Recycling Christmas cards into gift tags is such a quick and easy project. It’s simple, reduces waste, and is a ... Read More
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Cats can be wonderful companions, but they can also be aloof and boring to hang out with. If you want to get a little more out of the relationship, consider obsessively tracking your cat’s basic statistics with this display from [Matthew Sylvester].
The build is based around the Seeedstudio ReTerminal E1001/E1002 devices—basically an e-paper display with a programmable ESP32-S3 built right in. It’s upon this display that you will see all kinds of feline statistics being logged and graphed. The data itself comes from smart litterboxes, with [Matthew] figuring out how to grab data on weight and litterbox usage via APIs. In particular, he’s got the system working with PetKit gear as well as the Whisker Litter Robot 4. His dashboard can separately track data for four cats and merely needs the right account details to start pulling in data from the relevant cat cloud service.
For [Matthew], the build wasn’t just a bit of fun—it also proved very useful. When one of his cats had a medical issue recently, he was quickly able to pick up that something was wrong and seek the help required. That’s a pretty great result for any homebrew project. It’s unrelated, too, but Gnocci is a great name for a cat, so hats off for that one.
We’ve featured some other fun cat-tracking projects over the years, too. If you’re whipping up your own neat hardware to commune with, entertain, or otherwise interact with your cat, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.
America’s largest bank, JPMorgan, has taken a bold step into the future of finance by issuing commercial debt on the Solana blockchain. This move has caught the attention of the broader crypto and traditional markets, as it marks one of the first times a US commercial debt was brought into a public blockchain.
According to a press release published on December 11, JPMorgan has successfully arranged a US Commercial Paper (USCP) Issuance for Galaxy Digital Holdings LP, an affiliate of Galaxy Inc., on the Solana blockchain. The issuance represents one of the earliest debt offerings executed on a public blockchain in the US.
JPMorgan had served as the arranger, creating the on-chain USCP token and managing the delivery-versus-payment settlement for the issuance. Meanwhile, Galaxy Digital Partners LLC had structured the offerings, while US technology company Coinbase Global Inc. and global investment management firm Franklin Templeton had purchased the issuance.
Scott Lucas, the Head of Markets Digital Assets at JPMorgan, emphasized that the new commercial debt transaction was a key demonstration of institutional demand for digital assets and the transformative potential of blockchain technology in the future of financial markets. He added that, as a user-focused banking institution, JPMorgan is committed to meeting the evolving demand for digital asset exposures.
Notably, the USPC token issuance is the first commercial paper offered by Galaxy, enhancing the company’s short-term funding capabilities and providing access to a broader institutional investor base interested in blockchain-based money-market instruments. Details from the press release reveal that both the issuance and the redemption proceeds will be paid in USDC stablecoins issued by Circle, marking a first for the US commercial paper market.
In the press release, Jason Urban, Global Head of Trading at Galaxy, stated that the issuance demonstrates how public blockchains can enhance the functioning of capital markets. He emphasized that bringing Galaxy’s first commercial paper offering on-chain and structuring one of the earliest US transactions of its kind are significant milestones.
It underscores Galaxy’s vision of using open and programmable infrastructure to support institutional-level financial products. Urban also expressed satisfaction in collaborating with JPMorgan, Coinbase, Solana, and Franklin Templeton to integrate these innovations into daily market operations.
Sandy Kaul, Head of Innovation at Franklin Templeton, highlighted that institutions are moving from experimenting to actively transacting on the blockchain. She noted that deals like Galaxy’s on-chain issuance help build a more open, efficient, and resilient financial system while supporting broader adoption of digital infrastructures in traditional markets.
Nick Ducoff, Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation, described the issuance as a key step in bringing the security and efficiency of blockchains to institutional finance. Brett Tejpaul, the Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, stated that the transaction shows how institutional finance is embracing public blockchain technology, with Coinbase playing a foundational role as an investor, wallet provider, and custodian for the USPC token.
These days, Internet connectivity is ubiquitous, so you can look up live weather data on just about any device around you. Regardless, [Jozerworx] wanted a simple, clean, independent weather display, and came up with this simple design.
The build is based on the Lilygo T5 EPD devboard, which combines an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a nice 4.7-inch e-paper display. This display has the benefit that it only uses power when it’s being updated, making it particularly suitable to run off a battery for extended periods of time. Meanwhile, the ESP32 and its inbuilt Wi-Fi connectivity allow it to query the internet for updated weather forecasts. Weather data is sourced via the OpenWeather API, which [Jozerworx] notes comes with the caveat of requiring an API key. It’s a little fussy, but if you want good weather data, there are few easier ways to get it. The display shows a forecast for the next five days, while also showing graphs of ambient temperature and humidity along with useful information like the sunset and sunrise schedule.
Files are on Github for those eager to learn more. [Jozerworx] also notes that getting started with the display is particularly easy with the inclusion of a setup mode. This allows the display to act as a Wi-Fi access point with a web page that you use enter your home Wi-Fi connection details.
We’ve featured a great many charming weather displays over the years, too. If you’re working to plot, chart, or even predict the weather—don’t hesitate to show us your cool projects over on the tipsline!
A mosquito has a very finely tuned proboscis that is excellent at slipping through your skin to suck out the blood beneath. Researchers at McGill University recently figured that the same biological structure could also prove useful in another was—as a fine and precise nozzle for 3D printing (via Tom’s Hardware).
To achieve this feat, the research team harvested the proboscis from a female mosquito, as only the female of the species sucks blood in this timeline. The mosquito’s proboscis was chosen over other similar biological structures, like insect stingers and snake fangs. It was prized for its tiny size, with an inside diameter of just 20 micrometers—which outdoes just about any man-made nozzle out there. It’s also surprisingly strong, able to resist up to 60 kPa of pressure from the fluid squirted through it.
Of course, you can’t just grab a mosquito and stick it on your 3D printer. It takes very fine work to remove the proboscis and turn it into a functional nozzle; it also requires the use of 3D printed scaffolding to give the structure additional strength. The nozzle is apparently used with bio-inks, rather than molten plastic, and proved capable of printing some basic 3D structures in testing.
Amusingly, the process has been termed 3D necroprinting, we suspect both because it uses a dead organism and because it sounds cool on the Internet. We’ve created a necroprinting tag, just in case, but we’re not holding our breath for this to become the next big thing. At 20 um, more likely the next small thing.
Further details are available in the research paper. We’ve actually featured quite a few mosquito hacks over the years. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Greg Gavutis for the tip!]
Bitcoin Magazine
What Has Bitcoin Become 17 Years After Satoshi Nakamoto Published The Whitepaper?
Today marks seventeen years since Satoshi Nakamoto’s publication of the Bitcoin Whitepaper on the cryptography mailing list in 2008. Back then Bitcoin was nothing more than a proposal for a new niche technology, the latest in a long lineage of niche technologies created by the cypherpunks of the 1990s.
Bitcoin has gone through many massive transformations since that day 17 years ago. It went from a niche internet collectible, to a decentralized network powering illegal dark net markets, to a mainstream speculative investment for retail, to Wall Street and governments all over the world’s favorite new asset class. We have all had front row seats to the first explosive global technological revolution to the internet, and it’s been a wild ride.
On this anniversary I think it’s important to touch on a concept that is very relevant, POSIWID, or the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. The basic idea is that when you have a complex system, it is pointless to try to define it based on what you want it to do, what really matters is what the pieces of that complex system are actually doing. That is all that matters at the end of the day.
We have once again found ourselves in a time period where people are calling back to the whitepaper as a placeholder for some kind of founding document, or definition, or blueprint. The whitepaper is none of those things. It is simply a high level abstract explanation of a Proof-of-Work blockchain being used to implement a digital currency. It is the idea of a cart with wheels, versus the actual blueprint of the cart (the source code).
Bitcoiners seem to periodically fixate on the whitepaper in this manner, and inevitably use that as a justification for acting antagonistic towards some use case or idea of improving Bitcoin that they disagree with. Maybe we will eventually get past this, maybe we won’t, but it is an unhealthy attitude to have towards such a potentially impactful technology such as Bitcoin.
People didn’t recite the writings and speeches of Alexander Graham Bell when digital modems were invented to allow the first tendrils of the early internet to reach out between devices and facilitate digital signals flowing between them. They embraced it as a valuable technological innovation, and in the world today that dynamic has completely inverted itself. Most telephonic signals are now actually conveyed by communication mediums specifically constructed for digital communications.
Telephone networks were used to bootstrap the digital medium of the modern internet in a way that Alexander Graham Bell might have had only the barest inklings of, reshaping the entire world in ways that would have been impossible to conceive for people of his generation.
Satoshi did not give us a founding document to be shackled and constrained by when he released the whitepaper, he gave us a high level description of the software that followed.
That is the actual gift he gave us, the software. And he gave it to us completely freely, open-source, to do with what we decide to do.
“BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.” -Satoshi Nakamoto, 2010
This quote is always brought up in the context of the blocksize limit, or Bitcoin enabling multiple functionalities, but the thing that has always stood out the most to me is “users might get.” In the end before his disappearance, Satoshi is clearly being explicitly deferential to the wishes of users, and in the context of a critical and foundational decision like the blocksize limit.
Bitcoin isn’t Satoshi’s anymore, it’s ours, and collectively with how we actually use our bitcoin, we decide what the purpose of the system is. It’s important to remember that.
This post What Has Bitcoin Become 17 Years After Satoshi Nakamoto Published The Whitepaper? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.
The natural everlasting flowers are those with papery petals, often called immortelles, that can be dried and kept for indoor arrangements during the winter. The most common are helichrysums and other members of the daisy family including helipterum, ammobium, anaphalis and xeranthemum, all yellow, bronze, gold, pink and white and a packet of seeds can produce a lovely selection. The […]
The post Flowers for drying appeared first on Backyard Gardener.
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John McAfee is a tech pioneer and successful entrepreneur. He started his career as a software developer and went on to create the first commercial anti-virus program. McAfee founded McAfee Inc. in 1987 and resigned in 1994, selling his remaining shares in the company over time. His net worth is estimated at four million dollars, but that is likely to be (a lot) higher, given that he owns significant amounts of cryptocurrency.
After his resignation, he sporadically popped up in the news and on social media, giving occasional tech-related interviews. At one point, he was accused of a murder that took place in Belize. McAfee is perhaps best known for a rather bizarre YouTube video that went viral.
McAfee is a vocal proponent of cryptocurrencies and freedom of information. He gained notoriety for his bullish claims and ICO promotions. For example, he claimed Bitcoin would reach one million dollars, only to call it later a ‘true shitcoin.’
No clue WTF I am doing….but here it is:
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) May 16, 2020
Buthere pic.twitter.com/uoYRI5K1yU
McAfee is a prominent advocate for Monero, stating that no significant vulnerabilities are plausible until further development in quantum computing. He believes the world needs a real privacy coin due to governmental and private spying. However, he sees exchanges as a weakness, specifically centralized exchanges that require some form of government ID to trade. Therefore, McAfee created a decentralized exchange called McAfeeDex.
Decentralized exchanges are nothing new. Platforms such as Bisq and Blocknet have provided such services for several years. Bisq gives users the option to trade cryptocurrency directly for fiat. Still, most traded coins on these exchanges do not provide the anonymization that a coin like Monero does. Furthermore, Monero is not compatible with decentralized exchanges, and it does not aspire to be in the future. That is most likely due to fears of government intervention.
MacAfee saw this as a golden opportunity for his exchange, subsequently announcing his coin called Ghost. That coin is modeled after Monero but explicitly designed to be compatible with his exchange, though McAfee’s platform has not seen widespread adoption yet.
Ghost focuses on privacy, shielding, and erasing transaction history. It is a decentralized proof of stake network, including fast transactions and low fees. Their white paper and the TDLR lite paper are undoubtedly interesting.
Rapidly after the publication of the white paper, allegations of plagiarism and technical incompetence arose. The developers of the PIVX coin – an MIT licensed open source project focusing on privacy – stated that twenty out of 26 pages of the Ghost white paper were plagiarized.
Besides, they state that there are several technical inconsistencies and flaws within the white paper. Representatives of Ghost acknowledged that their coin was indeed a fork of PIVX, but defended themselves by arguing that PIVX is itself a fork of Dash. Moreover, they claimed to make significant improvements and that they would continue to innovate.
We still have to wait until the code becomes available publicly, in order to conclude. It should be noted that if Ghost does not respect the MIT license, they could be subject to a DMCA takedown, as well as exclusion from exchanges.
It is no wonder McAfee is living in (self-described) exile. He faces serious plagiarism accusations. Furthermore, his Ghost coin is also very suitable for money laundering. In a recently released podcast, he states he is on the run for the Federal Communications Commission, but he does not provide any evidence. Subsequently, he argues that it is not his job to police the world and that he is merely an entrepreneur that ‘builds shit.’
It is not unprecedented for the US government to intervene in such projects, though. TON, a blockchain project from the developers of the popular messaging app Telegram, was forced to shut down in a rather bizarre court ruling. Yet, it is hard to determine whether the US authorities are currently targeting McAfee.
In addition, McAfee stated in the past that he was in fact on the run due to tax evasion. He said: “I have not paid taxes for ten years, and I never will.” That appears consistent with his libertarian views.
When McAfee was arrested in the Dominican Republic for possessing illegal weapons and ammunition, there where no pending extradition requests from the US. He was released and allowed to travel to the United Kingdom. That strengthens the case that he is not in any (legal) trouble with the US. Meanwhile, he uses the media circus surrounding him as a form of marketing and publicity.
Something he seems to thrive on is appealing to a broad spectrum of dissident media pundits. In an interview with the right-wing Youtuber Keith Woods – a staunch critic of capitalism and advocate of the third political way – he claimed that the CIA was hunting him, although he called them ‘incompetent.’ He also alleges he had multiple interactions with the Israeli Mossad. Even though it is possible, such wild claims are hard to prove.
MacAfee is not very popular within the crypto community either, as he made many bullish statements, only to later deem them as sarcasm. He is known to promote cryptocurrency in return for payment. That led to the accusation of running a pump-and-dump scheme, as he never mentioned those coins again.
McAfee is an intelligent man. His image as a tech cowboy earned him fame and significant wealth. When it comes to developing and innovating, he seems to be chasing trends more than setting them.
Only time will tell whether Ghost will live up to its promises. However, McAfee broke his promises many times before. He does not see that as immoral, though, referring to his libertarian beliefs.
We recommend caution using or investing in any of his projects.
The post Should we trust John McAfee? appeared first on Rana News.
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