Most people think that American Express credit cards are costly to own, but in my opinion the cards are some of the most value for money credit cards out there. And here are some reasons why.
Almost all American Express credit cards come with an annual fee. But this may surprise many people as there is in fact an American Express credit card that has zero annual fees – the American Express Essential Card.
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Last November, while I was in Singapore for a cousin’s wedding, I visited the Singapore Flyer. The following is how the official website describes the Singapore Flyer.
Singapore Flyer is Asia’s Largest Giant Observation Wheel. Standing at a stunning 165m from the ground, the Flyer offers you breathtaking, panoramic views of the Marina Bay and beyond. There’s also a range of shops, restaurants and facilities.
I took the MRT to the Promenade Station (Circle Line) and from there it was about a five minute work to the base of the Singapore Flyer. Tickets were purchased at the counter there at SGD$33. After purchasing my ticket, I joined the line to enter the Wheel.
BrickCompare needed a logo. And since I do not have a single creative bone in my body, I decided to give Fiverr a shot. Fiverr is a website where you can outsource a job (called a Gig) starting from USD$5, hence the name.
So I signed up and picked the highest rated and most popular seller for logo designs, a seller called bossdesigners. Although I was pretty sure there was a whole team behind it. The USD$5 plan was pretty limited (you will find this with most gigs) so I decided to splash out on the USD$35 (plus $1.75 processing fee) plan which will give me three design choices and a social media kit.
Continue reading “Using Fiverr for BrickCompare’s Logo [Review]”
For my BrickCompare project, I decided to a microservice to do the task for scraping websites for the pricing data I needed. Amazon Web Services with their AWS Lambda service was the perfect service for the task.
I had already decide to use the node.js platform to run my microservice as I was familiar with it. So then I had to select a module that could get me started on website scraping. Initially I selected noodlejs as it looked to be easily to use and had decent documentation. But after writing about 10 or so scrapers for different websites, I found that it was rather buggy and did not return consistent results.
Continue reading “Scraping Websites with X-ray, AWS Lambda and Serverless”
On the Google Cloud Platform, Google provides Google Cloud Shell for free to easily manage your services. Whenever you launch the shell, on the backend, the platform creates a new VM instance to drive the shell. This shell instance will if there is more than 30 minutes of inactivity. Because of this, the persistence between sessions is limited. However there is 5GB worth of storage within you $HOME (~) directory which persist between sessions.
The Google Cloud Shell provides a great place to to run your Ansible playbooks since you will be able to clone your git repositories into the persistent home directory. However if you try to install Ansible through the package manager (apt-get in this case), every time the session terminates, you lose your Ansible install.
Continue reading “Using Ansible on Google Cloud Shell [How To]”