Matt Edwards

Asks Matt Levine in two columns on April 30 and May 2: People could take out new life insurance policies specifically to sell to investors. Go to an insurance company, get a $5 million policy, have it pay out to a trust, make an investor the beneficiary of the trust, have the investor pay the premiums, and charge the investor a fee for the exposure. This is called “stranger-originated life insurance,” or STOLI, and it is largely not allowed. ...

I enjoy riding bicycles, and I understand the risks of leaving a bicycle unattended pretty much anywhere includes the chance of it getting stolen. Most bicycles are lightweight and don’t have the same sort of protections that personal passenger vehicles do in the US (mainly etched VIN / serial numbers). A bicycle does not have the defense of a locked door and a keyed mechanism to get it moving; most of the time its as simple as picking it up or riding off on it. Therefore, if you ride a bicycle to do any normal activities such as visiting a store or a park or going to school, you need a way to secure that bicycle once you have reached your destination. ...

In my homelab, I have a handful of services which are never exposed to the open internet and therefore do not need a domain name such as myservice.mydomainname.com. Instead, I can get by with a domain name that only resolves within my home network such as myservice.local.1 Let’s talk about how we set this up. tl;dr You can use a self-hosted certificate authority with Traefik to generate SSL certificates for homelab domains such as myservice.local. ...

I’ve been drinking 8-8oz cups1 of water per day for the past 1,000 days. I feel…good about that. The actual Day #1,000 occurred on Monday this week, but I was traveling for work and did not have the time to get this post written. Here’s my Streaks (iOS app store link) screenshot from the day just before I crossed 1,000: Woo-hoo 1,000 straight days of water consumption. ...

Following a recent upgrade within my homelab to Proxmox VE v8.0 I had a need to refactor my Terraform configurations.1 This was necessary because my previous Proxmox provider for Terraform, Telmate/proxmox, has not been kept up to date and would fail to work properly with Proxmox VE’s API following the v8 upgrade. Luckily, a second provider bpg/proxmox exists and is seeing regular updates so I can move over to that. This post is not about that migration, but instead about a neat little trick I picked up during it. Credit to the various blogs and Mastodon posts that got me to this solution, which I assure you I did not discover all on my own, but nevertheless want to document here for posterity and to help others searching for this solution. ...

From Jason Koebler at 404 Media: A 13-year-old competitive Tetris player has become the first known human to beat the game on the original NES by forcing it into a kill screen. In doing so, the player, Blue Scuti, broke world records for overall score, level achieved, and total numbers of lines in the 34-year-old game. Previously, only an AI had broken Tetris. Tetris was released in 1989; it is currently the year 2024. ...

Another year, another post about how much I enjoy riding my bicycle.1 Check out prior Year in Biking posts here. A Note About Prior Years I made a mistake. In years past, I have accidentally included all sport types when calculating total year cycling mileage. Which means I overstated my cycling mileage in 2022 – oops! I’ve developed some news ways to visualize and reflect upon my cycling and sport data from the year. Below is my first attempt with these new methods. Hope it makes things interesting and informative. ...

Following my post from last month about passing through the Intel iGPU to an unprivileged LXC, here’s an interesting solution for how to pass virtual GPUs (vGPU) from an 11th-gen or later Intel CPU through to a Virtual Machine. Benefits are: You can have up to seven (7) vGPU’s. You can pass through to a Virtual Machine, not an LXC! (Big benefit, as I somewhat prefer VM’s for their portability and self-contained nature.) Downsides, though: ...

The headline from Apple’s Newsroom says a lot:1 Apple extends Emergency SOS via satellite for an additional free year for existing iPhone 14 users Tough for anyone to think that Apple would have made a different announcement, a la “That Life-Saving Feature of your iPhone Now Costs $5/mo!” However, those satellites in the sky are not free. In early 2022, there was a rumor that Apple was looking to augment its Services revenue by creating a “hardware subscription” for the iPhone. Pay a monthly fee, have an iPhone. Similar to the iPhone Upgrade Program, but the person getting the phone is not taking out a loan and paying in monthly installments. Simply, they are paying ~$60/month to have an iPhone. Presumably, they could cancel at any time, give the phone back, and move on with their life. ...

As a follow up to my post this weekend about standing up Jellyfin inside an unprivileged LXC container, @kiraso asked me on Mastodon if the Intel QuickSync iGPU could be shared with more than 1 LXC. For example, perhaps I want to run Plex and Jellyfin in two separate LXCs and have them both take advantage of hardware accelerated decoding. Possible?1 Sure is! ...