Category: starred

Food is one of our biggest expenses, but one mom, who feeds a family of 7 on just $300 a month, shows us that it’s possible to eat well without cutting coupons or relying on Ramen noodles every night.

Jen Wallwork Dominguez spends $3 per meal to feed herself, her husband, two teenagers, and three preschoolers. (We’re fans of the $4/day cookbook, but that’s $4 per person. Here, Jen is feeding 7 people for $3 a meal.)

There’s no real magic here. It’s all basically smart shopping and planning. She shops solely at ALDI, probably the cheapest grocery chain, avoids organic and processed foods, and relies on cheap food staples such as eggs and beans.

The most important part of her plan, though, is the rotation of the cheap ingredients. Ingredients do double duty instead of being used for just a single meal, which helps make those food purchases go further:

I’ve found the single, best way to save money on groceries is to use what is always least expensive and use it a lot. As such, there’s no great variety in my menus, no exotic ingredients that I buy for just one meal. We eat dinner on a two week rotation, lunch and breakfast on a weekly rotation. Yes, it can get a little boring. When that happens, I go looking for something else that uses primarily those same cheap ingredients. God bless the Internet.

If you look at her 14-day meal plan, the meals are pretty basic, but still appetizing, with dinners including a tilapia dish, lunch taco salads (made from leftover taco night ingredients), and hearty breakfasts as well.

While using meal planning to save money isn’t a new idea at all, and cooking like a peasant is a time-tested way to feed large families for cheap, it’s inspiring to see a real life example of how to carry out this strategy on a day-to-day and monthly basis.

How I Feed a Family of Seven for $300 a Month | Life in the Circus via Forbes

Photo by o5com.

via Lifehacker
Feed a Large Family on $10 a Day with a 14-Day Rotating Meal Plan

Everyone loves a good, clear, easily grasped narrative. “X leads to Y.” “A causes B.” But as we’ve seen over the course of this series, the nature of depression is simply too complex to follow a nice, neat storyline. In exploring the history of depression, we saw that the way we view melancholy today is […]

via The Art of Manliness
A Realistic, Encouraging, Compassionate, No-Nonsense, Research-Backed, Action-Oriented Guidebook to Managing Your Depression

Itchy Ninja Software is pleased to announce the release of Analyst for MySQL v1.1. Revolutionize the way you work and administrate MySQL, MariaDB, Galera, and Percona XtraDB installations.
Make More Efficient Use of Your Time
Gathering all of the metrics to diagnose a database installation is a very time consuming process, and many simply do not have the experience to know where to begin. With Analyst for MySQL, you will be able to get your hands on hundreds of metrics within moments. It really takes all of the guesswork, as well as tedious long sessions of writing queries out of managing a MySQL database server.
Cross-Platform
Not only can you run the program on Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can also generate server reports from each of those platforms as well! No need to install anything on the server at any time. All diagnostics are run from your laptop or desktop machine. The source computer (your laptop or desktop machine) can be any operating system and so can the server you are auditing.
Performance Tuning
With Analyst, you will get dozens of charts, tables, graphs, and rules concentrated on helping you resolve performance issues. You can even see CPU utilization, disk I/O, swapping / paging, network throughput, and more. For Linux systems with systat (SAR) installed, historical system metrics are also available.
Minimize Downtime
Analyst includes over 200 industry-proven rules which help identify the source of the issues as well as advice on how to resolve them. You’ll also get multiple charts, tables, and graphs that give you immediate access to the specifics of how your server is running.
Team Collaboration
Ever wish you could share all of the key server metrics with the rest of your team when there is an outage? With Analyst for MySQL we make this easy. You will be able to export all of the key data and send it to anyone you want. Have a manager who wants a report of what you have done? Analyst makes it easy to show reports from before and after your work to show improvement in scoring. Have team members who are not in the office and/or don’t have access to the server? No problem. Just send an Analyst report file to them and they will have instant access to the same data you have.
Security Hardening
With Analyst for MySQL, you will find anonymous users, users without passwords, accounts with excessive privileges, connections that are not encrypted, and much more.
Best Practices
One of the first tasks a MySQL administrator should perform when receiving a new server or setting one up is to ensure standards. We have spent countless hours drafting documentation on proper server configuration to ensure environments meet industry best practices. With Analyst for MySQL, you can benefit from all of our work.
Server Metrics
See metrics in the form of tabular data, pie graphs, line charts, and more. You will have metrics such as memory usage, InnoDB Buffer Pool usage, query cache utilization, and more at the tip of your fingers. Confused by the new Performance Schema? No worries. Analyst provides easy to understand metrics and does all of the heavy lifting for you.
For those with systat package installed on Linux, you will be able to turn back the clock and see how the server was performing throughout the day! See metrics such as CPU utilization, disk I/O, RAM consumption, network throughput, and more in gorgeous charts and graphs.
High Availability
For those with an Analyst Enterprise license, an audit of a MySQL Cluster, Percona XTRADB Cluster, MariaDB CLuster, or Galera Cluster you will give you rules, tables, graphs, and alerts giving detailed information on cluster performance. You will know immediately how the cluster is performing. Moreover, you will know whether the node you audited is the source of the problem or whether it is another node in the cluster.
Ease of Use
We created Analyst for MySQL to be easy to use. We know you don’t have time, or even want to read a complicated manual, to figure out how to use software. Want to archive your findings? Or send a report to someone? Analyst offers the ability to save your data to disk, export it into PDF, CSV, PNG, RTF, or HTML format, and of course printing.
Server Scoring
Analyst will examine key metrics in several areas including standardization, best practices, administration, high availability, performance, security, and more and assign a score to that category. You will get an overall score to see the current condition of your server. Once you start making the suggested improvements, run another analysis of the server. What could be easier?
Free To Use!
Click here to download your copy today!
via Planet MySQL
Analyst for MySQL v1.1: Database Performance, Security, & Best Practices Auditing Tool Released – Download for FREE!

The brave can kill a single wasp with a flip-flop or a rolled-up copy of Time. But only the foolish go after an entire nest this way. The central "design problem" with eradicating a wasp nest is that the executioner needs distance; thus chemical companies proudly announce their wasp sprays can reach distances of 20 feet, like bear spray.

But homeowners may not want to use chemicals, particularly if they’ve got children. And it seems silly that this weapon can be defeated by a simple breeze. Hence the following chemical-free method has become popular (at least on YouTube) among those who already own something meant to work over distances: Shop-Vacs with the standard 8′ hose. All it takes is a little ingenuity to get the nozzle up to the nest’s front door:

Safety tip: The National Park Ranger’s Association advises against using this method for bears.

via Core77
Shop-Vacs Versus Wasp Nests

While nearly everyone agrees it’s a good idea to have a financial cushion in case of emergencies, even the experts don’t agree on the particulars of building an emergency fund. Here’s a realistic approach from HelloWallet, which takes into account costs of different kinds of emergencies.

The budgeting service outlines three categories or levels of emergencies: minor emergency (a flat tire or minor plumbing repair), major emergency (replacing a car part or paying the out-of-pocket maximum on a health policy), and job loss.

For each category, HelloWallet looked at its users’ reported spending to come up with recommended savings amounts that would cover the worst-case scenarios. For example, in the major emergency category, data showed users’ most expensive car repair was $3,800, so that’s the recommendation for individuals with cars, while a roof replacement could set you back $10,000, so that’s the recommendation for homeowners. For job loss, HelloWallet recommends saving 12 months’ worth of expenses—minus contributions from unemployment insurance and income from your spouse or partner—since finding a new job could take a year.

The oft-repeated “three to six month’s” (or eight to twelve month’s) of expenses recommendation is simpler and works as well, but if amassing that huge amount of money seems daunting, it might be encouraging to see that you may already be well on your way to covering at least minor and major emergencies.

Check out the site’s calculator below that will crunch the numbers for you, once you enter your income and other basic information. Or read more about their emergency savings findings in their whitepaper.

Emergency Savings Calculator | HelloWallet via Forbes

via Lifehacker
Find Out How Much to Save for Your Emergency Fund with This Calculator

The only thing that sucks worse than doing taxes is a hacker stealing your identity, doing your taxes for you, and then depositing your return in a random bank account, where they can later collect the bounty. Sound impossible? It’s not, according to the story of an unlucky man named Michael Kasper.

Long story short: You should register your IRS.gov account, because it’s frightfully easy for hackers to do it for you. That’s what happened to Kasper, who recently recounted his horror story to veteran security reporter Brian Krebs. An enterprising crook managed to register Kasper’s IRS.gov account, request a transcript for his 2013 tax return, and then use that information to file a 2014 tax return successfully. The money from the return went to the bank account of a random student, who then sent the money via Western Union to Nigeria. She’d been hired off of Craigslist for a moneymaking opportunity and didn’t realize she was doing something illegal. (Pro tip: Assume every "moneymaking opportunity" on Craigslist is illegal unless they can prove otherwise.)

The craziest thing about this saga is just how easy it apparently was to hack into the IRS system. It’s not even hacking really, since the system is protected by so-called knowledge-based authentication (KBA). The fraudsters who broke into Kasper’s account did so by guessing some basic information about his life—information that was readily available elsewhere on the web. A security researcher can do the same thing in a matter of minutes.

Click over to Krebs on Security to learn more about Kasper’s sad story. However, since criminals won’t be able to access your IRS transcript if you’ve already secured the account, you should probably go ahead and go to IRS.gov to lock things down. And just pray that the tax man ups his security game for next year.

[Krebs on Security]

Image via Shutterstock

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Contact the author at adam@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22

via Gizmodo
It’s Very, Very Easy for Hackers to Steal Your IRS Account

Years ago on The Tonight Show, Kevin Pollak told car nut Jay Leno that Detroit should build the ’57 Chevy again. "They must still have the plans sitting on a shelf somewhere," he said. "Dust them off and start making ’em again."

While it’s unlikely that General Motors has saved the dies from 1957 to stamp the fenders, or is willing to go back to making carburetors, you actually can buy a classic American car with modern-day underpinnings—but from Orlando, not Detroit. Ford has licensed the actual body design of the original Mustang (the body that was on the ’64 1/2 to ’66 models) to a Florida-based company called Revology Cars. Revology then has the bodies produced by California-based muscle car parts manufacturer Dynacorn International, and kits them out with modern suspensions, brakes, steering, powertrain and interior amenities.

The result is that "The entire car is new," Revology writes, "with the exception of the engine and transmission, which are remanufactured units purchased from Ford Motor Company." And although some of the promotional photos show their cars sporting the "289" badge, indicating the 289-cubic-inch (4.7-liter) motor the Mustang debuted with, the engine in Revology’s cars is actually a 5-liter (corresponding with the 302 that Mustangs wouldn’t see until 1968).

The car is technically classified as a replica, which means would-be buyers will have to check their local state’s regulations for registering cars in that category. They’ll also want to check their bank accounts: The fastback version starts at $119,500 and the convertible goes for a cool $122,000. (There is no hardtop notchback listed on the price sheet.)

Buyers can choose one of three ways to take delivery: They can either pick it up at Revology’s facility in Orlando, have the car delivered to their home…or have it shipped to a local Ford dealership, where they can retrieve it. If I had the cash I’d definitely go with the latter option; it’s gotta be a trip to roll off the lot in one of these, past rows of sulking Focuses.

via Core77
You Can Now Buy a Brand-New Ford Mustang—with the 1965 Body!

Bondic is a quick curing liquid plastic. It can bond, fill and insulate plastic, metal, fiberglass and wood. It won’t harden unless exposed to UV light – a UV LED is built into the applicator – so it won’t stick to your skin easily.
via The Awesomer
Bondic Liquid Plastic Welder

By Michael Wardlaw via wideopenspaces.com

Don’t you hate it when you get to the ballgame only to learn you forgot the tickets? Nothing will ruin a session on the range more quickly than leaving something at home. A well thought-out … Read More

The post Ten Range Bag Must-Haves appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

via The Truth About Guns
Ten Range Bag Must-Haves