Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Archive for February 2012
Receipt and Expense Tracking
One of the thing I have wanted for a while now is a way to scan or take a picture of my receipts so that I can save space and eliminate physical clutter. Somehow I missed when Lemon was announced a few months ago, but fortunately I heard of it last week when it got a major bump in features to make it more like Mint. I’ve only actually bought two things since downloading it last Thursday (I’m trying to keep my spending low), so I only have limited experience with it, but so far it seems pretty awesome and exactly what I’ve been looking for.
I’ve tried a few home-grown solutions for electronically storing and cataloging my receipts, mostly including Dropbox for uploading pictures of my receipts or scanning them at home with my scanner and saving them on my computer somewhere. But I never really liked these solutions since there was little advantage over keeping a box of all my receipts other than the physical clutter aspect. I’ve long wanted some way to throw all of these receipts at something that will make sense of them and make the information contained within them useful, and I finally have this in Lemon.
The process really is just as simple as loading the app on my iPhone, snapping a picture of my receipt and then an hour or so later the basic details for the transaction are gleaned from the receipt and structured in a useful way. The app attempts to automatically categorize each transaction based on the merchant’s information, and allows me to tag transactions with a label so I can easily group items based on whatever criteria I want. So far I’ve stuck to Personal and Business tags as well as a tag for my method of payment (Cash, Credit Card, Debt Card, Check, etc..), in the future I may or may not expand this.
While I love this functionality, it provides me with a small conundrum. I use Mint to track all of my spending and transactions across all of my accounts (both personal and business), and so every transaction I make is already tracked there. Now I’m introducing a second place that tracks some of my transactions (so far I’ve only use the service for physical receipts, they have the ability to forward email receipts to have them added, but I haven’t tried this out yet), which creates a duplicate set of transaction information. I would really love for Mint to implement this functionality into their product so that I can tie a receipt to a transaction on one of my cards, or have it automatically enter a transaction if I paid cash. Whether they do this on their own, through a partnership/integration with Lemon, or maybe just buy out Lemon doesn’t make much difference to me, but I would be a lot happier if I could keep everything consolidated in one place rather than have a separate service for each different thing.
Update: I’ve added some more thoughts after getting some more time with the app.
Schedule Your Emails
Personally, I can’t say that I’ve ever had the desire to schedule when an email gets sent. Usually I either send it after I finish composing it, or if I don’t, it’s because I’m waiting for something, usually a last bit of information to go in or an attachment of some kind, and I don’t always have a set time or date when I’ll have it by. But I can definitely see the use-case for other people.
Either way, I got an email from Daniel over at Right Inbox yesterday and I thought I’d at least share what he had to say in case someone else is interested in the feature.
Right Inbox enables users to schedule emails to be sent later from Gmail. It is very easy to use after a small browser extension is installed. Then, a button with the label “Send Later” is added right next to the original “Send” button in Gmail. We are also in progress of adding more features like response tracking, improvements for sending large files, finding bulky attachments, email marketing etc.
You may check our website (http://rightinbox.com) and/or check out this demo video (http://youtu.be/w1zFFM36Hws)
If I ever get the urge to schedule an email, I’ll be sure and check out their service. For the time being everything is free while it is in Beta, but their website does say that eventually there will be higher-tier plans for a small fee, although there will always be a free plan.
The Unified Computing Device
If this idea pans out and works well, it may be a huge factor in helping me to switch away from Apple’s iOS/OS X-centric platform. The idea of having your computing life on a single, highly-portable device that you can easily take anywhere and use is exciting. As of now, many flavors of Linux offer the ability to install them on a USB flash drive and turn it into a portable computer. But that just adds another (small) device to your arsenal, and it still requires an actual computer for processing and the like. In this model, the Android phone is the computer, providing both processing, memory, and the OS. All you need is a display, keyboard, and mouse or trackpad.
Of course, there is nothing stopping Apple from making this happen as well. They’ve made it quite clear that they are rapidly moving to unify the interface and user-experience of their mobile and desktop OS, meaning that a few years down the road, there may be little difference between an iPhone, iPad, and a desktop or laptop computing experience aside from size and processing power.
If this happens, I could see Apple producing two ultra-light computing setups in addition to more standard. For portable crowd, the next-generation “MacBook Air” may only be a keyboard, trackpad, and display combo-unit. Just connect an iPhone or iPad and you have a laptop, redefining ultra-light portable computing. On the desktop side, Apple Displays may come with a keyboard and trackpad, you plug in your iPhone/iPad and you have a light-weight desktop computer. Local storage needs will probably be much less than they are now with cloud-based storage like iCloud, which would be baked into the new, unified operating system, storing all of your documents and files in the cloud, accessible anywhere from any Apple-device, or any other device through a web-browser.
Google’s Home Entertainment Venture
Rumor has it that Google is working on bringing a streaming media device to market. This won’t be another hardware partner device like Android phones and Google TV have been. This is supposedly a Google designed and built device, with no hardware partners anywhere in the mix. This alone is quite the departure for Google, who historically has only really brought software to market, leaving the nitty-gritty of hardware to other, more experienced vendors. And this is also the reason that I’m excited for it, more so than Google TV.
I have owned an Apple TV for the better part of a year now. I absolutely love it. Because I have a Mac and two iOS devices, using it couldn’t be simpler. Everything just works, magically. Even my die-hard Android friends admit that some of the feature-interplay between devices is amazing (AirPlay for videos/screen sharing on iOS most notably so). And yet, I’m excited about a Google-branded media streaming device, and I would very likely buy one. Why? Because I love Google. I really do. While my allegiance is primarily to Apple, that is only because I very much enjoy a streamlined and perfected user-experience across all of my devices. I like that everything just works (most of the time). Google doesn’t have a non-mobile OS (Chrome OS doesn’t count in this because it’s not quite as fully-featured as Mac OS X), and so they can only play half the field. Google TV doesn’t really work with other Android devices if you don’t count the remote app which is just a remote. There isn’t the same level of integration between Google TV and other Android devices that Apple has achieved with Apple TV and iOS, not to mention the ability to stream anything from a local iTunes library, whether it is Windows or Mac.
But this device is Google’s chance to get it right. Obviously it will likely be hooked up to Google Music, but with Google-branded hardware, they finally have full control over every aspect of the device from software to hardware, just like Apple. Google has come out with some really awesome things, and after watching a presentation from a few of their engineers last week on campus, I can’t wait to see what cool things they can come up with when they throw hardware into the mix. One of the things I took away the most from that presentation was the more or less free-reign the engineers had when it came to re-designing Google Search for tablet devices. There wasn’t a directive handed down from upper-management detailing what features they would implement and how it would work. The engineers themselves got to come up with their own ideas, play with them and find out what worked and what didn’t. If this is the same philosophy that the team building this device used, this thing is going to kick ass. Because no one comes up with better ideas than a bunch of really smart people having fun and geeking out.
Windows Upgrade History
I stumbled across this video from last March that goes through every major OS upgrade from MS DOS to Windows 7 (with the exception of Windows ME which was skipped because there was no upgrade option to Windows 2000). Even with my distaste for Windows, I have to admit, the backwards compatibility that Windows 7 still has is quite impressive, programs from the MS DOS days still ran without error. That’s roughly 25 years of backwards-compatibility. The one thing that didn’t survive were appearance/theme settings from Windows XP on, although theme settings from Windows 2.0 were persistent up through Windows 2000.
Apple, on the other hand, has made several large jumps in the last decade alone that have broken backwards compatibility. First was the decision to kill off support for OS 9 applications after they jumped to an Intel-based chipset in 2005. This was the end of the Classic environment, which was an emulator that allowed users to run OS 9 applications on Mac OS X. With this change, Apple introduced another emulator called Rosetta, which allowed the user to run applications compiled to run on the previous PowerPC architecture. Rosetta was supported and included with Tiger (starting at 10.4.4) and Leopard (10.5), but was only an optional install for Snow Leopard (10.6). With Lion (10.7), Apple dropped support for Rosetta all-together, forcing developers to move forward with their applications.
There are benefits and downfalls to both approaches. Windows can claim that almost every program written will run on any version since the release date. But, this means there is a lot of legacy code bundled with Windows, which takes up precious space and makes things complicated. Apple doesn’t much care about legacy support and this can sometimes leave users out in the cold if they rely on applications that were never updated for the newer architecture and OS-level APIs. But on the other hand, Apple also forces developers that want to stay relevant to continually update and improve their applications to support the newer capabilities of the hardware and OS, which can only benefit the end-user.
Personally, I’ve been bitten by Apple’s decision to drop support for old architecture, and there are a few applications I used that were abandoned by their developers and never updated. But I also appreciate that applications I am able to use now are built with newer and more advanced OS capabilities in mind, and I wouldn’t ever trade that.
Sayonara To My Optical Drive
Note: Earlier today I discovered this post I wrote on July 27, 2011, but for some reason I never got around to publishing it. So I decided to get it out there now, albeit 6 months late. Enjoy!
Earlier this evening I embarked on one of the biggest hardware mod projects I’ve done. I decided to take the jump and replace my MacBook Pro’s Optical Drive with a Solid State Drive. I ordered the same OWC Data Doubler kit listed in the article, which came with a 115GB SSD.
The hardware swap only took about half an hour in all. I took a break before replacing the cover to go buy some Endust and clean out my computer, something I probably should have done a year ago. I did run into a slight problem with not properly reconnecting the wireless antenna for WiFi and Bluetooth, it is deceptively difficult to get it back into place properly.
Once I had the drive installed, I turned on my laptop and was quickly alerted that OS X couldn’t initialize the device I connected, aka, the new internal drive wasn’t formatted and it was freaking out. I quickly formatted it and started up SuperDuper! to clone my hard drive over to the new SSD. I decided to leave out my iTunes and iPhoto libraries and keep them on my internal drive since they don’t need to be as zippy as everything else. It took just over an hour to copy the 60GB remaining to the SSD.
After booting from the SSD once as a dry run to make sure all the application configuration files and settings copied over properly (some didn’t), and update those that didn’t. After that I shut it down and got my iPhone stopwatch ready for the first speed test. The first real cold boot got me to the login screen in 25.4 seconds, and another 9 seconds to type in my password and launch my first application. Previously I hadn’t even gotten to the login screen that fast, and logging in and starting up all the background apps that I use regularly another 1-2 full minutes. Mind you, I’m still running on Snow Leopard here.
I ran 3 more speed tests, and all gave me pretty much the same results (24 and 10, 27 and 8, 25, 11).
Ultimately I am very happy so far with my decision, especially considering my optical drive has been dead for the past 15 months and just wasted space. I’ve still got a few things to move around and get setup (ie. creating a symlink for my iTunes and iPhoto libraries), but I’m pretty much settled now and it feels nice and zippy.
Your New Assistant
The co-founder of Siri (before Apple bought it), Dag Kittlaus wrote up a wonderful view of the future with AI Assistants as the norm in the next decade or two. It is definitely worth a read as it paints quite the picture about how cool the future could/would/will be with AI Assistants like Siri.
I am very excited about a future like this, and Artificial Intelligence is one of the areas in computing that I am most fascinated by. As Dag writes, imagine if your assistant knew that your flight was delayed 2.5 hours and it found a replacement flight to the same destination that was leaving sooner. Or you could tell your assistant to book a doctor’s appointment for next week. All of these things can be done now with real, human assistants. But imagine your assistant was virtual. It was on your phone and your computer, and maybe even in your car, so that wherever you are, you’re assistant is with you and ready to help. If your assistant knew everything about you, personal preferences, credit card information, contact and relationships list, etc.. it could help you bridge the gap for making like so much easier than it is now.
Of course, then there is the Big Brother aspect of it all. With all of that information digitized and stored in one central location, it would make it that much easier to completely steal someone’s identity. Not just their name and social security number, but everything about them, who they talk to most often, where they live, what food/music/movies they like, financial information, and more. Becoming someone else would be almost trivial. The potential success of AI Assistants all comes down to trust; trust in the company that makes the software, trust in the company that makes the hardware, and trust in the company that stores the information on their servers to be analyzed and retrieved by the AI Assistant. I feel like the privacy issues surrounding something like this would be far greater than anything we’ve seen so far, even making Google’s unification move look trivial in comparison.
I would like to think that if Apple expanded Siri to become like these fabled AI Assistants, I would have little concern with trusting them with all of my information, because between iCloud and iTunes they already have a good chunk of that (documents, email, calendars, contacts, photos, credit card information, music and app purchase history). Of course, none of it is correlated together to create a personal profile of me for predictions and the like (save for iTunes Genius, but I have that turned off), but still. Google could even come out with a Siri competitor and I would probably feel ok with trusting my information with them since they have an even larger chunk of personal information on me (everything Apple has plus my search history, Latitude location history, news reading habits through Reader, text and call history).
But there will likely be millions that won’t ever be comfortable with that. It’s unfortunate that such advancements in technology are so hampered by the paranoia and fear people have of having their information and identity stolen. It is of course a very valid fear, it seems that once or twice a month there is some big data security breach with some company and information gets stolen. Sometimes it’s more or less harmless, other times it is very harmful to those affected. If only that weren’t so.
Timbuk2 Appreciation Post
Can I just say that the bags that Timbuk2 makes are amazing? I’ve had one of their laptop messenger bags for somewhere around 8 years and it is still my absolute favorite bag I’ve ever owned, and I have a lot of bags, somewhere between 15 and 20. There are no tears, no holes, and nothing on the bag is wearing. It looks as if I bought it last week, but it’s nearly 8 years old. I still use the bag 2-3 days a week if not more and I wouldn’t give it up for anything except maybe a new Timbuk2 bag, and even that is iffy because how awesome would it be to have two? As of right now, I’m considered adding their Zeitgeist Backpack to my collection, but I’m also looking at their other messenger bags.
I have the original Commute messenger, and I like that the current model has a more efficient use of space in the main pocket, moving the laptop compartment to a second pocket in the back. That is one complaint I would have is that the laptop compartment (which is placed inside the main pocket) takes up almost half of the useable space in that pocket, especially if I have more than a few items in the front pockets. But what I don’t like is that they no longer have the secondary strap clips on the rear bottom corners of the bag, which allow you to adjust the strap to fit more tightly to your back, almost like a sling backpack. I wear my Commute in that fashion most often because it is more comfortable and secure when I am moving around. Meanwhile their Classic Messenger has two additional rings even though the bag’s strap is not removable. As a matter of fact, they don’t sell any messenger bags with the removable/adjustable strap that the original Commute had, which is a shame, because that is one of my favorite features of that bag.