The mass adoption of digital payments in the world’s most populous nation has made the use of physical cash virtually obsolete — a trend that has alarmed China’s central bank, which has been conducting small-scale rollout trials for its digitized legal tender since late 2019. At previous Olympics, cash and Visa cards were the only two permitted forms of payment, though the former diminished in usage at the sporting venues after the 2004 Olympics in Athens, according to people familiar with the matter, with nearly all payments having moved to Visa.
Author: Michael H
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A Risky Lab in Wuhan
An investigative article on Politico.com about who knew what when, entitled: “In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened.“
The article is by: Josh Rogin, a columnist for the Global Opinions section at the Washington Post. He is the author of Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century, from which this is adapted.
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A Digital Signage Project
I have been working with Timothy Toye, a realtor, for a long time. Originally I was able to buy some software that would display Lake County properties for sale by pulling from the California MLS system. However, over time, the software didn’t keep up with California standards so I decided to build a real estate project by myself. (I could have paid $$ to get a custom version, but that seemed like too much per month.)
I started with using a Lamp stack on the backend with a Laravel library for accessing the MLS data. Then I used a lot of small php routines and bash scripts to create all the materials to create a website carousel property display.
Finally, I mounted a raspberry pi to the back of a large monitor, and put that in the realtor’s front office. I set the pi software to boot up into a chrome browser that points at the website. Everyday a script runs to update the website.
It’s surprising how much work goes into creating a product that seems simple on the surface. Such is programming!
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Responsive Website
This is a property on Shendoah Rd that I setup. I set the images to resize to a max-width of 800px. For 2 across, I set the images into a grid, for portrait/landscape pair I used flex.
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Note to self: Scientists Figured Out How Much Exercise to ‘Offset’ a Day of Sitting
We know that spending hour after hour sitting down isn’t good for us, but just how much exercise is needed to counteract the negative health impact of a day at a desk? A new study suggests about 30-40 minutes per day of building up a sweat should do it. From ScienceAlert.com.