If I needed a hearing aid, I'd try this one first! (Currently, though: the best ear plugs are ...)

The New York Times just ran this article on a new type of hearing aid that's controlled by an iPhone! It's from GN Resound, who bills its Linx as "the world's smartest hearing aid."

Currently I don't need this, as I grew up on a farm in Louisiana, didn't listen to a lot of loud rock music growing up, and may otherwise have just genetically more sensitive hearing than most folks. For example, I'm one of the very few if any who plug my fingers into my hears when at least half of flight attendants or pilots come on airplane's intercoms. To me, these people are painfully loud.

So for the moment instead I use Hearos, my favorite earplug. They're rated at -33 dB sound reduction and can make the most noisome flight attendant into an easily tolerable and still perfectly comprehensible stream of words.

I'd be interested in the review of anyone who's actually tried the GN Resound Linx. Readers?

Fake Chicken salad: not identical ... but OK!

Here's my update to my last post on Whole Foods Vegan "Chick'n" salad:

It's make with these soy-based vegan-approved strips. I don't see how anybody thought it was identical to the real chicken version. For one thing it's much less dense. The carton of the actual stuff I get at Whole Food's is only 1/2 full for 1/2 pound (my limit so I don't eat until I burst!), but I asked for a pound of the vegan version and a carton full to overflowing of the vegan stuff was only 0.88 lb.

But: it tasted like chicken and tasted OK, to my omnivore's tastebuds. I won't go out of my way to get the vegan version in the future, but if served this I would absolutely not feel deprived.

Fake Chicken now as good as the real thing?

I stumbled upon Whole Foods' curried chicken salad a couple of years ago in preparing for a potluck. It was so good I ate most of it myself!

I have been avoiding the 'curried vegan chick'n salad' as not possibly as good, but apparently I was wrong! The New York Times carried this article a couple of days ago, claiming that a batch of customers accidentally getting the vegan version, could not tell the difference.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool omnivore, but I've got to give this a try. I'll report back here next week.

Recent recommended SF & Fantasy

I have been mostly "audiobooking" fiction for the past few years, and
the books listed here are no exception. Here's the roundup.

I had never before tried Child, but Nancy Pearl recommended "anything by Lee Child" and I greatly enjoyed it. Child is an MP in the U.S. Army in this story set in 1989-1990 when the Berlin Wall was crumbling ... and strange things were going on in the army. Reacher is violent and possibly amoral, but a very enjoyable character. Five stars and I'm just going back into the Reacher pile for another one shortly.

Another violent story that I enjoyed:

This is the first book on the "culture war" between two future starfaring civilizations: the culture (hedonistic, AI-loving) and the Idrians, an expanding tri-pedal warlike world. The protagonist is Horza, a "changer" working for the Idrians. He was a bit hard to get to like, but the closing parts of the book were so fast-paced and plotted that I got a bang out of anyway. Four stars and I'm planning to continue with the series.

Next, a well done near-future Mars mission gone wrong:

This was an enjoyable tale that focuses on Mark Watney, who's been accidentally left on Mars when the rest of his crew escape during a storm. He turns out to be not only alive but resilient enough to start planning to survive until the next mission ... four stars!

Finally one from the seventies:

This is a time-travel story set in the 1970's ... and in 1882. The time travel "technology" in use is so dumb it almost made me give up on the book ... but I'm glad I stayed. The author romanticizes 1882 way too much, but there's enough plot and tragedy and conflict to keep anyone interested. Five stars despite my quibbles!

A straightforward options trading strategy to return 3-6% per month (almost every month)

Options trading can be complex; one can look at it as the biggest video game in the world!

But some relatively simple strategies can produce reliable income without a lot of effort and without requiring moment-to-moment monitoring of a position.

The one I'll discuss today is the Iron Condor:

Basically, you:

• Buy a put, strike price A
• Sell a put, strike price B
• Sell a call, strike price C
• Buy a call, strike price D

This is essentially the combination of a put credit spread and a call credit spread. You make a profit if the price of the underlying stock (or ETF or index fund) remains roughly between B and C at expiration.

The return on capital one can make with this trade depends on several factors, but the one we're going to focus on today is the width between strikes B and C. Basically we're going to choose these strikes such that there is about an 87% chance that the stock will finish between these strikes when the options expire. But we plan to close this spread before expiration, when it's achieved about 50% of its maximum credit. This makes the chance for profit more like 95 to 96%.

How do we figure this initial 87%? We use the normal curve:

See where the 1.5 and -1.5 marks are? That's where we want to choose the short strikes.

Let's look at an example ETF: SPY, the S&P 500 index ETF. If you set up the main trade screen to show %OTM (percentage out of the money), you're looking for something in the range of 92 to 93% probability:

This is the short put we started with; now we need to buy the same number of puts at least one strike away. Let's choose 5 wide, as this gives us more credit (in Thinkorswim, one holds down the CTRL key to build up a multi-leg spread one leg at a time.)

Now we look for the same 92 to 93% probability on the call side:

And choose the long strike 5 points away on that side too:

Here's where we calculate the yield:

300 / 4660 = 6.4% ... so if we close the trade when we get 1/2 that, that's 3.7%.

Suggestions for beginning this: start small! Use 1 contract SPY (instead of the 10 I'm using here). Your max loss would then be $466 instead of $4660. Try this for a couple of months. Then move to 5 contracts, then 10 ...

When you're comfortable trading 10 SPY's, try 2 SPX. SPX is 10 times larger than SPY, and trading it is a little different in that it's not (currently) automated. It's "open outcry," meaning humans are still involved in the trades. You'll have to move 25 to 75 cents away from the midpoint to get SPX condors executed.

How big do you go with this? Just decide how much income you want to make and size accordingly. Using this example ... if you want to make $3000 per month you'll need a 20X larger trade, which means 20 contracts of SPX.

Happy trading!

How to get a remote job

There's a recent trend of widely dispersed teams working with the help of the Internet and communication technologies that run on top of it.

A couple of books have been published on this topic: The Year without Pants and Remote. The former is a narrative of a former Microsoft manager's work for Wordpress, which has a globally distributed workforce. The latter is a justification that could be used to try and sell remote work as a concept to management or a work team.

I'm currently working mostly-remotely for a Silicon Valley employer. Here's how I did it.

First, I used the Modern Job Hunting Hacks techniques I describe elsewhere on this blog. Often this is all that's required; in particular many recruiters ignore the 'I am only looking near Seattle' flag and send job listings from other places. For jobs that look interesting I reply "I can't move but could go for a month and then work remotely" and sometimes this works, as in this case. It's always worth a try.

Until I got this job I also started scanning two job listing sites: We Work Remotely and StackOverflow. StackOverflow has a very useful allows remote checkbox and generally more listings than We Work Remotely, though the latter is growing and has (currently) a higher proportion of non-programmer jobs than does the other site.

There are also niche sites for specific skills/interests, for example Django Gigs.

Caveats about remote jobs: you have to create your own structure and your own opportunities to socialize. For an extrovert this can be like being sentenced to solitary confinement! Get out there and have lunch with a friend!

Interesting Tech Roundup

Heat your home with other people's computers for free: nerdalize.com.

A worldwide network of virtual pilots exists, some flying the same routes on
the same schedule as the real airlines.

A price war in cell phone plans is currently going on, mainly due to T-Mobile. This is a good time to renegotiate your current cell phone deal.

A company onlycoin is rolling out a single card that pretends to be all of your credit cards at once. But how are they going to adapt to the chip-and-pin cards coming to the U.S. (finally) in the wake of Target's little problem?

The 50 smartest companies? MIT Technology Review has a list.

Redox Power Systems' PowerSerg 2-80

Affordable fuel cells are coming, finally, in the next couple of years.

That's it for now ... comment on your suggestions for this feature please!