SansPoint

I have big plans for the near future… well, medium-sized plans… a plan: I’m getting an apartment, or renting a house (with friends). Of course, houses and apartments things cost money, and money is one thing every college student lacks. I’ve been trying to mind and manage my money, and I’ve been putting my trust into a system that forces me to keep track of what goes in and what comes out. Enter Cha-Ching!

Until Cha-Ching, I’ve never used a finance application, except for TurboTax. This is a very new experience for me. Fortunately, Cha-Ching has a very, simple, Apple-style interface with a very shallow learning curve. It can keep track of my checking account (bills, walking-around money, and the like), savings (taxes, apartment fund), credit card (textbooks, textbooks, textbooks!), and online accounts such as PayPal. You can use it to set up budgets – though I haven’t tried this yet. I’m mostly keeping track of my stupid spending habits for now.

One major feature is the ability to tag, and make smart folders for your transactions. I have two smart folders, currently. One I use for keeping track of debit card transactions, which I do a lot of, and another for things I’ve tagged as “stupid” which are things that I really should not be spending my money on. Fortunately, I’ve only had three “stupid” transactions since I started keeping track at the start of the month. There’s also a good number of just plain stupidly fun features, such as being able to attach pictures of your purchases, even capturing them from your iSight camera… if only I had one^[1], and accessing your account websites through the application^[2]. It can also sync financial data to an iPod, though I really don’t see the utility for that just yet, and share financial data between networked Macs using Bonjour.

For a beta app, there’s a lot of spitshine and polish, though some things could still stand to be cleaned up a bit. Setting up a new account, or making an account transfer causes the main window to go translucent for no good reason. The new transaction panel has options for photo taking and file attachment in tabs, which I didn’t even notice until I started this review^[3]. Also, while the shrinking down of the window to a “Locked” dialog box is neat for the security-minded, the animation is pretty slow and jerky on my G4 mini. Most of the animation effects, however, can be turned off in the preferences.

Honestly, Cha-Ching is astounding, and the only real hiccup in using it was waiting for my registration number to come by e-mail. The beta price, $14.95, is a steal, especially factoring in free upgrades until it hits 2.0. It’s a lot cheaper than Quicken by a long shot, and cheaper than iBank, too.^[4] If you need a dead simple finance app for the Mac, Cha-Ching is perfect.

1. A donation jar to help me get a 24″ iMac Core 2 Duo will be posted on the site sometime before the last trump ↩
2. I always prefer stand-alone browsers for this, however. ↩
3. The develpers should at least add an “add file” box to the main tab of the panel. I could finally dump my web receipts out of Yojimbo. ↩
4. Though it’s a bit less feature rich ↩

I’ve been experimenting with web based to do managers for the past couple months. I started out using using Remember the Milk, which had some features I loved such as iCal to-do list feeds, tagging, and smart lists. Sadly, its interface was absolutely terrible and clunky, particularly when handling multiple entries in a list. Also, if you have a large number of lists^[1], the tabs begin to wrap - and that just looks ugly.

So, then I found Todoist. Todoist seemed like a lifesaver. It was everything RTM was not: clean and dead simple. Actually, it was too simple… I needed something that allows me to view actions in terms of both a context^[2], and a project^[3]. Its date syntax was annoyingly arcane, too. Also, it was self-contained - I could not see what I had stored on Todoist unless I was online and with my web browser open. Half of my system is based on being able to carry my reference material on my iPod, so Todoist was out. Shame, really. I did, however, like the ability to indent tasks and create an to-do list with an outline structure, which was great for projects, but utterly useless in terms of contexts.

Next I tried Vitalist. It was a little more complex than RTM and Todoist, much more GTD-oriented, and utterly impossible to use. That, and its iCal feed was utterly broken. There was no way to see what I had as NAs in Vitalist in iCal, either as events or to-dos.

So, I decided to go back to an web based application I’d tried for a while before: Tracks:GTD. I’d started by running it on my Mac, and switched to a web hosted setup so I could access it on the go. Sadly, my original web-based setup, Zenlist, died from neglect a few months ago. I found a replacement in tracks.tra.in. Using Tracks, I can see my actions by context and by project, sync with iCal and my iPod, and it even looks pretty damn sharp. The trick with Tracks, as with all GTD systems, is going to be reviewing and making sure what I need to add on to my lists gets added on, what is on the lists already gets done, and refactoring mercilessly when something isn’t going right.

1. say, five or six ↩
2. where I am/what I feel like doing at the moment ↩
3. anything that takes more than one action ↩

• A Neverlate Seven-day Alarm Clock.
• A large number of books.
• Two large Moleskine cahier notebooks
• A CD-ROM from my World History Textbook
• A Tootsie Roll coin bank.
• An Ikea desk lamp.
• The center of an LP of Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass
• A pair of Sennheiser HD-202 headphones.
• A telephone headset
• A set of JBL Creature II speakers.
• Two Spindles of CD-Rs.
• A Sudoku page-a-day calendar.
• A Brother P-Touch labelmaker.
• GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games
• Post-It flags
• A staple remover
• A really bright LED light
• An old Swingline stapler
• A large coffee cup filled with pens, pencils, a pair of needlenose pliers, scissors, and the like.
• Replacement leads for my mechanical penclis.
• Silver Sharpies.
• An electric pencil sharpener
• Scotch tape.
• Scotch puffy double-sided tape
• A large glue stick
• Fingernail clippers, toenail clippers, and a nail file.
• A cheap-ass pedometer.
• A hat cleaning sponge
• A ceramic figure of the Buddha
• Three SEPTA tokens
• A small box of small paperclips
• A Zippo
• Concert ticket stubs: Thomas Dolby (2), Devo, Polysics
• A cordless phone with base station.
• A Mark Mothersbaugh action figure
• Cell phone charger
• An iBook G4
• A large, unlined Moleskine
• My cell phone
• A pocket lined Moleskine reporter
• A Swiss Army wristwatch with a broken band
• My wallet
• An eyeglass cleaning cloth
• A pocket lined Moleskine
• Two hair elastics
• A black twist-tie
• A tin of Altoids.
• A 19″ Dell LCD monitor
• iPod headphones
• Rubber iPod sheath
• A pen
• Mac mini with 250GB LaCie external mini Companion hard drive
• Hairbrush
• Black iPod video 30GB in dock
• 7-port USB hub from Staples
• Lots of cables
• Speed Stick deodorant
• Apple pro keyboard
• 1GB Samsung Cruzer Titanium on keyring, with keys on carabiner
• Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
• Mousepad with built-in gel wristrest.
• Power strip and a large number of power adapters for electronic devices

Read Part 1

Well, we hit the local RadioShack and bought the battery we thought we needed for the iMac DV. I say “thought” because we got the damn thing back and put it in only to find the same symptoms as before.

Desperate, I hooked up my iBook to the network and posted on Apple’s discussion forums. Verdict: the damn thing is FUBAR.

Fortunately, my friend had accidentally^[1] bought another iMac from eBay which he has not paid for yet. Though that one is a bit lower in specs (400Mhz G3 versus 500Mhz G3), it does at least come with OS X 10.3 Panther, and should get the job done.

Still, I can’t help but feel a little frustrated.

1. or possibly by serendipity ↩

It was supposed to be a simple procedure. A friend of mine just bought an old iMac DV, one of the second generation models with the translucent indigo blue case and slot-loading CD drive, off eBay. It came stripped: no operating system, no software, nada. I was to be called in to help him set it up. I figured, what the hell, and acquired OS 9, and OS X 10.4 CDs, then went into Center City to help him buy a keyboard, mouse, USB hub, and other useful things.

We return to his dorm room, take the iMac out of its box, brush off the remaining styrofoam pellets, remove it from its plastic bag, and plug it in. As soon as it has power, the darn thing makes a sort of fuzzy, static noise, very faint. We’re not sure what’s causing it, but go full-speed ahead, and press the power button. The static noise gets louder, and it makes some other noises, but aside from that, nothing happens. I figure something’s wrong with the PMU, so take out my pen, jab it against the button on the side where the ports are, and wait.

No dice.

Eventually, with my pen still jammed against the PMU button, the power button lights up, flashes several times, and passes out. All the while, the machine is grunting away, trying vainly to start up. The monitor tries to come on, the speakers occasionally pop, the drives spin up and spin right back down. It can’t even get to the point where you hear the startup chime. So, I whip out my iBook G4, and decide to go searching Apple’s website and the rest of the web for solutions to our problem.

Of course, Temple University’s dorms lack wireless. Fine, we’d bought a network cable in the interim, and I plug that in. Still no luck, as I have to register the iBook with Temple to get internet access. My friend logs in to the Temple server, I run their configuration program, and get told that internet access will be up for my iBook in the hour. At this point, I seriously begin regretting my choice of college.

About a half-hour later, and more prodding the PMU and Reset buttons, I finally get online with the iBook. My searching had suggested that the problem may be the logic board battery, and so, we place the machine on the desk, screen down, and start to open it using my Swiss Army Knife. It is not an easy task, since a number of the screws are placed in little crevices where the blunt tip of my screwdriver/wirestripper/can opener blade can go. Eventually, we manage to break into the seedy underbelly of this iMac, and our quarry, a purple 3.6V lithium battery is easily removed.

We can’t be sure it’s dead, but thankfully my friend had a multimeter on hand. Sadly, the multimeter had no battery, and to put a battery in, we needed a screwdriver smaller than the bit on my knife. He runs out to RiteAid for an eyeglass repair kit^[1], and I prod at the computer a bit more. When he returns, we check the battery, and the damn thing couldn’t be more dead if it were buried by the light of a full moon. It’s never good to see “-0.01″ on a multimeter.

Sadly, by this point, the nearby RadioShack^[2] is closed. We admit surrender, for now, and close the computer back up. After class on Monday, we’re going to get a replacement battery, and see what happens. Wish us luck.

1. the battery for the multimeter was borrowed from his radio ↩
2. aka “RadioShit” or “Rat Shack” ↩