It's been a while. So I'll throw you some updates.

## Life and Opal

I've been pretty busy so haven't been able to post much but rest assured, @dopal (the most important) is doing well and is lively as usual. It's starting to warm up around here so it will be very nice to take her to the parks again and watch her run free.

As for me, recently we've celebrated my wife's birthday, where I may or may not have been forced to wear a unicorn onesie. Also we've been watching Game of Thrones (where I'm coming with knowledge from books and then jumping straight to the last season...hey I'm caught up!). 

Also recently attended a very rainy Andrew Yang rally out of curiosity. Interesting fellow, though I probably could have stayed at home and got the same experience. But add one more to the rally crowd I suppose. There's a lot of skepticism on his proposal to fund a universal basic income, and we spent time discussing how we expect it to possibly work (the VAT tax), but it's really not clear. Maybe he should just get everyone to sign up for Steem instead (just kidding, we can't fund it either. But hey, more adoption). 

When I'm not working or life-ing I'm working on Steem projects, yay.

## Steemit UI Tweaks

I'm maintaining my own condenser (Steemit UI), and continuing to make tweaks as needed. Right now https://cryptoempirebot.com comes with keychain and beneficiaries support, maintaining the state before the wallet split. It kept the flag icon, but that's more because I haven't figured out how I'm going to handle the merge that keeps the wallet around rather than my love of flags.

Regarding condenser changes, there's a few minor ones that recently got accepted that help usability:

* Prevent (fairly rare) cases where creating a post edits your old post instead (colliding permlinks). [Link](https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/3292) this caused a few hiccups on deploy though, apologies for that!
* [Wallet transfer list improvement](https://github.com/steemit/wallet/pull/32) that was causing rows to merge together (when fetching transfers, overwrite existing transfer state instead of merge). So those of you that had seen those weird double blending of transactions, those should be gone now :)
* And more in the pipe, going through review, stay tuned!

## Steem Engine Scot Token Websites

For a different project, I've customized condenser to show steem engine token balances/voting, for example https://www.weedcash.network . For ease of management I've tweaked condenser to be runnable on a hobby instance on Heroku. There's a lot of work to be done to get to a solid experience, especially when talking about feeds, and that is my next area of focus (partially released!). That, and restoring the wallet/profile pages in the case keychain is present.

This is now all happening in [this repository](https://github.com/eonwarped/nitrous), and you can read a bit about it [here](https://steemit.com/steem-engine/@aggroed/nitrous-is-going-open-source).

## Helpie Witness

For those of you that do not know, I've been part of the @helpie witness team (one of six in fact), maintaining the witness server with @swelker101, and helping automate various things, like the discord curation bot.

We spread virtual cake (manual curation) throughout the lands and hang out in the discord, hosting two meetings (hangouts) a week. And looking to come up with fun and engaging activities. Kind of like a kindergarten, in the best way possible. And at times we discuss deeper ideas concerning the blockchain and life, and random desserts.

And we have a Steem Engine token ourselves, the HLPE token. Distribution is through various forms of community engagement and redemption is through exchange with a voting bot.

Lately a bunch of us are in transition so things have been slow as of late. But I'm hopeful that we will be able to get some really cool projects going. 

But give a shout if you want to hop in! The community itself is an invite-only community but if you are a real human that is active on Steem that pretty much gets you 90% of the way there.

And if you want to find a way to express support for whatever I do (or for @helpie), feel free to support the @helpie witness which works towards helping the community as well. (I don't see a cent of it, proceeds go to the community account to support @helpie activities).

And to close it out, here's a random picture of @dopal.

    

![](https://d1vof77qrk4l5q.cloudfront.net/img/1c25dfaf952520ac711c223a83a6774fe27e52df.jpg)

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