This year for Thanksgiving, we decided to spend it with my wife's family in Santa Cruz. Our son would take the train from Davis to Santa Clara and we'd pick him up at the train station. Since we were going to be seeing him, he had a list of things for us to bring him such as his camping gear, laundry soap, a suitcase so he could use it to come home on winter break and plastic containers to store…
About 24 years ago, I started having symptoms of ulcerative colitis and then was diagnosed right after I got married. I won't draw any conclusions about what caused me to develop the condition at that time. I've been keeping it under control, for the most part, primarily through medication. When I was diagnosed, there weren't that many choices; now there seem to be a bunch. Every few years since…
The other day, my son came to me and said his monitor wouldn't turn on when plugged into the surge protector and that the "building wiring fault" light was lit. I told him to try the surge protector in another outlet and circuit and he said that it was still lit on the same circuit, but not on other circuits. As I was working, I told him to wait until my father came over later and that they could…
A few weeks ago I read an article about how celebrities and famous people were ripping out home automation systems because they were hard to use and unreliable. I kind of laughed at the article because the systems that were likely created by "professionals" missed one of my main points about home automation and that is the system must augment, but not replace manual operations. If someone walks…
When I first learned to drive, I always relied on checking a map prior to leaving so that I knew where to go and kept a map or map book (Thomas Guide) in my car in case I got lost. When MapQuest (remember that?) came to be, I replaced checking the map with printing out the directions to my desintation. For longer trips, I went to AAA and got a TripTik travel planner which was really neat at the…
I was chatting with a co-worker the other day and we were talking about working in an office. For knowledge workers going back to an office may have little value, but for managers they really have no way to measure if a person is being "productive" either at home or in the office, so the theory may be that if a worker can be seen not "goofing off", then they are productive. However, is that a good…
In our trips to the bin store , we kept encountering silicone liners for air fryers. After seeing them, I suggested to my wife that maybe we should get an air fryer to see what all the hype was about. She found one on the local "buy nothing" site and picked it up (free is a good price for trying something out). The first thing we made was French fries (pre cut, frozen ones from Trader Joes) and…
When I transitioned my blog to a virtual server many years ago, it worked adequately with the version of Wordpress and MySQL that I used. Over the years, Wordpress and MySQL required more and more resources to run. I didn't really want to upgrade my virtual server for a hobby, so I kept tweaking the settings to ensure that the server would still run. Unfortunately the server started having more…
I've converted my blog to a static blog so that I no longer have to maintain the database and other things that were causing me issues. At the moment, it isn't pretty and comments aren't here, but I'll try to bring them back.
At the height of the pandemic, I started to think a lot about retirement. When I was 12, my father started me on the path to retirement by setting up an IRA for me. While this may seem young, experts say that time is the best way to build a nest egg (unfortunately due to tax law changes, I can't establish an IRA for my son as it requires him to have income to offset his contributions). Throughout…
There has been a lot of discussion in the last few years about people working from home where it went from almost no one to most office workers working from their homes. My experience working from home differs from most people as it has been part of who I am for 25 years, way before it was what every one did. My first time working from home was in 1998 when the company I worked for closed its…
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about fixing the SB36512-F6 soundbar as sometimes we just couldn't hear anything from it. My "fix" seemed to work for awhile, but over the last few months, the problems have been worse. We would start a show using Channels or Netflix (primarily) and got no sound. Lately the volume buttons wouldn't work (through HDMI-CEC ) which is also frustrating. Through a…
I’ve been carrying a wallet for something like 35 years in my back pocket. Initially, I carried my ATM card and a few dollars. When I got my driver’s license, I added that to the mix. Slowly over the years, cards just kept getting added, such as my insurance card, student ID, CPR card, credit cards, EMT card, AARP card, etc. It got to the point that my wallet was quite packed, and I…
When I started learning about USB-C, I was excited to standardize on cables instead of having all kinds of cables and having to travel with a ton of cables. However, years ago, I read about a Google engineer who analyzed USB-C cables to find out which ones had charging problems or could damage devices. Fast forward, many years later there is still no way to tell what cables are good and which ones…
Last year, I wrote about ditching Paperless and storing all my documents in the Finder. This was driven by 2 main things. The first was I didn’t know how long Paperless would be around as it was getting kind of dated. And second I wanted to be able to see my documents and receipts on any device. Now that I’ve been using the Finder for a year, I can say that the transition has been…
Several years ago, I replaced the networking gear at my parents’ place with a UniFi Security Gateway, access points, etc. The setup has been working reasonably well and the only major issue was when the USG died and I had to replace it (turns out it was probably just the power supply, but I learned that too late). While the USG performed adequately (they only have a 100 Mbps down/10 Mbps up…
This past summer I was reading 3D printing posts on Reddit and saw the mention of “bin stores” where people were purchasing filament and other 3D printing accessories for cheap. I started looking at what a “bin store” was and learned that they are stores that buy up Amazon (and other company) returns by the pallet load and sell the contents by spreading them out on tables…
As I’ve written , I switched to Consumer Cellular in July in an effort to save a little money. While I’ve been an AT&T customer for many years, I periodically have looked to save money by switching carriers. When I turned 50 this year, I received an offer to join AARP and in the offer was a discount for Consumer Cellular. This was another wake-up call to check for a new carrier.…
As someone who tries to be thrifty, I routinely look at recurring charges and see how I can save some money. I’ve been using AT&T for cellular service for many years on various plans with various discounts. Last year I added a teacher appreciation discount (my wife is a teacher) and brought the rate down a little. I’ve been eyeing other carriers and MVNO s for awhile and gave Visible a…
When I was designing ReceiptWallet, I was concerned about the database being corrupted and losing all my data. I decided that as a backup to the database, I'd store all the files as PDFs (later in life it would store other types of files, but for the most part people only stored PDFs) and would embed all the metadata as PDF keywords that could be recovered. The keywords in the PDFs also served as…