Happy New Year Everybody!It's a new month. It's a new year. It is also time to review the month of December and to check the HBD interest payments. December has been an excellent month for bitcoin and crypto. Bitcoin broke $100k price point and made new all time highs. I thought bitcoin could reach $120k in December, however it didn't happen. But still we got an impressive $108k all time high price. For me what that means is no matter what happens in the markets bitcoin will always manage to go back to $108k. It is not the question of , but when. Hopefully that won't be too far away, as excitement around bitcoin and its adoption keeps growing expectations are high for 2025. When bitcoin does well, rest of crypto tends to follow as well.

Today is the last day of the year 2024. Celebrations around the world welcoming the new 2025 is about to start. We at Hive have a lot to celebrate as well. Normally, I publish total rewards for content after the year ends. This time I decided to do so before the year ends, just as a reminder to myself and all at Hive that we have a lot to celebrate about Hive as well. Hive has been a constant part of our lives for many of us for many years. Of course, many join every day, every month, every year. And we welcome all to our Hive network, Hive family. While everything is not about money, and Hive has much more to offer than money, financial metrics are among the ones we can proudly celebrate and brag about what Hive does. Content rewards is not the only thing on Hive, and Hive definitely can power more than blogging. Content rewards, however, is something all of us can participate in and all of us are familiar with. It has become a habit of mine to publish content rewards based on communities every year. Because it is one of the accomplishments all Hive people can be proud about.

I wasn't too excited when I was informed that the web app I had been automating with Selenium was about to undergo a major UI overhaul. While UI changes meant improved functionality and user experience, they also meant hours of rewriting and debugging automating scripts. My existing Selenium framework had served me well, but this change felt like an opportunity to explore newer tools. That’s when I decided to give Playwright a try.

Biggest Heist Ever is a Netflix documentary that shows story of the events around the Bitfinex hack in 2016, where 199,754 bitcoins were stolen. At the time this heist was worth approximately $72 million. By the time culprits were caught these assets were worth $4 billion. I haven't heard of this hack or haven't paid attention. That's why I was interested to see this new Netflix documentary. Unfortunately, I ended having more questions than answers after watching the documentary. Biggest Heist Ever is definitely not the best documentary ever Netflix has produced.

Establishing a human colony has long been associated with science fiction, space exploration, and the dream of expanding humanity’s reach beyond Earth. Colonizing Mars, in particular, has become an obsession for many, symbolizing human innovation and survival in the face of uncertainty. Yet, as grand as the vision of a Martian colony may be, there is an argument to be made that focusing our efforts on building a sustainable colony in Antarctica would be far more significant, practical, and beneficial for humanity’s immediate and long-term future. This isn’t a dismissal of space exploration, but a reframing of priorities. Why venture across millions of kilometers to build a home on an inhospitable planet when we have one of the harshest, most unexplored frontiers right here on Earth? Antarctica offers an opportunity to challenge ourselves, innovate solutions for extreme environments, and address critical issues like climate change and sustainable living while preparing us for any eventual ventures into space.

Extracting data from documents with python is not only fun but also saves ton of time. Python provides tools for automating such repetitive tasks and also many libraries that let us interact with documents programmatically. I have multiple scripts that does just that, extract data from hundreds of documents, clean data, and present in a more useful format. All of this can be automated and done with a click of a button. Alternative would be spending hours scanning through documents manually. Over the time things change. The data we need change, structure of documents we use change, the goals change. This may require revisiting and updating scripts. This becomes a bit more challenging if it has been a while since we wrote the scripts. This has been the case for me again this week.