Lisbon, Portugal
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🎈There are still a few (a lot) of people in the family that tinyMovieStar hasn’t met. The size of both our families, the pandemic, our lives, all added up, it’s only natural. Even so, this Saturday she met a few more cousins, when we all gathered at my in-laws. It was a busy, hectic, afternoon. But I was reminded of how happy I used to feel when I was a young boy, and the whole gang got together. It was brilliant, and still some of the happiest memories I have. Hoping she feels the same.
🎈(Part II) Sunday brought another couple of cousins and a great uncle. We had almost forgotten how this house was, or is: always filled with people. Wherever my in-laws happen to live, that’s where the action is. The whole family gets together at their place. This stopped for a while, during the worst months of the pandemic, but now they’re back in business. Food, laughs, people all over.
🔐 Keeping my crypto investment safe is the new project. I was never hacked, or stolen, and the amount I have in crypto is laughable anyway. Still, a hardware wallet is a gadget, and I was curious about this one. The Ledger Nano S is not that expensive, and has been favourably reviewed a lot of times. It sounds like the perfect one for a wallet newbie. Ordered. There are a LOT of pages to read, a LOT of YouTube tutorials to keep me busy for a few days, or weeks, depending on the work load I have.
🧐 One thing that makes me slightly anxious about these technologies, YubiKey and Ledger, is the fact that I am in charge of the whole show. I’m a responsible person, as much as the next one, but the What Ifs with these is harder for me to embrace. If I let a company, like 1Password, or Coinbase, in charge of the whole security, I know I might get hacked. But that will probably never happen, or the chance is rather small. On the other hand, if I have the keys to the whole kingdom, I can’t shake the feeling that the probability of something happening, losing the key, or the seed phrase, is real. I also don’t expect this to happen, but do I trust myself more that the hundreds of engineers who devote their lives to preventing exactly that? Until I get a duplicate key, like I have for the car or house, I’ll tread lightly.
📺 Finished The Billion Dollar Code. Enjoyable. I have some thoughts, but they would probably fall under the Spoiler category, so I’m not writing them down. It’s time to pick another one…
🎉 I also topped my OMG.LOL account with an extra 2 years this week. It’s a 5USD a year service that provides so much, I couldn’t help it. The developer behind it is lightning fast on support, and I’m always trying to figure out new things to add to it. Easy fun. And organised a giveaway, trying to spread my love for it. Congrats to @r. I had a lot of fun with it, hope he enjoys the prize.
🛵 My motorcycling days are not as frequent as before. The bike is in the garage, the battery is dead, I don’t have the time to ride it. It’s not great. Sometimes I miss it, but on most days I just think about it when I’m trying not to hit it with the car when backing up into the garage. I thought about selling it, but then never did. This weekend my father-in-law asked me to take his motorcycle for a spin, as he hadn’t in a while. It was great! The roads around their village are beautiful, winding, plenty of trees on both sides of the road, not a lot of cars on a Sunday. Perfect for an hour. Looking forward to the next time we visit already.
🏝 This week we had a friend visiting our favorite island, and we were surprised one evening when he video-called us from my godmother’s place. It was lovely to see her after all this time. The following morning one of movieStar’s colleagues also called, and she had one of our dearest friends by her side. He grabbed her phone and went around the whole village. We got to see everyone, and everyone got to see us. They kept asking about tinyMovieStar (they haven’t met her in person yet), and it was one of the coolest, and sweetest, moments of the whole week. We miss them A LOT, and can’t wait to go back. Maybe in 2022. Hopefully in 2022.
🎉 (OMG.LOL Part II) After I finished the Giveaway (I’ll have to go with Original Giveaway from now on), the developer of the site got in touch, and filled my heart. He really is the nicest person, and so we are doing another giveaway. You’ll find out who wins this one in a few hours, but too late for this edition of thingsThisWeek.
👶🏻 tinyMovieStar is still getting to grips with the difference between week days and weekend, and now we have tantrums every Saturday morning, when she finds out she’s not going to kindergarten. She soon gets over it, when it dawns on her that we’re having lunch at my parents place, but it makes for a very noisy morning. Music seems to help, but only to a certain point.
Almost one and a half years old, and tinyMovieStar still LOVES Jack Johnson. Can’t say I blame her, it’s perfect for a Saturday morning.
It’s on!
Time for another @omgdotlol Giveaway! 🎉
Thanks to a very generous offer from the developer I’m again sharing a code for a year of this cool, funny, awesome service.
If you’d like to try it, just add a comment in the next 24hrs for a chance to win.
I see another OMG.LOL Giveaway in the near future!
Get your comments ready…
The randomness has spoken! @r@social.up.edu.ph is the lucky winner of the OMG.LOL Giveaway. Hope you enjoy the prize, sir, and congratulations! 🥳
Thank you to everyone who participated 🙏🏼
Inspired by their own giveaway, I’m doing the same: I’m offering one year of OMG.LOL to a lucky winner!
I’ve been using the service for a little while now, and I’m really happy with it. The main use, as a profile page, works beautifully, and Adam keeps adding service icons, as fast as you can request them.
If you don’t need this one, you can also have it serve a static page. Or have the domain redirect to wherever you want. Whatever suits you.
The email service is brilliant as well, and I’ve been using the domain to create Masked Emails with the new 1Password/Fastmail offer, on top of the email forwarding OMG.LOL provides.
I’m also using the PURL feature, as a shortner for some bigger GitHub Gist links that I want to share with people.
There’s plenty there to keep you entertained, so I’m sharing the love with this offer. Comment on this post (on Micro.blog, Mastodon, or Twitter), I’ll get all the names and use random.org (as did Adam) to pick the person that gets to try this for free.
I’ll announce the winner on Saturday, you have until Friday to get your name into the competition.
Good luck! 🎉
I’ve had a curiosity about crypto ever since I first heard about Bitcoin, back in the day. At the time it was a hassle to get them. I remember jumping through hoops to get the equivalent to 25EUR, the amount I was ready to spend, and never see again.
It was money to throw away. I recall thinking about money my grandma would give me when we visited, stored away in a piggy bank, never to be seen again. It would be a surprise when/if I ever saw it again.
And surprised I was, when I found out, years later, that it had blossomed into WELL over that. I bought an iPhone, and had a lot of money left. I spent that money, of course.
These days I have little money in crypto, just enough to try these things. I got the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, and I’m ready to “own my keys”.
First impressions below, I’m only starting with this one.
Setting it up was a breeze, as expected. Plug it in, pick a PIN code, write down the seed phrase words, confirm them, and you’re in. Then install the apps for the currencies you want to store (BTC and ETH in my case), and get some of it in there.
The first part is managed on the wallet, the managing crypto side is accomplished with the help of the Ledger Live app. You’ll download it from Ledger’s site.
The model I picked, the S, has no bluetooth and no battery, so you do have to connect to the computer to get most of the things done. They have another model, the X, that costs twice the price of this one, and you get a few extra features. I didn’t need those, and was also a little scared, as there are a lot of people complaining about quality control issues with this model.
The apps allow you to check your balance, on the computer and iPhone, as long as they’ve been synced. It’s enough for me.
First things first, let’s get some coins on the wallet. This is where things can start to get tricky.
I’m used to dealing with Coinbase, happy with it too, so that’s where my fortune is stored. Sadly, I call it fortune out of delusion.
Anyway, you go to Ledger Live, say you want to receive some BTC, get the wallet address, copy that, confirm on the physical wallet, and paste that into Coinbase. The coins are sent to the account managed by the Ledger. A couple of minutes later you’ll find them there.
Repeated the same process for the ETH. It worked. Easy.
As long as you don’t misplace the wallet or, as a last resort, the seed phrase, they’re safely stored. That’s the main point.
On to the issues, as there are some. Not Ledger induced ones, but what have I found already?
I’m a very tiny fish in the crypto world. I like to follow the “only invest what you can lose” rule, so there’s not much in my wallet.
Crypto is also marketed as a way to stop paying banking fees, but there’s no way to escape the crypto fees! Network fees, gas fees, credit/debit card fees when purchasing, transfer fees, there are a TON of fees in the crypto world.
I transferred 100€ to the wallet, equal parts of BTC and ETH. On the Bitcoin front I had to pay 0.24€ to send. Reasonable. But, with ETH, the fee came to 5€! That’s 10%! It’s a huge fee.
I’m also used to Coinbase’s easy purchasing process, I can get 10€ worth of anything to add to my vault. That’s a cool way of getting you to spend money, bit by bit.
Ledger has partnered with Coinify for the purchase and selling part of the business and there’s a minimum there: 60€ for purchases and €125 for selling!
Not much, granted, but makes me think twice before making a purchase and, at the moment, I’m not even eligible to get my funds out, as I don’t have the minimum on any of the accounts. I would need to transfer the amount I want to withdraw back to Coinbase, and cash out over there. And add another fee to the whole thing while doing that. These can add up if you’re not careful.
Sometimes I’d get a little money out of the account for some random purchase, and that’s not happening now. It’s a great way to store money, safely, but not perfect if you like to play with it, converting to another crypto, and back to another one. Coinbase, on the other hand, is perfect for that.
Of course, if you have more money invested, the safety of the hardware wallet becomes even more alluring, and you probably have no issue with the minimum amounts for the transactions with Coinify. For me, at the moment, that’s something I have to think about.
I’ll use it as long term storage, maybe the prices will go up again in a crazy way, and then I’ll be fine. And I’ll keep transferring the little profit I want to keep to the wallet. In BTC, never again in ETH.
Have a few invoices to send, but can’t even find the right mindset for that. Not even to get money!! I’m the least business-oriented person in the land!
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