2022 is the year of the flu. Multiple vaccine boosters and shots did not make much of a dent. So far, I’ve successfully navigated Covid in June, stomach flu again in June, and now going through a bout of cold/ cough/ allergy/ flu in December. Without the modern marvels of Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen, the headache and or suffering would be terrible. Flonase and Saline spray decongest the nasal passages. It feels blessed to live now, and not even 100 years prior....
Cavorting in union square is always nice, especially in the fall. Macy’s Christmas tree and the ice rink set the tone for winter festivities in the bay area. Nightly showers created a minty fresh city sidewalks, and the California Sun provided a dollop of sunshine. Luckily on this Sunday, locals prevailed, so the place was not chockablock with brusque photo shoots. Hunting for a restroom is always challenging, but we lucked out in Macys....
Cybercrime is up, up and away. However, our systems to deal with it remain antiquated and wishy washy at best. A good example is our old staple of banking system - the check book. The entire finance and banking system has check as a dying vestigial organ in the modern mobile world we live in. So, how you may be wondering is this actually a problem? Three simple pieces of information can help us understand the fraud:...
The quintessential american dream of a white fenced single family home is alive, well and thriving in Silicon Valley. The melting pot of incoming immigrants buy into the dream, and crave to conform to the luxurious life style painted by the media and their social circle (no doubt influenced by facebook, twitter, nextdoor, ..). However, California and Silicon Valley welcome immigrants, but not construction. Housing is in perennial shortage. The infamous NIMBY rules strong (bad), and coupled with environment protection measures (good) severely limits capitalism’s capability to meet the demand....
Hosting costs are dramatically down. Companies not only offer free hosting, but also offer free publishing workflows. The only tangible costs remaining are domain name purchases and renewals. Setup Buy domain name: I purchased desilifeintech.com from namecheap for ~$7/ year. Choose a hosting provider: I liked using Cloudflare’s Pages, as it provides a free tier. For this to work, I had to switch my domain registrar (namecheap’s) nameservers to be Cloudflare’s nameservers....
I use the excellent pass utility locally for managing myriad passwords for all sites on the internet. These passwords are available in my macs, ipads, and iphone. My reasons for not using a cloud based solution (like lastpass or even keybase): Passwords are synchronized and encrypted on personal endpoint devices(ex: MacBook, iPhone, iPad, …). This provides redundancy as well as zero leakage of sensitive information over the internet. Password store on the local server is encrypted and versioned....
My personal mid 2014 MacBook Pro has served me well. I have had countless hours of internet surfing, playing music, editing photos, coding java/ go/ python, running kubernetes, doing taxes, managing vacation plans and other home projects. Professionally, I have a relatively more recent 2019 Intel MacBook Pro. However, I still like my older and personal laptop. I do not like the new touchbar nor the new butterfly keyboard. Going from MagSafe charger to USB-C also seemed like a step in the wrong direction....