This post explains a home-grown personal finance tool that aggregates transactions from various bank accounts and credit cards, auto-categorizes them, and presents information/analyses via a set of dashboards. All this is accomplished without sharing your banking credentials and financial transactions with a third party.

The pattern: How to remotely access a service that is bound to localhost and refuses to respond to requests not originating from localhost? The instance: If using Speedify CLI on a linux-based router with no GUI stack, how to nevertheless view the Speedify GUI in a web browser, from another device on the same network? This post documents some non-conventional hacks needed to get a working solution.

Home network schema

This series of posts describes the setup of a custom router for a home network. The router takes full advantage of multiple Internet connections, seamlessly manages Internet traffic when one of the connections drops or behaves poorly, and provides some additional functionality like firewalls, adblocking, VPN tunnels for specific clients, bandwidth shaping, network flow monitoring etc.

Home network schema

This series of posts describes how to set up a custom router from scratch for a home network. The router takes full advantage of multiple Internet connections, seamlessly manages Internet traffic when one of the connections drops or behaves poorly, and provides some additional functionality like firewalls, adblocking, VPN tunnels for specific clients, bandwidth shaping, network flow monitoring etc.

This post is a review of Relica Backup, the software I use and depend on to backup (and restore) all of my data across several computers. Relica seems to be relatively unknown on the interwebs; I have not yet come across any user reviews or articles that describe actual experience with the software. So this is my attempt to fix that. I am not associated with the Relica folks, just a satisfied user spreading the word about something I like 🙂

Recently, I have become aware of a burden of thoughts weighing down upon me. Intrusive, endless, unstoppable, uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts. If I desire to sit quietly for five minutes, without fruitless thoughts buzzing constantly in my mind… I can not! Sometimes, I become aware of a new thought arising.. in a parallel thought, I even realize that the newly arising thought is pointless and unproductive.. that I should not be entertaining it.. but that realization is impotent. I watch helplessly as the unwanted thought blooms and grips my mind for the next N minutes, until it is swapped out by another chain of thinking, often equally unwanted.

I have been experimenting with different recipes for a basic bread loaf to make at home without a bread machine. After many experiments, here is the one that works for me. It creates a fluffy, healthy loaf with good taste and lasts about 3 days.

This bread is made out of a mixture of all-purpose wheat flour (75%) and 100% whole grain wheat flour (25%). I would like to increase the percentage of whole grain wheat flour but need to conduct more experiments to create a loaf that is not dense.

If the striker thinks he scores
Or the keeper cries in shame
They understand not the crowd’s applause
I make, and hear and earn again
For I am the crowd and I am the ball
I am the triumph and the blame
I am the turf, the pies, the All
Always and ever, I am the Game.
It matters not who won or lost
Nothing is the score you made
Fame is a petal that curls in the frost
But I will remember how you played.

–Terry Pratchett (Unseen Academicals)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
–P.B. Shelley