You might want to check out SoftEther VPN, which was just open-sourced this month. Supports: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

OK, this is cool.

Subscriptions? No, thanks.

Going off on a slight tangent, for general-purpose electronics use, a Bus Pirate is probably more useful (it's a measurement peripheral, and not a standalone microcontroller, though). A Bus Pirate is a USB device that can do many basic functions (the following was taken from the sales page):

Ditto meh.

That may be very true but, if it's not reasonably easy to obtain by consumers, it might as well not exist.

If you have a recent, energy-efficient power supply (e.g., bronze, silver, gold, platinum), you need to use one of the more expensive pure-sine-wave UPSs, or you're killing the efficiency.

You don't necessarily need an app. You need to sign up for a free if-this-then-that account (ifttt.com), and have it automatically send you the day's weather report (via sms or push email, depending on what you have). I have the day's weather emailed to me every day, and it's pretty nice.

As much as I'd like stuff to be repairable, the sad fact is that, as consumer-grade technological items mature, they typically become harder to repair. Why? Because, both consumers and companies want cheap stuff, and monolithic non-repairable products are generally cheaper to manufacture. Consumers want cheap stuff…

Two comments:

Agreed, but keep in mind that the bad guys are now port-scanning, looking for ssh ports on non-standard ports. These days, if you open up ssh, you'd better be using a really good password (or, better still, just allow access via certificates only).

For an easier, but slightly more expensive, solution, you can use a twine to tweet/txt/email you when stuff happens.

Yeah, I agree with the review thing: if I write a review, I don't mind if people know who I am. (And, in fact, I think that reviews should be non-anonymous, because I think there's too much abuse going on.)

Portable USB battery packs aren't that huge. There are some around the size of an iPhone5, but maybe 0.75" thick (6600 mAh). I think there's another that's cylindrical (around 1"? diameter x 4.5" long, 2600mAh?). While these don't fit in your pocket, they're not huge, either.

I'm not sure waze is any better. I'd love to be wrong, but it appears that even your "anonymously-named" location is still publicly visible. This probably isn't an issue if you're in a crowded metropolitan area, with lots of wazers, but it's a possible issue if you live out in the country. If your location (with an…

Sorry, was being too literal. I got the HP part, but obviously not the point of your post. :)

For general (non-ebay/non-craigslist) deals, there are various websites whose only purpose in life is to aggregate various deals and present them to you (to be impartial, I'm not going to list them, but they're easily found). They also have RSS feeds that can be processed via IFTTT, although the website may also…

You're paying for the ease-of-use and convenience.

You just want a hand-me-down car. :)

It doesn't matter when the salt is added, as long as the salt is fully dissolved when the pasta is added to cook. It's usually easier to add salt at the beginning, as adding salt after boiling might cause the pot to boil over if you have a lot of water. The type-A nitpickers out there might whine that adding salt at…