tldr: This article talks about my personal principles for well-being, and the strategies I employ in my daily life to feel healthy, happy and fulfilled.
People who have known me since 2016 would know that I have had a hell of a relationship with health and my body. Part of why I am working on a preventive health project at the moment, is that I have struggled with body dysmorphia and health issues for a large part of my life. That's why people who meet me after a long time, often find themselves quite shocked at how much I have changed- both on the outside and on the inside with my perspectives on human well-being.
For reference, this is a photo from when I was 16:
tldr: Building web 3 startups is hard, as you have to balance product-market fit and iteration speed with community and governance. To achieve this balance, a mix of strategies must be deployed- using concepts from 20+ years of startup history, political science and human behavior.
Visionaries and dreamers have defined innovation culture in the startup ecosystem of the last 3 decades. In fact, we find ourselves in a world where cult founder personalities are aplenty, look no further than Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
This makes sense. Elon Musk's vision for affordable electric cars, and his drive to bring that vision to reality is what gave us Tesla. The company's mission was always driven top-down by what Elon Musk wanted for the future. In a sense, Tesla was an extension of Elon's ambition. The recipe for c
Autodesk bought Eagle! If you haven't been living under a rock for the past week, you would have heard the news that Eagle was sold to Autodesk by farnell/element14. How do I feel about it? Well, that's what I'll be talking about in this post.
First reaction
The first reaction I had to this piece of news when I heard it was to think that that was awesome! I'm sure most of you who read my posts know I'm a hardcore Autodesk fan and the fact that Eagle is now run by Autodesk just gave me more reason to move to it (aside from the bountiful libraries). So, in short, I was quite excited about it.
Some time later...
So I gave it more thought as I contemplated switching from my daily driver software KiCad to Eagle. Then Adafruit released this awesome interview with Autodesk about their new purchase. It seemed to indicate that Autodesk will be making incremental updates to the Eagle software. I hope they improve on the UX a bit more and stuff but all that is going to take time.
Startups are all the rage these days. From simple Socio-enterprise startups, to software startups of apps and service people from all walks of life are creating startups . Entrepreneurs are also provided with a myriad of ways to fund their projects. Finding investors and a potential audience has never been easier with the internet and social media helping to spread ideas and word quickly across the globe. This kind of funding is unparalleled in the history of Mankind. Granted that the benefits of these types of technology is widespread, there is always a negative side to everything and in this post we will be looking at the ugly side of crowdfunding.
Scam Startups??
When I say scam startups, what do I really mean? Well if you haven't been living under a rock, you would have seen the headline-making "revolutionary" products that are crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Some of those products are really good, but others are pure scams. Here's a list of just a few of them.
As the holidays roll around, students are starting to lose their purpose in life as they are bored by the lack of things to do. Therefore, naturally just like everyone else, here at MakerForce we are also hopelessly bored. However, instead of wallowing in boredom, we decided to write this small guide of random things to build when you are bored at home so that we could help some of you out.
#1: Build a cardboard house
An essential part of every builder's dream is to build you own house with the necessary internal decor that you prefer. Of course, as fellow students, we know that students generally are quite broke so we settled for a cardboard on instead. You could go actual full size cardboard house or mini highly detailed variants. Whichever path you decide to strode on, you are sure to have plenty of fun. Check out this link for some inspiration.
#2: Build a car
A car. A a widely used tool for transport for both humans and items, its considered extremely useful tool in the 21st cent
Today, I went to the often infamous Sim Lim Square with JiaCheng and Daniel. It's the best place to get PC parts and certain electronics in Singapore. A large number of mobile phone accessories stores are scattered around Sim Lim Square, frequently selling large numbers of Micro USB and Lightning cables in open bins. They are sold around $8 a piece, all not worth because they go for a dollar from Taobao (and I'm sure they buy from there too), and they are made terribly. I once got cables at these kind of stores that stopped working in a month, because of terrible solder joints that I had to resolder back on.
I made a bet with JiaCheng that these stores would not sell USB Type C cables, and that if he found one, I would buy it for him. Sure enough, we came across a store that did sell USB C cables. So I wasted $8 on one, despite that I wouldn't use it because I don't have any USB C devices yet (and I doubt the quality). Of course, you shouldn't buy consumer goods at SLS.
I've got to say, the life of a teenage engineer is quite hectic. Let me just give you a little taste of what it feels like. First thing in the morning of a weekday, I need to drag myself out of bed at around 4am to go to school. That's the easy part. Returning back home, I'll find myself drifting straight into my room for my fix of afternoon/evening tinkering. I'll either be working on one of my long term projects like SentiBots or more short term ones that come and go. At around 8pm, the sight of my bag sitting there unopened, jolts me from my focus on the project and most likely I'd remember that undone physics assignment that was due 2 weeks ago.
Of course, there are things I find more productive to work on than homework, but unfortunately the progress of human civilization has left me in this world of homework and studying. On top of the stress of school on an ordinary teenager, I have pressing world engineering problems like the world energy crisis to solve in my free time and the
daydreams are nice
you get to look at the datacenter you are gonna build
and all the twisted pairs you imagine yourself routing
and the switches and patch panels
then you fill each 4U slot with those hotswap storage servers
and 2U slots with application servers
and then you look at the SFP+ connectors
with fiber cables stuck inside
and all the link aggregation
with 20Gbps throughput from a single node
then you imagine the processors in each node
probably a dual socket motherboard
with two Xeon 8 core processors
and that low clock rate
the SSDs that are the drives
epic cable management inside too
dont forget the router running pfSense
and the 10Gbps connection to your ISP
all the application servers running CoreOS
all the management and data storage servers running Ubuntu
and so your storage nodes
are all btrfs
in the btrfs RAID10 configuration
exposed using NFS to your app servers
your app servers
all would run rkt containers
with 4 designated as etcd leaders
but due to cost constraint
