Impossible Sliders: Try 'em!

My wife and I are road tripping around the country with our dog. I am so tired of driving and ready to be back home, but that's another story for another time.

How to telnet from OS X

Why in the heck does Apple's High Sierra version of OS X lack a telnet client? It smells like they removed it for "security" reasons but without it, how am I supposed to poke at an SMTP server to manually test mail server things in my life as an email geek?

Amazon Prime: Is it worth it?

Amazon just announced that the price for a yearly subscription to Amazon Prime is being raised to $120. With that in mind, I decided to do some rough math to see if Prime was still worth it for my wife and I.

We do order quite a bit of stuff from Amazon, on things like "dog stuff" (food, treats, bedding, etc.), consumer electronics and accessories (iPhone/iPad cases, Chromebooks, headphones), clothes, and even coffee.

HOWTO: Play Roku TV Audio through Apple AirPods

We have a cheapo 55" 4K Roku TV that I think we bought for $398 at Wally World last year. It works well. I'm happy with it. It gets the job done. It is cheap enough, though, that the remote does not have a headphone jack, like other Roku TVs or streaming boxes have, nor does it seem to have Bluetooth support. But I found out that even without that, you can use an iPhone to stream sound from the TV to headphones connected to the iPhone. In my case, fancy new Apple AirPods that I just bought.

HOWTO: Cook shrimp in an air fryer

We recently got a cool new toy, something that I've wanted for a very long time: An air fryer!

What does an air fryer do? It doesn't actually fry. It is a convection oven that uses forced hot air to cook things quickly. These "air fryers" are meant to be used sort of like deep fryers; they're good for things like fries, potatoes, chicken wings, breaded shrimp, and other snacky things that you would cook in a deep fryer, if you had one. Well, I don't want a real deep fryer, because all that oil is bad for you, and it makes your home smell like a Burger King. So I've been wanting one of these things for a while. When I first started looking these up a couple years ago, I saw that that Philips was selling them for $200 -- just too expensive for me. I started looking again recently and saw that there are now some other well-reviewed ones from other brands for under $100. I ended up buying this GoWISE USA GW22639 3.7-Quart Programmable Air Fryer on Amazon for about $62. It was list price for somewhere around $70 or $80, so I ended up buying a used one (a returned one, I think) for $65, then I got an extra five percent off thanks to our Amazon card.

Guns are too easy to get, thanks to the modern NRA

Karl Frederick, NRA President in 1934, during congressional hearings on the National Firearms Act (which the NRA supported) testified "I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. [...] I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

Drinking on a budget: Dollar Tree martini glasses!

We had a very nice set of (I think) six martini glasses, some well-known brand, that we bought as a set perhaps somewhere around five years ago. Every year or so, I accidentally break one of the glasses by dropping it, or the dishwasher decides it's time to crack one of them. So now I'm down to one and it was time to restock. But, I'm on a budget here in Miami. The solution: Dollar Tree!

Linux: Redirecting or Silencing Script Output

I've been writing shell scripts on *nix systems for more than twenty years. You'd think that by now I'd have this memorized, but I don't. Since I'm tired of looking it up every time, I'll post this here so that it can help jog my memory next time around.

Linux: Scraping web output with wget

This is probably a tip that smarter folks than me know already, but I just ran into this today and decided I'd write it down for future reference.