Blogs

I've got an update on some pretty neat sites I've found related to the three Fs: Freebies, Frugality and Finance.

Freebies

About once a month or so I go on a "freebies" binge where I look around the web for all the samples and freebies I can get. I stay away from magazines, "online-only" freebies (like e-mail newsletters, online memberships, downloads [except un-DRMed music], etc.), and anything that requires you to complete a task of some sort, such as signing up for a credit card or completing lengthy surveys. But anything else is fair game.

While perusing today, I came across a couple good freebie-related sites that I thought I'd share.

Mom Advice blog

Although not a "freebie" or even a financal site per se, every Friday Amy of MomAdvice posts a glut of freebie links (some of them are links to coupons for free or "free with X" items at brick-and-mortar stores). Check out the latest post, and also check out the previous three or four weeks which have some still-valid freebies listed.

Start Sampling

Like some other sites, this site provides a portal into the daring world of corporate giveaways and enticements. However, they have a unique twist: A "Frequent Tryer Program" where you can earn "miles" towards free gifts. Reflect on the full implications here: You earn points toward free gifts by signing up to receive free samples!

Of course, the gifts are about what you could expect. Currently they have listed a mini stapler and a magnetic clip. Each costs 5,000 points, and both are currently unavailable. So, the point thing might not be that great of an incentive – but hey, you still get to sign up for free samples. :)

Frugality

While frugality is certainly related to finance, I typically think of it in a different light. Finance is a broad topic that deals with the earning, investing, and even spending of money. Frugality deals specifically with the spending part, particularly how to minimize it.

There are a lot of sites that deal with finance, but not quite as many that deal with frugality specifically. Here are a couple that I've found.

Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Dave inadvertently turned me on to this site through the Dec. 2005 post about Share Builder promotions. Its got some decent financial advice as well as some other interesting topics.

N.B. Any of my blog's visitors interested in couponing would dig this BFP post on Hardcore Couponing Experience: $240.64 Saved, 3.5 Hours.

Festival of Frugality (FoF)

The "festival" is really a "carnival" in blogspeak. For those who don't know, "blog carnivals" are simply posts that link to many other blog posts on a given topic. Each carnival is generally hosted by a different blog, though often there is a central blog like the FoF or a "sponsor" blog that links to the carnival posts. Anyway, the FoF focuses on blog entries that help you save money. :)

Mighty Bargain Hunter

I've only browsed the site a bit, but it looks like he's got a lot of good ideas and links to other blogs.

Google – the eminent search engine cum conglomeratus – has announced the release of a decades-old OCR package originally developed by Hewlett-Packard. According to the Google Code blog, the package was given to the Information Science Research Institute at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where it won some honors over a decade ago for its accuracy.

A few things to know about Tesseract OCR: for now it only supports the English language, and does not include a page layout analysis module (yet), so it will perform poorly on multi-column material. It also doesn't do well on grayscale and color documents, and it's not nearly as accurate as some of the best commercial OCR packages out there. Yet, as far as we know, despite its shortcomings, Tesseract is far more accurate than any other Open Source OCR package out there. If you know of one that is more accurate, please do tell us!

Since one of the (now very few) tethers holding me to Windows is OCR software for my work at DP, this is very promising. I've even file a Gentoo bug requesting an ebuild for it.

The project is hosted at SourceForge.

There were some pretty good sales this week for the upcoming Labor Day picnic holiday. Coupled with coupons, I was able to shaft the system (by "shaft," of course, I mean disturb it as much as a dust mite disturbs a person while sleeping).

A brief list of items obtained.

5 Pepsi 12-packs (12oz. cans)

$1.52: 4/$10 + 1 free + $1.13 sales tax + $3 bottle deposit - $10 rebate (sending away for) - $3 returned cans + $0.39 (for stamp to send rebate)

8-pack Quattro razor refills

$5.20: $9.75 (clearance) - $5 coupon + $0.45 sales tax. Original cost, $22 and change (before tax).

18 oz. SoftSoap body wash plus 12 oz. SoftSoap body wash

$2: $3 for 18 oz. - $1 coupon. 12 oz was included as "bonus".

I got a few other lesser deals (like Skintimate shaving gel, 2/$5 w/ $1 off coupon – if I'd had two coupons, I could've used them both). Overall, it was a decent shopping week.

Just like Dave did, I've updated my wishlist in time for you to get things for me for my birthday. Isn't that thoughtful of me? ;)

Available at Amazon.

As seen on Boing!Boing!, Freenigma lets you encrypt webmail. Nice.

This is really useful to me, since while I have gpg setup with Evolution on my Gentoo box, I often use my gmail acct from – well, other places. ;) With freenigma I can combine convenience and security. And I can even put it on my USB drive that has Firefox Portable.

I blogged before about rumors of an Atlas Shrugged movie. Apparently, the people who own the rights to make such a movie have provided more info at The Atlas Society's seminar this summer. Some bits:

• The story will be split into a Lord of the Rings-style trilogy (the book is split into three parts, so I'd guess they would follow that pretty closely).
• Filming could start as early as April 2007. While it would be nice to have the first movie in theaters before the end of 2007 (the 50-year anniversary of the original publication of the novel), more likely it will premier in 2008.
• The director and cast are yet to be determined, but apparently Angelina Jolie has a "keen interest" in the role of Dagny Taggert. Apparently Jolie is a Rand fan.
• Part I has been scripted and will have a cliffhanger ending with the first run of the John Galt line.
• While the movie will feature trains, it is still set in an "indefinite future."

Some guy tried to get petitions from people in Berkeley, CA, to support a proposed (legislative) law that simply states a timeless (and perhaps timely) axiom.

In a philosophical effort to come up with a city law that no one could ever break, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats wants Berkeley to legally acknowledge Aristotle's law, commonly expressed as A=A.

He didn't do very well – a full day yielded only 65 signatures. But there are some funny bits to the story.

Mayor Shirley Dean was dumbfounded.

"I haven't a clue what that means," Dean said of Keats' proposition.

Well of course not! To politicians, A never equals A. Politicians are deliberately non-Aristotelian.

But a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley isn't even sure A=A is the brainchild of Aristotle.

"It's a bit of a stretch to attribute it to Aristotle," said John MacFarlane.

Typical. He's from UC Berkeley. Berkeley professors also are deliberately non-Aristotelian.

Although his law can't be broken, a misdemeanor fine of up to one-tenth of a cent would be imposed on anyone or anything caught being unidentical to itself within city limits.

Now, that's just funny. :)

"A does not equal A, and I can prove it!" shouted Elliot Clayton, who rushed to Keats' card table.

"Look at your own petition! There's a capital A and a small case a, all throughout it. See? A is sometimes a, not A."

Um, I hate to say it, but pointing to something and calling it something other than what it is does not disprove an axiom. This person obviously is deliberately non-Aristotelian.

PS: "non-Aristotelian" is a pejorative term. ;)

A little while back I spent quite a bit of time entering about three years' worth of finance data into GnuCash. Having recently discovered the wonders of PostgreSQL over mySQL, I was stoked when I discovered that GnuCash had a PostgreSQL backend.

But my excitement was short-lived. As mentioned above, I had entered about three years' worth of data when suddenly the postgres backend stopped working as expected. There were several bugs in the 1.8 series of GnuCash that effectively stopped me from getting to my data.

So I bided my time, knowing that the developers were working on a 2.0 release. All the documentation talking about the postgres backend said that the developers were interested in continuing to maintain it, and I hoped that with 2.0 the problems I was having would be fixed. In the meantime, I made sure to download QIF files from my various banks and credit card companies so that when I got to a certain point I would be able to enter data much faster.

But as I followed the discussion on the GnuCash developer's mailing list, I found that not only had the developers had a change in heart about PostgreSQL – there was basically no chance in hell that I was going to get my data back out.

Well, that sucked. I mean, I dig GnuCash and all, but to have to go back and re-enter data that I had input over the course of several months did not sound very fun. Then, I remembered that I am something of a hacker. And I'm no stranger to postgresql -- not anymore.

So I browsed the developer lists and wiki for information about the GnuCash XML format and found this page, which pointed to a RELAX NG description of the XML format. That helped, a lot – but of course, it is "non-normative." Gotta love how open source developers stay up with documentation. Anyway, it was good enough. I built a PHP script that took data from the postgres tables and converted it according to the RELAX NG description. Then, I made a dummy file in GnuCash with some fake data in it and compared the two. I had to make a few tweaks, but in the end I got it.

So, now I have my data again. Yay. And if the GnuCash developers ever decide to reimplement a sql backend, I'll be the first to use it – but I'll keep backups in XML too.

Some timeless advice from the SNL team.

Wife: Ok, so what if I want something but I dont' have any money

CP: You don't buy it.

Husband: Well let's say I don't have enough money to buy something. Should I buy it anyways?

CP: No-o-o-o.

Husband: Now I'm really confused!

CP: It's a little confusing at first.

Wife: Well what if you have the money, can you buy something?

CP: Yes.

Wife: Now take the money away. Same story?

CP: Nope. You shouldn't buy stuff when you don't have the money.

Husband: I think I got it. I buy something I want, and then hope that I can pay for it right?

CP: No. You make sure you have money, then you buy it.

Husband: Oh, THEN you buy it. But shouldn't you buy it before you have the money?

CP: No-o-o-o.

Wife: Why not?