• Nov 10, 2024

    Lost My Wallet

    I’ve been carrying a wallet for something like 35 years in my back pocket. Initially, I carried my ATM card and a few dollars. When I got my driver’s license, I added that to the mix. Slowly over the years, cards just kept getting added, such as my insurance card, student ID, CPR card, credit cards, EMT card, AARP card, etc. It got to the point that my wallet was quite packed, and I looked for a slimmer wallet. I did find a wallet that reduced the bulk, and I used that one (or a replacement) for many years.

    Last summer, my son got his driver’s license and at the same time bought himself a used iPhone. While I suggested he get some type of standard wallet, he was insistent on getting a MagSafe compatible wallet that he could attach to the back of his phone. For him, it worked well as he only had his 1 card and a $20 bill; he insisted that he would only use ApplePay and didn’t need to carry his ATM card.

    This past summer, as I was thinking about what I had in my wallet, I took a careful inventory of what was in it.

    • CPR card - digital version on my phone; never needed to show it.

    • ATM card - I only use it to get money out of the ATM, which is deliberate and not just when I’m out and about.

    • Auto insurance card - digital version on my phone; proof of insurance in each car.

    • AARP card - digital version on my phone; have yet to use it.

    • Prescription benefits card - no longer in use as it is part of my health insurance.

    • Driver’s license - digital version not yet accepted anywhere.

    • Credit card - needed as not everywhere takes ApplePay.

    • Costco Card - digital version on phone.

    • EMT card - never used it, but I’m not quite ready to leave it out of my wallet.

    • Health insurance card - always asked for at doctors’ offices.

    • CERT identification card - card explicitly says “not for identification purposes”. Used it once to get into an evacuation site to volunteer.

    Looking at what was really needed, I slimmed down my cards to carry to 5 and decided to give a MagSafe wallet a try. The first thing I was kind of surprised at was how strong it held. The wallet also holds the cards pretty tight, so they’re not going to fall out. As I generally only wear long pants, I’ve made sure that all my pants have a side pocket on the leg; this allows me to carry my phone with attached wallet without making it hard to side down or walk. If I wore jeans and put my phone in my front pocket, the MagSafe wallet might be a bit more awkward.

    I’m now a few months into this “experiment” and while it does feel weird to no longer have anything in my back pocket, it is kind of liberating. When I get into the car, I pull out my phone (with wallet) and put it in the cubby where the CarPlay connector is. Since I’ve gotten into the habit of always putting my phone there (for the last 8 years since I first got a car with CarPlay), I don’t forget my phone when I get out of the car.

    The only weird thing about a MagSafe wallet is that when I want to take a picture, I have my wallet hanging off the back.

    I’m quite happy with this change and feel like I’ve been dragged into this century by relying on more things to be on my phone (yes, as technology person, this sounds kind of weird).

  • Feb 2, 2024

    The Road to Retirement

    At the height of the pandemic, I started to think a lot about retirement. When I was 12, my father started me on the path to retirement by setting up an IRA for me. While this may seem young, experts say that time is the best way to build a nest egg (unfortunately due to tax law changes, I can't establish an IRA for my son as it requires him to have income to offset his contributions). Throughout my life I've been thrifty (some may say frugal) with my finances. Combined with being hard working and frankly, quite lucky, financially I'll be ready for retirement.

    Being set for retirement only leaves me with a big hole; what is retirement? I've always told myself that retirement is doing what I wanted on my own time. That vision hasn't changed. However with retirement on the horizon, I need to figure out how I'm going to fill my time. I know what I don't want to do and that is sit around all day in a recliner, read the paper and watch TV. Sure, maybe I'll do that occasionally (well, what is a newspaper?), but being stagnant isn't in my nature and studies have shown that being active mentally and physically are keys to living a long life.

    Friends and family have asked what I like to do. That's a really good question; I've spent the last 17 years (almost) with my main goal being to help raise my son. So I've put what I want to do in the backseat. I've always wanted to help other people (yes, I know it is part of the Scout oath) and have done that through volunteering. I'm definitely going to spend more time volunteering. I've been a regular volunteer at Feeding San Diego and I plan on increasing time there. Also in the last 1.5 years I've changed how I work with the Scouts; I've gone from being a troop leader to helping at the district level. This has brought me a lot of joy and I feel like I'm making a difference. It's good that I've discovered happiness in that as they can always use more of my time. Is volunteering the only thing I want to do?

    What will I do for myself? Yes, I could argue that volunteering fulfills me and it does. However, there must be more. That's the part of retirement that I'm still working on figuring out. I really enjoy 3D printing and my son is dead set on teaching me how to use OnShape. I also enjoyed flying a drone (gave that up years ago as I didn't find I had time) and am thinking of taking a drone class to get licensed; that may open up a business opportunity if I want to film this commercially which sounds cool. Not sure it will pan out, but another piece to occupy my time.

    Any suggestions from the peanut gallery on what to do in retirement? I'm not quite there yet, but I'm not going to work until I drop (I hope).

  • Jan 8, 2024

    USB-C cables under deliver

    When I started learning about USB-C, I was excited to standardize on cables instead of having all kinds of cables and having to travel with a ton of cables. However, years ago, I read about a Google engineer who analyzed USB-C cables to find out which ones had charging problems or could damage devices. Fast forward, many years later there is still no way to tell what cables are good and which ones are bad.

    Now that Apple has adopted USB-C, I’ve read about what adapters to use to charge without breaking the bank. The article concerned me as the author recommend some adapters that were not USB-IF certified. Without any type of certification, there is no way to know if you’re going to get a cable that could cause a problem with your device.

    In my research to find cables that are quality cables, I watched a video where various cables were put under a CT scan and analyzed. It was fascinating to see the varying quality of cables. The cheap cables may not last and if they break, they could damage your device. In fact, some of the cables directly connect the power without any type of chip managing power. I have a flashlight and a bar code scanner that charge via a USB-C plug. However, neither one can charge with a USB-C to USB-C cable plugged into a power supply! They came with a USB-A to USB-C which probably just wired the power and maybe a few other lines. The only way I can charge them using a USB-C charger is to use a USB-C to USB-A adapter and then a USB-A to USB-C cable. So even if I carried a few USB-C to USB-C cables and chargers, I couldn’t charge these devices. That’s pretty disappointing that manufacturers implemented USB-C in non-standard ways so my hopes of having a single set of cables has been dashed.

    I’ve started acquiring USB-C cables and am making sure that all the cables are USB-IF certified (note that this appears to be self certified). Will that keep my devices from having problems? I have no idea, but it is at least lets me sleep a little better at night.

  • Jan 6, 2024

    A year without Paperless (ReceiptWallet)

    Last year, I wrote about ditching Paperless and storing all my documents in the Finder. This was driven by 2 main things. The first was I didn’t know how long Paperless would be around as it was getting kind of dated. And second I wanted to be able to see my documents and receipts on any device.

    Now that I’ve been using the Finder for a year, I can say that the transition has been pretty seamless. My initial plan was to only use the Finder for new things and keep using Paperless for older documents. However, when discussing this with my father, I went ahead and wrote an app that took all of my old Paperless libraries and extracted the PDFs into folders just the way I wanted. So after the extraction, I had all my receipts dating back to 2006 accessible on my Mac, iPad and iPhone.

    This is great and has come in handy when I want to find things when I’m not at my Mac or when I’m out and about (my wife has asked me what we paid for something and I was able to look it up in the store). With the Finder being able to search contents of the documents, it is pretty easy to locate a receipt or document. One thing that I still do is when I scan receipts using my ScanSnap, I have it OCR the documents. Unfortunately sometimes receipts are so cryptic that even with perfect OCR, a search may not turn up what I need. However, by stored the documents by year and month with the file name being the merchant name and date, I have a good chance of finding what I need. Note that while your can scan from an iPhone or iPad using the ScanSnap, it won’t OCR the documents, so I still scan all receipts that I don’t get electronically on my Mac.

    Now back to my first reason for transitioning to the Finder and that was the longevity of the app. As of the writing of this entry, the website for Paperless has been offline for at least a few weeks and all email bounces. I have no idea what happened to the company and I hope the owner is OK.

    If you’re still using Paperless and would like to transition to using the Finder, I hope my Paperless Extractor can help and bring you some piece of mind that you won’t be stuck when/if Paperless eventually breaks (all apps break at some point).

    It was a good run, ReceiptWallet/Paperless!