Personal

If you like to nerd out about enough money to buy lunch at a counterserve restaurant then this is the post for you. If you don’t care about effectively paying $18 less on a $1200 purchase then this is not the post for you. The short answer to the title’s question is ‘Only in specific circumstances.’ Let’s suppose that we want to make some expensive online purchase and the merchant offers 0% APR financing to pay for the purchase over time, literally buy now, pay later. It could be via themselves, Affirm, or some other company. To make it concrete, let’s suppose that we need a new mattress which costs $1200. How should we pay for it in order to minimize its effective cost? ...

This is the follow up to the prior post on a terrible internet of things experience with the JuiceBox. I got annoyed by Enel Group’s business decisions. Instead of buying a new EVSE, I bought a new control board for my JuiceBox made by the folks at the OpenEVSE project. The OpenEVSE project started work on a replacement control board for the Enel X JuiceBox shortly after Enel Group started making business decisions that would leave customers without recourse. The board is available for sale here and costs less than a quality, complete, new EVSE. ...

I have previously written about charging costs for an EV that we own. Today, we are going to learn a bit about how I charge the car at home. We bought a, at the time, Enel X JuiceBox 40 from Costco. The mobile app was pleasant enough to use at first, but the experience went downhill from there. Let’s talk about why and annoyances with IoT. ...

An update to a prior post about electric car efficiency using my relatively inefficient EV, a 2022 Audi Etron, as an example. We’ll include some up to date numbers and discuss DC fast charging prices as of July, 2025 (spoiler: fast charging is, indeed, expensive). See the prior post here for more context ...

I want to run some numbers on the energy used by our electric car that we purchased nearly two years ago. We’ll compare that to a roughly equivalent gasoline car. This is an interesting exercise because we bought what is considered a relatively inefficient EV. Let’s do some light arithmetic. ...

Last time in off-topic tax time we covered a small piece of how individual income taxes work in the US. This time, I’ll vent about why this is frustrating and why the alternatives are not great. It’s a positive feelings post. ...

In this post I give a short explainer on how federal income taxes function for individuals along with examples of why they are complicated. In a follow on post to this I will cover some thoughts about how we, collectively, can help make it simpler. ...