The frequency of screen capturing has been increased 100 times ever since I started blogging in Steem. No ways work better a single picture to tell the story in a blog and I have been focusing on the formatting to make the blog looks good and reading friendly. That could mean a lot of learning curves in Markdown language which I never heard of prior to joining Steem. Sometimes a little HTML tricks to deal with unique formatting that Markdown could not achieve. But I never pay attention to another important element in my blog, the screenshot or whatever graphic elements.

The trick is simple - Adding drop shadow effect under the picture

Take a look at the comparison below, the above screenshot is snipped normally with Windows snipping tool without any effect and the bottom one is accompanied by a shadow effect.

Although both pictures will bring out the same meaning but undoubtedly the bottom image looks more aesthetically pleasing. The reason behind is simple, a drop shadow below the image object will gives the main object some depth of view. As in the image is floating above the canvas hence looks more real.

How to do it?

There are many ways to add a shadow effect to any picture. The most complicated one could be the Photoshop way but I’m not so dedicated enough to tune up every single of my graphic content via PS. The simpler way could be making use of the Microsoft Word editing ability. However, ShareX beat them both

ShareX is simply a godlike screen capturing tool that meets each of my needs.

• Open source so that you don’t have to worry about the safety issue.


• Lightweight that cost almost nothing on the OS.


• Zero Advertisement so nothing bothers you while using it.


• Tons of features complimenting the screenshot ability.


• Free because it is open source!

Configuration of ShareX for the shadow effect

Install the ShareX, right-click on the icon under the toolbar and select Task Settings. On the left panel, select Effects and choose Image effects configuration.

Add -> Filters -> Shadow for new shadow effect to configure. This is my configuration but you always welcome to experiment and create a unique effect to your liking. The right portion would be the preview pane for the configuration.

To make the shadow adding process more fluent, right-click the ShareX icon under toolbar and go to After capture tasks then Add image effects/watermask. This will allows ShareX to auto implement the shadow effect after every capture task so there will be no need for the manual effect rendering process.

Last tips

While you can copy the captured task to the clipboard and conveniently upload to any image hosting service or Steemit/Busy.org text editor, the transparency for the shadow effect will be lost. So make sure the upload is from the saved file.

What do you think about this trick?

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First of all kudos to the awesome site owner disifi who puts up an effort for the updated and neat site: https://merit.disifi.com

From there you can access all the useful tools and site of Merit, like the Network hashrate, difficulty, Wallet of anyone, Mining profitability calculator, available mining pools and so on.

Network status

This page would tell you all the stats that matter in a blockchain activity, especially valuable for the miners to read stats like Network cycles/s, block time, current supply and latest price.

What software should you use for mining?

I found the mining-software page is exceptionally useful as I was in the process of hunting efficient Merit miners. Used to run the official minerd miner 0.2.0 for a long time and did not bother for a few weeks. Wrong move. Found this site and changed to the latest miner I now have got +30% mining performance. The cost of ignorance.

Mining Calculator

Base on my current improved hasrate with new miner I would get close to 0.4 cycle/s with a gaming graphic card which is equivalent to 3.5 MRT/day, or about $1 a day if you don’t mind I round the number up too far. Best tool especially for someone to get an idea before starting mining.

Join the Merit mining club

The best thing about mining Merit is that you don’t have to download the complicated miners and set up things like doing a rocket science, just download their light wallet with their mining feature built in. CPU and GPU are both supported and you are just one-click away from mining!

I have limited invites to giveaway to interested miners and those who are intended to extend their network, click the link below to setup your wallet and I shall send out the invite ticket ASAP if I know you are legit， miners are prioritized:

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Difference in keys and permissions

Although both Steem and EOS using the same DPOS mechanism and Graphene framework, running same segregated permission via multiples key like owner and active keys, both system are not really the same. Basically Steem has 4 keys starting from owner, active, posting, and memo, while EOS mainly comes with owner and active keys originally, while allowing user to customize permission with new keys.

Owner key in both system acting as the master key which having the highest level of permission and capable of signing every operation within the network. For example, active key can only signing operation that is currency-related such as sending fund or delegation to another account, but cannot approve administrative operation like recover lost account, and reset all private keys like owner key.

The main difference is, a Steem account can only have one definite master key which is the owner key, changing the owner key will reset all the private keys for active, posting, and memo at the same time. EOS has independent private key for each owner and active key, reset one doesn’t affect the other one.

Create new EOS account

Download the latest Greymass wallet. Tools -> Key Generator -> Generate Key.

A new key pair should be generated immediately and you should back it up to multiple copies in some other safe places. Click any tabs in the wallet and the keypair would be gone and there is no way you could recover it back, as the wallet does not save these keypairs within the application.

Generate 2 keypairs as we would use them for owner key and active key registration in the account creation later. You could use the same key pair for both keys but generally it is a better idea to use a different key pair for better security. Exposing the active private key will not risking the owner key integrity so there are still chances for you to recover the whole account.

Secondly, go to the Create Account in the left panel. Input public keys from the 2 generated keypairs into owner and active key column. Assign a 12-characters account name(has to be a unique one) and 4000 bytes for the RAM amount depending on minimum requirement. 4KB of RAM should suffice at the moment, I heard the devs saying that would be reduced in the future.

Delegate some bandwidth and CPU in term of EOS. I would just put 10 for each, in this case, to make sure I can operate freely with the new account.

Press Create Account and this operation would be broadcast to the EOS network and it might take a while to be confirmed. After it the transaction is irreversible, simply import the new account in the same Greymass wallet by Manage Wallets function on the left panel, and Import Accounts.

Private keys will be needed for account importing and you can choose to only import only active or owner key which is quite a cool feature in EOS. Active and Owner key is very separated compared to the Steem system.

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Shorting on digital silver

Litecoin has been receiving lots of criticism and challenge lately. Many claims that LTC is not competitive compared to the other altcoins anymore when Bitcoin completes its Lightning network where the fee would become close to none.

Charlie Lee, the founder of LTC was one of the targets in the discussion due to his disputable action of selling all his LTC stake back in the Dec 2017 where cryptos were riding on a huge bull run. Side note to that, I personally found that to be quite a fascinating investment move by someone with a bright mind and does not agree he deserved to be assaulted on that.

Under the huge public pressure of shorting the Litecoin, he decided to respond to the potentially harmful FUD via a series of tweets, here is the summary:

• LTC is the most secured cryptocurrency protected by $150MM worth of ASIC miners.


• Adoption in LTC is high given the supported LTC pair in many exchanges and multiple payment processors.


• LTC has the best working record. Running flawlessly for 7 years.


• His personal sellout was not moving the market price at all. He is still working full-time on LTC’s adoption.

Thoughts

Crypto is never a rational space, as far as I cannot tell how Litecoin future is going to play out, the technical advancement is not always the deciding factor for a coin ranking(looking at the Doge now).

Some advantages Litecoin used to have might be challenged by new hot projects but it has something that is hard to be beaten as a 7-year-old coin.

Nonetheless, watching FUD&SHILL talks like these is always fun.

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_Source

Looking at the price chart of new iPhone every time during the new announcement, sometimes it really reminds me the ultra bullrun in the 2017 Q4.

In Singapore the highest spec of iPhone Max would roughly cost around 2k SGD which could easily be one month worth of the average wages. Converting this analogy to Malaysia, people might need to save up 3 months of salary without spending a cent just to buy a phone! I could just buy tons of good with that amount of money, even my performance desktop PC cost about the same and it could mine some coins for me when I’m not using it. Can iPhone do the same? LOL

Same applies to the high end Android phones as well. The price spiking curve is never in sync with the new features/functionality of new gen phone, aren’t the price for new feat is dropping due to our tech advancement?

Apparently I don’t get the point at all at this pricing level. Nor I’m the fans of Apple. If you are one, just give me a reason why you are willing to get one out of your own pocket money.

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First and foremost, I’m not a designer and I don’t make a living or any profit out of these awesome tools but due to the hobby development, they are casually needed for some practices and work modification here and there. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator is the golden duo that most of the graphic designers relying on if you cannot live without them the best idea is to pay for it. Support the product that makes some real cash for you is the best way to encourage its healthy growth at the same save up a lot of headaches pirating it.

The ultimate Adobe Suite pirating tool: CCMaker

Get them via the link below or any sources that you find reliable:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MSToolkit/comments/89zowg/ccmaker_v136_download/

Some notes to take before installing the download:

• Be extra cautious when choosing the sources to download, the Reddit link above is reputable enough.
• Always check against the checksums of the downloaded files with the hash provided from the sources. Be careful if the source did not provide one. HashCheck is one of the most convenient tools I ever used for checksum purpose.
• Most anti-virus is likely to detect the file as a threat due to the false positive algorithm.

CCMaker let users download all the versions of different Adobe products and install it and finally, authenticate/crack it with the famous AMTEmu which is a software protection emulator specially tailored-made to get rid of the authorization mechanism of Adobe programs. In other words, AMTEmu can work without CCMaker at all provided you can source the authentic AMTEmu program from the Internet which is difficult nowadays as I couldn’t locate one myself. With the standalone AMTEmu, you can go to the official Adobe and download all the products you want and crack them with this tool. This way you are likely to bypass the risk of a funny altered version of Adobe version.

I would just stick with CCMaker for the ultimate convenience and reputation. And the only bad thing is that it is not open source, I gotta trust someone that this tool is not gamed before my download. If you are extremely paranoid but do not wish to spare the expensive Adobe subscription fee, get the CCMaker and use it in a virtual machine.

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