fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Build an SMS Alert System over the weekend with Rust and Zero-Cost
By: Wei Huang
Tags: Covid 19, Heroku, Sms, Canada, Rust

Use cases

Covid-19 has changed many of our daily life; with the new normal situation, we think and do things differently.

Every day, my wife and son are trying to get the latest update from the internet about the Covid-19 net new case growth in Ontario, Canada, which has become their daily routine.

This week, my son is busy with his school work. So he misses his routine. When my wife asks him about the number, he suddenly realizes that he forgets this essential daily activity. When he rushed out to the computer and started searching for the number, one of his words catches my attention.

Will be awesome if can get some push notification about those daily number!

“Right! What you give me a new idea for my next weekend, build and learn series. Thank you, son.”

The idea always comes from our daily life.
[Angular] 出現Invalid Host header
Tags: Web, Angular, Ngrok, Web Development

in Change Your Mind Change Your Life
The Ultimate Email I Sent That Landed Me My Dream Opportunity During Covid-19.
By: Anonymously
Tags: Email, Success, Business, Opportunity, Email Marketing Tips

Well, let’s all take a moment to think back to the beginning of 2020

How many of us, this crazy year particularly, have felt the urge to push that little bit harder because, for nearly everyone, our sense of security (financially or health-wise) felt so non-existent?

Our 2020 Summer Vacay plans on the verge of disappearance, our jobs hanging on by a short thread, graduation plans out the window, and perhaps the overall routine we mastered for ourselves was beginning to rattle and shake by the beginning of the year already.

For me, it was the time I felt the most lost in many ways.

Unsure of what I was doing, what was about to come, and more importantly, how we would survive the tide ahead.We can’t deny that feeling stable with our feet firmly on the ground offers, us as humans, this natural sense of comfort. This was now being flipped on it’s head.

I knew that if I wanted to gain absolutely anything this year, it was going to require a few things (I were afraid of):

- Some serious motivation to start from scratch - The courage and self-belief to take a shot in the dark - A LOT of Patience - Reaaaaally thinking outside the box to execute my ideas

With university closed, my part-time job becoming a no-time job and being confined to the four white walls of my bedroom, it was time to get creative if I had any chance of achieving anything post-lockdown.

The Ultimate Email I Sent Through to a Company which Landed me an Even Dreamier Role than I Could Have Expected:

Disclaimer: Although this template worked in my favour in this particular case, bare in mind that the opportunity that you are seeking for just may not be available at the time you send the email through — but don’t give up!

This template will definitely get someone to stop scrolling through their inbox and give it a chance.

What I Sent —

The Ultimate Email

Let me take you through the entire breakdown of this template you see above so you can apply it to your own situation —
Now Increase Your E-Mailers List For Free!
By: Sachin Mishra
Tags: Email, Tips, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Tips, Blog

Email newsletters are a great way to keep all the readers and followers updated about the new blogs, new features on the website, or any other beneficial information that can act as a clickbait for the readers.

We all want to have a high volume of traffic on our blogs and to enroll in mail marketing.

Some platforms charge a certain amount to avail their services.

Chargeable Platforms are

Stratechery

Sinocism

Cleaning the Glass

Hot Pod

reCharged

Some Free Platforms

Mail Chimp

Sendinblue

Sender

MailerLite

OmniSend

Emailers On Medium

Earlier, to get Email-subscribers, writers on Medium were making efforts to open a publication, or successful writers were taking some paid services to keep in touch with their followers.

But

Things have changed with a new update on Medium.

Under the below headlines, you can Individually create a mailers list on this microblogging platform.

Promotion

Followers can subscribe to receive links to your stories via email. You’ll be able to control the blogposts that you want to send via email.

Export subscribers

Get a list of subscribers who have opted to share their email address.

Below is the graphic representation of how you can utilize this feature.

Credits — Author

Make sure to tick the checkbox.

Use the service and create dedicated followership.

I hope this helped.

Thank you

Love from Smileytraveller
I Don’t Ghost Write For Boring Betty’s
By: Cholia, Cj
Tags: Digital Marketing Agency, Marketing Strategies, Digital Marketing, Email Marketing Tips, Social Media Marketing

Shout out to everyone named Betty (cool name- it was just for alliteration).

Fab image via Unsplash.com

I DON’T WRITE FOR BORING BETTY’S.

I should put that on a t-shirt and hop on ZOOM client calls with it emblazoned across my chest.

For close to a decade I’ve written my fair share of snooze fest fluff content for clients as a ghostwriter and copywriter.

Because 1. I had bills to pay (duh) and 2. That’s what the client wanted and thought their target market needed.

Now- I lovingly fight back.

I can’t write another sentence that includes the phrase, “I help you to…”.

After writing all sorts of content for clients such as obituaries of people that were still alive and kickin’ to adapting the memoir into a screenplay of a notorious drug dealer turned minister, I have a good feel on what gets people triggered.

NO ONE will be inspired to take ACTION by FLUFF.

Passive language and playing it safe is forgettable.

After all, you need your dream peeps on social media, your website, and emails to take ACTION.

ACTION is what gets you a new Mercedes SLK for your birthday. You paying for your kids private school tuition without an installment plan. Being the reason your hard werrkin’ Momma retires sooner than later.

Yeah sooooo, kill the fluff.

I want to inspire you to write to sell (or hire me to do it for you) so people can take ACTION.

Rattle them. Be confident in your claims. Be outrageous. Offer something no one else is offering in a way no one else is. Stand naked and sing to the High Heavens about your gifts during client phone calls (but don’t do this on ZOOM).

BE BRAVE. BE RELATABLE. BE EMOTIONAL. BE A RISK TAKER.

The longer I hang out in these freelancing streets the more I’m standing firm on not writing fluff (and safe) content for clients. Life is to short for using words such as; maybe, can, please, and if, in your marketing.

Storytelling is far too often missing in digital marketing, especially in social media marketing and email marketing. However, it’s such an easy marketing win. It’s a quick strategy that any brand can put to use to get them more connection, clicks, and cash.

So sorry, not sorry Boring Betty. I can’t write for ya! Only brave hearts need to apply! If you’re a brave heart then we can totally shift your entire biz sooner than later with words and strategy, even in a pandemic.

What color is your Benz gonna be?

The Holidaze are upon us, and on that note, I’m ready to whip up the social media captions and email marketing love letters that will get your tribe to feel their feels and press BUY NOW.

Click HERE to make at least an extra $5,957 to close out 2020!
Why Is Email Marketing Important? | Business After Burnout
By: Theda Wiebrands
Tags: Email Marketing Trends, Email Marketing, Email Marketing Tips

One of the forgotten methods to get more in contact with your target group is email marketing. Sending emails to the people on your email list.

Besides sending emails, product information, or your service details through your social media channels is sending emails on a regular basis a very powerful and effective marketing tool.

With email marketing, you reach your customers even better and at the same time, you reach new potential customers. You can personalize your content and build a relationship with the people who receive your emails.

Building a relationship with the people, and they will become your number one fan and eventually will promote your business, product, or service that you offer.

To start with email marketing you have to create an email list. Starting and growing your email list should be your priority when you have a business.

3 Reasons Why It Is Important

Your relationship with your target group will be stronger. Sending a personal email is more powerful than a post on Instagram or Facebook. The people who subscribed did that for a reason. They like you, they believe in your product or service. Therefore, selling will become much easier. You decide when you send out the emails. With email marketing, you don’t have to worry about algorithms + you can share whatever you want. Whether it is a video and selling your product in one message or promoting your new podcast in different formats, you can promote by writing, video, or audio.

Let’s have a look at How To Do Effective Email Marketing
Design Patterns. Strategy Pattern in Examples
By: Artem Diashkin
Tags: Strategy, Typescript, Design Patterns, Example, Strategy Design Pattern

📝 If you are not familiar with the term aggregation you can check more here:

… or you can just take o look at the examples, and you will get the main idea behind it 😉
There Can Be Only One: The Singleton Design Pattern
By: Matthew Macfarquhar
Tags: Programming, Software Development, Java, Design Patterns, Singleton

There Can Be Only One: The Singleton Design Pattern

When to use the Singleton Pattern?

The Singleton Pattern is used when you only want one instance of an object at a time.

An example when this pattern is useful is for an access point to a database 💾. In an app, it is beneficial to have one entry point to the database as opposed to multiple entry points (like what would happen with a regular class with a constructor).

In the image above, we have three users asking for a box 📦, our box service gives them pointers to the same instance instead of creating new ones for each of them. This is useful if creating a “box” is an expensive or long task ⏱️, with singleton, we only need to create one.

Case Study

We will create a small app where we have a DBAccessor class which we only want one to exist at a time. We will have 2 clients request to use the accessor and confirm that they are both using the same one.

The Singleton

Here is an example of a Singleton class, we get rid of the default constructor by explicitly declaring a private constructor so it cannot be called 🚫 outside the class.

If a client wants to get the instance of DBAccessor, they will have to use the getInstance() method.

Here we create two dbAccessors which actually point to the same object.

Query number 1

Query number 2

When we query the two “different” objects, we are actually querying the same one so it increments to 1 and then 2. If we got different instances, we would have seen…

Query number 1

Query number 1

The Singleton Pattern is one of the simplest and easiest understood design patterns, there is a clear understanding of how to implement it and when and why you would want to use a singleton over a regular Object with a public constructor.
The Strategy Design Pattern
By: Bruno Silva
Tags: C Sharp Programming, Software Development, Algorithms, Design Patterns, Junior Developer

The Strategy Design Pattern

What is the Strategy Pattern?:

The strategy pattern is a behavioral design pattern that enables selecting an algorithm at runtime. Instead of implementing a single algorithm directly, code receives run-time instructions as to which in a family of algorithms to use.

The strategy pattern can be defined by three characteristics. You have something identified as the ‘context’. The context is a class that simply has a reference to a strategy and invokes it. An ‘IStrategy’ is an interface that defines how to work with a given strategy. Then we have a particular strategy which is a concrete implementation of that particular algorithm. This of course sounds fairly simple and honestly, the strategy design pattern is one of the easiest strategies to understand and is one of those patterns that is commonly applied in applications, so much so you might not have known you’ve just implemented a strategy. If we translate our strategy pattern into what we can find in our application:

The context could be the class that simply invokes an operation to get the total fare of transport:

public class Transportation

{

public ITransportStrategy TransportStrategy {get; set;} public GetFare()

{

return TransportStrategy.GetFareFor(this);

}

}

We can then call our strategy to get a fare for a particular transport and our interface simply exposes our ‘GetFare’ to a particular transportation type:

public interface ITransportStrategy

{

GetFareFor(Transportation transport);

}

and then our concrete implementation can be how we get the fare for the specific means of transportation:

public class Plane : ITransportStrategy

{

GetPlaneFare(Transportation transport)

{

//implementation one: work out fare for plane

}

} public class Car : ITransportStrategy

{

GetCareFare(Transportation transport)

{

//implementation two: work out fare for car

}

}

The crucial part here is that we can select an implementation at runtime based on user input without having to extend the class. So the context we talked about is our Transportation class.
3 Tools to Take Compelling Photos With a Smartphone
By: Pamela Hazelton
Tags: Writing, Smartphones, Creativity, Marketing, Photography

3 Tools to Take Compelling Photos With a Smartphone

Photo by Pamela Hazelton

Stock photos are a quick and inexpensive way for writers and marketers to entice people to read their content, but they lack originality. Using them comes with the risk of producing seemingly repetitive content.

Slapping an overused or low-quality image on a story is one of 10 ways writers can invite instant rejection. Relying on the same stock photos featured at thousands of other places doesn’t make your work stand out. Free content providers like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels are attractive to budget-conscious creators. Still, they come with the price of editors, readers, and potential customers thinking, “I’ve seen this before.”

Photo by elwynn — licensed via Freepik premium

If you shopped online during the ’90s and early 2000s, you probably saw thousands of contact pages or callouts featuring the traditional headset-wearing customer service rep. Most often a smiling woman with warm eyes, she hasn’t changed much over the years. Still, the perception screams: that’s a model! In an age where people want to know who they’re supporting, it makes sense to showcase real people.

Of course, professional photo sessions can cost serious money, which is the entire reason stock photo outlets exist.

There’s something better. Chances are you already have this prime photography tool — you may be reading this story on it right now. It’s your smartphone. Today’s mobile devices make it possible for even the greenest users to take compelling photos to support stories, articles, and series.

While the smartphone doesn’t automatically turn you into a professional photographer — seriously, they can make a picture of last night’s roadkill tell a beautiful, uplifting story — it can help you stand out from the crowd when it comes to digital publishing. You need only a few additional tools to get started.
How to use Apple ProRAW. This week, Apple released iOS 14.3, and…
By: Mark Ellis
Tags: Technology, Apple, Smartphones, Tech, Photography

What is Apple ProRAW?

Photographers have relied on RAW files for a long time. They’re essentially unprocessed digital images. That means they retain all of the necessary image data needed for post-processing.

Think of it as a studio recording of a band. If every instrument is plugged into one input, the engineer only has one volume fader for all of them and can only adjust the EQ for the entire mix. If they’re instead plugged into separate inputs, the engineer can fine-tune the volume and EQ of the guitar, vocals, bass and drums separately. A RAW file does the same for all of the constituent elements of a photograph.

For instance, if you capture a RAW file and there’s lots of shade and light throughout the image, there should be enough data in the file to help you brighten the shadows to reveal what lies within them and bring down the lighter areas so they’re not overexposed.

You can’t do that effectively with a JPEG image, which is processed at the point the photo is taken. JPEGs don’t have anywhere near as much data in them as RAW files, and therefore as soon as you start fiddling with them in post-production, you lose quality and they just look… well, rubbish.

As a result, RAW images weigh in with considerable larger file sizes and require editing software to get the most from them.

Now, your iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 12 Pro Max (ProRAW isn’t compatible with any other model) can produce these files — and let you edit them directly on the phone.
Android Smartphones Are A Hot Mess And I Can’t Look Away
By: Fergus Halliday
Tags: Android, Apple, Smartphones, Tech, Google

If there’s anything that the last few years of writing about smartphones and consumer tech have taught me anything, it’s that while Apple certainly have their shortcomings, their flagship product — the iPhone — is rarely the problem.

As someone who has reviewed a lot of phones over the years, let me save you some clicks. The reason the iPhone continues to be so popular isn’t the cult of personality perpetuated around Apple as a company. It’s because the iPhone is, generally-speaking, a pretty solid product. It’s pricey, to be sure, but Apple do usual deliver on what they promise. That iPhones tend to depreciate slower than the competition should be evidence enough of that.

The top-notch design does a great job of affirming your choice to spend the money on a new iPhone from the moment you unbox the thing. The software experience is consistently super polished and Apple’s silicon is so far ahead of the competition they’re practically running a victory lap at this point .

In recent years, Apple has also made major in-roads when it comes to addressing previous blind-spots like battery life, camera quality and affordability. The new iPhone is always going to be Apple’s best iPhone yet but, in fairness to Apple’s smug marketing, that’s absolutely correct.

If you can afford one, Apple have done basically everything to try and make the latest iPhone the obvious choice. So much so that, compared to the untamed wilderness of the Android market, Apple’s iPhones are sometimes a little boring to write about.

Relative to the easy-going and straightforward iPhone, the world of Android smartphones is complicated, fast-moving and chaotic. Brands rise and fall, features come and go and what should be often loses out to what could be.

Where the rational part of my brain appreciates the curated and more-reserved vibe that Apple brings to bear, the other half of my brain thrives on the drama of the Android smartphone market. Although it’s often framed as a rival to Apple’s iOS ecosystem, the reality is that the Android-based smartphone market is more-often at war with itself.

There’s a definite tendency towards brinkmanship here and no brand is safe.

Given their role as the architect of the Android ecosystem, you’d think Google’s Pixel phones would dominate. They don’t. Likewise, given their size and popularity, you’d think Samsung would be a clear front-runner on innovation. Foldables aside, they aren’t.

Most of the brands here — from Oppo to OnePlus to Xiaomi to Motorola to Nokia — are drawing on the same components and extremely similar designs, which just serves to accentuate how marginal their differences are.

Android fans argue about whether 8GB or 12GB of RAM is better. Apple doesn’t include RAM on the spec-sheet anymore.
Apple’s Next Portless iPhone Is Coming Sooner Than You Think
By: Walid Ao
Tags: Apple, Smartphones, Tech, iPhone, Technology

Apple introduced the iPhone 12 on October 13th, 2020. with the iPhone 12 announcement, Apple introduced a new family of accessories for the iPhone 12.

Welcome to the MagSafe world.

MagSafe is a proprietary magnetically-attached wireless power transfer, and accessory-attachment standard used originally on Macbooks. The tech giant introduced the new MagSafe for the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro on October 13th, 2020.

For now, Apple released a MagSafe charger, different iPhone cases, covers, and a leather wallet. One can even charge the phone with the wireless charger through a MagSafe cover. The MagSafe charger is made out of metal, it is thin, and it remains attached to the iPhone even if one left the iPhone up to text, watch videos, or scroll through their social media feed.

At the same time, Apple kept the lightning port on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro and didn’t include a USB-C port. Something that iPhone users are waiting for for a long time.

In an old post of mine from October 2020, I claimed that the next iPhone would be a portless iPhone.

The claim was somehow controversial at the time. It was based on my observations regarding the development that came with the new iPhone 12 and 12 Pro. Yesterday, MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) posted a video on YouTube titled “The Portless iPhone 13: Let’s Talk!” In the video, MKBHD listed his observations and pointed out Apple’s policy in the past controversial changes and updates.

“Solve + Justify”

In short, MKBHD pointed out that Apple typically solves a problem to justify its action:

Face ID was their solution to justify removing the home button.

AirPods were released as they got rid of the headphone jack.

MagSafe is their solution to get rid of the lightning port.

I agree with MKBHD's observation, and I believe that the next iPhone will be portless. However, he did not mention all the reasons Apple has to take this path.

The lightning port has many applications other than charging. It connects the iPhone to CarPlay; it is used to transfer photos from an SD card to the iPhone with the right dongle, data transfer from an older iPhone to a new one, and many more. Therefore, removing the port will not be an easy task for the tech giant. However, Apple has all the chess pieces in the right place.

This story will be divided into three parts:

The reasons

The justifications

The solution

So, Let’s jump right into it.
How my Daily Life Changed by Putting my Phone on Silent Mode
By: Athina Kontolati
Tags: Smartphones, Attention Span, Daily Life, Distraction, Notifications

How my Daily Life Changed by Putting my Phone on Silent Mode

Photo by Zan on Unsplash

A couple of months ago I decided to put my phone on silent mode, indefinitely. Since then, my daily life has changed significantly in three ways.

First of all, my attention span has increased.

This is why I decided to turn my phone on silent mode in the first place. To be honest, I get distracted very easily. So, when I started working remotely, I had to find a way to stop, or at least minimize distractions.

As you can imagine, or even experience yourself, my smartphone was a major distraction for me. Now, after having it mostly on silent mode — and vibration— I can stay focused on the tasks at hand for longer periods.

Secondly, I feel less anxious.

Before I changed the notification settings of my phone, I used to feel mildly anxious all the time. I used to study, work, and do whatever needed me to sit down in front of my computer and concentrate while having my phone at my side. But not only that, the internet connection was on, too. Thus, the notifications that I received from people texting, calling, and emailing me, or even from the apps on my phone, made me feel I had to do even more work and consequently increased my anxiety.

Thirdly, my productivity increased.

After following this tactic for at least a couple of months now, I can say confidently that I am more productive than before. It’s a result of both being more focused and less anxious, which made me realize practically what I have to work on more to start achieving the results I want in every aspect of my life.

Additional notes

I also want to mention that besides putting my phone on silent/ vibration mode, I turned on focus assist on my laptop, too. What is focus assist? It’s a setting that Windows 10 have that lets you set which hours of the day you won’t receive notifications. That also helps me a lot, as I have apps on my laptop such as Viber, Skype, etc., and receiving notifications from them alongside multiple email notifications during a single day, not only distracts me but makes me feel overwhelmed, too.

If you want to learn how to turn on focus assist on your computer, watch this short video.
How to Handle Common Selenium Issues Using Python (Part 1)
By: Amal Hasni
Tags: Selenium, Programming, Automation, Web Scraping, Python

How to Handle Common Selenium Issues Using Python (Part 1)

Written by: Amal Hasni & Dhia Hmila

Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash

I have recently had the idea to use Selenium with Python to automatize some repetitive tasks on SAP for a client. And as it always is the case when getting your hands dirty with code, I started to come across some challenges I never saw coming. Having spent a lot of time going through the internet trying to find the most suitable solution for each issue, I thought to myself:

How nice it would’ve been if I had found everything I needed gathered in one place, ready for use ?

So, to make your lives easier, I gathered in this article, the answers to the most frequent issues a user could encounter when using Selenium along with ready to use code snippets written in Python.

P.S. If you don’t feel at home yet with Selenium basics, you can check out our Getting started with selenium article first:

And now let’s jump right into some action!

How to download files using Selenium WebDriver

When using Selenium to automate navigation, you might need to download files. The problem is, as soon as we select and click on the download link, a native dialog window pops up requiring manual intervention. Selenium having no control over your browser’s file download windows, cannot go through with the download process. Fortunately, there are always alternatives.

To work around this problem, you can give your browser authorization to automatically download files beforehand and set a default download file location. This can be done by setting preferences for the WebDriver profile (the code below is for a Firefox browser, you might need to adapt it for it to work on other browsers):

You might have noticed the CONTENT_TYPE variable that you need to replace. It actually corresponds to the MIME type of the file you’re downloading. If you’re not familiar with this term, a MIME-type is simply an identifier used to recognize a type of data for contents on the internet. It serves the same purpose on the Internet that file extensions do on your os.

To simplify the task for you, I scrapped the MIME types for the most common extensions from Mozilla’s web docs, for easy access. In the widget below, you’ll find the code to use to get the content type corresponding to your file extension. You can use the console to try it out immediately!

Graphical interface to retrieve MIME-type

You can get the JSON file by either copy-pasting from the widget above or downloading it from Github.

Now, your WebDriver should be able to go through with downloads without asking for permission or displaying any dialog windows 😉
Scrape A Political Website To Build A Fake & Real News Data Set Using Python
Tags: Python, Python Programming, News, Web Scraping

Build a fake /real news data set !

In this article, I will show you how to create your very own data set that contains false/fake and true/real news by scraping a political website called PolitiFact.com using python ! You can later use this data set for other projects like creating models to detect fake news.

Fake news is information that is untrue represented as news. Many times it is used and created to damage the reputation of a person or entity, or to make money. It would be nice to be able to detect fake news using a simple model, but before that can happen, I need data to train my model on, hence this article. So without further ado, let’s understand what we need to do before we start writing code for the program.

Understanding the Steps and Concepts Before Writing the Program

Image showing the website to scrape data from

2. Identify the information that you want to scrape. I want to get the statement that is being classified as either fake or real, I want to get the author , the statement, the source, maybe the date and last but not least the classification of the statement (true, false, etc.).

Image highlighting data to scrape

3. Use the inspect feature on your browser to identify where this data exists on the webpage. For example, right click on the source (the Donald Trump link) and click inspect. Notice where the text lies in the <div> tag where the class = m-statement__meta. Within that tag is the <a> tag and within that tag is the text ‘Donald Trump’ that we want to scrape and store into our data set for sources.

Image showing the inspect option

We will need to do a similar process for the rest of the data. The target or classification of the statement is slightly different and is within the image. More specifically it is within the ‘alt’ attribute of the image. This will tell us if the statement is true or false.

Image showing the location of the target

4. Notice that this is only page 1 from the link. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?page=1. This means there are likely other pages as well, and indeed there are. So we will loop through maybe 100 pages and scrape each one using the same steps above.

We can do this by simply adding the new number at the end of the link.

For example: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?page=45.

If you prefer not to read this article and would like a video representation of it, you can check out the YouTube Video below. It goes through everything in this article with a little more detail, and will help make it easy for you to start programming . Or you can use both as supplementary materials for learning !

Okay, now with all of that being said let’s program !!
Fast way to download url from HTML or web page
By: Vivek G
Tags: Python, Data Science, Web Scraping

Fast way to download url from HTML or web page vivek g ·Nov 19, 2020

To get the list of links from html you can use lxml or beautiful soup to parse the html then use selectors to the values.But if you want to get the tags fast without parsing the whole html the easier way to do is regular expression.Also you can tweak to get other values like phone number, date etc..
Who are you, 6ix9ine?
By: Anthony Obas
Tags: Hip Hop, Documentary, Social Media, Film, SoundCloud

I think the conversation of 6ix9ine finding a true identity for himself and finding value comes from various directions. One of them is a achieving a role model. Role models help guide us into the person we truly want to be whether one approaches him or he goes and finds it. As Akon stated in an interview before, 6ix9ine needs direction to find what he truly wants in life. I definitely agree with this statement. If one was to show him a route of what true success means, such as valuing family and sharing wealth, he can truly begin to express the various things he has troubles with. Another part of this comes down to more emotional intelligence from the people. We really need to stop fueling celebrity politics! I don’t care what you think, but it’s true. If we really gave less attention to the politics of celebrities, the power of celebrities lessen, and what happens? They just become normal people. Maybe this will help 6ix9ine realize who he really is because without fame and money, you just a regular person!
Who Do You Trust?
By: Oc Movie Reviews
Tags: Movie Review, Film Review, Documentary, Flint

Who Do You Trust?

By Mark

The Flint Water Crisis is an ongoing crisis that started way back in 2014. It was decided that, to save the city of Flint some money, they would switch the source of the drinking water from the great lakes they had been using, to the river that ran through the city.

You might shrug and say, ‘so what’? Well, the problem with this was that the Flint River hadn’t been used as a water source for many years and now contained old tyres, shopping trollies and god knows what else.

Shortly after the switch, residents began complaining that the water coming out of their taps was brown. Then things began to get really serious.

Children, and adults, where coming out in rashes, people where ending up in hospital with pneumonia type symptoms, that would later be revealed as Legionnaire’s disease.

Miscarriages went up, reading scores amongst children went down, and more and more health issues were raised in the years following the switch. In some homes the tested level of lead in the water was 13,500 parts per billion (ppb). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends levels be no more than 15ppb and water contaminated with 5,000ppb of lead is classed as hazardous waste.

So, obviously, this being a Western country, one of the richest nations on Earth, the government swiftly stepped in and solved it all, right? Wrong, oh so wrong. This crisis is still ongoing, the people of Flint still do no trust the water supply that comes into their homes.

It was residents who opted to bring in an external scientist from Virginia Tech to sample the water. But when he suddenly switched sides and began helping the governor, who many blamed for the crisis in the first place, a new group stepped in to be the saviours.

Enter stage right, Water Defense, the group backed by actor Mark Ruffalo, and their “scientist” Scott Smith. I say scientist because, as many point out, he wasn’t a scientist, isn’t a scientist, he’s an inventor and is terrible at backtracking and apologising.

It’s also telling that Water Defense no longer exists, gone to the great scrapyard in the sky, probably for the best.

Flint is directed by British director Anthony Baxter and written by Richard Phinney with narration by Alec Baldwin. It’s the latter who, after seeing an early cut of the film, decides to visit the residents of Flint, shocked as he is about the lack of action from the government, wondering why these people stay in the city.

Flint is a shocking story, something you can’t quite believe would happen in one of the richest countries in the world. The lack of input from the government, the fact that the governor kept his job, wasn’t sent to jail, the whole thing stinks. If that’s what the ‘land of the free’ looks like, you can keep it.
Steps Towards Minimalism: How my life became cleaner, less stressful, and richer!
By: Sadie Lee
Tags: Cleaning, Organizational Culture, Documentary, Spending Habits, Minimalism

Photo By Author

In college I would brag about the fact that I could go an entire semester without washing my clothes. Not because I was grossly wearing my undies inside out or anything. It was just the sheer volume of clothes I had. I had my clothes on the hanger, mountains of my wardrobe that overflowed from my “dirty bin” into a second dirty bin, and then the other pile that spilled onto the floor. I still found new things, cheap things to add to my wardrobe from the mall. I didn’t see a problem, if anything I felt like I didn’t have enough!

I have always been a messy person. It wasn’t until I moved into a one bedroom condo with my boyfriend I began to have a problem. I had never lived with anyone before, but the comments started. He was amazed at how dirty I could make a space! I had never had someone comment on the state of my cleanliness so often. Sharing the 780sq ft home was tight. I wanted the place to feel cleaner and nicer, but it wasn’t.

First, I lost my job: It wasn’t until I had lost my job and gotten another one, that I started thinking about money. I had made about $40,000 dollars at the end of the year when my company laid everyone off, and I didn’t have any of it. Somehow, I hadn’t saved a dime. Some of it went to an expensive gym membership, lunches in the city, rent, clothes, and some other black holes where money disappears to. I didn’t track or know where my money went.

I did a three month spending freeze: I knew I needed to change and to start with this I did a three month spending freeze. I stopped buying Starbucks on my way to work. I didn’t buy any clothes. I didn’t go out for drinks, or to eat, nothing. It was a little awkward to explain to my friends and coworkers, but I saved thousands of my income in those months. I set up a Roth, and maxed it out for the year, in just three months.

I took a year off of shopping. I did not let myself shop for an entire year. I could still eat out, buy coffees, and pay for fun activities. But I didn’t let myself buy sunglasses, necklaces, shoes, socks, or anything for an entire year. The rule was nothing that would adorn my body like skirts, shirts, and accessories. I could also borrow a friends dress, or my mom’s clothes if I really needed something. The only “cheat” I had was my boyfriend bought me a dress I needed for a winter wedding.
“Use This as a Share Button” Newsletter #2
By: Marcelo Porto
Tags: Writing, Newsletter, Documentary, YouTube, Netflix

Four things I read or watched this week

Photo by Serhat Beyazkaya on Unsplash

Writing Resources by Ashley Broadwater

Ashley compiled ten writing resources to help writers. There are things there I had never thought about, such as the correct form to capitalize your title.

2. This article by KR Franklin

KR Franklin talks about the importance of starting strong with your article due to the design changes implemented by Medium.

3. This article by Thomas Smith

Thomas looks for questions consumers have about a product and makes videos on YouTube. Simple and effective.

4. The Three Deaths of Marisela Escobedo

This Netflix documentary is devastating. An infuriating look at the judicial system in Mexico, although I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that happens everywhere. Warning: strong footage.
Coming Soon: “Vinyl Generation”
By: Shain E. Thomas
Tags: Coming Soon, Vinyl, Music, Documentary, Film

Keith Jones’s Vinyl Generation: A story of Art, Revolution and Vinyl, distributed by Dark Star Pictures, becomes available Thursday, 26 November 2020 in North America on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Vudu.

Picture it: It’s the 1980s. Czechoslovakia still existed as a sovereign state. An emerging generation of Czechoslovakians took inspiration from alternative culture to create their own worldview, politics and eventually, a revolution. Some 25 years later, this unique generational perspective is explored for the first time.

Vinyl Generation, filmed by accomplished cinematographer Gary Griffin, features performances from Mudhoney, Lou Reed, and Frank Zappa.

The music documentary, executive produced by Academy Award Winner Barbara Kopple, also features Veronika Bromová, David Cajthaml, Václav Havelka, Marcel Hrubý, Pavla Jonssonová, Jan Machácek, Ondrej Struma, Jáchym Topol, Otto Urban, and Tomás Vanek.
真的燒壞腦
Tags: Investing, Politics, Crypto, News, Hong Kong

in Eudaimonia and Co
大衛與歌利亞
Tags: 香港, 中文, Hong Kong

in The New York Times
【透視七個動向小公告 咁大件事冇人講？*】
By: 透視新加坡, 除障破蒙 看清新加坡
Tags: Updates, 新加坡, Love, Singapore, Hong Kong

in Change Your Mind Change Your Life
【回流新加坡 港人二代的選擇 星港教育、生活比較｜小朋友適應貼士】（訪問IGer vivianmok_ ）
By: 透視新加坡, 除障破蒙 看清新加坡
Tags: 香港, Education, 新加坡, Singapore, Hong Kong

in Change Your Mind Change Your Life
變變變肺炎，有關英國新變種需要知嘅幾件事。
By: Kwong Po Yin
Tags: Vaccines, Uk Lockdown, Covid-19, Hong Kong

in Change Your Mind Change Your Life
雙重保險
Tags: Investing, Politics, Crypto, News, Hong Kong

in Eudaimonia and Co
They call me antisocial…
By: Simão Cunha
Tags: Personal Development, Self Improvement, Self Love, Self Development, Personal Growth

…and I wave and smile…(even with mask on).

Photo by Nick Reynolds on Unsplash

But the truth is, I’m tired of small talks.

You may look at me, isolated from the group, in silence, but I listen what you talk about, and frankly, I prefer get lost in my head. The conversation inside my head is more interesting than the gossip you love.

I don’t think I’m better than anyone else, I’m quite the opposite, and I choose when to talk and with whom, I’m selective, you should try, someday.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small village where everyone knows about everyone’s life, and I don’t enjoy that, I like my privacy, and this is why I am, like you say, antisocial, but thanks for the compliment.
Be Smart or Looking Smart?
By: Simão Cunha
Tags: Personal Development, Self, Self Improvement, Self Development, Personal Growth

Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Do you remember the episode of Friends, where Joey has to write a letter to the adoption service, in favor of Monica and Chandler, and use the dictionary in ALL the words contained in the document?

Welcome to the society you lives in!

It is how much of society behaves, instead of studying to be smart, they prefer to look smart, which is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

So, do not make this mistake, every single day of your life, try to learn anything new, you won’t regret!
Become Less Impressed & More Engaged
By: Andy Murphy
Tags: Mindset Shift, Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Mathew Mcconaughey, Self Development

I heard Mathew McConaughey say this recently and it was like I had been waiting to hear it for the longest time.

Become less impressed and more engaged.

For much of my life I have been way too impressed and far less engaged because of it.

Whether that was when I was too impressed with those I used to play football with (or soccer for you Americans), or later when I was far too impressed with hippies with long hair, yogis with flexible bodies, rich people with money, travelling nomads with freedom, dancers dancing, chefs cooking, speakers speaking… or the multitude of other people I could name.

Being Inspired Is Different From Being Impressed

Much of the me that was impressed was actually just inspired, but hidden behind the inspiration was the judgement of myself that made me feel like I was not as good or could never become as good as the person I was seeing, or interacting with, so I would often become too impressed by whatever they were doing or saying and not able to engage with them in any meaningful way.

I was far too impressed by them so instead of becoming engaged in what they were teaching, how I might grow from a friendship or mentorship, I was afraid to fail. I was afraid to try. I was afraid to even be seen.

And this caused me to look neutral and become stagnant.

Not Being In Flow

I recently wrote a blog about how not being in ‘flow’ can actually be enjoyed, and, for me at least, it’s true. Being less impressed and more engaged allows me to be inspired by how a person plays, how a person communicates, facilitates, sings, dances or cooks (the list could go on), but instead of feeling like they are some sort of god or goddess that is on a golden pedastool, I now try to speak to them as a human being and ask questions so I can learn from them.

I give them the chance to be seen. I give them the chance to share what they love. We both win!

And I give myself the chance to learn. I even gain a teacher, a mentor and/or a friend in the meantime.

By being too impressed I lose the opportunity to all of these things, whilst living in self-doubt and judgement of not being good enough.

If someone else advised me of their options, giving these two as their outcomes, which one do you think I would advise them to take?

I started to ask myself these questions, I heard Mathew McConaughey say those magical six words and I started engaging in life more. Then something magical happened in return — life engaged me more!

Thanks Mathew!
Who would you offend: Yourself or Others?
By: Bulcha, The Charismatic Nerd
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Inspiration, Confidence, Self Development

So I was reading Essays by Michel de Montaigne and came across an interesting passage.

I’m not going to go into too many details, but Michel de Montaigne had one interesting idea.

Michel de Montaigne was talking about how he didn’t care to follow some courteous rules of being a nobleman in 16th century France.

Even if it offended others, he didn’t care.

Then he stated that if a person is more worried about offending others than offending themselves, well, they are going to live a life of servitude.

Reading that felt like a slap on my face.

There are countless moments in my life where I was more concerned about offending others and not caring whether that same action offended me.

For example, I let people walk all over me. I was more concerned about not offending the bully, more than my wellbeing. And in the end, I also offended myself.

Another example is when I would never ask for help. I didn’t want to be a burden. I was more concerned about not offending others than getting the help I desperately needed. And in the end, I only offended myself.

Photo by Obie Fernandez on Unsplash

I can keep bringing up examples, but I’ll stop there.

What helped me get over caring about whether I offended others, was taking myself more seriously. And when I mean more seriously, I mean respecting my views, needs, dreams, and more.

Instead of pandering to others, I started focusing more on myself.

This did offend others, as I spent less time doing things with others.

This meant less time on sports, video games, and other shallow things.

One of the things I got from Michel de Montaigne and his writings, is that we need to spend more time being acquainted with ourselves.

Spending time alone and trying to figure out our true selves.

Because in a constantly changing world, the only thing you are going to have is yourself.

People will come and go.

Wealth will come and go.

Work will come and go.

So instead of being busy ensuring that we don’t offend others. We should spend more time not offending ourselves and spend more time doing the things that we truly want.

You only have one shot at life.

Not two or three.

So in your one lifetime, are you going to choose to offend others or yourself?

Ultimately the choice is yours.

And ultimately that choice will determine your life.

(If you enjoyed this short article, then click here to join my email list where you get a daily boost of confidence every morning plus the free Self-Improvement Cheat Sheet for Nerds.)