How to interpret betting odds

Example from the 2024 BKT Tires World Women’s Curling Championship Draw 1 Matchup (Canada vs Sweden):

• Sweden Women: 2.75
• Canada Women: 1.40

Explained by ChatGPT:

Sweden Women (2.75): This means that if you bet 1 unit of currency (e.g., 1 dollar, 1 euro, etc.) on Sweden Women to win, and they do win, you would receive a payout of 2.75 units. So, if you bet $1 on Sweden Women and they win, you would receive $2.75 in total (your original $1 stake plus $1.75 in profit).

Canada Women (1.40): This indicates that if you bet 1 unit of currency on Canada Women to win, and they do win, you would receive a payout of 1.40 units. So, if you bet $1 on Canada Women and they win, you would receive $1.40 in total (your original $1 stake plus $0.40 in profit).

You can also take these payout odds, and convert them to “implied probabilities” of winning:

Sweden Women (2.75): Implied probability = 1 / 2.75 ≈ 0.3636 or 36.36%

Canada Women (1.40): Implied probability = 1 / 1.40 ≈ 0.7143 or 71.43%

But that doesn’t add up to 100%...

That’s because betting sites make money on bets placed, called the “house edge”.

Subtract the total implied probability from 1 to find the house edge: 1−1.0779 ≈ -0.0779

The house edge in this case is approximately -0.0779 or -7.79%. This means that, theoretically, the bookmaker expects to keep around 7.79% of all bets placed over time as profit.

By using this information, you can easily calculate the “implied probability” based on the betting odds, adding some interesting data to your experience in watching the game.

There is more to a good cribbage player than picking the right cards, though. Beyond strategy, flow-of-play and style add to the overall experience.

Qualities of a good cribbage player

• Quality decision-making in selecting hands
• Strategic selection of cards in the pegging round
• Speed of decision-making
• Accuracy of counting points
• Speed and fluidity of counting points
• Maintaining the flow of turns
• Navigating the board
• Use of cribbage phrases & banter
• Quality shuffling
• Sportsmanship
• Overall style of play

Elaborations:

• Is it your cut or theirs?
• What are the odds of getting a favourable cut?
• Get a sense of the “odds” for common decisions.

Strategic selection of cards in the pegging round

• Set good bait. e.g. Consider 10s are 30% of the deck... use this to bait your opponent into playing into your hand. “Assume they play a 10”.
• Be mindful of runs, and 3-of-a-kinds.
• Keep an eye on the count... 15s and 31s.
• Watch their reaction to the cut for cues into their hand.

Speed of decision-making & counting

• Quickness communicates skill and experience. Quick decisions are impressive and promote a smooth and brisk gameplay.
• Be careful not to miss things for sake of speed, though! Especially in muggins.

Accuracy & flow of counting hands

• Count your hand in a systematic and rhythmic way to keep things clear. For both you, and your opponent.
• Count 15s first, then runs, pairs, and flushes. Finish with the Right Jack. How you articulate the count matters.
• e.g. “15-2, 15-4, 5-6-7 and a pair for 9”

‌Maintaining the flow of turns

• Know who’s crib it is & who’s “go” it is in pegging.
• Reach for the deck for the cut when it’s their crib. Lead with first play in pegging. Count first.
• Attention and mindfulness make for a smoother and more enjoyable game. Even better to keep things straight despite conversation and distractions.

Quality shuffling

• There is a tendency for like-cards to collect in crib. Shuffling well mixes up the deck for a fresh next round.
• Keep the bottoms of the deck guarded while shuffling. Seeing a bottom card can affect odds and probability for card selection and pegging. e.g. “I saw a 5 at the bottom, so less chance I’ll get stung leading with this 10”.
• Avoid misdeals as best you can.

Sportsmanship

• Overall, these tips are for going from good-to-great. They are by no means essential. By getting better and more mindful of these aspects of the game, you’ll become a better player, have more fun, and become more enjoyable to play with. But don’t take things too seriously. Prioritize sportsmanship over everything else.

By making sound decisions based on expected value and probabilities, you will increase your odds of winning. The rest adds to the experience. A good game of cribbage should feel like a dance — moving with the rhythms and phases of the game.

What else would you add?

Good crib!

Key aspects:

• The audio mixing is excellent. The way they introduce and mix in early versions, demos and tracks for the song into the episode audio adds a lot.
• The length is perfect. 20-25mins is plenty to explore a single track.
• Finishing the episode with a full-play. “And here is {track-title}, in its entirety.” This full listen gives you a chance to re-live the song, listening for all the aspects that were showcased in the episode.

There are many songs/artists that I would love to see showcased on this show — but obviously the production team can only do so much. This is why I think this concept should expand to tailor towards specific genres and sub-cultures. Think: Same concept and format, but for local music scenes.

This could be supported by public broadcasting channels (CBC Music, or East Coast Music Association), or hosted by independent podcasters well-connected in the music industry (my preference). Alternatively, Song Exploder could create a franchise model where they facilitate a more turn-key production in partnership with a local host/franchisee.

Would love to see this happen.

In a pivotal scene in the Star Wars saga, senator Palpatine highlights to Anakin Skywalker the power that can be derived from negative emotion. It is a powerful focusing tool.

Negative emotions are rich with energy. They animate the body, mind and spirit. When fuelled by anger or frustration, you create a vivid picture in your mind of what you do not want. You are displeased with the current status of things and feel terrible as a result.

While most people may wallow in these emotions, staying fixed on the negative interpretations of reality — it is possible to use this powerful energy to pivot your focus towards what you DO want.

We naturally drift towards that which we fix our attention upon. We shoot towards our target.

So, frustration or anger emerges, it is worthwhile to use that force to create a more vivid picture of what you do want.

Let the anger or frustration focus your desire and fuel your pursuit towards your goals.

When this is put into practice, it allows you to unlock the gifts that come with each emotional state. "Negative" emotions become navigation beacons that help to guide your attention.

Context — this post was inspired by a strategic planning session. Frustrations about current organizational realities can be used to clarify a brighter future (vision).

Today, I heard back from Mailjet with a fix for the Gmail deliverability issue and it seems to be working! Here is a breakdown of the fix:

Our deliverability team is aware of this issue, and are working actively on the issues with temporary deferrals of emails sent to Gmail. Our team is in the process of providing a solution to this problem at the earliest

To give to a better context Gmail and Yahoo's Email Security Initiatives for 2024 In an ongoing commitment to fortify email inboxes, both Gmail and Yahoo have announced the implementation of new protection standards for bulk email senders. Enhancing Email Compliance: A Guide to Gmail & Yahoo Changes in 2024 for Optimal Deliverability – Mailjet Help Center

In the meantime, we can offer you an easy way to ensure optimal deliverability to Gmail by customizing the return-path for your sending domain.

To create a custom return-path, you need to create a CNAME record in the DNS zone of your sending domain hosting account. * The CNAME record must point to the subdomain we use as the envelope address "bnc3.mailjet.com". Specifically, your record should be:

bnc3.your-domain-name.com IN CNAME bnc3.mailjet.com

Once you have created the CNAME record, please send me another message with the information below so that our technical team can setup the return-path on our end:

• The domain on which you set up the CNAME
• The API Key on which the custom return path should be used. Please note that an API Key can only have one custom return-path active at a time.

Sinch Mailjet Support

Once this process was completed, gmail deliverability improved and I was able to achieve a 10/10 on email-tester.com

Here's hoping it will be smoother sailing from here!

How it could look:

• An "all tags" page which listed tags with the number of related posts.
• "tags pages" that show all posts for a given tag, organized by newest to oldest and showing thumbnail previews of each (e.g.title, date, subtitle, image)
• "posts" displaying the individual posts.

Then, I'd like to be able to use this database/collection of posts to generate custom feeds. For example, a feed exclusively for "pharmacy" posts or for "all posts".

An example of a solution that is close to what I want is the Bashblog script. It assists in publishing posts and organizing them into tags. I'd want to customize this to simplify it a bit more.

This is a "someday/maybe" project though, since I don't have the coding knowledge to execute on it now, nor the time to learn how to do it. The short term path is to embrace the multi-topic chaos and publish ideas on the site using basic static HTML pages with a manually updated rss feed. Details on the publishing process here (updated as the process changes).

People have been writing blogs for ages and of course what I'm describing here is not really anything new. My goal is to learn a bit about how websites and blogging works, without just creating it with a static site generator. I'm close to having most of the functionality I'd want already.

On the first iteration of TI, I was sending via my server on port 25 (which had to be opened on special support ticket request to Vultr).

Then, I discovered that emails were bouncing off of Live, Hotmail, and Microsoft 365 Accounts. Solution there was to send a request to the Microsoft Outlook email deliverability department to make a case to un-block my IP (as per this post). That worked.

Most emails were sending successfully at this point, except a few less common domains (Eastlink, Sympatico), and some domains used by larger companies (ones hosted by Postmark, I think). I didn't resolve these.

With a newer iteration of TI, Mailjet is used as an intermediary for email sending, which bypasses the need to open up port 25. This change actually resolved the issues I was having with Eastlink, Sympatico, and Proofpoint hosted emails.

New problems with this change though... now I can't send to Gmail. Apparently Gmail is notorious for deliverability challenges. I'm hopeful that working with Mailjet support, I'll get Gmail receiving my emails...

In the meantime, I use my gmail accounts to send emails to domains that I know will bounce.

At first, I thought this was all a product of my inexperience (it is, to a degree), but I'm starting to sense that I'm not alone in these challenges. Mailjet cites "known issues re: Gmail", and today I discovered a blog post outlining a pretty bleak state-of-the-union for self-hosted email.

More to learn...

This page is a commentary and supplemental guide for Derek Siver's "Tech Independence". Follow the instruction on that page for detailed setup instructions.

Overview

• The servers are run on a virtual machine from Vultr.
• The OS is OpenBSD.
• I use ssh to login to the server from my laptop.
• All work on the server is conducted via the command line; Terminal on Mac.
• Server configuration and setup was assist through the use of Derek's sive.rs/ti.sh installation script.

Setup Process

1. Sign up for Vultr, with the specifications recommended by Derek.
2. Acquire a domain name if necessary. (I use Porkbun)
3. Set the domain nameservers to the Vultr defaults (ns1.vultr.com and ns2.vultr.com). This takes time to take effect. See "DNS propagation". Mine took ~40 hours to propagate to the server...
4. Verify the DNS name servers have propagated using DNS Checker . Once it shows the vultr nameservers, continue with Derek's instructions to access the server and run the setup script.

Additional Setup (optional)

• DMARC record (to support email deliverability) - more here
• Install Vim
• .profile and .vimrc configuration (to improve the user experience through UI customizations)
• Additional users (for additional email addresses; I have 2 main ones and a few for special purposes.)
• Setup cloud storage (I use StorageBox)
• Setup "aliases" to make common commands easier/faster to execute.
• Practice publishing to the website.
• Establish routine backups.

Comments

• If you're new to using the command line, it will take a bit of time to get comfortable. It gets easier with practice and is a worthwhile skill to develop, IMO.
• If you mess up, just restart the process as he highlights. It gets easier and faster to setup once you're familiar. The reps will help you understand the setup and process.
• Once it is fully setup and you are ready to start using the services, make sure you have a backup process in place. Using self-hosted services makes you more personally responsible for the safety, security and reliability of your data. Make sure to take that seriously.
• For a full list of tools and services I use, click here.
• For my web publishing workflow using this setup, click here.

Challenges

• Gmail deliverability (solution pending with Mailjet support).

Of important note: While Derek's installation script is helpful in getting started, it is important to learn about the underlying systems yourself to develop self-reliance. I am no expert, so obviously follow these personal notes with a grain of salt and do your own research. I am sharing my notes in case they may help someone along their journey.

Good luck!

What happened?

While experimenting with another VM to test out Immich as a photos backup alternative to Google Photos, I accidentally "reinstalled" my brandontoner.ca server rather than the experimental deployment... whoops! My face went pale as I realized my mistake and discovered that all of my server data and configurations had vanished at the click of a button.

How it resolved

Fortunately, I remembered that I had been running nightly backups of the user directories for my main accounts on my server. Which, hopefully, would allow me to restore everything to the pre-error state.

To get things back up and running, I reconfigured the server with the assistance of Derek's new ti.sh script for installing the basic setup of the server. Once the basic programs and configurations were reinstated, I could then restore my data from my backup drive to the user directories via rsync commands.

During the process, I documented any additional steps and configurations I had conducted in a note in Obsidian for future reference.

One lingering problem is that with the new ti.sh script, Mailjet is used to relay outgoing mail. With this, I can no longer successfully send to gmail accounts... surely this is an easy fix.

What I learned

• The 3-2-1 Backup Strategy
• Backblaze as a reasonably priced and reliable MacOS backup service (for an "offsite" component)
• Some stuff about CNAME records with the Gmail deliverability issue. Including DNS propagation and the fact that it takes a while.
• Most importantly: backups are essential. If you don't have a backup process you can trust and understand, make it a priority. You'll be glad you did.

I've always considered backups to be "a good idea", but a bit complex to figure out how to do it properly and reliably. I still largely feel that way — but at least now know more than I did and have a renewed interest in learning more to make my systems more robust.

It sure feels good to have things back up and running relatively unscathed. Phew.

• "uses" page (/uses)
• "now" page (/now)
• "feeds" page (/feeds)

/uses

• A place to list the various tools, services, configurations, etc.
• A place to showcase and share tool stacks to help others.
• Here is a collection I stumbled upon to showcase concept (very tech-centric): uses.tech

/now

• Popularized by Derek Sivers, a page to share information about your current status... where you are located, what you are working on, and any other priorities. "A public declaration of priorities".
• Here is a page dedicated to the concept: nownownow
• And here is a collection of examples

/feeds

• A place to post feeds associated with your domain... blog(s), podcast(s), etc etc.
• Discovered via this article.

What I like about these conventions is that they make it easy to discover key elements of a personal website, and create a development trajectory to fill out content that might belong in each of these buckets.

I love the idea of having a website that has each of these elements, with a stream of content on each, maintained to be reasonably current and fresh.

• Web files are served from my Vultr VM.
• New files and changes are published by mirroring a directory on my Mac to a directory on the VM.
• Web files are edited directly (html, css) using VSCode & iA Writer.
• Posts are added to RSS feeds manually by adding an "entry" to the /blog.xml file.

Publishing Process

• Copy template file
• Rename file and headers
• Write the post in iA Writer in Markdown
• Copy the HTML (Shift-CMD-C)
• Paste the HTML into the template in VSCode
• Tidy formatting
• Save the file
• Add links to the file on /index and /blog (or elsewhere if relevant)
• Add an "entry" to /blog.xml to push to the RSS feed (if relevant)
• Publish changes in terminal via rsync command

Details on Updating the /blog.xml file for RSS

• Create new "entry" by copy-pasting an existing entry
• Populate "id", "link", "title", "published" and "updated" fields by copy-pasting from the original post.
• Add the "content" of the post by copy-pasting the body of the html from the original post, wrapped in a CDATA field to render the HTML properly.
• Update any links from internal (e.g. /webpub) to external links (full url), using find & replace in VSCode

Questions, comments or ideas on how to improve this workflow? Let me know in the comments. I'll update this post as my process evolves/improves. ]]> https://brandontoner.ca/capture 2023-11-11T06:00:00-04:00 2023-11-11T06:00:00-04:00 ]]> https://brandontoner.ca/kombucha 2023-05-26T08:00:00-04:00 2023-05-26T08:00:00-04:00 Making kombucha at home is very easy! It's also more fun and much less expensive than buying it at the grocery store.

Here is the process that I use:

Supplies

• Kombucha Brewing Kit (I bought this one, but you could gather these supplies on your own)
  • 3L glass jug
  • cloth to cover the top
  • string, elastic, shoelace, etc (to attach the cloth to the jar)

Ingredients

• 6 tea bags (mix of black and green tea)
• 2 cups (500ml) starter culture (included in kit, gift from a friend's brew, or plain kombucha from the store)
• 1 cup (250g) of sugar

Method

First Fermentation (main fermentation process)

1. Bring 3L of water to a boil
2. Add teabags and remove from heat
3. Steep for ~15min
4. Remove teabags
5. Allow the tea to come down to room temperature (to avoid damaging the bacterial culture in the starter)
6. Add sugar, stir
7. Pour the room temp sweet tea mixture into the glass jar (leaving enough room for ~500ml)
8. Add 2 cups of plain kombucha (starter culture) +/- the SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast)
9. Cover the top of the jar with the cotton cloth and elastic/string.
10. Leave it to brew for 7-10 days (brewing time depends on the room temperature). Remove it when it's reached the desired degree of fermentation.

Second Fermentation (flavouring and carbonation)

1. Pour the kombucha into sealable bottles (air tight to trap carbonation).
2. Add flavouring (optional)
3. Leave sealed at room temperature for 2 more days.
4. Move to the fridge to stop the fermentation

Enjoy!

Fortunately, there is a workaround for this using a Google Chrome web extension.

Steps to Export:

1. Download "Share Your Garmin Connect Workout" from the Chrome App Store
2. Visit the Garmin Connect web application.
3. Create a workout (Training & Planning → Workouts → Select "Create a Workout" → Follow the steps)
4. Once finished, save the workout and give it a name.
5. Click the download button (created by the extension)
6. Share the JSON file with whoever you'd like to share the workout with (e.g. attach to an email or FB post)

Steps to Import:

Note: Ensure you (or the person importing the file) has the extension downloaded and installed.

1. Visit the Garmin Connect web application (as above).
2. Go to Training & Planning → Workouts
3. Click "Import Workout"
4. Select the JSON workout file.
5. Voila!
6. Once you have the workout in Garmin Connect, it should be available to send to your watch/device.