Apple seems to be crippled by GPL3 on a few things, which pisses me off as a Mac user. Samba is the obvious issue, but there are plenty of others. Yosemite was a bad upgrade. I do love the concept of integrating the various devices seamlessly, but it isn't quite there yet.

I'm proud of my SnapBack-esque pull backups set on a NAS drive. The NAS has backup priveledges on the laptops, and pulls data via rsync. The laptops have no access to the NAS drive except for ssh. Provides linked snapshots hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Just need to get a second drive running in a few months.

Only challenge is that since the laptops are OSX I don't copy the resource forks, but that could be addressed if I really cared...

Backup>Snapshot>Redundancy for disaster recovery. It is the reverse for operating issues.

For item 4, you are still not addressing the vulnerability issues that adding Samba and a web server add to the equation.

Personally I am in a similar situation with this part, and will eventually get "extra" functions I have the router doing over to a NAS drive. (My NAS drive just needs to do pull-backups via rsync.) For Transmission, I personally would slap it on a Raspberry Pi or NAS drive in a DMZ off the router.

The Fry's near me isn't going to last that much longer, at least not in its current incarnation. Who knows how much longer the Fry Brothers will keep it going...

They failed to get on the Maker trend for sure, but the reason is simple-- there was better margin in phones. 20 Years ago they also failed to embrace the Internet; their catalog was originally a big part of their success and brand identity, and they lost that. Many of the products they carry are crap, and they dedicate 20% of the store to fairly obscure products.

I wish a SparkFun or Adafruit could take over Radio Shack in the retail world and be successful, but I can't imagine a scenario where that would work financially. Is there someone similar for Ham radio equipment and audio?

RIP RSH.

Closest product I have seen is a href="http://www.mini-box.com/picoUPS-100-12V-DC-micro-UPS-system-battery-backup-system">PicoUPS. Takes a 12v battery and maintains a constant DX output. With a standard 9Ah battery you could run most small devices for at least 8 hours.

Personally surprised that there aren't any 12V power supplies that can provide 3-4 regulted 2A outputs. Eliminate multiple wall warts and give yourself battery backup as well. I would love to have all the home networking gear and a NAS in one box with backup power. If you really want to get fancy, you could even have adjustable outputs.

Audit risk. You might still get audited, but anecdotally the risk is substantially lower. If I pay $3k more to an accountant over 10 years and reduce my chances of being audited from 80% to 30% it is worth it to me. I don't think I am doing anything wrong, but I did notice strange output from TurboTax that I could never resolve, and my income level is higher now. If you are audited, the IRS WILL find things you are doing wrong, or that you can't prove you are doing right.

My wife's single-person corporation gets much less value from the CPA, but we do play a game there by paying her minimum wage and putting everything left into her 401k. It is legal and justifiable, but abnormal and likely to be flagged.

The progression seems to go (by income): Pen, Turbo Tax/HR Block, CPA, CPA + Tax Advisor... The thresholds have just shifted down a lot over the last couple years.

The problem (looking at you, E*Trade!) is that the numbers between the Schedule D information (realized gains and losses) does not match the information needed to prepare form 8949. If you have any wash sales, it gets worse. So, the brokers report inconsistent numbers to the IRS. Sound like a good chance for an audit?

I pay $350 so my accountant can write "various." He is taken much more seriously than I am. Back when I used TurboTax, I had to make a spreadsheet to generate a TXF file to import in... various would be much better.

I get about 10GB of email a year, and do my best to purge what I can up front, but also try hard to save everything. Most of the girth is due to file attachments... And yes they really should have been saved to the file server, but sometimes it is missed. Little obscure pieces of information often come up as being useful years later-- one recent example was trying to figure out how certain financial information was derived 5 years ago.

But the bottom line is 99% of the information stored will never be used again after 6 months. Automatic expiry assignments would be cool, but wow that would be tough to track.

And, as an engineer, if you understand the mathematical term "combine," then you should not be touching your own taxes...

If you have capital gains it isn't really worth preparing yourself anymore. If you are in the top 5% of earners it isn't worth preparing yourself. If you have anything (legitimate) that makes you an audit risk you shouldn't prepare yourself.

For the first two years I used a CPA I needed to prepare everything myself, give him the information he requested, let him do his magic, check his magic, get changes made, repeat. Everyone should know enough to understand how the calculations work and go from there; if your tax is too high or too low, ask a lot of questions!

No, but you tend to have more complex tax status... and to the GP's point, you really should be using a CPA. As worthless as my CPA is, I am happy to pay the $350 for him to dump my information into his program.

As for why the change... it is what the market will bear. It is a pain to do Schedule D and the accompanying forms now.

I use Insteon at home as well. Budget $75 per control point, and $500 for the controller. I use the ISY controller, and it is a piece of junk, but it does the job. There isn't the variety of sensors, switches, devices, and accessories I wish there was, some older devices are a pain with low-power loads, and the plug-in devices are generally a pain in the ass. Programming is clunky, but not that hard.

I still haven't put it into our vacation home, holding out for something better. Two years later, still no progress...

My biggest complaint is that it is hard to "extend" Insteon. I wish I could integrate with Sonos, and I wish I had a simpler way to do a password-free web interface. (Hard, not impossible if you really want to work for it...)

Can you really be out-played algorithmically? The two computers would have different sets of data to work from as a base point. Any additional information you can glean from your opponents can improve the decision tree, so having two hands in the game and coordinating poses a substantial advantage.