Posts on Toby Jaguar

Pinata and NextJS APIs

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Pinning with Pinata and old busted NextJS APIs

Integrating NextJS Pages Router with Pinata

Well, it has certainly been some time since this ole place has been updated. Probably because a company was paying me to not write blog posts about quirky software problems, and I couldn’t write blog posts about their tech stack. Anywho, this blog post is about the nightmare of integrating the Pinata pinning APIs with NextJS Pages Router APIs.

AWS Cloudfront to s3

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Cloundfront to s3

Photo by Amos from Stockphotos

Setting up a static website with s3

This post, yet again, serves as a message in a bottle for a future self who ever needs to set up a static website on s3, in 2023…because all the documentation changes every year and you never know what will work today. So this obviously will not work tomorrow. But it works today.

Problem: serve a static website in s3

For this endeavour I thought it would be somewhat approachable to setup a static website in an s3 bucket. I heard you could do it, I have seen it advertised, so I assumed it would be easy enough. Aaaand, it isn’t, surprise, surpise, thank you AWS.

DeFi means democratizing finance

Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

DeFi means Democratizing Finance

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

Post DeFi summer, we are apparently in DeFi autumn(?), which suggests we are heading into DeFi winter? Or perhaps we went from DeFi summer to DeFi winter, and skiped the fall. Or is the fall so percipitous that we just end up immediately in winter?

Decentralized Finance

DeFi, a blending word created from contracting decentrailized finance had quite the run in the summer of 2020. It was the coming of age of DeFi, a concept that had been known before 2020, but solidified during that year. finematics has a nice summary of the events. The summer of 2020 defined DeFi as a force in the blockchain world.

Crypto Crashing...Again

Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Crypto Crashing…Again

Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash

Could be the name of a song, but alas it is just crypto being crypto. This time with moar flare than usual…or just the same ole same ole thang.

from @needacoin on twitter.

Lucky number 777

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lucky number 777

Photo by Samuel Branch on Unsplash

Working with the OpenZeppelin ERC777 contract

This is a quick post about working with the ERC777 smart contract implementation from Open Zeppelin. The other token contract implemenations from Open Zeppelin are somewhat straight forward to work with, namely the ERC20 and ERC721 contracts, however, the ERC777 contract implementation takes a bit of love before it can be deployed and played with.

What’s the problem

The ERC20 and ERC721 contracts can be deployed without any fuss, as they only depend on their import statements. Which if available will result in a deployable contract. However, because the ERC777 standard interacts with the ERC1820 Regsitry contract, an ERC777 contract will revert when deployed if a Registry is not available on the network. If you are working on a local network, then your contract will fail to deploy (and you will spend a couple hours trying to figure out why a vanilla contract won’t deploy). The following is a manual approach to get an ERC777 working on a local test network. Note, that the ERC1820 Registry contract is available on most major testnets, so if working with one of those, you should not have these issues.

Markets be nickel-and-dimin

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Markets be nickel-and-dimin'

Photo by Siarhei Palishchuk on Unsplash

The LME cancels trades for a third time

It has been a bit since this space has been updated, but a lot has happened! Today is a little offering for posterity, as this event will most likely be swept up in the dust bin of history, and only available as a footnote in a book. But it is a rather important development, IMHO, for blockchain tech and DeFi. The long and short of it is that Russian invaded the Ukraine on February 24th 2022. This threw the commodities world upside down, resulting in the price of nickel spiking from approximately $25,825 per tonne on February 23rd to over $100,000 per tonne on March 9th. This wasn’t the only commodity to spike as a result of the uncertainty in the geopolitical landscape, however, this move broke the London Metal Exchange (LME).

State of the Crypto Union

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The State of the Crypto Union

DeFi, NFTs, and Derivatives, oh my!

In an effort to remember how to update this blog, and to keep this area somewhat active, it is perhpas a good idea to reflect on the current crypto space as the middle of 2021 approaches.

Sell in May and go away doesn’t seem to be the case this year as, checks the price charts, Ethereum is posting a new ATH and Bitcoin is bouncing back from oblivion. 2020 was the shitshow of the century as the world devolved into the coronavirus pandemic, which we are still reeling from socially, fanancially, politically, and unfortunately from India’s perspective, the pandemic continues.

I Got A Shirt

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Own The Internet’ Hackathon: Post Mortem

Following the Sia and Namebase hackathon via gitcoin I recieved a runner up prize of 250 HNS and this pretty fun shirt, but handybot also got used in production for a bit in the HandshakeTalk telegram chat group, which was great to see.

The following is a recap of the use of the bot and some lessons for using telegram bots in a production environment.

Own the Internet Hackathon

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sia And Namebase Present: ‘Own The Internet’ Hackathon

(Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash)

Sia and Namebase recently held a hackathon via gitcoin in which one of the goals was to build an application with handshake, a decentralized certificate and naming authority. This is a quick recap of the project I made for the hackathon. The repo can be found at handybot.

Build An Application With Handshake

Handshake is a promising young project, which is now live, that aims to offer an alternative to the current Domain Name System (DNS). I have been following the project and was interested in its progress. The hackathon presented an opportunity to learn more about the tech stack of the project, and get my hands dirty in trying to make an application that integrated with the Handshake network.

Mongo Image Database

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I say Mango you say Mongo (for images)

(Photo by Avinash Kumar on Unsplash)

I recently looked into how MongoDB can facilitate storing and retrieving images, and had some difficulty implementing the examples I found online. Here is the solution I came up with to serve as hopeful help in the future for me or anyone else.

Background

MongoDB is primarily a document database, not designed for larger files, so CRUD operations for files over 16MB is not supported. Mongo’s solution is GridFS, a dedicated mongo database structure for larger files. This is more of a bucket to dump large files, which is split between two collections, one which stores the file’s metadata, while the other, the binary data source.

I Want AWS and Https

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I Want AWS and Https

…but how?

(Photo by Caitlyn de Wild on Unsplash)

It has been a spell since I have written here, mainly because I have been building out infrastructure for SmartPiggies. And in doing so I wanted to create another post for posterity.

Jump to Here is the good stuff if you want to jump to the good stuff.

We are moving most of our services over to AWS and I had the great fortune of navigating that rabbit hole. The initial challenge was to move one of our apps over to an AWS server, but of course we want https to be available. In previous cases we have used cerbot to generate and provider the ssl certificate, as well as manage the Nginx settings for port 443. This was very easy to implement on the Ubuntu 16.04 servers that I usually run. When looking to move over to AWS servers of course there is a twist.

Ah Ha Proxy

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

AH HA Proxy

(Or, take on me a server that stays up)

(updated 04-20-2019)

(Photo by marc liu on Unsplash)

Happy Tax Day! Thank you to the company that sent me a W2 a month and a half after all tax documents were supposed to be mailed!

The purpose of this post is a bit of a reminder on how I set up HAProxy on a Ubuntu 16.04 server, because it was a bit confusing, and hopefully it helps someone else doing the same thing, or at the very least my future self.

Don't Mine(d) Me

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t Mine If I Do!

(What a pain in the a$$)

(Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash)

Victory! Aaaaaaaand that was quite the exercise in futility.

I had been asked to pick up my mining rig from the space it was operating in. Well, it wasn’t running anymore; it was just taking up space. I ran a small mining rig that was mining UBIQ for the majority of 2018. It was a small rig (did I mention it was small), and over the course of that year it didn’t make very much in mining rewards.

What's for dinner Crypto?

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When Crypto eats out, she orders Stake.

(Or, it tastes better when someone else makes it)

(Photo by José Ignacio Pompé on Unsplash)

In this exploration of a retail investment thesis for crypto, the latest offering from companies hoping to capitalize on crypto for the masses is staking. Coinbase has announced the offering of staking support for Tezos. Tezos is a crypto currency project exploring governance on the blockchain. Tezos uses staking as its consensus mechanism. The idea of staking is simply locking up an allotment of tokens for the right to rewards and extending the chain, which also supports the security of the network. The more tokens that are staked, by a diverse community of supporters, the healthier that network is deemed to be. The more tokens a participant locks up, the more often that participant is rewarded with the opportunity to extend the network. This is similar to the concept of proof-of-work mining in projects like bitcoin. But it vastly differs in its security model (don’t yell at me).

A Serendipitous Update to Passive Income

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

An update to the previous post on Passive Income in Crypto.

(Photo by Saketh Garuda on Unsplash)

In a previous post on Passive Income in Crypto, Celsius was used as an example for making a yield on crypto deposited on their platform. Celsius is a crypto lending company that allows users to take out loans against their crypto, or allows users to lend their crypto out for a percentage return in the underlying asset. Celsius had a town hall meeting in New York last week, in which I attended. One reason I was interested in attending is because I use the platform, and I wanted to look into the eyes of the people I was giving my bearer assets to. The company uses BitGo to custody client funds, but these are not segregated accounts, and the funds are eventually lend out to counterparties. Suffice it to say, there is a high risk that client funds may never come back, but that is a 100% risk of default which can be taken into account.

Passive Income with Cyrptocurrency

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A case for passive income with crypto.

(Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash)

Aquiring cryptocurrency is difficult. It is championed to be easy, or at the very least easier than it has been before. But it still isn’t very easy. Exchanges and payment providers advertise that it is as easy as linking a bank account and buying on their platform. Coinbase, probably the largest US platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, states on their webpage, “Coinbase is the easiest place to buy, sell, and manage your cryptocurrency portfolio.” That may be true, it may be the “easiest” place to do that, but that doesn’t make it easy. Although this is probably the best time to sign-up with an online exchange for buying or selling crypto, as the demand for verifying customers is probably the lowest since the past bull cycle of 2017.

Cyrptocurrency Retail Investment Thesis

Sat, 09 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A case for crypto.

I am putting up this site as an internet reference for my ideas, and as a collective catalog of work. In doing so, the first blog post seems to be the most difficult. So rather than posting a casual introductory blog, I am going to outline my thesis of cryptocurrency for retail investment.

This thesis is easier to identify today then when I first heard of bitcoin, but we aren’t quite there yet so there may still be some details about this topic to explore. I first stumbled onto bitcoin when it traded at $11 USD. I remember less the date and more the price action. I can’t remember what source pointed me to bitcoin, but it was by way of the precious metal investment space. It could have been the Max Keiser Report (as I used to watch that back in the day) or some other hard currency source.