121–130 of 200 posts
Hire a cleaner once every 10-11 days to clean my apartment and do the laundry. Its surprising how much time you have if you don’t have to do dishes.
How do you not do the dishes for 10+ days? That said, my wife and I do the same thing. Plus have a Roomba. All told it means everything stays clean and we're only on the hook for laundry.
There are plenty of other ways to do this, but... I have a CC specifically for reoccurring bills. It’s automatically paid off every month and just by looking at that one debit it’s easy to notice if something odd happens and then track down what changed. Plus by adding it all together I tend to trim what services I keep paying for.
Your bank has an API for that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over the past 5 years, Nike has gone up by 100%, coke by 20%, Verizon by 15%, and apple by ~125%. The s&p500 has gone up by ~50%. So if you invested 100 in an index fund, you'd have 150, if you invested 100 split evenly in those 4 stocks, you'd have 165. Of course, if you invested in GE, you'd have lost money. And if you invested in Amazon alone, you'd have $500.
This analysis is flawed in two respects: 1. It neglects dividends. 2. The S&P 500 as presently constituted omits all the companies that were excluded during that time period (eg., went broke). If you just buy good solid companies that pay dividends, you do ok.
What are the good, solid companies 10 years from now? 20 years? When should I dump my current good, solid companies?
This might sound a little-bit stupid, but I automate locking/unlocking internet access on my phone and computer. That is to say, every night my computers and phone will lock me out[0] at a set time. Then in the morning I have to log 30 minutes of exercise (tracked by my heartrate on fitbit) to unlock internet access. I also have certain time-wasting sites like Reddit and Netflix locked out until I complete a sufficie…
What do you use to lock/unlock your gadgets?
Basic setup is that I wrote a script (against Kaspersky ToS) that can login and change the lock/unlock schedule and enable/disable website/application restrictions.
So it unlocks after I tell it to check Fitbits API, and disables restrictions after I tell it to check one of the challenge websites. Locking happens on at a configured time each night.
Lots of home automation fun with Home Assistant ( https://www.home-assistant.io ) * Self-hosted security system that e-mails me when triggered. It arms when everyone disconnects from the wifi and disarms when anyone in the home reconnects to wifi. Totally passive. Also arms at night when the kitchen lights have been out for 5 minutes after a certain time and disarms when motion patterns that can only be someone wakin…
I went through a phase of trying to automate _all_ aspects of my life. If I did a task more than 3 times, and it could be automated, I went ahead and wrote some scripts for that. Anyone will quickly learn there is a trade-off between managing the time it takes to maintain automation and the time you would spend just "doing" said task. After this realization, I started manually performing tasks, timing them, and stori…
I have a folder on my mail server called “Dead”. If I move an email to that folder then all subsequent emails to the same address as the first one go into “Dead/Match”. It’s driven by procmail and a script. When used with one-off email addresses you get a behavior that’s like unsubscribing, but without having to trust any “unsubscribe” links or processes, and also without having to edit any config files (it’s all dri…
I live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up wit…
I automate my garden. In the summer I have it configured with an automatic drop. I still get to play in my garden and there's always more annual maintenance to do, but the general watering and care is easily automated with a drip timer from home depot.
I live in a condo complex with a dog and no lawn. We learned after getting our dog that this place doesn’t want dogs going to the bathroom on any of the common area (makes sense but annoying to dog owners). We used to get a small patch of grass delivered every week but it was a hassle to swap each time. Also it was disgusting by the end of the week. Then I discovered porch potty. Got the version that is hooked up wit…
This has to be the most pointless and wasteful thing I read about all week.