[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I'm Katherine Druckman doc Searls is back with us again this week and we are talking to Steven Roberts and I'm going to let doc introduce Stephen, but before we get into it, I would like to thank all of our supporters again, particularly the ones who, send us all the great emails and, who pitch in on things like Patrion and coffee and that sort of thing. And we really appreciate it and it keeps us, you know, it keeps us going. So thanks for that. So doc, why don't you tell us a little bit more about why you invited Steven. [00:00:34] Doc Searls: Yeah, so, Steve and I actually met and hung out for a week, I guess, maybe as a longer on one of the Linux journal geek cruises, back when there was still money in Linux and there was still money in publishing and stuff like that we could afford to actually, you know, have have ships at sea giant ones where we would have, um, you know, um, interesting people along in addition to Linux, you know, alpha Linux hackers. We had Linus on there, Andrew Morton, uh, a number of other kind of famous Linuxy people. And, uh, you know, the guys who started my SQL a bunch of things. Um, anyway, uh, Steve was one of those people and it was, and it was somewhere, um, after he famously went all over the country. I mean, what like 16,000 miles on, on his computer as. Bicycle. And he put that in quotes because it was a gigantic geeky thing back when being mobile meant carrying hundreds of pounds of stuff around with you and having long antennas and all kinds of stuff in the, in the digital age, but really in the very ancient digital age. And, and I think Steve, you're pretty famous for that thing. And then got into, uh, you know, went from land to sea and you built the micro ship, uh, which is a tremor ran and, um, uh, and you know, Did an awful lot of writing about that you had at least two boats after that, that I can see looking at your, at your, uh, at your website. And, and most interesting to me right now is that you're doing digitizing of things. Um, I wrote a, um, A piece for Linux journal called the digital unconformity, which I'm into geology. And unconformity is the unknown history between two layers. You know, like at the bottom of the grand canyon, there's a layer of Vishnu schist, which is a 1.7 billion years ago. And then about a billion years goes by, and then you have many, many more horizontal layers that tell you the west was flat for a very long time. Um, uh, but nothing we know nothing about what happened in between. Now. They think that snowball earth kind of erased all of that, um, by sort of glaciers, plowing everything that was recordable into the sea, where it got recycled into, um, into trenches and things. And that's the way I feel about digital, everything. Like we could lose it all. And, but all of the analog stuff I have is also writing and I wanted to do it. Hmm. So that is, that, is that your business now [00:03:13] Steven Roberts: is that? Yeah, and it began when my, I inherited about a couple of boxes of eight millimeter films from my father and started researching what it was going to take to get them digitized. I didn't want them shipped off to some other country for cheap labor. I didn't want the Boston, the male quality was highly variable at the, well, no problem. I'll just build a system to do this, and then I'll eat bay at when I'm done. Um, it turned into a labor of love and I started doing it for other people and have since added all the video formats and audio tapes, sides and negatives. And, you know, it's turned into a, an entire enterprise here. [00:03:47] Doc Searls: So [00:03:48] Steven Roberts: I love it. Lots of tears, most businesses. [00:03:51] Doc Searls: Yeah. So, so give you the whole sweep of history. I mean, what, what got you, I mean, you must've stayed physically fit through all of this stuff, pebble, you know, grizzly bear sized pile of stuff around the country for a long time. And, but people [00:04:10] Steven Roberts: love the fact that I could eat 5,000 calories a day when I was on the bike trip. Unfortunately, I kept doing that even when I stopped riding the bike. So that was a bit of an adjustment, but I've got over that. But, um, no, I, I spent about a decade wandering the country. I'm like computerized recumbent, three versions of it. Uh, the final one was behemoth, big electronic human energized machine, only two heavy. Uh, and it's now in the computer history museum down in Silicon valley. Great place for wonderful people. And then somewhere in there, I just, I wasn't, I was kind of done with the road, but I wasn't done with being a nomad. So I started thinking, well, no problem. I'll just port this to water. How hard could it be? And, you know, even though water corrodes and salt water corrodes. Absolutely. Um, uh, it was, the problem was I had all this ice put lots of time into building all the technology. Um, and then it sat while I started building the boats. And when it came time to integrate them, the technology with all kinds of obsolete, I went through a few iterations of that. Um, but, um, anyway, never really did a big micro ship expedition like the bikes, but, um, it was a marvelous adventure building it. And then, like you said, I had two bigger boats after that, a 44 foot steel sailboat, which I cruised in the Northwest for awhile. And then, oh, you know, the old saying a sailboat trawler motorhome. I went to the dark side and now I live in a 50 foot power [00:05:37] Doc Searls: boats. So are you, are you living on a boat now? Is that you are okay, but it's a power boat this time. It's not a sale or I'm embarrassed, [00:05:47] Steven Roberts: but yes, that's [00:05:49] Doc Searls: okay. At least it's not pedal powered. Um, so, uh, you've had a lot of experience with obsolescence. Um, and so w what insights have you gained about that over successive generations of building things that took years to build and parts of it are already old by the time you're done with it, I'm wondering. [00:06:14] Steven Roberts: Um, I have a hard time letting things go. I have a lot of old stuff. Would you like some, I don't know. I'm not quite sure how to answer that. I, I, uh, I I'm always drawn to the, to the shiny new, cool stuff, but at the same time, I'm fascinated by all of our history. So, you know, the trends, what that all translates into it's massive amounts of tonnage. And, uh, you know, and now I feel like I'm trying to disassemble a mountain with a pair of tweezers, but, uh, it's been, um, I'm trying to find homes for a lot of the. [00:06:47] Doc Searls: Are the, are the boats, uh, another old saying is for people for aquatic type people, um, for Mariners. And is that the two happiest days of your life or when you get the boat and when you get rid of the boat. Uh, and so I'm wondering if you've, if you've successfully gotten rid of the, the, the at least three boats that I can count that you've had, no, I still have [00:07:12] Steven Roberts: the microchip that that's annoying because that was the one that was, oh, close to a decade of work. And, uh, you know, some serious engineering went into it, 160 corporate sponsors, you know, 40 something. Volunteers hired a fiberglass guy for a couple of years. You know, it was a, it was a big project even built a 3000 square foot building the Camino island for us just to have a place to build it after apple donated a building for two years. And before that you CSD. So, you know, a lot, it was a long process and I still got it. It turns out that this. Little micro tremor ends make terrible shelves, but that's basically what it's doing right now in my shop. It's this beautiful. [00:07:50] Doc Searls: It's an unlevel shelf for [00:07:53] Steven Roberts: stuff. Yeah, it's a terrible shelf. I mean, it's like a big bin with a curved surfaces on top of it's covered with crap. So that's, that's a nine, but, uh, I'm hoping to find some young, want to be tech nomad, brilliant pub who will take it and go do something interesting with it. [00:08:12] Katherine Druckman: Have a link directly to it. Or [00:08:14] Steven Roberts: I could do that. [00:08:16] Doc Searls: Is it still float? I said, it's a first it'll float. Yeah, it's an excellent shape. So fiberglass doesn't rust as much as other things, right? So, [00:08:25] Steven Roberts: and it's pedals, solar and sale power. And you know, the electronics it was designed for, it is kind of irrelevant that doesn't define it. It's just, there's no point in anybody using that, but the mode itself, spine deployable, landing gear, and all kinds of Peaky nautical. It's not ankle dementia, the whole thing. So it's a sickness, [00:08:47] Doc Searls: so, okay. So right now you're, you're into digitizing all kinds of stuff. So what, what are, are your clients? I think, oh, you've got, you've got, I mean, when I look at what I've got, I've got, um, in addition to stills, slides are a big one for me right now. I've been duplicating slides by taking a slide projector. I found a carousel projector and I predict those on the widest wall. I can find, and then shoot them with a, with a 35 millimeter on a, on a tripod. And it comes out remarkably well, considering that there's gotta be a better way. So let's start with those. I mean, w what do I do with the, um, cubic foot of S of slide boxes that are. Well, a lot of [00:09:32] Steven Roberts: people use slide scanners and they can be really nice, but they're super slow. The workflow is about three minutes each, so that doesn't scale. So I have a big Kaiser copy. Stand back in that lab and a mirrorless Sony, a seven three camera, and it's tied to an M one mini with Lightroom. And basically we just shoot really fast and capture all those with a high accuracy color backlight. And then I have a person who, a wizard in Lightroom who goes through and does basic color grading and editing and stuff to turn them all into beautiful files. So the client ends up getting three files system raw, and we export at high res JPEG and some digital contact sheets. [00:10:12] Doc Searls: Yeah. So that's cool. And what's the resolution again on that? When you're getting a raw, the, [00:10:20] Steven Roberts: the sensors 26 megapixel, I, the brawl files are [00:10:27] Doc Searls: way down into [00:10:28] Steven Roberts: the grain. More and more than needed. Yeah. [00:10:33] Doc Searls: Deep do. Okay. So I'm curious about something. So I have here back there, he kids there, you can't see them on for those of us who are visually impaired, which is all of our audience, because we're not, we can see each other here. You're not seeing this. If you look at your, look at your phone or your computer, I'm a Canon guy recently became a Sony guy and, and the friend who gave me the Sony camera that I'm using, it's a Sony mirrorless, a seminar said, can you make the Sony, have the soul of the Canon? Because the way they saw Ken and Ken and sensors have more sold in Sony has, and I've looked at both. And I, and I see what she's talking about, but I don't know what that is because, so I'm wondering if you have a similar, I know there's a Sony has the one kind of sensor and actually Nikon uses it. Almost everybody uses Sony sensor, or at least they used to, and Kenner makes its own CMOs. Uh, but do you know what the difference is? And does that also show up in the scanning? [00:11:39] Steven Roberts: I don't. And the thing is if I was using it as a field camera, like, you know, friends who swear by their Nikon or whatever, if I was thinking of it as a camera, I was out in the world. I would have a whole different feeling about this, but I want it to be as transparent as possible know, I don't want to introduce a new flavor because my job is to digitize people's history. [00:11:58] Doc Searls: Right. [00:12:00] Steven Roberts: And I can't, you know, I can't see anything in the results that put a stamp of, you know, equipment vendor anywhere, you know, and we do also do negatives by the way. It's exactly the same process. But the worst thing is when people show up for these binders, remember those old, uh, cardboard sleeves with the plastic pages over them, and the photos would stick to the, [00:12:20] Doc Searls: I have, I have many of those. Yeah, [00:12:24] Steven Roberts: me too. They're dreadful. And I always hope that people can find the box of negatives somewhere, but so many of them got tossed, but you know, the negative, like the sides, the negatives were the film that was actually a camera, the prints, or who knows what Fotomat random paper, you know? So it's the same problem. I mean, some, most of the time we're just trying to recover the best quality we can from. These ancient treasures. And sometimes they are amazing also all the film variation. So when we start getting really far, but the older Ektachrome two stuff, remember that back in the fifties, now it's all really red and faded. Uh, it's uh, amazes me how much color you can actually get out of, but it turns into, well, turns [00:13:07] Doc Searls: into a project. There was the way back when, um, CA Kodak at Kodachrome you could get, I mean, the 25 ASA Kodachrome was beautiful and then Chrome had a higher ISO or higher ASA, which generally like when a hundred or 1 25. And, um, and the Kodachrome looked better, though. You could shoot, you know, you had more flexibility with the Ektachrome and I have piles of both. I mean, I have both of those represented in this, in this thing, but th the reds and the long wavelength stuff looked better in the, in the old. And the old, uh, the old Ektachrome oh, the old, old code from none of which has made any more, is it? I don't think any of those are made [00:13:52] Steven Roberts: there is there's I haven't gotten into that and I'm thinking they're starting a little simple lab service, not for enlarging or anything, but basically just for processing, there's still film available, um, from somebody who does it, but there's a, there's a subculture that's into it. Uh, mostly old stuff, so that hasn't come up. But, um, [00:14:13] Doc Searls: I have somewhere a box of maybe 30 or 40 rolls of unexposed, um, uh, Kodachrome and Fuji film in somewhere in California. I don't know where it is it's in. Yeah. But there are no pictures on them. And I don't have a camera that does this anymore. It's this thing that I give it to somebody who still shoots film and have fun with it and see what happens, you know, maybe I'll send them to you if I ever find. Yeah. [00:14:43] Steven Roberts: Yeah. Those people will buy it for sure. It's [00:14:46] Doc Searls: a, it's a treasure. Yeah. There's a, there's, there's a market for that. So with, um, that's interesting that you do, uh, that you do, um, that you want the negatives in my case actually have negatives in sleeves and they're sorted a lot of them, not all of them. I kind of gave up at a certain point, but I have them, you know, and they are dated. All of them are dated. And, uh, the only thing I'm anal about any in my entire life is, is photography. Um, you know, But what's happening. I'm wondering your thoughts on this are, I mean, what's happening with photography, um, especially with the younger generation is it's all disposable. It's, it's, it's part of the, now it's not archival. And, and so much of it happens in these things. I'm holding up an iPhone, there's an iPhone 11. It's not even just like two generations back or two versions back. But this I, I was in, uh, this wonderful bar in Baltimore, um, last weekend. And there was a, the Baltimore hot club was playing there. Eight, eight or 10 musicians, most of the on guitars, but just playing Django, Reinhardt type jazz. And I recorded some of this with this and apple, doesn't tell you this, but it records in stereo when Mike is here and there's a little.in here and that's a mic. And it's remarkably good. And earlier I recorded something for a friend, a video of friend who was late in life. And I, um, and I recorded it this way vertically out in the deck of my apartment, the apartment I was in, in New York. And there's a Cardinal whistling over here and there's traffic over there and people inside saying stuff, and I still got stereo this way and I don't know how the hell they did it. I'm listening to it. And it's like, no, yeah, the Cardinal is over there. And so, so, and the thing is that, and the camera and this thing is so not bad and does many forms of stuff that I can lead to in post-production and you know, and it's, and it's way ahead. I mean, Canon and Sony and Nikon and Fuji and the rest of them, can't keep up with this. In a, in a, in the vernacular of the way people shoot and yet the art of photography is still there. So it would have you have any insights about what we're going through right now with all of this? [00:17:17] Steven Roberts: I know we've all had our personal dark ages in the, in my case, there were a couple of the Moana was textual, but the photographically, I was shooting slides for years and years. And I got so excited when the first digital cameras came out. Remember those dreadful old six 40 by four 80. And, and of course, you know, like every, you know, new shiny, you know, and I jumped into that and now these things are, I've still got folders of them on my computer. They're like thumbnails of, you know, little. And so what, what happened as a result of that is three or four years of just no good photos, you know, it's just like the days when we had, we kept everything on floppies and then they gradually. Seven boxes. But somewhere in there we stopped making carbon copies of letters sent by a typewriter. So there's another dark agent there have lost the picture. And it's funny because a lot of what we're doing now is extracting that for people, you know, the, that happened a lot with, um, oh, you know, the transition from film, the video, I noticed I do a lot of old home movies, 16 millimeter. It's just, some of it is amazing history from the thirties and forties. And with, with film, people were really, it was a precious, beautiful new tool and people were very selective about what they chose to shoot, you know, it was expensive, you know, you thought about making a movie, right. And then when the video cameras came around, I was like, okay, the entire soccer game, while chatting with the person next to you, you know, that sort of thing, you know, an entire kid's birthday party. So in a way it's really nice having the sound and lots more than material, except the raw quality of that material got a lot worse. So sometimes old movies. Our better just because it was something that people really focused on, so to speak. And I see that happening with cameras. I mean, like you, I have a, you know, I have a smartphone every day is documented. I've got, you know, every mood of my cat, you know, so, you know, and then we look back in time, it's like, oh yes, the three photos from, from 1982, they're really precious. So anyway, it's, um, it's fun seeing that transition. [00:19:20] Doc Searls: Yeah. So I wonder if this is the dark age of any future time in some way, maybe we're not, it's not that transitional. I think at least not technically, I think we're sort of at a, perhaps it's some kind of a, some kind of a weird plateau [00:19:35] Katherine Druckman: information, dark age, but that's for another podcast, [00:19:41] Doc Searls: it's the age of deep fakes. Right. And things like that. I mean, that's, uh, of, of, of misapplied or, or. Easily applied, uh, AI and, and all that and all that kind of stuff. Um, so, so tell us, okay. The listeners, can't see. What is it that that's behind you or is it just decorative? [00:20:06] Steven Roberts: That's, that's the wall of stuff for audio and video work? There is a a hundred and I just added 144 terabyte NAS. The fact that I can't say those words just kind of blows my mind. Um, and, um, and then there's a big motu stack for routing all the audio stuff. The guy would do all my video stuff with, uh, component levels. So there's a time-based corrector and a Tektronix analyzer and so on. So all that stuff back there is doing video recording and there's a couple of digitizers up there. And then over that way is some other video decks and things I can do. You can SP and of course, VHS and Betamax just finished a big job. Uh, and then also a reel to reel very well. There's a big old tardy deck up there for doing. [00:20:56] Doc Searls: And, uh, [00:20:59] Steven Roberts: and then there's two other workstations, one medicine member, disruption of moving the phone around here. Sorry. Um, this workstation is for the films. So that, that big beast is doing eight millimeter, 16 millimeter movie reel. [00:21:19] Doc Searls: And that goes to two K. You were saying in your, in your blog, or [00:21:24] Steven Roberts: I basically shoot every frame at two K and then it builds this massive data structure. And then we export from that to video files. So people end up getting thumb drives, you know, basically a wonderful group, then they can, they're cheap and can be sent out to family and backed up. And we still have access to every frame. And in many cases that's really nice, especially 16 millimeter. The individual frames are actually really nice quality. [00:21:48] Doc Searls: When, when you, when you finish one real, for example, then especially if the real isn't labeled in some way, other than it's just, here's a box or here's a real, do you then like take a still image of that saying this goes with this file. So, you know, what the hell it was? Yes, I make [00:22:09] Steven Roberts: thumbnails. And also I keep an old fashioned, a binder with pages for, for all the projects. I'm keeping notes there, just because I ironically don't trust all the tech stuff and everything is, and then numbers are tracked on the reels themselves so that we can get back to the source easily, uh, you know, just in case. [00:22:31] Doc Searls: So here's a weird and interesting job as it were. Um, I'm very tended to hire you, by the way, on this thing. Uh, back in the late eighties, my sister and I had. My mother and father's entire eight millimeter and super eight and earlier 16 millimeter movies that they started shooting in Alaska, the 16 millimeters in Alaska, in the forties, early forties, or maybe the late thirties. And then the, uh, the rest of all my FA family stuff, roughly from 1947 to 1963. And, and then we, we had them all dubbed to VHS because that's what we had at the time and by a pro pro shop in Palo Alto. And then what's that kept the original. Yes, we did absolutely have them all. Um, and then we took those and in pretty much chronological order, they were, they were put into an because I gave them and gave them to this shop in chronological order. I hadn't knew that roughly the dates on these and then recorded on. My mother re you know, giving a color commentary on this thing. So I have a cassette somewhere. I have like a cubic yard of cassettes, but they're in little slots and they're, they're, they're somewhat, or they're, they're at least separate. And they're there in our, what would have been a wine room, but turned into a storage room because that's what happens. And, um, at our house in Santa Barbara, which is not where we're at, but anyway, it's there. So I have those, but I think that the VHS stuff is useless. Cause I'm going to get the best to get off of that is six 40 by four 80. Right? So the thing I should do with that is find the cassettes, find the realtor, find the, find the real reels. I mean, keep them separate. I mean, ideally I could coordinate them, but that'll might be too hard, but, but have you done copy off these eight millimeters? Cause they're pretty, they're all pretty good. Archival stuff. I think, you know, and I looked at what you had, like from your dad in New York and like 1948 or something like that, which looks very, very ancient and was when I was already a year old and, you know, toddler toddling about her suckling about five miles. So where this was your shot, [00:25:02] Steven Roberts: I would love to, I, I just did some on 1945 and 1940 fix stuff from Montana for a client. And it included, oh gosh, just so much history. And it was 16 millimeters. So it was just fantastic. But some of those glimpses into the past, or just you're replaceable, you know? Uh there's there's so little of it. So yes, I'm really glad you kept your originally wouldn't believe how many stories I've firsthand had to deal with where, oh yeah. Well, we put it on VHS and then got rid of the film because it was starting to mold like, ah, no, because so much just wasn't captured. [00:25:37] Doc Searls: Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's, so there are these other for, for audio. I mean, we have, uh, besides cassettes, I've got the little Sony mini discs, which is their at they're, like, especially, they actually kept the, the things you play them with and record them with. I have that. I don't know if you can get the right of that. Um, I have a massive amount of interviews that I did with people during the whole time, 24 years with Linux journal. Um, they're on micro, uh, micro cassettes on these Sony things on, on cassettes, I'd say, uh, and I've got open real estate. I've got lots of those from when I was in high school, especially, I don't know how many. Yeah. So when you can copy up all that stuff. Yes. It [00:26:31] Steven Roberts: all just goes to MP3 about a megabyte a minute, roughly. Yeah. CD quality MP3. [00:26:37] Doc Searls: Yeah. Is there a growing market for this? I mean, do you think, I mean, do you watch this as there, are you a member of a cabal that cares about these kinds of things? [00:26:46] Steven Roberts: I know a couple of groups of people who do this sort of thing. Yeah. And it's, I don't think it's going to go away in my lifetime because you know, everybody, every family has the stuff in the attic, you know, unfortunately, or hopefully [00:26:58] Doc Searls: where's 900 degrees. [00:27:01] Steven Roberts: Oh God, I'm a guy came in last year. He buttoned 90. And, um, when he had two reels in cans and they took tools to get into that was not helpful at all. And I opened it up and it reeked of vinegar, which is the chemical breakdown of the substrate or vinegar syndrome bad. And he's just standing there saying, I hear you, you can watch the, I'll know this going to be good. And I mounted it on the machine and the dust is coming up and it's all crinkly suddenly, suddenly there was on the. And in 1937 in the backyard, in New York with his little sister, it was just the sweetest damn thing. And I turned around and looked at him, tears are just streaming [00:27:41] Doc Searls: down his cheek. [00:27:43] Steven Roberts: It just felt so incredibly worthwhile. And you know, now he can send it off to his kids and grandkids. Now it's suddenly set free from the [00:27:51] Doc Searls: diet. So in spite of the, of the vinegar decomposition, it was still that's good as, as it has been like the, like the nitrate movies from the audience and twenties. [00:28:02] Steven Roberts: Yeah. There's uh, there's there are people who have been recovering. Those I've done. I've not done any of that. And I can't handle a 35 millimeter film yet, but that's, that's just an add on to this. If that ever comes up, [00:28:13] Doc Searls: do you handle three quarter, inch or two inch videotape? [00:28:18] Steven Roberts: Uh, I can, I can do you MADEC and beta cam SP I don't have two inch capability, but I, yeah, I do have a friend in Seattle who can do half inch. Kind of basically everything. So, you know, if I need somebody to do something I can't, but I can, it's been funny learning this it's so analog I'm so used to having control over my entire informational environment, that it was quite an adjustment to realize that every time I think I know what I'm doing, something throws me a curve. So like mini DV is the example, you know, beautiful digital. [00:28:50] Doc Searls: Yeah. I have those. Yeah. They're great. I do. That's the other one? [00:28:56] Steven Roberts: Well, the thing is somebody brought in some many DVDs and I just couldn't make them work. And it turned out that they were mini DV HD, which is actually good. They were 1920 by 10 80 gorgeous high definition stuff, right at the end of the mini DV era. But they also a lesser known variant that existed for a while was LP, long play. And they managed to get 90 minutes out of each of these. And they were so fiddly that one vendor's tapes wouldn't play on another vendor's recorder. It was just a complete disaster. So somebody had about 20 of those. And I had to, uh, it turns out I had to add multiple old camcorders in order to play the ancient mini DV long plane variants. And you [00:29:36] Doc Searls: know, so you actually had the key, you couldn't, you didn't have a deck for doing this. You had to go to the actual camcorder. Right? I recorded this in the first place or one like it, right. It happened. Right. [00:29:48] Steven Roberts: I haven't, I've never professional mini DV deck, but I had to get a camcorder just to handle the long play version. They're like, like VHS EAP, you know, that awful stuff. It's that, that idea, you know, getting lucky, you can get 90 minutes instead of 60 minutes by our product, you know, but oh, by the way, it'll be impossible to play 20 years from now. [00:30:09] Doc Searls: Right? Well, I have a friend of mine and I have been mostly me. He had the deck, but many DV and a high eight, uh, tapes. Right. And, um, and I had to have, well, his mini DV deck fixed by the one place in the country that fixes them. Apparently they were in Chicago called Royal something, send it to them as about 500 bucks. And. Um, just think is noisy as hell. Still doesn't work very well, but it does work some of the time. And, um, unfortunately I have an older Mac that will drive. It has the device drivers in it. This one I'm talking to hundreds of 2017 mag doesn't do as good a job as the like 2013 Mac that has, that has ancient drivers in it, but still kind of knows what that thing is. Um, but with the Kim quarter, all it's just got component out. It doesn't have, uh, you know, so, and I don't know what to do with that. I have component or [00:31:08] Steven Roberts: composite. Is it the [00:31:10] Doc Searls: VOR? Well, it does have, it does have the yellow. Um, it might have composite. I mean, it, it has. The yellow, the two stereo, right. Plugs there's RCA. And then the third one that's the video. But I think it also has a special Sony connector of course, would be a special Sony connector. It does have that. It does have that that's marginally better. And I liked doing it and it got fixed by the same outfit for like a lesser amount of money, but still some amount of money. And I haven't, but I don't know how to get that into the computer. Exactly. [00:31:49] Steven Roberts: That's not too painful. But for that, I use these kind of digitizing tools that I've a hyperdeck mini studio here. [00:31:58] Doc Searls: Is it? There's a vacuum to him in that thing on the right isn't there. Yes. Yes. [00:32:02] Steven Roberts: This is the, uh, uh, the Techtronic video analyzer. So this helps me look at the color vectors and signal quality and things like that. And then this area central or time-based corrector, and it fixes all kinds of garbage, especially. VHS [00:32:18] Doc Searls: format and what's the big screen and you're right. That that's like, [00:32:23] Steven Roberts: this is a Sony monitor [00:32:25] Doc Searls: and it say it's a Trinitron of some sort, I suppose. Right. Wow. [00:32:30] Steven Roberts: This is specific community. [00:32:32] Doc Searls: The JVC I say, yeah, yeah. I'm verbalizing this for the people who are not seeing it. And it does everybody. Um, that's an [00:32:39] Steven Roberts: emotive stuff, which is fantastic. So anything can connect to anything. So I've got a big matrix of audio there and let's see what else. There's typical network things and the big NAS. [00:32:54] Doc Searls: Oh, and there's yeah. There's crown, which is to make these really great, uh, fires. [00:33:00] Steven Roberts: And then over in the video department here, that's the, the UW-Madison and the beta cam and that's an eight millimeter deck right there that [00:33:09] Doc Searls: does. [00:33:11] Steven Roberts: Um, [00:33:12] Doc Searls: com component then, you know, have your, your LP player there. I saw, you know, which has, uh, for, for playing vinyl deck [00:33:23] Steven Roberts: dedicated camcorders for those variants, I just mentioned the mini DV. So the stuff breeds. [00:33:31] Doc Searls: So the, so the Sony VHS deck there, or is that a Sony beta deck that I saw back there [00:33:36] Steven Roberts: waving this around, like crazy. Which one? [00:33:39] Doc Searls: The, yeah, that one. I think that it was [00:33:41] Steven Roberts: marvelous. Yes. This is the 2100. I think it is the Betamax deck and this one's really much, much sought after it's component. Now that I just finished 42 tapes of, uh, old car racing from the eighties [00:33:53] Doc Searls: and nineties. Wow. On, on, on Sony Betamax, the, uh, yeah. Beautiful quality. [00:34:01] Steven Roberts: Even the beta two and beta three is a nicer than the VHS equivalent. [00:34:08] Doc Searls: In their day, which the wrong one, one, and then they both lost anyway. Yeah, it [00:34:14] Steven Roberts: wasn't a good, I think the beta battle was because it would handle the full length of a Superbowl. It was a slightly longer, sorry. VHS was a longer recording. So that's, that's what won the fight. That was their, their marketing argument for awhile is you can record longer events on the tape. So I [00:34:32] Doc Searls: always, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, this is a, this is a history of tech, right? Th th th the better one usually loses in some way, whatever that is. Uh, wow. So, so here, you've got, um, I realize we're, we're making a great infomercial for you here. That wasn't actually the intent, [00:34:55] Katherine Druckman: but I feel like we need to snip out some of this video to, I have a little companion link somewhere. [00:35:05] Steven Roberts: Yeah, probably walking around, waving the camera was really disruptive to show you some that's [00:35:09] Katherine Druckman: all good. Well, well, yeah, we'll see. [00:35:15] Doc Searls: So for people who have lots of this archival stuff sitting in an attic or a garage, but haven't come around to take, uh, you know, harvesting your services or others like them. What's your advice to them for how they should save this stuff. [00:35:32] Steven Roberts: Oh, you mean [00:35:32] Doc Searls: just the storage? Yeah. I mean, it's obviously the guy with, with, with, with the vinegar movie, you know, having it in that 10 was probably not the best thing for it. Right. I'm guessing. Right. Yeah. [00:35:43] Steven Roberts: Not just not hot or cold or wet. Oh my God. I mean, he's, I've had stuff that's been in, I don't know, basements or something. I don't know where it's been, but heavy mold and growth where water has equipped in between the layers of the film reels and the amazing graphics. And it's really, it's really interesting. [00:36:00] Doc Searls: Oh yeah. I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Water is water is bad. What is the enemy of, of everything you found that out was boats, I guess, right. That, I mean, you want something to float on something that hates it floating, right? That's kind of the idea. Yeah. And it's, you know, [00:36:17] Steven Roberts: it's, I think of it as Aqua regia, you know, especially saltwater. So that, uh, the comment earlier about water corrode, saltwater, corrode, that absolutely. It just changed everything we're doing with system design. And it's such a subtle process that you just think, okay, everything's fine. You know, my, my piano is doing great. All this equipment is fine, but over the course of years, he suddenly noticed a little bit of corrosion and things. Uh, the challenge, but, you know, it's not difficult to keep this stuff safe just within normal human comfort range and know, not hot, not wet, you know? Um, but it's good. I mean, the thing is it's all slowly degrading and it's just a good idea to get it done because then it's backed up. That's the other thing it's like, you know, all those other details aside, it's like the fundamental error in any information management, it's only one copy, you know, you've got just your reels. If your house burns down. Now that's the end of that history. And I've run into multiple situations where people have died and their stuff just ends up either taken to the dump or taken to a thrift store is vintage movies, something like that. Um, we had a client a few weeks ago, brought over about roughly 43 inch eight millimeter reels, but also for larger 16 millimeter cans. And they were really excited to give its families. So I did some and send them some sample files. And we said, well, I don't know who those people are. And they sent them around to the other people in the family, and nobody had any idea who it was. And the conclusion was that mom, there was kind of a pack rat, probably picked him up at a rummage sale. They'd be cool to call, to do something with someday. And over the decades, family history became, okay, this is our stock, you know, but it actually wasn't inside. It's, uh, it's really nice to get things unlocked from those, uh, from those old formats and shareable with kids. In other words, backed up offsite. [00:38:13] Doc Searls: So it's 50 years from now. All of us are, or all the two of us are dead. two of us are dead. But my point though, is, is it so where, where is this stuff? I mean, so w how is it safe? Is it unheard? Uh, obviously it has to be on physical media. What is the physical medium? W what do we save this on you? If you put it in the cloud, you start paying for the cloud is gone. [00:38:45] Steven Roberts: I mean, I sometimes deliver things. I recovered. I must give people thumb drives, and then just tell them to just keep up with whatever comes out 20 years from now, or 10 years from now. That's just way better. Copy it over, you know, it's because they're just MP3 or, you know, and people boards or whatever, uh, or JPEGs, or, I mean, it's just normal file formats to us now, but 50 years from now, that's going to be something else, but there will be transitional periods of when people can take these things. And at that point, copy, you shouldn't be lossy then? No, I ain't generally say keep all the originals because you know, as much as we think we're state-of-the-art right now, who knows what the better techniques will come out. Right. [00:39:26] Doc Searls: So, you [00:39:27] Steven Roberts: know, sometimes I don't [00:39:29] Doc Searls: advise it. There's a, um, a product from again it's well, we're not on an open source show. It's proprietary product from a company called Topaz that has some AI that I use. I have this stuff that I shot with a, in 2010, a whole bunch of stuff with a crop frame, Canon 30 D um, and. It has, it does amazing stuff. I mean, it just takes, it takes the grain out of there, sharpens it up without having it look artifact. He gets rid of a lot of artifacts. It's pretty amazing what some of this stuff can do, um, much better than what Adobe has, which surprised me that the hard thing for me is, is, um, is, is, is basically it's, uh, it's how I catalog on archive and, and speed that up. There's a for photography and 90% of what I do is 99% is photography. And, um, and it's still photos and they're, uh, I mean, I hate apples. Um, I photo. I don't want to tell him me what my memories are. I don't want them guessing at anything. I don't want them, uh, another [00:40:53] Steven Roberts: file system [00:40:54] Doc Searls: too, which is horrible. It's it's so abstracted. And so, um, Metta and, um, my God. So what, but Adobe isn't Adobe is better, but there's no quick way to do this. You want to rename everything in the finder. There's a wonderful tool that came out in the arts, I think called Ivy media, pro Microsoft bought it, made it expressions media, and they abandoned it in like 2013 capture one, picked it up, created a whole new file for event four, but it worked exactly the same way. I don't know why they did that, but there's a new suffix for it. And I stuck with the Microsoft one. All of it is 32 bit. None of it's going to work on a new Mac. And so I'm an enrollment. Um, I'm here probably for the duration because I can't get along with. Program. And, and I don't see, I haven't written a piece yet. That's like, you know, my, my SOS, my appeal from my, my desert island here saying, please, somebody do this. Here's here's, here's the list. Here's the specs. Here's what it does. And you know, and people said, well, this Adobe thing will do this. That'll do that. But it's, you know, a guy at apple told me there's actually a tool apple has for quickly cataloging renaming things into finder that was abandoned years ago, but it's still around and it's good, but I forget the name of it. And I looked at it briefly and it's not that easy. So I don't know. Yeah. And I [00:42:25] Steven Roberts: mean, the stuff that we've been doing with a phone, at least you've got the, the AI and Google. I use Google photos, you know, I'm surprised at how often managers find something I'm looking for. But mostly I do everything with, with file naming conventions on my Mac, my giant archives are all searchable that. It's inconsistent over the decades, you know, as much as I do for other people, I haven't [00:42:48] Doc Searls: caught up with my own, well, this is the risk, right? Yeah. Yeah. [00:42:52] Steven Roberts: You know, one of the, one of these, these here is, is, is metadata loss of metadata, you know? So like, you know, you, you send me a box of slides or something like that. Well, there's information just in their proximity to each other, the way things are grouped, you know, the dates on the sleeve, whatever, whatever notes you made. And so I try to capture all of that stuff with the way we build pile systems and things, but it's different every time, you know, we can't just send you a bunch of images back serial, number one to end because now the metadata is all gone. Right? So capturing that from a collection is the challenge when collections have span decades of somebody's life and lots of different tools. [00:43:33] Doc Searls: Um, so, so here's another thing too, is that, and this is a, basically a memory, a memory issue. When you're dealing with a totally vertically integrated company like apple. So they, the single voice memos, which actually does a good job. If you're going to record stuff, here's the problem, the, the actual, the name that you give, whatever it was is metadata. It's not attached to the file itself. It's somewhere else. Right. And it's remembered by some, some program. Right? And, and if you want to, you know, and, and what it does is because it keeps a copy of this, not only on your computer, but it keeps it on your, on your phone. But if you want to get rid of it on your phone, you can't just transfer it to the computer. And it's done because it wants to keep that metadata for both those locations, you can only throw it away, but if you want to copy off like drag and drop away the actual files, none of that metadata is there. You'll have to manually rename. And, and apply new metadata to it. I have, yes. [00:44:41] Steven Roberts: The Google photos is really annoying people. Now, when people like me who want to pull it out of there and stick it in a Synology photos or something, the metadata is separate [00:44:50] Doc Searls: and there's no real. Yeah. This is deeply wrong. They'd go. They think of putting the data in the actual file as like destructive editing or something like that, but it's not, it's actually useful. It should put it right there in the exit file. You've got all this metadata that's embedded in the actual file. Right. Then the exit there should be there. It should be there. It should not be somewhere else. Yeah. Well it's [00:45:14] Steven Roberts: like, it's like photo descriptors written on the sleeves of a 35 millimeter slide rather than a piece of paper in the same box. [00:45:21] Doc Searls: And exactly. That's exactly what. Perfect. Perfect analogy because I have those for tapes for slides, the slides, the boxes for the slides are labeled, but, um, [00:45:36] Steven Roberts: I did a three ring binder for all my videos once, and then this place, the binder thing, I think, [00:45:42] Doc Searls: oh my God. So, so this is that's interesting. So see, you're enjoying this, right? I mean, this is, this is fun work, it's fun. [00:45:55] Steven Roberts: And I'm getting to my own, I'm trying to get my own archive done. And then I have an accretion donation going at the museum or for textual archives, you know, and articles and things like that. So this, this helps I I've had the tools to do my own stuff as well, but it's also turned into this kind of fascinating cultural thing. I'm making friends and I lived alone on this island and this has turned into a kind of a odd sort of personal identity, you know, people's families. I've become a personal historian. [00:46:26] Doc Searls: That's great. Wow. So you get to know these, you could go ahead. [00:46:30] Katherine Druckman: No, I just said, I have wondered, you know, I kind of hoped we would steer the conversation this way. Cause we've talked about the sort of technical parts, but we haven't talked about the human parts and I'm curious to know more about like, what is it like you, you must sort of have a, kind of a weird voyeuristic experience looking at, I mean, I assume you're not looking at every single know thing that that's as it's digitized, but you, you definitely get a lot of glimpses into other people's families and the way they lived and their, their, their, their surroundings and, and you know, their interior design and like literally, you know, you get the sample of, of so much about a person's life by looking at something like that. And I'm just kind of interested in how that, I dunno how that experience is for. [00:47:15] Steven Roberts: Th their annual traditions and the different ways different families do things like Christmases, things like that. And I have no idea, um, just, just things that weren't part of my cultural history, uh, you know, I see. And other, and, uh, and yeah, it is kind of fascinating that just, uh, not even from an abstract level, but just getting to know people and, and there's a creates a connection with every client. I didn't expect that I, it's not just a crank turning service. It's really personal. And, uh, um, I like, like I said, it's been amazing how many times there are tears involved, you know? And, and, and of course the joke here is that in most businesses that's a bad thing. Um, but, uh, but not here. So, um, you know, you [00:47:59] Katherine Druckman: were surprised by what, what certain people find worthy of recording and versus others. [00:48:06] Steven Roberts: Yes, I think so. I mean, very often the things I'm doing are they're really their father's choice of what to record, you know, things like that. I'm fascinated by the different styles. You know, there was back when movie cameras were being distributed widely there wasn't apparently a lot of, you know, common knowledge about how to do it. So, you know, some of the, I mean, there's, there's so many techniques ranging from really bad. There's what I call the spray paint technique, where he would just take the camera. They're just doing this all the time. Like just slow down. I want some clear frames, you know, stop the movie camera, just like a still camera. So they would, everybody would pose and stand in a group and then somebody would stand there and film them for 30 seconds without moving. It's like, look, this is a movie camera they can interact, you know, but the best part of the whole thing with old movies. Yeah. It's actual life, you know, you know, all those boring photos that all of us have some black and white ancestors frozen in a wall, you know, with a, with a stiff smile, okay. Cheese, you know, or something like that with film people are they're smiling and they're doing things right. So I can go through and pick out a framework. Grandma's shooting that perfect little smile granddad with the camera, the last, like one frame, you know, and I can pull that out and give that to somebody I'll print it as a greeting card or something. I've got a Canon pro 300, it's like having a dark room. It's just beautiful. And I think what I love about this is a moon or Rudy real is just thousands of stills and some of those stills. So they're as much fun for me as the actual video output. Uh, you see, uh, a different level of granularity, a different kind of magnification into people's lives than the post static photo that we all grew up with. [00:49:51] Doc Searls: So Steve, are you still nomadic, uh, on in, do you leave your island? Uh, other than on water, I guess you have to leave on water and my tech [00:49:59] Steven Roberts: dramatic Meritus, um, I am really embarrassed that I haven't gotten off the dock and date awake, uh, for a long time, like six years. Um, it's in fact, I'm now to the point that I'm trying to sell the boat that I'm on. It's a big 50 foot Delta, 50 Delta, 50 made for off shore fisheries, you know, back in the seventies, a really high-performance beautiful big boat, but it's just too much for me to a single hand. So I'm thinking of downsizing to a trawler in the low forties. I miss it. I mean, the whole point of this was to be traveling. I did have OPDs other people's boats. So I have a couple of dear friends who I get. I'm not totally static, but it's not like, not like the old days. [00:50:46] Doc Searls: Yeah. Earlier you mentioned the museum. Do you mean the computer history museum or that's wonderful. It is not only there. I, I, co-host a conference that takes place there twice a year or 34th is coming up in April. Oh. I spent a week. I spend, uh, two weeks a year. They're nice. They sadly, [00:51:06] Steven Roberts: it's a treasure. I think the people are, so it's a labor of love for everybody there. I think it's just an amazing. Uh, last time I was, there was 2015. I was, I was talking to Google about maybe doing some work for them. And they, I took a gaggle of dealers over and children, the bike and not really thinking, I just hopped up behind the thing and opened up the console and unfolded the system and everything. And one of the docents just about had a heart attack, do not touch the exhibits [00:51:35] Doc Searls: exhibit. [00:51:38] Steven Roberts: That's it. But I can't think of any place in the world. I'd rather have the bike. It's just exactly. I have one other artifact there too. I, I built an early personal computer in 1974 and that machine is there on the wall of home group. [00:51:53] Doc Searls: Oh, really? In 1974, I heard that. Does that predate, um, uh Wozniaks [00:52:02] Steven Roberts: wow. It predates Altera and M's and all those things came to life. I worked on it all summer in 74 and it came to life October 31st. For some strange primitive reason. I started my beard that day that's [00:52:15] Doc Searls: so, so was it switches? I mean, did you program, it was switches. Wow. Like the Altair? [00:52:21] Steven Roberts: Yeah, there was a front panel and then I also built a little low single shot Hollerith card reader. And I used a multifunction on oh two, six, the IBM card punch to make an image of the beat loader. So I could slide that thing in and then not have to toggle in, you know, deposit next to next, you know? Um, so that was, spit it up. And then I wrote my own assembler monitor, text editor, like all this time on cause I've had a business called type electronic. Um, and I used the term music synthesis in business and produced catalog rappers at my customer database on Penfold paper tape with, uh, frequently, during [00:52:55] Doc Searls: good times. Wow. Wow. Uh, [00:52:58] Steven Roberts: graphics with a couple of multiplying decks driving. Uh, the math co-processor made out of a calculator chip because I didn't know how to do floating point software. So I just tailor series and slowed to a crawl, but it worked all sorts of stuff. Good times. [00:53:17] Doc Searls: How did you get into all this? I mean, I, I, going back that far in 1974 and that's really great deep geek or shit there. That's really good. Thank you. [00:53:29] Steven Roberts: Um, I just, I just love this stuff all my life. I got into electronics when I was about eight and lived for science fairs when I was in school. And that was the only thing that really mattered. So, you know, it was just, I always wanted a computer. And when I was actually building a 74, 180 1 ALU based mini of sorts, um, before that, and then the oh eight came out. And so I got an ADA data book and said, well, just take a little break back, burn it out for a second and build this thing. And, you know, I never got back to the, to the, the mini of course, Um, the, the world, the world was changing fast at that point. [00:54:06] Doc Searls: So w what was your first store book personally? [00:54:13] Steven Roberts: And then I became an instant dealer and then the, my, my real workforce machine after that was a , um, which I, I loved. And then I used emphasis to do a bunch of consulting jobs for like Corning and Honeywell and various [00:54:26] Doc Searls: other Cominco. You and Jerry Cornell had, I believe he was into those. It was a good [00:54:33] Steven Roberts: machine. Yeah, the quality was fantastic. Thing was built like a tank. [00:54:41] Doc Searls: Wow. That's and do you have any of these still? Any, are those they're all? [00:54:48] Steven Roberts: No, I, I used to write about it for kilowatt and other magazines, but the machine itself, I sold that to a guy in Florida. It was like $6,000. It's something that I assaulted. I delivered it, literally handed to them. You know, imagine in today's dollars. [00:55:06] Doc Searls: Is there a, I mean, your, your website I was looking through it is, there's a lot of stuff in it and you've been writing for a long time. Um, do you have like the, the master list of everything you've written or some of it's stuck on old, you know, real floppies and other things like that, where it's going to be a hard time extracting it. Most [00:55:26] Steven Roberts: of it's on the server now I'm still periodic, still got a few binders of articles and things, and a few other bits of this and that, but I digitize one of my ongoing hobbies it's to. Park things on the server and the way I've been doing it. I know this is a little bit abnormal, but when I find like I just did one last night, it was an old article in Santa Cruz, Sentinel that not remarkable, but anyway, it's coming sometime in 92. And instead of doing a post dated today to get the RSS feeds and all that stuff with this article that I found from 1992, I just go and change the publication date and put it in the timeline at that actual date. So there's no event that happens now that gets any attention, but the archive itself just gets bigger and bigger. So, you know what I mean? So each, each piece actually has its own original event, date or publication date. And that way it's a real timeline, you know, but I'm slow on current post. [00:56:15] Doc Searls: This is, this is what I've done with my photography. Every photograph I have is year underbar, month underbar date. And I realized now the convention is dash instead of underbar. And, but then I have the dashes between the actual. Texts that tells me that this is party. This is Christmas. This is something else like that. So, um, but that's, again, that's the only thing. I mean, all of that, but, but I can sort, I can sort by date, I can search by right by a range. I can, I can programmatically approach this in a way that I can find stuff, which is really handy. I think that's [00:56:52] Steven Roberts: really valuable. I see people do it the other way, where they'll do a blog post about something that happened in 1985 or something. And then the blog posts, the date of that is just completely irrelevant in the future. That's just some time and it just adds noise. So the downside is that it doesn't create, you know, uh, events that, you know, get clicks, you know? So, no, there's no, I'm a little out of date on that. So, you know, post adding something to the, to the archive, which is technically a WordPress blog, doesn't it doesn't create any. Flurry of activity. Sometimes I tweet once a day, I have a three-year loop that I go through where I chronologically through the entire timeline and every day I'll just post the next one on the timeline, you know? And then what that does is it forces me to check it, check the links and make sure that they're consistent with hetero types and all that stuff. And it's just my, it lets me do site maintenance without it turning into an overwhelming [00:57:50] Doc Searls: project. So, so your tweets are a kind of metronome that keeps up, keeps up with your rest of your life. It's uh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's [00:57:59] Steven Roberts: I mean, I basically just go, uh, go all the way back to the beginning and just one tweet a day chronologically. And then I guess I'm going to be rapping, you know, catch up with presence sometime in the next three or four months and then decide whether to optimistically go around again or all of the job. [00:58:16] Doc Searls: Yeah. I've been tweeting since I was six, but, um, but I mean, I have my regrets about it. And this is, this is, I mean, it can, maybe it could move toward the close with this. Both of us have gone through periods where we were kind of geek famous for a period of time. Um, you know, you with, uh, with, with the behemoth and I mean, you attracted a lot of attention with that. Um, with me, I was, I had as many as like, 40 50,000 readers a day for my blog back when blogs were, there were only hundreds of bloggers that were writers that wanted to write there and they all went to Facebook or they all went to Twitter and the whole thing went away in a way. It didn't go away, but it's just kind of like, I mean, I, I still have a blog. It gets, I don't blog daily anymore. And if I tried it would be, I get literally dozens of readers, um, from that, but I feel differently about it. I feel like, okay, now it's some more reflective time. It's not, it's not about the clicks. I'm not looking for that. I never had advertising. I never looked for that. Yeah. So I'm wondering if you're going through a similar thing, you're in a phase of your life where it's stuff that matters that isn't about fame and recognition. [00:59:35] Steven Roberts: Yes, I think so know. And the, the nature of readers has really changed. I mean, I'm an old, long form writer. I used to do magazine art books and things, and I complain about, excuse me, I complain about the market, not reading long form anymore, but I'm part of that. I mean, I spend so much time on Facebook and you know, when I read articles, I zipped through them really fast and you know, the world would just change that way. So I still persist in thinking of that as my, as my publication product, as I suspect you do. And so when I post things on Facebook, I'm like, geez, I really need to do a proper article about this Sunday, but it's [01:00:10] Doc Searls: and if you ever use medium, which I use less lately, because they said as soon as he met with him as popular, they put it behind a firewall. So it was like, okay, screw that. But, but for the longest time, it's like, I'll write something and it has, it's like, let's say 2000 words, 3000 words. It's a big piece. And it'll say 15 minute read, and then let's see you had. You know, like a thousand people saw it 200 people, you know, read some of it and like, you know, 14 read the whole thing, something like that. Like, okay, well, here we go. [01:00:45] Steven Roberts: I miss the money. Mailed listserv, know the microchip status reports are thousands of people, no principal names. We all know, you know, principals, all this stuff. I would write every these updates about what was happening on the project. And at any time I would ask any kind of a question I'm trying to solve the technical problem. I don't know how to do this. These people who are like geniuses and wizards would write back and help me answer this, had this incredible global community of people who were helping or happy to convince at least, you know, or point out problems. But it was this really engaged interaction. And I miss those days because you know, I mean, I, I left that mailing list kind of fade. And of course now, if I were to take all those names post to them, I'd be breaking all kinds of rules. Yeah, can't do that anymore. [01:01:31] Doc Searls: Yeah. [01:01:33] Steven Roberts: So. Even I miss those [01:01:36] Katherine Druckman: days, Linux Journal was like that for probably for probably 10 years or so after I first started, well, no, maybe not 10 years, five years, you know, in the comments section of any article was it was a conversation about how to make whatever the problem, the article solved better that's, you know, it was fantastic and it's just, it's just not, [01:01:58] Steven Roberts: and people will take time and really think and responses, photographs and well edited. And you know, not like the threads on Facebook or tweaked comments or anything. That's. [01:02:10] Doc Searls: Right, which have to be brief. And a, but this is sort of fruit fly nature to it, through the whole thing as a half-life of a few seconds, you know, it's not my joke about Twitter is, you know, oh, you've got 25,000 followers you have, so does a parking space, you know, but it engages like said it gauges 10 cars a day. This parking space is 40,000 followers, traffic. It gets that much traffic. Well, not really. [01:02:47] Steven Roberts: That's fine, [01:02:50] Doc Searls: man. Well, listen, we'll, we'll, we'll have to visit this again. I'd love to get you on the other, on the other podcast, especially that, around that stuff, you just talked about the early stuff I realize it's early in the day for you. And so that's your problem with that? Nine 15. Let's look it up. Mr. Roberts is it's a joke, Mr. Rogers, Mr. Rogers beats, the Mr. Rogers and the bass player. And it's, it's a. It's on YouTube, but it's really better to listen to it then than to, uh, than to watch it because there was a video that went with it, but it's, it's, uh, it's Mr. Rogers interview with the bass player and it's early in the morning and, and Mr. Rogers says, say, you like to get up early? No, I'll have to get a, let's get up in a sun, gets more about one to two o'clock in the afternoon, you know? And, and what do you eat? You know, like I tend to, to, to, and from a chain store and it's this, it's this, you know, it's this wonderful disconnect between Mr. Rogers talking to children and an adult musician having a life. It's very, very funny. I won't tell you who does it, because there are two actually famous people, but it's so well done. But my, my point about it is that it's, it's, it's about timing, right? You know, if you love a musicians life, [01:04:16] Steven Roberts: I could move to Europe and then it will be later in the [01:04:18] Doc Searls: day. That would, that would be good. Yeah. I that's what I like about, um, this, the other podcasts, we do a floss weekly because when I'm on the east coast, it happens at noon. It doesn't happen or noon 30. It doesn't happen earlier. So, so maybe when you, when you rebase in Maine or someplace like that, some other place on the water someplace without volcanoes, you know, we go someplace, that's not in a subduction zone. That's going to give you, it's an army. One of these days, I [01:04:50] Steven Roberts: look forward to it. That'll be fun. Standing invitation. If you're out on this, into the world, [01:04:56] Doc Searls: what is the island? You're on? Oh, you're in San Juan. Okay. I know that one. Yeah. Yeah. Lindy's journal was in, in Ballard. In Seattle for much of its life. Yeah, it was born in Seattle. Phil was up there. [01:05:11] Steven Roberts: That's embedded. [01:05:13] Doc Searls: Oh, embedded linear. Should we had that too? We had, there was an embedded Linux journal. I wrote an article for that one. That sounds right. That maybe one of the ways we got you in, on the big boat [01:05:29] Steven Roberts: and I really missed out you didn't [01:05:32] Doc Searls: miss that. We went from, we went to the theater. We saw the first matrix, uh, as a big crew, the whole linear Charlotte crew, which at that time was about 10 people in an office. All went over to see the matrix, which I decided was my favorite movie of all time then. And it still is for different reasons over time. But yeah, I miss those a [01:05:56] Steven Roberts: geek cruises. [01:05:57] Doc Searls: I miss them too. They were so good. There was so much fun. [01:06:01] Katherine Druckman: The other podcast is doing a cruise this year. Of course I, you couldn't pay me enough to get on a cruise ship right now. [01:06:10] Doc Searls: I love cruises. I love them. [01:06:12] Steven Roberts: I did a Pearl whirl and Lennox lunacy and the Java jail. [01:06:16] Doc Searls: Oh, really? All of those. Wow. Wow. Neil Bowman, who organizes those still has them. He's got a different name in a cycle of geek cruises anymore. They're called something else, but you still doing them? I haven't talked to him lately, but I should ask him how it's going with that. I'm curious. [01:06:32] Steven Roberts: Yeah. What was that brilliant business model? Because you get to interact with the icons rather than, you know, normal trade shows. They're all gone. [01:06:40] Doc Searls: The separation trade shows are gone. What our trend, our show, internet identity workshop. I w I workshop that or a computer history museum twice a year. So we may have to invite you down for that, just to show up. I'll write you a note about that. If there, if I remember this, [01:07:02] Katherine Druckman: I still think we should, we should set up live, uh, live podcasts from the, from your ICW and the next time, the next time I'm willing to interact with humans in person, which I don't know when that will [01:07:13] Steven Roberts: be. [01:07:14] Doc Searls: Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be I'm in a basement here myself and see kinda kind of bare. [01:07:19] Katherine Druckman: I never leave my house again. I don't know. So thank you so much for joining us. [01:07:26] Steven Roberts: Yeah. Thanks next time. [01:07:32] Doc Searls: See you later.