If I could give some advice to my past self, it would be to immediately start living on half of my income. That way, I could have paid off debt immediately and started saving.

I wasn't interested in finances back then, but great blogs have cropped up since, like Mr. Money Mustache.

It's about early retirement and I'm not so much interested in that. But after ten years of working for the Man, I wanted to start freelancing. Turns out that if you have a family, you want to have quite a bit of money stashed away when starting.

So I kept working in a job I lost interest in, just to save half a year of income. Only then could I make the step towards starting a business for myself.

FTFA:

So to summarize: as a user, you can sometimes write to EFI memory.

That's currently all there is to it. There's no rootkit, there's no malware, etc. Just this space where you can hide and survive an OS wipe and reinstall.

I'm sure some will come up with a payload that uses this space to hide itself, no doubt about it. But currently, this is all there is to it.

After a long break in research I've been doing client work again. This client is pretty big, a small European airline company. For some reason they have a lot of trouble getting the Jira suite of products to run stable. Stash is offline complete afternoons. I find this quite bizarre. But is this really the Jira software, or does it have to do with the client's sysadmin team?

Even though this sounds reassuring, I started creating par2 checksums for my family pictures (and then back up the whole bunch, of course).

If you run OS X on the desktop, it installs nicely via Homebrew:

  $ brew install par2

Then use as follows:

  $ cd familypics
  $ par2create par2file *

And to verify:

  $ cd familypics
  $ par2verify par2file.par2

It takes about 5% of extra storage. If you run Linux, you can get that back by using btrfs and mounting it compressed.

FTFS:

So how do backups help you? Except for ZFS and btrfs (?), no file systems check for data integrity. You're not going to detect the bitrot taking place, and you'll happily send that rotten data to your backup until the corruption is noticed in some other way.

I really like the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic. Marco Arment has a nice review from 2013. He recently compared it to a Matias Ergo Pro.

Note that I'm a Mac user (yeah LOL Apple, I know right?) but with the right freeware, you're able to map, for example, the Caps Lock key to Escape. I used to work on an awesome Sun keyboard that had the escape key right there, for vi and all that good stuff.

The amount of misinformation in this topic is staggering.

There's enough cool stuff in the App Store that take a lot of the hurt away. I'm using iCab Mobile, an alternative to Safari that has many options, ad blocking one amongst them.

As for the comments that all browsers are just reskinned versions of an older Safari version, as far as I know the new WKWebView component makes it possible for alternative browsers to have equal speed compared to Safari.

Sometimes it -- what? Did someone attempt to hot-swap your CPU again? (-:

Perhaps at that exact moment, the deal expired or sold out? If you were at home, it would be interesting to SSH/VPN back to work and check (from a different IP address) if it really was a trick.

That is commendable. But hasn't it ever occurred that you promise a client to deliver a certain date, and you made a mistake in planning? I could imagine that rather than disappointing the client, you try and work overtime to make good on your promises. Obviously you didn't do that, so how do you solve those problems?

Hahaha wish I could mod this one up!

Is this true? I often get the feeling from the gaming industry that Q&A gets ignored and execs simply launch the game for whatever reasons.

Exactly. Basically the headline could say "mobile internet tax much higher than estimated: $34 billion dollars".

i wonder how this compares to 4K monitors. It seems this 1920 resolution has a relatively low DPI. I can get a 5K iMac, the whole 1920x1920 thing comes across to me as rather outdated?

Single-player didn't get dropped.