Matt Edwards

Joint reporting by The Verge and The Markup: Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned. The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts. ...

Finished editing this over the last few nights. The footage is all from May 2022 and the trip we took. Really digging this Artlist.io service for finding fun backing tracks to put behind the footage. Still trying different video edits, cuts, and effects using DaVinci Resolve. Overall - I think I’m getting better at this? ;) Oh, and it was a lot of fun to relive these warm summer days while fall and winter roll on in to New Jersey. ...

Winter is coming, and we’re back on the indoor biking train with Zwift. Got in a few outdoor rides this past month. Weekends were filled with a wedding and working on buttoning up the sunroom with insulation before the winter comes, which certainly took away from the time I would have been out biking on weekends. It has been a warm October. The first weekend of November looks like it will hit 71F on Saturday - so I guess I will be out biking this coming weekend. ...

Matt Levine, writing in Money Stuff on 25 October 2022: Over the past few months I have written a long piece about crypto for Bloomberg Businessweek. It is out today, and you can read it here. Some of the themes will be familiar to Money Stuff readers: I touch on crypto’s sometimes hilarious and sometimes insightful reinvention of traditional finance, as well as Bitcoin’s revolutionary (re)discovery of the fact that, if a bunch of people decide that something should be valuable, that’s enough to make it valuable. But I also try to start from the beginning of crypto and build step by step, to develop complex modern crypto ideas from first principles. ...

As a follow up to Part I and Part II, which included some narrative and photos of a recent motorcycle tour of New England, here is a video which cuts together GoPro footage taken from our ride. The primary source of footage is a trip down Route 100 in Vermont, starting in Stowe and ending once we had crossed the Green Mountain National Forest on Route 73. The polaroid photo effect was really fun to build (thanks YouTube tutorial videos!). The moving photos within those polaroid frames were made possible by extracting the video file from an iPhone Live Photo and embedding it into the image frame. All of those motion graphic effects were created using Davinci Fusion. ...

From The Verge: But upon examination, these new features are hardly the panacea that their boosters imply. Some elements presented as safety enhancements (like lane keep assist) may be little more than driver conveniences. For now, at least, those technologies that could save the most lives (like pedestrian detection) remain deeply unreliable. And even if ADAS eventually works flawlessly, it is likely to have only a modest impact on annual traffic deaths. ...

Bit of a strange ride to have this happen on, but hey - 2,000 miles for the year! Given the disappointing year of 2021 when I spent a lot of time in physical therapy for the hamstring/groin strain, it was realistic to set such a low mileage goal for this year. Luckily, I’ve surpassed it with another two months and change to go this year. I’ll have to celebrate again when I hit 2,022 miles in the year 2022. And some other arbitrary goal I set now for the end of 2022. ...

This post if the second part of my recent motorcycle journey through New England to take in the changing of the leaves. Find Part I of this post here. Day 3: A Stopover in Stowe The cold night in Jackson, NH turned into a cold morning. Ice on the motorcycle seats! Luckily the sun was up soon after we were, and the ice melted off in a matter of minutes. Following an excellent pancake breakfast at the Cranmore Inn, I proceeded to pack on as many layers as would fit beneath my motorcycle jacket - sans pancakes things might have felt a bit looser. The bike engines roared to life and we got on the road northbound to the Mount Washington Cog Train. ...

Through the final few days of September and for the start of October, I took a motorcycle trip up into New England to explore the fall foliage and visit some of my favorite places. Unsurprisingly, many of those places were craft breweries. Also snuck in a good hike, some historical monuments, and a jaunt through downtown Albany. A productive long weekend, to be sure. Kristin came along with her Honda Rebel, and we made a good time of it. ...

Tools such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc have become the modern way to communicate about trivial things that were once fodder for occasional small talk. It is simply a truth of the world today; I can shoot you a text far more easily than I can connect with you physically, face-to-face. However, that is causing some issues for highly regulated industries, as Matt Levine relays in his column Money Stuff on 28 September: ...