Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

I've been fired and laid-off. No matter how you cut it, losing your job is scary. Even if it's an awful job that you're relieved to never have to deal with again, losing all or half of your income sources is usually scary. What are you going to do? How long will it take to find work again? How will you pay your bills in the mean time? I'd like to talk about how you can budget in a way that will not only boost your savings potential but it will make you less dependent on your job so should that ax drop or that pink slip come, you won't need to worry nearly as much, if at all. For the scenario of this article, I'll be talking about what my wife and I did to our finances to protect ourselves from the event of losing a job.

I know, I don't write much about money, but next to IT and cars/motorcycles, I think about money a lot. Over this past year and a half, my wife and I have learned a lot about how to manage our money effectively. In order to understand and appreciate where we are now, let me explain where we were.

When I bought my first RPi, I bought a kit that included a cheap clear case. It works but I wanted something nicer looking for sitting on my TV stand in my living room. It was love at first sight for the FLIRC case. I'd like to talk about it below.

Ever since Nintendo announced that they were stopping production of the NES Classic (after what felt like months of purposely under-producing to drive up the demand/price), I've been wanting to get another Raspberry Pi and setup RetroPie on it to play the games of my childhood. Well, I recently celebrated a birthday and got a few Amazon gift cards (which I enjoy very much), so I pulled the trigger on a second RPi, which I'm dedicating specifically to RetroPie and duties. In this article, I'd like to go over configuring the RetroPie. I'm going to assume that you've already got your ROMs and I will not be covering the installation of RetroPie in this post. If you've ever setup an RPi, it's the same process. If you have not and this is your first time, then check out my recent post about the process  (It's titled for installing CentOS v7, but the process is the same for installing just about any OS to the Raspberry Pi).