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Posted by on 31st August, 2016

What I have learned in the last few years

What I have learned in the last few years

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 happiness… I yearned for more but wasn’t sure what that meant. My wife and I had many ideas, and together we decided that we wanted to build something for ourselves. We needed adventure and a bit more than the regulatory two-weeks-a-year routine vacation. So we planned our escape over the following year and (after several garage sales) we left for...

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Posted by on 23rd August, 2014

What are your tools?

What are your tools?

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, but very functional. Kind of like the search engine from the same company. Cloud Storage Google Drive Many contenders in this area, but its tight integration with Google docs, makes this an easy decision. It is fast, functional and with more tools and space than I will ever need. Storage Sync InSync Google drive comes with its default sync tool;...

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Posted by on 15th January, 2014

Cloud mining Datacoin

Cloud mining Datacoin

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 for about US$5 per month. I picked a coin that is not very popular with low difficulty, so I could get some decent amount of coins in return for experimental purposes and not necessarily to make money. I picked Datacoin [datacoin.info] and here are the steps I followed for mining this coin: Go to digitalocean.com and create an account. Once...

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Posted by on 15th October, 2013

China leading next Bitcoin rally

China leading next Bitcoin rally

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 call it that. The price dropped for a day or two and recovered to its previous levels in a few days. So, if Silk Road wasn’t driving the Bitcoin economy, then who is? The sceptics are asking who else is accepting Bitcoins. No legitimate, public company does, right? With current events in US politics causing some doubt in the financial...

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Posted by on 29th August, 2013

Mesmerizing dots

Mesmerizing dots

I saw on Reddit a post titled Mesmerizing and it was just a gif with some coloured dots in motion in a particular pattern. It was quite intriguing and I found myself staring at the thing for more than I am willing to admit. So, it was almost midnight, I am thinking, I can probably do this in a cople of hours… right? Right? Sure, it would be a fun experiment in Javascript. And there goes my sleep… Update: note quite finished, but I think I going in the right direction. Very little code: a loop that runs 18 times, creates the dots and animation, while the index rotates the layer that the dot is animating on by 20. I need to get the timing of the individual dots right and perhaps also the changing of colors. Notice how all the dots just move up and down a static line. 18 dots, 18 lines angled at 20 degrees from eachother. I added a toggle button so you can see...

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Posted by on 5th July, 2013

Javascript projects I should be looking into

Javascript projects I should be looking into

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 the documentation and attempts to write an example that runs in the browser for every single library added to the site. This all takes time and is motivated by a deep and possibly unhealthy love of JavaScript. If you are looking for something about package managers, scaffolding software, etc. check out: www.packagemanager.org read more And…as if that wasn’t enough, a...

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Posted by on 5th July, 2013

jQuery plugin repository

jQuery plugin repository

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 favourites. All in all, a decent site to find a neat feature or effect that you need for your next project. Bookmarked. read more Edit: of course, you should also keep the original jQuery plugin repository...

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Posted by on 19th June, 2013

Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails

Encrypt your Gmail, Live and Yahoo emails

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 being read while going over the wire to your email provider. Once it arrived at the email server in its encrypted form, it can, and usually is, decrypted and stored in its original format. The best possible way to keep your comms secure and private is to encrypt your message with unbreakable technology and store it as such on the...

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Posted by on 9th June, 2013

jQuery checkbox plugin

jQuery checkbox plugin

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 loading more pages when the results are scrolled to the end. Templating: support for custom rendering of results and selections. Instead of trying to understand what all these features do, head over to the samples and try each one of them out. I am sure you will find at least one that you will use in your next project. [button...

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