Quick Movie Review: Black Panther

Lots of action, tech, fun, jokes, more action scenes, vibranium, drums, and a hobbit. 10/10 would recommend a watch.

Authors note: Under no circumstances don’t sit in the back row of the theater, I was against a corner at my theater because I couldn’t leave a single seat open when I bought my ticket at the kiosk 5 minutes after movie start, will use box office next time. Also, obvious CGI alert during fight scenes.

Don’t use Lending Tree to Refinance or Purchase your home

I’ve been looking to refinance my home for the last couple months before rates start to inch forward. I’ve been a big fan of Zillow.com and their mortgage section that lets you model a mortgage by filling in current balance, home value, and your credit score with instant quotes. Seeing an ad and hearing from a friend to try lendingtree.com I decided to give it a shot. Instantly I get about 5 phone calls trying to get my social security number to run my credit and start the process. All the quotes I got without my SSN were higher than Zillow and some refused to model a loan without my Social. I ended up going with a lender through Zillow who has been a pleasure to work with and expect to close soon!

Long story short: Zillow is easy to see what you’re getting, lending tree you’ll get dozens of phone calls asking to pull your credit for higher rates. I recommend Zillow.com for your next purchase or refinance because of its simplicity and honesty with up-front mortgage information.

Done with 1 week of P90x3

I’ve been pretty good this past week with P90x3, I skipped only one day and am looking to make it up tomorrow (agility x+yoga). But I’ve done 8 days so far and its going well. I’ve already noticed some gains with pushups, pull ups, and energy so far and it feels really great to exercise daily. I’ll keep you updated. Down to 217.3 lbs this week.

For reference, I was at 232lbs a couple of years ago and with diet alone got down to 180lbs over the period of 6 months (thank you keto). But I’ve ballooned back up to 217.3 because of not paying attention to diet and not exercising a whole lot. I’m going to try and do 90 days of p90x3 and keep keto as much as possible. And walking 3-4 days a week at least 3 miles with Jack. Let’s see how it goes!

Let’s do 90 days of P90X3

I’m back on a health kick and want to get in shape. I’m sitting at 217.6lbs, I had a max of 232 years ago and got it down to 180 with just keto dieting alone so I need to try it again. The plan is to do 90 days of p90x3 and continue walking Jack 3+ miles 4 days a week minimum and do my best to stay on my diet (steaks and vegetables). Yesterday I did Total Synergistics and today is Agility X. Let’s do this!

Python and your firewall

I wrote a script in python that sets ufw rules to allow local network access but require all other traffic to be routed over a vpn interface. This is useful if you want to force all traffic to be sent over vpn from your linux machine except local network traffic (for local ssh access and the like). The snippet can be found here on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1524634 You can run –help and see the arguments. You’ll have an option to review the ruleset before it applies it as well. Enjoy!

Fun with the Raspberry Pi

I spent some time this weekend doing a morse code encoder in python on the Raspberry Pi. You run the program, type in what you want to say and it gets translated into long and short beeps in light (or relay) in morse code.

I should develop an actual image at some point for how to wire this up. I have a wire from gpio pin 7 -> led -> resister -> ground for this program. I also have a relay module attached to gpio pin 7 -> relay in1 that makes a satisfying click as well.

The code snippet can be found here on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1547397

 

Alt+Drag for Windows

I found a program named AltDrag recently that I find really useful. Its a small program that lets you hold the ALT key and left click and drag windows around. Now you don’t have to find the top part of the window to drag and makes it easy to rearrange windows quickly. Check it out here: https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/