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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • Don’t bother with the cert if it’s not your job, but at least look into CCNA Routing and Switching. There are tons of courses available, both in person and online, as well as numerous YouTube videos on the subject.

    See if your local library or community college has an adult education center that provides a course. At some point, you will need to learn subnetting, which is just math, but practice makes perfect, and your life is easier if you have it committed to memory.

    Proper written work is still one of the most effective ways to do this.




  • How diverse is your investment portfolio? How many different stocks and securities have you sold last year? Were these subject to short term or long term capital gains? Did you rebuy any of those, making the security subject to the wash rule?

    If you have a family, a house, multiple W-2s, 1099s, a retirement account, and a 529, things are still pretty “simple”. TurboTax does not let you use their free file if you’ve traded stocks, but for most other products, even some low volume trading in a brokerage account is considered fairly standard.

    At the end of the day, it comes down to how organized you are, and how much time it will take you to do data entry. Usually, your tax documents have clear headers, and usually, these match up to the fields in the tax application. But not always, and the more documents you have, the more hours it will take, and the more likely you are to run into a speed bump that will cause frustration.

    So, how much is your time worth to you? If it’s worth more to you than the cost of a tax professional, it’s an easy decision.




  • Why are you running a VPN? If you are simply shielding your internet activity from your ISP, Google won’t give a shit where you sign in from.

    If you are browsing to shield your identity, you want to be fully disassociated with any non-secure browsing habits. If this is your use case, even if you are using discrete internet accounts, tracking cookies are common enough that, you would still be identifiable from your browser fingerprint. It all depends on what your risk factors are, and how much you want to spend to mitigate them.



  • The biggest mistake users will make is thinking their data is safe JUST because they have a NAS or a RAID. It’s common parlance in Systems Administration that RAID is NOT backup.

    To wit— not truly understanding RAID and how it relates to capacity, parity, and especially the time required to rebuild in failed disk situation. It is a crucial mistake to use RAID 5 with greater than 2TB disks, and even that is pushing it, but RAID 5 is at least in the zeitgeist.

    There are also some outside concerns such as Drive batch dates and knowing to pre-purchase spare disks well in advance that may hamper recovery.