Quick notes

Quickie posts when I’m lazy

DeFi: your tokens aren’t in your wallet

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Crypto and in particular DeFi can be technically very complex, and the general audience often might oversee the importance of understanding the technical implementation.

In colloquial language, people often say something like "I've got 10 USDT in my wallet" or "my wallet has 1M Shibu Dogs". It sounds normal and assuring; we all have experience of having money in our pocket. As usual, it's not that simple after looking into the details.

Without the fundamental understanding of where tokens are actually stored there is increasing risk of losing money. It's a DeFi 101.

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That was a long gap

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Whoa, that's been a long 1.5 years without me creating any content. That's how much MacBook burned me out[pun intended].
Jokes aside - I do need to restart blogging at least occationally. These days I've got so much to share from my day work observations and even more from my personal projects.

The suspect is usual - "I have no time for that", and I don't have it indeed. Newborn baby, failing projects with money involved, personal challanges and of course the Putin's war.

That all makes me think it's not the best time to put something out and I'd rather focus on small projects just to keep myselves away from the outter world. Post-COVID world along with bustle caused by first time parenting makes it very easy to do so.

Fix for noisy and overheated MacBook Pro 16″

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If you're reading this is because you're in the struggle. Your $$$$ computer is hot, literally hot, as the oven and as loud as saw chain cutting metal right next to you. At the same time, your computer performance degrading down to the ZX Spectrum levels. If it sounds familiar, keep reading; I have a "solution" for you.

Disclaimer before we continue. This blog post is not a joke, and I actually have gone through all these steps and attempts to calm down this piece of metal, the so-called "Apple computer for professionals". I've learnt a lot about MacBook & MacOS, but it's a topic for another post. I'll try to keep my sarcasm minimal and sincerely try to help because I understand how disturbing this experience could be.

One can be satisfied with the minimal tweaks; the other - will have to go for more extreme ways to make this computer work. As for an Android / Backend developer, this experience was unbearable and caused many suffering and mental distress. It all made me feel miserable.

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Goodbye Endomondo

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In April 2014, I recorded my first activity with Endomondo. Back then, I was the chubby thing, mostly neckless, with the large hanging stomach. I had Subway and sweet soda for lunch at best, but the preferred option always was KFC deep-fried chicken.

Back then, I still didn't care much about my health, but I started to suspect that something is not entirely right. Two other passions met each other and actually enabled a log way to change things for the better. First was Location-Based Services, I like the idea of recording and mapping my activities, see my moves and squeeze intersting insights out of it. The second passion is long walks, it's the only physical activity I used to accept. Long walks help to clear mind, give me a reason to dial friends and family, and a good excuse to listen to the hours of podcast daily.

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Ubuntu 20.04 on Lenovo t480s

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Recently I've upgraded my setup and got Lenovo T480s with all max configuration(Intel i7-8650U) and additional 32Gb RAM

TL;DR: everything works really well on Ubuntu 20.04, 40Gb is just enough to run modern web applications. But in 2020 it's probably worth to consider modern models of computers and next generation CPU. Conclusion: while performance is good the design was upsetting

In this post I'll share some observations after a week of use for work. As a reminder I'm a backend and Android developer mostly focusing on JVM stack

What is GOOD

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Does pihole make any difference?

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The Internet is full of advertisements and marketing services which are marking and chasing you all over the web. I believe it is fair - if a user doesn’t pay for the product, the user becomes a product. Another problem with tracking and advertising services that they significantly affect browsing experience by draining up CPU, memory, making page look laggy, often affecting responsiveness.
Fortunately, the PiHole project helps to turn many of them off. More details about it are in my previous post

One might wonder, does pihole make any difference or it's just a placebo for a few geeks? I did a small research and took some measurements for the different websites with and without tracking.

Measurements were taken:

  • Screenshot of the page - it's interesting to see if there is any significant visual difference, compare space occupied by the banners
  • Number of requests - every request takes a lot of time even via the modern Internet protocols and fast internet connection. Also, downloading an additional code makes the page behave laggy as the browser needs to run it soon after. That's why the first seconds after the page visually completes it can behave a little hectic.
  • Data transfered - the more data it needs the more time to pull information is required.
  • Html loaded - it's a time required for broswer to load html page itself when DOMContentLoaded is emitted. I record an average time as this time can fluctuate significantly
  • Page loaded - time to 'load' event, when all direct dependencies of the web page are loaded. That include stylesheets, javascript and images

Examples

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Grumble: Virgin Media is hijacking DNS and has no customer service

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Just recently we moved home and of course we had to look for an another Internet Service Provider. Due to coronavirus outbreak we could not install Vodafone. We had it previously and generally it was quite reliable and service was decent. Instead we stick to the only option - Virgin Media

TR;DR: If you can - avoid. It's a scum. Terrible service, low-end hardware, DNS spoofing, HTTP/s transparent proxy, website doesn't work, support agents are humiliating and threatening you.
Not convinced? Read further.

I'm going to repost my post from reddit and provide additional comments

If you're from IT you probably would be especially interested in what Virgin Media is doing with you internet traffic

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Installing docker-machine on Raspberry PI

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One of the nicest things about docker is reproducibility and containerisation. It is possible to run multiple applications which requires different environment on the same computer and make them live happily altogether. Although Raspberry Pi has ARMv7 instructions set, we still can run docker on it - we just need different images. One would be surprised there are some official images available on docker hub.

The configuration can be very simple - literally two commands in terminal, thanks to widely available devops tools such as docker-machine and ansible. Having this setup there won't be need to login to the RPi and perform any manual configuration per service anymore. Instead, services can be configured and deployed right from your computer.

If you don't have your Rasbperry configured yet refer to previous article for the initial setup.

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