Recently I came across the 1994 interview with Milton Friedman where he spoke about his collaboration with Friedrich Hayek and how he come to write an introduction to one of the most popular Hayek’s books: The Road to Serfdom. That video reminded me that I had this book on my to-do list for a few years already so I decided that it’s time to finally read it.

It’s been a while since I used Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution outside of Docker containers so I’ve decided to give it a go and see if it’d be suitable for my everyday needs. The laptop I chose is my old MacBook Pro A1398 and I went with Ubuntu 18.04 as it is the most stable Ubuntu version at the moment. As I suspected, it didn’t work right out of the box but the problems I had to deal with were rather minor and I was expecting worse.

Ko Samui is an island on the east cost of Thailand and it’s a second biggest island in Thai kingdom. Pha Ngan is a much smaller island not far from Ko Samui and it’s mostly known for its Full Moon Party which is being hosted there once a month. I’d got a lot of positive feedback about those islands from my friends so I finally decided to visit Ko Samui and Pha Ngan for a few days.

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while but I never liked the side effects of this way of collecting website usage data such as having to install Google’s tracking scripts on all of my web pages. Those scripts are bad for both user privacy and website performance so I’ve decided to get rid of them and find an alternative way to collect the data I’m interested in. In this post I’m going to show how to set up a NGINX web server that can log the location of it’s clients.

Power is an umbrella term and it’s not that easy to describe what it means, let alone to have any meaningful discussion about the nature and evolution of power. Interestingly, that’s exactly the topic of the book “The End of Power” written by Moisés Naím, who himself was “in power” for quite a while working as a minister and than as an executive director of the World Bank.

The yield curve is an important thing to watch for if you are trying to understand what’s going to happen with the economy and the inverted yield curve usually means that we’re about a year from the next recession. Let’s dig a bit deeper in this subject in order to understand what it means for us and what can we do about it.

Payments are building blocks of our society and we started transacting value long before we were able to read or write. The early payment methods were inefficient but we kept improving our technologies and now we have payment cards that allow us to pay for goods and services from any place in the world. Unfortunately, our current payment methods are not flawless but it looks like we’ll be able to solve many of their issues pretty soon. So, what’s wrong with payment cards in the first place?

Coroutines have been available since Kotlin 1.1 but Kotlin 1.3 has lifted them out of experimental mode which means that Coroutines API is finalized and it’s ready to be used in production environments. There are many brave souls who’ve started using coroutines since the early days although the API has been changed with the release of Kotlin 1.3 so the old coroutine code needs some adjustments in order to follow the latest standards.

Thailand has been a popular destination for the remote workforce in the last decade, mostly because it can offer a good mix of warm weather, reasonable prices and welcoming culture. There are many countries with similar climate and cheaper prices but their infrastructure is usually pretty bad so they might not have well-equipped hospitals, big shopping malls, high-speed Internet connection and so on.

I saw this game on Steam the day before it was officially released and it immediately caught my attention. The trailer videos gave me the clear impression that ATOM RPG is an indie clone of the first 2 games in the Fallout series but what seemed odd is the fact that the authors didn’t try to conceal that fact and they even mocked a few of the Fallout cliches in those videos. I am a big fan of the Fallout series so I’ve decided to give this game a try and I wasn’t disappointed.