I found MB Compass a few weeks ago and it's been very helpful for everyday things. For example, I just moved to a new apartment and I used the app to identify which room would get the best sunlight for my office. Works great!
The executives in charge at that point made a lot of money on the "90 Day Fiance" "franchise", among other badly and/or dully and/or grossly named things. IP and branding wasn't exactly their strong suit.
This is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes.
I switched from YNAB to Actual Budget. It's FOSS, and has nifty power user features like a DSL for distributing monthly funds and cleaning up extra at the end of the month.
I used Ledger for a while, then some other tools. Now I'm on Actual Budget, a nice FOSS envelope budget app that can import transactions from my bank.
I find value in tracking everything, tracking it by hand, and tracking it with precision (our household budget has 68 categories).
When I've tried easing up in the past (e.g., with Mint's lightweight approach) I was left with a budgetary black box where I felt like I never had enough information to make big purchasing decisions. I knew what I had in the bank account, but I didn't know if it was earmarked for anything, or whether the next surprise expense was going to wreck my plans. I felt afraid and paralyzed.
Earning more didn't make the problem go away. Like the financial equivalent of Parkinson's Law, more income just meant more spending. I couldn't out-earn unrestrained consumption. I had to monitor & manage it.
For peace of mind, I found YNAB's philosophy helpful: one-off expenses often repeat predictably on a long-enough time horizon, and can be amortized accordingly. If I itemize all predictable expenses and save a little each month, I know everything is taken care of, and what I really have left over. I never get blindsided because several big expenses hit at once.
I know not everyone has these problems. But I like to talk about my experiences because people don't all need the same things from their finances. It's okay and normal to want control and visibility. Budget apps exist because people find them useful, not because the whole userbase has failed to reach enlightenment and transcend budgeting.
I can identify with this a lot. I don’t budget as religiously as I used to, but there was a time where I was writing little console apps to process all my recurring stuff and adding one-offs in from a separate file to help project future money. I turned the idea into a website, but really nobody ever used it but me. Shut it down probably a decade ago, and then found YNAB myself, but for the time period it reduced my anxiety by a lot.
Since Marmot pivoted to the MySQL wire protocol, I haven't had a clear picture of its advantages over using normal MySQL with active-active replication. Can you speak to that?
- Marmot let's you choose consistency level (ONE/QUORUM/FULL) vs MySQL's serializable.
- MySQL requires careful setup of replication, conflict avoidance and monitoring. Fencing split brain and failover is manual in many cases. Marmot even right now is easier to spin up, plus it's leaderless. So you can actually just have your client talk to different nodes (maybe in round robin fashion) to do load distribution.
- Marmot's eventual consistency + anti-entropy will recover brain-splits with you requiring to do anything. MySQL active active requires manual ops.
- Marmot's designed for read-heavy on the edge scenarios. Once I've completed the read-only replica system you can literally bring up or down lambda nodes with Marmot running as sidecar. With replicas being able to select DBs they want (WIP) you should be able to bring up region/org/scenario specific servers with their light weight copies, and writes will be proxied to main server. Applications are virtually unlimited. Since you can directly read SQLite database, think many small vector databases distributed to edge, or regional configurations, or catalogs.
> The latest release includes a Gnome update which fixed some remaining annoyances with high res monitors.
Interesting, I've had to switch off from Gnome after the new release changed the choices for HiDPI fractional scaling. Now, for my display, they only support "perfect vision" and "legally blind" scaling options.
By default Gnome doesn’t let you choose any fractional scaling in the UI because it has some remaining TODOs on that front. So from the UI you choose 100% or 200%. But the code is there and it works if you just open a terminal and type a command to enable this “experimental” feature.
Now whether or not this feature should have remained experimental is a different debate. I personally find that similar to the fact that Gmail has labeled itself beta for many years.
I've got the feature turned on. But Gnome 49 only supports fractional scaling ratios that divide your display into a whole, integer number of pixels. And they only calculate candidate ratios by dividing your resolution up to a denominator of 4.
So on my Framework 13, I no longer have the 150% option. I can pick 133%, double, or triple. 160% would be great, but that requires a denominator of 5, which Gnome doesn't evaluate. And you can't define your own values in monitors.xml anymore.
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