The Money Game and Beyond

Tio

My parents are using TROM-Jaro for the past half year or so. And Linux (Ubuntu or other flavors) for the past 3-4 years or more. They simply need a stable operating system and a way for them to access the Internet without "trading" as much. In truth my first motivation to make a custom Linux OS was to do it for my parents because I wanted them to have a "ready to use" OS that blocks ads and trackers and it is simple enough for them to use. In fact I tested TROM-Jaro with them first, because if they can use it, most people can. They are not at all computer savvy and probably most people are like that, so we need an operating system that ca be used by anyone. They know very well how to keep the system updated now, and because TROM-Jaro has automatic backups before every update then it is easy for me to fix their computers in case an update breaks the system, which never happened so far.

I also installed TROM-Jaro on a half a laptop (that had no screen anymore) and I connected it with a TV so now they have a "smart TV" to watch online whatever they want to watch. I paired that with a cheap Bluetooth remote controller that worked out of the box and so now they have 3 devices with TROM-Jaro.

So, it is super useful that TROM-Jaro is set up for people who don't know much about computers because I make sure my parents don't see ads or are tracked online, have automatic backups and the interface is so easy to use that they can find whatever they need by pressing or clicking one button (the Dash).

The laptops have between 2 and 4 GB of RAM and a simple integrated Intel graphics card, and the TV has 1.6GB of RAM. TROM-Jaro works well on all of them out of the box.

Tio

Thank you Savadey for the 100 AUD via Paypal and the message "keep up the good work " - Awesome! Lately more and more financial support for TROM which is fantastic! Thank you so much people https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

Tio

Here's a video I edited for Sasha for her campaign :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABbNeEmhMh0 - watch it! it is cool. very. interesting. talks about us too. also a footage with her, me and aaron somewhere there...

Tio

Sasha needs some help to finish a Trade-Free Book about her journey. https://www.gofundme.com/f/big-world-small-sasha-the-book - she will post the book as Trade-Free on her website in digital format.

Sasha has been a great help for TROM for the past 2 years. She helped TROM financially (quite a lot), with proofreading or by spreading the word about TROM and Trade-Free on her blogs, social networks, and she even created a TROM Discussions Youtube stream for a while where she was discussing TROM subjects with new-to-the-project people. Her website, https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/ is labelled as Trade-Free.

She is also now part of our small "TROM family" - I (Tio), Aaron and her share a flat that we transformed into our small TROM office (will post videos and photos about this in the following months), and we help each other financially to be able to keep working on these projects. So, any help for Sasha is also a help for TROM ;) - she needs financial help to be able to focus on finishing her book (she already wrote some 70%) - needless to say in the book she talks about TROM too ;).

What is important about what she does is that she reaches new people (people interested in travelling around the world and having this different kind of lifestyle) - these people we could not (or rarely) reach with our projects. Now such people get to also know about TROM.

Big World, Small Sasha!

Tio

Here is a review of TROM-Jaro by Alexio :) - https://www.facebook.com/tromproject/posts/2619863141403328?__tn__=K-R (it is too big to post the entire text on our live)

Tio

Keep in mind that Manjaro is one of the most well known and used Linux distributions. If they said they may incorporate some of our good ideas into their official Gnome edition, then that's big :)

Tio

We are getting more attention for our TROM-Jaro from Manjaro's community which is fantastic - see here https://forum.manjaro.org/t/trom-jaro-a-trade-free-manjaro-build/93739 - One recent message was very encouraging, comming from a member of the Manjaro's Team: "This distro makes me happy. It's cool that Manjaro has a daughter distro, with clear vision, ethics and style. I'm hoping to borrow some of your good ideas to gnome edition. :) " - He also said he can help with some stuff, which is truly amazing. Imagine if this trade-free idea catches on in the open source community. It could be a fantastic way to make people aware of what creates most of our issues in the society, not only in the open source. Let's see where this leads, but so far this idea with "trade as the source of most problems" and focusing on trade-free goods and services as a "cure" for it, seems to catch on little by little.

Tio

Did a bunch of work for tromsite.com - improved some stuff, fixed some bugs. this site is made of so many many many parts, yet the way it is built it seems like one. is almost like we took cats, dogs and elephants, and created one single creature but you could not tell that this monster is made out of other animals :))

Tio

Ah, and when you download them you download them in multiple video formats + their respective subtitles. We'll work to incorporate any other video we have on tromsite through the Internet Archive.

Tio

Another super cool thing thanks to the trade-free Internet Archive: on the videos page you can now download any series you want form p2p https://www.tromsite.com/videos/ - and everytime we add new content to any of the video series we make, the download links gets updated automatically. Much less work for us! :)

Tio

Now you can get TROM-Jaro iso from both our server and bittorrent https://www.tromjaro.com/install/ - both should work all the time. We use the Internet Archive as the torrent source since they also provide a seedbox so it guarantees peers. We got 631 vies on the manjaro forum for our tromjaro post. And a bunch of people got interested in-it. That's awesome! I hope to find more time to add more apps to tromjaro.com.

Tio

Working on the Fort-Profit Entertainment book by Dima! :)

Tio

So these days we had a TROM-Cast, like we usually do, but this time we discuss about our new trade-free.org project. It got the attention of some people, and new ones participated for the cast challenging the idea. To make it super-mega short, I “created” this path now for “social change” via “trade as the source of most problems”, and some think is not a good idea. I’ll keep it all extremely brief since I already wrote thousand of pages on the topic. Here's the blog I wrote https://www.tiotrom.com/2019/07/why-trade-and-not-scarcity/

Tio

Thank you Jennifer for the 100 Euros donation. Wow! And for the message "Thank you for all that you do! ". :) - https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

Tio

I sent 20 or so emails to several people in the Linux community about tromjaro. Let's see if any pays attention to it.

Sasha

Tio and I have been working very hard on my new site for the last 2 months and now it is finally done! Check it out: https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/

It’s a trade-free travel blog that details how you can travel around the world with little money, but the main idea is actually to entice people with travel stories in order to introduce them to the important topics that we discuss here in TROM. So the point is to reach new people :)

These two pages (and a lot of my blogs) include links to TROM material: https://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/traveltips/ [link src="http://www.bigworldsmallsasha.com/lifestyle/

The"] website was designed by Tio – I can’t thank him enough for the enormous amount of effort he put into my site. Tio is by far the kindest and most genuinely extensional person that I know. And also- genius! :D and very creative. All the photos of my stuff, Polaroid theme and basically everything else on my site was his idea :). And we spent many hours/days/weeks customizing it to make it look like it does now.

I hope you enjoy it :)

Tio

I fixed trade-free.org for mobiles ;)

Tio

Cody: "I use trom-jaro to easily edit videos and maintain multiple systems that help decentralize some of the tools and videos TROM creates! I also use it to host the TROM-Cast weekly and thanks to it's lack of tracking / data harvesting, my computers resources can be freed to do what I WANT =]"

Tio

Organized TRM Riot a lot since we fuckin' grow :D - we need a room for video, one for tromjaro, one for webdev, and so forth. I love it! Also, Alexio joined the team :) - he organized TROM stuff so neatly and awesome that we need to use his powers! hehe

Tio

David Panart just became a $15 patron! - thank you so much! :) - monthly donations help a lot! https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

Tio

The brilliant Roma is working on something super cool so that anyone can translate the trade-free.org website in a bit. The general idea is this: people have access to a public file on gitlab that contains the english text and all of the links on the page. And they simply translate that. Then trade-free.org can call that page everytime people add the lang after the url, like say trade-free.org/es triggers the ES (spanish) translation. Of course, anyone can use that file + the HTML5 version of the website to host it anywhere. Roma is like Ziad it seems. Two brilliant people who are helping TROM in ways I could not do! :)

Tio

We moved our videos to The Internet Archive :) - a trade-free alternative to youtube which is an abundant service that is based on trades :) - we love the Internet Archive. You can see our new and improved videos page here https://www.tromsite.com/videos/ - now it is way easier to access all of our videos. Unfortunately we don't now why the subtitles are not working right now....we contacted IA...we'll see. We want to also move every other video there. Next step would be to stream via p2p and not even rely on IA. But for now this is the first major step to move away from Youtube and Vimeo ;)

Aaron

TROM-Jaro is my tool to create trade-free things. I use it to translate TROM materials into german, such as videos and audiobooks with the video-editor kdenlive + audacity and books with the partially trade-free app Master PDF Editor. I communicate with humans via Signal, Riot and Thunderbird and I work on my personal website + browse the web with Firefox. All trade-free. Plus I decentralize our materials with easy-to-use apps like webtorrent and the beaker browser. All in all I love tromjaro as it is fast, easy to use and it simply works. The fact that it works on my macbook is even another big plus-point. www.tromjaro.com

Tio

We'll skip tromcast today. I am too tired :D - will do one next week for sure. I'm working on other stuff too, so I'll be busy these days, especially today

Tio

Thank you Roma for the 86 Euros donation :) and the awesome message:

"Trade-free. org is great from both sides: as an idea and the site itself is amazingly crafted! Kudos to all who was involved. Appreciating all you hard work to release it! A real pleasure to be a part of such dedicated Team! Love all"

Tio

We will start to make these kind of posts about TROM-Jaro :) - from Gia:

"I use TROM-Jaro as my daily drive to browse the internet without being tracked by scripts (at least not as much), without seeing ads, and such. Less trades. I use it to translate TROM materials, read books, watch documentaries, or for digital drawing. https://www.tromjaro.com/"

Tio

Here are some websites labeled as trade-free by Alexio www.creativitate.cf www.energetica.cf www.echipamente.cf www.instalatii.cf - we need to make this idea spread and have other websites labeled as such.

Alexio's message:

"Some of the reasons to propose these websites as Trade-Free are:

- I am sharing/adapting on these webpages the trade-free content from the TROM projects;

- it is all about open education - http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages/EAP/OEREU.html ;

- the content on these websites is available under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. "

Tio

I had to fix some stuff for trade-free.org - so now is 100% downloadable. Before it wasn't. Now even the font we use is downloadable. Also Roma added it to gitlab https://gitlab.com/tromsite/trade-free/trade-free.org - need to be updated with today's updates ;)

Aaron

We released the trade-free website in german: https://www.handelsfrei.org/ - very exciting :)

Tio

We are super close to move to Internet Archive, except the documentary for now. Rafa helps with migrating the subtitles ;) - I have also prepared a text document to explain how one can translate trade-free.org into their own language - I can't manage that myself....too much stuff to manage. So people have to take that as their responsibility and translate and host that page. I'll give them the tools. I may take 1-2 days of work, but is not super complicated. Still need to refine everything then will post on trade-free.org.

Aaron

The video + audiobook "valuable without a value" is now available in german on tromsite.com/de

Tio

We are super close to move all of our videos (except the documentary for now) to Internet Archive. Almost all are already uploaded there and I made a new video page for tromsite that is much much better. We will have better control now over the videos. This year we will give up Vimeo, moving away from trade-based services. We walk the talk boys! :)

Tio

Finally posted about TROM-Jaro on Manjaro forum https://forum.manjaro.org/t/trom-jaro-a-trade-free-manjaro-build/93739 and I will send info about it to others too - distrowatch and some youtubers.

Tio

Now musikwave.com, videoneat.com, tromsite.com, tromjaro.com and tiotrom.com are all labaled (at the bottom of each page) as Trade-Free :) - if you have a project that creates trade-free stuff then you can label it as such and link to https://www.trade-free.org/ - so we can start something interesting and useful. ;)

Tio

Big thanks to the "invisible" (or not so visible) people who support TROM on Liberapay https://liberapay.com/TROM/ and Patreon https://www.patreon.com/trom for the past years. Without them we could not have paid for servers, tools, and time to build TROM and its baby projects. So, thank you so much!

Tio

added trade-free to https://www.tiotrom.com/ and tromjaro.com too - tomorrow i'll add to musikwave and videoneat ;) + make a text to promote tromjaro!

Tio

added trade-free to tromsite.com and removed the links to any other external "thing" like fb or youtube and so forth, because tromsite is tromsite and i dont want to redirect people to these trade-based places :) - purism! hehe

Tio

Join tromcast here https://meet.jit.si/tromcasttradefree - password: tromtrade

Tio

fixed some stuff with tormjaro.com - kinda ready for promoting on manjaro forums and so forth! i am working to add "This is a Trade-Free Project" on all websites: musikwave, tromsite, tiotrom, videoneat, everywhere I can! :)

Tio

Next few days are dedicated to add a trade-free sign on all of my/our websites, linking to trade-free.org. Also fix some bugs with some websites + then I'll create a long post promoting tromjaro.com on open source forums/websites. Tomorrow TROM-Cast about trade-free.org and we'll also talk about TVP.

Tio

And thank you Willy for your monthly 10 Euros Paypal donation! ;)

Tio

Thank you anonymous donor for the 100 Euros donation! https://www.tromsite.com/donate/ :D

Tio

I wanted to post the bellow message on FB too but they won't let me: it is against their "community standards" they say. That's why I don't give much of a fuck about FB. Like we want to share our originally made videos on their platform and they won't let us....fuck them. Not all magnets are "illegal", you stupid!

Tio

And btw, the videos on trade-free.org are streamed from peer-to-peer. They are on no server! :) - they are on people's computers. If you want to help us, seed those videos:

The main video's magnet link is: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:bbe36cb6ba5d6afeb50421a2509a969786710e8e&dn=Trade-Free.mp4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.btorrent.xyz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.fastcast.nz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openwebtorrent.com

And the logo making video is: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d66bf00649e889e261782c3a5098f68b68d35a00&dn=Trade-Free+Logo+Making.mp4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexplodie.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.empire-js.us%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.btorrent.xyz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.fastcast.nz&tr=wss%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openwebtorrent.com

Use WebTorrent to seed them, else it won't work. It is simple and you'll help us! Thanks!

Tio

thank you thank you thank you to all who have helped with this site: the idea, the suggestions, the everything!

Tio

https://www.trade-free.org/ is DONE! Check it :D - we will improve on it but this is basically it. We will add translations and we will create a trade-free directory soon :P - sooo so happy is finally here!

Tio

Yeah a bit more work on trade-free.org....but we are getting there....i dont want to get to stressed out by the work I have to do...VN also has some bugs that I need to fix. After we release TF website I need to manage my time better and have some more leisure time for myself and be less stressed out with this work. I am too passionate so is hard for me to not stress out cause I am excited and I want to fix and release!

Tio

Fixed some tromjaro.com stuff and need to fix some tromsite.com stuff....like plugins update that break parts of the website and you only notice after a few weeks....annoying

Tio

We are getting close to release trade-free.org. Is kinda done....maybe today will release. That website will for sure improve in time and we will do a documentary about "trade" that will be posted on the site. But we need to get it out there. We need to link to it. We need to talk about it ;)

Flingafu

I made a video on how to setup your own trade-free WIFI network! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3dY7LmqwPs

Tio

Participate here https://meet.jit.si/tromcastvolunteer and pass is tromcastv

Tio

TROM-Cast about volunteering in 1 and a half hour https://youtu.be/xNNoNvmVMwE

Tio

New FAQ Submitted: Are some people born with genes or biology which makes them to have more chances to become smart in some certain things in life? - answer here https://www.tromsite.com/faq/

Tio

Ok so VideoNeat has some weird bugs that I had to force-solve...i have no idea why those bugs....is the theme apparently...anyways. Is back! We worked today a lot on trade-free.org. Ziad is such a great help. Great guy! Main thing I need to add to trade-free is the text (which is kinda done) and implement translations (which can be difficult). Also, seen we will have double the storage and power for our server where we store all of our websites. I'll let you know. Super excited!

Tio

For the past many hours I'm trying to fix some videoneat design weird bugs...dont know wtf happened there but some pages are broken...

Tio

Patreon: "MayBritt just edited their pledge from $30 to $50." - Thank you so so much for your ongoing support! https://www.tromsite.com/donate/

Seb

New TROM Poem out (made this one 3 years ago, crazy that it's been this long) - 'The Ugliness of Beauty': https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG60mUXDirFbCT4SaumWpyA

Tio

Ok, so, I tested some video-decentralization options.

1. So, the ideal solution would be using webtorrent + amara in a popup. Meaning, videos to be streamed from our computers (p2p) and if we can to embed them with the amara player so all subtitles are added automatically. If possible to do that in a popup would be fantastic - click and play. Webtorrent streaming is working (we tested) - though there are some downsides...but manageable. This streaming option is the perfect one since we won't need any streaming service/hosting. We have 80GB of video files already and we are growing every week in size, so no hosting plan is enough for us in the long run. The problem is how to add it in a popup and deal with the subtitles....this is super problematic. As soon as we make trade-free.org work perfectly well with this technology we could implement to tromsite.com. Also, to videoneat.com (likely) - imagine people being able to click and play any torrent file from videoneat!!! That would be my dream!

2. Another solution is to use the video files directly (like mp4 or webm) from either our server or the internet archive servers. From our server is safer cause we have 100% control over them, but that would mean upgrading our server and will costs some money and these people are super charlatans - they say "oh you can upgrade to $40 a month for double the space and power"....however they don't mention that it means ONLY if you accept a 3 year "contact" with them for the plan....else costs a lot more....also am not sure how well the server will handle video streaming. Then we have to integrate to amara if possible....

3. Directly using the Internet Archive's player. Their player is not that great but is the easiest solution right now tho we will have to add the subtitles manually to it. It is the best vimeo replacement for sure.

Damn is a lot of work and is not that easy.... :( - and I have so much stuff to work on...

Tio

So today I got really pissed off at that plugin giving me the middle finger and I looked more and more into decentralizing trom videos. for now we will upload all trom materials to the internet archive and i will probably replace all videos on tromsite with those. Already did for the trailer on the homepage https://www.tromsite.com/ - it streams from the internet archive. Let's see if the url is persistent. I will do that first then try to stream from p2p. So far I love the IA.

Tio

aaand is back! we'll look into internet archive and the like for now...we'll see...so many things to do ....

March 10th, 2016

The Money Game and Beyond

Live updates about TROM Project