Today I’m releasing a new version of Regex Builder, 14 years after the previous release, thanks to an email from a fan. Regular Expressions (regexes) are a powerful way to search text, but also hard to write and very hard to debug, kind of like SQL queries. I wrote Regex Builder originally around 2004 (!!) to help me...

I’ve been updating my backpacking loadout and learning from the “ultralight” backpacking community. I was struck by the parallels between backpack-packing and budgeting and how backpacking wisdom can apply to finance.

My Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 battery ran out on the first day by 4:00pm, and I was pretty disappointed. After a few device resets and a lot of measurements, however, my watch is now using only about a third of the battery per full 24 hour day. Here’s what I learned.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 recently came out, and it inspired me to try going phone-free, carrying only the watch. I spend too much time glued to my phone, and I wanted to take back my attention, but I know I need to be reachable. For me, the core problem is the endless scrolling apps - Reddit, YouTube, Google News,...

I used to think that “being frugal” and “being cheap” were basically the same thing. Along my saving journey, however, I found out that the two are very different. To me, In a nutshell, “being cheap” means trying to spend as little as possible and “being frugal” means to spend as thoughtfully as possible. What do those concepts really mean?

It’s surprising, but keeping food costs down was a big part of sticking to our budget and ultimately retiring early. Food is the third highest spending category for US households (after housing and transportation), so it’s a big part of most budgets. It’s easier to change your food choices than to move to a new house or...

The latest in my series of game replays is Batman: Arkham Asylum, thanks to a recent GOG Sale that had it going for $5.

After you retire, you need to decide how much you can spend each year, which investments to take the money from, and when to rebalance your investments. Collectively, this is called your “withdrawal plan”.

How should you split your retirement investments between stock and bonds? How do you make this decision? Your chosen split is called your Asset Allocation, and you’ll often see it written as two numbers; for example, 60% stock and 40% bonds is written as “60/40”. Let’s dig into it.

This blog is hosted on CloudFlare Pages with CloudFlare-managed DNS, and I finally have DNS resolution working fully. The documentation was confusing and incomplete - here is what I needed to know.