I have blogged before about the awesome personal budgeting software You Need A Budget!, a/k/a YNAB.  It is now in version 4 and better than ever, with cloud syncing among all your devices (computer, smartphone, iPad or tablet, etc.).  We use it for all of our budgeting, and we absolutely love it. Anyway, if you [...]

This is a PSA for those who have way too much junk on their hard drives. Background For several months, McAfee has been taking ever longer to run virus scans on my hard drive, getting to the point that it sometimes took a couple of days. When I investigated, it reported that it was scanning [...]

I just realized that my most recent post (GTD: Your 6 Most Important Things) was my six hundredth post on here. This site has come a long way since I started working on it in vi and Netscape on a Unix workstation. It has been edited in — and arguably abused by — vi, Netscape [...]

I just read about Duolingo on CNN. The concept is fascinating: teach people foreign languages for free, by feeding them text to learn and/or translate, some of which comes from real websites. In the end, you end up translating the entire web—the real goal. Some of the gotchas are obvious: getting enough participation to succeed [...]

Follow me at @EdInHouston. Not everything on here will necessarily be on there, and vice versa.

After posting to this blog only 5 times in all of 2011, I have decided that it is well past time to revive this blog. I regularly come across material that I would like to share on here, but inertia and the press of other concerns tend to take over. No more. In 2012, I [...]

Thanks to a post by Tim Challies, Sarah and I decided to download and try a trial of a software product called You Need a Budget, or YNAB. We are now in love with this product. The premise of YNAB is simple: (1) everyone needs to budget, and (2) no other software products out there [...]

Today’s win: successfully replacing the laser in a broken Wii console, without wiping the saved data or shorting anything out. Thank you, Console Zombie! Today’s loss: finding out that Momentum MINI in Houston put much cheaper tires on my car two weeks ago than the ones that I came in with, even though they didn’t [...]

So true: Thank you, xkcd!

I’m writing this on my treadmill! We bought a SurfShelf Treadmill Desk for those times when we want to work out but need to work or have something else to do on the computer. Pretty sweet.