Categories
Technology and Internet

Decentralized alternatives on the Internet

This post follows a recent discussion about decentralization at the first Madeira Tech Meetup of 2018. I already touched these subjects previously here on the blog a couple of times (for example,  the one about Zeronet and the one about Mastodon), but this time I will try to summarize the key points of the issue […]

Categories
Blockchain

Getting started with Blockchain and related technologies

Crypto currencies have been at all rage in the last few months, with the price of Bitcoin and other Altcoins skyrocketing and achieving new all time heights. This is very interesting and since there is the idea that the technology supporting all of these coins is revolutionary, some saying it can be used to solve […]

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Technology and Internet

Making the most of your dusty Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi was one of those projects that were “godsent” (just like Arduido). A cheap and very small computer that would let the little ones and also older folks learn, explore, prototype and build lots of things that  previously would be inaccessible to many. So in this post I want to give you some tips […]

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Random Bits Technology and Internet

Managing Secrets With Vault

I’ve been looking into this area, of how to handle and manage a large quantity of secrets and users, for quite a while (old post), because when an organization or infrastructure grow, the number of “secrets” required for authentication and authorization increase as well. Is at this stage that bad practices (that are no more […]

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Technology and Internet

Search open tabs in Firefox

A few days ago it was announced that next versions of Firefox will have huge improvements on performance and resource usage. This is great because browsers nowadays consume huge amounts of resources, making it harder for people with olders or weaker machines to use the computer without starting to pulling out their hair. I’m not […]

Categories
Software Development

Keep your dependencies under check

Nowadays most software projects with a “decent size” rely on many software dependencies, or in other words: libraries and tools, developed by other people. That usually are under constant change. The reasons for these are clear and can go from implementing common patterns and avoid repeating ourselves, to accelerate the development, to use mature implementations […]

Categories
Personal Technology and Internet

Federated Tweets, or Toots

Recently there was been a big fuss about “Mastodon“, an open-source project that is very similar to twitter. The biggest difference is that it is federated. So what it means? It means that it works like “email”, there are several providers (called instances) where you can create an account (you can setup your own server […]

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Technology and Internet

The wave of bloated desktop apps

Some time ago I complained about a mindset that was producing a form of “bloated” software (software that uses a disproportionate amount of resources to accomplish “simple” tasks). Later I even posted an example of a popular chat application consuming a ridiculous amount of memory, given the its purpose. One recent example of this phenomenon […]

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Personal Portugal Technology and Internet

Pixels Camp 2016

A few weeks ago took place in Lisbon the first edition of Pixels Camp (aka Codebits 2.0), an event that I try to attend whenever it happens (see previous posts about it). It is the biggest technology focused event/conference in Portugal with a number of attendees close to 1000. This year the venue changed to […]

Categories
Technology and Internet

EU-Free and Open Source Software Auditing project

Today I stumbled on this blog post about a poll for the EU-FOSSA. I’m not familiarized with all aspects of this pilot project, however by the information I could gather, it seems to be a really great idea. Most of us regularly use, up to a certain degree, several pieces of free (as in freedom) […]