Most commented posts
- Article Writing with InfoBarrel — 2 comments
Author's posts
May 01
Fun with Dry Ice
Or: How to Entertain Little Kids for Hours for $5 A few weeks ago, I was grocery shopping with the kids. As we wheeled out of the frozen foods section, I noticed a big cooler full of dry ice for sale. I had seen it before, and thought it might be fun to do some …
Apr 20
DIY Backlash and Internet Naysayers
The internet is the greatest tool for sharing information in the history of humanity. I particularly love it for finding out how to do new things, or how to do old things better. I’ve done a huge amount of work on my cars that I never would have accomplished without electronic help. And in that spirit, …
Mar 06
My Planet Express luggage tag
Or: Making a luggage tag that actually stands out from the crowd I’ve done a quite a bit of travelling for business, but for a long time I managed to avoid buying specific luggage to do it. My grandparents gave me a set of LL Bean soft-sided luggage in the 80’s, and it has been well used and …
Feb 16
Making a Google Cardboard headset for my iPhone
Growing up in the 80’s, I heard a lot of promises that Virtual Reality was right around the corner, the same way my parents had been promised flying cars. Any day now, I was going to be plunged right into a William Gibson novel, a virtual cowboy avoiding ICE. When the Oculus Rift came out in 2012, …
Dec 30
Accidental Landlord update: when things go wrong
One of the biggest fears we had going into the landlord game was: what happens when big things go wrong with the house? Of course, we also had the fear that the house wouldn’t rent, but that is pretty well understood. You know how much money you’d be on the hook for each month, so at …
Nov 07
The fiction writing experiment
Way back before I ever heard of the Smart Passive Income blog, or The 4-Hour Work Week, or Rich Dad Poor Dad, (maybe 1998-ish) a few of us engineers would sit around at lunch and talk about some of the same topics we would later hear about there: how to get ahead, how to stop working for the man, …
Oct 22
Becoming an Accidental Landlord, Part 2
A while back, in my first Becoming an Accidental Landlord post, I laid out the very basics of how the math of owning a rental house has worked for me. Since my wife and I are starting to think about buying a second house to rent out, it seemed like a good time to follow up with a more detailed …
Aug 14
Silver cube
When the Rubik’s Cube originally came out in the 1980s I was 10ish. I played with one, and could solve a side and the next level. But I could never do the full cube without laboriously paging through a solution book my Dad bought. Once the furor died down, I moved on to other things. Then, last year, …
Jul 25
Article Writing with InfoBarrel
If you listen to Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income Podcast, in Episode #15 you’ll hear his advice on how to get started in online business. Surprisingly, what he recommends that you try first is not to start a blog or a podcast, but to start writing articles for a content site. So I did exactly that, …
Jul 15
Berlin again
Another picture from my trip to Berlin. When we saw these parked on the street, my inner car-guy took notice. A discussion ensued about which was worth more. I believe we are looking at a Mercedes SLS AMG here, that sold for about $202,000 new. I have no idea what prices are like for older …