Advent of Code Day 7

Advent of Code 2020 Map

As the holidays come to an end, I have completed (well not finished, but been working on while I had free time) Advent of Code. I’ve talked about this in years past, but the short of it is 25 days of coding problems. Day 7 has to do with playing a game of Camel Cards.

2024 Retirement Calculator

Rifle Military Biathalon U.S. Army

Now that Congress has finally passed this year’s NDAA, we know what the final pay tables for 2024 will look like. This updated calculator also includes updates to the IRS tax brackets for 2023 and the new VA disability rates that went into effect Dec 2023. Again, if you see any mistakes, please let me »

Building a (Cheap) Minecraft Server on AWS

Box Headed Minecraft Men

My oldest kid wanted a Minecraft server for them and their friends, but I didn’t want to pay to run one 24/7. What should have been an easy project turned into a lot of discovery learning. Save yourself sometime and read this.

Workstation Setup

Dev Ops

I’ve been doing dev work for years but have never taken the time to document how I like my setup which means every time I do it again, I have to figure it all out again.

Implementing SSLSplit

A couple of weeks ago I talked about using SSLSplit to at as a proxy so that I could examine the mechanics of a Docker pull. I decided to go ahead a set up a purpose-built VM just for this so I could easily do this again in the future. I wanted to go ahead and document (and share) the steps that I went through for this.

Retirement Calculator 2022 Edition

A year or two ago I decided to create a retirement calculator to help me figure out my finances for when I was getting ready to retire. It occurred to me earlier today that I have done a poor job of keeping it current, so I decided to spend a few minutes and get it fully updated (I think) for 2022.

Advent of Code Day 9

Advent of Code 2020 Map

For day 9, we’re trying to break a simple encryption scheme. Our input starts with a preamble of 25 numbers. From there, it continues with a series of additional numbers. Each number must be equal to the sum of any two of the previous 25 numbers. We’re trying to find the first number that doesn’t meet that rule.