If you are like me, you may have a drawer full of old laptop harddrives, USB cables, SD card, PCI cards, PCMIA cards, and maybe a few motherboards. I don’t worry about it too much, as I used to have a trunk full of these odd items…that I never used again.
What you can do with old drives is quickly turn them into external storage devices for on-site backup, storage while traveling, or for sharing large amounts of files with friends and family when they visit your faraway abode. I’ve used this Sabrent enclosure that requires no screws and is right around ten bucks. Oh and the USB cable that comes with it is the standard USB 3.0 on both sides, so you can reuse the cable on other devices without worrying about micro-, mini-, or any other metric-prefix-type-USB.
Thankfully I am down to just four external harddrives: one 160GB, two 500GB, and one 1TB. There is really no point in keeping the 160, so I used the command line utility shred to overwrite any extraneous data.
If you have old electronics (even harddrives) you can recycle them at Best Buy or Staples so they don’t end up in a landfill somewhere.
One annoyance I found is that some sites won’t allow direct downloads but only streaming through apps. I mostly download mp3s to a flash drive and listen to podcasts through the dashboard in my car (2005 Prius with all the fixin’s). So eventually I may be forced to listen to everything through Stitcher or Google Play.
So today I (mostly) completed the workout I started Sunday, which was a heavy round of squat, bench, press and deadlift. I omitted the squat sets due to my wimpy squat rack and dis the deadlift portion today. I was going for 5 reps of 450lbs deadlift, but could not get the third rep. My brother encouraged me to realize, “hey, I did two reps of the highest weight I ever pulled” rather than “set incomplete.”
Here is the graph of my press, bench, squat, and deadlift since November 2018.
If you are tracking your spending (and you really should…there are many choices for OSS finance software out there…), it is easy to pull a report and say, “I’ve spent $4,554.96 on groceries so far this year. Holy crap that is a lot!”
Another way to look at it is the opportunity cost or what you would have spent on an equivalent product, say if you had outsourced the product. In this case the product is groceries (whether from a grocery store, 7-11, local bodega, or from your local dairy. So with the above amount, I spent roughly $4,555 over 105 days, which equates to $43 a day and just under $9 per person in my family. All for mostly organic, whole foods (don’t look on the top shelf).
I just read…skimmed J.D. Roth’s post about turning 50 wherein he riffed on his 50 nuggets of wisdom for the year. His paragraph about habits reminded me about reading The Power of Habit last summer, combined with my habit tracker in my Bullet Journal. I’ve been bullet journaling (bulleting?) for my fourth year now and find it an excellent tool to quickly write down notes, but more importantly serve as a a brain dump. Each month has a calendar, random list of tasks to do, and a habit tracker. I try to use it to see how much water I drink throughout the day (moderately useful) and how many days I go without alcohol (interesting). I’ve also tracked getting 8 hours of sleep a night and how days in a row I’ve gone with staying calm with my sons.
Duhigg talks about how we can’t change a habit, but rather change the reward or the cue. I’ve found that if I am feeling the need for something sweet, I will recognize this and eat a spoonful of coconut oil or almond butter, rather than to to chocolate. Or if I am upset at my family, I will recognize this and force myself to hug them or snuggle on the couch. This releases oxytocin (I hope it does…I’ve never measured…or maybe it’s serotonin?) and the anger lessens. See Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last for more about our world of hormones and when they visit. Also, go read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens for his discussion of how things or events don’t make us happy, but serotonin does.
My favorite meal for years has been breakfast casserole in a 9″x13″ glass dish. My go-to recipe is eggs, sausage, cheese and whatever leftovers are in the fridge.
Today I relied on this recipe. Unfortunately I didn’t have granny smith apples, so I fried the ones I did have in bacon grease prior to putting them in the dish. I really enjoy the kitchn and the spruce recipes.
If you are like me, my dopamine levels love seeing my net worth go up! My wife and I have been tracking our net worth for about seven years now. We migrated from a spreadsheet on our laptop to using Google Sheets. I know, I know: this can open a can of worms regarding the privacy/security of Google “knowing” how much I have in certain funds (I’m sure Sergei Brin keeps hitting F5 on his laptop when I type…).
This workbook has grown over time and today it houses seven sheets. I have tabs for Analysis, Net Worth over Time, Assets, Liabilities, LES template (aka what my paycheck breakdown looks like), Investment Template, and an estimated Retirement Income. The Investment Template came as a free download from one early retirement couple’s book, but I can’t recall who they are or what their book is.
The key functions in Google Sheets are importxml() and GOOGLEFINANCE(“TICKER SYMBOL”). Basically if you put the number of shares you have in one column and use the formula above to pull the price, you can multiply these columns to get the value of your holdings.
For those of you federal workers that have TSP shares (G, F, C, S, I or the lifecycle funds), the ability to track your holdings has changed slightly due to the TSP website’s changing of its share price history. To wit.
Here is the sheet for you to copy. Let me know if you have questions on how to use.
After eight long years, I finally built the lifting platform I had read about and dreamed about. Thanks for a 3 bay garage, temperate climate, and the Art of Manliness, I completed the 8’x8′ platform in my garage.
Before building the platform.
In October I started compiling the pieces by buying a use squat rack on Craigslist for $80. Then Dick’s had the barbell set and some pads. I bought a flat bench, weight rack, extra barbell, bumper plates and better clamps for the ends of the barbell. We were near a Tractor Supply a month ago, so bought the two 4’x6′ mats. Today I finally rented a truck from Home Depot, bought four OSB boards and one oak plywood board.
Total costs below. I didn’t count the screws or the bit holder for my drill as these will be used for other projects. I used 1″ screws for putting the OSB together and 1 1/4″ screws for screwing the rubber mats into the OSB and the plywood into the OSB.
I went with the OSB instead of plywood as they had this in 5/8″ and the Home Depot lumber expert mentioned that it deals with water better than particle board. I also chose the oak plywood as opposed to fir, since I figured that I’m here and might as well spend the extra $20 now and not regret it in 6 months. And then I talked to a coworker who informed me that it is only an oak veneer on top, so maybe I paid extra for something that didn’t matter.
Just getting the boards out of the truck and arranged on my garage floor was a workout. Finally got the OSB arranged and ready to be screwed together.
Right angles are your friend. I didn’t have a long straightedge or someone to hold the chalk line so I measured 1′ increments to lay out the grid.Using the carpenter’s square to space the screws.The finished OSB screwed together.Next the screwed in plywood, only around the perimeter. Finished layout.
I used some extra rubber mat pieces to prop up the weight rack off to the right and some other to protect the floor from weights. Brett McKay and Matt Reynolds said they did it in an hour, but it took me the better part of a day. Other note: I did not bolt the squat rack into the platform as I am leaving room for potentially buying a sturdier rack in the future. This one only holds 300lbs so I’m close to maxing out this one’s capacity for squat.
After installing Xubuntu in lieu of Lubuntu I took a look at what applications I use on my laptop. Chrome is open almost all the time for email, blogging, checking finances, etc., so if you want to know about Chrome I’ll let Google it.
Desktop open-source applications make up most of the applications I use that are installed on my machine, with the exception of Chrome and Crashplan for Small Business. Sidenote: I went with Crashplan Pro after they ended support for personal users because of their end-to-end encryption, continuous backups, and support for Windows and Linux users
LibreOffice: Have been using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office for close to ten years with only minor complaints regarding formatting when opening documents between Office and LibreOffice. However, the formatting issues have gone down significantly. LibreOffice supports several extensions, such as Solver (for operations research optimization problems), so that is very helpful.
VLC (audio and video files): Very useful for playing and editing videos and music files. Need to splice some mp3s for continuous playback? Play a DVD? Make a music playlist? All accomplished, all for free.
GIMP (images): The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free substitute for Adobe Photoshop. I am not a master manipulator, but this program will allow you to touch up images, create vector graphics, and copy human faces to future memes waiting to go viral.
Zim wiki (notes, writing projects): Useful for linking project notes, calendars, or any work you want to show linkages to. Also useful for blog page edits not yet ready for draft primetime.
Calibre (ereader manager): Got an ereader? Like ebooks? Calibre can manage, convert, and otherwise edit your ebooks regardless of your hardware.
The below list of three web-based applications I use everyday for exciting tasks such as password management, email subscriptions, and to-do lists.
Lastpass (password manager): There are password managers like it, but this one is mine. Used to use a spreadsheet with all my passwords, with a mediocre password, until I got wise six years ago.
Gmail (seriously?): If you don’t know what this is, I commend your for your ignorance of cultural technological phenomenon over the past twenty years.
Todoist (to-do list): This puppy works on my Android phone, work computer, and home laptop. You can label tasks, add them to projects, share tasks with others, and (best of all) implements a markup language that recognizes date references such as “File taxes on April 15th,” Take wife to dinner on 14 February” or “Train at Jedi Academy on Yavin 4 tomorrow.”
So if you are looking for open-source software for creating documents, editing videos, editing photos, or managing your productivity, consider the above options.
I’ve been using Lubuntu for almost five years following the ending of long term support for Windows XP on my Asus EeePC netbook. After upgrading to Lubuntu 18.10 a few weeks ago, the laptop refuses to show me a menu bar. It has also been very slow (first world problems…) for many moons now. So, I’ve decided to take the plunge and migrate to Xubuntu in lieu of Lubuntu.
We have been using Crashplan for several years now, so I can always download my files from their server, but took the last twenty four hours to copy my files to an external drive and will start installing Xubuntu shortly. If you have old harddrives, Sabrent makes an inexpensive enclosure that has no screws.
This means reinstallingecryptfs for sensitive financial, legal, and medical files which is always fun.
