Microblog

I never thought I would say this: being a self-employed/freelancer in Portugal requires much less bureaucracy than in the Netherlands!

After an epiphany, I bought a new domain: hacdia.sh 😯 What do you think? Should I move everything there? Sounds interesting.

Hey y’all! I know I’ve been quite silent recently and haven’t even send out my newsletter. I’ve honestly run out of ideas, but I hope I can get back on track with that again soon. Also, next two weeks are exam weeks so I will be busier than usual.

A few days ago, it snowed here in Eindhoven and I was quite happy. I come from a place where it doesn’t snow and even though I’ve seen snow before, it’s not something that is usually part of my life.

Stay safe! 🤗

Merry Christmas 🎄

Well, I’m going to try to quickly explain the best I can. First of all, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are not interchangeable. Secondly, “crypto” was historically used to refer to cryptography and not cryptocurrencies. I don’t agree with whoever started this trend.

But somehow I don’t understand the whole purpose behind it and I’m beginning to suspect that it’s just a pyramid scheme.

Even though I don’t agree with the way Bitcoin works and believe Ethereum is a much better alternative (more on this below), this documentary is fantastic to explain the problems we have nowadays and how Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) can help solving it. Right now, both Bitcoin and Ethereum are based on Proof of Work (PoW). PoW is the mechanism that allows the network to come to a consensus and this mechanism uses a lot of electricity. However, Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake (PoS), which uses much less energy. Here’s a nice article that quickly explains the differences.

Wouldn’t there be much better ways to exchange money anonymously and uncensored?

How? I’m pretty sure everyone is open to suggestions.

In order to generate any kind of coins, a lot of electricity is used (also from fossil fuels or atomic energy),

True, for now. But that was a choice of Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Ethereum is changing. There’s more cryptocurrencies, obviously, but I’m not aware of how they all work.

until today no project based on cryptocurrencies or the blockchain principle has really caught on

I think the main difficulty is making it easier for the end consumer, and also making the end consumer care. I know countless of people that are aware that many companies have way too much of their data. But do they care? How to make people care? How to make this technologies easy for people to use without all the technical terms, like public and private keys, addresses, etc?

I actually have some notes on blockchain that are not very explained, but there’s so many applications. For example, smart contracts is probably one of my favorites, since they’re trustless contracts. The transaction will happen, no matter what. You don’t need to trust the other party.

Well, I have to go eat breakfast 😅Hope I managed to explain something!

Well… I moved recently and was thinking about setting up a VPN with my new fancy router. But I discovered something: the ISP put behind a giant NAT. Didn’t even know that Carrier Grade NATs were a thing and it never happened to me back in Portugal. Suggestions? I want a simple way to access the network remotely: just for the machines, not for the Internet.

Thanks for noticing the typos. I have considered org-mode for Emacs but I didn’t have time, nor patience to go around it and try it as I should. For now I kept using Hugo and publishing some notes here. I might try in the future.

After a scare - or a hard cold I must say which I’m still going through - I just received my Covid test back. Negative, fortunately! Now, gotta tell my body to kill this horrible cold that haunted me the past few days. Much better already though! Very relieved 😌

Well… it was a library issue. Upgraded it, working now. Unfortunately, when I added it, the dependency manager didn’t add the last version, but it’s not its fault. The source code is not correctly tagged it seems!

The thing is: I’ve done this in the past. I just tried with a random Mastodon instance and the error is precisely the HTTP signature. Either I’m not signing correctly, or I’m not proving the public key correctly. But the fact that I did this in the past and it’s still not working, it’s what’s annoying me the most. Also, I’m doing this in Go and I’m basing on @jlelse’s implementation and his ActivityPub Accept is working. And my code literally looks the same. If I don’t figure it out in the next hour, I’ll leave it for another day.

So… I just tried implementing ActivityPub again… and once again, something’s wrong! Yey… When I hit the follow button on a different instance, I receive the request, process it and send a signed Accept. But it seems it’s not actually working… At least the accept part…