The formats he uses as raw are already compressed by default, gzipping them wouldn't help. Gzipping the new encoding makes sense.

What about the cost of living in these places?

A decent 1 bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto will run you about $2500 CAD/mo.

A decent 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco will run you about $3500 USD/mo. Or about $4700 CAD/mo.

So you make a good point.

If you can afford to own your home however that really makes the move worth it though, imho.

Discipline > motivation. There are lots of good texts about it, better than I can summarize. Google discipline vs motivation.

LEGO duplo. Or similar stuff. 10848 and 10572 are great since they allow creativity. 10847 for the numbers.

Book with many short stories their parents can read (5 minute stories series from Tiger Tales).

A book about pooping (if they are still on diapers).

Things with numbers/shapes/colors (colored and numbered shapes exist).

Something to spend energy on, like a small set of pins with a mini bowling ball.

A 35 dollar slide.

Play doh.

Characters from their favorite show.

A small real musical instrument.

Disk is very slow. Phoronix did some benchmarks recently, check them. Virtualbox is faster for some stuff, and more convenient.

I don't recall performance comparisons with Cygwin, which is still my default shell for Windows.

Is there an option to just change the email address? Change it to mailinator.