Snowy mountain with the snows covered around the summit which is not really noticeable for the weaker contrast with the background and middle of the mountain. Maybe next time I should add a heavier tone on the rest of the area but this time I decided to take everything lightly and freshly. There are always tomorrow for a drawing with monstrous contract and I did not make those any lesser over the years. Here, enjoy the fresh blue sky will you?

• Draw with: Black Pen, Copic markers, white pencils


• On top of: Hahnemühle The Grey Book


• Duration: 30 min

画多了重口味的高对比度手稿，这次来个小清新风格的白山蓝天远景图。在蓝天上为了让远处的深蓝和中间的浅蓝更好的融合，借用了混色用的 Colorless 0 马克助我一臂之力，效果还不错。可惜的是山峰上的白色雪景并没有很突出，整体还是太亮色了点。将就点吧，毕竟重手笔的画风以后还怕没有吗，况且我也没有少画过。

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TLDR: Mining with idles CPU power of rented VPS which almost cover 50% of the VPS cost while running a masternode on it is the most pratical lifehack I’ve learnt recently. Do not waste the potential of any idling resources.

太长没读：把 VPS 上闲置的 CPU 算力投入到挖矿中竟然带来了意想不到的收益，加上运行超级节点的收益应该就胜过了 VPS 的月费，而我却花了一个月多才领悟到这个道理。任何闲置的资源都很可能是被遗忘的钞票机啊！

Making use of idle CPU power

I’m running a masternode of SmartCash project on a VPS from the Privex. The Steem-accepting VPS has been awesome, 99% uptime and least hassle of setting up. But one day when I came across the CPU-mining concept, I realised this VPS could makes some profit using its idle CPU power.

I chose the Intense coin which is running a proof-of-work Cryptonight mining algorithm. Let’s do the breakdown of how this mining works on the VPS:

• Zero electricity fee as the VPS is already running for the masternode.


• Could have makes some extra bucks to cover the server fee($8 per month).


• Make full use of the idle hashing power.

Proof of concept

Out of the Prived V1 plan with dual-core CPU, the Intense coin mining on the VPS has been running for a while and this is the hashing performance graph. Let’s take 150 H/s as average hashrate for the next calculation.

Using this calculator, 150 hashrate with 0 power cost and 1% pool fees gets to mine coins equivalent to $0.14 a day, $0.93 a week and $4.34 a month.

Out of the monthly $8 cost for the VPS, making full use of its CPU hashing power would make more than half the money back already without taking the real SmartCash masternode profit into account. I was quite blown away the moment I found out the posibility to actually gain more real money out of the VPS investment.

Don’t stop being creative with idle resources

The CPU power was left idling for quite a long while until I started to step into the amazing mining field. Any idle resources could be another wasted money printing machine but the catch is you should know how to capitalize the full use of it in the right way. In my VPS, running a masternode and mining via CPU hashing power is not yet the best to gain most value back from the cost. More masternodes could be simply implemented in the same VPS as they normally consume least CPU and network bandwidth.

Keep learning and experiment, the tech world is awesome!

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WordPress blogging gave me some new perspective

Running the Wordpress hosting service aka Vornix I got the chance to finally owning my own blog site. If you don’t count the Steemit personal page as one.

Apart from all the backend stuff, the biggest difference between creating content on Steem and personal site is the target audience. On Steem we are basically talking to the ‘Steemian’ in mind while in personal site, the world wide web is the audience.

Steem content should mean for everyone on the Internet as well

As Steemit.com rise to the top 1000 in Alexa ranking, more and more content will be ended up in the list of search result from worldwide people.

Unless you are the Steem witness, or posting something very Steem-centric like development and community based event, you should always keep the writing style as opened as possible.

This can be applied to most of the general categories like photography, travel, food, life, education, and many more.

Write to the world

Write as in you are not only writing to the Steemians, but to the world wide audience as well.

Readers who have no idea what Steem is, will have no idea what you were trying to bring out in the content. They don’t know what is the project names you were mentioning and what are those @xxx you kept tagging(these Steem mentions will appear as normal text in WordPress site).

Therefore, there will be no connection between the content and readers because the content is not talking to them.

Make the content more non-Steemian friendly

• Try to share only the general topic post on the Wordpress site.


• Reduce the usage of specific greeting like Hi Steemian!


• Aurthoring a post with the non-Steemian perspective in mind. Ask yourself, will I understand what I’m saying without knowing Steem in the first place?

Verdict

Even without running own personal blogging site, this should be a great idea by address the audience to the world wide and public one.

Facebook users don’t call out the others as Facebookers, YouTube viseo makers are not addressing the audience as youtubers

After all we have the same dream of making this place as good as the above-mentioned one.

Image taken from unsplash.com

This page is synchronized from the post: ‘Talk to the world, but not Steem only.’

TLDR: Found the simplEOS wallet to host my EOS token after spending a month not looking at it after the launch day, completely missed out the awesome speculative EOS RAM trading as well.

太长没读：经过长达一个月的不闻不问后，终于因为完美错过的 EOS RAM 炒作之下重新回顾了寥寥无几的 EOS，找到了个好用的 simplEOS 钱包来使用，挺不错的。

First time to take a look at my EOS since the launch day

I know there will be much troubles and varieties after the long-awaited launch day for a few weeks. And keeping up with all the mess like studying which Block Providers(BP) is worthwhile to take my vote, the voting process itself, and all kind of tools, not to mention mountains of phishing and scamming attempt that was targetting the hot-hearted EOS holders.

Everything will be overwhelming and I don’t want to be part of it for this period. The last thing I did was to make sure my ETH address was properly registered and the EOS keypair is valid. Closed my crypto private key manager, ignored all the related news with the launching process and drove my attention elsewhere.

Things have finally settled down

The last thing I know about EOS is that it will be ported from ERC20 token to its mainnet. I’ve been lost track for so many things but at least I know currently it is much safer and easier to move around the fund. So the first thing came to my mind was that I got to find a wallet. That’s the idea, right? Import the private key and boom, everything should be available in it.

After one hour of researching, it seems like the idea of a wallet is not really popular and most of the tools I found was all about voting for BPs. Nonetheless, there are some famous wallets found after I dug further down. They are the Greymass EOS-voter, simplEOS by the EOS RIO team and the most famous Scatter browser plugin.

simplEOS seems like the one closest to my imagination

The elegant web page has grabbed my attention the most I have to admit that(Yes, I’m a highly visual animal). It supports more features other than just hosting EOS token (of course!):

• Token transfer



• Contacts list



• Support multiple accounts



• Voting portal



• Create new accounts



• Stake/unstake

The wallet itself is lightweight and have a clean cut UI at the same time. Absolutely do not need a handbook or manual to use it. Input the private key and everything shows up perfectly including all the airdrop tokens. The team have a clear planned roadmap as well, from permission management to mobile app version. Looks like they already doing a great job and definitely earning my first vote as a BP.

Saved up the earlier stage of troubles at the same time missed out another x100 opportunity

Yeah, I mean the EOS RAM trading which is the hottest topic for these few days. In fact, this is the exact reason for bringing me back to look at the EOS and try to understand what is going on in this extremely new place. Made me can’t help but fell into the “What if I knew it earlier” illusion, could have 100x my EOS and I should be able to quit the day job and catch a breath. OK, those are pointless but I guess there are still plenty of opportunities incoming especially sidechain solution to solve the current ridiculous RAM war.

I shall keep a close eye on the project now.

This page is synchronized from the post: ‘Hunting for EOS wallet, missed out the RAM war.’

This series is to record my SmartNode journey. This is very much a high risk experimental act and I’m prepared to lose all the fund invested. Do your own research as this is not a financial advice.

The mandatory SmartCash V1.2.3 update

I know SmartCash has been in a rapid development recently and there are several updates on the node program as well as wallet. I was so caught up recently in different project that could not afford to take a look at them as long as my SmartNode is still running. However, I can’t continue to ignore the update anymore few days ago when the SmartNodeMonitor(awesome tool again) gave me a ping that my node was not going to keep running until the mandatory update was implemented.

Oh right, guess I have to put everything away and settle this urgent matter as the top priority.

What to do to enable the SmartNode again?

In short, you can refer to this official post that includes all the important announcement, change log, and instructions for the updates:https://smartcash.cc/smartcash-v1-2-release-announcement-and-instructions/

For those who only care about the part to get SmartNode/VPS running normally again, I will summarized the steps below and those are what I’ve done exactly:

• Open up the old desktop wallet and have a backup of the wallet.dat or you are in the risk of losing all the SMART.



• Go here and download the Node Client(not the Electrum Wallet!). Close the old SmartCash desktop wallet if it is running, install the Node Client on the same directory of the original Smartcash wallet.



• Open the Node Client and you shall see everything inside the client is still the same as before, let it sync.



• Access the SmartNode/VPS, execute sudo apt update && sudo apt install smartcashd -y; smartcash-cli stop; smartcashd reindex



• smartcash-cli getinfo should return “protocol version”: 90026 which is the latest protocol version”



• On the Node Client, Start alias the SmartNode and you shall see the status will change to ENABLED eventually in a few minutes.

A few things to take note

• Start alias will restart the queue number of the node but this is inevitable if you are updating from 1.2 version and above. I was coming from 1.1.



• Node will have a 3 days initial waiting time. But this quickly changed and I got in the middle of queue after 2 days, the system somehow was quite in a mess.



• Use SmartNodeMonitor /detail to check node status to make sure things is running smooth.

Happying SmartNod-ing again!

_{Official site: https://smartcash.cc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/scashofficial
Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/BDUh8jr
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@smartcash or @smartcash}

Related post:

SmartCash#1 - My first crypto node setup for a passive income
SmartCash#2 - Acquiring 10,000 SMART
SmartCash#3 - Setting up a wallet
SmartCash#4 - VPS service that accepting STEEM
SmartCash#5 - Start the SmartNode
SmartCash#6 - Smartbot and the weekly prizes
SmartCash#7 - Received the node reward for the first time after 23 days!
SmartCash#8 - Smartreward is good, but it can be great!

This page is synchronized from the post: ‘SmartCash#9 - V1.2.3 Release, mandatory update and minimalized steps.’

TLDR: I bought an $4.99 app I should have bought 5 years ago which ended up treamendously improving my phone’s battery life and my life as well. Don’t try to be frugal on everything.

The regret

Ever regret not to purchase something while it actually brings way more positive impact than your expectations after you pulled the trigger finally?

Franco Kernel Updater is certainly one of it to me. Android enthusiast must be familiar with this famous Kernal developer who aims to boost phone’s battery life greatly.

While the Franco Kernal only supports dev-friendly phones like the Google Nexus series and One Plus series, the phones I used for the past few years are all in the support list. Couldn’t believe I didn’t get it until now.

Battery health at 85%

I’m using the mighty One Plus 3 which is a 1.5 year-old phone and it still going strong, I really see no need in replacing it but there is 2 issues I’m currently facing. Relatively sub-par camera compared to crazy-ass 3 lenses phone(I can live with that) and the declining battery capacity which is critical to me.

There is no way for me to source a factory battery in Singapore and I do not want to give the beloved phone up just because of battery life. Looking at the solution at system level and tried some tricks, battery life is still draining like waterfall.

I recalled the legendary Franco Kernel updater and finally pulled the trigger, this is when the magic happened.

Instant battery boost, amazingly.

The app automatically download the kernel, flash and reboot the phone smoothly. I wasn’t expected everything will be done in one-go and was quite nervous since things like this could go wrong and I don’t have latest backup. A plus point for the smooth installation!

I’ve been using this app for a few days and the battery life improvement is tremendously noticeable. Got almost 5 hours of On-Screen-Time out of the 1.5 year-old 3000mah battery, could have been easily gone up to 6 hours if this is a brand new phone. Oh man, god knows how much I’ve missed for skimping on a $4.99 app.

The configuration is simple

I’m not gonna make a full introduction for this awesome app but you can help yourself over link below(no referral bonus unfortunately):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.franco.kernel&hl=en_SG

They have tons of features but I only make use of the “Battery life labs”. I have same performance(never wanted to sacrifice this for but way more battery juice for the setting below:

• Underclock the CPU by 25%.



• Underclock the GPU.



• Applied 20% lower max brightness.



• Installed Naptime and enabled Aggressive Doze. Awesome idle time from this app, simply a must-get.

That’s all I did and all the setting will be loaded upon every reboot, so it is kind of a one-time setup. Add the BetterBatteryStats or other battery performance app to monitor the changes.

太长没读：买了一个早就该买的五美刀的应用，垂死的手机电池复活还更胜从前了。天知道这些年来我都错过了什么，该花的就不要省！

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