JDPFu.com 2025

This week, I got a shock in my snailmail box. It was an offer from my current health insurance company for a different policy which meets the new federally mandated requirements.

For the least 3-4 years, my premiums were $148/month. That was manageable.

The new premium is $321/month and raises the annual deductible 20%. I checked both my current provider’s other plans and those from the Obama-Care website. The Obama-Care website didn’t have any plans from my current insurer and were about the same 2x price. I didn’t look too closely at the options. I use Costco’s Insurance marketplace now and did look over the different options there. The cheapest plan which was significantly worse than what I have today was $280/month. I compared a few other plans against the one picked for me by the insurance company. Found one that was $302/month, then tried to change my current plan over to it, but couldn’t login. Reset the password (I use a password manager, so it shouldn’t have been necessary), and wasn’t able to login still. It was late, so I decided to try later. I have until Monday (2 days) to pick a different plan.

That offer had an increase of 2.1x and will all but destroy the extra household budget for entertainment. My hobbies will simply have to take a back door to health insurance premiums. I suppose we will eat out less too.

I’m confused how a service that I barely use that has monthly cost of $138-$148 can justify doubling in a few months? Is this fraud or do the federally mandated changes, which don’t have anything to do with my needs, really require that much more money?
Or are the insurance companies using this to make everyone pay more?

Perhaps 100% free health care in the USA would be better?

It seems that I’m not alone with the premiums going up. Washington Post

Perhaps I can qualify for government assistance for these premiums? I think this is doubtful.

The fantastic t-mobile payg (Pay As You Go) plan that I’ve been using for 8+ year is gone. It was $0.10/min, no monthly minimum.

Now they’ve made it $3/month and include 30 minutes. For many years, I’d spent about $20-30/yr total, so this is about a 50% price increase to me at 12 x $3/mon = $48/yr. It won’t kill me and my prepaid account is active for 365 days still (I assume). Most people would talk at least 30 min worth in a month, which is fine.

When I’d travel, the plan would be changed to

$2/Day Unlimited Talk, Text & 2G Web

. That still exists, but they’ve added $10 for 7 days of LTE data (1G max). This $10 is additional and only provides data, not unlimited talk/text.

For example, just returned from Phreaknic and enabled the 2G unlimited stuff (talk/text and 2G data) for $2/day over 4 days = $8 total. Talked about 45 min in that time and used about 60MB of data for maps, GPS, directions. The signal always said 3G, but there were many places where no data flowed.

None of these PAYG plans provide any international roaming. So sad. Looks like picking up a €10-15 SIM after landing will still be the std procedure.

Update – 2015

Took a trip and was able to enabled a 7-day $10 1G data plan on the $3/month pay-as-you-go plan. For some trips, this would definitely be useful, but not for my last trip. I visited family and knew the area a little. Using offline map too – FreeNAV and preloading a few highly-rated restaurants into the favorites removed any need for data. Basically, I used the data to check emails during the 4 days I was at a conference. Meh. Those could easily have waited until the evening. Even when driving, the data plan wasn’t very useful – FuelMyRide – a cheap gas android app has stopped providing service, so that wasn’t useful. I did look up a discount chain when on the road, but that definitely wasn’t worth $10.

In summary, t-mobile has made their add-on data plans too expensive to be useful for short trips. The $2/day plans were just right – not cheap, but I could justify it easily. $10/wk seldom makes sense for me.

I really miss the pure pay-as-you-go plan that didn’t have a monthly minimum charge. Oh well, they are still the best deal for my needs.

Update – April 2015

I feel screwed again by t-mobile. I’ll explain.
Normally, I add $10 to my PAYG plan every year. This has been working since 2007-ish. I never really checked the balance, since adding that $10 annually added to the prior balance and extended the length for another 365 days. Last fall (after I added minutes), there was $30+ on the account. My expectation was these were good for 365 days, just like they had been for years. I don’t really talk on the cell phone, not my nature.

Jump forward to March 2015 and a trip out of town so I add the $10/wk for 1G of data to my PAYG plan. Notice the account balance is $5.xx AFTER the $10 is taken out. Fine, time to add some more money, it will be good for a year after all. Looked at a retailer for a $100 card and not finding it, picked up a $50 card.

Today, added the $50 to my account and it said the minutes were good for 90 days!!! WHAT?!! What happened to 365 days? 10 minutes later and I found lots of other people like me pissed off at t-mobile – basically they remove the 365 day period and didn’t tell anyone. Further, they left all the old advertising up on their website. I can’t spend $50 in cellphone use within 90 days. Can’t be done.

So a few people are claiming that prior gold rewards accounts are grandfathered. I hope so.

Pulled this from the t-mobile website today – Apr 2, 2015

How can I get the most value for my refill money?

A: If you are a pay by the minute customer, add $100 in refills to attain Gold Rewards status. Customers who have reached Gold Rewards status get 15% more minutes with every refill and keep access to service for a full year.

When do my Gold Rewards rates take effect?

A: Once you have activated $100.00 in refills on a pay by the minute plan, you automatically qualify for Gold Rewards and will receive 15% more minutes with every future refill. And you’ll retain access to service for a full year!

From Bruce Feiler’s book, The Secrets of Happy Families :

The Do You Know Scale

Please answer the following questions by circling “Y” for “yes” or “N” for “no.” Even if you know the information we are asking about, you don’t need to write it down. We just wish to know if you know the information.

11/2018 Update

For Ubuntu 18.04, the commands have changed for network setup thanks to netplan, but the major ideas are still the same.
Hammond is active on the Ubuntu Forums. He has many server setup guides

6/2016 Update

Nothing major, just minor tweaks and a few details added.

4/2015 Update

Seems that lots of people are interested in extremely basic security of Linux systems and would like to see what others do initially on their fresh servers or VMs. So, I did a little googling (DRY, right?) to see what a few others are doing and to compare that with my setup steps. We all come from different places, backgrounds, and have different things we want out of our servers.

This is about basic, first-pass security, not securing Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, email, or any webapp. The box has an ssh-server, known login, DHCP IP and is ready for other stuff. That is our starting point.

Let’s get started.

Started watching Dale and Tucker vs Evil this morning IMDB link. I’m less than 30 minutes in and needed a break from laughing so hard.
I haven’t laughed that hard in at least 10 yrs, maybe 15 yrs.

It is a comedy/horror movie, so there is lots of blood, over-the-top blood and many quotable lines.

If you’ve ever lived in the country, see this movie, provided you are an adult. ;) Definitely not for the kids.

Best line in the movie:

He looks like he’s gonna walk it off, he’s gonna be fine.

– Tucker

Others suggest NOT watching the trailer first. I didn’t. Great movie. I don’t want to ruin it for you with any more details.

Plus it has Alan Tudyk in it!

I should have mentioned this – it is free with Amazon Prime now.

For the last … 7+ yrs, I’ve been paying about $10/yr for a cell phone plan.
Just added my annual $10 to the pre-paid account a few minutes ago to keep all the minutes alive for another 365 days.

Also, if it isn’t clear, I’ve had a smartphone for the last 2 yrs and only a voice plan. No data. Data works great from wifi. GPS also works if you cache the maps or if you use an offline map program like NAVFree. No Data Required Apps

I’ve described this $10/yr Cell Phone Plan before for anyone new to my blog.

• It might not work for many people, but it does work for many more than who are using it.
• If you are into minimizing, it could be for you.
• If you have a home phone AND a work phone, it could be for you.
• If you avoid talking when driving, it could be for you.
• If you don’t chat on your cell phone, it could be for you. Mainly emergency use and a few out-plans-have-changed calls every week.
• If you don’t need a data plan to earn a living, it could be for you.

There have been times when not having a data plan has been bad, but that happens only when I’m overseas and unlikely to have a data plan for the limited time there anyway.

Between dumping CableTV and not having a monthly cell bill, I’m easily saving $2000/yr.
Our electrical bill is in the lowest 1% for similar homes, so saving much there probably isn’t possible. Ceiling fans.
Our water and gas bills are routinely at the monthly minimal charge just to have service, so saving much there probably isn’t possible.
We could cut back on expensive foods and alcohol. Perhaps not.

Any other ideas for saving money from monthly expenses?

BTW, the pre-paid plan balance is $79+ after adding the $10 more today.

Turns out that nobody is paranoid enough when it comes to their internet use.

Even the most paranoid people, who use TOR have discovered that TOR isn’t enough.

I’ve been paranoid for years and years, not because I have anything to hide, my life is relatively boring. Mostly it is because I believe in the US Constitution and the right to privacy that is included by the 4th Amendment therein. Without a judge signing a warrant based on probable cause, what I do is nobody’s business.

If you haven’t read the full Constitution since High School – take 5 minutes and read the main part again now. It is a simple outline for governments written in plain English. I dare say – genius.
It isn’t perfect. I’d change the election laws by forcing term limits, prohibit campaign contributions except from 1 human individual to another human individual, prohibit contributions unless the person contributing can legally vote in THAT elections, and I’d add clearer privacy rights across all forms of communications taken place in private. I’d add that government employees can be recorded in any way while they are working, except where safety is a concern.

So it turns out that I was paranoid about the wrong things, at least if you read my blog articles. I’ve been paranoid about the US Government for years, just didn’t think it was a good idea to post those thoughts to the internet. We will see if there is any impact to my international travel based on this.

Some days we just can’t win.

This little blog VM is out of disk space … er … sorta.
It is out of inodes. Fortunately, it is at 93% use for sector storage, but unfortunately, there are less than 3K inodes available.

apt-get update cannot complete. Out of disk error.

The VM has 1.5G of swap that never gets used. The RAM amount is set to prevent that need on purpose, so I decided to

• change the swap partition into a data partition,
• rsync over a few thousand files from /var/www,
• mount /var/www from the other partition (vda5) and
  … life would be good. Yes, everything under /var/old-www was removed after mounting.

It was all scripted to minimize downtime. AND there is a good backup from last night should anything terrible happen. Downtime was a little over 30 seconds. Good enough. Heck, www.amazon.com was down for at least 10 minutes today, so my 30 seconds should be fine.

After all that, now there are fewer inodes available on /!!!

$ df -i

Filesystem     Inodes  IUsed  IFree IUse% Mounted on

/dev/vda1      296000 293371   2629  100% /

/dev/vda5       97344   3751  93593    4% /var/www

Looks like it is time to build a larger VM file. The blog storage was already expanded last year – which is probably why the inodes are so tight. Copying the entire VM will take longer than a few minutes.

What a pain. I hate downtime, but I hate leaving a system sorta-patched must more.

Some days we just can’t win.

Using FreeNAV on Android is mostly good, but it lacks a few capabilities that would be really nice for any GPS user.

• Add POI data
• Import POI files
• Export Favorites
• Transfer Favorites
  The POI DB is definitely missing many, many, many POIs. Looking for a specific pizza place found 6, but none of them are the two within 3 miles of home that have been there longer than I’ve lived here. It seems to list places 100+ miles away.

Looking for free audiobooks?

• www.booksshouldbefree.com/
• www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks
  Both sites also have links to free eBooks too.

These are well-known authors with well-known books. Many are classics, certainly a few books that you’ve always meant to read, but just never got around to reading. Very few new books there.

I use audiobooks when on long drives. I suspect that War and Peace will outlast any drive most people have planned. ;) Book 1
or
eBook
will get you started.

Have you read Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy? Now is your chance!