I haven't written a huge amount on this particular blog for a long time. that is because I write in various different places, work has been busy and life has thrown it's usual curveballs at us as a family. We've survived, everyone is ok but there have been some hospitalisations, with my mum-in-law being taken ill and then our grand-daughter having suspected Sepsis which turned out just to be e-coli.... "just to be", he says but that's life at times, everything happens at once and we all get stressed out.

I am glad to say, nobody is in Hospital any longer, Tina's mum is making a great recovery from a mild stroke, little Effie who is not far off becoming two years old, has recovered too. In fact she has more than recovered, she is a little joyous sod. Testing everything. She will be an engineer and I am going to teach her to code.

You may recall from me in my last journal here on Paragraph, that I wrote about my own health problems, well, nothing much to report on that, at least for now, I remain in good health considering and the last visit to hospital, all was stable as far as my kidney condition is concerned.

Work has been - work, busy, plenty going on but that I don't write about so much in this blog, this is the place where I like to practice my other career, that of the tech journalist.

I wanted to break down this post into a number of sections, to talk about the platforms I am on, my experiences with those and then to move on to some new groups that I am a member of, in the IRL sense, yes, sometimes I actually congregate with real people, have a beer, talk tech!

I may keep the following headings as sections for an ongoing series of write-ups, journals on these topics, to track my progress, learning and so on.

Farcaster and Warpcast

I remember discovering Farcaster through Paragraph, piqued my interest and I quickly learnt about the existence of Warpcast, got invited onboard and have been exploring it on and off over the past few months. I have dedicated more and more time to it, as I get more and more engaged with it and it's people.

I am very interested in Web 3 as a whole and the utility it provides.

I have this week been exploring the concepts of frames, $DEGEN and found a tool that reminds me a lot of Buffer for the traditional social media space, called Qaster. I tested that yesterday by scheduling a post on Warpcast to go out today.

FarCon, sounds like it has been a big event and stuff like that, I wish I could get to but it's so far away and I just don't have the available time to go out there.

Hive

Check out https://peakd.com/@nicklewis for what has become quite an established blog on the Hive blockchain, where I have been doing reasonably well. I have started to draw a small but constant income from the platform that has helped to pay for some leisure activities recently and some meals out. So anyone who doesn't believe in Crypto, I know you do because you're here reading this on a web 3 platform! However there are a lot of detractors out there.

Hive however isn't as big as some coins, hence I am building up my portfolio in the years to come to explore quite a few options.

I use Revolut quite a bit for crypto investments alongside my FIAT finances and I have found a way to withdraw HIve, via USDT, to GBP.

Ethereum and other Crypto

I have a number of wallets, each with some ETH and BTC in them, as BTC was the first I tried buying some years back, sadly not when it all began, as those investments would have been rather big by now. BTC was already £1000 per Bitcoin by the time I started, so I got myself £10 worth!

So here I should begin a more concerted effort in building upon what I have now.

Dollar Cost Averaging is my preferred approach to crypto and I'll stick to that.

Substack

Outside of Crypto I have been developing my music newsletter https://modulations.substack.com which I will mirror some of it's content here. It now has 107 subscribers, I am tempted to get some of those people across to the Paragraph platform, as on here I have nowhere near as many subscribers yet.

I am surprised over how Modulations has grown, we have two or three high profile members as well but I prefer not to divulge who they are, as I respect people's privacy.

Bluesky, Mastodon etc

I now spend very little time on these social media platforms to be honest, I dive in from time to time. I think they are good and I definitely prefer to stay away from the former bird-site, which is now very much my X!I

Music - rediscovering vinyl, synths and sampling

Last year I bought in no particular order, a Roland SP-404, a turntable and started buying records again. I love sampling and recording some beats crafted out of these sounds. So I'll share some of those with you, would NFTs work for this kind of thing? OF course they will but I lose track of which platform to use when there are so many of the flipping things!

ModCaf, XOX and Emoms

https://modcaf.org is a great thing, a great group of people, an amazing monthly event where synth nerds meet, perform, present ideas and we all get to play around with instruments and nerd out like crazy!

Here are some photos from past events, happy to write up about them here in the future.

Last of all

Excited to hear Paragraph and Mirror have teamed up, that is really cool.