Day 1 If you are arriving at MSP airport, then start your journey with the Mall of America. It is the largest shopping mall in the United States and is pretty close to the airport. Next, head to Minnehaha falls. It is the favorite fishing spot for the locals. Hereafter, you can head towards the downtown. There isn’t much to do in downtown during the day time. And I would recommend checking out Sculpture Garden and the Lake of Isles in the evening....
Die with me is a chat app which can be used only when the phone’s battery is below 5%. Here is a fun way to use the app without draining your phone’s battery. Connect the phone via ADB or start Android emulator and fake the battery level to 4%. Bash 1 2 sudo pip3 install adb-enhanced adbe battery level 4 # Set battery level to 4% And now, you can use the app....
Sh 1 2 #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail The first statement is a Mac, GNU/Linux, and BSD portable way of finding the location of the bash interpreter. The second statement combines “set -e” which ensures that your script stops on first command failure. By default, when a command fails, BASH executes the next command. Looking at the logs, you might feel that the script executed successfully while some commands might have failed....
Barcelona Public transport is good, get a Metro card with ten tickets, it can even be shared simultaneously. Beware of pickpockets. Credit card acceptance is high, but not 100%. Paella, a rice dish, is famous in Barcelona
Most native Hindi speakers like me are familiar with Punjabi vocabulary through Punjabi music. Out of curiosity, I decided to spend some time learning Gurmukhi. I was a bit taken aback by the fact that most articles and videos were aimed at teaching Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to English speakers. However, it is much easier to map Punjabi (Gurmukhi) to Hindi (Devanagari) letters for a native Hindi speaker, as almost all Gurmukhi letters map really well to their Devanagari counterparts. Here are my notes.
Madrid, originally Myrit, was set up by Moors in about 700 AD, to fight against the Catholic Spanish stronghold of Toledo which used to be the old capital of the Castile kingdom. Public transport is good, get a Metro card with ten tickets, and it can even be shared simultaneously. Beware of pickpockets. Credit card acceptance is high, but not 100%. Churros + hot chocolate are famous in Madrid. The city has pedestrianized itself over time, so the city center is entirely car-free.
Update: As of April 2020, I have switched over to GitHub Actions. Travis CI has become buggy and flaky over time and I got tired of trying to keep the builds green. My GitHub action scripts can be seen here. Just like many software engineers, I maintain my config files for GNU/Linux and Mac OS in a git repository. Given that, I wrote a fair bit of them in interpreted code, notably, Bash, it is a bit hard to ensure that it is bug-free. The other problem I face is that packages on homebrew, the Mac OS package manager becomes obsolete and gets deleted from time to time. I added CI testing on Travis CI to prevent these breakages and to ensure that my dotfiles are always in good shape for installation. The great thing about Travis CI is that it is entirely free for open-source repositories even for testing on Mac OS containers.
Car insurance in the United States is a system that more or less works well. You call up insurance agents representing different insurance companies with similar policies but varying quality of service. Then you buy it based on how much insurance premium they charge and how good/bad quality of service you are willing to accept. If you have an expensive car or you are a reckless driver, you end up paying more. The less you use your insurance, the lower your premium becomes over time.
Rome has a rich history pertinent to western civilization. There are three different aspects of roaming in Rome, namely, architecture, history, and religion (Catholic - Christians). I was profoundly interested in history and to some extent, in architecture, and that influenced my itinerary.
Money serves three purpose - unit of accounting, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. Cryptocurrencies have been compared to Programmable Money. Anything programmable requires an experimentation platform for iterations and improvement. Bitcoin seems to have won the “store of value” battle. Ethereum has the developer mindshare and is the preferred experimentation platform. Multiple cryptocurrencies are still fighting the battle to be the medium of exchange. The amusing part is that every cryptocurrency startup envies Ethereum’s developer ecosystem and is trying to attract developers....