Thought Bricks

I just had COVID-19. I’m not 100% sure, but it was likely the BA.5 variant. I’m double-boosted and it seemed like it took my body 24 hours to figure out what the heck was going on. I started to feel bad on late Saturday afternoon. We had returned from Scotland a day and half prior. Given the time it typically takes to hit, I probably picked it up on the travel.

I bought a cheap USB WiFi Adapter for my Ubuntu 22.04 system. I used to connect via a WiFi bridge running on DD-WRT but I’ve got this new Internet router from Cox cable that wasn’t being very cooperative with that, so I decided to replace it. I probably should have done a little bit more research. I just looked at the product descriptions for something that had Linux listed and figured that should be good enough.

The final results of the January Fantasy Trading Challenge were pretty ugly. Down 26.12%. The average trader did a little worse (-6.83%) than the S&P 500 (-5.54%). I’m considering doing the same thing in February. I only wish that I could put it all on Dogecoin however the rules will only let you go 20% into each asset. At some point the number go up. Maybe next month my ship will come in and I can get a fancy monkey to go along with it.

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: