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Expense Tracking

I have tested two self-hosted apps for expense tracking/budgeting:

• Firefly III
• Actual Budget

Both have their pros and cons and I don't think you can say one is better than the other. I think I'm going with Actual Budget for now but this is just a personal choice. If you want more options you can also check out the Budgeting tag on selfh.st.

I have started using metube to download and watch YouTube videos. I have tried using YouTube downloaders before but this one just makes it super simple to run everything in a docker container with a web UI.

Why do this?

A couple of reasons:

• Watch videos with no distractions. Helps me stay focused.
• No buffering issues. Watch at the highest quality even on a poor internet connection.
• Offline mode. Yesterday I watched a video while riding a bus on my way home from the Alps.
• No ads

So far the experience has been nice. Especially when traveling where I may not always have the best internet connection.

While the downloader mostly works, it has not been without hiccups. YouTube is changing constantly and so it is hard for the underlying downloader (yt-dlp) to keep up. I experienced this when the downloader suddenly stopped working and I had to wait for a fix. But hats off to yt-dlp for delivering updates quickly and doing their best to keep up with the changes.

I found metube via selfh.st. You can see other YouTube "alternatives" here.

Working on finding a new "read later" app. This is an area I have actually been burned by vendors before (Pocket I'm looking at you).

Right now I'm trying out:

• Linkding
• Linkwarden

Although it has only been one day I'm enjoying the Obsidian Android app way more than I ever did the Notion one.

Notion just never seemed to work well on my phone.

The fact that the Obsidian vault is stored offline on my phone with a sync to the cloud seems really nice. There is no loading time or waiting for connection when loading the app. Of course this also means I may end up having conflicts if I switch from phone to another device.

I know Notion also stored some state on the device. But loading still seemed much slower and sometimes quite janky.

Notes using Obsidian

I've started using Obsidian for my notes.

I want to try this to avoid vendor lock in and other dependencies. Obsidian is not open source but the underlying file format is markdown so I should just be able to take my notes elsewhere if I stop liking Obsidian.

So far I enjoy the desktop app. I sync my vault to OneDrive for now.

Setting up my Android phone was a bit more tricky as it does not sync OneDrive to a local drive by default. I had to get another app for that.

I'm testing out the setup and we'll see how it goes.

Progress so far:

Kindle Jailbreak

Jailbroke my Kindle following this video and https://kindlemodding.org/. Had a few small issues where my Kindle didn't behave exactly like described in the guide. But overall it was a pretty simple process.

I like using my kindle in the normal setup. And I will probably continue to do so for many books. But apparently Amazon is starting to get more and more aggressive with their monopoly over ebooks. They can pretty much do whatever they like with "my" books.

Jailbreaking my Kindle was both an interesting exercise and a way for me to feel a bit more at ease about the many books I have on there. It also opens up a new ecosystem for me to experiment with. Plus KOReader has way more options as to how I can read on the Kindle.

I've long wanted a better way of reading PDFs on my Kindle and KOReader may just be the tool for that. It is still early days but at least I now have more options than before.

MacBook Pro as my daily driver

I have started using my MacBook Pro as my daily driver. I have an old Windows desktop that used to have this job. But it has annoyed me for a while.

I bought a cheap docking hub to connect my keyboard, mouse, headset, and screen to my MacBook. I really love how I can just plug it in and I'm in desktop mode.

I did try running Linux Omakub for a bit on my desktop using dual boot. I enjoyed that experience as well but I'm not ready for the full switch just yet.

Right now I don't see any need for my old desktop. One computer is more than enough. So I'll continue this experiment and in time I may get rid of my old desktop entirely. For now it is still next to my desk, unplugged.