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.

Unfortunately I am getting occasional 404 errors from admin-ajax.php.

The request seems to be sent and processed because on refresh of the page I can see the updates. However it is a bad user experience because the user’s page just stalls.

After a little troubleshooting, mainly with crude debug statements from admin-ajax.php into HTTP headers, I have noticed that admin-ajax.php is not even entered.

At the moment I am not sure whether the error is related to one of the WordPress plugins I am using or whether it is due to my webhost.

There are no visible errors in weblogs nor in error_log.

One thing I noticed that a new incognito browser window resolved the issue.

This made me suspicious of cookie issues. I manage to narrow it down to the PHPSESSID cookie. Clearing it resolved the issue. The 404 error from admin-ajax.php is gone… for a while at least.

I recommend using the excellent Eat This Cookie extension If you are using Chrome or Brave browser.

The search continues…

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It did not matter how much you did, or if you did anything at all. The pay cheque was always there at the end of the month.

This was the first thing that came to my mind when a friend mentioned that her company had retracted her previous partial home office arrangement and required that she’d be at her desk full time.

I assumed that her performance had possibly been lower while working from a remote location. However she insisted that she had never been more productive. Instead it had been the other staff in her office that had complained.

They were upset that she had a special arrangement and wanted it too. Like the bullies at the school yard who saw someone with a shiny marble and if they could not have it then at least they would crush it.
It did not matter that my friend was working partially from home to be close to a family member who was ill, the other staff were just upset.

She had previously told me about the poor working conditions in the office. I suggested that maybe that was the main reason why other staff in the office also wanted to escape: not for the benefit of working from home but for the benefit of staying away from the office.

Finally my friend asked me what my advice would be and I told her the first thing that came to my mind.

Quit and find a real company that values results and is not run by second-tier staff who are first grade champions in office politics.

Photo by k2space.

The post Presence or productivity… that is the question appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.

Modern cameras have huge memory cards; 128GB isn’t uncommon. While this is very convenient it also creates massive amount of unnecessary data.

You end up with hundreds of photos (if not thousands) while “in the field” or any other situation without access to a computer to offload the photos.

This could be while on a holiday, on a multi-day shoot or if you simply don’t want to transfer all those photos only to delete them shortly afterwards.

100% zoom is your friend. Use it in combination with easy scrolling to weed out any obvious duds. Look for sharp eyes, open eyes, no unwanted motion blur, overcropping (a missing foot or arm), good composition and faces actually facing the camera.

Lock the good photos to narrow down to 1-2 photos for each subject/scene.

“Delete all” to quickly weed out the unwanted shots. This will delete all unprotected photos leaving you with only the good ones. I aim to delete half of the photos in my first pass. I sometimes do a second pass to delete another half.

Do not use the format function as this will also delete the protected photos!

One downside with this workflow is the larger battery drain since the screen is on for a long period of time.

Well done! Now you only have a quarter of photos to transfer to your computer and further work on in Lightroom!

The post Super efficient in-the-field SLR photography workflow appeared first on The Story of David Kaspar.

First I tried downloading all the items from Google Photos to a computer but the desktop version of Quik is nothing like the mobile app so don’t even try it. I then uploaded all the items to the mobile but Quik has a display bug and only showed 40 or so items from the same day and I wasn’t able to select all the required items.

In the end I was able to figure out a workflow that makes it possible to use older and shared photos that aren’t on your device. The functionality is a bit buggy but I was able to find workarounds for everything.

1. Create an album with the photos and videos you would like to use for your compilation. Curate and select just the items you would like to be in your Quik compilation.

2. Optional step: The “+ create a new album” option will not be available if you are using photos added by others. Instead you will want to use the Share button so that a link to your new album is created (make sure to save the link!). The album is not visible in your albums so use the link in a browser and this should open the album in your Google Photos app. Edit the album and give it a name. Also select to “show in albums” to make it visible in your Google Photos albums.

3. Open the Quik app and select to use Google Photos. Your new album should be listed. You may get errors such as “Google Photos is not available”. If you do, close the Quik app and try again… and again.

4. Select all photos by ticking all the days. Since you have already curated your items you can just select everything.

5. Hit the blue arrow and Quik will start downloading everything to your device.

6. The Quik app will then crash continuously when it tries to edit the compilation.

7. Delete the project (Quik will crash again), start a new project and select all items again from the Google Photos album. This time the download will be almost instant and editing of the compilation will work.
8. Once done, export and upload your compilation back to Google Photos so that you can easily share it with friends and also so that you will never lose it if/when you lose your phone

Other tips for Quick:

• Select “high quality” to produce 1080p videos that look great on a TV.
  
• Crop tall videos to include the important areas, for example people’s faces.
• Use the focus point option to select what to show in photos
• Duplicate any tall photos and use different focal points to show everything in tall photos.
• If you have many items in your compilation then modify the duration of the compilation to the maximum of your selected music to have more time on each item.
• If a photo that you like just flashes by you can change the duration to longer to see more of the photo (or to shorter if you want to see less of it).
• Trim videos and select “manual” to choose what parts of a video you want included. Split the video if you want to show multiple bits from it.
• Using “Highlights” can work better on longer action videos
• You can mute your video sound if it doesn’t mix well with your selected music
• Turn Outro off to remove the Quik logo at the end of your compilation (it gets old quickly).

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• Download the bitaddress.org code to your freshly formatted USB stick
• Download Tails linux ISO and burn it to a DVD.
• Boot up your computer using the DVD and load up bitaddress.org html from the USB stick.
• Generate one or more encrypted paper wallets and scan the public address so that you can send coins to it later.
• Save the paper wallets as PDF to the USB stick(s)
• Print multiple copies of the paper wallets or write down the private key manually using pen/paper.
• You are done

If you find creating and booting from the DVD complicated you can use the online versions of bitaddress.org but be aware that your are then exposed to any man-in-the-middle attacks or if your computer has been compromised an attacker could get hold of all your paper wallets.
Additional steps depend on the sum you are planning to store. Put the paper wallets in waterproof bags. Leave a copy with a friend you can trust. Consider storing a copy in a safe. Split up your stash between multiple wallets to lower the risk and to allow for spending in increments.
A recent version of the Android mobile wallet Mycelium has added import of BIP0038 encrypted private keys. This makes it very easy to scan the encrypted wallet and start spending the bitcoins on it.

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