Blog

  • Uber IPO

    Personally I wouldn’t touch the Lyft or Uber IPOs with a ten-foot pole. They’re both companies that haven’t made any significant profits and are largely reliant on new investor money coming into the business just to stay afloat.

    If they do eventually turn around and become profitable then maybe I’d reconsider but I see no reason to rush into a decision by buying at the IPO price. If something is a good investment today it’ll still be a good investment in 5 years.

  • StackOverflow April Fools

    StackOverflow has started their April fools joke for this year. They made the site look like something from the early 2000s with gifs and such.

  • Tor Monetization

    Its interesting that Tor nodes are operating at a loss while VPN companies are raking in the cash.

    For all practical purposes the Tor network is basically just a decentralized VPN service. Perhaps Tor could offer a paid fast lane (or introduce some way to automatically donate to nodes as you use them) to incentivize nodes to join.

    I also think Tor could gain quite a few more users by marketing to folks who are just trying to access websites blocked on their work/school WiFi.

  • Personal Domain

    I think buying a personal domain name is a worthwhile investment for anyone. There is just so much you can do with them for only $10/year.

    You can:

    • Create a portable email address that can easily switch between email providers
    • Host a web page that you fully control
    • Put web services like Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jabber, etc on it
    • Much more
  • Article 13

    Well looks like the European copyright reform passed. It seems to me that this is only going to limit the EU’s ability to compete with the rest of the world (specifically the United States and China) in the information technology sector.

  • Plex for Everything

    Something that I’d really like is to have a “hub” for all the various online media services I use. For example, I could connect my Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc. to it and see everything in one interface.

    Right now AFAIK the only way to do this is using something like Plex which requires you to purchases all the files yourself.

  • NextDock 2

    NextDock 2 is a cool project being crowdfunded right now. Basically it is a laptop with no onboard CPU, memory, or disk but it can be connected to any device that offers HDMI out to be used as a monitor (Android Phone, Raspberry Pi, Chromecast, etc.).

    If you’ve ever wanted a portable monitor with built in keyboard and a huge battery then you might wanna check this out.

  • F-Droid Repo Maker

    I have to say that I am seriously impressed with the F-Droid Repomaker utility. It’s well-designed and easy to use.

  • Participatory budgeting

    I recently found out about “Participatory budgeting” which is a democratic way of creating a national budget. Basically, each year when you pay your tax bill you decide how much money you personally will allocate to various government programs. For example, if you pay $100 in taxes you could choose to spend $15 on Military, $30 on Social Security, $20 paying down the national debt, etc.