hirohurl

Time to get organized! I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but a recent post by @alex-rourke prompted me to get it done: I'm going for a much simpler approach without using third party platforms.

July was a humid scorcher here in Japan, but also a fun month packed with beer garden parties and street festivals as per my previous blog posts: What was happening on the Hive blockchain while I was out

A few days ago, an aspiring internet marketer called Paul B contacted me. Paul’s promoting a program called OLSP, and he reached out to me for some guidance, because he'd seen that I'd racked up quite

This is summer 2025 in Rakurakuen (楽々園), a suburb in the western outskirts of Hiroshima, Japan - my neck of the woods. The festival is run by the local traders and it's one of my favourite festivals of

I came across a rather useful tool today - the "Buffett Indicator" - but before I dive into that, bear with me as I backtrack a bit... Is Bitcoin's 4 Year Cycle Still a Thing? A couple of months

Ah yes, July in Japan! Stifling Heat, high humidity, and... beer garden parties! Ahem, what is really meant by "beer garden" is "department store roof-top." Last Saturday found me at

Leadsleap owner Kenneth Koh has just made another improvement to one of Leadsleap's impressive portfolio of marketing features - the site rotator. He just added the option to make your rotator

At the beginning of the month I borrowed $1,000 USDT using $2,000 of BTC as collateral on CoinRabbit.io and converted the USDT into 1000 HBD. At the time, Bitcoin was around $109,000. That transaction

It had to happen one day. It was Sunday morning and I had just started to give the bonce a good clipping when the clippers slipped out of my hand and crashed onto the floor causing the upper clipper to

I woke up early one morning in June 2023 and was suddenly inspired to create what I call the "HBD Freedom Ladder." The ladder has nine rungs, or "steps." Each "step" represents

A few years ago, a book came out called The Complete Chess Swindler: How to Save Points from Lost Positions. I bought it, started reading it… and didn’t get very far. It ended up gathering virtual dust

June is not my favourite month in Japan, and this June was no exception. You get a double whammy of rain and humidity, with temperatures ratcheting upwards as the month progresses. It was also a bit sluggish

Last night I had a closer look at a blitz game I played recently on Gameknot.com. I managed to win as Black using Charlie Storey’s Sniper system. Charlie Storey is an English Fide Master who I met at the

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori... Reflections on Horace's Ode III.2

This weekend I bought the Audible version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Actually, there's more than one version available on Audible and I chose the 1980 version narrated

Yep, this morning I had a fit of minimalist rage and cleared some books off my bookshelves and emptied a couple of file boxes of old travel brochures. I stacked the books in the spare room ready to either

The first thing that struck me when I looked at the illustration of the nineteenth syllable in one of my Iroha Karuta decks was its similarity to the Seven of Pentacles in the Rider Waite Tarot. Well,

For the first time this year, I played three blitz games on Gameknot's Live Chess portal. I left the colour setting on random although I was hoping to get the black pieces so I could practice the

May was a good month for Bitcoin, with a new all time high of $111,970 being achieved on 22nd and a six figure Bitcoin price as "the new normal" at least for now. Coincidentally, I would describe

A few weeks ago I noticed I'd accumulated some unclaimed commissions on a "safelist" site called TheCryptoMailer so I sent in a withdrawal request for payment in Bitcoin (as that is one of the

Last Saturday evening I joined three other boardgamers and played a newly published game (2025) called "New Cold War." New Cold War is a board game for one to four players that simulates global