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@ f33c8a96:5ec6f741
2025-03-01 20:42:24
<div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QY6euaT_G_E?enablejsapi=1" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0;" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
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@ 5d4b6c8d:8a1c1ee3
2025-03-01 20:37:31
Alright, Fast February has come to an end. It was more impactful than I anticipated, considering daily intermittent dry fasting had been part of my routine for a long time.
I had definitely let the practice slip to the point where I probably wasn't regularly entering ketosis. Now, my food cravings are substantially reduced and it's quite easy for me to confine my eating to a smaller window.
Even with the fiscal fast being over, I just bought some vitamins and coconut milk (no cravings for junk food or snacks). I would have gotten some fruit, too, but it didn't look great. I did notice craving more juicy foods this month, as my dry fasts got longer. Eating more fruit will probably be an adjustment I make going forward.
If you have any practices that have been on autopilot, I recommend occasionally putting some focus on them to make sure they're still doing what you thought they were.
originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/901017
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@ 378562cd:a6fc6773
2025-03-01 17:53:12
You're in the right place if you've feel like you have never known God but feel drawn to Him. The Bible is God’s Word, His way of speaking to us, and it holds the truth about who He is, who we are, and how we can have a relationship with Him.
Here’s a *simple guide* to getting started:
**Step 1: Begin with Jesus**
The best place to start is with Jesus. He is the heart of the Bible’s message; we can know God through Him. Start by reading the Gospel of John in the New Testament. It clearly shows who Jesus is, His love for us, and why He came to save us.
**Step 2: Talk to God as You Read**
Reading the Bible isn’t just about gathering knowledge and meeting God. Ask Him to help you understand. A simple prayer like, "God, if You are real, show me the truth. Help me know You" is enough.
**Step 3: Understand the Main Message**
The Bible tells one big story:
God created us (Genesis 1:1)
Sin separated us from God (Romans 3:23)
Jesus came to save us (John 3:16)
We can be forgiven and have eternal life through Him (Romans 10:9)
**Step 4: Accepting Jesus into Your Heart**
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died for your sins, and that He rose again, you can ask Him to forgive you and come into your life. You don’t need fancy words—just a sincere heart.
You can pray something like this:
"Jesus, I believe You are the Son of God. I believe You died for my sins and rose again. I ask You to forgive me, change me, and come into my life. I want to follow You. Amen."
**Step 5: Keep Going!**
Read a little each day. Start with John, then move to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Find a Bible-believing church or group to help you grow.
Pray daily — talk to God like you would a friend.
Trust that God will guide you as you seek Him.
If you’ve taken these steps, you’ve begun the greatest journey of your life—walking with Jesus. Keep seeking, keep learning, and know that God loves you deeply. 💙
I may not know you, and you may not know me, but this guide can be a lifeline if you carry burdens— drama, heartache, struggles, pains or whatever. If you commit to following the steps of this guide and make time to read your Bible daily, you’ll find wisdom, peace, and the strength to face whatever life throws your way.
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@ bbb5dda0:f09e2747
2025-03-01 17:46:48
**A couple weeks with a little bit of everything, TollGate marketing, app stability improvements, and some personal matters that needed my attention. Let's get into it:**
## TollGate App
For starters, we worked hard to get an early version of the [TollGate](https://tollgate.me) website live. What do we want to communicate about the project, and to whom. We've identified three 'types' of visitor, each requiring its own 'customer journey' through the website. First there's the end-user, someone that just wants access to tollgate, but doesn't care about any of the technichalities. We try to guide those people to downloading our app as soon as possible. Currently that means downloading it straight from the website as an APK file. But we want to quickly move on to publishing it to the [ZapStore](https://zapstore.dev).
The past couple weeks I put some efforts into getting the app stable. It was hard to identify what was causing the seemingly random crashes and full reloads (of the web content). After getting some outside help we've identified that we were trying to interact with the android API's on the main thread. Which is bad practice. I first couldn't figure out how to make a web request without having to spawn a seperate thread in the kotlin code, that then we'd have to create some kind of system to bubble up the callback method's result. I then found there's a proper [Tauri (the framework) way](https://tauri.app/develop/plugins/develop-mobile/) of doing this using Kotlin Coroutines, which I wasn't familliar with. But it just executes the entire Tauri 'command' (function call) on a background thread. Problem solved. I haven't had any full app crashes since.
Which left me with the random page refreshes, the thing that was behind the demo-effect at Sat's and Facts. I noticed it happened around the moments I would go to settings to hit the 'sign in' button to dismiss the captive portal. That's where I had looked before, but I needed to zoom out. It had to do SOMETHING with moving the app to and from the background. Okay is it some kind of sleep issue? I don't remember where or how I found it but I saw a suggestion to run the Tauri dev build with a --no-watch flag. Which disables hot reloading of the app when I edit one of the TypeScript/HTML files. Somehow the reload would be triggered sometimes on app switching. Why? I don't know, but i'm glad I could pinpoint it.
So now the demo part seems stable, finally. Which means I can move on and properly implement the wallet logic and making the download on the website work.
## TollGateOS
The second customer group will be people interested in running a TollGate. We're trying to get them to download our custom build of OpenWRT that includes all the required packages. We 'baptized' this version to be called **TollGateOS** as we say in proper Dutch ;). I think it will help to have these clear distinct names. I really want any moderately technical person to be able to install TollGateOS on a supported router. My vision for this is to have some kind of web installer, akin to what GrapheneOS does with their web-installer. It seems to be possible to do SSH from the browser, but I'll kill that bird when I see it (is that a saying? I think it should be...)
By the way, in earlier docs/demo's we talked about a 'herald' module, which would do the advertising of the tollgate. But as we found that the crowsnest already interacts with the hardware antennas, which is needed for 'advertising' the tollgate, we thought it better to merge both of them into the Crowsnest.
## Developers
TollGate is fully open source, so anyone looking to either look at or fork the source code is welcome to do so. Developers interested at looking at the code are probably already interested to some degree. For this group we added easy links to navigate to the project's repositories
Currently our focus is publishing the Android version, but we're building the app in a cross-platform way. The only thing we have to customize are the system integrations, like scanning for wifi-networks and connecting to them.
## Gearing up for Sovereign Engineering
As i'm writing this piece for you i'm at 10km (that's 30.000ft for y'all Americans) in the air on my way to Sovereign Engineering edition #4, SEC-04. I feel ready to go kick ass once again and build beautiful things with a bunch of my favourite plebs!
## A bit of a focus shift
If you've been following me you might notice I haven't posted much about Epoxy recently. I found the momentum I see emerge on TollGate and GitHub Actions too good to let go to waste. So those will be my focus for a while, I'm hoping to circle back to Epoxy when these projects have a more steady pace.
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@ df478568:2a951e67
2025-03-01 15:04:27
In [my Soapminer article](https://habla.news/u/marc@primal.net/washing-the-invisible-hand-with-soapminer), I added quotes from various plebs. I earned over 12,000 sats! That's enough for a McJunk today, but maybe a steak dinner in a few years. That's my two sats anyway.
*This is not investment advice*
It feels great to receive value from people who support and appreciate your work. It's also nice to stack more sats by writing. I have a budget of $25.00 that I have sent to various people using Zapplanner, but I'm trying something new: Zapsplits.
## WTF Are Zapsplits?
I asked [Unleashed.chat](https://unleashed.chat). Here's what the anthropomorphic Unleashed said.
Me:
What is a Zapsplit on nostr?
Unleashed:
A Zapsplit on Nostr refers to splitting a Zap, which is a form of donation or tipping on the ~platform~ protocol, among multiple recipients. **It allows users to distribute their support more broadly across various content creators instead of just one**.
That's more succinct than I would put it, but nostr is a protocol, not a platform. The important part about Zapsplits for me is that it removes the cognitive cost of deciding what percentage of my giving budget should go to each creator. Do I zap podcast guests? Do podcasters with ads get less than podcasters sans ads? How much value did this particular article bring me? If I zap Guy Swann, should I also zap the authors he reads? Should I zap long-form articles more than micro-blogs? There are 21 million different considerations.
Zapsplits removes all this from me because I can use the following algorithm.
### Does This Person Provide Me Value?
Yes ⬇️
I add them to my Zapsplit post for that month. A portion of my monthly zapping budget, 25 dirty-fiat bucks, transforms into magic Internet money and is distributed among everyone in the Zapsplit.
No ⬇️
If I don't get any value, I don't send value. Simple.
#### Testing Zapsplits
I added podcasters and devs to a nostr post and enabled a 10-way zapsplit on the post. It's based on [prisms](https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lightning-prism-nostr/), a little nostr feature that gives me prose writing superpowers.
1. I can earn sats for writing.
2. I can support others with a single zap.
3. I can add people who give me quotes to my zap splits.
People appreciate attribution. I suspect they will appreciate it more if they also get paid. What if I added some quotes to an article and then split any zaps I get with the quoted plebs? Come to think of it, I'll try it. [Here's a quote from a dev on nostr](nostr:note1qf4277rudtflllrjr555890xsjp6u60f7xdvclkwc9t220duajeq0x665q
I added Silberangel to the Zapsplits on Habla.news.
My [V4V](https://blog.getalby.com/the-case-for-value-4-value/) payments can also get sent to ten different plebs with a simple click of a button. I am going to start using this for a lot of my monthly V4V budget. Every month, I'll think about the people's content I value most and add them to a single zapsplit payment. Then, I'll zap the post.
Say I create a poll and make a wager with ten different people. If I lose, I can pay everyone pit at the same time. This is probably better for a football pool, but you get the idea. The options are limited only by your imagination.
nostr:nevent1qqspnhucgxc6mprhw36fe2242hzv7zumavyy7dhzjswtldhxk4dh7ugpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygxlg7zks3uauf454q7phhzdh2mpkhxg9cdrzt3t9z7gzksj49g7vupsgqqqqqqsl5uwfl
Other people can also zap the post. As Siberangel says, we can use other people's money to provide value, too. This is a great option for stacking neophytes, people who don't have much bitcoin or cheap skates. Let's be honest, bitcoin has made most of us cheapskates.
Bitcoin books with multiple authors can have QR codes that link to one of these Zapsplit posts. The authors can do a book signing and sell their books using this on nostr. Nerds like me can get three autographs and zap the book. The sats are split among all authors. Here's a Zapsplit that includes all the authors of Parallel.
Can you think of any other ways to use Zapsplits? Let me know.
npub1marc26z8nh3xkj5rcx7ufkatvx6ueqhp5vfw9v5teq26z254renshtf3g0
[885,610](https://mempool.marc26z.com/block/00000000000000000000742c0f980fcfcbd25fade47c3ebcfd69eda93f6861c7)
[Merch](https://marc26z.com/merch/)