Being a fairly typical computer nerd who spends his days programming and his evenings talking finance and fintech, it will come as no surprise to hear that I’m not the biggest fan of laying my body out in the sun and waiting for the sky to change me to a pink colour in the hope I might turn brown and gain some kind of bragging rights. That said, my particularly fierce disdain for sunbathing comes as the result of something…
Can’t be bothered reading the article? Here’s an advanced summary (skip this if you prefer the narrative approach): Curve is a free to get MasterCard It comes pre-loaded with £5 credit if you use visit https://curve.page.link/t1AU and use code RC19U (and I get £5 too!) It works at home and abroad, with no fees and the very best currency conversion rate You can even use it to get cash out when you land in another country, for free When you…
If you’re interested in personal finance, and having your money work for you, then chances are you’ve switched providers since opening your account, and in some cases, have done so multiple times. This will typically have been either to put your cash into accounts with better benefits (such as free perks, higher interest or a better app), or maybe just to take advantage of some of those heft switching incentives, but either way, no doubt resulted in a couple of…
You see it in the news, on TV, on Facebook and just about everywhere else; switch your current account and you could get £100 / a pair of Bose headphones / some vouchers towards a holiday / blah blah blah. The problem with these adverts and the accounts they show off though is that they often come with caveats, such as 0% interest on your balance once you’ve switched, no option to open a regular saver, or some obscene pay…
DISCLAIMER: There’s a very good reason for me putting that “almost” in the title. Credit cards are, in my opinion, a 100% no brainer for anybody capable of responsibly managing their money. However, if you are even slightly unsure of your ability to do so, they’re not for you. Every single benefit of a credit card is a mere fraction of the downsides that can come from poor management. The #1 rule for this entire concept is to pay off your credit…
I write this blog post… review… trip report… whatever you want to call it, with the complete opposite of rose-tinted glasses on. The reason for this however is not that my train was delayed, or cancelled, or re-routed, but that it was in fact all 3 of those things. Accordingly, rather than writing this from my hotel room after arriving, or from home once the return leg of the trip concludes, I am instead writing it from Tring station, just…
A few months back I stumbled across Hatnote’s Listen to Wikpedia project, a wonderful little tool that emits gentle tones and sounds every time someone edits a page on Wikipedia, as well as outputting some basic information onto the screen. I came across the project from a Reddit post that mentioned its use as background music to put you to sleep, but personally I actually found it better to use whilst working. In any case, the biggest takeaway from the…
Just… why? Recently I was tasked with updating a number of legacy servers running Ubuntu 14.10. Aside from the obvious security issues of running an OS several years out of date, there were a number of newer packages that simply wouldn’t work anymore, so we decided it was time to bite the bullet, update, and deal with the inevitable incompatibilities that we came across afterwards. Now normally, updating an OS isn’t a terribly difficult thing to do, especially when that…