Lazy Man and Money

Working on a $100 Computer

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A few weeks ago, I brought you 10 Hacks to Speed Up Your Browser. I explored how I hacked my version of Firefox to run very fast and consume much less memory (most of the tricks will work for Chrome as well). What I didn’t know is that within a week, I’d be forced to put the hacks to the test.

My crazy computer purchase of February 2013 died on me. An ounce of drink hit the keyboard and though it worked for a few more hours, I had trouble getting it started after it went to sleep. It turns out that both the video card and the keyboard took major damage. I was able to rescue it long enough by plugging it in to television and using a spare keyboard. Getting that to work seemed nothing short of miraculous.

This put me in a position of needing a computer to work, but not having one. Circuit City is long gone. Best Buy moved out of my town years ago. I could get something cheap from Wal-Mart, but when you use a computer as much as I do, you don’t want to make a 2+ year decision because of a day or two.

And this is when I cashed in on the best insurance I bought last year. During Black Friday I bought a ASUS X205TA Laptop at Staples for $100. My rationale was that it would be a great travel computer at 2.2 pounds with 12 hour battery life. The processor runs like it is powered by a hamster wheel. It has very little memory meaning you can only open up a couple of programs before it grinds to halt. The screen angle has to be just right. The 11.6-inch screen is a big difference from the 16-inches I used a few years ago.

However, I was able to get real work done. I could write articles, check emails, update spreadsheets and just about anything else I needed to do.

It made me think, “What if I could just pick up nearly any computer and get to work?” What if I could do the same things on a $100 computer that cost me $1100 two years ago? Computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, but my computing needs aren’t necessarily expanding. The ability to retain my data and workflow are far more important to me than hardware itself.

I can’t lie, my computing desires expand all the time. I look up all the latest laptops much more often than I should. There’s sexy 4K screens and new processors that zip along using very little battery, all wrapped up in a package of around 2.5 pounds or less. As long as I can keep myself in check, being productive on a very cheap computer could save me hundreds of dollars.

Create a “Work Anywhere” Environment

Being able to work on any computer saved my bacon in this disaster. How did I do it? I simply looked at everything I do and tried to find a way to make it work on another computer. Specifically, these things came in particularly handy:

  • Firefox Sync – I was very nervous about syncing my browsing history with a third-party. It seems like a huge security risk. After reading about how the security was handled, I felt more secure. Being able to download Firefox (even on my Android phone and tablet) and have my browsing environment is about 80% of the battle.
  • LastPass – I use LastPass to store and secure all my passwords. If I can remember one password, I have them all. It seems like every site I use nowadays requires a login, so this is huge.
  • Google Documents – I have documents and spreadsheets that I want to have with me at all times. For example, I have notes on the articles that I am intending to write as well as a spreadsheet of earnings.

I’m sure I’m just touching the surface of what I could use. Feedly and Pocket are two apps that I’m looking to use more. I recently started to use NotePad++ which offers backing up data to the cloud via DropBox and similar services. I’m going to see if I can use this to sync files a little faster than dealing with Google Documents (it can be a bit of a resource hog to leave it open all the time).

I am testing my “work anywhere” environment by trying to work on my wife’s computer with my own separate Windows login. (I offer the same to her on my computer of course.) So far it is working pretty nicely.

What I Learned From Using a $100 Computer

I learned two really valuable lessons from using a $100 computer:

  1. While the computer is functional, it is annoying enough to use that I found myself looking forward to doing errands rather than goofing off.
  2. Most people probably don’t need nearly as much “computer” as they think they do.

There’s definitely some kind of sweet spot of having a very functional computer at a relatively bargain price. In the past you might need to spend $500 to satisfy basic computing needs. I feel like that has shifted significantly and much of that money is more about wants.

That leads me to…

Should You Really Skimp on a Computer?

This is a difficult question and it really depends on the person. I use my computer so much, that I feel like any loss in productivity would be magnified. At the same time, my wife uses her non-work computer only about an hour a day, so it isn’t magnified as much.

I’m going to cop out escape this question by simply saying that many people could save money if they wish to.

Next week, I’ll review the new computer I bought. In writing this article, I’ve realized I might have made a several hundred dollar mistake.

10 Hacks to Speed Up Your Browser

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My laptop had its 2-year birthday a couple of months ago. It wasn’t the fastest processor on the block to start with, but with the time it has gotten much, much slower.

I’ve already written about How to Speed Up Your Computer, but after you take all those steps, what do you do?

For me the answer was look at the browser. I’ve been using Firefox for years and years. When I got the new computer, I imported my Firefox profile so I’d have all my browsing history. I make extensive use of autocomplete in URLs, so that history is very useful to me.

When your Firefox profile has 7-8 years of history, bookmarks, and other information it takes up a lot of memory. That slows everything way, way down.

Things were going so slow, I almost bought a new computer… almost.

A couple of days ago, I decided to attack the problem. In traditional, non-Lazy, fashion, I may have taken it to the extreme. Here are some of the things I did to reclaim my browser and my computer. A lot of these will work on the browser platform of your choice, but since I use Firefox, I’ll be writing specifically to that.

  1. Say Goodbye to Firefox – Say hello to Firefox’s brothers and sisters. Firefox has alternative versions such as Pale Moon and Light. I’m tempted to give Light a try, but no spell checker? Ouch.
  2. Create a New Firefox Profile – This was the most obvious fix. Firefox profiles allow you silo all your data from the application itself. I can still go back to my old profile if I need something in a bookmark or auto-complete, but this gives me a fresh start. Think of it like buying a new house, and keeping the old. You move only the things you need and suddenly you have a lot more space and efficiency. To do this, you are going to want to install the Firefox Profile Switcher add-on.
  3. Disable Flash – There was a time when many websites needed Adobe Flash. Since mobile browsers don’t use Flash, many developers have found new ways to do what they need to do. The Firefox add-on, Disable Flash, gives you a button in the tool bar to easily turn Flash on and off. I’d say that 99.5% of the websites I visit work fine with Flash disabled. I found that doing this sped up my browsing immensely.
  4. Use One-Tab – I’m the kind of person who has 50 browser tabs open at any given time. One-Tab allows you to move all the tabs to… you guessed it… one tab. It’s far more efficient to work with 4-5 tabs at a time and have the other tabs for later reading.
  5. Use Pocket or InstaPaper – These two services take any articles that you might be reading and save them for later reading. I don’t need to keep a dozen browser tabs of articles that I want to read. I simply push them to my Instapaper account and read them on my phone when I have downtime.
  6. Use Ghostery – Ghostery is an add-on that is mostly for privacy. It stops websites from loading all kinds of scripts and cookies. The result isn’t just privacy protection, it is a faster browsing experience. You have to be a little careful with this as it can block some scripts that websites need to function. For these you can “Whitelist Site.” When I find that a website doesn’t work it was usually because Ghostery blocked a necessary script.
  7. Use a Password Manager – I’m not really sure if this makes browsing faster, but I’m going to include it anyway. Instead of storing all my passwords in Firefox, I use LastPass. It’s awesome for passwords protection. Not storing passwords makes my Firefox Profile leaner, but I may give up this speed advantage in storing them in the LastPass vault.
  8. Use this Simple Trick – A couple of weeks ago Lifehacker wrote about speeding up Firefox by enabling its new HTTP cache. You don’t need to understand what it means, but the instructions are there. I didn’t notice a huge speed increase when I did it, but I did it after doing all the above to make my browser fast.
  9. Lie to Websites – You can get the Firefox User Agent Switcher to make websites think you are using a smartphone. Websites, including this one, often have mobile-friendly pages that have fewer bells and whistles. I switch my user agent to mobile Safari by creating a User Agent with the following string:

    Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5355d Safari/8536.25)

    and the websites think I’m using an iPad. Many websites work fairly well like this as they don’t want to lose the huge iPad audience. If you go this way, be sure to customize the toolbar, and add a button for it so that you can do it quick and easy to switch back.

  10. Tweak the Heck out of Firefox – There are a number of tweaks that you can do to speed up Firefox. I found a good number of them at I’m Programmer. With all the above hacks, my Firefox is going crazy fast, so I only implemented the pipelining solution as I saw it in three other articles.

Bonus tip: Listen to the Experts – I didn’t want to include this, because I don’t think it qualifies as a hack. Firefox has some troubleshooting information that may help you if you have problems. Of particular interest is the “Refresh Firefox” option, which may be the solution to my Firefox profile problem.

Give these a try in your browser and let me know how they worked for you.

Firefox Profiles for Increased Productivity

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I know this is a personal finance site, but occasionally I like to write about my first love… technology. One of my favorite pieces of technology is the Firefox web browser. I like to root for the underdog company for more competition leading to more choice for consumers. For that reason, I’ve never been a fan of Internet Explorer, even when it looked like Netscape was dead. Thus I have been using Firefox’s main code back when it was Mozilla 0.7 (who remembers Phoenix and Firebird? Anyone?).

A few weeks ago, that came very close to changing. Firefox had started to slow on my computer. On a lark, I loaded up Google Chrome and found that it was really fast. So it seems like a no-brainer to switch, right? Well not so fast. I have a lot of extensions for Firefox and I couldn’t work the same way with Chrome. Right as I was about to bite the bullet and switch to Chrome, I had an idea. What if Firefox is a little like Windows… the more you use it, the more it slows down with extra junk sticking around pulling resources? If Firefox is like that, perhaps I could clean it. I thought about deleting all history, cookies, many plugins, etc., but then I had a better idea.

I remembered that back in the old days Firefox had something called “profiles”. Everyone using Firefox had a profile, but they are often not aware of it. These are kind of like users in Windows. However, Windows shares a single registry and most of the “extra junk” goes there. What was slowing me down was the information in my Firefox profile. Solution: Create a new, clean profile and use that. The result was a fast new Firefox again. The article that I used to help me get started with profiles mentioned that it might be best to have different profiles for different tasks. That’s exactly what I decided to do. I created one for general browsing. I then created one for blogging, web development, work, and one that I just label as “fast”. The blogging one has bookmarks, saved passwords, and extensions that help me blog more efficiently. The web development one has a number of web development extensions.

There are three main advantages to Firefox Profiles:

  • Faster Performance – My “extra junk” is now divided amongst 6 segmented profiles. The general browsing one still gets the most junk, but it’s not nearly as bad.
  • Increased Focus – Because my work profile is all work-related, I’m not tempted by Evil Mike Reiss and his continuous coverage of the New England Patriots.
  • Multiple Gmails at the Same Time – One of my biggest issues with web applications of all kinds is that it’s hard be logged into multiple personas at the same time. Want to Tweet about your personal and business life in two different accounts? You’ll be logging in and out of Twitter quite a bit. Have a couple of Gmail accounts that you want to keep separate? Same thing. With different profiles, there is a whole new instance of the browser. I can be logged into a Gmail account in my work profile and an entirely different Gmail account in my blogging profile.

The day after setting up my profiles, Lifehacker published this very helpful guide on Firefox profiles. My timing is, as always, very poor. The big take-away in this guide is to get the Profile Switcher plugin. It’s a must-have for getting the most out of Firefox profiles.

(Note: Yes, I’m realize that I’m ripping of Lifehacker’s title a bit, but I had already started this article before Lifehacker published that guide. I’m sticking with what I had.)

The Future of Personal Finance Tools

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money-tool.jpg
Nearly two months ago, I mentioned that Expensr and NetworthIQ (now Money Strands) had invited some personal finance bloggers to talk about personal finance software. I learned quite a few things, but one thing stood out to me. When you have 20 people in a room, you are going to get 20 different ideas on how the ideal software should work. Here are some examples (my memory may have faded slightly since then, so I apologize if I misquote a few people):

  • J.D. from Get Rich Slowly wanted more control of categorizing his expenses – the ability to enter them in each time. I wanted the opposite – the software to predict the categories. I think we found a happy ground where the software should try to pick, but you can override it’s guess if you wish.
  • Others like Dual Income No Kids felt that budgeting should be a significant part of the software. The Digerati Life has reached the point in her life where she doesn’t have to keep an eye over each outgoing penny.
  • Some people like all the bells and features that Quicken has, while others, think Quicken is too complex and resort to an Excel spreadsheet.

I did a lot of listening and not very much talking. I wanted to take in everyone’s thoughts and opinions and process them to come up with the perfect solution. It became clear that the solution should incorporate the following concepts:

Software As a Platform

Somewhere along the line, J.D. hit the nail on the head – customization. There’s simply no way a piece of software is going to be everything to everyone without it. I think he came up with idea that it should have different modules. I chimed in that Firefox has a good model – it handles the basics of web browsing for less tech savvy people like my mother, but provides plugins for those who are more advanced. Flexo from Consumerism Commentary said that Facebook’s application platform is another example.

If I were creating the software, I’d create a new proprietary mark-up language that can be manipulated by developers at a very basic level. For example, Google’s chart generator serves as a model for creating charts. I can imagine a subtraction module for budgeting, a basic text input module, etc. These would form the smallest building blocks. I would publish these openly and encourage software developers to combine these building blocks to create investment trackers, retirement planners, etc. I would have contests and prize money for the best modules and ideas for new modules.

I’d concurrently be doing market research to find what most people want from the software and make a default program based on that knowledge. I’d share the code to make this default software so software developers could tweak it and learn the system.

Privacy of Data

Many people were concerned about the privacy of their financial data. This is no surprise with the media discussing identity theft every few minutes. I have two schools of thoughts on securing data:

  • Data stored centrally – I’m a trusting soul with my data – I don’t know why, I just am. That said, I trust companies like Mint and Prosper to guard my data. These companies are well-funded and I believe that they have great incentive to guard this data with their business lives.
  • Data stored locally – Knowing that Mint’s servers have all that juicy on them is tempting for hackers. If I were to focus my efforts as a hacker, I’d go where there’s lots of useful data. However, if I had the option to store my data locally and encrypt it so that it doesn’t look like the data for this program, that would be a great way to hide from hackers. I think more companies should give users this option.

I originally thought that there should be a way to customize the website to look how you want. In the software world they often call this skinning. When I thought more about the prospects of being able to make the website look how you want, I decided that it is fairly unimportant as long as the default look is decent. It goes back to Firefox… you can skin it if you want, but it seems like 98% of the people I know have never cared to take the time. Either they are Lazy like me, or feel that it’s good enough as it is.

What would you put in your ideal personal finance tool? Let me know below… this is a good chance to make your voice heard to Mint, Expensr/MoneyStrands, and Geezeo. I have a good relationship with representatives of all those companies and will share the best ideas with them.