Current U.S. Debt: $16,800,000,000,000 (as of 4/7/2013) [1] Earlier this week I calculated out how much national debt we have per employed person (155,500,000 employed people as of Feb 2013 [2]) in the U.S.: $108,039. Add in the all the state and local government debt [3] and it’s $115,756 per working person. I have a … Read more
My readers from California will spot the irony in this… Over 73,000 Signers Support German Homeschooling Parents in Danger of Deportation Christian family seeking asylum; Obama wants to deport. Here’s a German family, the Romeikes, that believe in homeschooling their children, but in Germany that means jail-time and their children will probably be taken away. … Read more
Got my $44 UV-5RA Chinese built ham radio. For the price I couldn’t pass it up just to see how good a ham radio this cheap could be. Update 2014-05-11 It has been a little over a year since I first wrote this and BaoFeng has released several versions of this radio, UV-5RE, UV-82, FB-F8+, UV-B5, GT3, … Read more
(Updated: June 8, 2013. I’ve updated this post to clarify based on some questions I’ve received). For the clueless, ActiveSync is the protocol that allows you to sync your Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks with your messaging provider. Your two options to have an ActiveSync server is through a cloud solution (e.g Gmail, Outook.com, etc.) … Read more
With all the big banks charging fees I’m amazed that people don’t switch over to cheaper online banks. Two great places to find banking services with low fees are credit unions and discount brokerages. Here’s a Comparison of Bank Features (Google Docs) I wrote up comparing Alliant CU, Ally, Fidelity, Schwab, and ING Direct. The … Read more
(bought used) Starting miles: 77810 Ending miles: 94106 Because we drive less and don’t get typical discounts of having two cars (e.g. multi-car discount on insurance) our cost per mile went up, but total costs are lower. This is largely because driving fewer miles causes fixed expenses (insurance) to weigh in more heavily against operating … Read more
I’ll never understand this obsession with accumulating material wealth. You spend your entire life plotting and scheming to acquire more and more possessions until your living areas are bursting with useless junk. Then you die. Your relatives sell everything and start the cycle all over again. — Odo, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 1, … Read more
I just found out TomatoUSB can be used to manage internal DNS. On the Dnsmasq custom configuration add: local-ttl=1 address=/hostname/ipaddress That should have been in the documentation somewhere…
CrashPlan is a great way to backup your ZFS server, here’s a quick install recipe for OpenIndiana: Download the Solaris CrashPlan client from here: http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/download.html?os=SunOS Move the file to /var/spook/pkg then run…# sudo pkgadd (follow the prompts, do what’s obvious). Setup Crashplan service:# svccfg import /opt/sfw/crashplan/bin/crashplan.xml# svcadm enable crashplanObviously you’ll want to move the backupArchive … Read more