Ain't no Raging Bull I don't think I have ever made a prediction for the end of a Crypto Bull or Bear market. But, I'm going to stick my neck out and make one now. I think the Bear Market slaughter that's been going on for the past month or so, will experience a short-term bottom, if not a long term bottom, this weekend, or shortly thereafter. I think we are seeing capitulation selling across the board now, and that Crypto very well may turn around as of June 1st. Once it turns around I wouldn't be surprised by a double bottom, but at least we will have seen there is a bottom. What am I Hodling? People always ask me, "What am I hodling these days?" The answer is: A limited amount of BTC and ETH for "stability". A lot of Stepn (GMT) and W2E because I love coins that rise in price and pay the hodler based upon actual exercise by the person hodling the coin/token. A good amount of Decentraland (MANA) and ApeCoin (APE) because I believe the ...

Sometimes you just have to say WTF.  Today is one of those days.  I decided to jump in and buy a new iPhone 13 Pro Max.  I've had one iPhone or another basically since they first came out.  I've always had the big ones because I'm a big guy and the small ones just feel like a toy in my mealy hands. I shopped online for about an hour and finally decided to get what I started out thinking I'd want, an iPhone 13 Pro Max 512Gb.  Luckily, there were plenty in stock, so I picked one from the Apple store at Old Orchard and set it up for delivery between 10:00 - 12:00 the coming Saturday, about 2 days away. It was currently late on Wednesday night and the next day was Thanksgiving, so waiting until Saturday posed no problem at all. I actually noted to myself that what I just done to purchase the phone was a pretty satisfactory experience.  It is always a nightmare dealing with phone carriers, and that's why I didn't buy it from Verizon.  But it was surprisingl...

 If you've ever coded for multiple display types, especially the web and then iPhone screens, and  just  for grins throw in some Android screens including a few "Tablets" just for fun. My experience is you can pretty much just lump the Android screens in with your PC or MAC screens.  They tend to be a fairly common size and they are fairly well behaved. But when it comes to iOS screens, all bets are off.   Is it a small phone, or a big iPad., Is it HD display or not.   What is the input method, touch, type, or Pen?  Each of these require a different level of precision.  As I am writing the post today, we already have well over 10 pixel densities.  Common ones include  ldpi mdpi hdpi xhdp xxhdpi xxxhdpi nodpi tvdpi To help with all of this, I found two great sources.  One does a  great job of explaining iOS displays. Nowadays, not just iOS displays but may Android displays as well.  The other does a great job of e...

If you are a fan of Skylum's Luminar software like  I am, you may have been disappointed, like I was, if your experience with 4.0 was like mine. One of the main reasons to get 4.0 is the great improvements they've made in that AI photo manipulation.  One of the things they do that almost works like magic is the AI-based "Automatic Sky Replacement".  It does just what it sounds like, but it does it almost perfectly well and in a matter of seconds.  What would take me a good 15 to 30 minutes to do, you can now do with 2-3 clicks of the mouse. The problem is/was, that function on version 4.0 didn't work for me and judging from the comment boards, it didn't work for a lot of people. One thing I don't get about Skylum is they allow customers to post their bugs, complaints, and questions on the public-facing BBS, but they always send the answer directly to the customer via DM.  So you might search the board for help on sn issue, find that same issue posted...

I took part in a Kickstarter project to build "The ultimate Dashcam".  One with front and back cameras that would shoot in HD, was durable and low power, and would upload video clips to the cloud with the push of a button.  We'll after waiting more than a year, they did just that.  I received my Dride Zero a couple of days ago and, other than an initial rocky "Setup" process, it has been working fantastic. This post isn't so much to talk about the Dride, you can get that information from them at https://dride.io.   This is more for those people who might run into the same issues with Setup that I had.  Hopefully this will save them some of the time I wasted trying to figure it out. Dride Zero Getting Started 1) Unpack from the shipping box.   To get started all you need at first is the Dride Camera, the powercord that has the cigarette lighter connector, and a 16Gb type 10 Micro SD card. 2) Insert the 16Gb Micro SD card in the slot...

Wow, almost exactly a year since my last post.   How some things change and other things don't. On the one hand my father has passed away almost a year ago and that has left a big hole in our lives.  On the other hand a year ago BitCoin was at it's peak and was days away from jumping off the cliff.  Well it fell from about $19,000 all the way to $6000 where it has held for many months...until yesterday when it jumped off the cliff again.  On to Twilio - I'm blown away with how easy it is to get communication components accomplished with Twilio.  We are using it for normal SMS text messages at TapCloud.  We also use it to send out our Authy based 2-Factor authentication tokens, and we are starting to use it for peer-to-peer and one-to-many video conferencing. One of the great things about Twilio is just how easy it is to use.  Here's an example of just a handful of code that will let you go from start to finish so you'll be sending out MMS me...

So a lot of people have heard of Bitcoin, but there are many more people that have not.  If you live in the crypto currency space, like I do, you sometimes forget how far away from mainstream Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are.  But, that may already be changing.  This from an article by Sean Williams shows just how far blockchain technology has come in the past few years. "Just over a week ago, financial giants American Just over a week Express ( NYSE:AXP ) and Banco Santander ( NYSE:SAN ) announced a cross-border partnership that entails utilizing the blockchain network developed by Ripple. Behind bitcoin ($137.4 billion), Ethereum ($35.2 billion), and bitcoin cash ($20.3 billion), Ripple has the fourth-largest market cap ($9.1 billion) of any virtual currency. As reported by CNBC , payments made by American Express' business customers on its FX International Payments platform will be routed through Ripple's blockchain network and allow for instant, cross-borde...