Entries Tagged as ‘Lifehacks’

December 7, 2009

DIY Dryer Fixing

March also brought the opportunity of fixing my own dryer. My take-home lesson on the whole fix-your-own-appliances thing is:

applianceaid.com – This is the place to go for all the troubleshooting/repair steps to take.
Pray for wisdom – A definite must for the clueless DIY’er.

And for those of you just looking for a little dryer eye candy:
Here’s [...]

November 25, 2009

Envelope Budgeting…No Really.

Envelop budgeting.  It is a concept that I learned years ago when I first got married and was trying to set up a budget.  The concept is fairly simple: You take your paycheck, divide it into different “envelopes” for your different expenses, and then pay for those expenses (groceries, gas, mortgage, eating out) out of [...]

February 9, 2009

When Geeks Cry (Part 3)

(A little technology rant about how it has recently let me down.)
Part 1
Part 2
I’m big on backups.  I backup incrementally every few days, and a full backup once a month.
Of course, I wasn’t always like that.  Backups were more of a chore when trying to backup your PC to 50 floppies, or 20 CDs.  Man, [...]

February 6, 2009

When Geeks Cry (Part 2)

(This is a rant about technology, and how it has recently let me down.)
Part 1 here.
I had left our laptop for days trying to get the hard drive to work again.  It had been running SpinRite for several days and was making slow progress.  There were several sectors of the hard drive with a big [...]

February 6, 2009

When Geeks Cry (Part 1)

I consider myself a geek.  I’m an engineer by trade, and so I’m always trying to figure how stuff works, what’s wrong with it and how to fix it.  That’s just how I roll.
So when my wife called last week saying that she was having trouble with our laptop, I wasn’t too worried.
And then when [...]

October 12, 2008

Mr. Fix-It

I’m not one of those “Mr. Fix-It” guys who can fix anything.  I’m pretty cautious when it comes to home appliance repair.  So if I had gotten those 4 words (“Honey, the washer’s broke.”) a couple of weeks earlier, I would have made a call to the Sears appliance repair.
But last Sunday at a soccer [...]

September 1, 2008

DIY Whiteboard

In preparing for a new school year, my wife decided that we needed a new white board.  We had one 3′x3′ on the back of an Ikea easel, but she decided that it wasn’t going to be sufficient.
Big white boards, the kind that you get in a school are expensive, and so we decided to [...]

March 23, 2008

Budget Reboot

I figured that since I was leading a life group on Finances, I ought to take a good look at ours and make sure everything added up (literally).
I’ve prescribed to the envelope budgeting system over the years, using “virtual envelopes” in a computer rather than real ones, but there haven’t been many (any) good tools [...]