Maximizing GETGREAT star points (for KrisFlyer miles)

GETGREAT is a platform to earn star points. Star points can be used to redeem KrisFlyer miles, among many other reedeemables. In my case, I use it on iOS in Singapore, and the objective is 1,000 star points (or 330 KrisFlyer miles). There are at least 3 features helpful to our endeavour: 1. FitAge FitAge can range from +3 (bad) to -3 (good) years relative to your actual age. Stars here are earned on a daily basis:

The World After Coronavirus

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli professor whom I discovered wrote an article published on ft.com. Clearly, a much smarter person that I, so I just wanted to highlight a couple of paragraphs I found really compelling: Many short-term emergency measures will become a fixture of life. That is the nature of emergencies. They fast-forward historical processes. Decisions that in normal times could take years of deliberation are passed in a matter of hours.

Face ID Alternative Appearance

In the iOS Settings.app, there is a Face ID & Passcode > Set up an Alternative Apperance option. I tried it with my mask on, perhaps it might be able to recognize an alternative appearance, as that’s what it is, to me at least. Unfortunately I got a “face obstructed” message, which is completely true, as the lower half of my face is obstructed by the mask, of course. Well, I had to give it a shot anyways.

Face ID and masks

Face ID, as in the biometric mechanism I use to unlock my phone, a 2019 iPhone 11; mask, as in a single-use surgical mask one might use amidst COVID-19. Here’s the thing. Face ID doesn’t work when masked up. I used to use a 2017 iPhone 8, obviously it’d be far more effective at this point in time. And I can’t help but wishing for an iPhone 8-like replacement. Or for the folks that might prefer an even smaller phone, iPhone SE2 then.

Fun with Vagrant

Vagrant version: $ vagrant -version Vagrant 2.2.7 To create a Vagrantfile in the project directory using HashiCorp’s official “box”: cd /path/to/the/project/directory/; vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64 In case of any edits, use vagrant reload. Getting into your Ubuntu box; i.e., a VM: vagrant up vagrant ssh There is suspend, resume, halt <--force>, and destroy, among many other CLI commands to manage the entire lifecycle of a box. If defined, vagrant up will use the configured provisioner to bootstrap your VM to its desired state; e.

Logging into GitLab using LDAP

Recently, we deployed a GitLab instance, and my colleague discovered that when he logged in using our LDAP service account credentials, he ended up logging in as me; i.e., two different LDAP users with two pairs of usernames/passwords end up being the same user. I didn’t want that to be the case, so I dug into this a bit. Using ldapsearch with the sAMAccountName attribute resulted in two users (correct), and the gitlab-rake gitlab:ldap:check output proved similarly unhelpful, so I filed an issue.