Greeneggs.info

Practical Objectivism

Daniel Cox — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:38:47 +0000

This is a sweet example of practical objectivism.

DD-WRT is Pretty Frickin Sweet

Daniel Cox — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:52:32 +0000

I’ve now been using DD-WRT for a while as my primary router firmware, and I have to say, it is pretty frickin sweet. If you haven’t tried it, you should.

It includes features a lot of out-of-the-box router firmwares don’t have, like:

static DHCP
UPNP and custom port-forwarding
traffic shaping
wireless network repeating

Also, the administration interface is simple and easy to learn. Check it out at http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/index.php.

Lol Economics

Daniel Cox — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:47:44 +0000

Nuff said.

All About Slicehost

Daniel Cox — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:26:58 +0000

As you may have noticed, this blog is now being hosted on a different server. I’ve signed up for a really cool VPS called Slicehost, which I plan to use for pretty much all my web services. It costs about $20 a month (which is less than the power bill to keep my aging server running in my house), has a dedicated T1 connection, and best of all, I get my own virtual machine with root access. This means I can do pretty much anything that I could do with my old server. I hope to be a Slicehost customer for many years to come. If you’re interested in Slicehost, please use the referral link below, and I’ll get a little bit of money if you sign up and decide to stay with them:

https://manage.slicehost.com/customers/new?referrer=21b948bc84cbaddc70ac860e9f439b70

Easy Finance Management with GNUcash

Daniel Cox — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:41:36 +0000

I started using GNUcash (a free accounting program) about a year ago. It has a lot of cool features for keeping tabs of your money. You can use it to keep track of stock trades, car payments, credit card transactions, and just about every other transaction under the sun. It also makes filling out tax returns a snap. The cool thing about this software is that it comes entirely free, and has the best documentation I have ever seen from an open source program. For those who are considering using GNUcash for the first time, I highly recommend the tutorial.

With version 2.2.8, GNUcash is even better. A lot of the bugs that were nagging me before have now been fixed. But wait, there’s more! The licensing issues with online banking for Debian and Ubuntu users have now been resolved, so the default package on both platforms comes with OFX support.

Of course, because it is free software, online banking has a few caveats. First, you have to use a clunky interface to set it up. However, that interface is documented pretty well on the GNUcash wiki. The second problem is a little harder to deal with. Some banks don’t advertise their OFX information online, and if you have an obscure bank (like mine), it’s not listed on that wiki article either. Fortunately, there is a real cool database for OFX information. If your bank isn’t listed on either of these sites, you’re stuck with trying to contact their tech support. Good luck, and have fun.