2019 July 22 · 4 min read The Year of Blockchain The year of 2019 has been a wild ride for the blockchain industry. The looming ban on cryptocurrencies by the Indian government and the leak of a draft bill that proposes a 10 year jail term. The long awaited end of crypto winter with bitcoin reaching a high of $13,000 and hovering around $10,000 as of this writing. The announcement of a "cryptocurrency" by Facebook and their plans to make it a global stable digital coin. These all might seem like unrelated events but they all point to one thing, the blockchain and cryptocurrencies ecosystem has reached a level of maturity that big tech companies and democratic governments around the world are not only taking notice but are taking proactive steps to adopt and regulate the industry. February 01 · 2 min read Blogging: From Jekyll to Zola When I first created this blog I used Jekyll for my blogging needs mostly because that was the first time I had come across the concept of a Static Site Generator (SSG), generating html from markdown posts and Jekyll was and still is the most popular SSG to date. Also because of GitHub's free hosting for Jekyll sites. Jekyll gained its popularity by being a simple yet powerful framework. It combined the Liquid templating language with a markdown processor to create an engine that spits out a completely static website with no database or any dependencies. January 12 · 3 min read DLNA/UPNP casting support in VLC - Part 2 DLNA renderers, mainly TV’s are DLNA certified devices that are able to play any media from the local network and is built upon the UPnP A/V Architecture technology. This allows you to cast any video or audio from any other device to your connected TV.2018 August 31 · 1 min read DLNA/UPNP casting support in VLC - Part 1 The latest project that I have been working on lately is adding support for casting to DLNA/UPNP renderers in VLC. DLNA renderers, mainly TV’s are DLNA certified devices that are able to play any media from the local network and is built upon the UPnP A/V Architecture technology. This allows you to cast any video or audio from any other device to your connected TV. August 19 · 1 min read Protecting Your Privacy in a Post-Aadhar India With more and more online and offline services demanding Indian citizens to provide their Aadhar number for availing their services without any legal basis and necessity under the pretense of proving your identity, it does raise more than a few privacy concerns. July 08 · 1 min read Continuous Marketing - Exploiting Insecure REST API's After I finished refactoring my android app to use a 3rd-party public API for the user data, I needed a way to quickly promote my application to users. The API I used is inherently insecure with virtually no standard REST API security in place and designed with a top-down approach to suit their own mobile app. Their whole premise being to secure the mobile app with 2FA and having an API that's quite literally a bunch of wrapper functions around database queries exposed as endpoints. June 03 · 8 min read My First Mechanical Keyboard - A Review of TADA68 TADA68 with the aluminium case Why TADA68? After first coming across the Keywalker IFD68 on Massdrop for just $99 I almost bought it. But after trying to find some reviews online I also found the TADA68/SABER68 designed by originatives, which is a very similar keyboard with the exact same 68 key layout and even the type and color of keycaps. But the few differences that tipped the favor towards me buying the TADA68 were; first the Keywalker being a Bluetooth keyboard with an included battery the shipping increased to be just too expensive, second the Keywalker uses a proprietary firmware with a flashing tool to program the keyboard only available for windows platform. May 27 · 1 min read My Vim and Tmux Setup For the past couple of weeks I have been slowly setting up my Vim and tmux config files to just the way I prefer, creating the perfect workflow for working on C/C++ and Rust projects that increases my productivity by not only not having to constantly switch between the keyboard and the mouse/touchpad for every little task/navigation but also to just touch type my way to glory :). Especially since with C and Rust not having a single canonical IDE and inherently requiring to interact with the terminal for compiling and debugging, Vim coupled with a language server (I'm using cquery for C/C++, RLS for Rust) is the perfect IDE for these languages. May 16 · 1 min read Mobile and Desktop Wallets with gRPC Does anyone else also feel that we need lightning [network] desktop and mobile app wallets that can connect to your remote lnd server with gRPC (using rpc username and password) instead of every app loading and syncing their own chain on device? Leading to multiple wallets and coin fragmentation among those wallets. January 08 · 2 min read Prefetching Data with Next.js and Apollo Update: My pull requests implementing the techniques discussed here were merged into the zeit/next.js with-data-prefetch and with-apollo examples. You can easily combine the various examples (including the above two) to achieve your desired functionality. For most modern web apps, network speed and latency is still the biggest constraint for high performance and great UX. Universally rendered Isomorphic applications do a great job to solve that to some extent without sacrificing interactivity by processing the complete DOM of the first request on the server and subsequent requests on the client. But there is a lot more we can do.‹ PreviousNext ›