Cory Westropp

I have been running my home network system off of several Raspberry Pi’s and an ODROID U3 for almost a year now and I am starting to outgrow them. I have concocted a plan to build a home server based on Jeff Atwoods HTPC build. His build is powerful, yet power efficient. Since my server will run 24/7 and power is somewhat expensive where I live power efficiency is key. That was the original motiviation behind the Pi’s, they sip power. Also, I wanted something that I can put under my desk that is quiet.

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Whenever I am evaluating a potential raise or job offer I like to know exactly how it will affect my tax burden. To that end I usually search for some online tax calculator. The problem with this approach is that none of the tax calculators I have been able to find will combine all the different taxes that you have to pay to into one calculation (namely FICA and State Disability, which I always forget). I always have to get three different numbers form three different places and put them together. Not only is this annoying and error prone, but it makes it hard to compare different scenarios. So I decided that I am going to build my own.

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I recently decided that I was going to try to set up one of the apps I maintain at work to allow for zero-downtime deploys. We currently have to wait until the middle of the night to update it because nobody uses it outside of buisness hours. We have a script that does this, but I creates a long feedback loop for the customer and us and I find annoying.

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I have been wanting to build self-hosted alternatives to popular cloud services ever since Google shuttered Google Reader. I never really had the motivation to do anything about it until the Snowden leaks. I know everybody has an opinion on that and I won’t go into mine except to say that I no longer trust the security of my data on servers that I do not control. I would much rather have my data hosted on a machine I control, which is the motivation for this project.

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I currently have ownCloud installed on a Raspberry Pi under my desk that acts as a self-hosted Dropbox replacement for my family. It has been running quite well since I set up it, but lately I have noticed that sometimes I have not been able to login. Whenever I login ownCloud redirects to the login screen with no errors.

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