Ditch Quicken and QuickBooks, save time and aspirin

I thought y’all might be interested in a a couple of online services to help with bookkeeping and potentially replace Quicken.
1) The first is a free service called Mint.com.

It was purchased a while ago by Intuit, the makers of Quicken. It’s an online portfolio of all your financial accounts—banks, investments, credit cards, loans, everything. It shows it all to you all at once, and lets you configure alerts and reminders and budgets. I started using Mint a few years ago, and it’s really fantastic and easy.

And the iPad app is gorgeous.

2) The second is a more complete accounting package called Xero.com, which I’ve used to replace QuickBooks entirely. They have a personal plan for $35/year. It can pull transaction feeds from your banks automatically. It makes the whole process of bookkeeping so much quicker and simpler.

If you get squeamish about entering your banking user names and passwords into a 3rd-party service, it’s worth understanding that Mint draws its information from clearing houses to which banks already publish our data. As with any online service, it’s crucial that you choose a good, strong password for Mint, Xero, and your banking.

Should I backup my computer?

Every computer owner must keep active, daily backups of all of their data. We like to use the 3-2-1 Commandment of Backups:

Thou shalt keep: 3 copies of any data, on 2 different media on-site, and 1 copy offsite.

Put another way:

A file doesn’t exist unless it exists in three places.

The 3-2-1 rule applies to any piece of digital data, however minor, small, or seemingly unimportant.

Copy 1 is the drive inside your Mac,
Copy 2 is an external hard drive in your home or office, which gets backups via the Time Machine software, connected either directly to your computer or over your internal network,
And the 3rd copy happens across the internet, frequently to a service such as Carbonite or our current favorite, Crashplan.

We have established easy, elegant, and cost-effective methods to achieve 3-2-1, and we will work with you to find the solutions that best fit your business.

Here’s a scenario:

Let’s say you are maintaining good, solid, daily 3-2-1 backups. And then, in normal use, your Mac’s hard drive fills up, and you need to free up space. Before we do that, we just need to consider 3-2-1: if you delete something from your Mac, that means that you have to copy that stuff to a 3rd destination.

The easiest solution for that is simply another external drive. Think of it as an archive—you know you’ve got the data on Time Machine and Crashplan, so you can either do a manual, organized copy to the Archive Drive, or set some different software to automatically build the archive as you go, depending on your workflow.

It’s worth noting that Apple will release Mountain Lion this summer, which will let you set Time Machine copying to multiple drives. That’s going to ease a lot of our decisions in this arena.

Give us a call. We’ll help you choose the right devices, at the price that fits.

Was Jobs right about Dropbox?

On Feb 27, Colleen Pence wrote:

Thought you might find this article interesting:

Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product | PandoDaily

Man, that's spot-on in some ways. It's becoming a distinct possibility that Apple is going to make (or get closer to making) the "continuous client" idea happen with Mountain Lion. And I will be well glad for it.

But I don't see Dropbox failing anytime soon. The writer misses a crucial point, the difference between the Dropbox model and that of Apple and Microsoft. The major OS developers desire to keep you and your working environments within that company's ecosystem; Dropbox, on the other hand, wants to help you distribute your data across ecosystems.

This is Dropbox's killer feature: your stuff, everywhere.

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Guessing at iPad 3 arrival + Re: Idea Sketch

Can I use Idea Sketch on my Mac or is it only a mobile app?

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/idea-sketch/id367246522?mt=8

Mobile only, but with the paid upgrade to it, you can export the project files, which are openable in OmniOutliner, an amazing and long-standing app on the Mac.

Cool. Thanks. I think I’ll wait til I get an iPad. The 3 is coming out in like March, right?

I wish we knew about the iPad, but best guess based on rumors is March. Definitely don’t buy a 2. I’m recommending those with itchy fingers should look at a used or refurbished unit, especially a 1st gen, on craigslist.org or store.apple.com.

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New Google privacy policy won’t affect Apps for business, government

On Jan 26, 2012, bill wrote:

Twice I have had job interviews were I was presented with a document that states, “You will be fined and fired if we find out you are using Google for any services for data or email.” This is a very big deal for clients that do not not want their data mined and sold (investor-types and media folks, for example).

http://arstechnica.com/#!/business/news/2012/01/new-google-privacy-policy-wont-affect-apps-for-business-government.ars

As you might guess, I’m not bothered by this, and I suspect that Google will do a bunch of clarifying like this article talks about, and maybe even plain ol’ backpedaling, before Mar 1. Regardless, I think those contracts are ridiculous. But I’m glad the nonprofs and the FTC are around to watch this stuff before it explodes.

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Web and email hosting

I would really like to switch from GoDaddy for our email and Web hosting services. I believe you told me that Google can also handle this. Is that correct, and if so, can you point me to the Web page that will explain it?

I definitely believe that Google Apps is the best choice for email hosting. It also includes Google Docs and Calendar hosting, as well as Google Sites, for building ad hoc web sites that can be shared strictly internally or to the world. These are good for things like individual projects, or quick reference documentation.

Google does not offer conventional web hosting, but there are lots of possibilities for that. If you are going to design a new site, the go-to platform for web sites is currently WordPress, but I am building my new site in Squarespace. It’s simply fantastic.

If you are keeping your current design, I could recommend staying with GoDaddy just for web hosting. Some folks take issues with GoDaddy, regarding everything from business practices to aesthetics to animal rights and gender roles. Because of their recent support of the impossibly stupid Stop Online Piracy Act, I will likely move my own domains to another registrar such as NameCheap or Hover.

There are lots of excellent alternatives. Lemme know more about your needs.

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How to dispose of old technology

How do I properly dispose of an old CPU? It has no useful info on it. I just don’t want to throw it in the trash.

You can get rid of that machine a number of ways, including:

Best Buy will take recyclable technology, requiring neither a fee nor an appointment.
You can give stuff away at craigslist or Freecycle.
You can take any non-trashable material or items — from batteries to paint to televisions — to the hazardous materials disposal depot over at Culebra and 410 (dial 311 in San Antonio for details).

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Instapaper sine qua non

I’d hate to live in a world without Instapaper. It has changed my reading life, and my productivity. More than merely bookmarking an article, I put it on my reading list that shows up on all my devices. And the new version is so darn pretty. Bonus tip for nerds: check out Marco’s podcast on 5 by 5: http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze.

Instapaper

Marco Arment

Category: News

Updated: Oct 27, 2011

291 Ratings

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Can I simplify the process of writing a blog post?

A conversation with Matt S. on Friday sparked a little research. The goal was to simplify the WordPress dashboard, so that new users would see only what they needed, and not be distracted or confused by the other bells and whistles WordPress scatters around the admin page.

My initial thought was to find a browser plug-in that isolated the functional part of a web page, darkening or obscuring the rest of the page. Or, failing that, to find just one easy option for authors who prefer to minimize distraction.

After meandering down a couple of paths, I concluded that:

The only browser plugins that do what I was describing only work on video or flash sites.
I tried to get Safari’s web-clip feature to do this. I had disabled Mac Dashboard a while back, ‘cos widgets hog memory. I turned it back on, and created a web clip with the “Add New Post” interface. The first two attempts didn’t work, only giving me the WP admin login page, but then I tried it again, resulting in the screenshots at the end of this article. So, that kind of does the trick, but it also seems completely random and unreliable, and thus impossible to recommend to a novice user.
I have definitely found desktop blogging tools such as MarsEdit and Blogo helpful, especially when they can accept formatting in Markdown. But I think those apps put too much remove between a novice user and their end product; the process takes time to explain, and most folks are just going to want to get started posting.
I’m not sure if Colleen P. has officially changed her mind about this, but I really love Posterous. All I have to do is send an email to post@posterous.com — with formatting, images, links, the whole shebang — and my post goes on my blog, the link to it goes on Delicious, Twitter and Facebook pull it in, etc. (If you send an email to Posterous right now, you will create a new blog.

Option 5, however, might be the best place to start: There are a few WordPress plug-ins that simplify the WP Dashboard. I have already heard good things about Fluency Admin [pictured above], and this Easy Blogging thing looks OK (though there’s a fee to that one that makes me skittish).

I guess that’s where it stands at the moment. There are also a couple of iOS apps that making blogging easy. Certainly emailing to Posterous works well enough from anywhere. I need to see how mobile blogging from Squarespace will happen.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Discover the Dictionary

By Glenn Anderson
It’s just an application in the Applications folder, but there are lots of quick ways to get at the deep information stored in the Mac’s Dictionary.

There are two ways to view Dictionary: as a pop-up panel, an unobtrusive semi-transparent window with basic information; or as a normal application with a full-fledged window. Use it either way.

There are two ways to access Dictionary: through a contextual menu, which is what you get when you right-click on items; and through Dictionary’s main window, like any other application.

Screen Shot 2011-11-21 at 11.19.36 pm.png

Try right-clicking on a word in a web page or a text document. You’ll see Look Up in Dictionary in the contextual menu. Choose it, and whammo! You’ve got your definition. It’s that easy.

You can improve on that little definition, however. Open the Dictionary application, then go to its Preferences (in the application menu, to the right of the Apple menu:

Check the boxes for all the sources you want information from when you look up a word. (I’ve got them all checked.*) Selecting individual sources in the list sometimes gives you more options: for Dictionary, for example, you can choose which pronunciation you want displayed.
(10.6 and earlier) In Contextual Menu, below the list of sources, choose whether you want a panel or a full window to open when you right-click on a word.
Choose a font size as well. There are buttons for enlarging and reducing text size in the main window so don’t think too hard about this setting now.

Close the Preferences window and you’re done!

Power Tips

Ctrl-Command-D on any word in almost any Mac app, including browsers. (Yet another benefit of ditching Microsoft Office!)
Lion Users: try a 3-finger tap on a word to get a definition. Sweet.
When reading in Dictionary, you can click on words to get their definitions too. It’s a great way to delve further. Use the forward and back buttons like in Safari and Finder.

*If you have languages besides English enabled on your Mac you might have the option of a language dictionary too.