Author: Nayar

Published on by Nayar

Buying Games from PlayStation Store in Mauritius

PlayStation is maybe not officially supported in Mauritius right now. e.g. most Mauritians choose the US or UK as their country when first setting up their PlayStation.

For the past 3 months I downloaded different demos and free-to-play games. Then PlayStation put a heavy discount on Motorcycle Club, Life is Strange and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 year anniversary.  I decided to finally buy my first game. And lo! I couldn’t add my PayPal account

 

I even tried with my MCB Prepaid Card but I’d still get an error.

An error occured while adding your PayPal account

Fortunately there are numerous PlayStation groups on Facebook for Mauritians. I inquired about the problem there.

Finally a friend suggested me to buy PSN Cards. I quickly googled it and was going to buy a $10 card but then I remembered that my account is configured for the UK. I should get £10 cards instead.

Finally bought my PSN Card from offgamers.com.

It was very quick and they accepted PayPal as payment. I missed the deal of Motorcyle Club but managed to buy Tomb Raider in time.

 

Published on by Nayar

5 steps to prevent your Twitter account from being HACKED!

When our social media accounts get “hacked”, we wonder how is that even possible. Well, most of the cases, the hacks are not really hacks but it was your old self which gave legitimate access to some applications which might be sold to another party or the said developer turned evil.

Step 1: Click on More >> Settings and privacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 2: Click on Apps and Sessions


You might be shocked by seeing how many apps might have access to read your feed and even private messages.

Step 3: Click on the apps you no longer want to have access

Step 4: Revoke Access

Step 5: Repeat process 3 & 4 until satisfaction.

Share this tips with your friends if helpful. Securing your friends account will also secure your privacy from other parties 😉

Published on by Nayar

True #GunsForPeace

How can people say that guns causes people to die? Apparently these people know nothing about guns and need to educate themselves on the matter.

My religion teaches that guns are peaceful.

Spiritual guns are the best way to do Jihad* against our nafs (soul).

How beautiful is that?

We need more guns. Everyone needs to have guns. And more importantly, the correct understanding of guns which only members of my religion have. Now repeat after me: True #gunsforpeace.

* Find the definition yourself

Published on by Nayar

Why you should Node-RED instead of Java-based Logstash

What is Logstash?

Logstash is an open source, server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from a multitude of sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to your favorite “stash.” – elastic

In other words: Logstash is a software which can read data from multiple sources such as log files, tcp/udp port, MySQL (via Plugin) and MQTT (via Plugin) and then transforms the data into a desired format such as JSON with some augmented attributes and then sends the data into mainly Elasticsearch.

As you can see, Logstash is not given a complicated task to perform. All we expect from it is to stay alive and perform that task. But the setting up process and maintenance is such a pain. This reminds me of why I always refuse to use Java-based softwares.

Problem #1: Not starting with systemd inside an LXC container

No matter how much I tried, I never got it to start automatically with systemd. I had to open a screen session and then launch the process manually.

Ofcourse, whenever Logstash would crash, it would not autostart. And if i were to reboot the VM, i’d have to launch the process manually.

Problem #2: Long boot time

If I were to kill Logstash and relaunch it, it takes around 100 – 120 seconds. It’s that heavy. You lose 2 minutes worth of data. I guess a C++ based program would have taken a maximum of 10 seconds to do a similar task. Avoid Java-based programs.

Problem #3: Plugins (MQTT and MySQL)

If you want to use some other data sources or filters than provided, you’d have to compile the plugins yourself. When compiling the logstash-filter-jdbc_streaming plugin, I had to downgrade the my Java version from 11 to 8 else Logstash wouldn’t start.

And also the MQTT plugin would stop working randomly and crash the whole Logstash process which is unacceptable!

Problem #4: RAM Usage

Logstash would let me compile plugins without minimum of 2GB of RAM. I have managed to run Elasticsearch on just 256 MB of RAM. Why is Logstash so hungry? I ain’t gonna feed it anymore. Enough is enough.

Hello Node-Red

Node-Red already has a built in MQTT node. I had to install the elastic plugin via the interface itself and voila! I have a working Logstash alternative. Stay tuned for more on Node-Red