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What I have learned in the last few years

Posted by on 31st August, 2016

In 2013 I decided to do the unthinkable: leave a five-year promising career at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, WA, sell everything and go on a life adventure. Mind you, that leaving, included leaving a cushy five bedroom house with an outdoor Jacuzzi on a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course, a Nissan Z350 and so many other material “stuff” that was somehow supposed to make me happy. Especially in the US, it seems that the more we have, the happier we should be. It goes without saying that in the US, we are conditioned to base our happiness on our material wealth. Deep down, I never connected material wealth with...

What are your tools?

Posted by on 23rd August, 2014

Do the tools you use say much about you? It’s like clothing, right? You might wear a shirt because you simply like that particular shirt or you like the style… or the brand, color, fit, etc. The same can be said about the tools we use for our everyday tasks like email, calendaring, storage, etc. So, let’s see what these tools say about us. I’ll start; I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… Email Gmail My default email client for many years. It is fast, robust, powerful and simple, yet highly customizable. Works across all my devices. Calendar Google Calendar A bit on the simple simple side,...

Cloud mining Datacoin

Posted by on 15th January, 2014

I missed the boat on buying hardware mining equipment but still wanted to try mining for myself. Besides the initial cost, the financials of electricity costs with diminished returns, it just didn’t seem profitable at the time, and even less now. Now, without owning any hardware, one can still mine with cloud hosted solutions; whether it is Azure, or any other cloud service, you just create a Virtual Machine, install the wallet software for the crypto-coin you want to mine for and let it run for days on end. Just come back after a while to check on your balance. On Digital Ocean, you can run a single instance...

China leading next Bitcoin rally

Posted by on 15th October, 2013

The capture of Ross Ulbricht a couple of weeks ago, and with it, the demise of the Silk Road and the largest underground market ever, was big news in Bitcoin social circles. Forget the ethical dilemma: this market moved a lot of money… a lot… about 1.2 Billion dollars in sales every year. No small fry. Much had been speculated by analysts and sceptics that much of the Bitcoin economy was stimulated mostly by these kind of illegal transactions. In fact, this news, was going to be the end of it: this was Bitcoin’s blow to its  knees. Except, that it wasn’t. Let’s say it was a stumble, if one can...

Javascript projects I should be looking into

Posted by on 5th July, 2013

I give up. I just posted a list of jQuery plugin libraries that I need to look into and then find this site. JavascriptOO.com, brands itself as: “every javascript project you should be looking into”. That is ridiculous. I will never, ever have enough time to look into even a fraction of these libraries. Did you see how many libraries there are? In any case, I am adding another bookmark for a site that makes me feel very small: JavascriptOO.com The site is primarily focused on micro libraries, utilities, and other JS wizardry that can run in a browser. The site is not an automated directory. The site owner reads all...

jQuery plugin repository

Posted by on 5th July, 2013

Trying to follow and learn all the available, and quickly appearing jQuery plugins is a bit like drinking from a firehose. There are just so many libraries and so many effects and features to try. Some of them are good, some great… and some not so much. Unheap.com is a site that tries to be a showcase for all jQuery plugins. Going over 700 plugins strong, anyone can add a new library they stumbled upon on Github or elsewhere and user “thumbs up” points are used to weed out the good from the bad ones. Each plugins shows tags, views and there is even an option to save your own...

Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails

Posted by on 19th June, 2013

With the current NSA affair and its PRISM program apparently listening to our conversations and reading our emails, some people may be looking to shield themselves a bit more from intrusive eavesdropping on their communications. Email as we know it, is obviously not entirely secure. Evasive tricks such as the ones used by General Petraeus to conceal his affair with Paula Broadwell didn’t work very well. [they created a fake email acount and communicated by saving drafts to that account, only communicating via drafts, so the emails couldn’t be traced as outgoing emails]. Wait, you say you use https or ssl? that’s great… however, that protects your message from...

jQuery checkbox plugin

Posted by on 9th June, 2013

I found a fantastic checkbox replacement plugin by Igor Vaynberg. His open-source plugin, Select2 is a jQuery-based replacement for select boxes. It supports searching, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results. Some use case: Enhancing native selects with search. Enhancing native selects with a better multi-select interface. Loading data from JavaScript: easily load items via ajax and have them searchable. Nesting optgroups: native selects only support one level of nested. Select2 does not have this restriction. Tagging: ability to add new items on the fly. Working with large, remote datasets: ability to partially load a dataset based on the search term. Paging of large datasets: easy support for...

Pure: ridiculously simple CSS modules

Posted by on 28th May, 2013

Yes. Pure is a set of small, responsive CSS modules that you can use in every web project. Together or independently, pure CSS modules that enable you to put layouts in place and styling for native HTML elements, including the most common UI components. Zero Javascript: just CSS and at only 5.7Kb. If you just need the modules individually, you can only call the ones that you need, and since it is just simple CSS code, you can easily override or extend any part of it in your pages. read...