When I was advised a book of Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow", part of me arose: "How dare you point me out how should I think, fast, slow! My thinking area is only mine and nobody can point me out how I should do it!". As result the book was left unread.

Later however, when I have seen the video of  Tim Urban on Ted Talk, which I knew later was inspired also by this book, I finally decided to read this book.

It looks like Kahneman made his book hard to read it for some purpose. Looks like he really wanted to make his book possible unknown and hard to be understood. Instead of prominent characters of Tim Urban with characters like Monkey, Monster and Rational Type in his book Kahnemann uses terms "System 1" and "System 2". Those terms are not easy to remember.

There is a idea that the best texts are written the by most awkward language.

The Kahneman himself says that he uses this way to make people pay more attention to details because according his research when information is harder to be understood this activates the brain of the reader and makes people more attentive and critical. Probably it is the case, but also it opens opportunities for other authors use Kahneman's book to create more viral derivatives.

This book does not teach you how to think. It does not make speed of your thinking faster or slower. This book brings you other ideas about the way how people are using their brain. Nowadays his work is being used by marketologists, traiders, economists and all the people who are dealing with behaviour of higher primates e.g. humans.

In the 1970s, two assumptions were generally accepted. First, that people are basically rational and sane. Secondly, that most deviations from rationality are explained by emotions. But Kahneman's research has shown that people's constant thinking errors are due more to the very mechanism of thinking than to the influence of emotions. Today, researchers agree with the thesis that our minds are prone to systematic errors. Kahneman's main idea is to demonstrate the workings of the mind, taking into account the latest discoveries in cognitive and social psychology.

Should you read this book? Decide for yourself. But if we decide to read it be ready that your world will never be the same!

The people from TON Foundation organised again a contest. This time we need to write 5 smart contracts on Func language.

As they say the challenge is purposed to encourage the developers learning Func language and should be relative simple. For me thought is not such simple. I need to refresh all my knowledge about math and computer systems in general. I can not even understand WHAT should be done, not mentioning of HOW it could be implemented.

For example is the task 4 one need to implement an operation to sum of two elliptical curves Curve25519.

I assume that among readers of my blog there are someone who is calculating elliptical curves for fun every day before breakfast, but I am not like that.

However I starting to feel that I like this process - to dig into the new area and revealing the new ideas and knowledge. Nikolay Durov made a great deal of creating such an infrastructure. Someone even call him a second Nakomoto.

So far I have more questions that answers. For example: The TON smart contracts are mutable. How we can prevent scam then if the creator of the contract can rewrite it later? Or, there is an another example: wallets in TON network are smart contracts. There are some of them are written on Func, some on Fift. In the documentation they say that these wallets are almost the same. Why then the Func code of smart contract is not available?

In order to understand how it works one need to read trough hundreds of pages of documentation. There as some step-by-step guides but they are really different, opinionated and very often outdated.

If anybody love to solve puzzles, I would really recommend to participate in the challenge. The first phase is unfortunately already over, the second phase will be running till 21th December, so there are still some time left.

Perhaps there is no other text editor you need to work with. study specifically. However, if you learn to work with Vim, then a person gets amazing advantages over other people. Vim is usually already installed on most Linux systems and basic skills working with it are simply necessary for most developers.

Because this editor has its origins in the times when there was no Internet at all, the mouse had not yet been invented, and computers were terminals with a cathode ray tube and a keyboard that did not have arrow keys, then working with this editor looks akin to the dances of a shaman for the uninitiated.

One of the important advantages of this editor is the plugin system. It is thanks to this system that it is possible to transform Vim like an IDE, get syntax highlighting, auto-suggestions, file system navigation and much more.

There are many resources to help you learn how to use this editor, but I thought, if vim has so many plugins, is there a plugin for learning functions the editor himself? And it turned out that yes, there is!

Is is called vim-tutor-mode! In order to install it you need first to install vim-plag - it is an extention manager for vim. Then in a file ~/.vimrc you should add this line: "Plug 'fmoralesc/vim-tutor-mode'" to finalize plugin installation call: :PlugInstall

If the plug in installed successfully, you can start it with command :Tutor.

The tutorial covers the basic functionality of the editor, including working with files, searching and replacing, editing, running operating system commands, and more.

The passage took me several days in small sessions of about an hour a day. Passed on the phone in Termux, on the computer it should be even faster.

Installed an interesting aplication that makes me to move more. The idea of the application is to transform the steps you do daily into cryptocurrency tokens. These tokens theoretically you can sell in the market and earn some money. Of cource it is practically not acchievable. Each 1000 steps is being converted into one GEM. In the application you have a beast called CAThlethe. You should walk in order to make your CAThlete stronger. The number of daily steps theoretically allows you to increase your chances to win a fight with other CAThlets. 

Of cource an app is not perfect. It is not clear to me how I can use GEMs I have earned, how to transform theme to anything. But the idea is interesting and at least it motivates me to move more.

Recently something was updated automatically in the phone firmware, after which funny pictures with funny facts began to appear on the lock screen instead of the boring image that I put there by purpose. Maybe for someone it's ok, but it wildly pissed me off. One time I already turned off this pornography, but I completely forgot how. Separately, it infuriates that, until you find how to finally turn it off, you will ruin more than one setting and then look for how to turn it back on.

In the end, I found how to turn it off properly - go to Settings, select "Always On Display & Lock Screen", find the "Wallpaper Carousel" section, go there and cut it to hell.

It’s not easy to cut it down just like that right away - at first the application will offer to use your own photos instead of turning off the functionality completely - don’t get be caught in this trap, refuse. Then the application will ask you to give a feedback, what exactly did not you like - we politely answer, or we send it impolitely.

After the above, it turns out that the carousel is still in place! No need to despair! We go to the wallpaper settings and once again set the background image on the phone screen.

Now everything works as it should - the phone has again become quite boring and has turned from a time waster into a smart assistant in life.

The team which is developing the TON cryptocurrency offered everyone to make a network status page as a contest. I took part in this contest and got tons of fun.

Since the topic is very interesting to me, I thought, why not? At the very least, there will be motivation to figure out how it all works and what it consists of.

I did not have time to do everything planned, but more or less a working prototype turned out. Here you can check out the demo of the project.

The data is collected on a home server where a lightweight client of the TON network is assembled, which requests data about the system and puts it in the InfluxDB database. The server part written in nodejs reads the prepared data and shows the data in the browser by the client to react.

The code is posted on github.

The kids's TWS Bluetooth earbuds became poorly magnetized to the charging station, which is why they began to charge poorly. We bought new headphones instead, but I was wondering what happened to the old ones?

Disassembling the charging case gave nothing, visually everything was in place - there was a suspicion that something was wrong with the installation of the magnets in the charging case, but everything turned out to be in place. There was nothing to do but to assemble everything back. I tried to press the headphones themselves more tightly into the slot, gluing a piece of packaging bubble polyethylene to the opposite side of the case with double-sided tape, but I was not happy with such a "repair".

Then the idea came to my mind to check the location of the magnetic poles - possibly one of the magnets was glued in with the back side, and instead of attracting - pushed the earpiece away? I found a small magnet from other broken headphones and began to magnetize it to the case and to the plugs. In the case, everything was in place - both slots perfectly magnetized the test magnet, and on the same side. But the plugs showed an anomaly - being magnetized to one of the headphones, the magnet refused to stop in one place - instead, it strove to move to the side.

Disassembling the earphone immediately revealed that the magnet had peeled off from its rightful place where it should be glued and was magnetized to the magnet of the earphone.

In fact, in both headphones, the magnets turned out to be peeled off, only in one of them the magnet also slipped onto its side, which is why if one of the headphones was still at least charged, then the other was not charged at all. Apparently, this is the result of earplugs falling out in combination with poor quality glue.

I glued the magnet in place with cyanoacrylate and put the earphone back together - now it magnetizes and charges perfectly. Now my kid asks for the headphones back - the new ones turned out to be worse than the old ones!

From time to time I have a need quickly setup Raspbian on Raspberry Pi Zero W.

Here is the quick step by step guide:

In the local computer download an image and upload it to sd card: (replace /dev/sdX, username, wlanname, wlanpassword, 192.168.0.155 with your own values)

# download image
wget https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_lite_armhf/images/raspios_lite_armhf-2021-05-28/2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.zip

# extract
unzup 2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.zip

# copy to device
sudo dd if=2021-05-07-raspios-buster-armhf-lite.img of=/dev/sdX bs=2M conv=fsync

# activate ssh
touch /media/username/boot/ssh

# update the wifi access credentials
cat > /media/username/rootfs/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf << EOF
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=DE
network={
        ssid="wlanname"
        psk="wlanpassword"
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
EOF

# setup static IP address
cat >> /media/username/rootfs/etc/dhcpcd.conf << EOF
interface wlan0
static ip_address=192.168.0.155/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1 8.8.8.8
EOF

# prevent warning locale not found
cat >> /media/username/rootfs/etc/environment << EOF
LC_ALL=C
LANG=en
LANGUAGE=en
EOF

Put sd card to device and turn it on.

If everzthing went successful then you will see the new device in the network.

Connect to device by ssh: pi@192.168.0.155, the default password: "raspberry".

    
# expand filesystem on SD card
sudo raspi-config --expand-rootfs

# reboot
sudo reboot now

# after reboot login again and
# upgrade the system
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y        
    

After all steps above you will have a device with Linux to play with.

It is very important to use good card reader. I wasted lots of time before I discovered that my internal card reader does not write sd card well. It reads ok, but when I try to write or format sd cards on it the previously written information appears unchanged. After swithing to exteranal card reader all problems were gone.

The more information you can find on the original Raspberry Pi OS documentation.

After moving to a new server, the question arose of how to transfer email message from the old server to the new one. I could not say that there was a lot of useful information, but just in case it never hurts to have copies of archival documents from the past.

So I began to research how to do it. Moving the email folder with mail on the server disk turned out to be not the best option - it did not want to copy all the files, but it was not possible to copy the folders.

I did not find a single useful linux utility, but I came across several paid ones that did not inspire confidence.

As a result, the problem was solved in the most banal way - since both servers were still functioning for me - I simply selected the folders in Thunderbird that needed to be transferred to the new server and dragged them to the new account! It's that simple!

Everything went well! This was the last step I needed to complete the move process, now the old server can be safely paid off without paying twice as much for hosting!

By the way, I highly recommend linode - I have been using this hosting provider for many years and I like everything with them! For five dollars a month, you will get a full-fledged virtual dedicated server for your projects, with 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of disk space, it is enough for a small pet project.

Found a useful article on how to set up your own mail server. This is important to me - without such hints, setting up the server takes about twenty-four hours and with the instructions this can be completed in just a day. If not for some minor mistakes in the article, it could have been done even faster. After some time, the antivirus that I have installed according this article was uninstalled - this thing eats away almost a quarter of the RAM, which is slightly critical to me.

On the same site you can find of how to configure Apache, PHP and MySQL. I can not say that this information is very necessary - you can install them without such instruction, but with instruction it is easier.

The OpenVPN can be configured here according to this instruction. In my opinion, OpenVPN should be configured by every self-respecting specialist.

What useful links and instructions do you have?