twistedanimator

Hands down the best book I have read on money is Your Money or Your Life: http://amzn.com/0143115766

I'm a naturally frugal person, but the book helped me formulate new ways of thinking about money and my relationship with it. The major concept being that money is a representation of your life energy. You work X hours a day at an hourly rate of $Y. Knowing those numbers allows you to think about purchases in a new way. For instance, "That new phone will cost me 2.5 days of work" or "If someone offered me $500 or the new phone, which would I take?" If you chose the $500, then you know you don't need to buy the phone.

I would recommend Your Money or Your Life before all other financial "self-help" books. In fact, I think I'm going read it again.

And if you have an Android phone, I created an app for the section of the book about the Daily Dozen foods you should be eating every day. Here is a link if you are interested: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.slavick.da...

I love the thought that "eat more vegetables" constitutes dangerous advice.

I would like to know the ways in which people who already have an Echo use it. I have had one for months now and all I use it for is listening to music while I prepare dinner. Lately, the music has begun to stutter and that irritates me so much that I say "Alexa goodbye" and pull the plug out of the wall.

But who are we to say where he should apply his abilities? He may be interested in something new and that is where his next best contributions lie.

I know it's been said a million times already, but no way would I use this service after they shut down Reader.

Maybe they're just fishing to see how much marketshare they can take away from Evernote? If it's enough they'll keep it and improve it. But if it doesn't capture enough marketshare, I expect to see it culled in a few years as well.

And if you use Firefox, give pentadactyl or vimperator a try.

So do they have a policy of no instant messages or emails? I'd be pretty upset if I was forced to come into work only to continue to communicate with my coworkers through IM and email.

Just yesterday I was able to write a one liner on the command line to analyze my skype usage. I wanted to see if it was making financial sense to keep skype alongside my prepaid wireless plan.

You can download your last six months of skype activity from skype.com and they are in the form:

Date;Date;Item;Destination;Type;Rate;Duration;Amount;Currency "July 31, 2012 21:16";"2012-07-31T21:16:01+00:00";"+11234567890";"USA";"Call";0.000;00:00:10;0.000;USD "July 31, 2012 21:15";"2012-07-31T21:15:38+00:00";"+11234567890";"USA";"Call";0.000;01:17:02;0.000;USD

After 15 minutes or so, I came up with the following one liner:

cut -f7 -d";" call_history* | grep -v "Duration" | awk '{ FS=":"; s+=$1*60; s+=$2; if ($3 != 00) { s+=1 } } END {print s " minutes"}'

I could have done the same thing in perl or python in 5 minutes, but it was interesting to "program" only by hooking programs together to achieve the same thing.

After analyzing my skype logs, I found I used 1800 minutes. That would have cost me $180 with prepaid minutes, but only cost $30 with skype.

I was seriously coming here to say the exact same thing. Right now I am a web developer, but I've been dreaming about starting a medium sized aquaponics farm. I'm currently building a system that will use my master bath as a fish tank to learn the ropes.

You must not have much experience being around teenage boys. An improved test for pancreatic cancer is not something normally coming forth from that demographic.

Unfortunately, pentadactyl doesn't seem to work with Firefox 15, so I guess I'll have to stay at 14. I tried both 1.0rc1 and the latest nightly and neither work.

Ah, I hadn't clicked any of the links. I thought you had just linked back to their site.

By the way, I like your site. It makes it easy to cut through the cruft that always appears in reddit threads. Do you just grab all responses by the poster and the parent comment?

Why would scraping their site be illegal?

A couple months ago, reddit started refusing requests from my web scraper. Figured out they started checking the user agent and refusing connections that didn't look like they came from a user's browser. Unless I missed an announcement somewhere, it doesn't seem like they're overly friendly about allowing web scrapers.

I launched http://justthetops.com. It's a very simple site that remembers the top 10 posts for various subreddits on reddit.com.

It is very possible and was what I was going to do originally. However, I was worried that there would be thousands of subreddits to scrape, so I decided to just go with the top ones in terms of size. There are also a few that are included because they're interesting to me.

In the future I will either have a subreddit suggestion form or a way to only see the subreddits you're subscribed to. I really just wanted to get it out there and see if there was any interest before I put more effort into it.

Clickable: http://www.justthetops.com

Yeah, why would he publish the guy's face, but blur out his google account info? It smells like an ad to me as well.

The following link is a pretty thorough explanation. Much better than I could do in a few lines.

http://www.theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/

I noticed that they have copied the close tab behavior from Chrome. That's a pleasant surprise I didn't see mentioned in the release notes.

That's exactly what I did when I went to El Salvador last year. It cost me $30 for a routine cleaning as opposed to $150 in the US.

He should put 30 second clips on YouTube and then have links to the full video on vimeo.

If all you need is secure password syncing, you should check out LastPass (http://lastpass.com/).

I'm a pretty heavy user of Skype, but I would switch in an instant for that call blocking functionality.

I've been on a little Conway's Game of Life kick for the past couple weeks myself. Such a simple algorithm like this is great for learning a new programming language.

I recently started learning python, so I wrote an implementation using the pygame library. If you're interested, you can see it here: http://readysquid.com/blog/programming/conways-game-of-life/

Feel free to take the source and play with it if you'd like.

This is correct. When payroll was missed the first time, we learned that the software consultants we were working with had not been paid in a month. I can only assume at least the same is true for our hardware suppliers.

You bring up a very good point. I do not have any equity. I was always promised it, but of course it never materialized.

I was looking for something along these lines, but I really just want the h, j, k, l movement keys. Those combined with the / (search in page) and ' (search links in page) shortcuts would dramatically cut down my use of the mouse when browsing.

I have gotten my last 2 jobs with no connections whatsoever. Both were software developer positions for languages/frameworks that I had no experience with. My advice is to write a killer cover letter.

The cover letter is the most important part of any job search. In mine I explained my side projects that I work on and my insatiable love of learning new technologies. I was up front in both cover letters, stating that I had no experience in the language they were hiring for, but I have a verifiable track record of being a quick learner when it comes to technology.