Michael Davie's Blog

The purpose of this post is to document what I’ve learned about the tax treatment of the Education and Training Benefit available to veterans, in the hopes that it can help others facing a similar situation. Education and Training Benefit Since 2018, Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) has offered the Education and Training Benefit (ETB), which provides veterans with funding to further their education. There are two levels of eligibility based on the number of years served.

My son has gotten interested in 3D animation with Blender, but his low-grade laptop is too underpowered to render any reasonably complex animation in a sane amount of time. He finally agreed to try out rendering in the cloud, and this post describes what I ended up building. I came across a promising workshop from AWS that used AWS Batch to split a rendering job across multiple compute nodes. This seemed to be exactly what we needed (really, they had me at Step Functions) so I worked through the workshop steps and got the solution up and running fairly easily.

Our Overly Complex Home LAN Over the years, our home network has grown increasingly complex. It’s fairly stable at this point, and I think reasonably secure as well. Here’s a breakdown. Physical The edge of our network is the combined fiber modem / wireless router provided by our ISP. We basically use it as a modem, and put our real router in its DMZ. The core of the network is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X.

Backups and Photo Management I have spent entirely too much time over the years thinking about and tinkering with systems for backing up our data and managing our photos. This post documents the current state of things. Backups Unsurprisingly, our iPhones and iPads back up to iCloud. We have 200 GB of shared storage for the family as part of our Apple One subscription, which is more than enough. Our primary MacBook has a couple layers of backup.

Privacy Technologies A few years ago I read Tim Wu’s excellent book, The Attention Merchants, which opened my eyes to the pervasiveness of what’s become known as surveillance capitalism. (The documentary The Social Dilemma also did a great job of highlighting this problem.) Afterward, I basically declared war on advertising in our family’s lives, and deployed a number of technologies on our devices and our home LAN to block as much of it as possible.