Episode 803 transcript

FLOSS-803

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week Simon joins me and we talk with Gary Williams about AugCamp. That's the un conference all about free software, free culture, and a bunch of mates getting together to have a good time. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 803. Recorded Tuesday, October 1st.

Unconferencing with AugCamp. It's time for Floss Weekly, the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett. And this week we have, uh, well, it's not software this week. It's more about free culture and open source culture. We're talking about AugCamp. And, uh, of course, it is not just me, we've got the, the great, the amazing, Mr.

Simon Phipps! Hey, Simon! Oh, it's me, it's me! It's you! I'm back again. Welcome back! Always a pleasure! So, uh, Ogcamp, you, uh, you, you know, you know something about this, like you're, you're sort of, uh, one of the insiders. In fact, you're kind of doing double duty as a co host and a guest today, aren't you?

Simon: Yeah, so the story here is that, uh, I have a, um, a non profit that I host in the UK that looks after small community activities.

Uh, so one of the other things it does is it collect, it crowdfund the, um, maintenance of the ODF specification. Uh, and a, a lawyer friend said, Hey, this group of people needs a place to host their conference. Uh, all the money and the trademarks and the domain names, would you do it? So I agreed years ago that I would host, uh, the, uh, fiduciary oversight of this thing called OG Camp.

And I also go along. And act as treasurer at the actual event. So I take the cash box and I buy everyone's lunch and everything. Uh, but I don't do any of the other organization and none of the hard work is actually anything to do with me. Uh, and it's a different organizer each year. Um, but we're going to find out more about that now.

So I've been involved in it for years and I, I'm quite, um, pivotal to it happening, but I'm not actually the person that does the work. I

Jonathan: see. And so the person that does the work this year, is that Gary Williams?

Simon: That's Gary Williams.

Jonathan: All right, well, let's go ahead and bring him on. A noble volunteer. Yeah, we've got him waiting in the wings.

And, uh, Gary, welcome to the show.

Gary: Hey, Jonathan. Hey, Simon. Great to be here.

Jonathan: So, what, our, our Our outline for the show is basically like the the question words, right? Like what, why, where, who, how Is Oddcamp? Because we're talking about Oddcamp. So let's start with what And just give us kind of the the overview.

What what is this thing and why should people care about it?

Gary: Yeah, so Oddcamp is uh, we well we self describe as a free culture free open source software Uh kind of hardware hacking, uh Uh, conference in the UK actually in Unconference more accurately. Uh, so we've been running for 15 years now, although this is only our 11th year actually running the conference because of the event that happened over the last few years.

Um, and really it's, you know, it's a place to be if you are at all interested in hardware hacking, open culture, foss, um, and yeah, I guess things of that nature.

Jonathan: Is that where the name comes from? OGG? Are you guys really into doing audio compression?

Gary: So yeah, the name is a bit of baggage with it. We were talking a little bit about this before the show.

So OggCamp actually originally came out of a couple of Linux podcasts and came out of the Linux podcasting community and Oggvorbis and Oggtheora were the hot thing at that time, 15 years ago. So they chose the name Ogg and clung onto it and, uh, It's the, it's kind of the name that stuck, so it's Ogg in the sense of, I guess, uh, open formats and open standards, uh, but actually there's a lot, a lot more wider things discussed at OggCamp.

It's completely unrelated to Terry Pratchett.

Jonathan: One of the podcasts, was it the Linux Outlaws? I remember Dan was involved with this for a while.

Gary: Yeah, it was the Linux Outlaws and I think the Ubuntu UK podcast at the time. Ah,

Jonathan: yeah, cool. Okay, now you said you guys have taken a break. What, what's up with that?

What in the world would cause that? Why? Why?

Gary: Yeah, so we last ran in 2019 and then, uh, in 2020, this, uh, this large virus came and stopped us from running the event, uh, in 2020. Um, 2021, similar story, um, and because we're completely volunteer organized, there were a couple of years there where it just took some time for someone to pick up the slack.

Um, I was supposed to run OccCamp last year, uh, but, uh, we had a baby and that kind of got in the way of my time to organize things. So, uh I understand. Yeah.

Simon: And we did have a great team that was going to run OGCAMP the year before that, and they, they got very nervous about the return of COVID. And so they decided that they couldn't run it.

And they, they eventually stepped back down. And so we had two years where that crew was going to run it and found that the environment wasn't right for it. And then Gary last year, and now here we are with running the event for the first time in five years in Manchester in the United Kingdom.

Jonathan: So you, you have jumped to one of the next questions.

It's in, it's in Manchester. Um, have you ever thought about moving it outside

Gary: of the UK? I think there have been various people who have asked about running one outside of the UK. Um, I guess the difficulty we've always had is Oddcamp's home has been spiritually the north of England. So we've done Manchester, we've done Liverpool, we've done various other cities across the north of England.

We've ventured south a couple of times, there's been one in Oxford and one in Canterbury, but by and large it's been the north of England. Um, there were a crew looking to run one in Edinburgh, so I guess that's technically outside of England. Um, And there were a crew who were partially interested in running one in Dublin at one point.

Um, but, but that never quite got off the ground to say. England has been the kind of spiritual home of Oddcamp, um, but I guess if someone wanted to organise an Oddcamp outside of the UK, I can't see why we couldn't.

Jonathan: Yeah, you could have like, uh, Ogcamp West and Ogcamp East and have them, you know, in Berlin and somewhere here in the U.

S. It'd be fun.

Simon: It's, uh, it's got quite an eclectic draw, actually. I've been watching the ticket sales. Yeah. And there's been people in Germany and France and Belgium. all buying tickets and coming over. So although it's located in the north of England this time, um, there's, there's quite a draw from across Europe, which really quite surprised me when I realized it was happening.

Jonathan: Do you have a decent little handful coming from the States or are we Yankees not, uh, not in your target audience?

Gary: I don't think we've had any make it this year from the States. I think we have actually had a couple from Japan and places like that, but no one from the States quite yet. Yeah, maybe you should be the first Jonathan and, uh, go and get a ticket.

Although two weeks is maybe a bit short. There are

Simon: still tickets actually. You can still come. Yeah. It's very surprising where you can fly to Manchester from across the U S there are direct flights from many U S cities.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Um, okay. So. Let's just say I decide I'm going to come to Oggcamp.

What, uh, what should I expect? What's the experience like? What, uh, give me, give me a quick survival guide for a first timer.

Gary: So I think probably the, the easiest thing to say about Oggcamp is that every Oggcamp is entirely different. Say. Um, we have a set of scheduled talks, uh, just to make sure that we've got a bunch of content.

So this year we've got two rooms worth of scheduled talks, and they're from a variety of people. Uh, we've got workshops from people, uh, like Utah. One of our sponsors this year who are a, our Camp Utah, one of our sponsors this year who are a workers union here at the uk. Um. But I guess OPCAM's real selling point is that we're an on conference.

Um, so in the UK and perhaps in other places, BarCAMPs are quite a popular, uh, method of running a conference. And, uh, What that means is effectively if you've got something interesting that you think that OpCamp attendees would want to hear about, write the talk, turn up with it, or indeed don't write the talk, find out what people are interested in on the Saturday, and then what we quite often see is people with their laptop furiously writing their talk on the Saturday night to give on the Sunday.

So it's, you know, it's a real variety of topics that, that you end up hearing about our camp. It's anything from, uh, you know, securing your website with a WAF to mental health to you, what's the latest on what Collabora are doing or, you know, whatever else. Um, that there's a whole plethora of topics. Um, so yeah, no two old camps are ever the same.

Jonathan: Yeah. Uh, you said there's some workshops too where people are actually hands-on with hardware.

Gary: Yeah, so we haven't got any official hardware workshops this year, but we have in the past had people, you know, turning up with the Raspberry Pis and soldering irons and putting together ESP32 microcontrollers and things.

I think there was an event a few years ago, actually, where we had to ask someone with a soldering iron to please go outside of the conference center because your second smoker lights off. So they ended up soldering at the car park, which was pretty cool to see. Um, it's great, but we, uh, we encourage you if you've got a cool hardware project, uh, show off, absolutely bring it along.

Um, and, you know, being in the UK, we've, we've always had quite a lot of the Raspberry Pi community and things there as well. So it's, uh, it's always cool to see.

Jonathan: Yeah, oh that sounds like fun. I have had an experience earlier in life Dragging the sound system a portable sound system outside It was a church in that case But dragging it outside to the front steps to be able to solder something to fix it and not Smoke the inside of the building up.

So I I know how that goes

Gary: Yeah, yeah, it's uh, you get some funny looks from a hotel or a venue soldering gear in the middle of one of their conference rooms, that's for sure

Jonathan: Uh, yeah, I feel like they should know what they're getting themselves into though hosting a conference full of geeks and hackers

Gary: Yeah, well our venue this year have graciously welcomed us back, so, uh, clearly we didn't do anything too wrong last time we were there.

Jonathan: Yeah. Um, okay, what are some of the, uh, I guess what are some of the talks that you are excited about that are coming this year?

Gary: So, on the schedule track this year, there's a few things that I'm quite excited about, actually. Um, we've got Stuart Langridge talking about, uh, open web advocacy. I know that's something that he's been really, you know, fighting for.

Um, so just, you know, getting the open web available across a variety of platforms. I know he's been quite pivotal in getting things like, uh, other browser engines available on iOS, which is, you know, something that we've all struggled with for a long time. Um, We've got people giving us talks on audio podcasting which are going to be really cool We've got hacker public radio actually talking us through what it takes to get your certificate in order to do In order to do kind of amateur radio stuff in the UK and what are all the things you need to consider for that?

And then we've got, you know, even some of our sponsors this year, like Utah are doing a workshop on how to organize a union in your workplace, which is something that we know tech in the Europe is particularly under, you know, and unionized say they're giving a workshop on why should you join a union and what are the kind of things that you need to think about for that?

And then of course we've got our classic Oddcamp panels this year, which is kind of a look back over the last five years and all the things that have changed in FreeCulture since the last Oddcamp and what's been good, what's been bad, how do we make the next five years of FOSS and FreeCulture even better, and how can you play your part.

So a bunch of really cool talks going on, um, I named a few there, but there are a bunch more that, uh, that we've got available and they're all at oddcamp. org slash schedule. And of course. The great thing is that half of our talks aren't even announced yet, because the attendees make 50 percent of the agenda at OpCamp, so it might be that someone turns up with something really cool that we just haven't thought of yet.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's always, that's fun. Um, okay, Simon is whispering in my ear here that there is some offbeat stuff that he wants to talk about.

Simon: Yes. So, um, we're, we're going to, uh, one of the things that's always happened to odd camp has been, uh, a raffle. Um, uh, and there, uh, we've had sponsors supplying toys. Um, actually the organizers have a small budget for, for buying toys as well.

And it's very likely that there will be a, uh, a raffle for all the attendees this year as well. I suspect Gary is going to go out and buy some stuff. Uh, I've got a big budget. box of toys next door. I've got things like a robotic car that's powered by a raspberry pie. I have a lifetime supply of LEDs. Um, I have, you know, those sorts of things.

And then we've been talking about having a swaps table this year, like you'd get at a, at a local meetup where you, you bring something and take something. Uh, and we're not quite sure how that's going to work. But we are probably going to tell attendees to, to bring good quality things that they would love to have been given, uh, that they can bring along to the SPOPs table.

Uh, and then one of the things about OGCAMP is it's, it's actually a very safe environment for people who, um, Find large public events, uh, challenging. Uh, there's a lot of very caring people who take care of the folks who are around. Mm-Hmm. . And so a lot of what makes on campus special actually happens outta the meeting rooms in the, in the, in the corridor spaces, the hallway track, the open spaces.

Uh, it's a hallway track, but it's a, but it's a, it's not just a bumping into friends hallway track. It's also a taking care of, of people who are there for the first time. Type hallway track too.

Jonathan: Yeah, interesting. Um, let's see. What was I going to, what was I going to ask about? I had something that came to mind.

Um, so like what are, what are some of the, it sounds like it's a, it's an intersection of a whole bunch of different things. So you've got obviously people that care a lot about open source. Do you have some other niches there? Like, is there, is there a retro hardware enthusiast sort of group that comes?

Do you have security people that come like what, what, what do these different groups kind of look like? What are the, what are the different interests that get represented?

Gary: It's a good question. Um, I'm trying to think back five years.

Simon: I mean, it depends on who comes, right? You know that. So there's a quite interesting profile.

Uh, I know that one of our organizers has recently got into, um, creating art with, uh, with plotters and, um, with pen plotters. And there is certainly going to be a little section that is interested in that this year. Um, I, I, we've previously had, uh, people who are into security having, uh, having questions about that.

There's typically quite a big Ubuntu community. Um, faction in the room, uh, trying to be friendly, welcoming Ubuntu people. And of course that's evolved over the 15 years, uh, into something completely different now. Uh, so I, uh, but it really, it's going to depend on who shows up. We've got a couple of hundred people showing up.

Um, some of them, the names I recognize lots of people I don't, and it's the odd camp is the product of the people who come, um, because we're, we're We're cowards. We, we do plan a planned track just in case, you know, no one comes with any talks, but that's never happened. And so it's going to be the product of, of, of who comes and that makes it quite different to most of the other conferences that I attend, where the conferences, you know, I can tell you in advance what's going to be happening at all things open, and I can tell you, uh, you know, in advance what's going to be happening at FOSDEM, uh, to a certain degree.

Uh, whereas OGCAMP. I can tell you some things that are going to be happening. There's going to be a raffle. Um, there's going to be two, two rooms full of planned talks. But apart from that, who knows, you know, that's part of the charm of it.

Jonathan: Is that really what's meant by an unconference that things tend to happen ad hoc?

Gary: Pretty much, yeah. So it's, we call it an un conference because there almost isn't a conference, right, until people turn up and make one. So, um, like I said, we have two rooms or two rooms of our schedule track that we, yeah, we come up with. But actually it's, it's the people who turn up and present their interests to like minded people that really make it an un conference, I think, for me.

Um, Yeah, it's, it's a very, yeah, it sort of evolves over the two days. You find that you get a well attended talk about, uh, TLS from some of the security crowd and you'll find someone else go, Oh, there's a bunch of TLS stuff that they didn't cover in their talk. So I'm going to do another one in TLS tomorrow.

Um, and yeah, you sometimes find that. Rooms get full and people are just giving ad hoc talks in hallways or in a hotel foyer and they've got 10 people grounded around them or in our kind of event space, someone turns up with a cool toy and I think one year someone turned up with a robot conferencing device that could walk around and be controlled and, uh, yeah, it was just walking around and people are having conversations with it and it was great.

So it's, it's the unexpected, like you say, the thing that really makes it an unconference for me.

Jonathan: Yeah, as you as you think about the things you have scheduled like on the the official tracks this year Are there any particular talks that you hope people bring?

I know that's kind of an interesting question But is there anything that you don't have covered that you really hope people will cover?

Simon: You know, I'm hoping we've got some folk there who are very into activity pub Uh, and I'm hoping we're going to get some, some good, uh, horizontal thinking about ActivityPub showing up spontaneously.

Uh, you know, a shout out to Andy Piper, who I hope will be the catalyst that causes that to happen. Uh, but, uh, you know, I'm hoping there'll be some, some really good things about that, because I think that's, that's close to the center of where the biggest hope for open source is at the moment, is getting away from over centralization.

Mm hmm. Uh, moving into Federation. And having devices and software which is simple enough for everyone to federate instead of becoming the, uh, the, the data slave of meta. Uh, and so I, that I really hope is going to show up, that we're going to see, talk about federation, talk about ActivityPub, talk about, um, uh, cutting the cord to the, um, the ad industrial complex.

Yeah. Yeah,

Jonathan: I get that.

Gary: I think for me, I'd love to see some talks about self hosting coming up. I think there's a bunch of really cool open source projects that people can self host that are genuine competitors to, you know, the proprietary. Google Photos or Google Drive or Office 365's of this world that have come along in the last five years and, you know, really running with, with what it is that, um, those products had, um, but you know, you can, you can run them on a server in your garage, right?

And I think that's really cool. So, you know, people coming along and talking about those projects and talking about their journey from proprietary platform through to, I run everything on a server myself that's in my garage is, is a really cool thing. I'd like to see some of this year too.

Jonathan: Yeah, um, I don't suppose you have anybody coming that you know of to talk about Meshtastic?

This is a project that I've been spending my time on here recently.

Gary: I haven't seen anybody so far.

Jonathan: I may have to go and uh, drop a link to this in one of the discords and see if anybody there wants to go and give a give a talk on it because that would be fun. Uh, it's, it's lore, lore radios that talk to each other but they, they mesh and they're all decentralized.

I think it would be a great fit.

Gary: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like something that people would be interested in.

Simon: And I'll be bringing one of my raspberry pies along and giving a talk about running, you know, Because that because I host most of the things I care about Uh on a rack of raspberry pies just downstairs from where i'm sitting And it's very straightforward to do Um, and there's no reason why most people couldn't do it to be honest.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah, that's true uh, simon, you said you are the sort of the the treasurer and the um, I guess sort of the legal host You of Oggcamp? I'm curious. I'd like to hear more about that. Um, why, why such a thing is needed and what all you, uh, what all you do.

Simon: Yes. Well, uh, so that, that arose, uh, a number of years ago when, um, a, uh, a gentleman I work with who happens to be a lawyer said that there was a community of people running a conference and they needed a fiduciary host.

And I, I run a, uh, a small not for profit organization called Public Software in the UK. And, um, the reason you need a fiduciary host. is because, uh, I think like a conference, there's actually quite a lot of money floating around, uh, all camp is going to cost us probably a five figure sum of money to put on.

And, uh, and it, it breaks even. So the, at the end of the process, there's probably going to be a five figure sum of money sitting ready for next year. And somebody has got it. Somebody's got to keep it, and you've got to trust someone to own it. And, um, this particular conference is one that gets run by whoever is available next year.

And so the people who are responsible for it in 2024, possibly none of them will be involved in 2025. So, If that's the case, who owns the domain names? Um, who has got the money in their bank? Uh, who is it that has got the legal standing to make contracts with the hotel? And so that's what Public Software does, the organization that I run.

Uh, and public software, um, provides a home for unincorporated associations of, of people who are doing things for open source and free culture. So, um, we host, uh, OGCAMP and we have one other project called COSM, which is a crowdfunding pot for maintaining the, uh, open document format that you find in, in LibreOffice and now in Microsoft Office.

Uh, and so, uh, I, I do that. I, um, Uh, run the incorporated association that looks after the assets of odd camp so that Gary is able to show up and there is money for him to spend on the conference this year. And there is somebody who's willing to sign the contract with the pendulum hotel. And there is somebody who is willing to pay the, the, uh, the crew radio supplier.

And there is somebody who can pick up lunch for the volunteers. And then at the end of the show. Um, public software will, will draw everything together and get ready for next year and make it available to whoever shows up to run OGCAMP 2025. So fiduciary hosting, it's, it's kind of like what, um, software in the public interest or Software Freedom Conservancy do for open source projects.

Uh, just for things, I do it for things that aren't software, for, for a small conference, for a standards project. Publix offers hosted other small activities over its lifetime as well.

Jonathan: Yeah, I guess that's something I didn't think about, but if you have that much money running or moving around, like if, if nothing else, you just need to be able to have a paper trail of nobody walked away with a thousand dollars in their pocket that shouldn't have.

Simon: Yeah, so we do that. And also, um, you know, there is value added tax, sales tax to be collected and paid. Yeah, that's true too. So we do that. And, uh, uh, you know, that we've, we have credit card machines, uh, you know, ordinary individuals typically don't have. Credit card facilities and we have credit card machines so we can host the Stripe account and we can, we've got, we have a Square account that we make available.

So it's all of these little details that make it possible to put on an event. Modern society has, uh, as in so many other areas, has, uh, has, uh, officialized or bureaucratized the things that previously would have just been, uh, the way that mates did things together. So, if we'd been running a village fate 40 years ago, we probably wouldn't have needed public software.

Right. But in 2024, you absolutely need a fiduciary host to look after these things for you. Because otherwise, Gary is going to find himself with HMRC wanting to know where the VAT is. He's going to find himself having to pay corporation tax on the turnover personally. And he's going to find it's added to his income tax return.

And he doesn't want any of those things to happen. Right. So, so we make sure that doesn't happen too.

Gary: Yeah, Simon makes it so I can just, uh, contact the hotel, get the invoice sent, and, uh, forget about it and carry on with my day, which is, uh, which is always great. He takes the bureaucracy out of what otherwise would be quite a painful thing come tax return season.

Yes,

Jonathan: yes, understood. Uh, how many, how many tickets do you guys, uh, well, let's see. How many tickets total? What's your, what's your max capacity for the event?

Gary: Absolute maximum for the event in the venue that we're in this year is 250. We hope to get somewhere close to filling that. Um, and we're not, we're not too far off actually.

Um, Where are you at?

Jonathan: How many have you sold? How many are left? I

Gary: think we're just under 200 at the moment. We're not too far off. So,

Jonathan: so if nobody else signs up, you guys still, you're on, you've got a good conference, even with just under 200 people, that's a, that's still a good group of people.

Gary: Hey, we've, we've definitely got enough people to, to put on a good show, I think.

Um, and yeah, plenty of people to come and come and fill slots for talks as well. So

Simon: in terms of cashflow, looks like we've collected enough money to refresh the pot for next year. So, um, I think this, this event is going to break even and that's what we want to do. We don't want to make a profit. We want to, we, we do want to break even.

And we want there to be about the same amount of money in the pot next February as there was in the pot in February when Gary took it.

Jonathan: Uh, what, what is the cost for it as far as per ticket?

Gary: So what we've always done with Old Camp is trying to keep it very accessible to people. So This year, um, I think it's, it's no secret to anyone that the bottom has fallen out of the ad market and, uh, sponsor money is much more difficult to get hold of.

Uh, so this year we've said, yeah, we're going to honor that pay what you can model. Um, but we've got a suggested ticket price of 40 pounds. So, For your 40 you get, you know, two days worth of, you know, really good solid talks on the schedule track, plus whatever, whatever else turns up, plus the hallway track.

Um, but if you can't afford that, then absolutely you can pay us anything from 1 upwards. The only ask there is that you cover the cost of our ticketing platform. Because they charge us a small amount to issue tickets and store people's records and things like that.

Simon: Then there's the opposite end of the thing where we have a bunch of people who say, you know, we really want to support you.

And rather than taking donations, we put on the system some high price tickets. So we've had a whole load of people who have bought what we call professional tickets, which are the 100 tickets that for people who can expense it. And so we've had, uh, quite a few people have bought professional tickets.

They don't have to, they could have just bought the one pound tickets if they wanted to. And it's quite comforting and reassuring that if you look across all of those tickets we've sold, uh, there's a pretty even spread of people at pretty much every price point between, I think the most anyone has paid is 200 pounds and the least anyone has paid is five pounds at the moment.

And there's, we have a pretty good spread across the whole, Yeah,

Jonathan: I'm, I'm actually really glad to hear that you guys keep it affordable that way. I, I was looking at going to a conference. You know, not, not anything particularly open source, although I tend to make conferences open source when I go to them.

Um, I, uh. Famously was at a, uh, U. S. Department of Defense conference where they were talking about the problems with, uh, FPGA security. And, of course, I, from the back, Why don't you just open source the toolchains if you want it to be more secure? I have lots of fun doing stuff like that. Uh, anyway, this conference, I was looking at it in the background.

Tickets were like 699 a piece or more if you wanted everything. It's like, oh man, we can't expense that right now. Um, so I think that's really neat that you guys make it, uh, you make it affordable. You mentioned sponsors, uh, And I, I, I was going to ask whether you have sponsorships. Um, and, uh, so how does, how does that work?

Do you guys go, do you have like a list of companies that you go after each year that it's going to be put on and you say, Hey, you guys supported last time. Would you be interested in, in, in helping do this? And then like, is there a banner somewhere? You know, is there, is there a banner wall where people come up and take their picture with all the logos behind them?

Yes.

Gary: Yeah, we do have that. So. So I think one of the nice things about OGCAMP is that we've always tried to not be super corporate, right? Um, yeah, you're not going to come and see, you know, logos of insert big FOSS company here plastered in every single conference room. But what we want to do is cover our costs and we want to, you know, return a fair value to those people who help us cover our costs.

So, um, this year we've actually ended up with four sponsors. I think I'm right in saying that none of them have sponsored us previously. They are all entirely new sponsors this year. Um, and they are anything from kind of small software development companies, to larger open source projects, uh, to a trade union actually this year is our pinnacle sponsor.

I mentioned Utah a couple of times. Yeah. Um, And yeah, so they get their Lego on a t shirt and they'll get their Lego on banners and things and, you know, a personal thanks from us for, for really helping make our camp happen because we couldn't, we just couldn't do it without, without that little bit of extra cash injection that we get from sponsors.

Um, So, um, yeah, I think like I said earlier, uh, Utah running a couple of workshops this year and a panel discussion. Um, a couple of other sponsors have got stands in our kind of community room where we sell merch and put out tables for people to do anything from play role playing games to show off their cool Raspberry Pi projects.

Um, so yeah, we, we have a list of people we target, um, but this year it's actually just been an entire new set of sponsors, which is actually really cool. And what we're hoping is that that will introduce a whole new demographic of people to, to OrcCap.

Jonathan: Um, so I was going to ask, I was going to ask who the sponsors were, and I think you sort of just covered that, um, you've got the, the trade union.

Uh, is there any music? So one of the things that it, it sort of, it sort of hits my mind that there might be an intersection here is that you could have musicians and people very, very interested in music, very, whether putting it on or doing talks about music or even building your own music hardware, it seems like you could have some of that.

Gary: Yeah, so Dan, previous organizer, had previously done our evening entertainment in 2019, which was quite cool. We don't have any kind of scheduled evening music entertainment this year, but I'm absolutely sure that there will be people turning up with their cool synth project that they've built with their ESP32s or something.

I know we've definitely had things like that in the past where someone's turned up with, uh, yeah, here's my, here's my rack of, uh, Analog synths that I've built from open source hardware and say yeah that there always is that kind of maker slash music crowd I think that turns up our camp But again, it's it's kind of like we were saying it really depends on who turns up as to as to what's gonna be there But but that is one of the the many crowds of people that turn up our camp.

Jonathan: Yeah Do you have anything like I know in some conferences people like to come and actually camp out? Uh, to, to attend it rather than having to pay. Is there, is there something like that? Is it going to be a tent village?

Simon: Um, I think it's unlikely. Okay. Um, you know, the Manchester is not the greatest place to camp out during October.

Uh, and, or, and it's gonna be quite busy in the city this year. There's, because there's a, there is a sporting event going on, uh, as well at the same time as the conference. So I, I, no, I, I think everyone's very likely to either be local or in hotels. , uh, certainly I haven't booked a room yet, so I really must get round to doing that.

I, I might be sleeping on the street. Simon's gonna be ski out on the

Gary: street. Simon's gonna be on the bench outside in the, uh, in the hotel.

Jonathan: No, Simon's going to be in the hallway track like, Hey, do you have an extra bed in your hotel room?

Simon: It's the hallway and sleeping bag.

Jonathan: Oh, that's great. That's great. Um, so let's see what, uh, what, what have I not covered?

What else do you guys want to let folks know about? What, what else are you looking forward to with the conference?

Gary: I think for me, it's, it's just getting something running like this in the UK. I think the UK is. Is kind of really lacking in these community led FOSS events. Um, yeah, there's, there's a bunch of them that exist across in the U S um, but, but we're definitely lacking in them in the UK.

So I think for me, it's going to be the main thing I'm looking forward to is just seeing old faces, new faces, what people come up with and really, you know, how the community has evolved in the last five years, I think really for me is, is the key thing that I want to get out of old camp this year.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Simon: I think I'm in a similar place to that, you know, in the, the, the curious thing is I've been doing open source for a couple of decades living in the UK.

And I've always had to go abroad to go and do anything, you know, and so there is a certain desire to hold grassroots events that are not about, uh, feeding a corporate strip mining open source culture, but they're actually about people who use things and make things. And so I've always loved OGCAMP for that reason, that it's about the only event that I can go to in the UK.

Actually, it isn't the only event in the UK. There is a, there is a, uh, another conference in the UK now as well called, uh, EMF, which actually does have a campout, uh, that happens as well. And that's also in the north of England. So there's, there's now two events in the UK that, that are, uh, addressing that niche.

And I find that really encouraging that that's happening. Um, I, I do, I've often wondered whether, uh, Europe needs to have an, uh, an, a summer FOSDEM. And I'm kind of hoping that eventually one of these events is going to evolve a bit into a summer FOSDEM so that we can have a Europe wide open source event.

Europe does have quite a few good open source events. Um, there's a really good one that I'll be plugging later in, uh, happening in Northern Italy in November. And then there's a couple of, uh, good ones in Germany, like, uh, uh, the one that happens in Bonn. Um, and there's a, a, a good international conference called FOSS Backstage that happens in Europe.

So, there's good things going on, but the UK has tended to be, um, the one place where there has not been enough going on. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm excited about being involved with Oddcamp. I'm really pleased that Gary's come along this year. Gary's a very level headed, very capable, uh, uh, uh, sensible person.

And I'm very pleased to be supporting him.

Jonathan: Yeah. You know that that idea about not having anything in the UK and sort of missing it I get that because like there's not a whole lot here in Oklahoma where I'm at and Be nice. Don't laugh at my state. Uh, I think I think Oklahoma is actually about the same size as UK if I remember correctly It's it's gonna be on the on the discord Somebody put a picture of like the map of Europe and then Texas over it And like, Texas is just, is bigger than Germany and covers half of France and covers half of Italy.

And, you know, Doc Searles famously says that the big difference between the United States and Europe is, in the United States, we think a hundred years is old and over in Europe, y'all think a hundred miles is far. And that just, that really, I think that's actually really great. It, it covers, Sort of the mindset difference that comes out of the history and geography of the two places.

But like I've had this thought there's nothing in Oklahoma that I that I know of at least nothing big uh, you got to go down to Texas and I got real excited because there was somebody that was going to do like a once a year I think it was the Texas Linux Fest and was going to be in Dallas like oh Dallas That's that's you know, that's when the not too much more than 100 miles.

That's not very far Uh, you know, I could get down there in three hours. That's not too bad um I don't know if that's happening again, because again, we got hit with COVID and so a lot of things closed down. Yeah, it really makes, it really makes me think that, uh, maybe we need more people from the community to start talking about things like this and try to put them on and put them together.

Because there is something to be said for getting together in person and not just over the internet. Uh, meeting, meeting people in person. And actually doing things, putting your hands on things together and, and fiddling around with stuff. Um, So I think, I think that is cool and I, I, I look forward to hearing stories from this year about what all happened and which talks happened and which ones were popular and people that got to meet each other for the first time.

Simon: And you know, Jonathan, we can discuss licensing OGCAMP to you for OGCAMP West if you want to run it over there in Oklahoma.

Gary: Well, it was that meeting of people in person that kind of inspired me or I guess, uh. Maybe drunkenly got me convinced to organise Oddcamp this year. Like

Jonathan: all great ideas, it was birthed in a tavern, in a pub.

It

Gary: genuinely happened in a pub, yeah. So, um, it was actually, I worked for a brief period with a previous organiser, John Spriggs. And, uh, he was like, oh, I'd love to see Oddcamp come back, but I don't want to be the one doing it. And, uh, you've been to Oddcamp a load of times, you know how it works. How do you feel about putting, uh, putting on an Oddcamp?

Couple of beers later, and before you knew it, I was sending an email to Simon saying, Hey, what do we need to do to get this thing kicked back off on a cold December night at a white Christmas party? So, uh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's getting the community back together, I think, is where some of these things really, really spawn out of.

So it's also going to be interesting to see, like you said, what, what other things spawn out of Oddcamp and having people together that, um, yeah, is, is going to happen. Yeah,

Simon: you know, I want to say to all the odd camp attendees and supporters who are, who are listening that, um, we're getting back again, back together again this year.

We haven't been able to nail down all the things that you, that you want there to be there. So try and bring them with you this year, if you can. And if you can't help us organize it next year, so that they're there. So, you know, we, as Gary said, we don't have a. Um, an event organized on the, uh, the intermediate night on the Saturday night.

Uh, it would have been great to have booked a room and got a band and had everyone, you know, able to order their fish and chips and mushy peas and their half a lager. Um, but, uh, you know, that didn't happen. And so maybe it can next year and maybe it's one of the people listening to this that's going to be the person that, that insists on organizing it.

Um, Probably too late to organize it this year. I think that the hotel told us that they, you know, we've, we've, we've paid for a certain number of rooms. Uh, we could go back to them and try and say, Hey, you said, you know, we said we didn't need the ballroom. Well, we do now. Um, and if you're listening to, you're listening to me saying this and you really want to organize the thing in the ballroom, then get in touch.

My email address is, uh, simonatwebmink. com. And you can, you can get ahold of me that way. Okay. But, so this year I see very much as a relaunch, you know, it's, it's doing the things that we know work, um, hoping someone's going to bring the stuff that we haven't been able to organize, but really hoping that we're going to have some new blood who are going to help us organize, um, the double this event next year.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. So what, like, you, you allude to this, what's not happening that people wanted to see happen this year? What happens in the ballroom?

Gary: Well, what happens in the ballroom stays in the ballroom, I guess. I could tell you, but then I'd have to

Jonathan: kill you. I walked into that one.

Gary: Previous years, Oddcamp has been quite famous, I think, for its, its social track.

Um, so we've always had some kind of entertainment on maybe the Friday night, definitely the Saturday night and occasionally actually the Sunday night. Uh, we've always had some kind of prearranged entertainment. So, uh, yeah, whether it be a band playing or some kind of FOSS quiz on the Saturday night or something like that.

Um, Like Simon said, this year our focus has really been on what do we need to do to get OggCamp up and running. Um, and what do we need to do to do that in a way that is sustainable for a small, new, organised increase. So, some things like that have fallen by the wayside. Um, and yeah, Simon alluded to things like the raffle, um, We're pretty sure the raffle is going to happen this year.

They're kind of famous or camp raffle. Uh, we just need to, as an organizing crew, get our head into gear and make sure that we've got everything that's needed in terms of prizes there. Um, so I think the big thing is going to be the social track. I think that's the big difference that people might notice this year compared to previous years.

Um, But that said, um, the hotel have graciously said that we will have the bar open for OCCAMP and they're putting on some food and things like that for attendees to buy at a reduced rate. So, yeah, there will be social tracks coming, uh, you know, there will be things happening and I think it's human nature to have a like minded group of people get together and congregate in the hotel bar or head off elsewhere.

Um, so, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, it will, it will feel like an old camp, um, it's just going to be a case of, uh, yeah. I guess a little bit of autonomy happening, uh, among attendees that perhaps we, we didn't do quite as much before.

Jonathan: Yeah. My, my wife is in the discord and she's also apparently listening to some of this and she says, if life circumstances were different this year, I'd all be for attending this conference in Manchester.

Like both of us, none of this just sending Jonathan business. In years past, I went to a conference in Dublin by myself and, uh, While it was fun, it was a bit of a bummer that I couldn't take her along. So one of these days,

Simon: you know, it's not too late. Just check, check out, uh, the, the, what flights are available.

There's going to be some cheap flights direct to Manchester. You can just make the weekend for it.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think our kids are a little too young for that at this point, but, uh, that's, that's all right. Maybe in a couple of years. So, what, let's, let's, let's, let me ask you this. What are some, like, highlights from the last couple of times you guys had OggCamp?

Uh, what are some of the talks that really you remember or just memories you have that you think people would enjoy hearing about?

Gary: I think for me the first dog camp I went to was really eye opening just as to how small the UK is. Um, so I ended up actually getting talking to a guy in, uh, on one of the hallway tracks and, uh, I'm from a fairly small county in the UK, uh, so Norfolk on the east coast for anyone who knows it.

Um, quite famous for the fact that we've got no motorways in any one city. So it's, uh, it's a fairly small place and I got talking to this guy, um, And we were like, he was like, where are you from? And I said, where I was from. And it turns out that he lives five minutes down the road. We both have, yeah, had similar jobs at the time.

Very similar kind of interests in FOSS and things like that. And we've stayed in touch ever since. So that for me was a real OGCAMP highlight. Um, but in terms of talks and things, it's actually been the talks that, necessarily directly FOSS related that have really appealed to me. So I kind of alluded to before that we've had talks on things like mental health and stuff like that.

And actually going along to those talks and just hearing those insights as to, ah, this person struggles with the same things of, you know, Struggles of working in IT as I do or this person has come across this particular problem They've tried to solve in this way and perhaps that's a different way that I could approach something that have I've always been highlights for me So it's it's almost been the unexpected things that you couldn't plan for going to a conference that have been highlights for me So I mean you have any thoughts

Simon: Yeah, wandering around seeing the toys people have got in the, uh, in the, in the exhibit area where the tables are.

That was, that's always a feature for me. I remember having a picnic on the front steps of the venue in Liverpool when the conference was held there. Um, I remember giving a talk all about, uh, the, uh, legislation that keeps on trying to backdoor crypto, um, which is back again this year, just in case you had any concerns.

Uh, so, uh, those are all pretty, you know, they're, they're, they're minor sounding things. They're pretty random. For me, the event, this is, this is the, not the event where there are the, the big corporate talks. This is the event where there are the, uh, the important new relationships are created. And that's what I really hope for for this year as well, is that we'll meet interesting people and befriend them.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yep. Very cool. All right. Uh, let's see what, uh, what have I not asked about? What have we not covered that we, we ought to let folks know about?

Simon: Great questions. Uh, so if you want to buy tickets, uh, there are still a few available. Uh, you'll, you can find them at, uh, I think the org. camp is, uh, is the, the easiest to remember URL that will get you there.

So if you type in org. camp, it will take you to our website. Uh, and I'm pretty sure that we bought all the other websites that sound like that as well. So I think we, we have oddcamp. com and things, but what the cool one is odd. com. There

Jonathan: you go.

Simon: Um, and, uh, you know, I encourage you to pay what you can for the tickets.

And, and that means at both ends of the scale, if you can afford the thousand dollars for the ticket, please buy a ticket for a thousand dollars. Because you're, you're investing in the future of the conference. When you do that, the conference isn't run. For the benefit of, uh, anyone financially, um, what will happen if there is a surplus is public software will hang on to it and it will be available for next year's conference to be bigger and better.

So, um, uh, it's, you know, it's, if you can afford to, uh, to, to buy the thousand, thousand pound ticket, we don't actually have a thousand pound ticket, Gary, could you fix that before the show goes out? Um, go, go, go ahead and do that. Um, uh, Also, keep an eye on the socials, we do have a couple of venues, I don't think we've fixed on an official venue on social networks this year, but we do have a Mastodon account.

We do have a room on Matrix that you can find, and there may be some other remnants somewhere, I think we might still be on that social network that nobody should use anymore.

Gary: Yeah, there's a, there's a few places there's, there's the X accounts, there's a telegram group, uh, there's a discord as well. I know you love hanging out in discord Jonathan. I

Jonathan: didn't say I love hanging out in discord. I said that's where I find myself a lot.

Gary: Yeah, I think I'm in like five discords at this point.

I can't, can't honestly say I read messages in all of them. I'd have to go count. Oh my goodness. A lot. It's quite a lot. Um, yeah. Let's see. Og. camp is probably the place to go, um, and anything that you need to know is, is kind of linked from there really.

Jonathan: Yeah. Uh, what are the dates? I don't think we've ever actually said.

When is this?

Gary: It's the 12th and 13th of October, uh, this year, so coming up in just a couple of weeks.

Jonathan: Less than a couple of weeks. Yeah, that is, that is coming up soon.

Simon: There's still rooms at the hotel, so you can still stay at the venue, which is the Pendulum Hotel in Manchester. So you, uh, that, that's available.

There's still a few tickets left. Uh, if you're quick, um, Gary's going to have to turn off the tickets when we reach the fire limit for the venue. Uh, so, uh, you want to get in there as soon as you hear me saying this, cause there's stop listing now and go to org. camp and buy your tickets.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's the important thing, right?

You don't have to listen to the episode. If you're going to be there, uh, what, what year did, did our

Gary: camp start? You'll know this better than I will, Simon. I don't know, I joined it after the fact. 2009, I think. The last OddCamp was our 10th anniversary in 2019. So, uh, this is the 11th OddCamp, but it's our 15th year, which, uh, feels like another milestone.

Jonathan: Yeah. Boy, the world was different in 2009. Goodness.

Simon: Ah, those were the days.

Jonathan: Yes. Yes, they were.

Simon: Still a Sun Microsystems, then.

Jonathan: Yeah. Uh, Gary, I didn't ask and I guess I should. How did you, uh, how did you get into, we know, we know Simon, we know where Simon came from. How did you, how did you get into like the, the whole open source and free world?

Like what's your, uh, what was your gateway drug that got you interested and that you started coming to Oddcamp?

Gary: It was a teacher back in high school actually handed me a CD. So yeah, I, I at the time was, uh, was running a, uh, Not so great laptop that been handed down and handed down and handed down and Windows didn't run so well on it and I just went to this teacher who was a Gentoo user back then and said yeah, what could I do to sort this out and he said, I'll sort you something out tomorrow and came in and almost, you know, dealt under the desk this Kubuntu 7.

10 or 7. 04 or something CD and I was like, yep, here you go. Um. And never looked back, I installed that on that machine, it lasted me another few years and uh, yeah I guess from there ended up getting into, you know, working in IT, advocating for replacing a bunch of Windows stuff with FOSS where it made sense, um.

Then kind of got into the kind of cloud world and continued to advocate for open source stuff there. Um along with attending Uh op camp and fosdem and linux fest northwest and anywhere I could get my fill of uh, false goodness Um, that's that's where i've been for the last 10 or 15 years, I suppose

Jonathan: And you're thankful that your teacher gave you a kubuntu disk and not a uh, not a gen2 disk

Gary: Uh, yeah, I mean it might have had a slightly different appeal, I mean since then I've moved off of the Plasma desktop and, uh, daily driving Fedora with Gnome.

But, uh, yeah, I mean, it was probably a wise choice not to send me down the road of, uh, doing a Gen 2 install at, uh, you know, 12, 13 years old or whatever it

Jonathan: was. Yeah. All right. So let me, let me actually cover this and we get to ask Simon. I don't think we asked Simon this. Um, and I don't know the answers.

We're gonna start with Gary. I want to know what's your favorite text editor and scripting language.

Gary: Uh, for me, it's got to be nano and bash. I just, I want to deal with something simple. Uh, so I actually spent a lot of time just in nano writing stuff in bash, which is probably the most boring, terrible answer I could give.

But for me, I'm all about keeping things simple.

Jonathan: No, no, that's all, that's all good. You know, Simon, I don't know that I know the answers to this. I don't think we've ever asked you. Yes. What's your, what's your favorite text editor in scripting language?

Simon: So, I never really got into text editor religion, and I use whatever there is that is on the system I'm running.

Um, I have a soft spot for nano on my raspberry pi's, uh, but I, you know, I used to enjoy using E when I was at IBM and, uh, which nobody will know about and, um, uh, it's, but, so he is the editor that, that Emacs. Became when you added the macro language.

Jonathan: So

Simon: I, I used to enjoy using that. Uh, I do most of my editing these days in whatever notepad I can pop up on the device I'm using at the moment.

And I use Markdown, um, and when it comes to scripting, um, it's been a while. I have to tell you. Uh, so the last scripting language that I used in Anger was on a, a sign organizer. Uh, I actually wrote commercial software in sign organizer scripting language. As

Gary: you went lying when you said it'd been a while, eh?

I think that's pretty much it. For me, it's a really difficult question to answer these days because I spend so much of my time in the cloud world that it's like, you know, whatever thing abstracts away the clouds is what I end up using. So I end up writing a lot of Terraform and Ansible and CDK and stuff these days, um, just because I guess that's what I work with day to day.

So, uh, I don't get to play with, uh, with much nice, cool scripting stuff anymore.

Simon: Yeah, to give you an idea of how old we're talking here, um, uh, so, uh, my story was a little bit like Gary's, so my, my physics teacher at school, uh, uh, was moonlighting while he was teaching physics and making the motherboards for, uh, compute for development systems that used a 6800 microscope.

processor called SWTP 6800 development systems. This was in 1977. And, um, so that was my first computer. Cause I used to, I do, he used to soak test them in one of the labs. And we used to go in during the breaks and program them. And the reason I'm telling you that story is I went around the computer history museum in Silicon Valley recently.

And I, there is the computer that I learned to program assembly language on, uh, sitting in the computer history museum. And that's how I know I'm old. Ha!

Jonathan: When you find your first computer sitting in a museum, yeah, that would do it. Uh, now I have to think, like, what was my first computer that I ever actually did anything on, and is it old enough?

It might be. It might be. The first one I ever played with, my dad had one of the Trash 80s. Excuse me, TRS 80. But that wasn't really modern then that was like pulled out of storage But I think we had a like a tandy one of the original tandies and I think those are just old enough to be museum pieces now, so I suppose i'm old too.

Simon: Yeah You keep using you keep using that hair dye jonathan

Jonathan: No, no, mine's all natural there's a little gray poking in there, but it's not too bad

Gary: Now I feel young when I can say that it was a pentium 133. It was You The first machine I really used and did stuff on, but even then that was somewhat of a hand me downer space.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. All right. Well, I am, uh, I won't be there, but I'm looking forward to OGCAMP because it sounds like you guys are going to have a great time this year. And hopefully we're going to have

Simon: an old fogeys reminiscence session over a beer in the, uh, in the, in the bar at the hotel where I will show people photographs of the SWTP 6800.

And we can talk about a 6800 assembly language and the unique register commands it had.

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, who knows? You guys keep doing it, you'll eventually have the, uh, retrocomputing track. People will bring their old machines and let people play with them. Alright.

Simon: Now there's an idea. Next year, Gary, okay?

Yeah, we'll put it on the list.

Jonathan: I mean, retrocomputing is big right now. There's a lot of people that are, uh, Very nostalgic for the machines of yesteryear. So, all right. Thank you guys for being here. I appreciate it very much. Gary, particularly, thanks for coming and telling us all about the conference and, uh, best of luck here in a couple of weeks that everything goes exactly the way you want it to.

And, you know, all the surprises are good and all of that stuff.

Gary: And tech gods are with us for demos and audio and. projectors and other such things.

Jonathan: Yes. Yes. I've been that guy and there's always something that surprises you. Uh, awesome. Thank you so much. Uh, Simon, this is where normally I ask you what you think, but you were sort of the, uh, guest too.

Um, I guess I'll go ahead and ask you though.

Simon: Well, I think everyone should buy tickets and come to the conference in Manchester because, uh, you know, I could. I could hype it up and say it's going to be, you know, the, a super majestic technical whiz orgasmic thing. Uh, but actually we're just going to be a group of people who want to be friends, uh, coming together and sharing a space and sharing our interests with each other.

And, um, uh, I think that, uh, if that appeals to you, then you should go get a ticket. Uh, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you really should go to, I dunno, some Oracle conference.

Jonathan: If that doesn't appeal to you, then maybe you need to rethink the decisions that have led you to this point in your life. Oh, all right.

Well next week, interestingly, we have somebody from IBM going to talk about their, uh, Open AI stuff, and it'll be very interesting to compare notes with what IBM thinks about open source LLMs and AI with what OSI and Mr. Simon Phipps thinks about it So we will keep that kind of as a bug in the back of our minds as we talk to IBM about it Simon is there anything you want to plug?

Since we have you here. Well,

Simon: uh, there's, there's Ogcamp, obviously. Go to og. camp and buy a ticket now. I'm going, I also help organize another conference in Europe called South Tyrol Free Software Conference, which is another conference that you might not have run into. It's, it's now grown into quite a big conference.

There'll be over a thousand people there. It's held in a beautiful city in Northern Italy called Bolzano. Uh, it is the, uh, the second weekend in, uh, November, and I would love anybody who is listening to this is in Europe, can't make it to Manchester to come and meet me in Sno for SFS Con with the website is S-F-S-C-N do it and the conference is conducted in, uh, in English and will be fantastic.

Excellent. And what about you personally? Where can people go to find. Uh, probably the best place is, uh, on, uh, Mastodon where you'll find me as, uh, webmink at meshed. cloud, M E S H E D dot C L O U D. Uh, and I would love to see you, uh, popping up there and saying hi and following me. Um, my, uh, most of my stuff, if you want to find out about me is at a website called webmink.

com. That's, uh, W E B M dot I N K, and that's got all the pointers to everything about me on it. Simon, you're all

Jonathan: about the fun,

Simon: uh,

Jonathan: TLDs.

Simon: Well, you know, they exist, and it seems a crime not to make the most of them.

Jonathan: Not to have fun with

Simon: them. Because you can do good things that are memorable with them, you know?

Uh, so, you know, you can email me if you want to. I'm simon at phipps dot email. Uh, you can have a look at my website. Uh, that's, it's webm. ink. And, uh, I, I host my own Mastodon server at, um, mesh. cloud. So find me in one of those places. Running on a Raspberry Pi. That one is not. That one is actually, uh, running on a slightly more robust hosting server, because it turns out it takes quite a lot of energy.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yep. Uh, it makes sense. All right. Thank you, sir, for being here. Sure. It'll do appreciate it. Um,

Simon: Well, thank you for the invite, you know, have, have me back again sometime.

Jonathan: Oh, for sure. For sure. I've, goodness, we've, we've got to, we've only got so many co hosts and people get tired of, of listening to, to, to Dan and Doc and, and all of that.

Definitely an important part of the crew, man. All right. So if you want to find me, Of course you can. Go to Hackaday, that is the home of Floss Weekly these days, and we sure appreciate that. I've also got the security column that goes live on Hackaday every Friday morning. Keep you up to date with the, uh, the bits and the bytes that are moving in ways they're not supposed to.

Uh, and then we do, of course, have the Untitled Linux Show over at Twit. Dot TV still. And we have a lot of fun there covering, covering the news and a bit of, uh, open source stuff, but with a decidedly Linux twist on it. Uh, so make sure and check that out too. We do appreciate everybody that's here. Those that watch both live and on the download, and we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.