Today I Learned
Every day we learn something new: a fact, a process, a tool. I'm sharing it with the hope that other people may also find it useful or meaningful.
Exploring the Polars Dataframe Library
Renewing a US tourist visa in Singapore as a foreigner
Holding a Philippines passport means you will plan most international travel well in advance. This is especially true for trips to the United States. (Photo by Erica Jahn on Unsplash)
I hold a weak passport in a country whose citizens hold the world’s strongest passport.
Whenever I need to get a visa, there are very few resources online for how to actually get it done. I’ve even gone on adventures to Kuala Lumpur for smaller countries that didn’t have consular services in Singapore.
In my case, I was renewing my B-1/B-2 (Tourism/Business) United States Visa that expired in 2022, and was originally issued by the US embassy in Manila. I’m writing it down, hopefully to benefit someone is in a similar situation.
Moving Shares from Shareworks Solium to Interactive Brokers
Stock and Crypto Market Values. Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
I was lucky enough to be part of two companies that went public via an IPO: Uber and Grab, both ridesharing companies.
A common platform for managing and distributing these employee shares is Shareworks/Solium (now part of Morgan Stanley at work). While it’s great for seeing your stock compensation as you earn it, it’s not really a platform that you could use once those shares are granted to you and tradeable in the public market.
Nerfing Google Analytics to be more privacy-friendly
Photo by Lianhao Qu on Unsplash
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I’m only sharing how I navigated privacy legislation and attempted compliance on a personal website.
I recently revamped my personal website to connect more closely to my “second brain” which is in Obsidian. It’s now published via Obsidian Publish. I’m pretty happy with it so far!
As I polished it up, I realized that I wanted to understand how readers read, interacted, and understood, especially as they go through the digital garden part of the site, hence my exploration of website tracking tools.
Restoring modification timestamps in cloned git repos
gh-pages branch to be published. However, the ordering of the field notes was dependent on the file modification timestamps. I imagine workflows that use Make will also be affected by this issue.