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  • E24 Introduction to Navcoin: I interview the lead developer

    E24 Introduction to Navcoin: I interview the lead developer
    2022/07/02
    Episode Notes On 29 May 2022 In this episode of the podcast I interview Alex one of the lead developers in the Navcoin project. We discuss what Navcoin is, some problems with cryptocurrencies and some of the future plans for Navcoin. This episode answers a number of questions asked on Discord and the telegram channel. Check out the Navcoin project at https://www.navcoin.org/ Transcript: E24 Introduction to Navcoin: I interview the lead developer. Kerry: Welcome to conversations with Kerry, a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can find me at @khoath on Twitter or e-mail me at kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Kerry: This episode of conversations with Kerry contains information on the cryptocurrency Navcoin. You can find out about Navcoin by visiting www.navcoin.org. Please note that this information is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. If you require investment advice, please consult a financial advisor. Please enjoy this content and I hope you find it educational and entertaining. Kerry: Welcome everybody to this episode of conversations with Kerry and as a special treat on the podcast this week, this will be distributed through various other channels, we are very honoured to have the lead developer of the Navcoin project with us which I'll introduce in a moment and Alex has come on the podcast with us. Now if you've never heard of Navcoin before don't worry a lot of people haven't and hopefully this podcast will fix that for you and tell you about this exciting project so hello Alex and thank you for coming on the podcast, I really appreciate it. Alex: Hello, Kerry thank you for having me it's a complete pleasure. Kerry: I’ll say a few words about cryptocurrency now. Everybody heard about Bitcoin, and everybody heard about cryptocurrency now in case you've been living under a rock for the last 12 years or so. In simple terms, cryptocurrency is a method of exchange that is calculated and stored on computers, that is thought to be worth actual money by a lot of people. That is probably the simplest definition of cryptocurrency I can give. The reason it's called cryptocurrency is the original project in this space that was hugely popular Bitcoin which came out in the late nineties, was the first cash system to be widely successful in this digital space, although when Bitcoin started, it wasn't worth much at all and we can talk about that a little later. Now when you talk about cryptocurrency, you'll get the term “blockchain” and I don't want to get too geeky because we're trying to keep the podcast general but in very simple terms when you put money in your bank and your bank takes your money, the bank says you have $3.57 or whatever your currency is and you believe them and hopefully all of the other banks believe them and this will sort of butterfly across into a topic that we're getting on to in a second here. But if you ask the bank how much you've got the bank says $3.57 and if somebody says, “person X has bought a chocolate bar which is $3.56, do you have $3.56?” the bank “says yes, yes they do”, and you end up with one cent left in your account and a chocolate bar. Now, this all sounds pretty simple and straightforward, except there are a couple of underlying problems with this system which we'll get into. First of all, you have to trust the bank and that seems as though it would be, pretty simple right? Nothing to hide, nothing to worry about? But if you've been following the news, the Canadian truck drivers would tell you all sorts of things about how the bank wouldn't let go of their funds and they were up doing a protest and went to buy a chocolate bar or whatever else they needed, not possible. So, we'll get to that in a minute, very soon actually. Kerry: So cryptocurrency used to be seen as a bit of a joke and everyone went “Bitcoin it's like the Dutch Tulip craze, it's not worth anything, don't worry about it” and then as time progressed and the technologies advanced and an incredible amount of intellectual power in the community, it became popular and the price went up, and then the price went up, and then the price went up. In 2013, bitcoins were $100 apiece, in 2022 Bitcoin is around $29,000. Let me have a look now… $29,062 yeah that's right. So first of all, one of the things that were taught about Bitcoin, and this leads to the first question. Kerry: I mean everybody heard about Bitcoin and people thought Bitcoin was anonymous, and I think we're gonna talk about this a little bit because Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Or pseudonymous I think the term is, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. But what's the problem if everybody knows what money you've got, and everybody knows what you're doing? What’s the problem with that? and probably what I wanna ...
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    1 時間 8 分
  • E23 Listen as my ADHD medication takes affect

    E23 Listen as my ADHD medication takes affect
    2022/05/23
    Episode Notes

    Here is the next episode of my podcast. In this episode I discuss my adult ADHD, take my medication and let you listen to how it takes affect.

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    27 分
  • E22 Moccona coffee, a not bad instant coffee blend

    E22 Moccona coffee, a not bad instant coffee blend
    2022/04/30
    Episode Notes Alicia and I discuss Moccona, a freeze-dried instant coffee we both enjoy. Welcome to Conversations with Kerry, a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions, or feedback, you can find me as at K-H-O-A-T-H on Twitter, or email me kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Welcome, everybody, to this episode of Conversations with Kerry and day four of ADHD medication. Can we tell there is actually podcasts on a reasonably regular schedule? So here's another episode, and I have invited along this time the delightful, ineffable Alicia, welcome. Thank you. What kind of word was anyway? Ineffable. It means to look that one up. Awesome Yeah. We have to get a definition for ineffable. As you can hear, she's had quite the audio upgrade from last time. If anybody who's been following my podcast for some time, original podcast we had her on was the Doc and Alicia Fun with Hypnosis podcast, episode 15? I believe it was episode 15. And if anybody has any feedback, comments, would you like to see more of Alicia or less of Alicia on the podcast? I don't know if I want the answer to that. Well, maybe not. I would like to see more of her on the podcast because I love podcasting with people. It's fun. We're up here on Riverside on Sunday, the 3 October 2021, and I put that on just because so many of my recordings don't have dates on them. And then I go back and listen to them later and sort of go, when did that happen? So here we are today. We're talking about Moccona coffee, or we're talking about coffee. Now, I've had some interesting experiences with coffee. Coffee, when I used to drink a lot of it when I was younger, would cause me quite bad reflux. And we'll come back to that thought in a minute. And in fact, when I have been to America, and I've been to America four times, which is where Alicia is from, their coffee is made in pots and French presses. Well, how did you used to make your coffee? Actually, as a case in point, just- You know, pot or keurig. Pot or keurig. Okay, so bit of keurig coffee, bit of pot coffee. Take a few cups out of the pot throughout the day. That's a common thing No, not throughout the day. Yuck. Okay. Just in breakfast. Okay. Well, I mean, if you're I'm not opposed to having coffee throughout the day. What I'm saying is you make a fresh pot of it because letting it sit in the pot and then getting it later and heating it up in the microwave. There are people who do subscribe to this, I'll believe. Abomination. That's the problem. It is an abomination. Yes, I know. That is no, not you. Okay. All right. So we have a coffee connoisseur in. Our midst, which is that's kind of funny. I'll tell you why later, but anyway okay, no worries. So you used to drink either keurig coffee or pot coffee. Now, for people who aren't in the US. Keurig is one of those. Actually, I think it ends with a G. Keurig. Yeah, it is. K-E-U-R-I-G-I believe Keurig. Okay. Keurig coffee is one of the American coffee pod systems. So if you want to make a lot of okay coffee quickly with minimum fuss, many people default to a keurig. They probably shouldn't, but it's convenience over yum. I was going to say I believe kind of where that trend got going was for offices. Initially, people would have the keurig, paper cups, sugar packets, creamers, there's your coffee station with a minimum of mess. You weren't pouring out of a pot, you weren't making a bunch. And then either having too many people try to get coffee and there wasn't enough, or vice versa, you'd make a pot that doesn't get gone because you'd have those really big industrial, commercial office size pots. So I think that's kind of where they got started, was in offices, because someone could just make their own the way they wanted it, minimal mess. There you have it, and it ended up migrating into everybody's homes. Interestingly enough, and this reminds me of the inkjet printer on every desk that we used to have in offices. Like, I can't use the main printer, so I will have an inkjet on my desk. So keurig was the solution to that for coffee, because certain smaller offices would have a keurig in them rather than having a building coffee machine. Yeah, okay. No, that's all very interesting. I have had keurig coffee. It's not that great, in my opinion. It goes from blur to not so bad, basically. Yeah. If you want coffee and you have to have coffee and you're in a hurry, give me coffee now. Keurig. No problem. All right, so what was the problem with coffee for you? I remember you talking to me earlier in the year and just you can't drink as much coffee as you like. Yeah, well, backing that up for a second, just because I'm amused by you calling me a coffee connoisseur. I did not start drinking coffee till this 2015, so until I was 35 years old. I always loved the smell of it when I was growing up. I mean, I loved how coffee smelled, ...
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    28 分
  • E21 ADHD and me the journey begins.

    E21 ADHD and me the journey begins.
    2021/10/01
    This podcast discusses how I decided to get tested for ADHD, my diagnosis and initial experiences. Transcript thanks to Alicia: Welcome to conversations with Kerry: a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions, or feedback, you can find me as @khoath on Twitter, or email me, kerry@gotss.net. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Welcome to the podcast. This episode is entitled ADHD and Me. Story time: I have recently been diagnosed with adult ADHD, and it was quite an interesting journey to get to this conclusion, so I’m going to cover a little bit of that, in the hope that it may be useful and instructional to others. Now, as a child, I was always reasonably intelligent, and I did reasonably well at school. But I discovered that I really had a problem with procrastination, and getting me to do homework was like pulling teeth. It never seemed to get done. I always found other interesting and more wonderful things to do. And some would say that’s true of any child, but as the years progressed, I discovered that procrastination was a huge problem for me. I would put off important things even if those things were going to pay me lots of money, even if those things were extremely important, even if those things would negatively impact me if left to chance. And I also noticed that I was having trouble focusing on tasks that I wanted to do. I could hyper focus, I could sometimes get into projects and complete them, but I would always jump from project to project and rarely complete anything. So it was late last year on YouTube I was watching a humorous video about adult ADHD. And they basically have a comic asking you a whole series of questions, and getting you to mark off the behaviors that you experience. And I realized that the actual examples would occur to sighted people more than blind people. But I decided to try this quiz, and see what I actually scored. And I scored quite highly, which got me thinking. And I wondered over the years how many things at my job I had delegated to other people, and how many things in my job that I hadn’t actually done, and how efficient was I at working. And I came to the conclusion, not very. And I got to thinking that there may be a reason for all of this sort of behavior. So I started to research, and I discovered that a lot of these traits were, in fact, typical of people with ADHD, although ADHD symptoms could occur in other mental conditions, such as bipolar and schizophrenia. So I decided that this required further investigation. And I spoke to some people on the Internet, and got some personal stories, and decided to go to my general practitioner, and get a referral to a psychiatrist. And I got the referral to the psychiatrist, and booked an appointment only to find out that the appointment was going to be 473 dollars. But I was pretty sure that there was stuff going on, so I decided to put the money aside and go to the appointment. And I went to see the psychiatrist, who was an older fellow. And he asked me lots of questions about my family. Did I live with my family? How closed was I to my parents? Did I experience abuse? Was I depressed, anxious? Had I had psychosis? A whole range of questions. And I discovered through some research that the reason they ask about psychosis is because some people do experience psychosis when they take dexamphetamines or similar stimulant medication. There are a number of non-stimulant medications for ADHD, but the first line of defense is usually stimulant medications because they work for 70 to 80 percent of people that they are prescribed for. Now when I was seeing the psych, he asked me if I had any of my old school reports, and that if I did, could I please bring them in to the next appointment, and that he would see me in seven weeks’ time. I have to say that was a little demoralizing. So first appointment down, 473 dollars, got some back from Medicare obviously, see me in seven weeks. So, and fill in this questionnaire on adult ADHD. So I got my support workers to fill in the questionnaire on ADHD, and I also got together the school reports, which luckily my mother had saved for me and sent across to me. And we spent a couple days scanning all of the reports, and getting those into the computer and getting them into JPEG files. And I filled in the ADHD questionnaire and scanned all of its pages into PNG files. And I went to try and email in the documentation for the psychiatrist, and discovered that the system would only accept PDF as input. Not only that, that the PDF’s were limited in size as to how big they could be. And I’d initially sent them a Dropbox folder with all the necessary documents in it, but that wasn’t acceptable. So I ended up getting on to a site called PDF Candy, which can convert JPEG’s into a PDF, and I made a PDF of about 13 pages of the school report, only to find out ...
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    16 分
  • E20 My Third Computer

    E20 My Third Computer
    2021/08/20
    Episode Notes In this episode I discuss my 486Dx/33 the first computer I owned and my first modem. Transcription: Welcome to conversations with Kerry, a series of audio interactions with people and things in my world that I find interesting. If you have any comments, queries, questions or feedback, you can find me as at h on Twitter or email me kerry@gotss.net thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of the podcast called my third computer. Now don't panic. We're not going to do an episode of the podcast on every computer I have ever purchased over the past 30 years or so. That would be a podcast series in its own right, and probably extremely boring and uninteresting to the listeners. However, the third computer that I considered my computer was a machine that was purchased for me in 1993. Now, there were some interesting circumstances that surrounded the purchasing of this computer. My first computer, as we remember, was the Keynote XL, which was obtained for me in 1987 and that was purchased for me by the Lions Club of WeWar and Narabra. The second computer that I used throughout my high school years, the keynote PC Plus. I got my hands on that in 1990, and that served me through until the time I got my actual first personal computer and I was doing my first year of year twelve. I'd split my year twelve over two years and was doing it using the pathway scheme, which allowed me to do year twelve in two years rather than one. And we were contacted by the Lions Club to say that the trust fund that had been established for me was supposed to be disbanded when I turned 18, or at least the trust fund had to be emptied of the money by a certain date. And they asked if there was a specific purchase that would do me the maximum amount of good and make a fundamental difference to my quality of life in February 1993. And the answer was my first personal computer. And I contacted a couple of friends of mine who knew far more about computers than I did. And this was the days before the World Wide Web and before the days that the Internet was as popular it is today. And we were searching with things like Archie and we were looking on FTP sites and trawling through Usenet archives. And I spoke to two friends, Tim and Shane, who suggested that I go through a computer shop in Sydney and purchase a computer from them. We had gone around and looked at local computer stores. We'd looked at Marnie Computers in Tamworth, and we'd looked at Osborne when Osborne was still selling computers before it went belly up as far as its computer business was concerned. And we looked at another one of the CPS computers, but nobody really had a lot of computers in stock. They were expensive. The shops didn't sort of keep a lot of them on shelves at that time. Sort of predated the big department store, like Harvey Norman and stuff, getting into electronics and stuff. So we spoke to a computer store, and for the princely sum of $2,995, I'm sure they just put 2995 to make it look nicer from a marketing perspective than charging a flat 3000 for it. I got the following computer hardware. A full tower case. Now, for those of you who know your old 80's style case specifications, this predated ATX that had space for four. No, it had space for six, five and a quarter inch half height drives, or three full height drives. It had space for two, three and a half inch externally accessible drive bays, and it had support for two internally accessible hard disk bays. The processor in this beastie was a 486 DX 33. That's right, 33 MHz. And the 486 DX 33 was suggested to me because it contained a floating point unit. Now, prior to this, when we looked at processors prior to the 486, so the 386 and all the way down, if you wanted a floating point unit, you would have to add in a 387 coprocessor. And you may validly ask yourself, why would a floating point unit be useful in a modern computer? And some software could utilize the three eight seven floating point to do much faster arithmetic using decimal numbers. And as you can all hear, there's rain coming down at the back. So I apologize for that, but not much I can do about the rain. That's going to have to stay in the recording. And that was the case. The processor was a 486 DX 33. The system board, I believe, was a PC partner system board. It's been a while. It was an 80's system board, full size 80. You can look that up on Google if you want to know how big that was. Six ISa slots and no onboard peripherals. So no serial ports, no parallel ports, purely just the system board and the processor. The machine had eight megabytes of ram, which was kept in eight one meg 30 pin sims, which were the little thin sticks of memory that would slide in at a 45 degree angle and then slide down to be vertical. So there were eight slots on the board, and all were populated with one meg 30 pin sims. In the system was a multi io card, which had your standard ...
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    28 分
  • E19 Life update and podcast future

    E19 Life update and podcast future
    2021/06/21
    Episode Notes

    In this episode I discuss how I can fund the podcast, ask for feedback from people on what they want to hear and provide a life update.

    Support Conversations with Kerry by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/kerrykos

    Find out more at https://kerrykos.pinecast.co

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    9 分
  • E18 Audio and microphones chat Part 1 with Derek Lane

    E18 Audio and microphones chat Part 1 with Derek Lane
    2021/06/19
    Episode Notes In this episode Derek Lane and myself discuss some of our introduction to audio and a little about the art of choosing a microphone. If you wish to reach Derek you can email: info@lanesaudio.com Transcription: Kerry: Welcome to this episode of conversations with Kerry. And I'm delighted to invite a friend of mine on to discuss a fascinating topic. And that is, types and varieties of microphones because obviously, if you're going to record stuff, one of the things that you will need to do that is a microphone. And this fellow who I'm going to invite to the podcast, I met in 2011. I think it was Hello, Derek was it 2011? 2012? It was 11. And I was mystified because there wasn't a lot of hiss in his audio background, we were running an academy. I had headsets, and they hit like a snake. And I couldn't figure out why Derek's audio was so clear. And in fact, I think you'll find that it wasn't always this good either. You started off from humble beginnings as well, I think you told me you started off with some very entry level gear when you were young and upgraded as you as you got older. Derek: Yes, so basically, I had two options. When I recorded in the computer, when I first got an actual machine capable of recording audio without messing up things or freezing, I could either connect the really crappy microphone that came with the computer to the computer and pick up a lot of hiss and ambience from the kitchen because the computer was sort of in the dining room as a central Family Resource. Or I could record my audio on a tape, and then hook a tape deck to the computer and play it off of the tape. So then that gave me a different set of issues. So I could I could pick the poison as it were. Kerry: So on the one hand, you could have sort of iffy sounding audio from the computer's microphone with background, kitchen, ambience and whatever else. Or you could have tape hiss and the artifacts from the actual tape recorder? Derek: Pretty much. Yeah, I'm sure in my room, I had a mixer. And it was a Sony 3 Head Cassette deck. And so I could make good quality recordings for what it was and the time. But you still had the nice, wonderful, idiosyncratic characteristics of tape plus poor mp3 encoding because this was the late 90s, early 2000s. And I was on dial up so naturally, the sacrifices in the compromises were pretty nasty. Kerry: Yeah, if you're on dial up, and I remember these days quite well, because we were on dial up and stuff as well. Your general encode bit rate was 128 kilobits per second or lower. It was a meg a minute for music. And it took a long time to download that. I mean, you're looking at four and a half to five minutes at 56k. So you were looking at a mag every 20 minutes at 14, four, or a mag every 10 minutes at 28 Eight. So it took a long time to download things Derek: To break it down. If the song was five minutes long, it might take you 15 or so. Especially if someone was sending it to you over email, you know, and they had to upload it themselves. It was a if you wanted the song. In other words, you really, really wanted that song. Yes, that recording from your friend. Kerry: And in fact, I think I would argue that because media was more hard won back in the late 90s, early noughties. We valued the files in a way more because they were harder to get and harder to obtain. And it was like wow, I have whatever it is that I've managed to download. Now, one of the things you said to us as part of the recording course. Now, Derek taught recording courses for us for a number of years for the Cisco Academy for the visually impaired, overworked, underpaid, but did manage to have quite a lot of fun doing it and got him into the Jive of teaching. That you said An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So did these early years teach you that the cleaner and better your input sources and things were the ultimately better? Your final results could be? Derek: Yes, because audio cleanup software has advanced significantly over the last few years. But back then it technically worked but left its own mess in the wake of the audio that was preserved and quote unquote, restored. I mean, you had things like verbose audio wizard and dark pro 98 and ruber mechanic and that was about it. And the accessibility varied, the quality varied, it's just, it was. So if you could at the source, get your audio cleaner, not only would it sound better, even though you did have some rudimentary processing back in the day, but the computer itself would take, you know, anywhere, at least the one I had anywhere from, you know, 20 to 30 minutes to clean up a file, you know, a 10th, the length, it would take a long time to do. So that was another step. Kerry: And so you would essentially set your parameters and wait for the results of the job. So you'd literally go exist somewhere else, have a drink, eat lunch, come back, and then check what the results of the processing work. Derek: And if they weren't good,...
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    1分未満
  • E17 discussing TV Dinners

    E17 discussing TV Dinners
    2021/06/11
    Episode Notes

    Here is a podcast about TV Dinners, what they are and I cook one live on the podcast.

    Support Conversations with Kerry by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/kerrykos

    Find out more at https://kerrykos.pinecast.co

    This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
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    21 分