could have outlays of like here's all the tickets ever assigned to this pc here's your company inventory information about it this video card stuff like that hololens maybe that's real so so what you're describing there is augmented reality i believe that's the buzzword is that right yeah wow you sound like an old man wimpy all right hey well i am an old man i've got gray hairs and everything um i think augmented reality has got far more mileage than vr frankly now you know see in

microsoft's world they also have the ability so i think in anything that's going to be successful today you got to have a whole ecosystem you got ecosystem. You've got to have app partners like Netflix. You're going to have to have – they have Skype. They have an app store. They have universal applications that people write for Windows 10, and the phones also work on HoloLens somehow. I mean, so they even have the ecosystem to back it up. I think when it comes to augmented reality, it's easier to do as well, honestly. So not the full integrated thing, but actually just the basic level of, you know,

you have something that identifies the product that you're looking at in a store. Yeah, speaking of Minecraft, here's Minecraft in your living room using HoloLens. I don't think this is ever going to happen. Microsoft has never been able to pull this kind of thing off, and this isn't really going to happen. This is the Surface table all over again. Yeah. It's not going to happen. It's the Surface.

Exactly. This is the table. This is the table all over again. It's the Surface. Exactly. This is the table. This is the table all over again. Or there's going to be the three leading ones, like, as I said, Microsoft, Valve, and Facebook.

And then there'll be loads of cheap and cheerful knockoff Chinese ones next year. I guarantee it. And open source is where in this? Yeah, and what are you actually going to do with these things that's that's the other thing i just don't see what the purpose is so so i imagine that i would be able to see a 3d render of chris's studio and i'm sat here at home with my goggles on while i'm listening to him doing you're describing the internet when it was sold to us in 1994 right now.

That's true. Right, this is a Unix system, I know this. You know, it is exactly, it's 3D, and I want 3D and I want to be able to, while Chris is talking, I want to be able to turn around. We were all told we were going to be working around this virtual cyberspace back in the mid-90s. Sun had some great demos, didn't they?

Remember the Sun Microsystem demos? Do it up. You know what, Chris? I actually worked at Sun Microsystem and helped create some of those demos back in the day. Those are good! I wanted to live in that virtual world. I'd never have to leave my house. I'd go to the mall,

and at malls, online stores weren't websites. They were represented as virtual reality first person stores that you were going to walk into and think how how out of date was that because look back what people were trying to create was a 3d representation of a shop that you would walk around in the same inefficient manner that you walk around a real shop to do your shopping. It was so backward thinking. The Second Life game is as close to that as possible.

Yeah. Yeah, well, it's how we approach everything when we bring it into a new era. You know, we kind of put like all the old way of looking at things out, and then as new people come along, they shake that stuff up. I think the two industries that are going to push this are the same two industries that are going to push this. Oh, come on, Opie. Go and get your credit card out.

Tell us what it is you subscribe to. The two things that you buy are... Games and porn. There we go. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that honestly, still feeling a little nostalgic. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. So we had, last week, we had a show that was pre-done for us because we were taking some time off during the beard apocalypse and during the scale coverage,

which we're going to do a little bit more of in today's episode. A couple of interviews. One that I put back in the rotation based on a request from an audience member because it's for a really great cause. And one that really blew me away. I didn't expect to ever feature an interview on the Linux Action Shore, Linux Unplugged from this company, but Noah got it. And we found out they use a lot more Linux than we expected.

And then also there's a really in-depth discussion with an Ubuntu representative at the Ubuntu booth. So we'll play those coming up in the show a little bit. And then also, after all of that, I'm going to pick Wimpy's ear on all of the developments going on with the Ubuntu Mate project, some of their news, and also just maybe any mate updates in general and some other stuff.

So, Matt, we've got a lot of ground to cover. Good stuff. We've got to get down to business. So I thought first there's just a couple of, like, speaking of being nostalgic, there's just a couple of things I wanted to touch on. First one, before we get into the main show, I don't know if this makes you feel old or what. On this day, in 1999, March 3rd, 2015. Yeah, it's March.

Guys, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes, it's March. GNOME 1.0 was released on March 3rd, 1999. Wow. Slash.headline goes as follows, or blurb. GNOME 1.0 is now released for download.

Please pursue the press release and then download it via a convenient FTP mirror. And then they also say, and I forgot about this extension, and then they have this update the next day. Forgot to plug my own program. If you've installed GNOME and want scrolling slash.headlines in your panel,

check under Applet's Amusement slash app. Wow. Do you remember the slash dot headlines in your panel? Man. I was reading them in between because I had to stock my compound for Y2K and all that.

I was busy with all that sort of stuff. That year was the busy year. All right. Let's bring in the Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, hello. Hey, guys. Good evening.

Anybody in here old enough to actually remember the release of GNOME 1.0? I'm not going to say if I was or not. I remember. Wimpy as. Yeah, I am old enough. And also, dare I say it, that it was much easier to compile KDE back then, so I was a KDE user back in those days. Oh, wow.

Good times, good times. You know what it makes me think of? It makes me think of KDE as well, because that was actually a hardcore KDE user back in those days. So it actually made me think of the same thing. All right, so in the pre-show, which if you're listening on the download, will probably be featured in the post-show. How about that for a little time travel? We got into a big discussion about smartwatches and wearables.

It's the big thing right now. You know, next week's the Apple Watch event, and Pebbles got their Kickstarter going right now, which I think I'm totally going to back, and Poby just backed during the pre-show. But nobody's been talking about what the Firefox OS is doing watch-wise. So I found this article over at Linux Gizmos. Pocket watch.

A pocket watch that runs Firefox OS. Screw putting it on your wrist. Check this thing out with its slick, sexy wood style. It's got a Japanese-style wood that's beautiful, and it has a camera built in right to it. It's got a Japanese-style wood that's beautiful, and it has a camera built in right to it. It's got a metal ring around the front, and you can hold it kind of like a smooth pebble. It's a disc shape.

It fits in the palm of one's hand, and the round screen is fairly small, but it appears to be probably larger than most Android Wear devices, like the Moto 360. Look at that. What do you think of that? I don't know. You know, I almost want to say I'm skeptical. No, it actually sounds pretty cool.

It does sound pretty cool. It's one of those things I'd want to actually try before I could really give a proper judgment. But it sounds pretty cool. So, yeah, I don't know. A little skeptical? Yeah, I am very skeptical. I just... Does everybody have to be doing this?

Really? Like, can we all... Do we all have to be doing this? Can some of us just focus on one thing and just do one thing? Right. That would be nice. Don't ask Popey,

because apparently Ubuntu can't. Oh, I'm just kidding. Now. Just kidding. You know, your guys' pre-show got me all riled up. I'm all fired up now. It's like they were really going at it. Now I'm all ready to go.

Which kind of, while I'm at it, I'll take just a quick shot at Wimpy. Just a real quick one. Wimpy, I've got to give a thumbs down to the Amazon Fire TV. Thumbs down. I mean, I wanted to love a Linux running rig like no other. But in my estimation, for the money, the Roku 3 is the much better buy. It is. So I heard you hint that you were not impressed with my recommendation on Unplugged, I think.

Uh-huh. I think so. Maybe it's a geographical thing because I think you're more spoiled in the U.S. with online media services. I'll give you a basic – here's a basic bar. First of all, there's no Jupyter Broadcast now. Right. There's that. There's a dedicated Roku app.

Now, you could sideload it. Now, see, a big part of my complaints are if you sideload most of the apps, it solves most of the problems. But I just find the Amazon app selection to be extremely limited. It's like I have three apps maybe that I like, four apps. Yeah. I sideload almost everything. I have a really great GUI sideloader. So I think this is where the difference is. So you have to sideload things to get what you would consider normal service,

You have to sideload things to get what you would consider normal service, whereas in the UK, what we would consider a complete service is available through the App Store, which is where it differs from the Roku. I also feel like the Roku kind of has a much more freewheeling, open community where anyone can contribute. That's certainly true. Yeah, and so I like that aspect of it a bit, too. I don't know. I just, I mean, they're both, at the end of the day, I'm trying not to say that anymore, but at the end of the day, they both will play

my Plex files. You both can sideload Cody on them. Or I don't know about the Roku, but you can sideload Cody on the Fire, so that's good. I mean, that gives it a major plus in my book. But the thing I really like about the Roku is but you can sideload Cody on the fire, so that's good. I mean, that gives it a major plus in my book. But the thing I really like about the Roku is it does feel – it's a little bit faster to get just to what I want. There's less stuff they're trying to sell me, like all the Prime stuff. It's all up in my face.

And then also there's a Jupyter Broadcasting app, which is really nice. I would go so far – because I have both. I have the stick for the Amazon situation, but it's the same experience. I do feel like Amazon's experience is very much like a gigantic ad being blasted in my face the entire time. No question about that. Side loading just to get it to work even remotely usable. That being said, when you actually get into something like Plex or whatnot, Roku feels painfully dated. Painfully dated.

I mean, just really bad. Although that is changing. Plex has actually got a new thing coming out. Yeah, they do. There is a Plex update coming for the Roku, but it's still not going to be as nice as the Fire. And, you know, the Netflix app on the Fire TV supports multiple profiles, but on the Roku it doesn't.

No, it does now. It does now. Yeah, it does now. Not in the UK, it doesn't. Oh. It doesn't? Okay. Yeah, so anyways, Firefox is working on a thing. So maybe, you know, we're playing a bit of catch-up in our five-year experience. Goodness, yeah, I almost would say VPN is your friend, I think, if you live in a region where you're not services that we have here.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, you might even get different firmwares, for all I know, which has even different menus. Either way, that was just my roundabout way to say that they're both good devices. They both run Linux, of course, but I wasn't crazy impressed with Fire TV. I'm not crazy impressed with Firefox's attempt here. I mean, I'm totally willing to give it a go. Maybe it's not even the Mozilla project. So I literally just found this before the show just to talk to you guys about it.

I kind of, like, if I step back and thought about it being possible you know you could think about maybe putting a gsm connection in this thing you know if there was a way if there was a way to really kind of uh make this thing connected so it was a true true legitimate computer that would be that would be kind of interesting then you might have my attention uh but i just i don't think you could put the horsepower or the battery life in it to pull it off yet. Maybe one day. Maybe you've got to start somewhere, right, guys?

Speaking of starting somewhere, I'll tell you where I'm going to start right now. Let's start with our first sponsor this week, and that's Ting. Now, this is a great time to move to Ting because Ting is rolling out the open beta to their GSM network. And you remember our buddy Chase from HowToLinux, and he's actually been on Linux Unplugged a couple times. He is setting up a pretty sophisticated security system. And he said, you know what? You know what's something you've never mentioned but a great use for Ting?

It's remote systems that need internet connectivity but don't use a lot of data. They send off reports or they do a nightly upload like once a night or a weekly thing. He said Ting's perfect for this. He says, I looked around and I said I could buy some prepaid things. I had different routes to go. But Ting's flat $6 a month and just pay for what you use. And I don't need any voicemail. And he has a thing you can send SMS text messages and then do image uploads and video uploads.

And so he just, when he needs to send a text message a couple of times a month, he pays for the text, and it's like nothing. It's like nothing. It's so great. And there's no early termination fee if he wants to turn it off because there's no contract. It's a really cool service. And, in fact, if you go over to linux.ting.com,

you can take advantage of the Linux Unplugged discount and support the Linux Unplugged podcast. It's a great way to say, hey, I heard about this on Unplugged and I really appreciate you helping them stay on the air. So go to linux.ting.com for $25 off your first device and then you can go grab this Ting GSM card and this is cool because

it's pre-cut to multiple different sizes. So you grab this one thing and it fits in your various different devices. Ting also just added the Moto G for $91. This is unbelievable. This is an unbelievable phone for $91, and you get it with no contract. It's unlocked.

It's yours. $6. Go to linux.ting.com. Here's another ride you could go. These Novotel MiFi devices. This is like internet in your pocket. $6 for this MiFi hotspot. It's tri-band LTE.

You get the signal coverage right there. This is a great way to go. And then, of course, if you want to spend just a little bit more, just a few dollars more, you can get the Netgear with the OLED screen, and it gives you the touch interface and all that kind of stuff. They've also now got the Kyocera Hydro Vibe, which is a slick phone, as well as the LG G3, the Nexus 5, the iPhones, the Galaxy Tab, and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus unlocked and all yours, including the HTC M8. Go to linux.ting.com. Try out their savings calculator. Give it a try.

See what you might save. You'd be surprised. Put your actual usage in there. And then also check out the Ting blog. Like right now they're talking about like their customer service demands right now with their new GSM rollout but also some changes in the Sprint network which they're dealing

with and updating customers on their blog. And you can read more about it. Ting's really great about updating their customers. It's a great way to go because they have an incredible control panel. No hold customer service. You only pay for what you use. Unlocked phones. It's a really great way to go. One of the things that I constantly, constantly mention

because it's just so damn useful is every phone just has hotspot and tethering. It's just part of the plan. They don't try to trick you into some sort of gimmicky plan where you have to pay more. You just turn it on and have it. And I think about with the GSM network now coming online, for those of us who have devices like,

you know, many of the multi-SIM devices, but the Nexus 5 is one of them, you now have the advantage to switch between GSM or CDMA. Now you're going to have to figure out how to do that and make sure you can manage it in the Tink Control Panel, and they're going to have more information on that soon. You can switch between whichever area has the better service, and then turn on the hotspot

or tethering, and you're just paying for the data usage. That's pretty slick. Linux.ting.com. Go check them out, and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Guys are kicking butt. Keep up the good work. Okay, so then there was one more thing I wanted to

discuss with the panel because there's a piece of software we've talked a lot about on the Linux Unplugged show and I think a fair amount of us on the show have used it for at least different periods of time, if not extensively. BitTorrent Sync. New version announced today.

They're rolling out BitTorrent Sync Pro, or just call it Sync if you're hip. $40 a year okay this is they say as they bring the beta to an end they're exiting beta as Sync 2.0 comes out, BitTorrent is

introducing a business focused pro tier starting at $39.99 per year per user, not per device but per user, to date there have been over 10 million downloads of the alpha and beta versions of Sync, generating 145 petabytes of data, according to the VP of Product Management,

Eric Pounds, in an interview with TechCrunch. The Pro product's $40 charge, they say, is competitive when you compare it to Microsoft's $90 for OneDrive and $99 for Dropbox. Here's the really big catch, though.

The free edition, if you don't pay the $40 per year for BitTorrent Sync now, the free edition, limited to 10 folders. Unlimited in size in those 10 folders. So that means at the root level, only 10 folders. So the other features of Pro include control over folder permissions and ownership. You can change it any time. Once you link all personal devices together via private ID, all your shared folders are available wherever you need them.

Consume on-demand view contents of very large folders. Consume only the content you need and preserve the storage capacity, which is useful, especially, say, on mobile devices. That is very useful. I use Dropbox. It's one of the reasons I still use Dropbox very heavily, is selective sync. And also, adding priority, you get technical support,

like priority technical support for the pro version. Limited to 10 folders now. If you update to the new BitTorrent Sync 2.0, they just came out today. Boy, you know, I'm actually, for now, I'm okay with it, but I think in the future, I might have to start looking at alternatives. I don't know. I feel I don't know.

I'm not real happy with it. I know that. I sure am getting sick of the beta label being used as an excuse for making bait and switches okay, because here's what I feel like what happened is here everybody go out and implement our technology help us prove it out make sure we bang on the code but also get

hooked on our infrastructure yeah and then oh by the way now thanks it's no longer beta so now we get to charge oh but we're also going to remove functionality right because see the problem is I have like I have a folder for all the unfiltered supporter shows,

notes, all the notes for all the unfiltered shows. Well, I share that folder out directly. So when you subscribe to that folder, you get every show's notes in one folder. Well, right now, that's hundreds of folders, right? So I would have to restructure the way I do all my syncs. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work at all for me. This totally breaks the way I use BitTorrent sync.

Well, I also think it proves a good argument for other alternatives at some point. Something that's open source that you know is not likely to do that to you in the future. Go ahead, Wendy've i've been testing alternatives as a uh fallback plan for bt sync because this has been rumored for for some months now yeah and the only solution i found and this is for my personal synchronization of files that can rival bt sync in

terms of volume of files and size of files is c file s e a f i l e right c c file.com which is an open source solution um i i can't get sync thing to scale up to what I'm trying to do, but C file does. But I don't know, Chris, whether it's going to work for your use case or not. So you'll have to give it a try and see how it works for you. It's such a shame because being able to just give out a key and then anybody just has that key and now it's syncing is – even though that big long key is scary looking the in in actual practice that is so elegant no links needed no names nothing to search right yeah i don't even have to like go like give them an email address to the bit torrent sync program to send them an invite link like i could just

instant message them a hash key and it's just so nice i missed that i'm gonna miss that so much so that's the that's the and that's the major problem with sync thing that's the major major problem with sync thing is i just could not individually add every single person to my swarm or whatever and sync thing even if you've got you know four or five laptops you know shared between your family then it gets in a pickle just managing that few number of devices. So, yeah, sync thing really doesn't work so well once you get beyond a few devices. The other nice thing about the way the BitTorrent sync works

is it's essentially a CDN. Because as a few people grab the file, they then seed the rest of the other files. So I really like the way it distributes large media files. So I wonder if I bought the Pro, which is pretty easy to justify as a business expense, if everyone else subscribing would have to have Pro or if they just get the advantage of me having Pro

so I can have more than 10 folders. Because that's fine. I'll pay $40 for that. I think that's an important differentiator because even if it's in fact that they don't have to have Pro now, what's to say six months down the road they're like, hey, you know, we could really increase our revenue. That's the problem. Pro on both ends to get to that many folders. Yeah, that's the question. Like on Dropbox, right?

If you have a really big folder, both people on both ends of the Dropbox have to have more storage on their account. on both ends of the Dropbox have to have more storage on their account. So I guess historically, if we look at this based on their pattern of behavior, we know that they have no problem shafting you for a buck. So it may be good to look into some alternatives now before it becomes even more of an issue later. Man, you're making me sad, dude. I know. Giving you a sad.

You are. You are giving me a sad. Because really, this works so well for what I need. Because it doesn't require any centralized cloud storage. It distributes these large files. Each person acts as a seeder. It's just the publishing process. This would be true with most sync things.

But the publishing process is I drop things in a folder. So I think going forward, because realistically, pulling the plug on it just out of spite right now is just not realistic. Going forward, keep things as they're going now. Do what you've got to do to keep it up. But in the background, begin looking at alternatives so that if you have to pull the trigger, you literally just basically switch the tracks versus going, oh my god. Derek Devlin, you had something you wanted to jump in with? Yes, pretty much i was just wanted to point out that own cloud even though it's uh currently not supporting and they didn't

even set up as in the roadmap of setting let's say the clients can actually go and work as a central place as well the client itself but they have federated on cloud um hosting so you could have two own clouds communicating together communicating together. So I'm not sure how feasible would it be on your But then I would have to have everybody in the unfilter audience that wants to participate with an on-cloud instance. It's like

the same way you have the client, though. So if you instead think of it as if you had it locally installed instead of in a server, right? And that's the federation you have. Well, that's pretty much what you already have, which is a client right now. And Heaven's Revenge, you wanted to mention

Peer.io? Yes, I found this little programmer application called Peer.io a few days ago. It is kind of a personalized vault that you use. There's no limitations on file size. It's got a built-in messenger.

It's actually built from the same person who makes Minilock and CryptoCat. Everything is encrypted and you only have the key. It is interesting because it's only for you. And I know that you can send messages to people and I can send you a link to the file. send messages to people and I can send you a link to the file. It's not much of a synchronization sort of rsync or bittorrent sync type thing, which kind of link all of your things together, but you do, you can send files around and there is no limitation. It's limited by your upstream bandwidth or downstream bandwidth and whoever you send the messages to. It's more of a completely...

Seems like it'd be a good collaborative, like, little back-and-forth... Families use it. I've been trying to use it with a few, like, one friend, but it's not very... I can't exactly give a full recommendation based on only using it with one person. Okay. I might play around with it a bit. It looks interesting. And there's a Chrome extension you can add.

It's native, which can be on Mac, Windows, or any Chrome that you want. So it's quite multi-platform. Peerio.com. And I'll have a link in the show notes. Peerio.com. Okay. Wimpy, you wanted to jump in on the own cloud syncing point. Yeah, I've tried own cloud through version 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Or is it 8, 7? What's that now? 8, is that the new one? Yeah, and it's great for syncing contacts and calendar and stuff like that. I've had good success in using it for that. But I've never really got it to work well with large volumes of file synchronization. And I've really tried. I really want that to work because everyone keeps raving about it. And I don't think that I can be so unusual because it's just me and some data that I need to shunt around the place. But I just can't get it to work for me reliably.

And the thing is, is it sort of fails silently. So you end up with all of your devices out of sync and then you have to sort of unpick the tangle by hand. So, yeah. Yeah, Noah's experienced quite a few problems with the file sync as well. BitTorrent sync has been a rock for me, even more so than BitDropbox has been.

Yeah, yeah. It's been super reliable for me, and that's why I'm so disappointed that, you know, we'd hoped that it might become open source, but no, they've gone the other way. Yeah, that's part of what feels like the bait and switch is they were kind of, you know, they danced around that, oh, maybe, yeah, we'll think about it.

And now it feels like that was sort of a mislead. Feels a little bad, a little yucky. You know what feels good? Linux Fest Northwest. And the reason why I'm plugging this is because I want to meet you. I want to say hi to you or say hi to you again if you made it before. Come say hi to Matt, too. He'll be there.

You're going to make it, right, Matt? Oh, absolutely. I'm sure by then we'll have a few episodes of How to Linux out, so people will have all kinds of things to talk to you about. And we'll also have as much of the crew coming as possible, so it would be great to see you. And we are in the process this week kind of like really locking in some plans. So if you'd like to be involved somehow or something to contribute, email Angela at jupiterbroadcasting.com and let her know.

And it's April 25th and 26th, Bellingham, Washington, LinuxFest Northwest 2015. We should be considered a sponsor. You know, I'm going to talk to them. I plug them like every week. Yeah, you should. I think so. And I want to see you guys there because I'm going to be walking around a bit more. Will there be swag?

You know, actually, so this is something we are talking about. We're talking about doing a limited run LinuxFest Northwest shirt because one of the things we want to do is offer reimbursement for some of the people that have to travel. Because if you think about it, like Chris Moore is on the East Coast. Of course, Q5 and Rotten Corpse are on the East, right? So to bring them in, and Alan as well, although Alan, I suspect, will probably volunteer to fund himself, but I would offer to fund his trip as well,

all on the East to bring them over to LinuxFest Northwest and then to put them up in a room for three days or whatever it's going to be. Yeah, that's going to be a nightmare expense-wise. We'll probably run a limited run LinuxFest Northwest shirt to try to

not only give you guys something unique for LinuxFest that we can have there, which means we've got to start it soon, but to also help raise funds to cover some of those costs. I don't think it would cover even half of it, but maybe we could. Who knows? So we'll probably have more about that soon, and I'll let you know. Well, and speaking of doing something soon regarding LinuxFest Northwest, I've been going for many years.

I'm actually originally from Bellingham, so I'm going to give you all some advice. When it comes to hotels and motels, start reserving immediately. Don't wait. Get in early because it will fill up so fast and you will be left with the places and the the motels you might not want to stay in i'll just leave it at that there uh there are some really good ones too but you get to go to them fast uh bellingham is um it's a good taste of washington in an interesting way it's a little eclectic it's a little hippie but it's that's washington right yeah okay well speaking of hippie, but that's Washington, right?

Yeah. Okay. Well, speaking of hippie, the two areas you want to pay attention to, Meridian and Fairhaven. That's pretty much where you want your hotels to appear. You want to avoid Samish, generally speaking. That's pretty hit and miss, but yeah. Also, if you are a beer fan, some of the best beer in the Pacific Northwest is going to be there. A lot of great breweries up there. Also, some folks at the Fest usually every year who are brewers that use Linux.

We've featured them before. They'll be there. I mean, really good stuff. Traditionally, also, they've had an after party at the Spark Museum, which is a really great radio museum. Really, really nice. And they have a Tesla coil there that they fire off, and there's food. It's a really unique thing. Billiam's all about the food and the brew, sure yeah so it's a good trip it's and and linux fest northwest

i i think you know having been around and seen a lot of them i think this is got to be in one of the top three fests uh in the country so well it's cool to watch how it's matured over the years because i mean you remember the old ones i mean it's just very very different i've been going since not quite, but since nearly high school, a little bit after high school, but quite. I've been going a really long time. I've been going since the first person I started going with was my high school, one of my high school computer teacher.

Oh, my gosh. That's crazy. Yeah. Now, that was a couple of years after I was out of high school. So I've been going so long that I've been going. Angela used to go with me to help me take notes, and she'd be there for a while when she was pregnant, and she'd be like trying to sit in those seats, you know, being Paul Prego, helping me take notes. Oh, man.

That's wild. It really has come into it. It's something else. Something else that's kind of unique that they do, and it's perfect because it's the Pacific Northwest, is they have a college there that has some chef courses. And they do a big barbecue. Now, you can leave. We often leave because we usually have a large crew.

But at the college campus, they're barbecuing up salmon and ribs and stuff like that. And the salmon is really good stuff. So it's a good opportunity to get some Pacific Northwest barbecued salmon. And they have these big barbecue grills they cook them on. And there's enough local folks of us that we're usually able to provide transportation for most everyone. Yeah, that's a pretty good time. So that will be April 25th and 26th. You can find out more at linuxfestnorthwest.org.

They're not paying me to plug it. I just really would like to see you guys. It's the biggest one we do in the year because it's here in our backyard and we don't have to fly all the gear everywhere so we can go a little bigger. That's right. Hopefully we'll have – maybe by Linux Action Show on Sunday we'll have the Fess swag stuff ready. All right. So we got to – speaking of Fess, we got to talk – we got a couple of more interviews to play from scale and then we got to talk about Matei because, I mean, damn. to talk about Mate because I mean, damn.

I never would have expected so much exciting things to be happening with a desktop based on the known Toon paradigm. If you would have asked me a year ago where some of the most interesting things were happening, I wasn't going to guess that. So we're also going to talk to Wimpy about some of that stuff

because it's crazy exciting. First, I'm going to talk about DigitalOcean. Head over to DigitalOcean.com. Right over to DigitalOcean.com right now. DigitalOcean.com Yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to make them a jingle. We have a... Oh my. We do have a promo code, though. That I do have. D-O unplugged. One word, D-O unplugged.

Go over there and use that. Just keep that in mind while I tell you about DigitalOcean. Now you'll see why you want a promo code. So DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider, and they're dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up your own cloud server. And it's legit. You're going to get root access to this thing. You get to watch it boot all the way up.

You get this great console to manage it. And it's a free BSD or a Linux rig. Let's be honest. It's going to be a Linux rig, right? You're not an animal. It's a Linux rig, and it's going to rock, and it's super fast. I would recommend you just go spin one up over at DigitalOcean. Use the promo code DLUnplugged

you'll get a $10 credit and just kind of play around with that. The package management, the speed of it and just have some fun. You'll find too you'll get started in less than a minute. Probably about 55 seconds or less. Sometimes it's as low as 26 seconds. I've gotten some crazy tweets. And the pricing plans start at only $5

per month. That'll get you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. A terabyte for $5? Yeah, I, one of the things I do for a living is I distribute content. I can't, when I look at that, when I say $5, I think, maybe I'll just buy like six or seven of these. Right. You know, just, actually, the problem the problem is, let's see, one terabyte. Yeah, that would be a lot of droplets. Okay, it wouldn't quite work out.

But you might not have that problem. One terabyte, I would imagine, is way more than enough. And if you're thinking about maybe setting up something like C file or own cloud or BitTorrent sync or sync thing, you could go pay for somebody's ridiculous amount of cloud storage, or for way less money, you could have it on your own rig up in the cloud that you control at DigitalOcean. There's a lot of opportunity there. They have one-click deployment applications too, some really great stuff.

You can do full DNS management over there. They have data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. I love that too, because if you're going to do the sync stuff, that's something to consider. And then you know you'll have that interface to manage it. And that interface that they have is so intuitive. The control panel is crazy powerful, but yet they didn't make it very complicated.

So you can get through it at a really fast pace and get everything you need, but not feel like they've removed some sort of necessary feature. Because they've just spent time to make sure you have access to all that stuff, but it's designed well. Run it all on top of Linux, which is beautiful, with these tier one data connections.

Go over there right now. Try it out. DO Unplugged. Go spin yourself up something like a ghost installation or WordPress install. There's so many possibilities. DigitalOcean.com. See what we've been talking about. Use the promo code DOUnplugged. And a big thanks to DigitalOcean.com. See what we've been talking about. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUG. And a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program.

You guys rock. Now, Matt, I love these clips that Colonel Linux, or a.k.a. Noah, got at scale because I'd never been, and I was kind of on the fence this year. It looks like I'm definitely going next year. There's some great folks I talked to. Why don't we start with the Kids on Computers initiative? This is one that a longtime viewer, EB, wrote in, and he said, you've got to feature this one because I saw it on your live event, but you didn't play it in LAS.

He says this is a really good cause, and he wanted to know more information about it. And he was right. I went back and I watched the clip, and I thought he's absolutely right. So for a good cause here's Kids on the Computer at scale 13x. So as both a father of two kids

that I desperately want them to be all involved in computers at least as much as possible and understanding the ramifications if they're not into technology and as a person who wants to see Linux implemented wherever possible. I was beyond elated to come across Stormy with the Kids on Computers project here at Scale where they do amazing things. They do amazing things.

Not only do they bring computers to kids, they essentially build their own little mini Internet to take to places that don't have access to the Internet. How are you today, Stormy? I'm great. Glad to be here at scale talking to everybody about this. Yeah, it's fun, right? So I guess my first question is, obviously, when you're dealing,

if your goal is to go out and put computers to kids that don't already have them, chances are that there's probably not a lot of money. The budget isn't real high for doing these kinds of things, right? No, they usually have no budget. So we actually either collect donated computers and install Linux and free software on them, educational software, or we apply for grants and get money to buy new computers. But the schools themselves have no money.

We do like the community to be very involved, so it's been really awesome. At some of our schools, the parents do fundraisers. They pitch in $1 or $2 a month per kid, which is a lot of money for them, and they've been able to set up computer labs, build the buildings. They had parents build the buildings to put the computer labs in. They hired computer teachers off of donations that they've gotten. So we work in communities where people are really willing to give and they participate, but there's no money there.

So can you tell me how that plays into Linux per se? I mean, why not purchase Microsoft Windows or why not purchase a bunch of Macs? So our goal is to empower kids to be able to create and to do things in the world. And so by giving them Linux and free software, things that they can learn how they work, maybe not in the beginning, but they can learn how they work and they tweak them and they can build on it, it's much more powerful than teaching them that the world is about pirated software that they have to steal from someone. Right on the head.

Right on the head. So in a lot of these places, I understand that there isn't a lot of money, and that leads to not a lot of services, and not a lot of services means there perhaps might not actually be Internet there. So tell me about the tools that you give these kids so that they can access the Internet without having access to the Internet. Yeah, so the main thing we wanted to bring was, like, the knowledge of the world and education to these kids.

So we've worked with different things like Rachel and Khan Academy, and we give them essentially on every machine for sure educational software so they can play math games or things. We give them a full offline copy of Wikipedia, usually in their native language, and always in their native language so far. And we give them a complete set of the Khan Academy videos, all the ones in their language as well. That's crazy.

So we don't have Wikipedia. We don't have access to Wikipedia. So we'll bring the Wikipedia to you. Yes, it's really amazing. They have an entire, more than what would be in a set of encyclopedias on every computer, and they can look up their info. It's cool. In one school, we were setting up the computers,

and this is in this little town in Mexico that they have. They not only don't have internet, cell phones don't work there. They're in a canyon, and they don't have any, like, landline. So they really don't have any communication. And we had three moms come in while we were working, and they sat there the entire afternoon and browsed through Wikipedia and Khan Academy. And this wasn't on the internet? No, no. Like, just in this little lab, in this little town, in this little canyon, these people played with it. That's unbelievable.

Is there a particular distribution that you use when you go to set up these computers for kids? We've played with a bunch of them, so we're not tied into any. We've tried Ubuntu, we've tried Lubuntu. At the moment, we're using Ubermix. One of the things we need is something that runs with really low memory on really old machines that's very customizable. Right. So it has to be new enough and late enough that those kids are getting a relevant experience. And at the same time, it has to be accommodating to very legacy hardware, essentially.

Yeah, it's the hardware and the amount of memory and stuff that limits us. Well, that's absolutely outstanding. If people wanted to, I assume that you guys could always use the donation or could always use a plug for your website. So if people wanted to give back, if people wanted to donate hardware, if people wanted to donate money, where could they go? They could go to www.kidsoncomputers.org. You can get involved there.

We're always looking for volunteers, whether you like working with technology or you're good at marketing or you speak another language, we've got something to do. Donations help. The money goes a long ways. Like, you know, for very little money, we can bring a donated laptop to a country and give it to someone. So donated hardware or money. We're doing a fundraiser here for Cool Hats. They were made by a local businessman in one of the communities that we work with. Yeah, and so we're selling those as a fundraiser. Alright, well outstanding. And this is a way that if you care to contribute to this project, not

only are you contributing towards Linux, not only are you contributing towards open source, but you are putting in the hands of kids that wouldn't, not only, they're not people that, you're not converting people from Windows, you are converting people from no computer at all to a Linux-based experience and that that's essentially what they are going to know you have the power to do that so i you know you know from the bottom of my heart thank

you for doing what you're doing thank you for going out to do all this is a super cool project and i'm really excited to follow you and see how things go thanks so much for stopping by and spreading the word please please come help us out we appreciate it that's a pretty neat initiative uh i i actually kind of wish i could figure out more of those things and and help direct uh more attention to them i feel like i have just some stuff i could send to these places we we should seriously one day i don't know if we'd have to have somebody that would be committed to doing the legwork but we should seriously consider one day doing a roundup of places all around the world maybe, or at least in the U.K. and the U.S. and Canada,

where people could donate equipment that would get then loaded with Linux. Like you have to, you know, stuff that would go for Linux towards Linux use and deployment. That would be really cool. Sounds awesome. Well, that was a really interesting initiative. So that's Kids on Computers, and you can check that out. So we have two more interviews to play, and this next one is a bit of a long one, and it's because there's a lot to cover.

It's the Ubuntu booth one, and I saved it just for this episode because it is kind of long, but there's so much ground. And then the one after that is the one that I never thought we'd feature an interview from on any of our shows, let alone that they were big Linux users, but it makes a lot of sense. So we'll start with the Ubuntu one first. Many times as I walk around these conferences, I find it increasingly difficult to actually find Linux. I know that sounds a little weird, but being at a Linux convention sometimes, finding the Linux isn't so easy. I especially have a special place in my heart for people that use Linux on the desktop. Now, I'm here with Nathan, and he's from Ubuntu, the community

outreach. He very much cares about seeing Linux on the desktop. Isn't that right? Yeah, it's the most important thing in the world. I agree with you. I mean, world peace and world hunger, those things don't pale in comparison to getting people to use Linux on the desktop. I think because there's so many proprietary operating systems on retail stores that that's why we don't have world peace. I agree. I agree. I think it contributes to all the problems in the world. And I think if we had desktop Linux, that would solve all of these.

So, obviously, we're here. We have some fine-looking System76 machines behind us. And, of course, the orange, which represents Ubuntu. Tell me what it is specifically that makes Ubuntu such a great desktop operating system for regular users. So we take the hardware capabilities and stability of the Linux kernel. We take the massive amount of software available for Debian, and additionally for Ubuntu. We take that, we polish it, we have a clear goal of what we want on the desktop. We have the Unity desktop interface that scales beautifully to large screens, laptops, touch

screens, phones as well. And so as we take this software with a clear, strong vision across different devices, I think that one unified vision is what helps Ubuntu be so awesome on the desktop. I see that you have the BQ there. Now, you said those aren't shipping, actually, until March, so you're kind of a special person in the U.S. to have one of those. Yes, so there were about 50 people who were Ubuntu insiders that were flown to the launch event.

I was not one of them. Stuart Langridge was, and so I sold his phone. He was actually nice enough to donate it to the booth this weekend, and Jono might donate his tomorrow, so we'll have two of these. And this is just so the Nexus 4s we have are development phones, and they run really beautifully. But there's a lot of the specs in this are kind of low, and people are really upset because they're used to really high-end Android phones performing okay.

Well, even just so optimized, this phone works beautifully, you know, just even on these specs. So we're demonstrating that today. That's outstanding. Now, how do you like the actual usability of Ubuntu on the phone? Because I installed it, and granted it was a couple months ago, but I found there were some very key features I found to be lacking. So, for example, I didn't see an email client.

So there is an email client. It's been developed by, I think they're Canonical members, but by the community. It's a port of Trello, I think. It's called Deco. Okay. And so it doesn't ship on the phone by default, but it is in the store for free. And once it's super stable, it's a little bare bones, although it's getting just to where I think it's actually a really nice client.

As that grows more mature, it'll be shipped by default. But it is in the store, and it's a really nice client. All right, there you go. And there's a little audio pop, so I'll leave it there. Boy, it was a good interview, too, but I'll pull out more clips if there's more in there maybe next week and play it, because that pop and that audio happens sometimes from the conversion of the camera clips.

Alright, so one last interview to round out our scale coverage. And this is the company I never thought we'd have an interview with on the show. And it turns out they use quite a bit of Linux. Okay, we're here at Scale 2015, Scale 13X. We're walking around, and I expect to see a lot of Linux when I go to these Linux conventions.

Sometimes the Linux isn't quite as obvious as you might think it is, and that is exactly what I found out when I came across Disney. Who doesn't love Disney? So I'm here to talk a little bit what exactly Disney does with Linux, how you guys use Linux. And for anyone that thinks that Disney is all about cartoons and animations, all of that stuff is actually powered by Linux. Correct. So we actually have Linux running in a lot of our operation environments. And one question that you actually asked me was if we had Linux running in our desktop environment.

And that is so, especially in our animation environment, they actually have fully Linux-based environment. So a lot of times individuals will sort of identify Disney as a brand and the affinity just to themselves. But the amount of technology that Disney uses to actually support its business lines is huge. And Linux is actually a very large component to that technology line, which is why we're here.

Yeah. Well, and of course, it goes without saying that the Linux community in general always appreciates people like you that build a business on the backbone of Linux that are willing to give back, that sponsor these kinds of events that come here and talk about it.

I mean, that's, you know, that... Right. From this perspective, it's about being able to go ahead and provide the community with a little bit of sort of support overall in general and letting them know what it is that we do with this line of technology and just making sure that people understand that it can go hand in hand. So we have obviously a huge brand that's out there, but a lot of it is done with amazing technology such as Linux. So the reason I brought up the desktop thing is because you walk around and you see a lot of the

presenters, they talk about Linux and they talk about building their business on Linux, but at the same time, they don't trust Linux enough to actually use it on a day-to-day basis. It might be on the servers in the backend that does that stuff, but they're not looking at it, they're not interacting with it. And what was interesting when I was speaking with you is I get the impression that there are places in Disney where when you walk into work, everything is Linux. I'd probably say in selective environments, especially in areas like animation or feature animation environment,

that is so the case. And that is just generally case by case in terms of how much Linux is used overall within each environment. So it may not be the case for all environments, but specifically, especially for our animation teams, it's a very big part of their day-to-day. That would be, yeah.

And what would really be cool is if someday those tools that you guys used, if those ever became available for purchase, that would be absolutely awesome. If somebody wanted to find out more about Disney and Disney's involvement with Linux, is there somewhere you can point them? In terms of Disney and Disney's involvement with Linux, I'd probably say in general you can go ahead and sort of check out DisneyTechnology.com

or a little bit more so I would say DisneyTechJobs.com. Through DisneyTechJobs.com, you'll actually get a really good understanding of our overall technology environment and sort of how we're able to go ahead and kind of use Linux as well as other open source technologies within our environment. And that's going to be specific to every segment and every position that we have. That's absolutely outstanding. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And as Colonel Linux points out in the chat room, they are hiring. So you could get yourself a gig at Disney, managing some Linux servers. You know, instantly my brain flashes to that song from Frozen, Let It Go. She's talking about proprietary software. Let it go let it go let it go get it get it out of here i think is uh yeah let it go because it is wasted effort yeah exactly yes nice very good

callback man very good callback uh all right well we gotta talk mate we got our mate uh don't pursue oh thanks zero luck well you know i thought if this podcasting thing didn't work out, I would. Okay, no, you don't think I could become a Disney singer? Well, there goes that plan. Get your tutu. Yeah. Guess I better stick to reading ads. And that's why our next segment is brought to you by Linux Academy.

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They have a whole bunch of new stuff coming up, so it's really a good time to become a subscriber. I'll talk about that more really soon. Mr. Wimpy, if you're still around, sir, I had a few things I wanted to pick your ears and brains about, and that is the stuff coming up for the big Ubuntu Mate project, which is now a powerhouse among distributions that is not only an official flavor of Ubuntu,

but apparently is so damn rich, is just giving out money to other open-source projects. What's going on? Well, yeah. rich is just giving out money to other open source projects what's going on well yeah powerhouse and rich is that so um i don't know where to start with that really that's a pretty big build-up i admit yeah it's awful of superlatives uh how do i follow that um yes well uh i suppose um the big news is we're now an official part of the ubuntu family which is just terrific and we're already reaping the uh benefits of being part of the official canonical uh infrastructure team and having uh and also getting consideration from you know the the wider Ubuntu group

on decisions that are being made now. So that's really great. So I'll give you an example. So today I was contacted by two of the guys that are working mostly on bringing SystemD enablement to 1504, and they wanted to make sure that Ubuntu Mate 1504 was going to play nicely with system D. And they gave me all of the tips about how I could test this and make sure it was working okay, because they want a tick in the box that Ubuntu Mate is

going to work. And so now being official, you know, we're given that kind of due diligence, and that's just terrific. Yeah, no kidding. That is really great. And plus you get also the hosting infrastructure for the repos and the ISO images? Yes, yeah. So there's a number of other benefits. So we've got access to the build server now.

So that's terrific. And more importantly, the official build infrastructure, because I'd had to sort of reverse engineer it as best as i could and i think to most people the ubuntu mate images look and feel and smell like real ubuntu but i knew where they weren't quite the real deal uh so now they really are so for example now on ubuntu mate you can now use the uh the oemEM config. So you can install a batch of machines in OEM mode and then close them up. And when you turn them on, it asks you who you are and where you are.

Does it mean at some point I would maybe be able to be like on a bare Ubuntu server type install and do app get install Ubuntu dash Mate? That's all possible now. So that all happened a couple of days ago. So if you were to download the mini ISO, for example, go really trim, you can now do a task cell install of the Ubuntu Mate desktop. So it's all fully enabled throughout the stack now. Wow, that is a big deal congratulations yeah yeah it's terrific it's been it's been a long old grind and and really the tipping point was um about a month ago i was fortunate enough to travel to montreal with work and one of the guys from canonical who I'd been working with to try and do all of the back-end build infrastructure enablement was based in Montreal.

So I met up with him and we went out for coffee and beers and went to the Montreal University and went to the Montreal Linux meetup for the evening. And we hacked away on this for sort of until about four o'clock in the morning. And that was really where it all started to sort of gather momentum and start to sort of fall into place. So yeah, CypherMox, as he's known in the IRC, he was terrific. He's really made a big difference. And there's about eight or nine people at Canonical that have really, really sort of made this happen in the last two weeks. It's been great. Now, there's also a couple other things I want to talk to you about.

Number one is you did something that I think would be really neat to see a lot of other projects too. So you have some community funds, right, to help pay for the cost of the projects. And I guess there was extra funds, and so you kind of paid it forward that's right so um one of the things that came out of the community back last year was um they wanted a community site that wasn't hosted through the social networks because you have a lot of people that are uncomfortable with signing up to Facebook and Twitter and Google and what have you so I said well I'd be perfectly happy to host it all and put it all together, but I couldn't afford to run it myself. So I started a funding campaign to just cover the costs of hosting a server.

And the money started trickling in around November time last year, and I just gave it a couple of months lead time so I knew I'd got a buffer you know so that it was comfortable but it kind of overtook itself so we're comfortably funding a rather beefy server so it's a quad core server with four gigs of ram and raid six disk and six terabytes of bandwidth per month and that's where we're hosting our discourse community, in addition to what we do in the social networks. And we're now using that to really sort of develop some of the teams in the project as well. Interesting, because I've noticed, you know,

the project's also pretty active on Google+, the Ubuntu Meta community. Yeah, it's active on Google+, also surprisingly active on Facebook as well. One of the community members started a Facebook group. I wasn't sure whether that was going to be any use or not, but I'd say that's almost as big as the Google Plus group and growing much quicker because it was some months behind. But anyway, we've had all of this money donated, which is terrific. And I've been thinking about how we can make use of it. And I'd originally been thinking of doing like, you know, code bounty, something like that. But I thought it would be better to actually identify projects that we're already making use of and sort of fund those projects. Oh, very cool. So we've got to a point now where we're not rolling in money, you know, and I'm a couple of months ahead of where we are, but we've got a little bit of surplus.

So I wanted to pick a couple of projects that we're dependent on that sort of make Ubuntu Mate what it is, that aren't part necessarily of Marte itself. And I was thinking about, well, where will I look to support? And then I got an email from Marcos Castales, who's the developer for two projects. One is GUFW, which is the front end for the uncomplicated firewall. And he's also the developer for folder colors right both of which i've integrated into mate gufw has been there since day one and folder colors i added um just a couple of weeks ago and he sent me an email that basically said um i really love the project

um uh here here's how you disable the donation links in folder colors. So it doesn't, you know, nag people. And I'm telling you this because I think the project's great and I really want to see it succeed. And I was like, well, there we go. There is the first person that we should reward. So we went through the accounts and we've donated $50 to GUFW. And we've donated $50 to GUFW, and then we've donated another $50 to Folder Colors and taken him up on his offer of disabling the donation links in the Folder Colors piece. So that was $100 we've donated this month. And also, when you download Ubuntu Mate through the ubuntumate.org website,

could you give us a download tip? It's not you have to fill it out. It's just there alongside the rest of the content. And it suggests tip us $2. If everyone who downloaded Ubuntu Mate gave us $2, it would fund the full-time development of Ubuntu Mate and also the Mate desktop. And we've had quite a few people doing that. So from that, I've been able to give $30 to the Mate desktop team this month as well.

Nice. Yeah, I really like that approach. In fact, I was wondering if maybe down the road, if maybe this might be something that takes off a little more because open source really does depend on everybody that you're building on top of and everybody that sort of is writing on top of you. And not only did I not really know about folder color, but I, by the way, love that you integrated it.

But now hearing that backstory too, that's so awesome, the way that the project worked together with you guys like that. Yeah, and I think that for a distribution, it's easier to gather donations. I mean, we talk about people wanting free software, as in free of cost, but people are so generous. We're not asking for anything we're gently encouraging them to give something but the the the money that's coming in is surprising quite frankly far far more surprising than i i i realized and and we can really do things with that um

and you know i i can't afford to make a hundred dollar donation uh as an individual but using ubuntu mate as a platform to do that that actually makes a difference to the developer of that piece of software that's it's not gonna it's not gonna pay their wages or anything you know grand like that it's it's still a small contribution but it's much more than i can make as an individual it seems sound it seems like investing in the ecosystem and uh the other thing is it's made me kind of think about how i could apply something like that here um and i don't know exactly how that would be but wouldn't it be interesting to take like if we if we had a milestone where if we reached a certain set

amount of funding uh then we would contribute a percentage to maybe production Linux software like video editors or audio editors or maybe other things like GStreamer or things like FFmpeg or VLC or something like that. It gives me a lot to think about, and I think a lot of projects could think about how they could apply it to their kind of setup and sort of reinvest in the tools that they use. a lot of projects could think about how they could apply it to, uh, to their, their kind of, uh, setup and,

and sort of reinvest in the tools that they use. Like Jupiter Broadcasting Network fricking lives and dies on FFM peg. Like if anybody deserves a buck from us, it would be at the FFM peg project. I don't even know how their funding is set up, but, and the other thing is like, I could imagine like,

so say down the road, we did something like that where we set up a goal on our, on our, uh, patreon.com slash today page where we set up a goal on our Patreon.com slash today page where we said, alright, after this milestone we're going to give back to open source every month. And then imagine, so I reach out and I start, here, FFmpeg project I would like to donate.

Well, then maybe that starts a conversation with the project and then we land a great interview too. There could be other types of benefits to it too, other than just... Yes, quite quite and now you have a dialogue with these projects right well this is it this is it and now now uh we have a relationship because now i've exchanged many emails with marcos and we've actually started talking about some spin-off projects so it actually then you know garners some involvement in the project other than what I've already seen is out there.

So this is a mechanism I'm going to try and use going forward to actually recognize the efforts that people have put into their applications and try and use it as a way to bring them into the wider Ubuntu Mato project and reward them for, you know, what they've achieved. It will be in a small way. And is your plan, as this happens, to continue to post about it? Are you going to do like an online – what's your plan there for kind of making it sort of transparent for the community? Well, yeah. So when I first tabled the idea of taking donations to pay for the community server, I set up front. And I do this quite regularly.

If there's anything that I'm not sure about, I ask the community. So it's very democratic. I put a poll out and I basically say, vote on this. How do you want things doing? So when I said I'm going to open up for donations, how do you want the finances reported? The result of that feedback was they wanted a monthly statement of accounts. So that's what I've been doing since, I think, December time. So at the end of every month, I post a detailed list of these are all of the people that donated.

This is the amount that came in. This is what the money was spent on um and how we've we've used it and i felt a little bit awkward about this last month or the month before because i spent some money on an ibook g4 that i bought off ebay because i wanted to work with one of the community members on the power pc port and i was like you know 80 quids quite a lot of money to spend on a second-hand computer. And I don't really know anything about PowerPC. But as a result, we now have PowerPC as an officially supported architecture. So I feel that that money was well spent. And certainly for those people in the Ubuntu Mate community that use PowerPC, they're super happy with that.

And I feel that, you know, that was okay. It was okay to spend that money because there was a measurable result as a result of spending that. So this month, I'm going to buy a Raspberry Pi 2, and an Odroid C1. And this is a precursor to trying to achieve ARMv7 hard float images for 1510. Very nice. And so 15, but before we get to 1510, 1504 is going to have an official PowerPC edition. It's going to have one-click compass enablement for the desktop, right? I mean, this is fancy. Yep. Yep. So some of the headline features for 1504, I've worked with the upstream Compiz team. So I've ported the integration layer to Mate in Compiz. I've also ported the compatibility plugin to Marte as well. So now in 1504, you'll see there's a proper Marte compatibility plugin.

And then I've also added detection of the Marte session for Compiz. So Compiz knows it's running under Marte, and these are the plugins, and this is the profile that it should use because this is Marte. It's not GNOME, and it's running under Marte and these are the plugins and this is the profile that it should use because this is Marte, it's not GNOME and it's not Unity. So we've got first class Compiz support. And I've spent many evenings

tweaking a sort of a default Marte Compiz profile with a sane set of defaults that give you some nice transitions and some nice effects without being too sort of in your face and over the top and uh and i've just i've just sent uh another merger proposal um i think yesterday evening which has been accepted to just tighten that up a little bit but as a result as a result of working on um on comp is i had to sign

the uh ubuntu um cla so i was invited to sign the cla yeah and i've i've read the small print very carefully and as i understand it uh every second tuesday i have to go to popey's house and wash his car yeah and every and every and every last last Thursday of the month I have to cook him dinner or something. And also I think you're also obligated to catch his chickens when they get out. Yeah. All right. But only if the day of the week ends in Hawaii. Well, everyone should be obliged to do this.

It's not just – everyone should have to. I had one more thing I wanted to talk to you about, Wimpy, and that is I'm pushing the buttons right now. I just became a patron of the project. Yeah, so talk about this a little bit. The reason I want to talk about this, too, is because I suspect that this might be

something more distributions pick up because to me it seems like a no-brainer. Of course, I'm using Patreon, and it's maybe more geared towards content creators in a sense, but people can go to patreon.com slash Ubuntu underscore Mate. And if you're already one of the patrons of our network, then your stuff's already set up. It's just really click, one-click button.

And they have 29 patrons right now making $174 a month for the distribution. And I wonder if other projects like maybe elementary OS couldn't go on something like this. How has it worked for you so far, Wimpy? Well, it's effectively the patrons that have funded the community server. So all of the setup costs and the month-to-month server hosting, but more importantly, the bandwidth costs, because Ubuntu Mate 14.04 and 14.10, which are unofficial, and therefore we're having to field the costs of delivering that for, are being downloaded between 900 times and 1,000 times a day. So that's a lot of bandwidth that we're having to fund yeah

so those those patrons are basically funding funding the distribution network so without them uh it wouldn't have happened um and i went down the patreon route because um you could do you know kickstarters and crowdfunding and you get a gob of money up front, but there's no longevity to that. You want sustainability. Yeah, so I went for, it might take longer to build up a head of steam, but I want to know month to month

that the project can support itself. The reason why I think it's actually kind of brilliant, and yes, there's Bounty Source, and there's other ways to do it, but the other thing that's kind of nice about it is it legitimately one-to-one translates to the interest in the community. So you can scale up your efforts and your investment as the community scales up their investment. And it directly corresponds. As they want more, they'll fund more and then you can afford more.

Or you can come to them and say, OK, we can do this next thing. And the milestones allow you to say, all right, once we reach this milestone, this is something the distribution can offer uh you in fact you need some new milestones in there as a matter of fact yeah i do and in fact we don't listen to me milestones are the worst part i have i have got some that i'm going to add but um you talk about you know the community want more so at the moment there's uh about four of us that are discussing some merchandise team because what we're getting quite often now is people saying that they want stickers for their computers or they want mugs and t-shirts and all of that good stuff so we're just putting together a team to try and uh and fulfill that requirement um and again there'll be a little bit of kickback, which can go into the

project, which we can then use to do, you know, the next thing and the next thing. So hopefully, it's a cycle of self sustaining that we can we can start to generate. Well, I'm looking forward to 1504. I think, I think we'll have a review when it comes out, because I think that's I mean I think already the distribution is in my estimation seems to be one that's worth watching already and that's a pretty I mean there's a lot of distributions that sort of

hover in that kind of I mean I don't mean to really put people down and it's not really the same thing but Mandriva a little bit I love Mandriva I love you guys I'm a Mand mean i love me i love my andreva i love you guys i'm a mandrake user back in the day i was a drac club member uh so i got the special repos i mean seriously i love it so honestly but i actually just just talking in terms of sheer relevancy

i just wonder well yes it'll be interesting to see what happens. So DistroWatch were refusing to list Ubuntu Mate whilst it was unofficial. And the day after we got our official status, DistroWatch put up an Ubuntu Mate page on DistroWatch. And that was a week ago. And we're at number 23 now in a week. So I know they're hinky stats, but it's an interesting barometer for interest, let's say. Yeah, yeah. There's other ways.

I don't know. I've watched this stuff for a long time. There's other ways you can gauge it. Yeah. And the thing is now it's getting difficult to follow the downloads because now we're on the official canonical infrastructure. I can't track all the downloads. So I don't know how popular 1504 is versus 1410 and, you know, 1404. So I start to lose some visibility.

There was a recent article on, was it the Register where they talked about the upcoming 1504 release? And didn't he talk about the torrent stats? Or was that somewhere else? No, it was. It was the Register article. Are you familiar with the Register? I think that's mainly in the UK. Oh, yeah.

We're familiar with it. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, yeah, the Register covered the 1404 beta releases and covered Ubuntu Mate and happened to remark that the seed ratio for Ubuntu Mate was three times that of any other flavor. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, it is. Yeah, look at the register doing a write-up on that. I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

So, yeah, we've got some good stuff planned. And the other new feature in 1504 that's probably worth mentioning is, yes, you've got compis that you can turn on with a drop-down menu. But the other thing I've been working on is the user interface switcher. Oh, yes, tell me about this. Yeah. Okay. So this was something I had the idea about because the default Marte desktop arrangement isn't how I actually use the system.

So I created a number of panel layouts that suited me and also another podcaster who has a particular requirement for how they drive their machine. And I created these and they said, what you should do is you should make a GUI so you can switch between these. So I've now made this. So effectively, you've got the Mate default arrangement.

You've got the OpenSUSE desktop arrangement as was some years ago. And then something that looks broadly like Windows XP-like. And then something that looks somewhat Mac OS X-like, and that integrates with Planck and what have you. So you can quickly switch your panel arrangement to single panel, top or bottom, with docks or not, or dual panel, and you can just cycle through them very quickly. Find one that broadly reflects how you want to run your system

and then customize it from there. But hopefully it's just something a little bit different. And the porting the Mint menu to the Mate menu and setting up the Windows thing makes it kind of feel like a Windows 7 interface, so people who want that could easily get that really quickly. Yes, I've called that theme Redmond as well in sort of a hat tip to XP.

So you know what I'm going to do? I think everybody should go check out the DistroWatch link because that's number 23 right now. I just tweeted it out right now and you can check it out. It's distrowatch.com slash Ubuntu

mate. And I think a lot of people would like to learn about this distribution because it's pretty compelling and you can hear it's got a lot of cool features coming. So go check it out. Maybe go up a little bit further in the ranks and people will check it out even more. Wimpy, that's a ton of stuff. So are you not pulling your hair out? You're doing okay? You're not about

to lose too much sleep or go insane from all the workload? No, I am working two jobs at the moment. I'm effectively doing my day job and then I'm coming home and then doing another full shift. Most nights until 1, 2 o'clock in the morning. So I am properly exhausted. I just need to get over the hump of fixing up for the 1504 stuff, hopefully be done in a week, and then it should be a nice easy cruise in through beta 2 release candidate to final. And in that period, we can start to look at the planning for 1510 and i've got some gsoc mentoring i'm planning at the moment as well wimby i tell you what you almost make me

want to switch away from arch that close too bad i could just easily install mate of course you know what honestly is i miss all of the fine touches you're doing like the color like the file color like you need to you need to like can you, can you make all that, like, a package that I could just install on Arch? Yeah, yeah. No, you're a little busy, huh? No, I probably could. It's just finding the time.

Some of it's there already, to be honest with you. Other people are maintaining some of those packages. But, yes, if I did that, then I sort of dilute the value out of Ubuntu Mate. So you have to walk that line. What I have to do is just watch everything cool you do and then just go try to rip it off on my own desktop on my own. The thing I've been working hard on is the Mate tweak

and Mate menu. I've made those distro independent so those were forked from the mint utilities and now they don't carry any specifics for either ubuntu debian or mint so those tools could be used on on any distro now so technically you could get all of that one-click goodiness for Compiz on Arch. And a couple of weekends ago, I did update the Compiz packages for Arch Linux for Mate users as well, because I maintain those there as well. Good man. So, lots coming. PowerPC support, eventually ARM support, 154 and even 1510 in the works.

Officially a flavor now of Ubuntu and the Patreon and the DistroWatch submission. We have links to all that stuff in the show notes. Thank you very much for taking such a keen interest in the project. It's been great to watch it, Wimpy. It's been a lot of fun. Well, it runs all my computers. I just signed up on the Patreon because that's selfish interest for me. I need this to work. It's generally a great product, too. That's the great part is to watch it. I just signed up on the Patreon because that's selfish interest for me. I need this to work. It's generally a great product too. That's the great part is to watch it.

I want to contribute to this. And what you get is the warm, fuzzy feeling that if there's any money left over, we'll find a good candidate that's worthy of some funding that directly benefits Ubuntu Marte. some funding that directly benefits Ubuntu Mate. And every month now, I plan to support an open source project through our funding campaign. That's really cool. You keep it up as long as you can, because that's

a pretty neat deal. Alright, well, we'll probably wrap it up there. So, did you know the Linux Unplugged show is live? All these people we just talked to, they're not recorded. Well, they're recorded now that you're hearing them. But when I'm talking to them, they're live. And you could talk to them. You could be one of the people we're talking to, they're not recorded. Well, they're recorded now that you're hearing them. But when I'm talking to them, they're live. And you could talk to them. You could be one of the people we're talking to.

Oh, my gosh. Go over to jblive.tv. We do this show on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone. And don't forget, if you can't be here live but you still want to contribute because you know you'll love us, we do have that subreddit over at linuxactionshow.reddit.com we pull stuff in from there and we'd love to have they also have the irc you can participate in and you can always help out financially too at our patreon patreon.com slash today the money raised there goes to all of the network and matt you know i think with linux fest around the horizon i've

already started thinking about spring now in summer i'm thinking about doing an episode of the show around the barbecue. Nice. I should probably just focus on next week, though, to tell you the truth. It's okay to have long-term goals, but your short-term ones can't lose focus. Right. Well, Matt, have a great week, and I'll talk to you next week. In fact, maybe if you swing your timing just right, when you come down here on Monday for your super secret mission, I'll have some barbecue.

There's a possibility. Ooh, sounds good. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unpl some barbecue. There's a possibility. Ooh, sounds good. Yeah, yeah. All right, everybody, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next week, and also we'll see you on Sunday. We're going to do our production

under Linux episode finally, so tune in for that. Thanks so much. See you next week. so so so so so so so so

so so so so so so so so

so so so so so so so so so so so so oh dang it i was just uh i was just reviewing uh poppy's contract and apparently we didn't dedicate enough time to ubuntu touch poppy how's the ubuntu uh touch project going in the bq stuff

all good i'm sorry i'm contractually not allowed to talk about that now oh wow okay fine try to give you a chance to give us you gotta wash his truck if you want this to work out Chris that's what's coming down to no it's fine oh it's good huh trying to give a brother a chance

it's fine hey jbtitles.com there was a photo that went past on Google+, one of the people at the Meizu stand. The Meizu MX4 is one of the devices we're shipping soon, and there was a couple of Samsung executives hanging around the booth looking at the Meizu phone running Ubuntu, which was nice. Yeah, I want that phone.

If Tizen ever doesn't work out for them, we'll be there for them with proper limits., you know. Yeah, I want that phone. You know, if Tizen ever doesn't work out for them, you know, we'll be there for them with proper limits. There you go. The next time we're doing this show, next week, the Apple Watch is going to be announced. Like, whatever features it has are going to be established, and the price and shipping date is going to be announced. And I don't know.

Like, here I am, like, before, and I'm still, like, thinking, I'm still not, I don't feel like they've sold me on why I want an Apple Watch. Although I don't feel like Pebble ever sold me on why I want a Pebble, and Google never sold me on why I want an Android Wear, exactly. I'm still kind of in this area where. is the fact that they're touting it as being more hackable and having a connector on the back that you could attach the watch to or attach the strap to the watch. The bands. So the bands can have different sensors. Well, it says it can be bands.

Yeah, the bands could have sensors or there could be more batteries. Or you could just take the watch completely off your wrist and have that as the control unit for something else. Oh, my gosh. And have all kinds of other stuff underneath it. It doesn't have to be on your wrist.mo yeah exactly but the thing that the thing that kills android and ios obviously i'm speaking from a perspective of someone who doesn't actually use android or ios anymore i'm screwed i can't use either of those i have to buy into the apple ecosystem to buy to use an

uh the iwatch and i have to buy into the android ecosystem to use the iWatch, and I have to buy into the Android ecosystem in order to use an Android Wear watch. So I'm boned either way. I can't use either of them. Whereas Pebble seems to be a bit more open. They're completely open source. I think the future of the watch is on having something that just receives dummy information,

has a framework for displaying UI, and the backend is always elsewhere. And this is for the stores, an open protocol. You just enter in the story and you get options on the watch. This is what Pebble's doing. You can push a Pebble app with their API

and write no code. And people can choose to install it. And it's amazing. But still, you install it. Like what I really am saying is... You install it to the watch. You subscribe to it. That's exactly what I'm'm saying you don't do anymore

that the app exists actually on the store computer yes it's on the pebble store you just you just say go and then it starts showing the information there's no choice or you know there's no setup for it you just oh i want this to show up someone's already put it together for me you just say okay show it on my watch i got over the watch thing when I was like 10, when I got a Timex data link and I started programming it with a flashing screen, the flashing monitor, and programming it that way. Even though there was only programs that I could put

and download to the phone via the sensor, like the light sensor onto it, it was still pretty cool. And I kind of got over that way back then then the watches now aren't really attractive to me so so pebble have clearly got like first mover advantage because they were kind of first out the gate in this space and with their ink displays and the battery life they've been able to offer something that is similar to the watch-wearing experience that you would already have had, you know, because these other smartwatches... They're trying too hard.

Yeah, you're lucky if you get through a full day. It's not about firmware updates. It's about whether your watch will still tell the time at 9 o'clock at night. So I don't know if you guys have seen this Sony E-Ink watch. It's not a smart watch per se in the same way that you would call it, but it takes basic Bluetooth stuff, and the

amazing thing is, the whole thing is an E-Ink display, like the band itself. And when you can go in and say, I want this design band, and you can just go and say, I want this design band, and I want the watch at the top to look like this and it's like, you can do that.

I thought it was so cool. I was like, that is the watch I want. And what is it running? It doesn't run anything. It's kind of a dumb watch where it takes in some basic input. Yeah. Oh my god, this Pebble thing is cheap. How did it get $9?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pebble's got to figure it out. Pebble really does have to figure it out. I think I am on record saying that that is the business model to go on the show here. Okay, I've just backed it. Really? Are you going to get a watch as a result?

Do you go for the steel? Yeah, you're just drunk on hot cross buns, you poopy. Poopy, you should go for the steel while you still can. That's cross buns you poppy poppy you should go for the steel while you still can it's more posh that's fine i'm much more expensive it's so what are they i haven't actually looked at this only the steel does the cool bands oh really so they have 68 000 backers $10 million. So they're definitely funded. Is this the right Kickstarter? Which one do I look at? Yeah, you're on it.

Yeah, you're on it. I think it's more than that now, isn't it? They hit their goal in like an hour and a half. Or is that the original? How do I know I'm not looking at the original? Oh, yeah. Okay. It's called Pebble Time. Awesome. No compromises.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So here we go. This is pretty cool. All right. I'm going to play just a little bit of it. Hey, Kickstarter. My name is Eric. I'm the founder of pebble you may remember pebble from our first campaign when a bunch of you supported our quest to build the world's first real smartwatch i do remember that okay so oh okay so you right when you jump in all the price levels are uh your choice of one pebble time steel, which includes your choice of color, includes a leather strap, an extra metal strap. Oh, I really want to do that.

Well, I don't know. See, this seems like it's hard for me to gauge right now which is the wearable watch to go behind. But it seems like pebble is the one, doesn't it? At least for us, maybe. Yeah. I think I want to back it, you guys. I have a really cool completely online

development environment for it, too. It's sweet. As long as you're on the same network as your phone, you can just write code and push it right to your watch. I think I want to back it. Should I back it? And then I could... Oh, oh gosh i want one now oh there's still we're we're at a tipping point chris there's there's there's two ways this is going to go when apple come out with their apple watch that will set the um direction for the wearables market if apple make a success out of it everyone else will jump onto

that ship firmly and if apple's wearables flop it will be uh a novelty that never really gains any traction and it will be the likes of pebble that own that space and it will be a relatively small market so where do you want to be do you want to be either way pebble sounds like a safe bet yeah i think so i think i think well that you know like i said they've got first mover advantage they're far more far further along than the others in actually delivering a wearable device you know something that you can wear all day long that works one of the better things about the Pebble is that I've had mine for over a year now and I think only two or three people

have ever been like, oh, is that a smartwatch? It just blends in. I don't think that these other devices are going to do that. The thing Apple has is giant gobs of money. And that's something that Pebble never has,

which is going to be hard to compete with. And maybe they get the hacker mentality that people like us will play with it, but Apple will have premium stores and lots of news airtime on all the mainstream channels as a result of them being Apple. But here is the trick. It's open source, right right mostly so at least so that means that any low-end store that looks at the high fees to do partnership with apple that still wants a phone a phone sorry a watch is probably going to do with the pebbles especially if you're naked so so the thing is the thing is is uh all

the the hackability and open source stuff is great for the likes of us that are discussing this now but if i say to my wife i'm going to get one of these smart watches and she's going to say to me why and i'm like well it can tell me all of the things that's on my phone and the time she's going to say well why don't you just look at your phone yeah and and this is this and this is how i feel about it that's the truth see the problem is these watches in overall have been marketed as a device for a consumer to buy i really think that this is our devices for a store to offer to a customer, to a member, like that or a cheap one that is

subsidized by these businesses. But for what? What are you going to use it for? I haven't seen a compelling use case yet. I use my Pandora every day. It replaces your membership card on the store. It gives you more information, and to the store,

they win more precise information about your actual buying habit. But I've got NFC in my mobile phone. I already carry that everywhere. Why can't I do those things with my mobile phone? It's great as a remote, without having to take your phone out of your pocket. But my phone is out of my pocket if I'm sitting down, so why is that compelling? So how big is your phone?

That's my, like everyone that I see has these huge, ginormous tablets, I'm going to call them. Yeah, yeah. I had a Note 2, and today I've just replaced it with a Nexus 6. So I have the Firefox West Flame as my main phone and it's already to the point where it's like, this is kind of large

and I don't want anything bigger than this and yet I can't buy anything smaller than that now. So it's honestly one of those things. You could buy an Ubuntu phone that's about the same size as the Firefox Flame I actually have both in my hand right now

the Firefox Flame and the BQ phone and they are pretty much identical size Pebble is nice when I get an email notification and my phone's in the other room but I can hear it and I can see the email and know that it's not worth getting up for or when I want to skip a song that's playing and I don't want to unlock my phone and deal with getting into the app to skip a song.

Okay. So the song skipping, if, if you put yourself in an environment where that's more convenient, uh, because it's on your wrist, like for example, if you're cycling, for example, and you've got your phone in a backpack and you've got your headphones in and your watches on your wrist and you're cycling along, you can be measuring your distance and velocity and all of that good stuff. And you can skip tracks. I can see a use case for a smartwatch, but you have to kind of think really hard and you can't see that most people are going to get value out of a device like that. If you're an upper class businessman and you're sitting in a really important meeting and your phone's on silent but your wish is giving you a buzz that your wife is calling you. Upper class businessman doesn't know how to use his phone or his computer and therefore he won't know how to use his smartwatch either.

Middle class. You said the right way of saying end of conversation would be look at your watch. Now when you look at your watch you're going to think you're looking at Facebook. It's true. I do sometimes. That's the other thing. You guys are thinking about

why I as a consumer will acquire a watch. That's why I'm saying the future of these watches is not on you acquiring it it's in the companies that want the information from you will give it to you and then you're going to start using some of these uh leverage i don't understand this approach because the watch doesn't collect any data oh so this is the beauty of it once you are inside the store usually they have patterns on oh no okay what things you decided to pay on the cash,

right, on the cashier, right, with your membership card for you to get the discount. That's why they apply the discounts. Okay, what about extra information on a product based on you closing your watch to the product? But the watch doesn't do any sort of communication like that. Well, I guess, are you envisioning, like, these stores, like, the watches will get so cheap, these stores will have, like, a branded watch they give you as sort of communication like that. Well, I guess, are you envisioning like these stores, like the watches will get so cheap, these stores will have like a branded watch they give you as part of the membership program? That, or they will collaborate in a pool of companies, and they will have a system. And so you have a single membership card, and when you are inside of one specific store,

you get the system of that specific store. When you're inside of another store, you get the specific of that other store, and then they can share the cost of producing these watches. Hmm.