Quicken Classic for Mac is a good personal finance tool—it simplifies and automates most of my financial tracking. But there are a few tasks I do manually every month: Not anymore. Both of those are now automated. Anthropic recently released a beta feature for Claude Cowork which allows it to control a Mac. A simple … Read more

My Proxmox backup strategy has been to backup all the VMs to an onsite Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). Then sync that backup daily to a remote PBS server–this works well–but it requires maintaining a remote server. However… Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) added Sync to S3 object storage as a Tech Preview with their latest 4.0. … Read more

I was sitting in the living room, working on the computer. I heard a dog barking out front that sounded just like Blaze. But I knew it wasn’t Blaze because he was in the backyard with Kris. Then I heard a woman out front who sounded just like Kris. But I knew it wasn’t Kris, … Read more

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. – Ecclesiastes 8:11 ESV

After years of watching Ziply install Fiber all over North Idaho and being on the waiting list, Ziply Fiber (referral link) called. Fiber is available at my house. I already have 1Gbps symmetrical with Ting, but Ziply offers faster, cheaper, and a larger variety of plans. In Sandpoint they offer 100 Mbps, 300 Mbps, 1 … Read more

I spent some time over Christmas break simplifying and reducing the cost of our cloud backups. I wrote about the 7 Backup Principals on the MacBook Backup Strategy post and the same applies here. My TrueNAS server consists of primarily SMB shares–videos, documents, files, old computer archives, and a webdav share which I use for … Read more

I simplified our backup strategy for our MacBooks. Here’s where I landed: 7 Backup Principles The most comprehensive yet essential list I’ve come across is the seven characteristics of a backup plan created by Ross Williams: I’m using two backup solutions: Time Machine Backup to TrueNAS (local) The MacBooks primarily backup to Apple Time Machine … Read more

It was -15°. The furnace died. I cranked up our gas stove in the living room to get us through the week. In the midst of this, our utilities company sent out an alert asking us to conserve gas. Both our primary and secondary heat sources run on gas, so maybe I need to diversify. … Read more

A couple of people have asked how I keep track of Health Savings Account (HSA) transactions; so here’s how I do it in Quicken. Quick summery of HSA Accounts: Health Savings Accounts are a way to save for health expenses if you have an HSA eligible (HDHP) health insurance plan. I always maximize our family’s … Read more

I’ve always allowed comments on this blog, and even allow people to disagree. I rarely moderate comments except when they’re inappropriate. But one of the issues I have to deal with is comment spam. I moderated the comments by hand for well over a decade but it gradually turned into hours of work each week. … Read more