…in which your blogger finds he has to take several deep breaths at the sheer vacuity and cluelessness of an anti-Tesla-solar-roof guy who tries to use a Net Present Value calculation to show that said solar roofing is not worth it. In essence, he’s saying, “I think it’s crap, ergo I’ll fudge something I don’t understand to show I’m right.” […]
READ MOREBack in August 2015, I wrote a blog post about the sleazy auto-warranty companies mailing me trying to get me to sign up after I’d bought out the lease on my wife’s car. It’s turned into one of the more popular posts on this site, so, without further ado: it’s time for another sleaze! […]
READ MORENumerology, like a whole bunch of New Age-y things, is a complete load of old bollocks. If you want to see some “meaning” in a bunch of numbers, those associations will be there to spot. Sometimes you can be convinced enough to put them on a lottery ticket and watch your money disappear. […]
READ MOREYou might know the feeling. You’ve got a flight, 2+ hours. You’ve prepared and uploaded a bunch of ripped DVDs to your tablet, at least one or two of which you’ll watch during the flight. You pop your headphones on as the doors are closed and you start the first video. […]
READ MOREFrom a site I’m the webmaster for, a list of requests that caused a 404 not found error: […]
READ MORETen months ago – 10! It seems like yesterday – I upgraded my Dell XPS 13 to the latest version at the time and purchased a Dell TB15 Thunderbolt dock to go with it. Although the laptop is great, the dock has been anything but. Let’s put it like this: it took a long while for the drivers to stabilize enough for me to actually use it properly. Where ‘properly’ means some approximation of correctly. (For example, the Ethernet port was incredibly flaky and so I bought a Plugable USB-C dock to help out.) It finally got to the point where I could bring my XPS 13 back from a trip, plug it all in, and have everything working within, oh, I don’t know, 5 minutes. […]
READ MORESo, just before Christmas, I switched to using a client-side library to highlight the code in my blog posts. The library I chose was Prism JS, and it works by marrying up some JavaScript and CSS to specially decorated pre and code elements so that their content (the code itself) is highlighted nicely. […]
Next on my saga of finding the best replacement for Microsoft Money – well, OK, the best for me – is Moneyspire. Actually, I half-heartedly tried this out some 8 months ago, but I wasn’t feeling the urge at the time and I stopped. At that time they produced a free version for a single account (if I recall correctly) but that’s now been dropped: you can get a two-week trial version with limited accounts and transactions, or pony up some cash for the Basic or the Plus version. I Paypaled $75 for the Plus version; in for a penny, in for a pound. […]
READ MOREWell over a year ago, I upgraded my main machine at the time to Windows 10, and the one app that caused install and running issues was Microsoft Money. Since then it’s been pretty stable for me (and I’ve even got it running on a new, totally different machine), but I’m always well aware that one day, I’m going to run into some insurmountable problem with it, and then I’m hosed. So, better to think about a replacement for it while it still works, and what better time for that than over the New Year, when nothing much is going on and I have a long weekend. […]
READ MOREOnce upon a time, I wrote a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that took code that had been copied from Visual Studio to the clipboard and converted it to an HTML pre block for my blog posts. The different colors were maintained during this conversion (in essence VS copies the code as RTF) so that the code displayed here in my blog posts would be nicely highlighted. I even published it to GitHub so that it could also be used for Open Live Writer too. […]