Thought Bricks

While I soldier on with my 2015 MacBook Pro, I got my daughter a M1 MacBook Air for Christmas. She likes it and it’s a nice upgrade from her vintage MacBook Air. I’m not the only one who did this as Apple had an absolutely great quarter.The most interesting numbers in the report are how strong the M1 Macs have been. Truly stunning performance for a fairly risky (no pun intended) replacement of Intel chips with the Arm-based M-series.

For kicks, I joined the Wealthbase January Fantasy Trading Challenge. I’ve done it in the past and it’s a fun way to try really dumb trading strategies to see what happens. In this case, I created my All-Crypto Superstars Fund on January 3rd that consisted of the following: Ticker Amount Price Total LTC 5.242 148.42 779.19 BTC 0.429 46532.53 20015.06 BITQ 934 21.38 19968.92 MSTR 35 555.52 19443.20 COIN 78 253.

This is a good analysis by Matt Rickard on why the incumbent large cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) will not follow the telcos to become “dumb pipes” for compute and storage. He presents a number of arguments why the hyperscalers will continue to provide high value services. The most compelling one is that the incentives are aligned between open source and the hyperscalers. These companies can capture much of the value of open source by value added offerings.

I’ve been using btop for monitoring system usage and statistics on Linux and MacOS. It’s much better than the built in resource monitors and seems to incur less overhead as well. Being able to use the command line to get insights into what processes are taking up resources is very handy. It works great on Ubuntu right out of the box (or, more accurately, sudo apt install btop). It also works on MacOS with brew install btop but the colors don’t work quite right on my system unless I set it to the TTY theme.

I upgraded my Linux Mint laptop to 20.3 today after my upgrade from 19.3 last week. It was very easy and took just a few minutes. I’ve only been using it for an hour, but so far, so good. The new theme looks sharp and I like the rounded windows. I haven’t tried the updated apps yet and might not have much cause to. I am intrigued that they named the new document manager Thingy.

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the encrypted communications app Signal, has a really interesting post on web3. Essentially, he points out that the current state of web3 is very much like the structure of web2 and is more centralized than it seems on the surface. He did an experiment by making an NFT on OpenSea that varied depending on who was viewing it. Since an NFT is basically just a URL, this isn’t complex to do.

Shellcheck is a handy tool for working with bash scripts. It does a nice job of doing a sanity check of bash script against a set of rules and is simple to use. As a quick example, consider this very simple script: #!/bin/bash A="some value" echo $A echo "${A}" echo "${B}" This script will do what you think it should but has a few problems. Running shellcheck on this script produces some simple output with suggestions to improve the script:

I finally got to upgrading my Linux Mint laptop from 19.3 to 20.0. 19.3 is supported for another year, but it seemed like a good time to give it a try. The upgrade process is well documented and straightforward. Basically, make sure you don’t have pending updates, reboot, take a snapshot, disable 3rd party repos and run an upgrade check. If it comes out OK, run the upgrade. The whole process took about an hour end-to-end on my Lenovo X1 Carbon.

I use AWS occasionally and on those occasions I almost always discover something new and interesting. Today’s discovery is fairly prosaic but interesting in a number of ways: AWS CloudShell. I’m running a little behind the times here as this has been around for well over a year and I’m somewhat familiar with the GCP and Azure versions of the same basic thing. AWS CloudShell is, as the name says, a browser based shell that is integrated into AWS.

Hugo has worked out well for creating this blog. To make it even easier, I wanted to make creation of new posts simpler. To date, I’ve basically looked at the last post and then created the next one in sequence by using the command hugo new ~/myblog/post/content/091.md, for example. To automate that some, I created a bash alias that looks like: alias newpost='hugo new ~/myblog/content/post/$(printf "%03d.md" $(expr $(basename $(ls ~/myblog/content/post/ | tail -n 1) .