ossblogger.com

You may want to check other free money management software for your Windows here if you think this post is irrelevant to you.

We work hard to make money. But we never work as hard to manage the money that we make. That is why, some of us “finished” their hard earned money even before the end of the month.

Most of us spend more than we could earn. And most of the things that we spend on to are not necessary. Try differentiate things that you are planning to buy next by labeling it to either “needs” or “wants”. You may then realize how much have you spent on unnecessary things…

If you think that you spend most of your money to the things that you “want”, and end up broke before the end of the month, then you should track your spending habits with some of the best free money management software around.

FreeCoins
For me, FreeCoins is one of the best free and open source money management software for Palm OS (which I use with my Treo 680) that I have used so far. There are other proprietary software to manage money in Palm OS, but I don’t think it is necessary for me to spend money when you could get something that is compatible and free like FreeCoins. Although the development of the program/software stopped on May 22, 2006, the program has been running smoothly, and I have been using it to budget and track my monthly spendings.

The only thing that FreeCoins can’t do for me is to import/export the database files to .QIF or even .CSV, as I planned to integrate it with Gnucash and jGnash, 2 of the best money management software which you could install in your Windows.

FreeCoins is a full-featured accounting program (similar to GnuCash) for the Palm OS released under GPL.

Some of the features in the program are:

• available in multiple languages (French and German at the moment)
• Manual
• Integrated calculator for speed-entering transactions
• International number format support
• accounts structured in trees
• Autocompletion for speedy entries
• double entry bookkeeping
• cleared/uncleared transactions (can be viewed separately and the views can be remembered)
• separate cleared/uncleared/available balances
• transactions can be scheduled (very useful for direct debits/standing orders)
• totals for the current account, current category and all accounts in all categories

I just hope that the development of the software could continue, as to improve the usability of the software in the future.

If you have been using M$ Windows Media Player and feels that it is getting “bloated”, slow and sometimes have annoying pop-ups saying that “you don’t have the plugin/extension needed”, then you may find VLC Media Player is the best replacement.

I have been using VLC for the past 2 years, and I have never found any other player that come close to it. VLC is small, fast loading and don’t have the unnecessary bells and whistle which most multimedia player has.

The best thing about VLC is that it could play .3gp files, which is a video files that you usually play it in mobile phones! You can install it in Windows, Linux & Mac.

VLC media player - the cross-platform media player and streaming server

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

I wish I’ve found this open source software before I started my Kinabalu website. But anyway, it’s better late than never. I just found FreeMind few months back while planning to start my new blog/website. A “must have” tool for you to plan for any project!

I remember the last time I used mind mapping was during my school days, in one of the workshop for me to brainstorm new ideas and to plan for writing essays, for example. I used mind mapping in med school, but it was just for some subjects, and I never realize the usefulness of this “mind mapping” until I started my own websites and blogs.

What is Mind Map
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

What is FreeMind
FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. And it has become one of the high productivity tool for almost everybody! You can download and install it in Windows, Mac and Linux.

Argh… I was bitten by SCUBA diving bugs after my first dive. I am now planning to get my PADI Open Water ASAP (i.e. when the $ is enough). Anyway, I just would like to share with you some of the best SCUBA diving software around for you to track and log your diving.

JDiveLog

An open source logbook for SCUBA divers for logging scuba dives. It’s written in Java (JRE 5.0 or later required). You could even transfer your dive profile from your dive computer directly to JDiveLog. Up to now some Suunto and Uwatec Aladin models are supported, as well as the Open Source Dive Computer by HeinrichsWeikamp.

Aqua DiveLog

Aqua DiveLog is a logbook for scuba divers, from beginner to technical diver.

The goal of this project is to develop a flexible and easy to use dive logbook for Palm OS based PDA. The advantages of the old paper logbook (small, lightweight and easy to use) should be combined with the power of a computer (interface to dive computer, search functions, data access , …).

And the best of all, it is free!
The ADL is an Open Source project under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

I have been using Palm Treo 680 for the past 2 months, which I bought from ebay for around RM1000. Seek for Salat Software for Palm OS since then, and I found that Salat Schedule 1.2 is the best.

Some of the features:
SalatSchedule is a simple PalmOS(R) application that displays the Muslim prayer time schedule for the current day, along with the praying direction “Qibla”.

A list of 525 city locations around the world are made available for the user to select from, with the ability to change location and Fiqh parameters.

Alarm schedule can be generated for 30 days and the software can be used as a prayer time reminder.

It only has “Takbir”, and not full Azan. A good feature (I think), that is just suffice if you think that the whole Azan is too long for your Palm.

I was shopping for my airline ticket through Airasia.com for my next holiday back to Muar, Johor in March 2008.

The booking process was smooth, up until the end - when I realize that my HSBC credit card cannot be used to complete my transaction online - due to browser problem. It seems that HSBC is NOT Firefox compatible. I am not sure. Or is it VISA incompatible?

Screenshot:

Clicking on their T&C will not give you an answer about any particular compatible browser.

Luckily I have my good old Maybank Mastercard and I managed to complete my internet transaction. So far, my Maybank Mastercard never disappoint me.

P/S: HSBC use Internet Explorer??? Sigh…

I have experienced the same problems few months back. Somehow or rather, I received this annoying “HTTP Error 403” every time I tried to log in to my admin site of my blog.

Upon investigating, the problem lies on our Malaysian internet provider, Tmnet Streamyx, as they provide random dynamic IPs that apparently was blacklisted.

The solution for this problem was just restarting the ADSL modem/router and create a new connection. Tmnet Streamyx will then assign your computer with a new IP that (hopefully) is not blacklisted.

Yesterday, the same problem happened. Every time I tried to log in to this blog, I received another “HTTP Error 403” message. I thought the problem lies with Tmnet again, but after restarting my router few times, I still got the same problem.

I could also not be able to access my blog from my desktop PC at home.

One of my colleague, said it may be because of Sabah IP address which are blocked due to some technical problems with Tmnet.

Anyway, this morning, I tried to log in again, and now I found out that there is another additional technical support information from Bad Behaviour:

This may also occur with old versions of Bad Behavior. If you do not see any blacklist providers listed below, and you are the site administrator, try updating to the latest version of Bad Behavior.

Aah… That might be the cause for my problem for merely 24 hours!

True enough, when you head to Bad Behaviour website, they confirmed that the problem are caused by their plugin:

Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.

So, if you have the same problem, just head to Bad Behaviour, download their latest fixed plugin, and replace the folder in your Wordpress plugin folder.

I got my admin site of my blog almost immediately!

Cheers!

When I found bugs with my PCLOS last week, I decided to take a good look back with Ubuntu. I did found a bug with Ubuntu installation cd with my current notebook set-up, but I found out the solution from Ubuntu forum.

#The bug: it seems that Ubuntu installation did not recognize a small partition (fat16, 8MB) that was left by my Xandros, 2 years back.

Did a new installation on top of my existing PCLOS, and now, I am dual-booting my notebook with Ubuntu!

Tried to upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon, but unfortunately,I didn’t have enough disk space to squeeze all in (Gutsy needs 4GB of space, but the existing partition was only 3.2GB). Sigh…

Anyway, I managed to convert my Ubuntu to Ubuntu Muslim Edition. With Ubuntu Muslim Edition, I now have Zekr (Quran Study) and Minbar (Prayer Times) in my notebook.

I have been dual-booting my ACER notebook with Windows XP and Xandros OCE (open circulation edition) 3.0.2 for the past 2 years. I can’t remember when was my last login to Xandros, as Xandros has stopped supporting their OCE since few months back.

Most of their package repository was not updated, and if I were to update or upgrade my Xandros, I have to dig into their forum site to manually install the packages that I want to use. Tried to play with Backports, but I don’t think I am that geeky. So, most of the software packages in my Xandros was “outdated” - even my Firefox was stuck with version 1.5.

I tried to install Ubuntu 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon, but found bugs during manual installation, and have to abort the installation process half way through. I was a bit disappointed with that, after reading a lot of good reviews about Gutsy Gibbon and the smoothness of the installation. It did not stopped me from getting my ACER new Linux soul though…

I tried to install Mandriva 2008, using a free DVD that I received with my monthly LinuxForYou magazine, November 2007 issue, but failed to get the installer running as the text-mode installer has a bug, and my ACER notebook does not support graphical installer. Sigh…

Did some homework and surfed Distrowatch to get feedback on the best Linux distro to replace my Xandros, and found out that PCLinuxOS is the highest hit page ranking. I downloaded the cd image of PCLinuxOS, burned it on a cd and run it first as a live cd.

I must say that the process was really easy. Live cd showed KDE with a dedicated button for installation (similar with Ubuntu). Running PCLinuxOS live cd was smooth, and I could get all my hardware running out of the box. Setting up the network for internet was also easy, no problem in internet connection, although I was using live cd.

The installation process for PCLinixOS is also easy. It has a graphical installer, which detected all my hard drive, including the reiserfs partition which Xandros lived. By installing PCLinuxOS, my LILO bootloader which was created by Xandros was replaced by a new and more beautiful GRUB bootloader by PCLinuxOS, and I still can boot my Windows!!!

The best thing about PCLinuxOS is the Beryl 3D (now have merge with compiz) desktop presentation. After upgrading it with Synaptic in my PCLinuxOS, my desktop behave really differently, and I don’t think my XP can do it…

On tweaking Windows, I found these 3 open source and free desktop enhancing tools few weeks back. They are small, and does not need huge resources to run.

Folder Size for Windows
I have been using Folder Size for Windows for the past few months, with version 2.3. Brian did a good job to upgrade it to version 2.4, and I have to tell you that it only works with Windows XP. He did have a problem with Vista, and said that there won’t be any Folder Size for Windows Vista.

Features:

1. Don’t have to switch to another program to see folder sizes. It’s always there when you’re viewing your folders (even in Open and Save file dialog boxes, you can change the view), and it’s a great visual cue to help you find the one you’re looking for. Not just for disk cleanup, but for any time you need to choose a folder.
2. No scanning phase before you can start. As soon as you display the Folder Size column, you’ll see sizes immediately. Large folders will continue to scan in the background while you browse your folders.
3. Explorer will automatically update the folder size column in real-time. No more manual rescanning.
4. Background scans won’t monopolize your disk. When Folder Size detects that other programs are doing a lot of reading to and writing from the hard disk being scanned, the background scanning will wait for the other programs to finish.
5. If you don’t show the Folder Size column for a while, it won’t forget what it’s already scanned, but the background scanner doesn’t stay active. It won’t waste any CPU time maintaining the cache on your P2P sharing or gaming machine that’s always changing files.

Launchy
The winner for Sourceforge.net 2007 Community Choice Awards for Best New Project, Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

It even has become a great feature in Lifehacker, with lots and lots of tips and tweaks on how to enhance the usage of Launchy. I personally loves Launchy, even more after knowing how to tweak the software with Lifehacker.

Ditto
Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom format, etc…

I use Ditto a lot when writing and editing HTML code using Nvu (now Kompozer). Although I have migrated fully to Wordpress, I still have few websites that I created using Nvu. Most of the time I hand coded the HTML pages and uses a lot of copy and paste feature. At this stage, Ditto plays a big role on things that I copied to the clipboard.

Features:

1. Easy to use interface
2. Search and paste previous copy entries
3. Keep multiple computer’s clipboards in sync
4. Data is encrypted when sent over the network
5. Accessed from tray icon or global hot key
6. Select entry by double click, enter key or drag drop
7. Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries
8. Display thumbnail of copied images in list
9. Full Unicode support (display foreign characters)
10. UTF-8 support for language files (create language files in any language)
11. It’s portable also!