I've tried a lot in the past as well, and after getting annoyed with proprietary OS X software (iBank in particular) back in 2009 or so, and not really liking GNUCash and KDEMoney (at least back in 2009) ended up writing my own open source simple app (native Cocoa, with a more recent Qt port for Linux) that I've been using every since on a daily basis.
In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food', 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.
But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort to record them so accurately compared to making use of the details.
Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...
At some point I really should do a first principles analysis of why I track money... as far as I know, it mostly comes down to: 1. is fraud happening? and 2. Am I saving enough for retirement? Oh, and I guess 3. taxes
For fraud, I think it's basically a matter of whether we can recognize each transaction. You don't actually need to download transactions for that; you can just skim your monthly statements.
For saving, that's tricky because there needs to be that recognition of what categories are likely to increase during retirement versus decrease. I gave that a single pass a while back, and now I have a count each month of those expense categories that will continue into retirement, along with a 12-month average, so I can get a sense of what my portfolio needs to be able to fund after I retire. For that, even though I have Banktivity, I also have to use a spreadsheet.
For taxes, I don't know if anything really makes that easy. It's hard to know what category breakdown you really need to know whether you're capturing all your tax benefit, and my financial software doesn't tell me "oh, by the way, you'll want to split that transaction since some of it has a tax benefit."
In the early period after moving to the USA, for a few years I was tracking money in and out in great detail. Including splitting checks from stores. And while I did not set explicit budget, I believe it allowed me to keep our finances healthy. And it certainly decreased money-related anxieties, giving me sense of control.
I stopped doing it after a few years, after I felt pretty secure financially. And that certainly coincided with more spending on things that I would otherwise not spend on...
Your grandparents tracked money because they were also verifying the math, which could have done by hand. Now, we assume the math is right, and we're checking for fraud.
Oh come on... there's lots of reasons. Understanding where the money goes. How much are you spending on dining out each month? How much does your car cost when you add it all up at the end of the year? It's easy to fool ourselves when it goes out $10 - $20 at a time.
This is true but unless you have a motivation, i.e. somewhere else that money could rather be going that's somewhat immediate, you're kind of wasting your time (IMO).
If you want a vacation and couldn't afford it or you wanted some cool home gadget and couldn't afford it then sure, delve into your finances. But if that money you're saving is just going to sit around then what's the point? If you already have a rainy day and a 401K or equivalent, then you're good. Ultimately money is worthless if you don't use it.
The reason I say this is because tracking money is not free. It's a mental burden. Do you really want that to be your business? How much mental energy are you willing to give it?
Because it sounds simple until you really want a coffee after work, but it turns out you don't have the budget and then you sit and cry in your car because that hypothetical coffee was the one thing tying you to reality.
That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage.
Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.
The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack.
The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.
I think the throughput is currently quite limited because of low levels of water in the natural lakes close to Panama which are used for both Panama's drinking water and for the locks in the canal, so they're restricting the number of ships per day...
I mean, it does read badly, and maybe the worst should be assumed, but at the same time:
> You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty-free license to copy, make derivative works, display, perform, use, broadcast and transmit on and via the Internet Your Content, solely for the benefit of You and to enable Vultr to perform its obligations under these Terms.
Given Vultr has a distributed CDN service, could not the "copy", "display", "broadcast" and "transmit" parts be charitably interpreted as part of that agreement? i.e. them serving your content via the CDN?
Edit: it looks like they've updated it already from what the blog post quotes it as?
Yeah, as someone who's been attempting to use VSCode to do Python and Rust dev over the past three years, I'm continually surprised by people who say VSCode and the Rust analyzer plugin is a Good/Great IDE env.
It so often seems non-functional to me: auto-completion just doesn't work consistently, even on really simple things - you firstly normally have to save your file first, and even then often if I restart VSCode it will then work again on something it didn't a minute ago, and other times I can never get it to complete things. And this is happening on two different Linux machines and a MBPro M2 in multiple projects, so I don't think it's just a one-off bad configuration I've somehow got.
Its auto-indenting when writing code is insane as well, it seems everyone must be running rustfmt all the time, even on code as they're writing it? It never seems to get the indents right on new lines for me, I'm either having to add them or remove them.
At the end of the day it's what you get used to I think, but Visual Studio 15-20 years ago was pretty good (other than the bloody pause for "Updating intellisense"), I've yet to find anything as good for Python as PyCharm, and QtCreator (CLion was pretty good as well) is still the best Linux/MacOS-based C/C++ dev env I've found (but recent versions of it are getting worse IMO what with all the complicated "Kit" build config stuff).
My first code editor was Notepad++ and my first IDE was Code::Blocks. These two worked really fast on my Pentium 4 computer with Windows XP. All the while providing much better experience than VSCode.
Yep this is the case at most (if not all) the brands e.g. Z, BP, Mobil, etc. But it does vary by site (and possibly time of the day and/or whether they have enough staff to monitor etc). In my experience pay-after-fill has not been the norm here in New Zealand for quite some time.
In terms of the detail, I used to do very detailed breakdowns of categories, but now I don't really see the point: my app supports 'split transactions' (one of the reasons I actually made it, as existing solutions had poor support for them back in 2009), and I generally just use things like 'Food', 'Drinks', 'Essentials' as categories, as it never really made sense (at least for me) to detail them with such accuracy.
But for things like 'coffee', I do 'Drinks:Coffee', so I can see how much I am spending on fairly specific things, but I guess it's a balance in terms of whether it's worth the effort to record them so accurately compared to making use of the details.
Similarly, things like 'Car:Fuel', 'Car:Service', etc...
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