Hold strong!

You’ll never fail anything if you don’t try! This guys figured it out!

Semi-manual tracking with YNAB. My bank doesn’t offer an OAuth2 API and there’s no way in hell I’m giving Plaid my bank credentials. So, I just download a transactions file and upload that to YNAB.

I know people here will probably recommend https://actualbudget.org/ which seems like a YNAB-clone (in a good way). But the reason I went with YNAB is because they have a ton of docs and videos about how YNAB works and budgeting in general. ActualBudget seems to be targeted at people who already know what they’re doing (not me).

YNAB/Actual might be different than Mint, though. YNAB is based on envelope budgeting, as opposed to just collecting spending metrics. I haven’t used Mint in a very long time, not sure if it’s changed since.

My new years resolution is to spend less money and spend more deliberately.

January is wrapping up and I’m kinda shocked. I discovered that the estimate in my head of how much monthly house bills are is… off… by… a lot… I was just thinking about the monthly bills like water, electricity, internet, but failed to account for gas, groceries, restaurants, and repairs.

Now that I’m actually budgeting and tracking, I’m seeing what’s really going on.

My neighbor told me I was gonna die in 1year after getting the first round of COVID vaccines. Pff. I wish! Still here unfortunately.

Can we make Matrix not suck first?

Technologically, very cool, much wow. But UI/UX wise, it’s pretty terrible. I managed to convince 5 friends to move to Matrix from Discord. They lasted like 3 days before going back to Discord. One guy couldn’t even figure out how to post a message and have it be decrypted by everyone in the group. We just kept seeing “Message could not be decrypted” or whatever over and over again. We had to fall back to Discord to reach him.

They probably won’t be taking recommendations from me anymore. :|

(We used Element X clients.)

Good questions!

But problem is, all my email address would be @mydomainname.com instead of @protonmail which millions of people use. Isn’t that just linking all your account together.

I mean, yeah. You can’t setup sockpuppets on the same service. It’ll be obvious it’s the same person. And if someone is tracking you across services, it’ll be way easier to find you. This is a con.

I would recommend not picking a domain with your real name, like smith.com or john.com. Even though it does seem popular to have me@johnsmith.com. It won’t solve the issue you noticed, but it’ll mitigate it a tiny bit.

its hard to even pick a name that sound good

Also, true. Ideally, you pick a common word with normal spelling that doesn’t have a homophone that’s not embarrassing to say to random people on the street. It would be awkward to be applying to a job or a loan and have to say your email is “[email protected]”. Also, you will have to speak your email over the phone at some point, the shorter and easier it is the better.

I would also recommend picking a domain with either .com or .net TLDs. Some companies blanket destroy your email if it comes from some weird TLD like “.party” or “.xyz”. Omg, specifically, .xyz I think has been linked to tons of spam. Bigger companies will handle this more gracefully (put it in spam). But smaller companies, like my local garbage company run by normies, will just not deliver the email. (And debugging why emails don’t get received is really hard and annoying.)

Unfortunately, a lot of people squat domains, so finding a short, simple, easy domain is really hard. I’m curious what other people do. Maybe other people just have me@reallylongdomainthaticanactuallyget.com? Or maybe other people have had better experience with john@mail.club? Or maybe some people don’t care that their domain is john@boss.baby?

Ultimately though, having email independence is valuable enough for some folks to be OK with the downsides.

My experience with my friends and family:

I left Facebook a long time ago and never looked back.

I just got a pop-up about this today… It would have been nice to get this at the beginning of the month…

Proud of you. 👍

Other options:

• https://purelymail.com/
• https://migadu.com/

This was my failure.

https://purelymail.com/ seems like it’s a cheap, no-nonsense email provider. I’m already setup on Migadu and happy enough, so I haven’t tried it. But it seems like a lot of people like it.

People were recently talking about it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836818

Did you notice if it seemed to improve a bit with time?

Mmm… no. I just more violently drag across the trackpad until it works and then resume what I was doing. 😅

I don’t have problems with high DPI … only problems I’ve come across is … I DID have scaling problems with Wayland

This is exactly my point. You did have problems with high DPI. You had to fix some random config and avoid Wayland.

I don’t want to deal with this. I want to be able to use whatever software I want and have it work with minimal or no extra “fixing”. I value this over slightly neater pixels.

Here’s a screenshot I just took from my Framework 13. Notice how some of the text is clear, but the entire menu to the right is blurry.

Common “fixes” are “move to Fedora” or “just enable some experimental flag in some random config”. This all misses the point though: I don’t want to have to do any of that. I just want a system that works with the most amount of apps.

Of course, it depends on what you specifically value. For me, I value broader software compatibility over slightly neater pixels. Some people might like it the other way around. That’s fine, but it’s something important to know.

Exactly the combo I use. Been happy with Migadu for the last 2 years. Although, purelymail also seems interesting.

… I’m not a purelymail user or know much about it… But, I guess I am old now…

I’m guessing the service being in beta for 6 years is a joke. It’s a reference to Gmail being in beta forever.

Minor gripe about the trackpad sticking intermittently

Aaaah!!! It’s not just me! I used a track pad on another computer and realized the Framework’s stickiness wasn’t just in my head!

I currently own a Framework 13… and… after daily driving it for a year, I decided I don’t like it.

The deal beaker for me is the high dpi display. Linux just isn’t 100% compatible with hpi displays. I’m tired of my apps either having blurry fonts or tiny text. Ironic because hi dpi displays are supposed to look better.

With Framework, you’ll be pushed into using Fedora (it doesn’t solve all the scaling issues) or pushed to stop using apps you like because they’re using older GTK (some times there are no alternatives). You’ll also have to dive into debugging scaling issues.

I just switched back to my Dell XPS 13 9310 FHD and it was a breath of fresh air having everything just work. Any distro, any apps, no scaling debugging, text is readable and crisp, app UI elements look properly sized.

I only ever switched out the modular ports once, but honestly it would have been better to buy a dongle instead because that would work on any computer.

Oh, and I tried the higher resolution screen. It didn’t fix the scaling issues.

Oh, and, I actually had a display fail on me! After like 8 months, half the display went black. Thankfully, they were nice enough to send me a free replacement, but it definitely left me feeling like the Framework isn’t that sturdy or durable.

The shell also dents easily. I dropped a small music player from desk height onto the top lid and it left a small dent. (I have like 3 dents on the lid.)

Repairability is the one feature that the Framework beats everyone else on, but to me the cons outweigh the pros.

Yeah, you’re right. Bad advice actually. Oops.