pcal.net

I’m dismayed at the lack of quality personal finance apps for the Mac. Is it just me or do they all suck? I’m actually to the point where I’m seriously considering writing my own. I’ve been wanting to play around with Core Data anyway.

All I want is a Mac app that will:

• Download my banking and credit card statements (or at least remind me to do it)
• Suck the data in and save it in some kind of database
• Automatically categorize the transactions according to rules I configure
• Produce some cute graphs and pie charts to tell me what is going where
• Do all of the above with a simple, no-nonsense UI

The point is to give me some additional visibility into what is happening and a permanent store of the information that I control, with as little effort on my part as is possible. I don’t want to manually reconcile my balance. I don’t want to write checks. I don’t want to enter anything by hand.

That doesn’t seem like it’s asking a lot, but I can find no application that does these things. Quicken kind of does is but the UI is terrible and the auto-categorization doesn’t exist. I’ve tried a dozen or so shareware and freeware apps, none of which do what I want.

Eff the new MacBooks - check this puppy out:

Yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about! The

best thirteen bucks I’ve spent in a while - a portable laptop pad that

• helps keeps a powerbook cool
• protects surface of the table and the PB’s underside
• provides a handy swivel motion
• produces a slight tilt that i think is actually more comfortable for typing

I’ve been using Retrospect for backups forever. It came free with a drive I bought a while back, and it just seems like the thing to use. But prior to prepping my Powerbook for return to Apple, I tried
using Carbon Copy Cloner instead.

Aside from being free, the big win is that it makes a completely accessible and bootable backup of your entire drive. I don’t care so much about being able to do incremental or journaled backups - I really just want to know that there is a fairly recent copy of my stuff on my backup drive that I can access and boot from as needed. Once you get past a somewhat clunky GUI, CCC fits this bill perfectly.

It also makes it trivial to migrate your entire operating environment to another machine: just mount your destination powerbook as an external firewire drive (hold ‘T” at startup), and use CCC to clone from old machine to new. Start up the new machine and everything just works. Brilliant.

I ring in the new year with a return of PowerBook woes.

The hard drive is making scary noises and I’m experiencing increasingly-frequent lock ups. And now I noticed in System Profiler that I’d lost a 1/2G of RAM. Turns out this is a

common issue and there is now an

online petition
about it.

I’m about to put AppleCare to the test. I want them to replace the RAM and/or logic board, give me a new drive, and ideally a new LCD - I have some of the dreaded ‘white spots. Problem, is the behaviors are intermittent, and Apple has not acknoweldged the logic board problem at all. We’ll see…

My Powerbook has become The Blob of my digital devices. It has swallowed whole my television and DVD player. It has bitten the head clean off of my work PC (RemoteDesktop is truly wonderful) and is leisurely gnawing on the bones of my desktop machines at home. It’s still only nibbling at my stereo, but it would greedily gobble up a closet-full of Atari 2600-era video games if I turned my back. I’m seriously considering feeding it my home phone line as well.

Feeding time came again last month with the first beta release of PCSX, the first functional OS X-native Playstation emulator. The first few games I tried - the only ones I really care about - came up flawlessly: Intelligent Qube, Hot Shots Golf, and Tekken 3. Considering it’s an early test release, this is outstanding - my compliments to the developers.

I’ve also purchased a

PSX controller adapter from Radio Shack for $10 that completes the original Playstation experience perfectly. One more device in my Powerbook’s belly.