Notes

Vanguard: Ask Vanguard to allowlist my account to be accessible outside US. What to do about 2FA using phone number? Update address. Fill out W8-BEN form. (This is important and the customer representative might not know about it - but they support it and that’s what will decrease the tax deduction that they will do.) May have to do this at other places too, such as Fidelity and Schwab. Probably make Schwab as our primary bank account because of the fantastic international features on their debit cards. Close out our phone accounts.

Details of the printer we currently have at home: HP LaserJet Pro M15w Wireless Laser Printer (W2G51A). Compatible cartridge: HP 48A Black Original LaserJet Toner Cartridge, CF248A

Here are the list of accounts I should take care of next year and beyond: Vanguard. Fidelity. Schwab. First Tech. Chase. HSA distributions - 1099-SA. 529 - Bright Start. Reminder: 529 contributions are treated as gifts with some special allowance if you want to contribute lump sum for 5 years. WA PFML maybe. Following are things I should remember while filing tax returns in: 2022: HSA: I had to withdraw excess contributions in 2021 (for those we made in 2020).

I recently got interested in a few actively managed mutual funds from Morgan Stanley. They had high expense ratio and turnover rate but I thought, if their stellar performance continued from 2020, the extra costs would be worth it. However, that wasn’t the right way to think about it. While cliched, it is true that past performance doesn’t gurantee future results. I also don’t control or understand the factors that go into stock selection behind the scenes - I can only trust the fund managers. CPOAX, for instance, had a really good 2020 but, when I looked back for 2 year time frames, it rarely outperformed VTSAX. I shouldn’t be blindsided by a single year’s performance, that too 2020 when the whole market was exuberant. There is plenty of historical evidence that actively managed funds never consistently outperform the index, if at all. So, even if the fund I selected is outperforming today, I have another headache of figuring out when to get out. They aren’t well diversified. For e.g., CPOAX only contains <50 stocks, most of them large cap. If I try to compensate for that myself (for e.g., by buying Morgan Stanley’s MACGX for mid-cap companies), that will complicate things further. Highly tax inefficient, if kept in taxable accounts. High costs add up in the long run. I think I should do the following: ...

sudo yum localinstall sample_file.rpm

Today, I only self-host those things which won’t impact me too much if they are down. Email isn’t one of those things, so I’ll have to be more careful with it. The previous also implies I’ll probably have to do more sysadmin work. For e.g., regularly apply security patches, guard against DDoS attacks etc. Too many new technologies to learn, time that can be well spent on other pursuits. One example is spam management: apparently, you need to put in some effort to ensure that outgoing emails aren’t marked spam at recipient’s end. Moreover, IP reputation is important but won’t be high for my situation because the outgoing email volume will be low. Look at the list of technologies below! (I found the following here.)

Detailed instructions here. VERSION=1.2.1 OS=linux ARCH=amd64 mkdir ~/my-fathom-site cd ~/my-fathom-site wget https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/releases/download/v${VERSION}/fathom_${VERSION}_${OS}_${ARCH}.tar.gz sudo tar -C /usr/local/bin -xzf fathom_${VERSION}_${OS}_${ARCH}.tar.gz sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fathom cat > .env << 'EOF' FATHOM_SERVER_ADDR=9000 FATHOM_GZIP=true FATHOM_DATABASE_NAME="fathom.db" FATHOM_SECRET="..." EOF # Verify fathom --version fathom server fathom user add --email="..." --password="..." sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/systemd/system/my-fathom-site.service << "EOF" [Unit] Description=Starts the fathom server Requires=network.target After=network.target [Service] Type=simple User=ubuntu Restart=always RestartSec=3 WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/my-fathom-site ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/fathom server [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target EOF' sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable my-fathom-site sudo systemctl start my-fathom-site # Or just reboot. sudo certbot --nginx -d fathom.flister.cf Add the following to the relevant section of the Nginx config file and restart: sudo systemctl reload nginx. ...

Also, see: What’s running on my Pi?. What’s running today On an Always Free virtual machine from Oracle: Algo VPN. Bad ideas Email, or even an email forwarding service: seems to be a lot of hassle. Nextcloud as a Dropbox replacement: too heavy, as compared to Samba, for my requirements. Some kind of a simple document management system that can ingest documents, run OCR to extract content and build a searchable index on top of that content. Hosting such a thing on the public internet seems to be a bad idea.

# Stash untracked files git stash -u # Or, stash both untracked and ignored files. git stash --all

Recurring charges Gym? T-mobile. Wave G. Seattle light. Bitwarden. Other places Paypal. Amazon. Uber and Lyft.