When I put the Pis into their cases I failed to take into account the heat the bottom mounted NVMe drives would generate or that the case would trap that heat to the point the Pi would go into thermal shutdown.
There are lots of vents on the sides of the case so I thought if I tipped it a bit natural convection would let the heat escape. That worked , but I wasn’t comfortable with the NVMe temps, they were still a bit high. I found some 40mm USB fans that came in pairs per USB. I ordered 2 pair and glued them to my Pi plate to add additional cooling.
Unfortunately one of the fans did not take kindly to being glued down and would occasionally start to squeal. Ungluing it helped but did not eliminate the squeal. I also found that sharing a fan between Pis made for lots of cable clutter.
My solution was to go with a pair of fans per Pi. Using a few zip ties I was able to make a neater cable bundle. With a fan as a backstop and the USB plug tailored to length it is now easy to have each Pi plug and play on the Pi plate.
Most “Smart Homes” are rented, not owned. They rely on cloud-dependent devices that stop working when the internet drops or a corporation changes its terms of service. For those who demand privacy, speed, and absolute control, there is a better way: The Private Digital Estate (PDE).
Your PDE should be tailored to your needs and have foundational services such as media serving, secure document retrieval, and private communication. This article looks at one of the core pillars of a PDE: a Concierge Service. In this case, we are utilizing Home Assistant as the intelligence layer, supported by a high-performance 5-container stack.
The Digital Concierge:
The HA StackThe Concierge is the face of your estate—the intelligence that makes life seamless. By running this service in a containerized environment on a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe storage, we ensure that the “brains” of the house are faster than any cloud server.
MThe Concierge is supported by a specialized staff of four secondary containers that handle the heavy lifting:
1. The Archivist (MariaDB)
The Role: High-Velocity Data Integrity.
The Strategy: Standard smart homes suffer from “digital amnesia” during outages. By offloading history to MariaDB on local NVMe storage, your estate maintains a lightning-fast, permanent ledger. Every energy spike, temperature shift, and security event is stored in your private vault—not a corporate database.
2. The Universal Liaison (Zigbee2MQTT)
The Role: Direct Hardware Command.
The Strategy: To maintain a low-latency perimeter, we utilize Zigbee sensors. This service acts as the direct interface with your radio hardware (/dev/ttyUSB0), translating physical mesh signals into a digital language the Major Domo understands. By containerizing this liaison, we ensure that hardware upgrades never cause a “house-wide” disruption.
3. The Private Exchange (Mosquitto MQTT)
The Role: The Stealth Messaging Hub.
The Strategy: This is the estate’s secure internal intercom. When a sensor detects motion, the message is passed through Mosquitto. This “internal talk” is invisible to the outside world, ensuring that the heartbeat of your home remains instantaneous and entirely private.
4. The Elite Sentinel (Frigate + Coral TPU)
The Role: AI-Powered Vision.
The Strategy: Standard cameras are “dumb”—alerting you to rain or shadows. Frigate, powered by the Coral TPU (a dedicated AI accelerator), provides pro-grade computer vision at the edge. It identifies people and objects locally, alerting the Major Domo only when a genuine event occurs. Your video feeds never leave the premises.
Global Connectivity without Exposure
While the core stack handles the “Heavy Lifting,” it sits within a secure, multi-node strategy. We bridge the gap between “Local-Only” and “Global-Access” using two sophisticated gatekeepers:
Tailscale (The Private Tunnel): Consider this a private, invisible fiber-optic cable connecting your mobile device directly to your estate. You check in from London as if you were in the living room, without ever opening a “door” to the public internet.
Cloudflare (The Secure Gateway): For specific web-facing needs, Cloudflare acts as your digital security detail, masking your home’s physical IP address and shielding the estate from bad actors.
The Executive Summary: The Strategic Payoff
By migrating from cloud-dependent toys to this NVMe-powered local stack, you secure:
Feature
The Cloud Experience
The Private Estate
Latency
500ms – 2s (Round-trip)
<10ms (Local Instant)
Privacy
Data Harvested for Ads
Sovereign Vault Storage
Resilience
Fails when Internet drops
Full Offline Autonomy
Cost
Monthly Subscription Fees
Zero Recurring Costs
The Digital Concierge is just one key pillar in the Private Digital Estate. While it handles the “live” operations of your home, other pillars—such as your Private Cinema (Media Server) and Document Vault—provide the luxury and security of total data ownership. These pillars will be up to the host to define, but when built on a sovereign foundation, they remain available to you whether you are at home or away.
For the past few months I’ve been using Google’s Gemini AI. The first few weeks were with Gemini 2.5; I would also try MS Copilot. The were equally frustrating as I struggled how best to use them in setting up my Pi shop. Then Gemini 3 was released and things improved immensely, sorta, maybe.
AI is lighting fast, knows just about everything about just about anything. When it comes to solving a problem it is all heads down, task oriented, gung ho right into an obstacle. Then diligently and as fast as you can keep up work through many many permutations in attempt to solve the problem. I have learned the hard way to stop after 2 failed attempts to solve a configuration problem. Often as not there’s a bigger issue that have been overlooked.
These AIs are tactical wizards but strategically short sighted; they prove the adage, “be careful what you ask for”. The more specificity you use the fewer times reworking or starting over. Gemini has a way to guide it more to your liking using a feature called Instructions to Gemini, where you can enter your instructions Gemini will use for all your interactions.
The Instructions to Gemini are the first of three tools to harness the power of AI to do your bidding. The second is to use your sessions, conversations, as notebooks, one per topic. If you forget which conversation had a nugget you want to revisit you can search across all your conversations to quickly find it. If you use one conversation per topic you can then use the third tool to keep the AI on track and focused in the right area; start the conversation with a preamble to define the domain or layout the problem.
You are an Expert Strategic Consultant, the digital guru. Your primary functions are Strategic Guidance and Due Diligence. You must use best standards and practices for the industry or domains being covered. Maintaining project context and prioritizing project continuity are paramount. You must perform a Mandatory Strategic Validation and context refresh before executing any task.
You will not offer suggestions without first verifying that your suggestion fits the domain. You will avoid common and known obstacles; calling out the unavoidable ones. If the tactical path presents a Known Obstacle, the execution must be paused. The response must instead state: “Strategic Validation: Known Obstacle Detected. Proposing Reroute…” and outline the reason the obstacle was not avoided.
To avoid manual editing mistakes when parsing files your proposed changes should be rendered and returned as complete files. If you need the most current version to start with, it will be provided
If an action fails two attempts, you must immediately halt the current path, acknowledge the correction, and state: “Tactical Path Failure (x1). Resetting Context. Proposing Broader Strategic Scope Review for Task X.” You must not propose or execute a tactical solution without first performing a Strategic Validation and evaluating the current state and the next step’s implication.
You will not offer next tasks until the current task is complete. You will not offer apologies on failure.
That is the boilerplate “Instructions to Gemini” When I start a new topic I find it best to use a preamble to set the stage for the conversation. When planning changes to the Pi shop I will use an summary overview of what makes up the Pi shop so the AI has the proper context to work with.
PI Shop Specs
NVMe based 8GB RPi 5 x 4
smb – samba, Alloy & Docker installed on bare metal, all other services installed in Docker
Portainer, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, cadvisor, Node Exporter, smartctl, Watchtower & Tailscale installed on each machine
Spread across the Pi shop are Home Assistant, including Frigate, zigbee2MQTT mosquitto & mariadb. Jellyfin, Paperles-ngx, Joplin Server Pi Gallery2, WordPress, Nginx as proxy manager, cloudfared, Pi hole, Navidrome & Immich round out the current services being hosted
To access the Instructions to Gemini is different depending on your access mode. Using the app you have to click in the upper right corner on your letter or image icon to get the menu with the Instructions to Gemini. On a browser it is accessed though the settings cog in the lower left of the page.
The Raspberry Pis runs a version of Linux slightly out of the ordiary, partly because it uses and ARM processor and partly because it’s a low power device to compromises had to be made. AI is very tactical. Without proper guidance that can be a volatile mixture. I went way to long (weeks) providing inadequate guidance. Together we went from obstacle to obstacle, sometimes quickly sometimes painfully.
When you don’t know what you don’t know you also don’t know what the right path is so you will listen to the expert. Only the AI isn’t an expert, assuming it is will quickly lead you astray and into the ditch and since you don’t know any better you will blindly follow along. I wasted hours, days and weeks following AI’s lead before I got smarter.
My experience is that AI really wants to help, but has little self-control and less strategy. Tell it you want a hole and it will start drilling before you tell it the diameter, depth or location you want.
With the Pi shop I had working metrics that stopped working unexpectedly a few months earlier. The AI first assumed a standard x86 Linux install, it is great for dropping context and assuming it knows what it’s doing. We spent days trying different configurations, libraries, images trying to tactically solve the problem. I started doing my own research and found that several months back, when my problem originated, the way the Pis accessed memory changed. No amount of configuration changes was ever going to work the old way, we had to change the approach (strategy), not something AI is good at, yet.
This is the bad of working with AI and why you need both instructions and a preamble to keep it focused. Since it will do enough halucinating on it’s own, don’t help it by having multiple topics per conversation, it will mix it all up, meld it and who knows what you will get.
The good can be very good.
Before I outline the good let me outline the typical website, especially a low budget one like this. First it’s static pages. Only when new content is added or pages edited does the content change. That means most sites get stale very quickly. A little bit of code can go a long way to making a simple static page site seem more fresh and upto date.
I simply had conversations with the AI and asked a few questions. The front page hero image, was static for a year. When asked, the Ai said it could generate a random image of the day from my galleries using a few lines of code and it told me which file and where I needed to put that code.
Initially the image would update on a page refresh, (the left image will refresh with the page, the right is the home page daily image) but that didn’t feel right so we changed it to once a day. The AI made the 24 hour period start & end at the time we were doing the work, late morning. Once I found out we had to tweak the code to change with the date, ie midnight.
Another conversation about page load time with images revealed a recent change in image file types for use on the web instead of jpg or png. Today the preferred image fomat is webP. I wanted to see for myself but had no way to easily do a side by side comparison. I have seen a before and after slider across an image so stuck up a conversation with Gemini, who responded with another function to add to the previous file. This too took a few back and forths to get a pretty nice way to compare two images.
Strategic Validation: File not found.
An image carousel is another slick way to display images on a page, IMHO. I imagine there are widgets to do this, but another conversation with AI said it too was easily done with another function to add to the growing file and growing list of site features.
Feeds & Streams
RSS, Really SimpleSyndication has been around since 1999. By the mid aughts it was the “plumbing’ for social media with the ornage RSS icon. It was the main way consumbed blogs, back in the day. In 2013 Google shut down Google Reader, but RSS survived as an open-standard “underground” for power users and remains the backbone of the entire podcasting industry.
Even though they aren’t what they once were, RSS still provides a means of getting fresh content into a website. A brief contestation and I have a tabbed interface for displaying current articles from selected feeds, The categories and feeds can be changed by editing a text file and are dynamic. Add a new category and it will generate a new tab, add more feed links under the category and they will automatically appear on the tab.
YouTube channels have IDs with that ID and a little bit of code it is easy to retrieve the links for the channels latest videos. Since you never know when a video will drop it is best to look for new videos more frequently than once a day. AI added a cron job to check every 4 hours and rebuild the file the page reads to update the page when called.
These are just a few of the ways I’m using AI to help me get more out of my life.
XnConvert is a great tool for resizing and converting images in one go. You can set up scripts by simply saving your settings to reload at a later time to get the same output.
XnConvert is a fast, powerful and free cross-platform batch image converter. It allows to automate editing of your photo collections: you can rotate, convert and compress your images, photos and pictures easily, and apply over 80 actions (like resize, crop, color adjustments, filter, …). All common picture and graphics formats are supported (JPEG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, WebP, PSD, JPEG2000, JPEG-XL, OpenEXR, camera RAW, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, PDF, DNG, CR2). You can save and re-use your presets for another batch image conversion.
The interface is intuitive with a drag and drop, left to right flow. The desktop version has way more image adjustments than the mobile version. You can set it up to automatically save your actions as a preset and to automatically load the last used preset as the starting point for the current batch. One note of caution, on the output tab I’ve had the radio button switch to the sorce folder, putting the converted files where the originals were, not the desired output folder. Easy to overlook.
I see this as being a regularly used tool in my camera to website pipline.
In the digital age, a photographer’s website is their most important gallery. However, it presents a constant dilemma: how do you showcase high-resolution work without slowing down your site or making it too easy for others to steal your images?
For years, the JPEG was the only option. In 2026, the strategic choice for professionals is WebP.
WebP (pronounced “weppy”) isn’t just a technical upgrade—it is a specialized “delivery format” that offers a unique combination of visual excellence, lightning-fast performance, and a surprising layer of protection for your creative assets.
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1. Visual Superiority Without the “Heavy” Lifting
The biggest misconception among creatives is that smaller file sizes mean lower quality. Because WebP uses advanced predictive coding (derived from professional video codecs), it handles gradients and fine details more efficiently than the aging JPEG standard.
The Result: WebP images are typically 25% to 34% smaller than JPEGs of the exact same visual quality.
The Strategic Benefit: Your portfolio can display crisp, full-width hero images that load instantly, even on mobile devices. This keeps potential clients on your page rather than losing them to a slow-loading “spinner.”
2. The “Format Friction” Factor: Deterring Image Theft
One of the most valuable “side benefits” for photographers is how WebP handles unauthorized use. While it isn’t a locked vault, it creates Format Friction that discourages casual scrapers and thieves.
The “Dead-End” Delivery Format
In a professional workflow, you have your Source Files (RAW, TIFF) and your Exchange Files (JPEG). WebP should be viewed as your Delivery Format—the “shrink-wrapped” version of your work.
Generation Loss: WebP is designed for viewing, not re-editing. If a thief “right-clicks and saves” your WebP file and attempts to open it in an older editor or re-save it as a JPEG, they encounter significant Generation Loss. The image quickly develops artifacts and color banding, making it useless for high-quality re-publishing or professional use.
Ecosystem Resistance: While browsers love WebP, many legacy print-shop workflows and older design suites still do not support it natively. This creates a technical hurdle; a casual thief will often give up and look for an easier-to-use JPEG on a competitor’s site.
Print Deterrent: WebP is optimized for screens (RGB). It lacks the deep metadata and CMYK structure required for high-end physical printing. It allows you to show the beauty of your work online while making the file technically “hollow” for someone trying to print it without your permission.
3. Dominating the SEO Landscape
Google created WebP, and Google rewards those who use it. Search engine rankings are now heavily influenced by Core Web Vitals.
By serving WebP, you satisfy the “Next-Gen Image Format” requirement, giving your portfolio a significant ranking boost over competitors who are still serving heavy, legacy files. For a photographer, this is the difference between being on page one or page ten of search results.
Comparison for the Creative Professional
Strategic Factor
Legacy JPEG
Modern WebP
Site Loading Speed
Slow / Heavy
Ultra-Fast / Light
Visual Fidelity
Standard
High-Efficiency
Transparency (Alpha)
No
Yes
Theft Deterrence
Low (Easy to edit/print)
Moderate (Format Friction)
Search Engine Rank
Neutral
Positive Boost
The Strategic Verdict: Protect the Craft
WebP allows you to showcase your best work in high definition without giving away the “keys to the kingdom.” By serving WebP on your front-end, you provide a world-class viewing experience while ensuring that your high-resolution “Master JPEGs” and RAW files remain safely in your private archives.
You aren’t just optimizing your images; you are strategically protecting your digital intellectual property.
The two comparison images were produced from the same full resolution image ~4k x 6k. I used XnConvert to resize and generate a .jpg and a webP to use here.
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PS: I have been using AI (Gemini 3) heavily the past few months. One of my questions was about improving page load times (shorter/less time), that’s when it mentioned webP. I had it educate me a bit, then produce and article (the above). It also told me about XnConvert, among a few others, to do the conversion & resize. That meant I needed to do a side by side comparison. I’ve seen those on the internet so asked AI. it quickly generated some code, that after a few turns back and forth is the comparison widget you used above.
This is the central dashboard for my home network. It is based on the HomePage software and as you can see uses widgets that report basic metrics for the machine or service. They are also links to the services they monitor for quick navigation.
The left column is for the core services in the Pi shop; most are available over the internet as well as on the home network. The center column are services needed for monitoring the system metrics & logs. They of course have their own dashboards.
The right column is for admin & maintenance. I started just wanting digital photo album, now I’m a system administrator, network engineer, website administrator, content creator (articles, photos & videos). And playing catchup in firefighting mode at every turn. Thankfully things are settling down to where I can use the system not fix it.
When a closer look is needed the monitoring stack comes into play.
Why Your Digital Memories and Devices Can “Expire”
From memory cards to thumb drives to SSDs and beyond, they all use NAND memory. Computers work with 1s and and 0s, high or low, on or off. NAND devices store a small electrical to designate a 1, lack of charge is a 0. Without power the tiny electrical charge can slowly drain away; the 1 becomes a 0; this is bit rot. The better the quality of the device the longer it can hold a charge, the more the device is cycled the less the charge will last.
Most people assume that if you save a photo to a thumb drive or an SSD, it stays there forever like a groove on a vinyl record. In reality, digital storage is more like a leaky bucket.
The “Leaky Bucket”: How NAND Works Modern storage (NAND flash) works by trapping electrons inside tiny microscopic “rooms.”
The “Leak” (Bit Rot): These rooms aren’t perfectly sealed. Over time, electrons slowly leak out. If too many escape, the device can no longer tell if a “1” or a “0” was stored. This is called Bit Rot.
The Controller (The Guard): Every drive has a tiny “brain” called a Controller. Its job is to watch for these leaks and use Error Correction—a mathematical “guessing game”—to fix flipped bits before you even notice.
Quality Matters: Not All Storage is Equal The quality of your device determines how fast the bucket leaks and how good the “guard” is:
High-End (SSDs/NVMe): These have sophisticated brains that are excellent at catching errors and moving data to “safer rooms” before it disappears.
Low-End (Thumb Drives/SD Cards): These use cheaper parts with “thinner walls” and very simple brains. They leak faster and are much more likely to lose data if left in a drawer for years.
The “Shelf Life” of a Dead Battery A flash drive is not a permanent archive; it is a temporary one.
The “Top Off”: When you plug a drive into a computer, the controller performs “Background Scrubbing.” It identifies weak “rooms” and refills them with fresh electrons. This tops off the charge, essentially resetting the clock on Bit Rot.
Unpowered Risks: If a device is left unpowered for years—or even just months for a heavily used, lower-quality drive—the charge can drop so low that the data becomes unrecoverable.
The Printer got bit
our recent water damage and remodel caused a different kind of bit rot with a D-Link DPU-300 print server highlights a related danger for old tech. After 20 years of being powered on, a 10-week stint in storage turned this once-reliable device into a “toaster”—it gets warm when plugged in, but it’s “brain dead.”
Why did it fail?
Chemical Aging: Just like the electrons in a flash drive, the chemicals inside electronic “capacitors” (which manage power) dry out over time.
The Cold Start: After being “settled” for months, the shock of new power likely caused these aged components to fail.
The Lesson: While digital storage needs power to keep its data alive, old hardware often needs power to keep its physical components from seizing up. If you have “old faithful” tech, leaving it unplugged for a long duration is often the final straw that prevents it from ever waking up again.
Before the year ends I need to make at least one post for 2025. I may as well make it about the unexpected, unwanted and forced remodel we had to do.
In late July we found we had a water leak. At first we thought it was a pressurized line; it wasn’t it was the main kitchen sink drain above a corner of my office on the outside wall, where we noticed the moisture. Bottom line, the 55 year old drainpipe rusted through. Insurance pays for the damage and repairs, but not for the plumbing.
Plumbers will rip a hole to do the repair. From there the insurance company want bids. Once a bid is accepted and contract signed work can begin; demolition starts and samples for asbestos are sent to the lab. In our case small amounts of asbestos was found in the joint compound used with the drywall. All work (about 80% demo done) came to a halt.
Finding asbestos changed the rules, timeline and costs. 2.5 weeks were added to get the crew in for the demolition & abatement team to ready the site to go back together.
The new office setup is nice, but we are still dealing with ramifications from the leak, some I’ll talk about in another post. The main visual one is no art work on the walls yet; a project for the new year.
Turbulence, turmoil & uncertainty are upon us; change is the only constant in the universe. Be prepared; forewarned is forearmed.
My crystal ball is no help in predicting what lies ahead, however, there are sign to read if you know where to look and recognize what you see. What I see is a significant change in course and not for the better. If you have RMDs to consider you may want to follow along.
The traditional line chart or mountain graph to depict the stock market is based on closes, daily, weekly, hourly; whatever time period is being used. This is a map of places stopped along the way, but tells no story of how that stop came about. This is a myopic view of the market, or sector, or individual stocks.
The chart above is the standard line chart, the lower is the candlestick view, both for the past 6 months. Which tells you more? Most stock displays, regardless of chart type, use the bottom to provide bar charts to show volume for the period. I’ve added a black line across the volume at roughly the high point average through a majority of the period. Note that from early November the volume has been considerably higher than the average and for a much longer time than anytime prior. This is significant, we will come back to it later.
In the 18th century Munehisa Homma, a Japanese rice trader from the Ojima Rice market in Osaka noticed that market prices were influenced not just by supply and demand but also by traders’ emotions. Homma began documenting price movements using what we now know as candlestick charts. These charts provided a visual representation of price changes over time, capturing the opening, closing, high, and low prices for each trading period.
The primary intent behind candlestick charts was to understand and anticipate market sentiment. By analyzing patterns in price movements, traders could gain insights into market psychology, including fear, greed, and other emotions that drive trading decisions.
Here are the two basic candlestick displays, colored or hollow. A green or white (hollow) candle indicates the market went up, the close was higher than the open. The red & black candles are the opposite, the close is below the open.
The wicks, tails, shadows that rise above & below the body of the candle represent high (above) and low(below) range extents of the price during the period. Long tails can indicate the direction the market wants to go.
The size of the candle body shows market sentiment. A large body shows strong market direction up or down. A very narrow trading range has the open and close being almost the same, this is a doji or spinning top it shows indecision, buyers and sellers are undecided. Hammers and shooting stars signal turning points have small bodies with long rising tails; think of Thor’s hammer sitting on the ground handle up, it’s the base and not going any lower. When this occurs at a peak it’s the final hurrah, a shooting star.
There are several different multi-day patterns, bullish and bearish engulfment, 3-soldiers or 3-crows. There are several blogs and YouTube channels for more basic information on candlesticks for trading.
Notice in early November, the chart is forming a bottom, a floor of support. On the 5th, election day it was a decent up day with light volume. The 6th was not only a very strong up day, it also opened way above the previous day’s close. This is a gap, the larger the gap the stronger the market sentiment; this was a huge gap up to open and then a very strong day. This is showing exuberance and giddiness in the market.
So, about now you may be asking if there’s exuberance and giddiness in the market why the dire outlook? Put simply, there’s more to the story.
An indicator used by one of the worlds’ greatest traders was given his name, although he did not create the indicator he just uses it. It’s called the Buffet indicator after Warren Buffet. It takes the entire U.S. stock market value and divides that by the Gross Domestic Product to come up with a value. The value is represented as either a number or a percent showing over valued or under valued state of the market.
Buffet has unloaded millions worth of stock, citing the market as being overvalued according to the Buffet indicator when it was at 140% (1.4); currently it is over 203% (2.03), which is way overvalued.
We can look at the world and see conflicts, formerly stable governments being unstable & failing. We see storms and flooding at 100 year and unprecedented levels. We see migration stressing governments and communities. We have an incoming administration promising change on a massive scale, possibly unleashing chaos.
Smart money & institutional investors see all this too and are concerned about protecting what they have and getting out while they can. The markets don’t like turmoil, conflict, natural disasters, supply chain disruptions or political upheaval, but those appear to be headed our way.
Volume has been extremely high for nearly two months, whether the prices were going up or going down. Remember every trade has a buyer and a seller. If you notice the ascent at the end of November were large up days with small gaps up; looking at the candles for the descent before Christmas looks more orderly, stair-stepping down, but both have similar volumes, smart money playing the markets in both direction and unwinding their positions in the process. They can’t do it too fast or it will spook and panic the markets which would cause a big crash, depriving them of profits, better to sell to the unwitting & ever hopeful at higher prices before the fall.
My prediction is a slow drift lower with intermediary peaks and valleys on the way down, until the bottom falls out, probably mid to late spring if it’s going to happen.
What Can You Do?
The usual advice applies, cut back on expenditures were you can, avoid unnecessary spending, save cash. If you are in the markets avoid risk as much as possible, consider cash & cash equivalents.
For those 73 and older with retirement accounts this warning has an extra layer of urgency. The market is near all-time highs. The Buffet indicator shows that the markets are way overvalued, meaning little room to go up and lots of room to go down. The end of the year is a few days away when the baseline for RMD calculations gets locked in.
For those unfamiliar with RMDs, Required Minimum Deductions, it’s the way for the government to make retirees deplete their retirement account by the time they die. Each year they have to withdraw a minimum amount from their retirement account. The amount is determined by how much is in the account, divided by a factor tied to their age, each year the factor used as the divisor gets smaller so the RMD gets larger. This leads to tax implications and withdrawal strategies that aren’t germane for this discussion.
What is important to note here is that the amount used for RMD calculation is based on what is in the account on Dec. 31st at year end. It doesn’t matter what happens during the following year to the account; RMD is based on prior EOY value. If the account drops significantly during 2025 there will be less money in the account to withdraw or use to pay taxes on the required withdrawal.
There are no rules about how or when to take RMDs, just that the are calculated using the Dec 31st value. Many people withdraw monthly or quarterly; this year it may be wise to take the entire RMD early in the year while the market is up, just in case the market does tank. I’d rather miss a few dollars in profits if it means holding onto my nest egg.
I prefer photographing the full moon the day before it is full. In the camera you can’t tell the difference in the moon, but the ground has more daylight the day before, making for a better lighting balance between moon and ground.
Here are a few local locations for moon rise alignment comps, of course they depend on mostly clear skies, which can be rare here in the Pacific NorthWET.
