Category: Productivity

  • Laser Alignment

    Laser Alignment

    I’m going dive into the theory of laser alignment, show the math and the jigs I built to put that math into practice. This post is for someone who wants the “why” behind a lot of the online material on laser cutters. If you just want some practical tips on how to better align your…

  • All those wireless Mice! (from Taiwan)

    All those wireless Mice! (from Taiwan)

    If you are like us, you get too many mice and keyboards lying around. With 5 or six devices, and an equal number of receivers you can just plug stuff in to find what matches. That assumes the peripherals are working and haven’t been lost. Can we interrogate the usb receivers and discover their associated…

  • Quick(ish) Price Check on a Car

    Quick(ish) Price Check on a Car

    So, is it a good price? With my oldest daughter heading off to college soon, we’ve realized that our family car doesn’t need to be as large as it used to be. We’ve had a great relationship with our local CarMax over the years, and we appreciate their no-haggle pricing model. My wife had her…

  • Otis on Leadership

    In Shawshank redemption Otis “Red” goes before the parole board with promises to be better. He tries to play by the rules and repeatedly gets denied. Finally, he has had enough and lets them have it. He is done with their game, they can keep him there forever.  He speaks with the tired wisdom of…

  • Making PDFs editable

    I automate everything and PDFs are so easy to fill in automatically. It’s a digital world and we just live in it. It’s so frustrating to get a “protected form” that doesn’t allow for appending documents, automated form completion or even filling out fields. It’s silly because all of these forms are printable. Many years…

  • Protected: 2019 Travel

    There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

  • New Jersey School Heat Map

    This morning before church, I wrote some code to build a contour plot of schools in New Jersey. The “hot” reddish regions have the best schools and the cooler regions don’t. Tech Stuff: How it’s made This wasn’t that easy. Since I had all the code from my previous post, it should have been very…

  • Tax time automation

    Happy New Year! Bring in the new year with some code to transform USAA bank statements into a set of transactions for 2016. It is a little tricky because there are some 2015 transactions in the list and USAA puts transactions on two lines. To use, just save the bank statement pdf as text and…

  • July 4th Home Project: Thermostat Bracket

    This post is about how to use design tools to save time and build nice stuff at home using computer controlled machines (CNC). In addition to describing my design process, I’ve also included the helpful references I found along the way. Our old thermostat was too small for our wall. I could have replaced the…

  • CY2014 Quarter 1 Financial Review

    Chrissy and I review our spending on a quarterly basis. Updating every 90 days isn’t too long to correct mistakes and remember purchases, but it also allows for the busy multi-week sprints that life presents us. While we have used every financial management program available, I’ve found the most straightforward and flexible solution is to…