TWID Jan 15, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


Finished the blockchain pluralsight course this week and started on the Github course

Should be done with the Github course by tomorrow

Watched Hell or High Water,  the movie was really good and I especially like the music. The music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and it's I guess Western music?


Started to listen to the King of Kings podcast from hardcore history, I think this is the third time I am listening to it. Such great stuff!!

This Week I Learned

Merkle tree
While watching the Pluralsight course Blockchain Fundamentals I learned about a Merkle tree

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

The concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle who patented it in 1979

More about Merke Tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree


White Plague
Heard about this on the Lore podcast episode 77. White plague is also known as consumption or tuberculosis, never heard it called white plague before. Tuberculosis I know very well, my grandfather died from it, he was 23 years old and when he died my father was only a month old. It was a rough time for my grandmother having to raise 3 kids on her own in the 1950s past war time frame.


Iron
Heard about the different kind of iron on the How it began podcast episode: Mastering Metals: From Sticks & Stones to Cars & Computers
Wrought iron... this is produced by putting the rock on a fire and then manipulating the iron by banging on it
Cast iron...  this is produced by using ovens and melting the iron.. it is however brittle
Steel... this is produced by removing carbon and it is not brittle like cast iron

This Week I Tweeted

A Vast, 430-Year-Old World Map, Full of Places and Creatures, Real and Imagined

The map shows a lush, highly personalized take on the world, with a surprisingly large collection of real and fantasy beasts carousing and cavorting on land and sea. Rumsey’s scan and digital assembly of the cartographic puzzle represents the first time that Monte’s work has been seen in its full glory: It is the single largest world map of the 16th century, and one largely forgotten or overlooked by cartographers and scholars.

Some interesting stuff, would be nice to have this hanging on the wall


Royal Mail’s Game of Thrones Stamp Collection available to order

These stamps look great.

Twitter, Snapchat tie up with Fox to provide coverage of FIFA World Cup

Twitter Inc is partnering with Twenty First Century Fox Inc’s Fox Sports to stream a live show on the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament set to be hosted in Russia later this year.  

Who is going to watch this on crappy telephone screens?

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Good block chain material from ycombinator: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Small sample

• The official Solidity docs are a good place to start.
• The Truffle Framework is one of the best solidity frameworks.
• See how tokens and token sales are developed in the zeppelinOS repo, one of the most trusted libraries to build dApps.
• Blockgeeks also provides an in-depth Ethereum token guide with code samples and high-level concepts.
• You can even learn from Crypto Kitties and create your own digital game on the blockchain.

In addition, the developer communities are remarkably receptive and helpful. Check out:

• /r/ethereum
• /r/ethdev
• https://blockgeeks.com/

Find more here: http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/

Some pics I took

Eight feet of snow.... will take a while to melt.

Use Purse.io to shop on Amazon and pay with bitcoin

A couple of years ago I mined some bitcoin with ASIC Antminers. This bitcoin amount was still sitting in my bitcoin wallet until now. I needed some stuff from Amazon and decided to see how I could use some of this bitcoin I had to pay for these items. Amazon doesn't take bitcoin as a payment but there is a 3rd party site you can use. This site is Purse.io

The way it works, you create a wishlist or add the items. Then you can add a discount, I tried 11% for the 4 items and someone accepted

Sweet, 11% on top of the low Amazon price is not bad at all. The way it works is that the people who buy the items for you will get the bitcoin.  Once the order accepted, the amount is put into escrow and when it is delivered and acknowledged by you, the amount goes out of escrow into the buyer's wallet

Not sure if this is the right way to do it, it worked for me and maybe it can work for you as well. Let me know if you tried Purse.io and if it worked out for you as it did for me

TWID Jan 07, 2018

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


Skipped last week, so here is a bunch of stuff from two weeks combined


Made a whole bunch of chicken broth from the leftover bones I saved up over the last couple of weeks



I use this as a base for lentil soups, vegetable soups, risottos or I just have it as is to warm me up.


Finished: The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin

This was pretty good, if you like history I recommend this book

Blueprint for Armageddon

Since a lot of podcasts took a hiatus or had a best of episode, I had some spare time. I decided to listen again to the fantastic World War I podcast episodes Blueprint for Armageddon by Dan Carlin. I think this is the 3rd of 4th time I have listened to it.


Cold spell is still going strong in the Northeast. Worked from home Thursday and Friday. For some reason there was a Comcast cable above ground. The first snow cleaning truck that passed by clipped that cable right into pieces. There went cable and internet. Used the hotspot on my phone to continue working. Comcast had the cable repaired within 2 hours so that was not too bad

Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking water.
The water was frozen in the container on the right side so these cows were pushing each other to get to the water in the container on the left side. The cows seemed contend, not sure how because it was bitter cold. Maybe now if you mil them, you get ice cream instead of milk  LOL




I finally watched Downfall
The movie is well known as the inspiration for "Downfall parodies". One scene in the film, in which Hitler launches into a furious tirade upon finally realizing that the war is lost, has become a staple of internet videos. In these videos, the original German audio is retained, but new subtitles are added so that Hitler and his subordinates seem to be reacting instead to some setback in present-day politics, sports, entertainment, popular culture, or everyday life

I highly recommend this movie, although you know the outcome, if was interesting to see Hitler as a broken man suffering from Parkinson's Disease and still thinking that the war could be won. The human treatment of Hitler raised some concerns by critics

This Week I Learned

kebeb case
Snake Case

In Snake Case, all words are lower-cased, then all spaces between words are replaced by underscores.
So you would get

then_all_spaces_between_words_are_replaced


Kebab Case is similar except that the first letter of each word is capitalized, and hyphens are used instead of underscores:
So you would get

Then-All-Spaces-Between-Words-Are-Replaced

More here: http://blog.greglow.com/2017/12/29/sdu-tools-converting-t-sql-strings-snake-case-kebab-case/

bombogenesis
Bombogenesis, a popular term used by meteorologists, occurs when a midlatitude cyclone rapidly intensifies, dropping at least 24 millibars over 24 hours. A millibar measures atmospheric pressure. This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bombogenesis.html


Who comes up with these words?

This Week I tweeted

As drone demand soars, New Jersey poised to bar drunken droning

U.S. drone sales in 2017 topped $1 billion for the first time ever, but don’t raise a glass too quickly if you are in New Jersey, where lawmakers are poised to outlaw drunken droning next week.

Drunk droning is the new drunk driving...


Christopher Nolan on the power of the people and why '2001' should be required preschool viewing

I understand you showed “2001” to your children when they were very young, like 3 or 4?
I did. I think they’re able to absorb it on the most important level at a young age. That’s what happened to me. I saw it when I was 7 years old, and that’s the level I think it works the best — pure cinematic spectacle. I was extremely baffled by it, but excited by it.

When people talk about the age of people watching a film, part of what they’re asking is, “How does a 7-year-old parse the content?” And if you look at “2001” and you think about it, you can’t parse it anyway as an adult. The experience is the thing.

Interesting... most people I know say this is the best movie ever or a very boring movie

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Listen to live Bitcoin transactions: http://btclisten.com/ 

Listen to live Wikipedia updates: http://listen.hatnote.com/


 Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video auto-tuned to major chord

Nirvirna - Teen Sprite from Sleep Good on Vimeo.

Wow this really is uncanny valley territory

Some pics I took

Trail near my home, looks cold but it is actually very nice to run on snow.


Went to pick up some eggs and cheese at the farm and saw these cows drinking