The twins had their first birthday yesterday! I’m glad to let you know that we all survived their first year of existence! I wonder if this surviving thing was harder for them or for us. ^_^

I finished “audio-reading” I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi last week. I realize that the title sounds like crappy self-help, but I thought I’d give this book a chance. I got several positive recommendations, and Ramit’s personal finance blog is pretty good.

Unfortunately, after reading it, I can’t recommend it to any non-US readers…

I agree with the principles that are at the essence of the book:

1. Invest aggressively, invest early.
2. Spend responsibly on what brings you the most value.
3. Be as frugal as possible with everything else.
4. Automate financial processes whenever you can.
5. Don’t be stupid with debt, fees, tax advantage opportunities, etc.

These are great messages, worth passing on. My problem with the book is that 95% of the content delves into how these principles apply to the average 20-something american – which I’m not. Three examples from the top of my mind:

• Going into the details of credit score at length.
• Detailing the different types of US bank accounts.
• Reading out phone numbers of US banks?! Seriously?!

Bottom line, if you live in the US, this book may be valuable to you. Otherwise, save your time.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last weeks.

Blog posts from the last three weeks

1. Running a time-limited subprocess in Python.
2. Introducing working with protocol buffers in a SCons project, and integrating a custom Protoc builder – the latest episodes in my SCons series.
3. Two Shell-Foo posts – parallelizing downloads with wget and xargs, and merging common files from two directories.
4. A new app in the app-highlights series – xkcdViewer.
5. The previous weekly review

The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

GeekDad is running a Patreon campaign. Go ahead and support some geeks!

Interesting analysis of the Sony attack attribution by Bruce Schneier.

If you archive Gmail messages straight from the notification bar, but your OCD bothers you about the rising unread count, take a look at this apps script that marks archived messages as read.

Here’s an instructables about making a WiFi webcam from an old Android phone.

Useful tips on traveling with Two-Factor verification.

This astronomically correct twinkle twinkle is wonderful!

Look at the cool graphs in this Google cloud platform blog post on Cloud Monitoring.

Now that’s some serious Maker-fu – etching circuits at home.

If you always wanted to make an Arduino-like board in a Tic-Tac container, search no more!

hack.pledge is a community of developers helping each other improve coding skills. I think I’ll sign up.

This project uses a Raspberry-Pi as a portable VPN/TOR router.

Change-detector tests are a common caveat. I’m sure I’m guilty of writing such tests from time to time. It can be delicate in some situations…

Raspberry Pi launched Raspberry Pi 2 (Model B), that replaces the previous Model B. Much more power at the same price – who can complain?

Speaking of Raspberry Pi, this project uses it to make a fairytale rotary phone! Nice.

A bunch of Google Cloud Platform stuff:

• Running Dataflow pipelines in multiple environment, including Spark.
• Local SSD’s or now generally available for all GCE customers.
• Kubernetes.
• What makes a container cluster?
• Hortonworks Data Platform is now available on GCP.

Side project updates

Nothing to see here. Move along.