Posts in category "post-retirement" - page 11
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The Hunt For A New Car Begins
If you didn’t already know, it was time for my almost 15 year old Maruti Alto car to be re-registered. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I was contemplating whether to renew the registration or buy a used/new car altogether. From what I gathered, it will cost me some 30-40K on my old car to get it registered for another 5 years. The problem was that I was not sure that it will pass the fitness test even with all the repairs. Moreover, the new registration is valid only for another 5 years. I felt it may be better to sell the car and buy another used or a new car instead of spending the money on it. Then I faced another problem which tipped the scale in favor of buying a new car. First, I could not find a decent used car. Second, I found that it was not easy to sell my old car.
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Bought A New Car
I went against my own advice and decided to buy a new car, although I advice everyone to buy an used car. I am a hypocrite. There, I said it. Not just that, but I don’t even follow another advice I often give to everyone which is that they should go with 70:30 split for their equity and fixed income asset allocation. You already know that I don’t follow that rule. So what is my excuse to buy a new car this time? Continue reading to find out. But before we get started, I want to let you know that this is my first new car. Before this I purchased 3 cars and all of them were used cars. If you include Mrs. re-ynd, that is 5 used cards before buying a new one. So this is something really special for us.
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Tools I Use To Repair Electronics
This is a continuation of my previous post on the tools that I have at my disposal when I am building electornic projects. As I mentioned before, this is not the comprehensive list of tools, but it should give you an idea. In the last post I left off at my soldering station. I use a couple of solder tips depending on the work. If I am soldering thick wires or soldering pins to an arduino nano board, I will use a chisel tip because it spreads heat well and makes good fat solder joint. For delicate work I use a thinner conical tip. Other than that I don’t use any other tips.
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Tools I Use In Electronics Projects
A reader asked to me to write a post on the tools I use in my projects. Since my projects range from software to electronics to mechanical, the number of tools I use becomes quite large. So in this post I will cover the tools I routinely use in electronic projects. May be in another post I might cover the tools I use for more mechanical projects such as repairing cycles or scooter, setting up solar panels and batteries, building rain water harvesting pipes, plumbing, drip irrigation etc. If anyone is interested, I might also write a post on the tools I use in software development but in this case the tools vary quite a bit depending on the software. Anyway, lets get straight to the point and do a bit of show and tell of the tools I use in my electronic projects.
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Professional Service vs DIY
Is it better to take the help of professional services or do things yourself? I don’t know myself, but I have become more of a DIY (do it yourself) person ever since I retired. There is a certain fun element in doing things with your own hands even if you do a pretty poor job. However, earlier I was a person who got most things done by profession service personnel. What has changed then? Well, the time, that’s what has changed. When I was still working, there was barely any free time. It was easier, more efficient and less expensive to have someone fix things rather than me wasting my time. Remember, if you consider my hourly rate, it was way higher than the hourly rate for the services (at least in India). Now, I have a lot of free time and my hourly rate is precisely zero.
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Repaired My TV
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that I tried to repair a TV but my first attempt failed. After some more work I was finally able to fix it! At least some positive news after a lot of set backs in repairs, about which I will write in another post. If you have not read my previous post, I urge you to read that first. Basically what happened was that my old LCD TV back from 2006, started to show its age and conked out, not quite spectacularly though. My initial investigation led me to believe that the culprit could be 3 capacitors (caps) on the power board. However, when I ordered the replacement parts and soldered them, the TV was still not turning on, or is turning on briefly before freezing.
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How Not To Repair A Phone
The last few months have been quite busy for me. I was so busy that I could not allocate any time to write new posts on my blog. Multiple things were happening which were more exciting and interesting. In between I had a bad shoulder injury which put me completely out of commission for a good one month. It has been more than 2 months and I am still recovering. Meanwhile other events demanded my attention so the frequency of my posts have gone down from two per week to just one. If things ever normalize I will go back to my previous cadence. While there were a bunch of interesting events that took place, here are a couple of them related to mobile phones.
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Failed To Repair My TV
The past few weeks have been quite busy with multiple electronics failures and other interesting things happening in my personal life. One of the failed electronics was my old TV. This was the first TV that I bought with my salary a few months after I landed my first job. So it has some emotional connection. To get you up to speed, I finished my MS in the US and also started working in the US. In 2006 when I bought the TV, flat screen TVs were just coming into the market. I wanted to test out the latest in tech but did not want to spend too much on it. So I bought a cheap Sceptre X32GV-Komodo flat screen TV. It worked great. So great in fact that I shipped it to India when I moved in 2011.
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Experience With New Income Tax Portal
The new income tax portal launched last year, so it is not really “new” anymore, but I wanted to write about my experience with it. When it first launched, there were innumerable bugs. The portal was very slow. Login used to fail due to excessive load on the servers. Data I entered would not tally properly because of rounding errors in the software etc. But it has come a long way. The most recent tax submission process was much better compared to how much I struggled last year. Perhaps there are still bugs but I did not encounter any this time around, or at least I figured out the quirks in the system and worked around them.
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This Blog Is 4 Years Old
Yes, it has been that long! While I became financially independent on December 31, 2017, I officially retired on June 29, 2018 and started writing this blog almost one month later on July 21, 2018. It was a long journey, for me at least, since I started and quit twice earlier (separate unrelated blogs). May be third time’s the charm? Since this post is mostly bragging about myself and how much I wrote, you can safely skip it. For the rest, you get to see some silly insights into the number of active users and how much I am earning with ads on the blog (got your attention now didn’t I?).
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