Productive Organizer

There are some important lessons not taught in school but are necessary in life. One of them is to manage your cash and money well.

One of the greatest problem faced in the twenty first century have been how debts have taken such a great hold of people’s lives. People start asking the questions how do they get themselves out of so much debts.

The answers presented in many personal finance sites are largely the same.

You take responsibility in how you use and manage your money

1. Do not carry debt. Except perhaps mortgage. We should avoid credit card,car loans and home renovation loans as possible
2. Have adequate emergency cash. You want to build a large buffer cash slowly so that in the event of a situation you have something to fall back on
3. Start your investment warchest. I always said create a nest egg early. Pay yourself first and learn to invest and put your money to grow
4. Be insured. You do not know when illness and tragedy will strike and when they do you will need a sum of money that you will have difficulty to come up with. Hedge that risk by buying cheap low cost insurance
5. Develop a budget. Manage your money in a systematic way. Give each dollar a job
6. Boost your income. There is no point just saving and scrimping. It will be massively easier to upgrade  yourself, focus on how to carve a great career and earn a better income

You need a budget as your personal finance manager

One software that understands how to help you make sense of your finances have been You need a budget (YNAB). It is a personal finance software that focus heavily on budgeting and help you get out of debt.

It is highly flexible to accommodate to your budgeting methodology. For myself I tried many methods of saving money and I find that by following envelope budgeting, I can allocate my paycheck to virtual envelopes and prevent me from spending over the limit.

1. Find out your spending pattern

The first step is to identify how you currently spend your money. Collect all the receipts from recent purchases for 1-2 months. This will let you know what you spend on typically.

With that you can generalize them into spending categories

2. Give each dollar a job

The next step is to break your monthly income from your salary, passive income, dividend income into virtual envelopes or YNAB categories

YNAB provides a default set of spending categories that you an extend to two levels. You can also specify your own

Basically, each of your transactions will be tag to a category and you can monitor at the budget screen whether you are overspending it.

What if you do not spend enough? The amount will be brought over to next month. In this way if you overspend you will face with a deficit and if you underspend you will face with a surplus.

That means next time you need to spend less if the amount gets negative.

If you get a lot of surplus, it means u can indulge and spend on big ticket items.

3. Enter daily spending in transactions

Every time you spend money, take note of what you spend on. At the end of the day come back home, fire up the PC,  fire up YNAB and record your transactions.

Some people find it difficult to do that but, with smartphones nowadays you can enter your transactions into an iPhone or Android YNAB app or record down in a notepad and enter them at the end of the day.

It is a good habit to record these transactions and I don’t think you need to spend a lot of time.

4. Review your spending pattern

On a quarterly basis, review whether you are meeting your goals.

1. Your emergency cash category should be rising
2. You should be paying yourself first and building up a nest egg
3. You should be paying down your debts through the debt accounts
4. Your hobbies account should not be exceeded

These are some review items to evaluate. You should also evaluate whether some accounts warrant an increase or decrease in amount.

Conclusion

Saving money and clearing debt need not be filled with anxiety and despair. The first step is the most important. Follow the 4 step process to kick start a sensible money management plan.

YNAB can be a great companion software because it is ubiquitous. It is available on the Windows and Mac which means you are not tied into one platform.

YNAB also have Android and iPhone apps that allows you to record, review and sync transactions to the desktop.

I still have a love hate relationship with Evernote, mainly because I still have not really make sense of it yet.

But while I complain about it, what you like is to subscribe to a cloud app that is continuously value adding. And this update is rather small but provide something that many would appreciate.

I compose some of my notes on the go and before I actually save and upload the notes, I may stop halfway and get on the bus and my accidentally close the Evernote Android app.

This version of Android Evernote provide a feature to manually save when you are composing really lengthy note.

Small but really helpful.

Now if you were me, you will have this small problem of not liking to create playlists. Rather, the way I play music is to organize them into folders. I can always drag an updated folder in because most of my song folders are theme as

1. 01 Rock
2. 02 Chill
3. 03 Popular
4. 04 Podcasts

But somehow, perhaps influenced by iTunes not many Android music players are like that.

Enter MortPlayer [Android Market >>]. Here is a music player, that not ranked the highest but serve its needs.

Plays music by folders

Instead or artists, playlists, it enables you to scan available music folders. You can let MortPlayer to scan for you or choose a designated root folder.

Equalizer and Bass Boost

If you think this is just a lousy app that only plays via folders, think again. It comes with a range of audio enhancements. I love having an equalizer and bass boost settings.

Lock Screen Controls

Now this is something a lot of third party players do not have. My Samsung Galaxy S2 default player allows me to change track on lock screen, not many can.

MortPlayer allows you to do that! The image above shows a sliding door you can slide up when you are at your lockscreen. You can access most of what you need to do, change tracks, change folder, stop and play there.

When you click the notification bar it will launch a control pop up like this for fast control.

Conclusion

I am very happy using MortPlayer and have not found any faults yet. I hope you can give it a try.

I chanced upon this Stock Portfolio Manager project from a site that focus on DRIP investing.

I was pretty impress by it but found that it is not as suitable as my Free Stock Portfolio Tracking Google Spreadsheet. But nevertheless I thought that perhaps some folks would appreciate it.

Why need a tool like this

We talk about the importance of planning financially at different stage of your life so that you do not get to a state where you lose financial control (see Frugal Living)

One portion of the plan is to plan for your nested egg or having adequate money for retirement. Investing in stocks is one of the solutions.

There are many tools or websites that does this but not many focus on enabling you to key in transactions and different currencies.

The Use Case for Stock Portfolio Manager

1. A portfolio manager that works on different platforms
2. Able to let the user fill in his own stocks whether US or international based
3. Able to let the user update based on transactions (buy, sell or dvidends)
4. Able to provide graphing to let the users do a portfolio review

I thought this tool does a pretty competent job. What stopped me from exploring further is that there Is limited currency selection and that for transactions I believe there are more frequently encountered transactions other than buy,sell and dividends.

This application is free and if you are interested to try and see if it works for you, you can download it from here.

Use Case: Some portrait photos look great just like it is being drawn in pencil. How do you do that?

Here is a web application that enable you to put pencil filters and adjust the settings to create a great photo as if you have drawn it

[Go to use Picfull >>]

I never knew why would people want to turn off WIFI background scanning. To me it used to be that you can discover better WIIF connection and you never know when you will go into a local shopping mall and have to discover WIFI connection on the go.

The Benefits

so it turns out I discovered over from NirmalTV.com that there are benefits to optimizing your WIIF connection.

1. It improves latency time of wireless connections.
2. This reduces connection spikes

WLAN Optimizer Software

Here is an app for Windows PC call WLAN Optimizer that starts up everytime you starts in Windows and enable you to Disable background scan.

[Download WLAN Optimizer>>]

The use case: You have 3G mobile data connection on your Windows Phone, how do you share this with your other device which are wifi enable?

MakeUseOf have revealed it is build into the Mango release of Windows Phone 7.5. Yet it was released with little fanfare.

1. Make sure that Data Connection and 3G Connection is enabled in Settings

2. Slide to enable Sharing and specify a name so that other devices can discover your phone’s connection.

3. Go to your device and find this SSID name, key in the password and you should be connected.

I tell my readers that my favorite ubiquous note taking application is Evernote.

Here is why I like about it

1. It is ubiquitous. Its found on the desktop, Chrome browswer, firefox, safari and IE. Its found on iPhone, IPad, Blackberry, WP7, Android. I don’t have to worry which device I own because I know I can have access to my notes.
2. Taking notes is easy. I can clip notes on my desktop. I can take voice and picture notes from my smartphone. I can now sketch on my picture notes.
3. Its got rich text input on desktop client. Its got rich text input on its iPhone and Android app! how cool is that. The key to being able to take notes effectively is to be able to come up with bullet points and I Can do that with Evernote.
4. The guys at Evernote are trying to build Evernote into a platform. They are opening up the API so that third party apps can interface to Evernote.
5. The network is getting bigger and bigger. The more people in the network the greater the value.

How did Evernote come about? Read their story here

[The evernote story >>]

We talk about in the past the swyping virtual keyboard for multiple platforms SWYPE. It speeds up text input on your device but recently I have fallen out of love with it.

SWYPE comes as a default on my Samsung Galaxy S2 but no matter how I tried to use, I still go back to the standard keyboard application such as Ice Cream Sandwich or SwiftKey.

SWYPing is just not very normal. I still prefer good ol typing input. I am not sure about you guys.

Today’s update since SWYPE was acquired by Naunce comes the integration of Dragon Dictate technology into SWYPE. So now not only can you enjoy Swyping goodness but also quality voice to text input.

You can also download other language packs as well.

The update can be installed from the Swype preferences pane now, and you can join the beta from Swype’s website

The Amazon Kindle Fire. A $199 Android device that Amazon wants you to only use to assess their Amazon music, applications, movie and buy things from them. I am sure not many of you want to use it ONLY for that.

So how can you have more fun with it? We saw what happen to a cheap Android device with a relatively good hardware in Nook Color which got hacked pretty thoroughly such that so many people are buying it off Barnes and Noble.

It’s a matter of time before it happens to the Kindle Fire.

Root the Kindle Fire through SuperOneClick

To enable your device from being able to have that much freedom, you need to give it root access, which in layman terms is to give it the super user access so that they can do everything.

Note: Rooting your device can be risky, and may end up rendering the device in an unrecoverable state or void your device warranty

1. Download Android SDK and install ADB [Instructions and guide here >>]

2. Download SuperOneClick 2.2 [Download link >>]

3. Go to your %USERPROFILE%\.android on your system and local the file adb_usb.ini. Edit the file and append the following at the end of file: 0×1949 and save the file.

4. Go to the folder where you have the Android SDK installed and open the google-usb_driver folder and then edit the file android_winusb.inf. just add the following to the [Google.NTx86] section and [Google.NTamd64] section:

;Kindle Fire

%SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_1949&PID_0006

%CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_1949&PID_0006&MI_01

then save the file

5. If Kindle Fire is already plugged into the USB you may have to open device manager and find “Kindle” under other devices and choose the android_winusb.inf file.

6. On Kindle Fire make sure to turn on installation of apps from unknown sources.

7. Now launch a command prompt windows (cmd) and run the following commands:

adb kill-server

adb devices

8. You should be able to see you device listed there. If it is then you are good to go.

9. Finally just launch the SuperOneClick tool. Hit the root button to get the SU binaries, BusyBox, SuperUser etc. pushed to your device automatically.

10. Kindle Fire is rooted.

Sideload other android apps

Sideloading android apps not on the Amazon App Store is just doing 3 things

1. Get the app APK
2. Ensure that quick settings > More > Device > “Allow installation of applications from unknown sources” is turn on.
3. Move the APK over and install it.

You can find more detail instructions here [Instructions here >>]

Getting Android Market on your Kindle Fire

You would need to root your device first. XDA developers then have the GoogleServicesFramework.apk and vending.apk for you to install and configured to work.

[Files and instructions here >>]

Getting other Google Android Apps to work

Once you get Android Market working, the rest of the apps should be a smaller problem for you.

Follow the instructions here to get them downloaded and installed. [Instructions here >>]

Conclusion

I hope you have fun with this device. Its price point is lower than that of the iPad but looks like a good hardware to do a lot of the productivity stuff.