Updates

Because this matter is still ongoing (Jaxx does not seem to want to fix this vulnerability), I have moved the updates here to the front. The original post is below.

2022-08-14

In order to help a reader who was having trouble with nodejs, I added a section below with a replit setup that you can run with the click of a button.

2018-07-19

Reader Alex points out in the comments that newer versions of Jaxx use a different storage method, and links to this LinkedIn article.

The WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme was exactly what I needed to update the look and feel of the Visible Orbit project website, except for one thing: No sidebar on pages, only posts. For  the Visible Orbit website, having the site information and navigation visible on the page-heavy site is quite important:

Getting the sidebar to show on pages seems to be a popular question online. Besides just hacking the source, the only nicely packaged solution is this plugin by Joachim Jensen. However, for that to render correctly, you have to set page layout to “one column”, but that setting is exposed only if your front page is static, which is not the case for the Visible Orbit site.

For the high-resolution orbital slice viewer on the Visible Orbit website, I had to setup wlziipsrv, a fork of the iipsrv large tiled image server. This is a FastCGI app, which means that, unlike a normal CGI which is started up for each request, one runs a number of these processes in daemon mode, and the front-end webserver communicates with them using the fastcgi protocol.

The end-result is this web-based high-resolution image viewer, which you can use to explore several thousands of microsocopic slices of human eyes. This is slice 41 of the S2897L registered set:

In this post, I’ll show you how you can use Emacs and orgmode to query live data from any RESTful webservice, and then use that data in orgmode tables, a really great way to get live table-based calculation and display functionality in your rich orgmode-based documentation.

As an example, we will query live ticker data from the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, and then use the current trading values of two different cryptocurrencies to calculate a fictitious investor’s position.

(This post is an extract from another post written a year ago on my other, more personal blog.)

I finally got around to studying the math behind bitcoin.

If you more or less know what a hash is (the hash is as a short string, e.g. 32 characters, than can be calculated from a file of arbitrary size; if even one byte in the file changes, the hash will be completely different; read more on wikipedia, or ask me in the comments) and you more or less know how the public and private keys in asymmetric cryptography work (you can encrypt (encode) something with the public key, ONLY its matching secret private key can decode it; you can SIGN any file with a secret private key, the authenticity of that signature can be proven by anyone with matching public key; read more on wikipedia, or ask in the comments!) you can more or less understand bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrency in general.

The crux package for Emacs contains, amongst a list of useful functions (crux does stand for A Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs after all), the function crux-open-with. This interactive function opens the file you currently have open, or the file under your cursor in dired, using the system application for that file.

On Ubuntu 16.04, this function unfortunately does not work. It looks like the application tries to start (icon visible in the dash) and then dies.

Google recently announced the availability of GPUs on Google Compute Engine instances. For my deep learning experiments, I often need more beefy GPUs than the puny GTX 750Ti in my desktop workstation, so this was good news. To make the GCE offering even more attractive, their GPU instances are also available in their EU datacenters, which is in terms of latency a big plus for me here on the Southern tip of the African continent.