Tag Archives: Microsoft

While it may seem like a long time, the 3 year validity period for the new MCSE (Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert) exams are approaching as early as the end of this year for some. It appears that Microsoft is releasing specific re-certification exams.

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New Certification: MCSA Windows Server 2012 Charter Member

January 23, 2013 Mike Leave a comment

In the past, MCSA Charter Members were limited to the first 5000 recipients of the designation. Now, this has changed to 6 months after the certification is released.

From Microsoft’s website:

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New Certification – MCSA: Windows 7

September 18, 2012 Mike 3 Comments

Microsoft released their new MCP terminology this year. This included changing the MCSA from Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator to Solution Associate. They are practically giving them away. If you previously held certain certification combinations, the new certification was automatically added to your transcript. Continue reading New Certification – MCSA: Windows 7 →

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CloudFlare FrontEnd GUI – Manage your domains

Aside March 8, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

CloudFlare FrontEnd is a useful front end GUI tool to quickly manage your CloudFlare domains without having to log in to the web site. Use promo code CLOUDFLARE until March 31, 2015 to download for free.

$0.99 – Get it now! Checkout Added to cart

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ROGERS IGNITE 250u review

Aside March 5, 2015 Mike Leave a comment

Today I switched to Rogers’ newest service, ROGERS IGNITE 250u, why the all-caps is beyond me. That is unlimited usage tier, with 250mbps download, and 20mbps upload bandwidth. It is $69.99 for 3 months, then $95 after that. I was unable to use my existing retention discount of 25% in addition to the 3 month discount, but it worked out for me to use my retentions discount as it lasts longer.

Here are the details:

ROGERS IGNITE 250u

UNLIMITED USAGE

Speeds up to:

250Mbps DOWNLOAD
20Mbps UPLOAD

But I am actually receiving significantly more on the download end, at 320Mbps!

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New Server – VPS

Aside September 25, 2012 Mike Leave a comment

Today, I moved the blog to my new VPS. I decided last week to take the plunge – a hard decision as I have never owned (rented?) a VPS before and I wasn’t really sure what to get. It came down to price for me; to get the best ‘value’ for my money. Looking at the $12-20 per year market, on average, gave around 128MB RAM (256 burstable), ~10-20GB disk space, and 10-100MB metered connections. Continue reading New Server – VPS →

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DeFi Deep Dive

Aside November 9, 2021 Mike Leave a comment

How to do DeFi in ~7 steps down the rabbit hole

Over the past week around the start of November 2021, I have decided to learn a little bit more about the current state of decentralized finance (DeFi), with a focus on the various blockchain “features” to get a better pulse of the current state of the market. I have been somewhat invested in a few cryptocurrencies that I was not very familiar with but they SEEMED to have decent staking rewards (more on this later) at more that what a bank would give – on Kraken up to 20% for Kava as an example (and it was not required to claim any rewards; restaking seemed to happen automatically with the exception of Ethereum, also more on this later).

Step 1: Need a New Wallet

I had the same wallet(s) for up to 10 years and they were starting to look outdated! At one point, I tried opening up my Ethereum Mist wallet and it was so old that it couldn’t connect to the network, but I did at least claim some bitcoin forks by exporting my private keys of a swept (IMPORTANT!) wallet about a month ago, which meant I had a bit of extra crypto to play with.

After sorting out all these wallets and sending to various exchanges, getting kicked off Binance, and doing some traditional CeFi (centralized Finance, i.e. aforementioned exchanges such as Kraken, Binance, and others) trading, I started to read about DeFi and pretty much watched every video on Finematics.

It was a prerequisite for me to get a new wallet that was DeFi friendly. So I ended up trying Trust Wallet as I was interested in Kava, since I literally have stake in it. The setup process was very straightforward and I was able to transfer some coins from the various centralized exchanges to this multi-coin wallet with very little effort (the only pain point being copying addresses from mobile app to my desktop session – I used a Google Drive document for this).

Step 2: Peruse a Platform (Kava)

Once I had some Kava in my “Trust-y” new wallet, I was able use WalletConnect to link to the Kava app in a very simple but new to me way, by scanning the QR code on my desktop with my phone camera. I started by essentially loading up funds from my wallet to the platform; its interesting how your Kava balance can still reflect in the Trust Wallet app too. I tried the various platforms, Mint, Lend, and Swap (specifically adding liquidity to a pool), and was so very impressed at the transaction speed and low cost, but not so impressed about the reward vesting period and deceiving APY numbers – you have to vest for 1 year to get the displayed APY, otherwise 1 month vesting only gets you between 1/5th or 1/10th depending.

The mint feature I thought is a pretty clever way to not have to pay capital gains tax, so thats what I did, minted some USDX using Kava as collateral to play around with the Lend and Swap functionality.

I thought this was pretty cool, but what else is there?

Step 3: Do a dApp

I checked out a bunch…I don’t remember them all but the short of it is, in the current state (November 2021), the ERC-20 (Ethereum based) ones are basically unusable if you aren’t a whale. I mean that the gas fees were so high >$50 worth of ETH per smart contract that it just isn’t worth it when I was spending less than a penny worth of Kava in my previous experiment. Nonetheless, for curiosity, I spent a small fortune on fees to try out pooling some AMPL Ampleforth on AAVE as the APY numbers were insane. I don’t think I will be seeing those returns but it was a YOLO bet that I allowed myself to do because I found a few ETH in an old wallet the other day.

The only time I felt I could condone the use of any dApp using my Trust Wallet was when they leveraged Binance Smart Chain. There the fees were much more reasonable, but because I can’t use Binance, it is a relative pain to get BNB to convert to Smart Chain so I ended it here. It seemed like Kava was the way to go, but it also felt lacking. What made it so easy/fast? Turns out it was built on Cosmos, so thats what I looked at next.

Step 4: Covering the Chain (Cosmos)

So would you believe that I also was staking ATOM (Cosmos) on Kraken at a mere 7% reward rate (I thought this was pretty, pretty good before). A bit more reading later and I found myself wanting to unstake my ATOM and play around with the new-ish Emeris platform they have built…

Step 1: Need a New Wallet (again)

Nope not a typo. Emeris required Keplr wallet to integrate…I’ve come this far so I unstaked some ATOM and deposited it into the Keplr wallet, lets see what this can do.

Already able to stake directly in the wallet using validator of your choice at a higher APY than the 7% I was getting on Kraken? Ok, lets try it – not sure how I feel yet about having to claim the staking rewards. Time will tell on this one.

Looking through the various (all Cosmos chain? I mean Kava is on the list) supported cryptocurrencies, I was shocked at some of the staking yields, again, time will tell but I understand they payout at “epoch” daily which is 5PM UTC? Please “Do Your Own Research” on this. It sounded like Osmosis was the one to look at next.

Step 5: Crossing Chains (IBC transfers)

What I really like about Cosmos (Emeris) is that you can mostly intuitively move assets between blockchains (pay close attention to which blockchain you have selected as Akash seems to default and I may have mistaken sent to the wrong chain once). The fee is pretty low at the lowest setting, ~9 cents, and it was relatively fast ~9 seconds.

Step 6: O! cOSMOSis!

It took me a while but I eventually realized the cleverness of the name! I will leave this step with one simple image with the caveat that every transaction I have done so far has been FREE!

Step 7: Checking Crypto.com

Let’s just say my deep dive ended with me getting a crypto backed Visa debit card from crypto.com by staking some CRO. I feel as though this is rather gimmicky (they have gamified missions that give you rewards), but decent exchange that I may provide a more detailed write-up on once I receive my card.

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