 Hello viewers. So this is just an end of the year. 2022 was a great year, don't you think? I think so. Worked out well for me. But I just want to talk about a couple things that happened this year and a few things that might happen in the future. So I hope that you guys have noticed the last couple of months. I've had the same microphone, but now I have, you know, this adjustable stand. So I can actually put it in front of me with ease to where I can record better audio for you guys. So hopefully the audio has sounded better. I noticed that I go I make noises with my mouth a lot more in my videos. So I apologize for that. I don't do that with thinking. Also, I'm trying very hard every video to actually look at the lens. I tend to look at my picture on the screen instead of the lens. And I feel that's a little weird. I don't know if you guys noticed that. But so also sometimes even though the audio has hopefully been improved on my videos, I sometimes my camera is a little out of focus. I love my Canon T3i. It's older, but it works great. And thing is, it doesn't have it has automatic focus until you start recording video and then it's locked in unless you do manual, which is fine because I'm going to turn off automatic focus anyway, because I hate videos that go in and out of focus because people are moving around. So I would lock in the focus anyway. I used to have a little remote control and I would just take a still shot with myself and that would focus the camera and then I'd press record and do the video. I don't know what I did with that remote. There are a couple dollars and I was going to buy one, another one. But normally what I do is I just focus the camera on my chair and then sit down. So sometimes it's not perfect. So I apologize about that. But I'm hoping to get an extendable arm just like I have for my microphone here for the camera so I can bring it in close and actually reach the button for recording. I also am hoping to get a nice lens for my camera. Very happy with the two lens or I got a wide angle lens like a fisheye lens that I use sometimes. I have a telephoto lens and then I have this standard one that came with the camera. Very happy with them. But I want to get a nice camera for videos that I do more home videos. It's not going to make too much of a difference for these videos, but it might make the picture look a little bit nicer. So I'm hoping that you guys will see some improvements on the video quality in the near future. So there's that. I also want to take time to talk about Patreon and my patrons. So I have a handful of patrons on Patreon and some of them are silent. They support me monthly. I don't hear from them. There have been a few times where I put out surveys and questions and no one answers them, which is fine if you want to support me. Just enjoy my videos and that's fine. But there's a few of you that I've talked to regularly and I just want to take a moment and thank Mr. Newby. Mr. Newby, I've video chatted with him a few times. He's a really great guy. He actually has this website that he's set up that he's given me access to. And there's actually, he's set up a Matrix client there to where we chat and there's another patron of mine in there. If you're a patron of mine and you want to chat with me regularly, he's given me permission to grant access to a handful of people. So I can do that for you if you're a patron of mine. And if you want to be part of that, you can become a patron of mine over at Patreon.com, Fortes, MetalX1000. There's a link in the description of the video. So yeah, if you want to talk with me, that's the best way to do it is to become a patron over at Patreon. But I want to talk a little bit more about Mr. Newby. I hope he's okay with me talking about this. So we got talking once and I don't remember how it comes up. It comes up every once in a while in my life. So about 12 years ago, back in what it seems like, I thought it was earlier than this, but 2011, there are a few of you out there who asked me to start accepting bitcoins. At the time, I had no clue what a bitcoin was, but I looked into it, created a wallet, posted it, and two or three people gave me some bitcoin. And I don't really remember exactly. I think I just did the clicking thing with my mouth that I was talking about, but I don't really remember exactly, but I want to say it was around one, one and a half bitcoins that I had. At the time, I remember looking up, it was worth 14 or $15. It's bitcoin. I didn't know what it was. I didn't care much for it. No one thought too much of it back then. And I did something that I never, ever do. I compressed it in a seven zip file and encrypted it and password protected it. Seven zip. Why did I use seven zip? Why did I encrypt it? Like, I kind of just thought, oh, this is like money thing. I should encrypt it, which is really weird because that's not something I normally do. I normally keep important files offline, secure and safe. I don't encrypt them because I'm always worried about getting locked out of them. So I am one of those people who have been locked out of my bitcoin, which one bitcoin was worth, you know, $60,000 a year ago. I think it's worth about 20,000 right now. And I'm pretty sure I have around one and a half. So I mentioned this to Mr. Newby and he offered to try to crack it for me because I tried a few times in the past running it through a thing, but it's like, I had no clue what the password was, how long it was. And I would run, you know, trying to brute force it for days and it'd be a fraction of the way through what I was doing. So he offered, so I sent him the file because what's the worst case? He cracks it and steals the money. I'm not getting it anyway. A while later, he contacts me, wants to video chat with me and he tells me I've cracked the word, but I've lost the original file. So basically he pulled the hash out of the file, the password hash and ran a crack on that, but he accidentally deleted the PZIP file. So I went and I got it and he told me the password. And at first I'm like, that doesn't seem, I don't remember using that password more. I looked at it because nowadays I just, I randomly generate 32 character, whatever password and then grab part of that and use that as password. So my passwords are completely random and I use a password manager to handle that. Back then I didn't. And more I looked at it, there were words and numbers in this and the numbers did have association with me. And I don't remember using this password more. I looked at it. I was like, that does seem like a password I would have used. And not only that, but one of the words was misspelled, which is exactly, and it was misspelled in exactly the way that I would have misspelled it. So I'm like, yes, this, this has got to be the password, but it didn't work. He gave it to me. I tried, sent him the file he tried. We were like, okay, we used PZIP, seven PZIP. I may try the full version of PZIP seven, seven zip. I had the full version of seven zip. And then we're like, okay, well, I was using Debian back then. I don't really remember what version. So he got an older version of seven zip to see if that would do it. And eventually I came down to what we finally determined was the file was corrupt, right? The header where the password was wasn't corrupt, but somewhere down further in the file, it was corrupt. So I do backups regularly. So I go to my safe and I have hard drives all the way back from the early 2000s, hard drives that are over 20 years old. And what I do is I backup stuff to hard drive and multiple hard drives now, but back up to hard drive. When that hard drive gets full, I buy a hard drive like double that size, copy all that stuff to the new hard drive, keep the old hard drive and keep adding to it. So I have multiple copies of stuff. And I used to back things up to CDs as well. But now every year I backup, I have, I have two servers, my next cloud and just a Raspberry Pi that I do are sync to. So I back everything up to those. And then I have some offline, some online backups for certain things. And then I put things for every year, I put the files and photos I have on flash drives because flash drives are cheap. You can get a 64 gig or 120 gig or 28 gig for under 20 bucks. So I have a binder in my safe that has each year marked. These are the backups from these years. And it's the photos and videos for that year, but also any documents from that year and previous. So I have multiple copies of this file. So I start going back as far as I can. Again, I have hard drives further back than that file was. But the earliest copy of that file, it says it was created in 2011. And all my copies are, I look at my hard drives from 2010. I had nothing. I looked at my hard drives that I had from 2012. And it was there, but it was the same exact. We checked the hash file, the MD5, some of it, and it was the exact same file. So it seems like right off the bat, I had a corrupted file because I can't find any earlier copy. And it was right around the right time. So unfortunately, unless I find another file of that wallet unencrypted somewhere, I wonder if I should just try to, no, it doesn't matter. It'd be nice to have an extra $20,000, but I'm surviving now. But I just wanted to tell you guys that story. He was very, very helpful. Even after that, he kept running crack on it to see if he can get other passwords just to make sure. And because with hashes like that, you can get multiple passwords that work. But the other passwords he came up with still didn't work. And I'm sure that first, when he gave me, like I said, it was words and they were spelled wrong in the way that I would spell them, misspell them. So yeah, that's not working for us. But I really, really appreciate all the effort he put into it. And yeah, thanks for that. So Mr. Nubia, I wanted to say thank you for having your server sharing it with me and my other patrons. And for working on that for me. He's also been very helpful in sharing different tools he uses with me, projects I didn't know about on like GitHub or lab. And he's just an awesome guy. So if he had a YouTube channel, I would recommend it. I'm pretty sure he doesn't because he's never shared any of his videos. But yeah, again, if you enjoy my videos, and you want to become a patron, check out patreon.com forward slash mail X 1000, maybe maybe we could hang out and chat. And maybe I'll be doing a video about you someday. But yeah, happy new year. I hope that 2022 was a good year for you. And I hope 2023 is even better. I hope my videos continue to inspire you, that you like them, that you learn new things. And I love making them. I hope that you enjoy them. Happy new year.