In a world obsessed with the new, House of Eff dares to ask a different question: What if true luxury lies not in the untouched, but in the transformed?

This is the philosophy behind Wearable Poetry. The radical idea that every discarded treasure deserves a second act. At House of Eff, abandoned beauty isn’t mourned; it’s resurrected. Forgotten materials find new purpose. Cast-off elements become statement pieces.

 The brand’s approach is both artisan and alchemist. Each handcrafted earring, clutch, and cushion carries within it the narrative of transformation. The quiet story of something once overlooked, now elevated to art. These aren’t mass-produced accessories.

 They’re individual acts of creative reimagining, where sustainability meets sophistication.

 The aesthetic matches the philosophy: dark, contemplative, refined. Deep midnight blues and sophisticated greys create an atmosphere of intentionality. Typography speaks in whispers rather than shouts. Every detail (from the Cormorant Unicase headlines to the generous negative space) reinforces the same message: beauty can be found in what we choose to see, in what we dare to reimagine.

 House of Eff proves that conscious consumption doesn’t require sacrifice. Instead, it offers something more valuable: pieces with soul, with history, with poetry woven into their very fabric.

 True luxury, it turns out, isn’t about perfection. It’s about transformation.

 Discover the wearable poetry at House of Eff

The post When Fashion Becomes Poetry: Inside House of Eff appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.

Now you should see a new incoming channel and a new outgoing channel. The incoming channel will have all the liquidity remotely and your outgoing channel will have all the liquidity locally.

This means that no lightning payments can be routed via you. You have to balance those channels to have 50% local and 50% remote liquidity.

In summary your will pay yourself half of the channel capacity and route the payment through all the swap participants. This will result in all channels in the swap to become 50/50 balanced.

Case 1: Now for a simple triangle swap, where there are only two other participants, you can use the plugin Thunderhub or Ride The Lightning (RTL) to perform this payment.

Select the node you connected to as Outgoing. You should see 100% blue bar, this means the balance is all on your side (local).

Select the node that connected to you as Incoming. You should see a 100% green bar, this means that the balance is all on the other side (remote).

Set the fees to something you are comfortable with, perhaps 100 for each field.

 If your swap participants have done their job they have lowered all fees to 0 and the rebalance should be free.

Set the amount to Fixed and half the channel size (or slightly less if you get liquidity problems).

Hit rebalance!

Case 2: For any more complicated swaps like a square (4 participants) or a pentagram (5 participants) you will have to build an exact payment route through all the participants to do the balancing correctly (and cheaply).

You still want to pay yourself half the channel size but it has to go out to the node you connected to, then via each participant in the correct order, and then back in via the node that connected to you.

You will have to use the lncli command after you SSH to your node to perform this more complicated payment.

Some swap sites like lightningnetwork.plus will prepare the correct route for you already. Please start by running the provided command to test whether the route works correctly:

lncli buildroute --amt [AMOUNT] --hops 1a613234234116def5de68...,7243578234df738...,87827ea233...,014aea43432244...,0a34324445...

Replace the example hops with the actual public keys of the nodes in your swap.

If all is well you will get a json output with a prebuilt route and the cost for this transfer:

{
"route": {
"total_time_lock": 715773,
"total_fees": "4",
"total_amt": "1250004",
"hops": [
{…

If the fees seem too high then you should start a dialog with the other swap participants to lower their channel fees. Skill levels of the participants varies widely and you may need to assist them.

You can now prepare an invoice which will be the payment to yourself since the routing appears to be successful:

lncli addinvoice --amt [AMOUNT]

This command will return you a PAYMENT_ADDR and a R_HASH that you have to use in the below step.

You can now run the command provided by your service that will in a single line build the route using lncli buildroute, add a multi-payment record (mpp) using the jq utility and then send the payment using lncli sendtoroute:

lncli buildroute --amt [AMOUNT] --hops 1a613234234116def5de68…,7243578234df738…,87827ea233…,014aea43432244…,0a34324445… | jq -r '(.route.hops[-1] | .mpp_record) |= {payment_addr:"[PAYMENT_ADDR]", total_amt_msat: "[AMOUNT]"}' | lncli sendtoroute --payment_hash=[R_HASH] -

You can also construct the hops manually by hand by starting with the node you connected to, traverse the participants one by one and finishing with the public key of your own node.

If all goes well, you should get a SUCCESS result code and also information about the total fees paid.

Congratulations, you are now balanced!

Common problems with liquidity rebalancing

Not all channels have been set up.

The swap participants are reporting that they all have opened channels but how can you be sure? The lncli buildroute command is a quick way to test that the route is correctly set up.

Private channels

If a swap participant accidentally created a private channel instead of a public one then the liquidity swap will not work.

Not enough liquidity in existing channels

A participant can accidentally crate a smaller channel than specified.

I have also seen cases where participants already had existing channels with the other participants so they didn’t feel like creating additional ones.

This will however break the swap as the liquidity in the swap is less than was specified. Rebalancing will not work for example.

Remote node is down

You are unable to open the channel and you see errors like 503, 'FailedToSuccessfullyConnectToRemotePeer'.

This is likely due to the remote node being down, having TOR configuration issues or other resource problems. A restart of the remote node often helps.

Divide the channel opening process into two steps: 1) connect to the peer first and 2) open the channel with the existing peer

Node not accepting the specified channel size in the swap

A node can be misconfigured to only allow chanel size above a certain size… a size that is larger than the swap. Often this is due to am extra zero in the required channel size.

Blockchain reorg

Luckily this hasn’t happened to me but there is a theoretical scenario where the open channel has only one confirmation and due to blockchain reorg that transaction becomes void. Wait for a few confirmations before using a newly open channel!

You are using Umbrel and thus LND in a Docker container. You get the error “The input device is not a TTY”

Umbrel is popular Lightning node operating system. If uses docker container for many of the require services, such as lncli. This means you don’t have direct access to lcnli and linux “piping” between processes doesn’t work.

Split the routing command into two steps:

lncli buildroute --amt [AMOUNT] --hops 1a613234234116def5de68…,7243578234df738…,87827ea233…,014aea43432244…,0a34324445… | jq -r '(.route.hops[-1] | .mpp_record) |= {payment_addr:"[PAYMENT_ADDRESS]", total_amt_msat: "[AMOUNT]"}' > path.txt

lncli sendtoroute --payment_hash=[R_HASH] --routes="$(cat path.txt)"

“not enough witness outputs to create funding transaction”

You are opening a channel and you have enough funds in your on-chain wallet but you still get this error.

Some of your utxo are probably unconfirmed and you cannot spend them even though they are showing in your total balance.

You probably have some chennels pending. There are unconfirmed payments to yourself as part of it.

Wait until all channels are confirmed and all funds should be available again for new channel opening!

The post Rebalancing lightning channels after a lightning liquidity swap appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.

The internal transfer of NameCheap domains is usually easy and instant but this time the other user was complaining that the transfer was failing. The error page suggested a few missing details in the user’s contact details:

Fixing the missing State was easy enough but we couldn’t find extended attributes so we just tried again and got this:

The exact error was “Extended Attributes: .UK domains – Company or Domain Registered for is required”.

NameCheap allows adding Extended attributes to various regional domains in “Profile > Tools > Domain Contacts Presets > Alternative Domain Contacts“.

However .UK is not one of them. There was no way for the receiving user to be complaint for a .UK domain.

After a few chats with the very responsive NameCheap Live Support the root cause became clear and a workaround was suggested.

First the initiating party had to cancel the domain transfer request.

Then rather than using the usually recommended “new user’s contact details” during the transfer, we had to use “existing contact details”. This allowed the transfer.

Then once the transfer was successful the user changed all details to theirs… including the “Company or Domain Registered for”.

You may be tempted to leave the contact details with the old information but I recommend against this to avoid confusion of ownership… and perhaps breaching .UK domain registration rules.

I wish NameCheap would enhance their Alternative Domain Contacts functionality by adding options for .UK domains!

The post Extended attributes are required when transferring .co.uk domain with NameCheap appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.

We found two jackdaw chicks in our garden and the parents were nowhere to be seen.

It was obvious that they were too young to fly and the nest nor parents were nowhere to be seen.

We could have left them to fight for themselves but our motherly instincts kicked in.

The feeding

After housing them in our cat’s old cage we tried feeding them but they were too distressed to be interested in anything.

After 2 days of no food we were getting very worried and researched what to feed them.

Peanut butter, worms, cat food… We tried everything.

I randomly made kissing sounds and they got very excited. They started crowing and opening their beaks fervently.

Finally it was possible to feed them. They seemed to prefer tuna flakes and were now feeding every hour throughout the day.

We also used a large plastic syringe to give them water.

After 5 days of feeding they had become very comfortable with us and had become very cuddly.

They enjoyed our presence and to walk around our arms.

By now they were cleaning their wings frequently.

Flight training

We discovered that if we lowered our arm while they were sitting on it, they were flapping their wings. It was almost as if they were testing their strength.

Suddenly they took off and flew a few meters to sit on a ledge.

Our jackdaw flight training had officially started!

Over the next few days we continued with frequent feeding and flight training.

4 days later they were able to fly 100m and sit in a tree for a while.

They always came back to feed and to socialise with us.

Next step was to teach them how to feed themselves.

We took them to a flower garden with soft ground and dug around a little bit until we found worms. It took the jackdaws a few moments but they got the hang of finding the worms and to chomp on them.

This made us very proud jackdaw parents indeed!

It’s now day 10 and the daily routine is to take them out of their cage early in the morning, feed them, socialise and continue flight training. 16 hours a day!

Come back to hear the rest of our jackdaw adventure!

The post Rescuing jackdaw chicks and being rewarded with love appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.