Ever tried Gaming on a Linux system? Even though Linux exists since more than 30 years now, it is still hard to play a Game on it. Most Games don’t even publish a release for Linux. That’s why projects like Wine exist (Wine provides a compatibility layer so that Linux Users can play Windows Games)

Why is it like that?

For that, we need to understand how a Game works and how a Game Developer thinks. Game Developer need to earn money so that they can buy e.g. food. For that, targeting a big Group of Customers is important.

Many people hate Facebook and Instagram. They say it makes us feel bad, is bad for our health, increases the suicide rate of teens and does many more bad things.

But is Meta really all the bad in this world, or is it maybe that Meta just offers a Tool, and it depends how people use it?

I want to shine a light on the later part in this article.

Since I started creating websites at a young age, I always tried to have good domain names for my projects. I also sold a few - that’s why I want to cover this topic today.

A good domain name can be worth quite a bit. Some Domains were sold for multiple millions.

But unfortunately, Investing in Domains isn’t quite so easy as you think. I bought at least 45 different domain names and selling them is really hard.

When I was a kid, I completely ignored politicians and thought they were unnecessary. Now, I understand they are here to represent the people and try to prevent that different groups inside our society kill each other by defining the rules of how our communities work.

I am interested to bring my thoughts into this by joining a political party. There are big differences in how much such a membership costs in a country, but even bigger ones when you compare political parties from different countries.

When the SolarWinds supply chain attack happened in 2020, I didn’t really get deep into what SolarWinds does because I had to focus on day-to-day business. But now, in 2022, I found out what SolarWinds does because I was searching for monitoring solutions myself.

In this article I want to cover the current valuation, a description of what SolarWinds does and my thoughts about the future.

Valuation

As of March 12, the company trades at 11.21 USD per share. That’s below book value. The company has an equity ratio of nearly 48% and the revenue for 2021 fell nearly 30% from 2020 and is now at 2017 levels.

The current events in Ukraine led to many economic sanctions against Russia. Despite this war is the result of leaders, not their citizens, the West decided to define many very hard sanctions which resulted into making it impossible to trade with Russian Stocks right now. (After the close of the Moscow Exchange, ADRs listed in the US and GDRs listed on the London Stock Exchange also can’t be bought anymore)

Because many Russian stocks can only be sold right now, the prices for these fell more and more. Speculators who bought some stocks in the beginning of this Week could get these shares very cheap on the few Exchanges and Brokers which still traded them, but now these Speculators also can’t trade Russian stocks anymore.

In all the recent news to the War between Russia and Ukraine, I always ask myself about the economic consequences.

Recently the EU and US declared a ban of SWIFT currently focused on the state owned banks (which are also the biggest banks in Russia).

What’s SWIFT exactly?

Before getting into possible alternatives to SWIFT, let’s dive into what the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication is.

It is an Organization with HQ in Belgium which defines Standards and Services for the transaction of financial information. For that it has its own Network, the SWIFTNet. Data is transferred as XML-Files (I personally would prefer JSON, but old ppl like XML) and the Software is based on Java (again, I would prefer something like Go or Rust, but however old people love Java).

In 2008 Russia fought against Georgia in the Russo-Georgian War. This resulted into a catastrophic situation for the people which live in the areas occupied by Russia. Still today, Russia claims that parts of Georgia are “independent” Countries which do not belong to Georgia.

So why do I start with this story? It’s simply because yesterday Putin officially announced to marsh into Ukraine and basically has the same strategy: he says parts of Ukraine are “independent” Countries which need to be free from Ukraine. That is basically the same Strategy Putin uses for years.

Recently this talk was given on the rC3 2021 Chaos Communication Congress:

In summary, Florian Gallwitz explained that there are no “Social Bots” which are often covered in newspapers and magazines.

Newspapers and Journalists create stories about AIs which post about political discussions but in reality these “Social Bots” are just accounts from human beings which write a lot of social media posts, classified as bots.

Static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll or Nuxt are awesome. They provide way faster delivery of your contents to your customers than any PHP solution like WordPress.

Unfortunately you have to create the Markdown files for your content yourself, but because every single post has a filename, title, date and often tags as well as a status for draft, I created a simple tool which takes care of doing exactly that.

Over the last days Evergrande China, the 2nd largest property developer in China after revenue, was in all financial news. More than 1.5 million homes are planned by Evergrande and it has $300 billion in liabilities.

There are fears that Evergrande China will cause another financial crisis like in 2008, comparable to the Lehman Brothers insolvency. I am watching this very carefully. Most of my personal Assets are stocks and a big decline in the stock market could mean damage comparable of loosing multiple yearly incomes to me.

Recently I came across a blog post which described some Tips how to write a Journal on Hacker News.

This interested me because I also write a Journal since multiple years (since the 20th March of 2018 to be precise and if we don’t count my Journals I had as a child) and it already helped me in multiple occasions.

The author of the article asked himself multiple questions every day and because I think that is too much pressure I want to describe how I do it.

Wirecard and Steinhoff are both companies of German origin which had accounting scandals. In this post I want to describe why these two accounting scandals are completely different and why I choose to take a long position in Steinhoff after the scandal, although I did make a profit with a short position in Wirecard.

I am writing this article because I want to describe that shorting a stock with an accounting scandal / fraud isn’t always the best option. Sometimes this can be a chance for a long position.

I stake a Cryptocurrency based of Peercoin on a Server since years. Multiple months ago this stopped because of the following error:

Coind: kernel.cpp:372: unsigned int GetStakeModifierChecksum(const CBlockIndex*): Assertion `pindex->pprev || pindex->GetBlockHash() == (!fTestNet ? hashGenesisBlock : hashGenesisBlockTestNet)' failed.

This Error often comes when your Blockchain is corrupted. The cause of my problem was an unexpected downtime.

To fix this:

1. Stop the Daemon
2. Backup the Folder of the Coin
3. Delete everything except wallet.dat, peers.dat and *.conf
4. Start the Daemon again (/path/to/coin/src/Coind -daemon -datadir=/path/to/coin/folder/)

I also published a German blog post about compiling AltCoins.

The history with Odoo started with TinyERP / OpenERP which was a free ERP System. This was a great idea and pioneered the open source ERP environment.

But in the last years the name and the vision changed. Now Odoo provides besides the ERP part also a CRM, CMS, Blogs, Forums, E-commerce (Online-Shops), Timesheet, Project Management, Inventory Management, Recruitment, Spreadsheet, Documents, Email Marketing…

So in short: Odoo changed from a focus on ERP to an all-in-one solution which seems to cover nearly every application a business needs. And the bad part is Odoo got money from investors for this stupid idea.