Monthly Archives: April 2022


Using Revolut Metal in Cyprus

In this entry, we will briefly describe our experience with “Revolut Metal” as a customer that resides in Cyprus. We will update this post as time passes and new data are collected.

Day 0

Pros

It was straightforward to change our plan and upgrade.

With a click, we could also convert the plan to an annual instead of a monthly one, which gave us a reasonably good discount!

In the tab “Accounts,” under the category “Net worth,” the “Savings” option, we can see some money being accumulated that is marked as “Metal cashback.”

The new metal card was immediately available to use online.

Cons

Under the “Accounts” tab, we clicked on the “Discover discounts” option, which popped up a video. At the bottom of the video, there was a button labeled “View my Rewards” we clicked on it, but nothing showed up. We could not find a page with rewards available for people residing in Cyprus.

Day 11

The metal card arrived at our door in a black envelope!

Day 12

The maximum cap for Revolut Metal Cashback is 13.99 euros per month.

Day 20

Revolut credit cards cannot be used with the Bank of Cyprus wallet application, nor can they be used with Google Pay for people that reside in Cyprus, as Google Pay is not available to Cypriot citizens.

Day 53

The maximum number of disposable virtual cards daily is six (6)!

Day 90

We used the travel insurance of the Metal plan, the reimbursement was not as much as we would hope, but at least it covered a large portion of our expenses.

Day 103

Our metal card information was copied, and someone tried to use it illegally. Revolut spotted it early on and froze the transactions. Then we were notified, and once we declined the transactions, they issued a new metal card with customization for free.

Day 140

Even though we got a notification that we could add a Revolut card to Google Pay, it still did not work:

Your bank doesn’t support tap to pay with your watch on your card. Contact your bank fro more info or add another card.

The error we got when trying to add the card to Google Pay

We tried to add a card while no watch was connected to the phone and still got the same error.

Day 173

Apparently, if you have multiple requests on a “Single-use virtual card” and authorize all of them before the first one is billed, you can perform multiple transactions on a single “Single-use virtual card”! We accidentally did this with two transactions on one “Single-use virtual card.”


Rough notes on setting up an Ubuntu server with docker

Static IP

First, we set up a static IP to our Ubuntu server using netplan. To do so, we created the following file:

/etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml

using the following command

sudo nano /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml;

and added the following content to it:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# For more information, see netplan(5).
network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp3s0f0:
      dhcp4: no
      addresses: [192.168.45.13/24]
      gateway4: 192.168.45.1
      nameservers:
          addresses: [1.1.1.1,8.8.8.8]

To apply the changes, we executed the following:

sudo netplan apply;

Update everything (the operating system and all packages)

Usually, it is a good idea to update your system before making significant changes to it:

sudo apt update -y; sudo apt upgrade -y; sudo apt autoremove -y;

Install docker

In this setup we did not use the docker version that is available on the Ubuntu repositories, we went for the official ones from docker.com. To install it, we used the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release;
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg;
echo   "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null;
sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io;

Install docker-compose

Again, we installed the official docker-compose from github.com instead of the one available in the Ubuntu repositories. At the time that this post was created, version 1.29.2 was the recommended one:

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose;
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose;

Increase network pool for docker daemon

To handle the following problem:

ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

We created the following file,

/etc/docker/daemon.json

using the command:

sudo nano /etc/docker/daemon.json;

and added the following content to it:

{
  "default-address-pools": [
    {
      "base": "172.80.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    },
    {
      "base": "172.90.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    }
  ]
}

We executed the following command to restart the docker daemon and get the network changes applied:

sudo systemctl restart docker;

Gave access to our user to manage docker

We added our user to the docker group so that we could manage the docker daemon without sudo rights.

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER;

Deploying

After we copied everything in place, we executed the following command to create our containers and start them with the appropriate networks and volumes:

export COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=120;
docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans;

We had to increase the timeout as we were getting the following error:

ERROR: for container_a  UnixHTTPConnectionPool(host='localhost', port=None): Read timed out. (read timeout=60)
ERROR: An HTTP request took too long to complete. Retry with --verbose to obtain debug information.
If you encounter this issue regularly because of slow network conditions, consider setting COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT to a higher value (current value: 60).

Stopping all containers using a filter on the name

docker container stop $(docker container ls -q --filter name=_web);

The above command will find all containers whose names contain _web and stop them. That command is actually two commands where one is nested inside the other.

#This command finds all containers that their name contains _web, using the -q parameter, we only get back the container ID and not all information about them.
docker container ls -q --filter name=_web;
#The second command takes as input the output of the nested command and stops all containers that are returned.
docker container stop $(docker container ls -q --filter name=_web);

Free dial-in to WebEx

The following video demonstrates how to dial into a WebEx online meeting without using the WebEx client.

In some countries, there are no toll-free numbers for people to call. Not having toll-free numbers can be problematic for people with issues with their connection or the WebEx client is not working for them.

From our experience, we noticed that there is usually a US-based toll-free number available for most WebEx meetings (a cheaper package for the owner, maybe). Considering some people’s problems and the US-based toll-free number, we propose dialing in to the meeting via Viber.

Viber offers a service called “Viber Out.” This service allows you to phone call almost anywhere globally as if you were performing a local call (so you get lower rates).

Our proposal is the following since WebEx offers toll-free numbers for the US, then use “Viber Out” to perform that free call and join your meeting. To the best of our knowledge, Viber should not charge you as their partners should not charge them for this call.

Hope it helps; it helped us!

We cannot be sure if Viber will change its policy in the future, so be sure to check where and when you use your financial tools.