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Migrating From Wordpress To Jekyll
If you read my previous post on Jekyll, you already know why I switched from WordPress to Jekyll. In continuation of that post I want to explain how I migrated to Jekyll. For those who are not interested in the software side of things should skip this post. Wordpress offers a lot of features out of the box, like search engine and comments engine. So all I have to do is write posts and users can search and comment on them. This works because Wordpress is dynamic and runs a DB to store data. However since Jekyll is static, one needs to figure out a way to make things work.
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Internet Addiction Is A Thing
As parents of an unschooled kid we never really have any restrictions on most things our daughter wants to do. However, in the recent past, we had to bring in some restrictions. As you might recall, I am an ardent supporter of technology. And so, I believe that kids should also grow up with technology if they want to find their place in this world. My spouse on the other hand does not quite agree with me in this regard :). Anyway, the point of this post is not about whether technology is good or bad for kids, but more about whether they can self regulate addictive behavior.
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Real World Application of 4% Rule
I have not even completed 4 years into retirement, yet I wanted to check how the 4% rule is working for me. Please keep in mind that this is such a short time in retirement that we can’t make any conclusions about whether 4% rule really works in this day and age at all in India. We will only know its usefulness in a much longer duration like a decade or so. This exercise is to understand how a 4% rule will work with and without the 20% buffer I usually talk about. Lets get started.
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Be Smart Or Not Be Stupid?
It is amazing how many people focus on being smart than avoiding stupidity. One could be the smartest person in town, but if they keeping making silly mistakes, eventually the mistakes pile up enough to waste a smart decision. This is even more true in investing. I am one of those people trying to be smart instead of avoiding mistakes. This reminds me of an article I read a long time ago about the findings of a scientist and statistician Simon Ramo.
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Why I Switched From Wordpress To Jekyll
The past few days have been quite busy, so I have not been regular with my posts. One of the reasons was because of the migration of my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. This post is going to be a bit technical, so for those who are not interested in software should probably skip this one. I have been using WordPress to publish my blog. My WordPress has been running on a Google Compute Engine instance since I started the blog. But I have been wanting to move away from WordPress for a long time. So I decided to go with static web pages. Unfortunately the process was not quite easy because WordPress offers so many things out of the box. Doing all that work manually was some work, but it was well worth it.
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The Time I Could Not Resist Teaching My Kid
Normally I don’t teach anything to my daughter unless she specifically asks me about something. This is inline with our belief that kids learn best when they are curious themselves, rather than explaining something that we want them to learn. All part of the whole unschooling journey that we are going through. However, from time to time I make some exceptions. One such exception happened recently where I had to teach something to my kid without her asking me because I could not stop myself :). Guilty as charged! But let me explain.
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Getting The Most Out Of Solar Panels
It’s been a while since I updated you on my solar panel project. I thought I should continue where I left off. So after collecting all the data from my solar panels, batteries, grid and load, I observed something interesting. While the SMU was disconnecting the grid so that the load can run on batteries and solar energy, we are not fully utilizing the solar energy. During a perfectly clear day, the solar panel is generating more power than we can use during the day. The excess energy is just getting wasted. Can we do something about it?
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Giving Up Satellite TV
As part of minimalism, we try to reduce stuff from our life every now and then. Like Bruce Lee said, “hack away the unessential”. You may recall some of our minimalism activities from the past like selling our car or the minimalist wardrobe. This time around we wanted to experiment with cutting out satellite TV from our life.
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Improving Returns On Investment
A few days ago I wrote a post on how to start on a simple investment plan. The reason I wrote that post is to help you get started because it is easier to start on a simple plan. The more complex a plan, the more we procrastinate. But what if you have already started on your investment journey and want to improve the returns? Continuing from where we left off with the simple investment plan, here are some things you can do to improve returns.
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #6
Thank you to everyone who joined virtual meetup #6. As usual, we had some lively discussions. This post is a follow-up to that meeting to answer any questions that I could not answer at the time. So here goes –
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