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Home Tech

Moving from MS Money to Moneywell

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I think that I have settled on Moneywell as my software of choice for Mac money management. I really like how this software is setup for an envelope system style of managing your money. I also like that it imported my QIF exports, although there is no way for it to preserve transfer transactions between accounts.

I initially had problems and had dimissed Moneywell because I could not connect to my primary bank. After perusing the Quicken Financial Life forums (I was a beta tester), I found the issue – I was not using the correct username and password. To work with my bank, I needed to provide my member number and PIN to authenticate – not my website username and password. Worked that out, and now automatic updates are all set.

June 12, 2009 1 comment

Home Tech

CrashPlan backup is awesome

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I setup CrashPlan for a friend overnight and the software really lives up to its advertising. The software is really easy to install and registration is straight forward. After install, you select what data to backup – which is less robust than Mozy’s default filters – but its easy enough to point to her user directory on her Mac and backup the entire profile.

After setting up her selections to backup, just need to point it to a destination. CrashPlan makes that really simple. You have 4 options – folders, computers, friends or online.

June 12, 2009 0 comments

Apple Home Tech

Quicken Financial Life beta expires, community closed

by Philip Sellers June 11, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Maybe I’m late to the party, but I found that my Quicken Financial Life beta build had expired. Unfortunately, there is also no newer build to download. So, no more testing of that software. But I’m not crying.

June 11, 2009 2 comments

Apple Datacenter Home Tech Software

Microsoft officially kills Money (updated)

by Philip Sellers June 10, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I’ve been a loyal Microsoft Money user since 2004 – well, maybe 2003. My transaction logs go back to mid-2004, but I think I decided to start over with a new data file in 2004. I’d played with MS Money since 2003 sometime, but I seriously approached it in 2004. Yesterday, I learned, Microsoft will be killing the product. It will no longer be for sale at the end of this month and automatic services for the product will go dark in two years.

Microsoft Money was the one product that I haven’t found a suitable alternative for on the Mac. And having years of data in its proprietary format doesn’t help, either. Really, there are great Mac software options, including Quicken for Mac (maybe Quicken Financial Life sometime soon), Moneywell or Moneydance.

June 10, 2009 0 comments

Home Tech

Mozy status update

by Philip Sellers May 29, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Its been a couple weeks now since I’ve written a Mozy backup status update. We have progressed quite a ways in the backup process. I have interrupted the backups almost every evening once I get home because it was saturating my upstream connection and degrading my internet performance while I was trying to use it. So, that hasn’t helped my speed issues. But that does bring one point which Backblaze includes in their software – bandwidth throttling. That would be a nice feature to keep the client software from saturating your full upstream or downstream connection.

Beyond that, the backup is progressing nicely. I have less than 10GB of data left to be processed and uploaded. I think that we will be complete by the end of next week, if not sooner.

Since some data is now online, I am able to see the restore features of the Mozy website. As somone from Online Backup Reviews commented earlier, Mozy has added the feature of getting your data (snail) mailed to you in the event of a disaster. The rates are significantly better than Backblaze’s simliar service.

I let my Backblaze trial account lapse. I haven’t done much more with that software, but I genuinely liked the service and the yearly cost. I didn’t like the offline restore cost, though, and that kept me from subscribing. I thought those prices were very high ($99 for DVD?). I may sign up for a trial of another vendor just to see what the experience and software is like. More updates soon.

May 29, 2009 3 comments

Home Tech

Mozy backup update

by Philip Sellers May 15, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

So, its been exactly a week since I started my Mozy backup. I have now progressed to completion of approximately 20GB of my data backed up. My iMac froze (yes, it does happen…) one day and I had to restart it when I got home from work, but the backup kicked off again. So, 20GB in a week isn’t that bad. But I’m impatient. I can’t help thinking how much fast this would be on Bluewave (my company’s fiber to the home product). I’d have a much faster upstream. That brings me back to my point in the last post – the biggest hurdle to online backup is upstream on home Internet connections. But, that’s where we are today. I’ll be following up later on this.

May 15, 2009 0 comments

Home Tech

Trying out Mozy again…

by Philip Sellers May 9, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Since posting about Backblaze, I got some very good comments about Mozy. They have also not been sitting idle and they’ve added a few features to the service. One of those new feature is the ability to get your restore on external media shipped to you, a key differentiator to Backblaze, I said earlier. The price of a similar service was Backblaze was a little costly, I thought, so Mozy’s options are a much better approach. More on that soon.

So, I setup my iMac at home to use my Mozy account. I had signed up for full service a long time ago, but I have to admit, I was too impatient to let the initial backup complete. So, this time, I made a consious effort to backup only the data that I knew I didn’t want to lose and leave away things like the system files and applications which I knew that I could replace easily. That brought my data total to about 60GB to backup on my intial.

May 9, 2009 1 comment

Apple Home Tech

Google Gears, for offline use, rocks

by Philip Sellers February 9, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

There was a time when I was the first on the block to try everything new that came out. Those times have long since past and family and other priorities have taken over. But this weekend, I was able to try Google Gears and finally understood the value of the service. Over the years, I’ve become a big believer in many of Google’s services. They are my primary search in all my browsers, I’m loyal to my GMail (more on that), and I’ve embraced Google Docs, much to the point that I don’t even have Microsoft Office installed on any of my Macs anymore. I must confess, though, that I do have iWork installed, though, for some of the more creative things – like family newsletters.

When Google Gears first appeared, I asked myself, why’d anybody want that? What does it buy you? See, I can’t imagine the world without Internet – its always close by for me, but not everyone is that way. I can’t say I really understood fully until this weekend. My wife and I have been discussing building a house and so all our spreadsheets with potential scenarios are in Google Docs, so we can share (talk about its killer feature, right?). Well, sharing is great, but we hadn’t had time to talk about some of the scenarios I’d put together. See, I am the geeky numbers one in the family and my wife confessed she really didn’t understand what she was looking at… So, we had an hour’s car ride Saturday while traveling to go see the circus with our daughter. Enter Gears.

February 9, 2009 0 comments

Home Tech

Quicken Financial Life Beta opens to wider audience

by Philip Sellers December 29, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

About 1:59pm today, I finally received my invitation to the Quicken Finanical Life beta program. The software is currently downloading in the background and I anticipate installing it and giving it a test drive here shortly.

Update:
There is a confidentiality agreement for testers, so I won’t be providing any details, but I will be playing. Good luck to others and I hope you’ve received your acceptance, also.

December 29, 2008 1 comment

Devices Home Tech

Another problem for the T-Mobile G1

by Philip Sellers September 29, 2008

written by Philip Sellers

The much hyped T-Mobile G1 handset will hit the market next month, but its in my eyes, it has a major obstacle to overcome – the overwhelming lack of a 3G network to operate on. Many site AT&T’s 3G coverage (or lack) as a weakness with the iPhone 3G models, but T-Mobile’s 3G network coverage is abysmal. It looks like parts of Texas, New England, Atlanta and spots of California are the only lucky 3G coverage in T-Mobile’s network from examining their coverage map.

September 29, 2008 1 comment