I’ve long been inspired by the work of Steve Souders. Back in 2009 Steve published an article titled Loading Scripts Without Blocking, which I first became aware of and studied during my time at Orbitz – where every millisecond a user waited for the page to load had a measurable impact to the business.

Steve’s work was instrumental for performance-critical websites and apps, and even inspired Nicholas C. Zakas to write Loading JavaScript without Blocking the same month Steve’s book Even Faster Web Sites was published.

10 months ago I took a trip to Bali and spent a couple weeks living in a boutique hotel turned coliving apartment at a place called Roam Ubud. During my stay I met all kinds of interesting people including serial entrepreneurs, digital nomads, lifestyle bloggers, iOS developers and even a feng shui author.

Of all the chance encounters I had during my trip to Bali one individual stood out. His name was Robin. And I’ll never forget Robin because he sold me my first bitcoin.

After making some tweaks to improve my online privacy I’ve been waffling over whether or not to use Telegram. I’ve never been too keen on software which collects metadata, or, as Edward Snowden calls them, “activity records”, about their users. My hang-up was the controversy and theoretical weakness in MTProto, Telegram’s encryption protocol. But that all changed the moment Russia banned Telegram, reportedly disrupting their national banking system in the process.

Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed.

Pavel Durov

Now that’s what I call integrity.

I’m back in Bali after a trip to Anarchapulco and Chicago to pick up my cats. It was my first time back in the United States in over a year. Instead of a warm welcome back to my birth country I was promptly detained by a CBP officer and put in holding room while they ran a background check and attempted to obtain personal information.

After declining to give CBP my address in Bali and questioning them as to whether or not I was under arrest they were kind enough to inform me I was free to go at any time but that my passport belonged to the U.S. government and wasn’t my property.

It would appear surveillance states like post-9/11 USA don’t appreciate having their own citizens outside their visibility. That certainly wouldn’t suit the “Deep State” if such a thing existed now would it? The experience was very disheartening to say the least.

Anyone who invested in bitcoin just before the August hard fork and simply held it for three months has already more than tripled their original investment.

As the next bitcoin hard fork approaches the value of Bitcoin is lifting. Here’s how you can take advantage of Bitcoin’s volatility as it moves up and down with very little risk as the price fluctuates before and after the fork.

After a four year hiatus, I recently rejoined Facebook to give it another shot. Here’re some insights I gained since I left.

Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency. It is open-source and accessible to all. With Monero, you are your own bank. Only you control and are responsible for your funds. Your accounts and transactions are kept private from prying eyes. Learn how to install the Monero CLI wallet. There’s only one way…

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

Timothy C. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

If you’re one of 10 million plus Coinbase users and didn’t move your bitcoin to a wallet “under your control” prior to the Bitcoin Gold hard fork you may never see any of the Bitcoin Gold you were entitled to receive at the time of the snapshot or, more precisely, at block 491407 when the snapshot was taken.

Imagine your sitting at a cafe on some exotic island after your last visa run to Sim Lim Square in Singapore where you picked up a CCTV Wi-Fi camera to protect your valuables and nerd out on gadgets.

You unbox your new toy only to realize you can’t connect it because the cafe you’re sitting at is using a captive portal.

Gah! What to do… Shell into the device and use wget or curl? Fuggetaboutit.

You reach into your Tortuga carry-on bag, pull out your laptop and do the only sensible thing you can think of—spoof the device’s MAC address.

Here’s how to spoof the MAC address of an IoT device using macOS.

You know the drill. When you’re building for the Web or mobile performance is everything. Out of the box Sketch does not lend itself to producing flyweight images. But that doesn’t mean you need a second image editor, or even another tool, just to create performant images. Use these techniques to reduce file sizes and optimize images with Sketch.

An open source ebook from Addy Osmani on modern image optimization techniques. Formats, decoders, techniques for efficient compression and more are covered.