For the past few years I’ve been using iBank / Bankify for my personal financial management. I documented my move to iBank in a previous post. Finding a Mac compatible financial application was the final app that I needed to completely go Mac only not require a virtual machine for my personal use.
I’ve been generally okay with iBank now Bankify however there been some lingering challenges. First and foremost I keep getting duplicate transactions even after I downloaded from my bank. What that means is I sometimes have to spend hours each month trying to reconcile my accounts because a single transaction might have three or four transactions in my register. It also might turn out that several of those transactions if the account transfers might show up as a transfer to the wrong account thus throwing off balances across multiple accounts.
This year one of my financial goals was to automate bimonthly banking and bill payment as much as possible. This bug has caused challenges to completing the objective. This month I had a renewed desire to find an alternative. I tried you need a budget however the downloading of transactions from my bank seemed to be clunky. It also focuses on budget only. That’s important to me however I need an app that can do more. My sites then turned to Quicken since their 2016 Mac upgrade it seems to have been a big improvement over the 2015 one. I know it doesn’t have all the same features as the Windows version however I wanted to stay native Mac. I did contemplate trying the Windows version however I don’t think I need some of the advanced features that the Mac version does not offer. That is why today I bought Quicken for the Mac 2016.
The import process went surprisingly painlessly. My export from Bankify went over without any problems. The import of that file to Quicken also appears to of been painless. I need to go through each account and confirm the balances make sure everything is correct. For now it looks like this is the easiest migration I’ve had to do. In the past I went from Quicken for Windows to Mac and then back again. Then I went from Quicken to Bankify. Each of those migrations was painful and took a lot of time to validate things right or to tweak the process in order to get a good copy of my data. Part of my problem is trying to keep and migrate 16 years of data. I don’t need it but I want it and since it’s all in one file should be straightforward to migrate. I do have an additional eight years of data in other files that I don’t migrate but I have all of my financial transactions going back to my freshman year in college in some sort of backup or another. At some point soon I need to archive old transactions to an off-line backup so I don’t have all of it on an Internet connected machine. That’s my next step.
Random play place
Random municipal playground is such a score when you have 2 hours to kill before having to be somewhere
Teaching Alexa New Commands
Tonight I taught my Echo to turn on and off my media center using my Harmony Hub. I showed MC and she was not impressed. I am starting to think unless Alexa makes her a full breakfast and delivers it to her in bed she won’t be impressed by what it can do.
I also got the echo to take its own task list items I give it and add it to Trello so it is useful for me.
Next up is integrating smartthings commands.
PiCam Lives
Building it was supriaingly easy. Test photos were ok. Now the hard part begins, making it work like a store bought webcam with alwys on video recording.
BitTorrent Syncy Network Phase II
Since around the new year and trying to figure out what next phase of my private cloud backup network would look like. The design was originally leveraging several raspberry pi’s however practice only one remains at a remote location. The remaining remote locations I’m using old Mac Minis. Even the one Pi I do have deployed is inoperable and needs to be rebuilt. I’m not sure if it’s the Rasbian version of BitTorrent Sync are generally anyone expelled for sync but I had several problems with the Rasbian installs losing their license identity. What happens is I then have to re-add the BitTorrent Sync pro license and reindex all my shares on that node. It’s annoying and I’m concerned though because option at some point.
At the same time I’ve been looking at ways to better secure the remote data. All of my systems are at friends and families houses so endpoint security’s been less of a concern then on the network security however when BitTorrent Sync announced encrypted folders I was extremely curious. After playing around with it for a while I have opted not to use the encrypted folders however it’s something I’m still thinking about for the future.
On a side note I’ve been contemplating a Lenox desktop to complement my Mac. I shopped around and found a nice inexpensive Zotak. I picked one up and put a 120gig SSD and eight gigs of RAM in it. I wasn’t sure if I was use it as a desktop or to replace my BitTorrent Sync Pi. Right now I’m having keep a replica copy of my data at home to test it out. I’m currently running go to 14.04. It’s been running pretty well however I did have one or two anomalies with sync folders so I am not yet ready to deploy it in the wild. My goal in a long-term is to replace all the minis with something like the Zotak. The new boot to install also increases that new to 4 TB of storage versus the raspberry Pi I have deployed with a 1 TB hard drive.
As part of my incremental upgrades I have put a 4 TB drive in one of the remote minis and the other has a 2 TB drive. That gives me some headroom since fully seated backup is around a terabyte.
Holding off on any additional drive upgrades until I can confirm that the Ubuntu based Zotak is working well. If it is I hope to pick up another one two.
The raspberry Pi’s are not going to go to waste. I’m using one of them has an extra replica copy at home for BitTorrent Sync. I have a higher tolerance for failure for that since it’s an extra copy at home of my data. I’m installing some applications on another one. Future projects for the remaining ones include a possible reverse proxy, Wi-Fi hotspot and or WebCam. I just need to find the time for all these projects. For now just want to finish my backup solution upgrade.
And if you’re reading all this thinking yourself do I really need a four node private cloud network the answer is of course not. The other answer is it’s really six nodes if you count the three I’m running at home. In the end I didn’t save the money using a private cloud since even though a lot of the equipment was lying around there was some upfront costs that I won’t realize unless I use the system for 2 to 3 years. The reason to do it however was more because I can and because I wanted control over my information. I’m glad I’m continuing to tinker with this since I’m learning a lot and a lot of fun.
iPhone 6S or Not
Ah September. Fall is almost upon us. That means iPhone upgrade season. I admit that typically I have upgraded phones annually. That ended when when the iPhone 5S came out. There was just not enough compelling reasons for me to upgrade so I skipped it. Last year the 6 was significant enough of an upgrade and I needed new phone so the decision to upgrade was simple. The harder part was deciding between the 6 or 6 Plus. The 6 won out. This year I have to ponder the same issue.
The 6S may not be enough of an upgrade however the force touch does seem nice. It boils down to I likely do not need to upgrade however I am going to anyway. I save away money every month with the assumption that I am going to upgrade and I can sell the 6 with enough resale value that I am don’t get sticker shock from the upgrade.
T and the Hand Soap
Upon visiting my parents apart a few weeks ago T declared that she liked the hand soap in the bathroom. But it was rather funny that she pointed that out however I didn’t make much of it. Then the next week when we came back to my parents she wanted to take it home with us. My mom not wanting to deny T anything told her she could. Before we left T quickly remembered that she gets to take it and ran to the bathroom to grab it. So now are the proud owners of candy cane smelling hand soap.
In our bathroom we have both the so we normally use and the candy cane stuff. When going to wash T’s hands she makes it pretty clear she doesn’t want the regular stuff.
I find it funny sometimes the thing that the kids find enjoyable.
Another Mystery Solved
It’s been on my mind that it is coming for some time. Today I realized it is already upon us. Teagan as I am holding up a can of soda while trying to talk to her goes to me “drink your soda”. The way she said it confirms she is MC & my child. I have been wondering at what age she would get sarcastic and show some level of snark. The answer the the question is almost 3 1/2. One less mystery to solve.
Still Trying to Grasp Amelia is Two Today
It feels like it Teagan was just born so grasping that Amelia turned two today is challenging to me.
It was funny to see Teagan & Amelia help MC bake a cake for Amelia yesterday. I don’t know what was funnier. That Amelia picked the yellow cake batter over the chocolate cake batter or that Teagan continued to try to change her mind to chocolate. I was hoping Teagan would be successful because sometimes you wonder if a two year old really knows what she wants. Well in this instance Amelia did know, and was insistent on the fact that she wanted the yellow cake box.
All I can say Amelia is I hope the cake is yummy later. Happy birthday to my little smiley face!
Surprised by the availability of NFC payment
I was shopping today and I was surprised at the number of locations that I went to that supported Apple Pay (aka NFC payments). Along those lines until this week I hadn’t seen anyone asking me to use the chip in my card (EMV chip) eve thought the deadline that shifts the liability to the merchant and not the credit card companies if they don’t use the chip passed in November.
Of all the places I went to today the quick scorecard I had was as follows:
- Macy’s, YES but I knew that already since I have used it before
- Lego Store, NO however what was frustrating about this merchant was that they used the same terminal as several places I have shopped at that do take NFC payments. To make things more annoying the terminal had a big NFC logo on its screen however I was told the system didn’t accept the payment type. I did have to pay using the EMV chip.
- Applebee’s, YES however I couldn’t get it to work. They still get props for the fact that check out was via a tablet at my table. It was still a regular swipe card but cool that I could have ordered food and checked out at the table.
- La Maison Du Chocolat, YES
- Card store, NO. Let’s face it this is a local Hallmark store that doesn’t even take AMEX so I didn’t expect anything. They still used the standard swipe card.
- Party store, NO, however I only bought something very cheap and paid cash.
- liquor store, NO but at least they took AMEX. For some reason I find many liquor stores that don’t take it however that is a different conversation/blog post.
Based on my experiences today counting the stores that should have worked with the NFC payments I was supposed that almost 40% of the stores supported the NFC payments. That was higher than I would have guessed. I am hopeful that 2016 will see a large increase in the number of stores accepting the chip technology.
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