Tech Over Tea - #41 The Long Awaited Episode - feat Distrotube

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

I've wanted to do this episode for a long time, today's guest is the man, the myth, the legend Distrotube, sadly he forgot to turn his audio server on so it doesn't as great as it should but even so I feel like it's a really good episode. ==========Guest Links========== Website: https://www.distrotube.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DistroTube Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 Mastodon: https://mastodon.technology/@distrotube ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Welcome to episode... Okay, maybe I should have started later. We're not restarting. That doesn't happen in this show. Welcome to episode 41 of TechMT. I'm, as always, your host, Brodie Robinson. And today's guest is someone who I've been, not trying, just wanting to bring on for a while. I knew he'd come on as soon as I asked him. Welcome to the show, DistroTube. How's it going, Brody?

Oh, not too bad. I've been saying for the past three or four months that I was like, oh, I'm going to go ask DT to come onto the show, because back when I had, what, like a thousand or so subs, you were like, oh yeah, do you want to do a collab at some point? And nothing really ever happened with that, because I didn't have any ideas for it, but I knew that once I asked you, you would actually come on the show. Oh, yeah. I'm easy to get on camera.

I've done, I mean I've appeared on a bunch of other channels. Typically when people ask me, I've got no problem with it. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, anybody that wants to sit around and just chat you know whether it be about linux computers or just life in general you know these are always fun yeah for sure that's part of the reason i started the podcast anyway i just i find it fun to chat with people and it gives me an excuse to talk to people that i otherwise wouldn't really get a chance to talk to yeah so it's like, well, today it was a little hectic. I know we were just starting recording, but I had actually just finished editing and publishing a video like not even an hour ago. I was actually trying to get something done as quick as I could because I knew we had scheduled this appointment and I never miss an appointment.

Because I knew we had scheduled this appointment. And I never miss an appointment. But it was starting to run kind of late. So I'm glad I got what I wanted. To make you feel slightly better about it, it's 9 in the morning here. So I have the entire day ahead of me. Oh, good. Good.

Yeah, my day started pretty early. I actually got up and went to the gym this morning. Worked out. Then came and made a video for my channel now I'm doing this with you and once this is done I'm probably gonna drink a couple of beers and go to bed. I did notice you're wearing that Anytime Fitness shirt a few videos back. Oh yeah. I didn't realize that was like a massive chain that came out of Australia because there's Anytime Fitness here as well I thought it was just an Australian thing. No they're all over the us okay yeah i've been a member of any

time for for about five years about five years ago i started working out in a serious way because i was pretty out of shape and i had some issues with my back i've said had some serious back issues that i was actually worried that when i signed up and started working out i wouldn't even be able to work out but oddly enough it actually straightened things out my back you know kind of it worked out all the kinks just lifting weights and just doing something physical and i've just stuck with it yeah i've been kind of lazy with working out i was working out for a while when i had um back when i was my old place we had like a home gym um but since i moved from there i've kind of been lazy about it i should be getting back into running but i just keep putting it off i find some

reason to just not do it and then a couple months what's my hair doing then a couple of months pass and i'm still not working out we can get into your hair later because people still no matter how many times you say it you're still bald yeah they can see the hairline i know they can see the hairline but um yeah i've just been putting off working out i did used to kind of be like pretty unfit back in high school but it was nothing like major major bad it's just if i left it for a while it would have eventually become a problem that i would really have to deal with no yeah my problem was mainly just uh you know especially younger doing physical things working offshore on the oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico and doing things with my back that I shouldn't have, picking up on things you shouldn't have, not the correct way.

And it just got to the point where it was hard to just get out of bed. Or, you know, it was hard to just put on a pair of pants because your back is hurting all the time. It was a pain just sitting up in a chair. And it was just amazing. Really, just a few weeks after starting to work out three, four times a week, things were completely different. And that was what shocked me. Because I thought it was going to be one of those things,

you don't really want to do it. Nobody has the time to work out. But if it was, hey, sit around and paint all the time or go to the gym work out a little bit yeah i'm gonna keep up with that well everyone has some time that they're they're wasting but i don't realize they're wasting like maybe you'll i don't know go on youtube watch some videos maybe you'll sit down watch something on tv there's always a bit of extra time unless Unless you're someone like Elon Musk who runs three companies. Everyone has a bit of time where they can go and work out. It's just getting yourself to actually go and do it.

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people spend so much time on Facebook and playing video games. And, you know, things that are really not that productive. And if they could just take a fraction of that time, you don't have to spend hours every day at the gym. If you could spend three days a week for an hour each day at the gym, you would be amazed at how much better you feel. And you probably might even lose some weight,

but at the very least, you probably won't gain any weight. That's another thing Mmm, yeah walking walking 30 minutes a day. Yeah And so it especially when people locked inside all the time it's just good to get outside and get yourself a bit of sunlight Yes, you know that was the problem here in February We had our lockdown here for two months. And I mentioned I started working out about five years ago, going all the time. And then for two months, I had to stop.

And I was actually concerned after two months. Well, you don't get in the habit of not going. And the very first day they opened everything back up, I was back in the gym and it was like i never missed a beat so it's just gonna be like you're a bit stiffer than you were before it's just but once you get past that easy yeah yeah don't try to go as hard as you're going before because then you're gonna put yourself out of the gym for a while i've done that a couple of times you can hurt yourself i've seen guys get injured doing things they shouldn't have. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's usually what happens when I start running again. I'll push myself a bit more. I've run for like six or so months in blocks, and every time I stop because I do something stupid and hurt myself. I used to run on a regular basis. You know, I could run, you know, four miles, no problem. But I ended up stopping the running, at least not on a regular basis because I was having problems with tendonitis

in one of my feet, which is, you know, this tendon gets inflamed and it doesn't really hurt all the time. But anything that touches it, it is excruciating. Like if you bumped it against the corner of a table or something, you would be on the floor crying. It hurts that bad.

So after a couple of bouts of tendonitis, I was like, you know what? Let's not stress that tendon as much anymore. So instead of running now, I spend a lot more time on the elliptical. The ellipticals are great as well. I've got a, what's it called, a bike trainer thing. So you can put your bike on it and then basically turn it into an elliptical. That's perfectly fine. Because my area is kind of hilly.

And getting into cycling again in a hilly area isn't the most fun experience. Man, I wish I had hills because I do like biking too but because of where I live in Louisiana, you know, half the state is essentially just a flood plain for the Mississippi River before they diked up all the rivers.

So it's flatland. There's not a hill to be seen. I wish there were some hills. Yeah, Surrey is good for that. You can go like five minutes away from one area, it's flat there. Then you go to where I am, it's super hilly. Then five minutes down the road again, it's flat again.

Yeah. It'd just be nice to break the monotony of everything looking the same. That's fair. Yeah, that's why I like going visiting my parents a lot because they live in the South Australia Riverlands, which, as the name would suggest, there are lots of rivers there. And it's just, it's a different look from being in the suburbs all the time.

And as much as I like where I am, you do definitely get sick of seeing houses everywhere. Yeah. Yeah, I live in a city, but when I was in college, I spent two years in a very remote area of Ohio, in the southeastern corner of Ohio, in a very small town. There wasn't even a Walmart or any kind of supermarket. And the streets, instead of being paved, they were still like red brick. It was just, you know, out in the middle of nowhere. And I loved it. You know, I had to drive like 45 minutes to go shopping, you know, like to go buy something.

And a lot of people would be put off by that. But I loved it. I had no neighbors and just see herds of deer everywhere. It was beautiful country. I kind of miss it. Yeah, I grew up in a rural part of Queensland in the middle of a rainforest. And honestly, it was lovely out there. The nearest town, I think, was about 30, 35 minute drive.

For anyone who knows anything about Queenslandland it was the nearest town was gimpy and that's the only town anyone recognized in rural queensland um anyway oh well that's got to be an awesome town no with that name yeah gimpy it's felt gym pie oh okay yeah i don't don't just don't question it anyway my uh my primary school there i, had 60 students when I left. And that was from first grade to seventh grade. I don't know what that would be in the US. That's when you're like 12 or so, whatever that works out to be. Yeah, that would be like our middle school age, you know, seventh grade, eighth grade. So there was three classes.

There was one, two, and three in one class, four and five in one class, and six and seven in another class. And it obviously didn't work out, but because there were so few students, the teachers somehow managed to handle it. But I do want to eventually get back out to being in a rural area because it's nice and quiet, honestly. It's just nice to get away from people sometimes. I would agree. And I think just based on the name, Yimpy, I would want to live there. That ranks up there with some of my favorite town names. There's a town in Indiana called French Lick. And that's just a fantastic name.

And I'm not too far away from Arkansas where I live here in Louisiana. And in Arkansas, there's a small town called Bald Knob and man that is just the coolest name ever Bald Knob Arkansas well there's a place in South Australia called Iron Knob so hey we've got Iron Knob there's a lot of these weird weird names in Australia um I don't know what they were thinking with some of these but hey the name actually does make sense for iron knob because this is where the steel industry was born in Australia

well that would make sense but still iron knob really yeah ball of knob makes sense too because of all the cypress trees and when they start growing out of the water they're called knobs that makes sense it's actually it's actually the bald cypress it's like bald knobs well now that

we've scared everyone away with not talking about anything at all uh how about for the people hey just edit all of this out just just cut it out. No, they can have it. You want to do the intro? No, I like just doing something completely off topic. This podcast, I don't worry about it being anything about tech. It's a tech podcast in name only. But for the people who just don't know who you are, now that we're 12 minutes in, let them know who you are. Well, I am a Linux nerd this is what most people think I have a YouTube channel and a

library channel and most of it is about Linux you will find me at distro tube on YouTube and on library that's about it that's me in a nutshell all right so you've been making videos for, I think, what, three or so years now? About three years. About three years, yeah. Yeah, I went back and looked at some of your really, really old stuff, and it makes me feel good about how bad I was like a year and a half ago. I do that sometimes.

It's one of those things I often do when they ask me about YouTube and getting started with it, it's like dude you're not going to be good at it, not when you start so don't even worry about it, because people hey how do I do this, how do I do that, man just hit record and go with it, because I promise you that first video is going to be so bad you're going to come back later

and be like I can't believe I made that yeah I've got a couple of friends who are like oh I'm going to start making videos i i can't get the video like i want it to be and they just keep putting it off and keep remaking it it's never going to be good it will never be good just release the video make the next one yeah i often tell people until you've made at least 100 videos you're not going to have any idea what you're doing yep so yeah you can kind of get these uh i guess ideas about what you should possibly be going towards but when it comes like even not just presentation style presentation style is something you can work on as you go but when it comes to doing things like titling and thumbnails that's

something that no matter how much you look at how they should be done, you will have no idea how to do it until you've sort of seen what works with the audience that you have. And when you have no videos, you have no audience. So just put the video out. Right. Well, it's, yeah, it's the same thing with the presentation as well, but also with the titles, thumbnails, everything is, uh, you don't really know what you want to do when you start out. Even if you I know I'm going to make videos about Linux, but still there's so much involved in that.

I mean, what are you really going to do? You won't know until you start recording. You make a few videos. You find out what you're good at, what you're not good at. You won't even have found your voice until you've made 100 videos in my opinion absolutely yeah your first videos were mainly on which obviously explains the name were mainly on distro stuff you did have a couple things here and there like videos on pwd and touch and just basic things like that but most of the stuff you did at the start has been Distro stuff, but you sort of shifted away from that since then you still do some distro videos here and there but it's mainly the software stuff now

Yeah for the most part is it's like anything else interest change so when I started I Really didn't know what I was doing You know I just started a channel Figured I'd do something about Linux just because I didn't see a lot of Linux content on YouTube. So why not? And then you figure out what you like. So I started talking about, well, I did distro reviews, obviously, early and also did some early videos about the terminal. I did a lot of videos about Openbox and Qtile, a couple of window managers. I did a lot of videos about Openbox and Qtile, a couple of window managers.

And I kind of liked that. I like diving into especially window managers and some terminal stuff too. And it got hard to juggle all these topics, right? Because people are only there for one thing sometimes. I only want to watch your distro reviews. I only want to watch your videos about them. I only want to watch your videos about VIM. I only want to watch your videos about these window managers. And you're juggling all this.

At some point, you just got to go with what you want to go with. You just make the videos you want to make. That's what I do these days. If I have a topic in mind, I want to make the video. I don't care about the audience. I don't care how many views it gets or anything.

It's just what I want to do that day i'm going to do it because it has to be something that you enjoy doing for sure yeah if you're making videos you don't enjoy doing you're going to hate it also comes across in the video definitely yeah oh yeah yeah because you see a lot of people on youtube a lot of people that you can tell they hate making the video that they're making. And it's usually because early on they'll get themselves stuck in a niche and then not realize that that niche is smaller than they thought it was. Oh yeah. Or interest change. They brand the channel one thing and they go with it for a few

months and realize, I hate doing this. But you've done pigeonholed yourself into making this one kind of content. And then if you try to change you lose all your viewers because all your viewers were there for that other kind of content and it's basically starting over. Yeah, you can sometimes retain

some of those viewers if your switch isn't going to be as massive. Like, say you switch from Linux to general tech. You are still going to retain some of those viewers. But if you, say, switch from Linux to a cooking channel. Yeah, exactly. You're basically, might as well restart your channel at that point. Yeah, you can't go from tech to basket weaving.

I think anybody that was interested in tech is going to stick around for your channel. Well, you can go from Linux to ranting about roads, as we've seen some Linux YouTubers do. Well, that's true. But he's a special exception.

Well, I suspect many of his viewers are probably there for that content rather than the Linux content. Yeah, that would definitely make sense at this point. Yeah. Because let's face it, there's only so much of an audience you're going to get talking about Linux. It's still kind of a niche topic, right? I think that...

We would like to think we're more important than we are, but at the end of the day, we're that 2%. Linux is still that 2%. Yeah, if we just go with dedicated Linux, I think the biggest channel is level one Linux. I think. Because Chris Titus is more general computing at this point. I think level one Linux is going to be the biggest. Yeah, probably.

I actually don't have my browser open, but... Yeah, level 1 Linux is 156k, but Wendell is a special exception as well. Yeah. Do they post much to that channel anymore? I used to check it out every now and then, the level 1 Linux channel. Once every

two or three weeks, maybe. Okay. But because all of the videos they do are on really big things like getting graphics cards working on Linux or things like that, all of the videos hit really well. Mm-hmm.

Well, I mean, they focus on the hardware side of things yeah well yeah yeah they don't have that many videos only like 72 which the only reason that it is a lot but yeah just because you have a thousand videos brody doesn't mean you know 72 videos this is a small amount I don't have a thousand yet I'm getting close close to it. I think I'm at a bit over 600, 500. I don't remember the exact number. Too many. Too many is the answer.

Yeah, I'm probably closing in on a thousand. Yeah. Well, when you make a video every day, you do notice that you do start to improve way quicker. That's sort of the reason why I started doing it. Because there is a lot of stuff I want to talk about. People will say things like, oh, Linux isn't a content machine. That's a meme that's going around right now.

Linux isn't a content machine. But there is a lot more than some people seem to think. And when people talk about Linux too, what exactly do they mean when they say Linux? Do they mean Linux the kernel? Do they mean the good news slash Linux operating system? Do they mean all the other stuff? Like a lot of developers and programmers use Linux,

but are we talking about programming? Are we talking about databases? Are we talking about MySQL databases? There's so much to Linux. It's just such a general term. You've got to narrow it down. What topic are we actually... I haven't really touched on anything outside of the user space, really. I'm mainly talking about the sort of software people use. But yeah, if I branched out of that, even in the user space, I've still got myself in kind of a niche in here. I haven't really talked about, say, audio production or firewalls or anything like that, really. So

even with what I've done, I'm still in this very small part of Linux, but I've noticed when I do branch out, those videos still do fairly well. So it's not like I have locked myself into this niche. I mean, there's no chance I would ever run out of content as far as ideas for content, because it's such a broad term Linux. Matter of fact, I could comfortably make another thousand videos

talking about one piece of software. I could easily, matter of fact, I could easily make a thousand videos just on org mode in Emacs. So the idea that you're going to run out of content because of Linuxux you know it's it's ridiculous and if you do talk about general software if you go to places like say reddit there are people releasing new pieces of software every single day every day oh yeah they email me it's like hey man have you checked out this uh this distro have you checked out this distro? Have you checked out this command line tool? And, you know, I always respond to them, hey, did you write this? Because I don't think this is just a random person.

Just email me and say, hey, man, I wrote this. What do you think? I've gotten a few of those, and some of them actually are pretty good. But, yeah, if you want me to advertise it i if it's a good piece of software i will but come on we we know what this transaction is yeah just be upfront about it but i i don't get as many of those emails as you do most of my video topics come from reddit so i have i think like six um subreddits where you get reasonable content. I stick them in an RSS feed and then just filter out the garbage, basically. Yeah, there's a couple of dozen subreddits that I follow a little bit.

Some of them are really good as far as good information, especially if you want Linux help. There's a couple of really nice support subreddits, Linux for noobs is really good, questions is really good of course I'm also following r slash command line r slash em, r slash emacs

r slash bash and several others yeah I've noticed that a couple of times I will go and record a video and then the day after you've already released the video like okay we're clearly getting topics from the same place if this is happening depending on what some of the stuff we do is a little weird yeah so it's unusual that we come across the same things, but more general topics you will often

see, like 10 or 15 guys make the same video within a week. That's a big discussion. Like if Torvalds does something big, obviously every Linux YouTube is going to talk about it. It's always funny when someone says,

oh, you're stealing this topic from someone. Yes. Yes, I someone. Like, yes. Yes, I am. Like all these other people. Well, I can understand, especially when it, like some of the bigger topics where you have 15, 20 guys talking about the same thing. Now, they're not copying each other. They're all, you know, giving their opinions or their thoughts on things. But still, if you're subscribed to a bunch of people

and they're all making videos about this one topic that you don't care about, me, the consumer, would be a little frustrated. Hey, could you talk about something different? For sure, yeah. And I've taken this into consideration a little bit in the past when I know a story's going to be big

and I know there's going to be a ton of other people talking about it. I typically avoid those now. That's fair. I don't think you miss out on anything by avoiding some of those big topics because with so many people also talking about it, when you're doing something different, sometimes people are looking for something different during those periods of time. That's a fair point. Yeah. No, I can definitely see that i like to cover those ones just because i like to have my take on

whatever it is um be on my channel when it's something where it's just like okay that everyone's take is going to be exactly the same i typically avoid them but if I can add something of value to it like I'm not going to talk about hey look there's a new version of Ubuntu like I don't it's a Ubuntu like everyone everyone's gonna have the base of the same take it's newer gnome it's newer Ubuntu okay we can all agree this is probably better than it was before usually well with Well, with Gnome, that's questionable. Okay, yes. Yeah, I'll give you that. But...

I need to stop. People already call me a Gnome hater, so... I just... Yeah, I don't know. I enjoy talking... I have a very special relationship with Gnome. Mm-hmm. Explain. I don't think I know about this relationship.

Well, I've made a lot of videos very critical about the Gnome project. Oh, you cut out for a bit there. That was weird. Well, I did move the mic. Maybe that was my fault. I was saying I've made a lot of videos in the past about...

Discord does not like you speaking it's only when you're saying this sentence maybe we can I'm trying to silence you it's gonna home trying to censor me am I being cancelled okay I think we're good now all right yeah that's good nonome trying to cancel me because I've been very critical of some of their politics involved with their organization. And they don't like it. And because I've made videos about this and stated this publicly, other people are also getting on them. They don't like anybody putting a spotlight on them like that. That's fair.

Well, everyone needs a bit of a spotlight on them to show off the things that they probably shouldn't be doing. Absolutely. I think that's another reason why I... This is less negative in this way, but that's part of the reason I do like covering these random little projects, because a lot of the time it's just going to be like one or two people working on it. And when you just have such a small number of people, typically you design it in a way that makes

sense for you, but not for other people who are going to use it. And that's a problem I've noticed when I do programming work as well, that if I don't have someone looking at it it's gonna it's not gonna make any sense to anyone else trying to use it well absolutely i mean that's just human nature we tend to do that with everything not just programming if you build something yourself as for a purpose specifically for you or whatever it is or as a musician if i write a piece of music and i know the one that's going to be performing it i'm going to make sure i can actually perform it right i'm going to make sure everything needs to happen and that i can do or if i'm writing it for somebody else i may do things a little differently. So you always tailor things to yourself. Yeah. And let everybody else figure it out.

Speaking of music, you've had some interesting musical takes on your channel, like your recorder videos, for example. Yeah, but it was weird because when I do, especially in the early days of the channel, when I did live streams, people always wanted to hear me play. Because I talk about having some degrees in music. Oh, play us something. So, yeah, I've got some videos of me playing the recorder and the trombone.

Got a duet with Richard Stallman singing the Free Software song. You do have a duet with Richard Stallman. And I have my freestyleestyle Rap video as well. I did not know you had that one. What was that one called? It's one of the... Actually, just search for Freestyle Rap and it'll probably come up. It was an early video on the channel,

but the kids loved it. Okay, that's probably why I didn't see it. I don't think I found your channel till... Okay, here we go. okay that's probably why I didn't see it I don't think I found your channel till okay here we go freestyle rap and the blue yeti mic I didn't find your channel until like maybe a year and a half ago or so

I reckon not sure I don't know it doesn't really matter but yeah I'll definitely I'll check that out and I might leave a link to it in the description if anyone wants to see it for themselves if you want to say somebody rap about linux it's pretty cringe so yeah well i judging by just your regular talking in the older videos you weren't as confident as you are now so i can't imagine the rap's going to be any

better uh i actually had somebody do a response rap video to my rap when I put that out. They've since taken their response rap video down, but it was pretty funny. We had an East Coast, West Coast beef kind of thing, like Tupac and Biggie. Because of that

rap video, I'll just go ahead and give you a preview. At one point, I'm rapping about tiling window managers, and I talked bad about the i3 window manager and this other linux youtuber he loves i3 so he's gonna make a response video it just got silly i see why it's not taken down i can't imagine this was good at all that's like it didn't end good with tupac and Biggie. It's not gonna end good with us. If we're gonna have this Xmonad versus i3 beef, I mean where's it gonna lead? Bodies in the streets? So you're running... what window manager are you running now? Because I know you're running Xmonad for a while. Well actually at this second I

am in Xmonad because it was the one I ended up in when I ended my video earlier, when I was recording a video. I actually logged into about 10 or 12 different window managers today. This just happens to be the one I'm on doing this. It could have been any other window manager. What one do you mainly use right now? Is it Xmonad? That tends to be the one I spend most of my time in these days but it changes.

Because I know people in my discord were talking about how you finally finally embraced Emacs with a EXWM. Yep. And I've spent some time in it recently. Well, that's an easy one to get into as far as if you know Emacs. It's just full-screen Emacs. That's all it is. So your window management is basically doing vertical and horizontal splits in Emacs. Right. That works.

So everything's just in an Emacs buffer. I launched Firefox. It's an Emacs. Right. That works. So everything's just in an Emacs buffer. I launched Firefox, it's an Emacs buffer. So Linux finally becomes your Emacs bootloader. That's essentially what it is. All you need to do is create an X sessions file and make sure the executable is Emacs. That's it. And make sure you have a plugin installed called EXWM. I still haven't looked at emacs i've

been wanting to do it for a while just people keep on like oh you should try out do emacs you try out this version i'm like okay at some point i have to do this but i just haven't found the time where i can actually sit down like with emacs it's something I want to sit down and properly try out before I do any videos on it. That would take some time. Yeah. Because I don't want to have a repeat of my early Vim videos where I had no idea how to use Vim, really. Well, I was going to compare it to Vim. Vim is so much easier to get into.

it to Vim. Vim is so much easier to get into because you can literally go through the Vim Tutor in about 30 minutes and have a pretty good idea of at least the basics of Vim. You're not going to have any idea what's going on in Emacs just by going through

and reading some documentation. You're going to have to spend some time in it. Part of the problem is they're not really the same kind of program. Well, yeah. MIM is really a text editor. Yeah, it's Emacs. It's really something different, yeah.

Because, yeah, you can, as you said, you can have Firefox embedded in Emacs. That's not a thing a text editor does. No. MIM is really thing a text editor does. No. Vim is really just a Elisp interpreter. I mean Emacs. For you to write.

You said Vim as an Emacs. That would be great if Vim was, but that's not the case. Although I guess now they're trying to do it with Lua and NeoVim. So give it like five years and Bram will eventually bring it to the regular Vim as well?

Probably. Because nobody likes VimScript. I think everybody can agree with that. Yeah, VimScript is... But yeah, Emacs... Emacs is just an Elisp interpreter. You write Elisp scripts and it executes them.

That's all it is. Just the fact that it has an editor built into it. write elisp scripts, and it executes them. That's all it is. Just the fact that it has an editor built into it, not a great one, maybe, depending on who you are. Not everybody likes the standard GNU Emacs key bindings in Emacs, but because it's so extensible and you're essentially writing your own programs anyway, the evil mode layer in Emacs, which gives you all the Vim key bindings and Vim modes,

it's almost spot on. There are very few things in Vim that you can't do in Emacs evil mode, which is completely different than the Vim emulation you get and other editors where you find all kinds of things that they just can't do.

Yeah, sure. sure emacs you can actually make it emulate vim you can make it emulate the old ed text editor as well like the line editor i think you can even make it emulate cacoon although i'm not positive on that like people have written a lot of emulation plugins to make emacs mimic other editors. I think the only program that actually does Vim emulation properly is VS Code, and that's because it's not doing Vim emulation with the plugin. It's running NeoVim headless in the background. Right. I've heard people say the same thing about VS Code, that it does Vim emulation really good. I've never actually used VS Code, but I have heard they do them good.

Yeah, well, I started programming with Eclipse, and then I slowly moved my way down to Vim. So I've used Eclipse, I've used the JetBrains suite, I've used Sublime, Atom, VS Code, and eventually made my way over here. And when you're just doing scripting languages, there's no reason not to be using Vim. I get it if you're doing like C++ or something like that, why you might want an IDE. That's perfectly valid. You get a lot of really useful tools along with it. But if you're just doing, say, Python, even JavaScript,

I know we can talk about JavaScript for a while. If you want to take a really easy job and do web development, JavaScript is great to learn. Or you're doing doing shell scripting, you don't need an IDE for that. Well, I'm not a programmer by trade, but I have done some programming

most of my adult life as far as just hobby, doing things, doing some basic web development stuff, really since the mid-90s, since the birth of the web. And even back then, I learned to do everything on Notepad, Windows Notepad. And that was the only text editor I used for anything, whether I was writing HTML or PHP or JavaScript or whatever.

I did everything in Notepad until I switched to Linux. It was the only thing I ever used. That's terrifying. And I don't understand how I ever got by with just Notepad. Because once I got to Linux, and there's so many fantastic text editors, even GEdit in GNOME is so much better than Notepad.

I think I've opened up Nano once, and even Nano is better than Notepad. I'm actually surprised Microsoft still ships Notepad as Notepad. Like, they've never really extended it in any serious way. Well, they could just always drop it and just ship with Notepad++. Yes, but isn't that the licensing might be an issue i'm not plus plus it it's under a free license and i want to say it may be gpl not everybody especially with proprietary software

likes bundling gpl software i know mac os has a serious problem with the gpl that's why they switch from bash to zsh is because gnu Bash obviously is GPL and they're scared of that license because of the viral effect I guess they could always just ship with a stripped down version of VS Code then Yeah, that would work It doesn't need to be a code editor

they could just strip out a lot of the code features and just make it like a basically a simple editor yeah i mean it's their own editor actually they have two editors because they have adam too well adam was created by github and microsoft now get up what about that yeah so that they actually have two very similar editors and and then actually when they first bought GitHub, they said they were going to maintain both

because the people that were using Atom were kind of concerned. Like, are you going to keep developing this? Oh, yeah. Microsoft loves open source in a really weird way. They love it because it's good for them to be able to outsource stuff. Like we can outsource our bug reports. We can outsource this development. But when it's very important to them, they are not... They don't like open source at all.

Well, it's all about business for them. What can they get out of it? Rather than what they can put into it. Yeah, sure. rather than what they can put into it. Yeah, sure. And now the conversation has stopped. Well, since you paused to take a drink, I figured I'd finish my last bit of coffee here.

Yeah, I've got this Camelback bottle. I'm not sponsored by Camelback, but hey, Camelback, if you want to give me some money, I'll take it. Make sure you check the box in YouTube that this is a paid advertisement video. The paid advertisement is always a weird one because the video I uploaded this morning,

so I don't know if it showed up in your YouTube feed or anything. I did get a notification about it. I'll just show you people on the screen because so a while back I did a video on Vivaldi Talking about the way it's licensed and they liked my video so they decided to send me a box of merch and Yeah box of merch and yeah the thumbnail i made they sent you a hat or a shirt or something cool uh they sent me a hat five pens five blue pens 10 stickers a really ugly shirt it's a gray shirt

with like a white vivaldi logo on it on the back i don't know why um and i think there's there's a grey shirt with, like, a white Vivaldi logo on it. On the back. I don't know why. And I think there's a postcard in there as well. And that's about it. But I'll take some free merch if I can get a video out of it. But the weird thing with the paid promotion thing is I didn't sign anything for that. So I wasn't really sure of, like, is this a paid promotion? Because the description's like, if a third party sends you items, then there's a paid promotion.

But I wasn't told to say anything positive about them. They didn't even say make a video or anything about it. They just said, here's a thing. Yeah, I don't know about that either because typically when people are doing paid product placement in their videos, like, you know, Linus Tech Tips or somebody like that.

Somebody is actually like they contact Linus and Linus gives them a quote, pay me this amount of money and I'll talk about product. There's actual transaction that goes on. It's kind of understanding we're paying you this money. Here's what we want. We want this video. We'd like for you to say these things or at least talk about it a little bit. Because, yeah, I don't know.

People send me stuff occasionally too. Little trinkets or sometimes I get people contacting me about real products. And can I send you something? Yeah, sure. That's the end of the conversation. I might make a video about it. I might not. If I do, I'm in no way oblig I might make a video about it. I might not. If I do,

I'm in no way obligated to say good things about it. I may trash it. So would I check that box? I probably wouldn't. Unless, yeah, unless there was money involved or unless there was some kind of agreement. I think it goes into the same category as like receiving a review unit if

you're someone like linus tech tips again like they will receive like cpus from intel or gpus from nvidia and that but i don't think you'd have to declare that as a paid promotion because that's just here have this so you can do your job and then usually they want it sent back but not always sometimes you get to keep the card yeah well that's different because they just want somebody to make a video about it they don't care if it's good or bad necessarily they just want people talking about their product i don't know i think the only other thing i've made a video on that someone sent me was when um library sent out i don't you probably got one when they sent out the LBC USB sticks.

Mm-hmm. It's still kind of worthless, but maybe one day it'll be worth a lot. That'd be nice. You know what? That's weird because that actually is money. But they didn't send it to you for any reason. Regarding your YouTube they didn't send it to you for any reason yeah regarding your YouTube they just they just send it to you matter of fact they don't even care if you're on YouTube this library so I

don't know I wouldn't have checked that box for that either well also because you don't actually know it could be worth nothing by the time you can actually access it that That's the thing. So really, you've got a USB stick. That's true. It's a cool-looking USB stick. Until it's in your bank account, then technically they haven't sent you anything. I think right now it's worth like four grand or something,

which obviously isn't nothing, but I would like the price of LBC to go up. Would be nice. Yeah, I was checking the prices a couple of days ago. And yeah, I want to say 100 grand of LBC right now, yeah. It's worth 3 grand, maybe a little more.

I was going by Australian prices, so yeah, it'll be a bit less US then. Because our currency is monopoly money. Yeah. Which is good for me getting paid. Oh, yeah, it'll be a bit less US then, because our currency is monopoly money. Which is good for me getting paid. It's definitely worth something. My car is about four grand, so. Well, there you go.

You can buy a new car. I need one of those. It's breaking down a bit. Yeah, I could use one too. I think I've had this car since I first got my license though. So I've had a good run, like three or so years. I'm not a car person as far as, like I'll buy a car and run it until it completely falls apart. Yeah.

I've never been one of those people. I'd buy a car, drive it for 2-3 years and then go trade it in for the next new thing it's just such a waste of money I just drive them until they don't work anymore yeah yeah yeah I've got lots of friends who are car guys and I'm like

it's a car, it gets me from point A to point B that's all it needs to do yeah that's all it's about like I get being for me it's not a status symbol, I'm not trying to pick up chicks in my car, I may be trying to drive to a chick's house in my car but I'm not. I do understand being into a car though, I get it, I get being really involved in a community of people, that's the same sort of idea as being involved in Linux as well. I understand why people are interested in cars.

I just have no interest in it myself. Yeah, I've never been interested in that kind of thing. Never been interested in the mechanical side of cars. I've had friends like that. They love working on engines and things like that. I was like, that seems boring to me. I'm just going to go tweak my window manager. Yeah, let me go inside and write something on notepad. And they'll have the exact same

response to you like, what the hell are you doing? Well, I mean, look where it got me yeah yeah you're doing quite well for yourself on youtube i can i don't have exact numbers but i can i can estimate numbers of how much your channel is making judging by your views and how much i make well you know with youtube it's weird because the revenue fluctuates wildly everything about it fluctuates wildly

the views I think they tweak their algorithms often because from month to month there are some things that just don't make

any sense I'll have a month where I get really high views and don't make that much as far as the revenue will be down that's like it doesn't make any sense. I'll have a month where I get really high views and don't make that much as far as the revenue will be down. That's like, it doesn't make any sense because more views, more ads are being run within the next month. It'll be a down month as far as views. I'll make twice as much money as far as the ad sales revenue. There's something really weird that's

going on with YouTube, especially in the last year. This has really been in the last year I've noticed it. The first couple of years, like, you can set your watch to it. I know exactly how many views I was going to get every month, how much money I was going to make. But this year, it's like, it's just a roller coaster. I did notice something weird back in like until May or so. My channel started diffing, but so did every single linux channel and now they've all started to pick back up again and i have no idea what happened there because my

videos were the same as always i'm guessing youtube just stopped pushing them for a while i don't know what happened yeah there was something weird going on around may into the summer or something like views views were down but oddly enough it didn't touch revenue no revenue was exactly the same i was i had no idea what was going on is there a problem in their reporting as far as counting the views maybe i don't know they've definitely been a few of those this year i think i think it was a couple of days ago i actually reported this to youtube support they gave me a nonsense answer because of YouTube support. On that day, it said I had 12,000 views,

which was more views than I had the entire past two days. I was like, okay, this obviously isn't right. I went and reported it to them and like, oh yeah, sometimes our view counting is slightly delayed and doesn't show the accurate numbers. Like this isn't slightly delayed. Your numbers double what I'd normally have It's fixed itself now

If it was a day last week, I had the same thing happen. Okay. Yeah recently. Yeah. Yeah Because I checked I don't check my analytics like all the time When I log in and I noticed I had the biggest day in the history of my channel for views that day Yeah, and i did not make a video so that's really unusual and i didn't put out any new content it's like where the hell did all these views go from yeah i was excited for a moment and i was like so i didn't have to email youtube support because i already knew this is broken as soon as i saw that number it's like that's not right yeah Yeah. Cause your,

your number would have been more like if mine was 12,000, your would probably be in like 40 or 50,000. Yeah. It told me I had 60 or 70,000 views that day. I was like, I was like, there's no way. Hey,

it's possible. Maybe one of your old videos just suddenly got boosted. You have done a lot of videos that could obviously be boosted out of nowhere, like random things like an Arch install video, for example. I do have videos that every now and then will all of a sudden jump up in views that I made a year or two ago, but that will be like all of a sudden two three thousand people watch that video in a day not you know tens of thousands like that would be very unusual yeah because what for that to happen youtube would have to be heavily pushing

that on to people as far as suggestions and why would they do that for me right this well yeah we there's obviously a lot of people in the linux sphere but it is still kind of a tight niche like i can list out most of the bigger channels that exist even a lot of the really small channels because there's really not many of them there's more than there were when you started, but it's still fairly small. Yeah, I would agree. I would say I probably know most folks that do any kind of real Linux content, but because there's always new people cropping up every now and then I'll come across somebody that's been making videos six months or a year and maybe has a few thousand followers. But I, year and maybe has a few thousand followers but i for whatever reason i hadn't stumbled across of them across them until then as far as your viewers though you would be surprised how many people

that are going to watch this that are subscribed to either me or you and didn't know about the other i guarantee you most of the people that watch this will not know about one of us I feel like it's going to be more heavily slanted towards one direction but it doesn't matter if I was doing this collab with somebody that had

about the same number of subscribers most of the people watching that would be there for one of those people and will never have heard about the other just because most people don't subscribe to like every single YouTuber that does the topic. I want to learn a little bit about Linux. I'm going to subscribe to two or three channels to learn about it. I'm not going to subscribe to 100.

Yeah, that's true. That's not what most people do. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I've got my small group of people I tend to watch. I don't watch much Linux content anymore. I find it kind of difficult to watch. I've talked about this before. It always feels like I'm just watching my own video.

I'm just like, okay, here's what I could do here, here's what I could do there. I don't find it relaxing to watch Linux videos anymore. But... Especially if you make a lot of content. And for me, I spend so many hours making content. My videos typically are going to take four to six hours for me to record

and edit and everything. Typically, probably five or six videos a week. I'm sitting in front of this computer a lot. And then when I'm done you know, typically probably five or six videos a week. I'm sitting in front of this computer a lot. And then when I'm done, okay, let me continue to sit in front of this computer and pull up YouTube and watch videos about people making videos about the same topics I talk about. I just want to blow my brains out at that point. Like, I can't do that. Typically, when I'm done here, I step away from this computer.

I got to get away. Okay, okay yeah that's fair i find that sorry if i'm on youtube i'm gonna watch something so not tech related like the furthest thing from technology i'm gonna watch cute cat videos you know something just ridiculous yeah that's fair i was gonna ask you what you watch when you do get a chance to watch it but yeah i get the feeling i i i typically watch skit comedy uh yeah so it's just i do occasionally watch like linus tech tips i just like i do like the general tech stuff because that's not really as it's not anywhere near as related to what I'm doing is going and watching say like here's this video on Xmonad for example like those videos It's like No, I'm not doing that unless it's something where I'm like

I need to know this to do Something like I'm gonna maybe watch a video on like my sequel or something like that because I want to know how to do something with my sequel but Typically a lot of the content you do a lot of the content i do are for people looking for solutions to a problem they're not there to be entertained yeah so i do try to make obviously still try to make the videos entertaining in some way but not not the same sort of way that you would in like a skit comedy for example well every now and then you do have to for example well every now and then you do

have to do something different every now and then you gotta do a little oh you're getting censored again discord is really shit I wonder shouldn't be a problem with my network here at the house I have issues I'm gonna blame it on mine

Australia's still in like 2010 with it's internet so I wouldn't expect much at the house. I have no issue. I'm going to blame it on mine. Australia is still in 2010 with this internet, so I wouldn't expect much. Well, we'll just have to go with it. Yeah, it's been fine. What you could do is just dub in my voice later.

With another voice. I'll just find some random voice clips of you and just put that in there. That'll work. Let's do a deep think. Those are getting scarily good. I'm worried when people start using them for things besides memes.

Yeah, and I came across one the other day. You're talking about the stuff I do watch on YouTube just because it was a deep think of a movie that I love one of my favorite movies is a comedy called Step Brothers I don't know if you've ever seen that movie it's ringing a bell but

is it Will Ferrell that's in that movie you've never seen that movie. It's just absolutely hilarious. You should definitely watch it. Somebody did a deep fake redoing that movie. Instead of Will Ferrell and John O'Reilly, John C. Reilly doing it, they do it with Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Doing the exact scenes, some of the funny scenes, and it's pretty good. Yeah, someone over on Library, he has a channel where he just does deepfake videos. One of his early videos was putting Luke's face onto mine, and it was when the beard was short. Obviously the beard does get in the way, but it still looked surprisingly good.

And I was, I'm, I'm worried. I'm worried for the, the future. They didn't make you bald, I hope. Uh,

no, they didn't make me bald. I have seen pictures of Luke with hair, and it's weird. Well, people that are actually balding, you have to shave your head because it does start looking pretty bad once you have some patching going on. So why do you actually shave your head anyway? I don't think I've heard you say that okay well

this was about 17 18 years ago at the time i was in graduate school i was working on a master's degree and i was flat broke and i was waiting on some student loans to come in, you know, eating ramen noodles every day. And I couldn't afford a haircut. So I decided, you know what, I'm just going to cut my own hair. So for two or three months, you know, every time I needed a haircut, three weeks or so, I would just take some electric shears shears you know with the proper guards and cut my own hair and uh it looked all right after a while man i'm tired of cutting my own hair let's just shave and then i just stuck with it all right i'm never paying for a haircut i'm not i'm never paying for a haircut again if i can save that 14 15 a month hey so at this point

how do you actually keep it short do you just like razor over it or what do you do yeah just with a razor okay all you need is a good razor so not a single blade bick do not put that on your head but anything with four or five blades you're good i wouldn't put a single blade anywhere near my face anyway. No, it will chew you up. But the hair on your head is really thick. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, mine...

Every time I go get a haircut, they're like, hey, do you want to have your hair thinned? Your hair is way too thick. So I don't know how well that would go for me without really getting it

as short as possible before I did anything. i've been doing this you know almost 20 years now but i remember when i first shaved my head you know it was i don't know october november of that year starting to get cold you know winter time here and you wouldn't be surprised how cold your head gets without hair you don't realize how much insulation that hair provides the other thing is in the summer you burn really quickly i can understand it because i used to actually have really long hair like down past my shoulders just it was a weird me wanting to rebel after high school thing. And

when I got rid of that, I realized how much lighter my head was and how much I actually felt how, like, the temperature was. In summer, it was really hot having that hair. The second I got rid of it, it was perfectly fine.

Yeah. There's another benefit, though, when you start shaving your head is that people often mistake you for a cop. That can be a good thing, that could also be a bad thing in some situations. Yeah, no I'd maybe wear a beanie in some places. Especially you know know, most of the time, especially before the lockdown and I was working all the time, I was professionally dressed. And if I'm wearing a nice shirt

and tie with this haircut, oh yeah, definitely a cop. You can tell people look at you, they start moving away, especially if they're doing something shady. Hey, at least it clears the path for you. Yeah.

I remember years ago I was working at a liquor store. A liquor store slash tobacco shop, cigar shop. A rather large place. And I was the manager there.

I remember one night, this girl comes through our drive-thru. We have a little drive-thru window. I open the window, and she wanted some cigarillos to take the tobacco out, of course, and put in whatever herb she was wanting to smoke.

Typically what they do with cigarillos. Anyway, she pulls through the drive-thru hey i want a three pack of cigarillo she looks at me i go no no never mind and she drives off and i already know it's like i'm not a cop i don't care what you're gonna do i don't care what you're gonna smoke yeah that but at least in when it when it's good for you it's good for you but yeah yeah that was an interesting place to work that particular liquor store you had all kinds of drunks and crackheads and meth heads. I remember one night I was at a store and this meth head came in right as I was about to close. It was like

midnight on a Saturday and he came in and asked me, hey, was I ready to go? I got everything shut down. I'm like, why is he asking me this? And then he goes, well, I want you to know I'm now the owner of this place. And he's twitching and you tell he'd been smoking something. I was like, you're the owner of this place. He goes, yeah, I recently found the biggest diamond in the world up under the sands of Iraq. It's the largest diamond that was ever discovered. I'm now the richest man in the world. He goes, and with that money, I purchased the Dallas Cowboys, the LA Lakers, and this store. And he said this like it was fat. And I looked at this guy and normally I would run

people like this out immediately, but it was so funny. I wanted to hear where the story was going. So I just let him keep talking. And he's like, no, nothing's going to change just because I'm the owner. Nothing's going to change. Just keep doing what you're doing. I love what you're doing. He goes, the only difference is I'm thinking about bringing on Taylor Swift as a manager. So I had a very large bat, wood stick, really behind the counter. Then when he said Taylor Swift, that's when I grabbed it. And then I walked around. He saw I had the stick in my hand and he hit it straight for the door and he's running to the door. He gets out the door. I turn around and when he sees me turn around, he puts his head back in the door. He says,

you're fired. Oh God. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, I haven't... That man just fired me. You've probably never been fired from a job by a man. No, that would be a new one for me. Oh, that's... Yeah, I haven't worked any liquor store jobs, but right now I'm working in a supermarket

in a... not the richest of areas, and you get some interesting characters coming through but yeah god this may mainly mainly crackheads and they're fun characters when they're nice yeah oh god now one time at the same liquor store, somebody parked their car there. And I came inside and bought something from him. I forget what he did.

But you can tell it was probably on crack or meth or something. He was tweaked out of his mind. And then I see him leave. And he starts walking down the street. I'm like, what's he doing with his car? And seriously, he was so high, he forgot he had drove his car there. So he's walking to whatever hotel

or wherever he's staying, that area of town. That car stayed there for two, three days. And then I realized, this dude forgot. He probably was so tweaked out of his mind, he forgot even his door. He has no idea where his car he left his door and locked up oh god I put it in neutral and I roll it to the side of the parking lot

where it's not right by the front door because I don't know how long this car is gonna be there eight days later he comes back and he comes in the store mad. And it's like, who took my car? I'm like, we stole his car. It's like... Was the car still in the parking lot? Or had it been moved at that point? Yeah, it was still there. It just wasn't where he left it.

He thinks somebody stole his car, drove it to the liquor store and oh god he didn't remember actually getting in his car and coming over there fun times yeah um this is what i like doing night feel because I'm not directly interacting with the customers. I can imagine it would be real weird if I was working on the checkouts. Yeah. Well, when you're constantly checking out people, you meet some interesting people, which can be fun. I spend a lot of time working retail. of time working retail. I spend a lot of time working in retail.

I don't mind actually working to register. Sometimes it's nice chatting with people. You meet people from all walks of life. Some of them have interesting stories. Of course, you do have to deal with the occasional drunk or the occasional

idiot, but you have to learn one of the rules in life is people are who they are and you can't change it you getting mad it's not going to change who they are yeah like if somebody comes up to you and they're drunk you getting mad at them it's not going to sober them up unless you are unless you're not putting on a cop voice, then it might. Yeah. For you, that might work. I have played the cop a couple of times when it was advantageous. Just pretend like you're an undercover working the checkouts. Mm-hmm.

So, when we were actually planning to do this, I wasn't expecting you to say, oh yeah, let's just use Discord, because you usually use Jitsi when you do your your live streams and actually chat with your patrons, don't you? That's what I've been using, yeah. Yeah, I was surprised you suggested Discord. Well, I didn't suggest it, but you said you use it i have it installed yeah okay i keep uh i keep discord around i have zoom installed too okay a lot of people love using zoom so especially you know you asked me to be on your show here i'm not gonna tell you no use the

software i want to use no i'm fine with whatever well i always leave it up to the guest anyway because sometimes they just don't have discord in the first place yeah jitsi would have been fine one of the matrix clients like element would have been fine isn't it kind of like a discord clone too i think they do video chat as well i think yeah i think there's video chat i've recently started using matrix i've actually got my Discord server bridged over to Matrix now because there's some people who have been like, oh, I want to be in your chat, but I don't want to use Discord. I'm like, okay, sure, I'll set up Matrix.

That's fine. And to be honest, I wouldn't, for my patrons chats, I use Jitsi. But if I was just letting anybody join a conference, I would probably use Zoom because you can actually password protect that thing. Where Jitsi is a little scandalous that anybody can join and can immediately just start kicking everybody else. Yes, that was a fun time during that live stream we tested it. And I knew it was possible to do that

because I've had that done before in Jitsi. Before that video. Yeah, there were people in the comments section of that live stream being like, oh, Brody's here, but he's acting real weird. Like, yeah, I'm not good at dealing with just random people. It's just a room full of people I've never spoken to. Well, that particular room might have been random people people I've never spoken to. That particular room might have been random people that I've never spoken to for that particular one

because it was... I'm going to try out Jitsi. I'm going to try out Jitsi. Anybody can join, like literally. I didn't say patrons can join or I didn't try to password protect the room or try to have anybody kind of filter who could come in. Anybody.

Next thing you know, we had, you know, like 30 people on this web call. And then you got that one guy who all of a sudden starts banning everybody. Yeah, that was actually really dangerous for you to do because they... Like, he could have just played something that would have got your channel, like, nuked. Well, I mean, I'm still actually recording everything. Mm-hmm. I mean, he could have put something on screen, but it would have been there just like this. Yeah, well, I'd still worry about putting that up on my YouTube channel, even if you weren't going to archive it then.

Yeah. But hey, it's your channel. You don't want to risk it. That was just a test stream anyway. I don't think I even... It might be on my channel. I probably deleted it. I wouldn't have a clue.

I didn't bother to go look back at it. But Jitsi does seem like a cool piece of software, for sure. Yeah, it's not bad for what it is. We need better moderating controls, obviously. But if it's just people you trust to some extent, it seems fine.

Yeah. I wouldn't expect your patrons to start deleting everyone from the chat. Yeah, I wouldn't expect that crowd, right right and most of those guys like they're regulars they've been a lot of them been patrons for a while they join me every month like i know these people you know it's not just some random guy that shows up and then decides he's taking over the room

So what made you actually want to make a Discord server because you don't use discord yourself. I'm guessing did people just ask you for it or something like that or people ask early on in the channels Like right at the beginning so I made one and I kind of told people I don't use this stuff Not just the fact that discord is proprietary software, but I don't actually just sit around and chat. Yeah. That's not me. Like,

and when I'm at my computer, I'm working and I don't want any distractions. So I don't have, I don't want the notifications because I just keep getting the little bell thingy ringing all the time. So I don't hang out in IRC. I don't hang out in Discord. I don't hang out in any of this stuff. But people, hey man, create these rooms. So I've got one.

I'm never there. I go months, months at a time without logging into them. And typically when I log into them, I'm still not there to chat in my Discord. I'm here to chat with you. They see my name in the room, but I'm not actually...

Yeah, have you actually got yourself set to online? Oh, you do! So yeah, you actually will be online in... Oh, you're not even on... Because you haven't given yourself a role, it doesn't even look like you're online, it's just got BigPod right at the top. Yeah, I'm hoping that, you know, I won't get a million direct messages. Oh, he's here! Oh, with that, you can set it to only friends can message you. So I would just do that in case you ever do need to open up Discord. One of the other reasons I have Discord and a Discord channel is early on in the channel's history, I did some live streams where I would ask the community, my followers and everybody,

hey, you want to do a game live stream with me? So we'll play something like Team Fortress 2 or something on Steam or whatever it happens to be, or we're going to do free and open source games sometimes we'll play the first person shooter, Zenotic and of course we want to chat while we game, everybody uses Discord so I have the voice channel in Discord

yeah that's fair it works well enough it is proprietary software but it works well enough for what it is and Matrix isn't a Discord replacement at this point. I've been using Matrix a bit. It really is lacking. If you think that Jitsi is lacking moderation tools,

Matrix is just as bad. Yeah, I've played with Matrix. I've got the element client installed. I've got the Element client installed. Yeah, it's... I would worry about how difficult it is to set up. Especially, it's not user-friendly. Like, it's not... Discord, anybody can figure out how to use Discord rather quickly.

Matrix, it's not like that. Like, it's fine for the most part like the only people i've got on matrix are like the well the only people who've joined the matrix server are the ones who really like matrix anyway but if i didn't have the discord server i don't think everyone would just suddenly migrate over to matrix well what i did is i bridged my IRC channel with the Matrix channel. So really, you're seeing both on Matrix. Okay. But it doesn't matter because I'm not in either channel.

I'm fairly active in my channel, in my Discord server, my Matrix server. But because you're not, I noticed that there's just goes days where there's just no messages at all and then right now everyone's super active that's weird that's a first but I have no idea because I'm I literally never open discord so yeah sometimes I'll get messages hey man where you been you're not ever in your eyes free IRC channel you're never on discord so yeah sometimes i'll get messages uh hey man where you been you're not ever in your irc channel you're never on discord and it's like yeah i'm not i probably shouldn't be chatting as much as i do but i enjoy chatting with the community it's fun yeah and then i've mentioned on my videos many times that i don't hang out in those kinds of places, IRC or Matrix or Discord.

It's because when I have some free time, I'm trying to do productive things, trying to work on my video or trying to do this and going to the gym, working out. Maybe I got some books I want to finally get around to reading. Something educational, productive in some way, and chatting online is not something I enjoy or want to be doing. And when I tell people this, they have gotten upset at me. Because when I do show up in my Discord or my IRC channel, the people that hang out there on a regular basis and love chatting with other people, like, hey, man. It's like, are you sure that this is not productive because i've met some real friends you say that all your online friends are not real friends they're fake online

friends but i've made some real buddies on irc okay well that's cool but i don't know it's still pixels on a screen you're not talking to them in real life you know do you have real life friends you can no i get that and if you do real life friends? No, I get that. And if you do want to spend your time doing productive things, that makes perfect sense. But I think some people need to realize that people value their time differently. Like, if you really enjoy chatting with people online in chat rooms, that's awesome. If you think that's a great use of your time, cool.

Other people want to just get some work done and then i don't know go outside and lift some stuff yeah go get some sunlight right go get some vitamin d yeah yeah i'm definitely gonna go for a walk lady because it's finally not boiling hot here it's starting to turn cool here. Okay, I'll give it to you in Fahrenheit. Over the weekend, it was 104 degrees. Yeah. Gotta love an Australian December.

Yeah, it's about like our summers here. Although, I don't know about the humidity. Is it dry where you're at? It's pretty dry here queensland it gets really bad though now the humidity here is what's really bad because it'll get up you know to 100 degrees fahrenheit but it'll feel like it's 115 yeah i don't miss out in the desert because i in Arizona It'll be well over

100 degrees And it will actually be comfortable But it's the sauna here In Louisiana It's really brutal No that's fair I don't mind A bit of humidity but when it gets to the point

Where it's like 80 or 90% humidity Then it's like okay this is a bit of humidity, but when it gets to the point where it's like 80 or 90% humidity, then it's like, okay, this is a bit much at this point. Yeah. And the other thing in humid climates is if you have any kind of allergies, it can be really bad in the spring. The pollen, it's just everywhere. It's just yellow everywhere. So if you have allergies, this would not be a good spot to live.

No, no. It's pretty bad where I'm at. Nowhere near that bad, but my allergies do play up during spring. It's usually fine after the first couple of weeks. It's just that first little bit of spring where everything's starting to flower. I'm just not used to it after nothing like that for the past 10 months yeah my allergies sometimes act up at the beginning of the season too let's see uh we talked about library a bit earlier um so how long you you been on Live before at this point? I'd have to think about that It would be at the end of last year

Okay, so yeah, you joined at the same time I did then It would have been I want to say November, December of last year Right around the new year So what made you switch to it? Because I got hassled by some of the guys who are really big users of it. You know, I can't remember at the time

because it was still kind of new. There wasn't much to it at the time. There weren't that many channels on it. But people often ask me to mirror my content in other places. And the only other place I host my own videos in an Amazon S3 bucket. And I do have those on my website. So people can watch my videos without having to be.

And even the YouTube videos, you can watch YouTube videos without having to be on YouTube. If you know the right tools to use, I'm not going to say those because our Google overlords will probably give you a strike if I mention some of those tools but I'm sure you know some of them yeah well one of those back up on GitHub now and I did a video on that and yeah I'm glad they're back yeah but it was just I didn't have my videos mirrored on another video platform. Yeah. And a lot of the ones people, and people suggested a million different places for me to mirror my content.

And the only one that I felt comfortable with was library. Okay. Reading the site and their mission. And obviously it's free open source software and somewhat decentralized. I wish it was. Yeah, there's a need to be open. Yeah, but like other places, like I didn't want to be on BitChute and DTube

and all these other places. And some of these are not even free and open source platforms anyway. It would be just like being on YouTube. So why don't you just watch my videos on YouTube if you're going to watch them on all that garbage. The library was the one that made the most sense at the time. I really didn't expect it to go anywhere. I doubt anybody will ever use it. And really, it kind of really started exploding in popularity a few months after I joined. I mean I would say

March or April of this year I really noticed an uptick as far as a lot of content creators were starting to be on the platform, started getting views, you know, started making some LBC. Yeah. Like serious LBC. It wasn't... it was worth my time to be online. Yeah, because I think around that time is when a lot of the Linux guys started joining. I think most of the big Linux channels are on library at this point. Yeah, I would expect. If you're interested in free and open-source software at all, why not? I think there's one I can think of that's not. He used to be on library... Switch to Linux. No Library... Switch to Linux. No, not Switch to Linux. He's on Library.

No, I think you're right about Switch to Linux. Maybe? Yeah, I know Tom at Switch to Linux. He said he was getting porn advertisements or something. Yeah, I think I switched to Linux then. Yeah.

I thought I was switched to Linux then. Yeah, so. Well, I thought I was thinking of the Linux experiment. This is the problem with Linux channels. They all have the same name. But yeah, Tom, I forget, he's like on their front page or his suggested videos or whatever.

One of them was kind of a adult-ish title. Yeah yeah and he obviously has this linux channel he also has a christian channel where he talks a lot of biblical discussions and he said he wasn't comfortable with his viewers telling them to go check him out on library stumble across on the platform which is understandable. I can understand it. Yeah I've come across some stuff that was a little edgy it to say the least maybe it wasn't straight-up porn But there was I've come across some stuff that like man, I can't believe I'm being suggested this video

Yeah, the suggestions aren't great. It's definitely better than it was before like early on you would make like a Linux video and then be like, big bot beach girls or something like that. Like, okay, that has nothing to do with what I'm actually making. But you watched it anyway. Yes, I've watched it anyway. No, it's definitely better than it was now, for sure. No, it's definitely better than it was now, for sure. The way they're doing recommendations is still very rudimentary. So they're not skipping out words like the.

So there's a channel called The Moonpad User. So if you put that in your title, his video is probably going to show up in the recommended. Hmm. Well, that's a good way to game the system. It is. And I'm happy people haven't noticed it yet but they probably should i shouldn't have said it um people are gonna know now it's out there now i'm not gonna make sure i i use the in title description the end of time in the tags i wonder if just adding that in a tag, how that would...

I don't know how tags work on library, actually. That's one I'm real confused about. Because you only get five tags. Yeah, I haven't experimented at all with tags. So I don't know. I think at this point, tags are still like, if you search for a tag, then you will see content in that tag. They don't actually affect searching for just a piece of content like you normally would hmm I'm not sure

on that so what do you think of library at this point because I think it's it's gotten so much better than it was like three or four months back especially now with Odyssey being out well obviously they've done a lot since I joined a year ago or whatever it was. Because I don't think you could comment on the videos. Nope, there was no comment. There was nothing. There was no liking or disliking. Everything you think about a video platform, it was not there. All I could do was upload a video platform it was not there all i could do was upload a video

and that was it whatever happened after that hey i've got no moderation controls there's no analytics there was nothing we still have no moderation controls i'm really annoyed with that yeah because i there's there's no reason why i can, I shouldn't be allowed to delete spam. Because if you don't try to combat the spam, you're not going to have a platform for very long. I understand you're against censorship and all of that. But if you don't allow people to delete the spam, you're going to be overrun by it. I think where you can come at that from is the platform themselves shouldn't be deleting it, but you should give the creator the ability to delete whatever they want.

Yeah. I've noticed, I don't know if you check your library comments, but I've noticed that there's a couple of people who are doing Bitcoin scams on library now, being like, hey, during COVID, I made this much money doing this thing with Bitcoin. It's like, no, you didn't. And then there's an obvious malware link there. Well, I've been seeing not that scam, but similar things with Google. If you check your spam stuff, other than obviously the weird sex bots that are going on every now and then. I'll get one Hey, I made this much money from

working at home. Click this link. YouTube is doing a better job at filtering those. I have noticed they've been clearing them out recently. I have noticed that too. All of a sudden they're going straight to the spam and I don't have to manually go in

and... I think it's because a lot of people started making videos about it again and they're like okay well i guess we're gonna do something now now that people have told us even when they've known about six months sort of how youtube works if they don't have to do anything they're not going to yeah well it's a billion dollar company you know they're they don't have a lot of resources yeah not at all hold on just a second i am getting

blown up here on discord i don't know a way around it. Oh, well, I'm just going to have to deal with that annoying little ping I get every now and then from somebody messaging. I've gotten like 200 of them in the last five minutes. It's like...

So... I'll show you after. If you want, I'll show you afterwards how to disable DMs from people who aren't friends. Well, it won't matter because I won't be back on here until the next time I do one of these. That's fair. Yeah, I've got one notification right now, but that's fine. Because people know that I'm on Discord most of the time.

They can just message me normally. I mean, it's not a rare sighting. For me being on Discord, it's like a Bigfoot sighting. Yeah, it's usually rare to see me not on Discord. A lot of the time, I just have it running in the background. I'm not even looking at it. It's just it's open. If you want to message me,

go ahead. Um, let's see. Actually, how long did you want to record for i'm happy to do how how long you want um because we didn't actually yeah i set aside a block of time for two hours okay cool cool we're in an hour yeah we're good for at least another 30 minutes unless you run out of things to talk about but i'm flexible so just when it's over just give me a nod and i'll try to shut up

if i'm talking i've done a four hour episode before so i think we're good on time i won't make you sit around for that long though do people watch that what was your watch time on that video my watch time of the podcast is always terrible because i don't actually really have organic viewers for the channel most of my viewers for it are people I direct over from my main channel yeah the audio version actually does have organic viewers though weirdly enough well they're there for that it's different on the video platform mmm serious long form on YouTube I've no nobody's gonna stick around like they'll stick around for the first five minutes and then they leave. The exception is... Yeah, I was going to say, I used to

do that. Sometimes I would get long-winded, even on Linux videos, where I would make videos that were 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour long sometimes. And nobody would stick around. Nobody watched till the end. I know they didn't so why was i

making that video that long like shut the hell up and say what you want in 10 minutes and get out of there yeah what do you actually get for your uh average um watch time uh i haven't actually checked it out in a long time i i check out my analytics that often these days. I used to, but then it got to the point where I would look at my analytics, but I didn't do anything with it. Like whatever it said, I didn't actually change what I was doing anyway. So I was like, why do I even bother logging in to check this stuff and pull up my analytics and see what my average watch time is. Let me pull up my analytics and see what my average watch time is. Average view duration, 5 minutes and 53 seconds.

Hmm, okay. I've got about... It was a bit high before, but it's gone down a bit. Mine's 3 minutes 58 right now. Yeah, I suspect some of that is i my average video length is is quite a bit longer than you're probably even though these days i try to do shorter videos i know for a long time i used to keep up with the average video length of my videos youtube doesn't provide that information but i kept up with it myself and i want to say on average my videos were averaging 18 or 19 minutes in length so that's yeah yeah they're only watching minutes of 18 minutes right they're only watching a third

of the video yeah that is a a bit of a problem um you just you obviously still get people watching to the end but finding that sweet spot for how long a video actually should be is always kind of difficult to do yeah there are certain types of videos that you can't make sure like if it's going to be something really deep and a lot of detail that's technical that's okay but sometimes if you're just speaking off the cuff about a topic, yeah. And sometimes I'll ramble on and I've tried to force myself these days not to ramble on. Yeah. And now that I actually spent more time editing my videos than I did, I will actually edit out a lot of the rambling parts. Yeah, yeah. Even if it was an interesting point,

even if I have to cut out some points that I thought were interesting, just to get the video length down, sometimes I will cut out parts just because I think it's more important not to have somebody sit there for 15 minutes listening to me when, you know, eight minutes is plenty.

Yeah, no, I've definitely had that problem myself. I realized my videos were getting too long. People people were saying like you could have cut this down there were people being a bit extreme about it like oh you should just do all of five minute videos like If you want no, you can't do that's not happening No, because there's some things you there's no way you could do in five minutes. Mm-hmm Like if I do we're gonna do it you did your very first video on emacs for an example you're gonna have to spend at least 10 minutes explaining to people what the hell emacs is before you even demonstrate anything about it right there's some topics you just can't do in five yeah yeah that makes sense on the other hand sometimes you definitely can,

and then you try to fill it out a bit more than you probably should do. Yeah. There's viewers that are not going to be satisfied either way. Oh, no. The videos where I ramble on people say man you talk too much and then the videos i made a concerted effort to trim down as much as i could and make it as size as possible hey man you didn't really explain that as in-depth as well which group are you going to satisfy i think ultimately you need to it kind of goes back to what we said

earlier you need to be looking at what you want to what we said earlier. You need to be looking at what you want to do and trying to improve on the content you want to make. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the big thing is I never make a video for the audience. I know that's

I hate to tell people that, but the videos I make, yeah, they're strictly, hey, that's what I'm interested in at that moment. I never pre-plan. Rarely do I ever pre-plan a video like days ahead of time to make show notes or anything. It's I'm turning on the camera, I sit down. What do I feel like doing today? Whatever it is I feel like doing, that's what I do.

That's interesting because I've sort of taken the opposite, well, not opposite approach, opposite in one way. I actually do heavy show notes at this point. I didn't do anything back when I first started, but I found that I ended up taking longer to record and taking or making more mistakes on the things that I was saying. So now I typically note out the stuff that's actually important so I don't end up saying something completely

inaccurate. Yeah if I'm doing something that I know I'm going really in-depth on something and I know it's super long video like over half an hour in length I don't want to waste time so I will jot down some notes or at least a outline just so I don't get sideways on something, where you get to the end and realize, oh, I forgot to cut that. Go back and record that section again. So sometimes when something's really lengthy, I may jot down some notes, but for the most part, I don't bother. So you were saying before that you recorded recorded it and edited or i guess edited the

video and uploaded it before you started so you don't actually plan anything ahead like you just do you make your videos out of the day they go up most of the time what not all the time sometimes i will record something and not upload it that day maybe maybe the next day. If I'm trying to do some batch recording to get ahead because I'm going to have a couple days where I can't record. Yeah, I may record three videos in a day and spread them out over the next three or four days because I'm not going to be around. But 95% of the time when I upload a video, I recorded it and edited it that day. Well, I can't do that because my upload time is 6 30 in the morning local time so i'd have to record it the day before but i do everything in batch

recording so at the start of the week monday tuesday i will do five videos on monday two videos on tuesday and that blocks out my entire week wow i think i do I used to try to do the one video a day thing I've actually done that in two different spurts early on in the channels history I'm gonna and did that for a while and then I was like yeah there's no reason to do every day just do as many videos as you can but if you take a few and then after doing that for a while I thought man I should go back to doing a video a day I think that was the right thing to do and then here recently I decided a video a day is too much so now I've backed off a little bit

well I might cut back from doing a video a day but I do still like doing the batch recording because I like just knocking out all of my work at the start of the week and then after that I can actually then go and spend my time doing other stuff whether that is playing around with something I might want to talk about or just doing things outside of YouTube really yeah the problem for me I don't mind the batch recording but the editing process is always the longest thing anyway and to have to edit a lot of videos this is going to take so many hours i actually take way less time for editing because of how much i do my show notes so i typically have like a story i want to get through whereas you i can probably guess you have a lot more i guess tangents you go on during the videos

and that takes more time to edit out. Yeah. Sometimes I edit those out, but mainly if there's any pauses, any silences, because sometimes I'll start talking about something, get to the end of my point, but I don't have show notes, right?

So then, okay, what's next? I pause for five seconds. I got to come back and eliminate those five seconds of silence, you know, put everything together. So that's typically the most time consuming part of the edit. So when you're recording, do you just do one long recording and not, like if you make a mistake, then you'll go back and just re-say that as you're actually going over,

as you're going in that same clip, or do you stop the back and just re-say that as you're actually going over um as you're going in that same clip or do you stop the recording and then restart no i stop and do multiple tips try to i don't like doing anything in one long recording even an interview like what we're doing here if this was me doing this recording with you and i was saving it on my machine at some point after about 10 minutes i would say all right brody i'm going to pause i cut it i started again because i learned a long time ago when you do everything in one long clip if something goes bad yeah right now if something happened to that file you're recording we just lost the last one hour and 41 minutes that's a fair point maybe i should uh change what i do

where if you split it up into about 10 minutes if there's ever a problem with one of those files for whatever reason you lost that 10 minute section and if your guest doesn't mind going back and recording that 10 minutes again that's fine but when you get to the end of two hours and then realize i forgot to hit the start button which happens a lot recording i've done it many times i've i know it happens to other people that's why i took your advice you said a few months back have your file manager open when you record a video yes until you see that file created don't start talking yep right because you will get to the end of that two-hour interview

and realize you never recorded anything and then you got to ask your guests you have another two hours yeah i i do definitely to make sure that i uh take breaks. When I'm recording my regular videos, every time I take a pause, I stop the clip. So for my regular stuff, I do heavily make use of clips. Like I have a 10-minute video. There might be 20 clips in there because I'm not very good at stringing through a sentence. You can probably tell from this.

I'm better when I'm talking to someone, but when I'm just doing a video, sometimes I will get to a point where I'm like, I have no better when I'm talking to someone, but when I'm just doing a video sometimes I Will get to a point like I have no idea what I'm gonna say next and just stop and this is usually after like 10 or 15 seconds Right Yeah, I would say if I'm doing like a 10 minute video I'm gonna have I don't know

six to 12 different clips. Yeah, okay. You know, think about it in paragraphs. I typically, you know, give one thought, and I know I'm going to move on to something. I could do it all in one clip, but I'll pause the recording and start again. And the nice thing about pausing the recording is you spend way less time,

or you make way less mistakes with leaving stuff in because if you just have like one long clip maybe you accidentally skip over a bit and not cut that out and then repeat yourself twice whereas if they're distinct clips it's a bit easier to notice those problems yeah if you break it down into shorter clips too you know if you make some kind of weird mistake or you stumble through some word and you want to say it again, then you got this weird situation where you got to splice two different sentences together to try to fix the mistake you made.

Well, if it's only, you only recorded two minutes, right? Just go back and record that two minutes again. Or if you record it, a 20 minute clip, you're not going to go back and re-record 20 minutes you're just going to

fix it in editing but when you take it in smaller chunks when you make a mistake re-recording that clip is always the best option rather than trying to edit it the only time I try to do one long video is when I'm doing like the vloggy stuff outdoors

oh yeah anytime I just am doing any kind of ramble. Yeah, the rambles obviously make sense like that. Unless you just completely forget. Sorry? I was just going to say, there's no reason

to even breaking that up or even editing that stuff. Now, that's typically the kind of stuff I won't edit. Again, unless there's some weird pause or something but i'm typically not worried about fixing mistakes or anything and that kind of stuff or like a truck drives by and honks their horn oh yeah or the other day i think i had one where a dog was barking or something going crazy. Yeah, I've definitely had that before. Well, that makes those videos more real. Yeah.

Well, there was one I did a few months back where I was recording outside and there was a big gust of wind and it like knocked over something onto my fence. I like turned around during the middle of the recording. What was that? Every now and then I will get the neighbor's lawnmower picking up. There was a period

about a month ago where for two days I did not record because I knew it was going to pick up the roofers working on the roof on the next door neighbor's house because they were using the nail gun and it was... I was like, you know what know what i'm just gonna take a couple days off from recording because i i didn't want people what the hell is that gunshots what's going on there that is the nice thing about doing batch recording though then you can make sure that you have videos in case that does happen but that was some of the aftermath from the you know the the two hurricanes yeah

some of the roofs around here so there was a lot of construction there september and october there was people rebuilding their fences and having uh new tiles put on their roofs and everything and it was it was affecting me recording because i was having to work around what these construction crews were doing yeah you've had a good year of hurricanes like it's been yeah how much time have you had to take off because of hurricanes it's got to be at least like two or three weeks i reckon well when hurricane laura happened at the end of august and that was a monster hurricane. I've never seen a hurricane like that in my lifetime as far as I don't live on the Gulf. I'm about four hours inland, and it was so strong when it hit the Gulf.

It was like 150 mile per hour sustained winds, and it was traveling really fast, so it got up here quickly. really fast. So it got up here quickly. Typically, by the time these storms get here, their tropical storm force wind, you know, maybe 40 hour, 40 mile per hour winds, this thing was still like category one strength all the way up here. And it just leveled trees and took out power for most of the state. I went a week without power. And late August, that is the hottest time of the year. It was like 100 degrees with the humidity, you know, 110 degrees with the humidity, with no air conditioning, no nothing. And it was horrible. Probably the worst week of my life as far as just comfort level, extremely uncomfortable. So that was bad.

I lost eight or nine days recording, I think, because I just was completely out of everything at that point. I had it a little easier than most people who live close to the city and people that are out further. There were people without power three

weeks later. It was bad. That particular hurricane was really nasty. Six weeks later after that, another one hit. It took the exact same path, but it was not nearly as strong. I lost power briefly.

I think three days. It was cool by then. It was like 70 degrees outside. It was comfortable. It was almost like a vacation at that point. It was nothing like in late August. You can just take one of those internet vacations.

You're like, oh, no internet for a couple of days. It's all good. Yeah. So really, the months of September and October for my channel were really disrupted because I probably missed out recording probably about two weeks or so combined with storms and everything because of the power. And then there was no Internet here for three or four days after the second one because a tree took out a massive section of lines or something so i had no network here at the house for like four days straight at one point but it didn't affect the channel any you know you wonder about that when you record as often as me and you do especially you know almost every day um no views drop off as far as people still watching the old videos it's not like you go away for a

week and come back everybody's now they're still here yeah some people do have that happen to their channels but i think it really depends on the sort of content you make like a lot of stuff we do has a lot of residual views that keep going like i'll do a video on like vim or something people are going to keep watching that as it happens, or as time goes on. But if you're a channel that makes more timely content, I can definitely see how a week drop-off would definitely really affect you. If you do, say, tech news, for example,

that might be a pretty big hit on your channel. Yeah, I don't do much that's time-sensitive. Yeah, I do things that are so time insensitive that even when it should be time sensitive, I still do it like three months later. Yeah. And I tried to keep my viewers informed like with that first hurricane, Hurricane Laura.

I let them know because I was already getting a heads up from local authorities. This could be bad. People could be without power for weeks. I kind of knew. So the night before, I sent out a post on my community tab in YouTube with a little photograph, the weather photograph, the radar of the storm. I was like, hey, this is about to happen. I might lose power.

I might not. If I don't lose power, I'll still be making content. If I do, no problem. And then storm hits. It's bad. I lose power. So I post every single day on the community tab. I actually have to drive in my car to power my phone so I could post on the YouTube community tab.

I take a picture, a selfie with my camera and then drive and go post it. Just letting people know, hey, day one without power, day two without power, and then just to keep them connected. So it's not like I go seven or eight days without making anything. Oh, yeah, I heard a cane get. Yeah, that definitely does help. It's not like because some channels just do suddenly stop making content and not really give any indication they're ever coming back or anything like that.

So it is definitely good that you are doing that. Some of them disappear and don't come back. Yeah. That's the one thing, you know, making these videos for the last three years. You know, I've been a Linux user for about 12 years, strictly Linux user on the desktop for about 12 years. And there were people making Linux content, not nearly as many. But I couldn't tell you what those channels are because none of them exist anymore because nobody makes youtube videos that long right people typically flame out pretty

quickly right they yeah yeah go really hard for six months or a year and then man this is work i didn't know it was going to be work i i gotta quit doing this and that's those people that just disappear you never yeah i when i started this i knew like this this wasn't going to be like a walk in the park it was going to be like you're going to be putting in the hour if you're going to be making this many videos i didn't start doing video every day at the start but i knew that if i was going to be making videos like if i want to do them well this isn't going to be like oh just 15 minutes upload a video that's not happening there will be real work involved you'll put in the hours and you will

get it done right especially at the beginning uh i know i didn't know what all was involved and i think most of our viewers have no idea about they assume you turn on a camera and record and that is it they don't know about editing the video or in some cases editing the audio you know cleaning up the audio or they don't know the thumbnails just magically appear nobody has spent time creating them right there's so much involved i am putting so much more effort actually thumbnails is a place where i'm just leaking time now because i've started to put so much more effort into them but it is having such a massive effect on the channel um it's one of the most important things that a lot of people don't do yeah it. It's just spend some time with, with titles and thumbnails because there have been videos I have made.

Where I just thought, man, I could make this really cool thumbnail. I make the thumbnail and now I got to make the video. Yeah. Along with the thumbnail. That's what I thought it would be. Thumbnail.

Like I, at this point, I'm just like, I'm going to just take the piss with it. Cause I know that what I've realized with thumbnails is, you make it colorful, people will click on it. Obviously, I'm still making it relevant to the- the content, but this is the picture I'm gonna use for a video on, um, pulse effects. Uh, you should be able to see it in Discord.

Maybe I gotta get out of the grid, you. Ah, yes. You know what I am? Full screen too, in my window. Here we go, got it on the screen. Ah, okay. It's gonna be the title something like... Something about audio wizardry, I mean, it's gonna be the title something like, um... Something about audio wizardry, I don't know.

Nah, I think that's gonna be alright. Hmm. This is, uh, so... I've got two Hawaiian shirts on, and the two, I've got three hats on, so I've got my I Heart Goon hat, then the two hats on the left and right, those are Jack Daniels hats. One's a Jack Daniels racing hat, the other one's just Jack Daniels whiskey. Yeah. You got a nice colorful shirt there.

Make sure when you edit it, oversaturate it so it really stands out. That's the big one as well. I heard that early on. For some reason, if you make it higher contrast, people click on it more i don't know why i think it's just colorful things people like it does pop out especially when the thumbnails are really small when people are looking in the search results if you're as is really colorful and it's

really saturated it's going to stand out compared to everybody else's. The problem is that everyone else also does that as well. It's not in Linux. Well, no, they don't. Okay, not in Linux, that's for sure. Like, there's a lot of really bad thumbnails in Linux content. Oh, there's some really lazy thumbnails. As in, there's some people that don't do thumbnails that have sizable channels.

Are we talking about someone? People will go with just the standard YouTube snapshot. And it's like, no, don't do that. Are you talking about a certain anime Linux YouTuber? Oh, I actually didn't have him

in mind, but yes, that was one that certainly is guilty of that. Although, does he still do that? I think he actually spends some time. Maybe. I don't watch much. No.

Nope. Exactly the same. Well, I'll let you pull it up because you found it first. All right. Yeah, it didn't really take any of the advice you put in your video a couple of months back yeah but a lot of people did yeah i was surprised that the response from a lot of people that had youtube channels or were thinking about getting started that just loved that video that particular video there's like hey man that was really good advice i would have never thought

of some of that. Yeah, I knew most the stuff you're already talking about, but I did still definitely get something out of that video. For people who didn't know anything though, like that was an amazing resource. Yeah, that was a fun video to make too. That was... Like I said, I like making videos. I like to make that was... Hmm. That was, like I said, I like making videos. I like to make that was. Because it's nice just to take a look at other people's videos, other people's channels and like, hey, this is what you're doing right. This is what you're doing wrong. And yeah, yeah.

When people see you criticize something instead of just talking about it, you say hey you gotta focus on titles and thumbnails you don't really know what that means until you show it the wrong way yes yes this is clearly not the right way right yeah it's it's with titles and thumbnails i think people in linux they are still stuck in like five or six years ago with very descriptive titles of exactly what it actually is whereas that's not really where youtube is right now you kind of have to move more i don't like it but you have to do clicky titles in some sort of way well clickbait has always been a part of all content even written content even a part of all content, even written content.

Even 30 years ago, when I was doing stuff on the web, I mean, if you were writing anything, articles or blogs or anything, yeah, it's all about a catchy title, so people actually read that. Because there's so many other competing articles on the same stuff. I mean, clickbait is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just part of the game. Yeah. And if you don't do it, you're damaging yourself in a lot of ways.

For example, I did a video on StartX. I could have titled this video StartX I don't even know how to title it without being clicky. StartX can start up your X.org server without a display manager or something like that, which is what it does.

Like, that's a descriptive title, but I titled it Eliminate Your Display Manager With StartX, and that video exploded. It's still descriptive. It still says exactly what it is is but it's done in a way that makes it more catching to or more eye-catching people just scrolling past it yeah i like that i like the thumbnail too yeah i actually i didn't edit in the monitor i did edit in the image obviously but i actually picked up my second monitor and held it up for that picture you know what i was about to say because i actually thought what you did is you took a

picture of your monitor maybe you even took it on on and then you used a rotating tool or something in your that's actually the picture yes i actually i unplugged my second monitor and held it up it was not easy to get that picture you see i said that was a really nice thumbnail because i thought you worked hard at that but no that's just the way you took the picture i did have to like manipulate the picture of light dm to get the fit right i find but yeah ah in the monitor yeah Yeah, in the monitor. But that would have made it much easier. It would have made it so much easier.

I think I like the other thumbnail next to it better with you holding the cash. Ah, yes. The Vivaldi merch. I love that thumbnail. And you're going to become a Vivaldi shield now. Ah, yes. Yes, I am.

At the start of that video, I literally say I don't run Vivaldi. They didn't pay me to say anything about their browser. I run Brave on my system. I like internet money. Yeah, I run about six different browsers. I have three installed installed but my main one is brave you know I'm not loyal to any particular piece of software like I'm the most like no window manager I miss something different every day you never

know a text editor or I might fire up why not. Why not? It doesn't matter. Use whatever tool works. No need to get yourself in these wars on what is the best text editor. Well, I love confusing my viewers because I'll make a video about Emacs one day. Hey, I love Emacs. I like Emacs

more than Vim. I'll never go back to Vim. Next day I'll make a video and I'll open up a terminal and fire up something in Vim. And then, man what are you doing? Because I know it's going to lead to all kinds of... Well I think a good... I troll my viewers a lot. Yeah, a good, a good topic to end on then is those videos, not just those little trolling, the videos where you really troll your viewers, like the gun video, for example.

Well, that wasn't necessarily a trolling video. That was another fun one to make. But, you know, it was a sincere video as far as the points I wanted to make. But I did have a little fun with it by showing off my gun collection. And that was fun. But I already knew because just the way political things are. But I already knew because just the way political things are. Yeah, you knew exactly what the like-dislike for that would be. Oh yeah. And that's fine. I hope the people that

enjoy arguing over politics had fun in the comments section. I wasn't hanging out in that comments section. But hey, you guys, go ahead. Because you know what? All those people commenting and the 10,000 people that gave me the thumbs up, you really helped me in the YouTube algorithms. Definitely did.

So, guys, you got played. You got played. Oh. Well, I think that's as good a place as any to end off the podcast. We're just past two hours now. I think that's as good a place as any to end off the podcast. We're just past two hours now. I usually end off the episode by giving just some random channel out there a shout out.

Anyone that you think deserves a bit more attention. Maybe it's a channel that uploads cat videos. I don't know. Anything you're enjoying. Well, because I don't consume that much video content. I will say here in the last month or two, I'm not really a gamer, but there is a free open source game, real time strategy game called Zero A.D. I don't know if you know of that particular game. It's fantastic. Yeah.

And free and open source. And I've been playing it a lot. And it's a lot to get into as far as the mechanics of the game and learning about the game. And there is a YouTube channel called Tom Zero AD who discusses all the various civilizations in the game and the skills that you need to acquire to become good at the game when you're competing online against real life players, which I'm too bad at to compete against real-life players. I just play against the computer. But that's one I've watched here recently

that's actually a pretty nice channel, if you're at all interested in the game. That sounds kind of cool. I've never been into RTS. It's just something that I feel is too big-brained for me to understand. But they always look cool.

When I watch people who are good at them, it always looks cool. It is like people that have the capacity to handle chess, right? It's kind of like that. You're either one of those chess people or you're not. For the most part, I'm not one of those people.

That's why i had to go to be to explain to me how the hell to play this game and how to win because all these other people are just beating the crap out of me i don't understand i might check this out because i am starting to get uh get back into gaming a bit this is this is how you make gaming productive okay What you do is you start live streaming it. Yeah, I've done some of those in the past. Not recently. But I'm starting up like a second, I guess a third channel, because this is the second channel. I'm starting up a third channel, which is gonna be like a game live streaming channel,

and then it's not gonna be consistent. Whenever I feel like playing a game, I'll upload something there. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. If you start doing gaming on your regular channel, all the people there for your game content are going to be unhappy. Yeah, I can make exceptions for things like Super Tux Cart, but most games, no. Yeah, one of the things with youtube is they punish you too when uh you have those videos where you have very low watch time or whatever yes i said a while it's

not bad but if you were going to do basic it would seriously hurt your regular channel so it's best to put all that on a separate channel well yeah it it gets to the point where you're sort of trying to move out of your niche if you do it too much and youtube isn't the biggest fan of that no okay as for me i'm gonna say uh i'm gonna suggest you go watch an australian comedian called luke kidgill uh he does a series where he watches The Bachelor with his girlfriend and they laugh at it while being really drunk and that's fun. The Bachelor Australia which is even better. It's Bachelor reactions. Pretty much but he also does random other skit comedy stuff. He did one recently, which was called

People Who Comment First on Videos. He got drunk and played Fall Guys. Yeah, basically, it's a comedy channel. I recommend it. Also, he is absolutely amazing to see live when he can eventually do stand-up again. Yeah, hopefully the world will get back to normal. Hopefully. Sometime to normal. Hopefully.

Sometime in 2021. Maybe, I don't know. I'm not holding out much hope. It'll happen probably six months from now. It's not close, but eventually we'll get there. Yeah.

Yeah, at some point. Okay, so where can people find you if they want to go see your stuff? Well, they can find DistroTube on YouTube and library. On social media, the only social media that I really do much on is Mastodon. Look for DistroTube at mastodon.technology. Sometimes you can contact me on Reddit. I do have Reddit.

I don't really converse too much with people on Reddit. Mainly I'm just there to check out potentially cool topics to cover. Yeah. But I do have a subreddit. There is a DistroTube subreddit that anytime I post a video, it gets posted there.

And you can comment, and I might respond, but probably not. That's fair, yeah. I have a subreddit, I haven't advertised it yet. I need to do that. Cause I've got some people in my Discord. I have never advertised my subreddit. And the other day I got an announcement that I just crossed 1K subscribers on reddit I never

actually mentioned this on video where did all these people come from I think they just searched distro tube on reddit and they found it yeah and I don't even like I said I don't even talk to the people there it's weird I guess I need to start talking to these people, especially the ones hanging out in Discord and IRC. Just not enough hours in the day. That's fair, yeah. To do everything I want to do. I just... Since the moment I woke up this morning,

I've been going nonstop. And now it's close to 7 o'clock in the evening. Like, there's never enough time to do what I want to do. Well, we are after this. I've still got my weekly thumbnails to make and editing this and then editing the thumbnails for this and editing the clips for this. Yeah.

Come up with some good clickbait. Yeah. That takes a few minutes thinking about the clickbait. Yeah. I need to be better on clickbait for the, the, the podcast, the main channel.

I got it down, but the podcast, I'm still a bit lazy with. Yeah. I think just putting your name in the title is going to be enough for the clickbait for this one. Yeah, yeah, that should be good. Cool. Before we go, I want

to thank my supporters, so a special thank you to Chris, Joachim, Donald, Gulbinian, Andrew, Nathan, Montez, Iwill, Chico, Bento, Josephoseph mitchell peter d road tony tushar and all my two little supporters if you want to go find my stuff you can find my main channel at brodie robertson on youtube and library uh my podcast this got this one right here it's available as an audio release if you want to watch it basically anywhere any any way any way that you can find podcasts, it's probably there. iTunes, the other things that have podcasts. I don't know.

Is it on Spotify? It's on Spotify. What about Google? It's on Google music. It's on Google that. Yeah. Yeah. Basically everywhere.

Yeah. Uh, and if you're watching the audio version, the video version is on YouTube library and honesty. If you want to watch it there and yeah, I think it's pretty much it. Um, I'll give you the final words. What if you want to watch it there. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it. I'll give you the final words. What do you want to say?

I really have nothing else to say other than check out... Yeah, check me out on Mastodon. Other than that, thanks for having me, bro. And everybody that watched this or listened to this, thanks for hanging out with us. Hopefully next time Discord will cut out a bit less because it's been getting pretty bad. I've noticed you actually cut in and out a little bit here.

Just very briefly, nothing that's going to be a problem for you. But yeah, I've noticed it being a little buggy here. Well, I record my audio directly from my mic input, so I won't notice that on my side. Hmm. I don't know. Maybe I'll try something besides Discord next time. Yeah. Cool. Okay,

well, it's actually been a lot of fun talking to you. I'm happy we finally did this podcast. Yeah, this was a blast. I'm glad I did it too. Cool. Yeah, I think that's pretty much everything then. And I'm out.