August 22, 2019 at 11:14am
MailMate Review
I have bought a license for MailMate - a mail application for the Mac. This cost me AU$84. Why pay that kind of money for a mail app, when Apple provide Mail for free, and I have access to a good web app for Fastmail and Outlook for work email?
I was happy to pay the money because MailMate is excellent artisanal software that offers unparalleled features and power. That money also goes straight to the single developer who has committed to this app for years.
If you are looking for beautiful software, MailMate is not for you. If you are looking for simple software, MailMate is not for you. If you are looking for a Markdown-aware, IMAP-compatible, smart rule-centric email powerhouse, MailMate is for you.
Functional - not pretty.
Tell me the features
If you’re buying MailMate, you’re spending hard-earned dollars to get a mail app that does things that other mail apps do not. From my perspective, these are the features that I got for my money:
- Markdown composer - MailMate lets you compose emails using Markdown, and simultaneously renders a preview of the HTML that will ultimately be sent. I’ve always preferred plain text email, mainly because composing HTML email is traditionally a clunky, error-prone affair. Not with MailMate and Markdown. MailMate generates clean HTML and doesn’t mangle previous HTML elements that might be within the chain of quoted history. I’ve used more bullets, bold text and headings in the last month than I have in the last 10 years.
- Send Later - Included in the recipient header area is an optional field that accepts natural language input for expressing when an email should be sent. So go ahead, write those emails at 11pm at night, but be kind to your recipient and schedule them to be sent at 9am.
- Custom Keybindings - MailMate is a good Mac citizen and features a full complement of keyboard shortcuts. The user can take this a step further by defining custom keybindings. I apply the FastMail web app shortcuts but you can just as easily add Gmail keybindings. This provides single-trigger actions to invoke common tasks.
- Tagging - Going beyond flagging, the ability to tag emails with custom labels (including emoji 🙌🏻) adds a layer of workflow management to email. For instance, I have
waiting for (🔃) and action (❗) tags that I apply to particular emails. Combining these with MailMate’s superpower - Smart Folders - unlocks further abilities.
- Smart Folders - MailMate embraces smart folders. These represent on-demand searches of your entire email archive. The app encourages these to be used as the primary interface to your email, to the point where I keep my IMAP folders tucked away, and instead rely on a series of smart folders to surface and hide email according to my needs. Combined with the aforementioned tagging, this can be great for showing, for example, emails that I’m waiting on a reply that are more than 2 weeks old. Your imagination is the limit for smart folders because the amount of searchable elements included is bonkers.
Filter to your heart’s content.
- Custom columns and views - each view - whether a Smart Folder or a regular IMAP folder, can have its own view and columns displayed. This can be helpful in a Smart Folder to identify which IMAP folder the email in question actually lives in, or which email account it originated from. I like that it can also show the correspondents within the email exchange (not simply who it came from).
- App integrations - MailMate is extensible which allows it to connect to third-party apps, such as OmniFocus, DEVONthink and BBEdit, among others.
Should I bother?
If you have a Gmail account and generally use the web app or your phone to deal with email, no, you shouldn’t buy MailMate.
If you have multiple email accounts, and you want to centralise your email world into a single location and benefit from the features I outlined above, then yes, you should buy MailMate.
Sure, but what do others think?
There are two brilliant reviews out there that provide alternative impressions of MailMate:
So, now you have three differing insights into MailMate, which may assist your decision-making process.
software
mac
review
August 7, 2019 at 11:21am
Stoicism
It seems I can’t spend any time on the Internet at the moment without coming across insights, thoughts and video on the philosophy of stoicism.
While this could be a product of frequency bias, I claim some modicum of defence because I learned about stoicism in detail in 2011 during my time studying at the Cranlana Colloquium.
I have enjoyed rediscovering and reminding myself of the stoic philosophy. It’s a mental model that makes sense to me and can help ward off the feeling of helplessness in a complex and not entirely well-functioning or well-governed world.
The Stoic manifesto
Stoics attempt to be guided by logic and reason rather than fleeting worldly gratification. The practice of Stoicism supposedly allowed people to lead more peaceful, rational lives.
A Stoic and a… Romantic?
I appreciate the stoic’s view of the world, as long as it doesn’t veer too far into fatalism. I’ve always favoured the concept of logical thought (i.e. Doctor Spock) ahead of irrational behaviour (i.e. Captain Kirk). Yet because I’m not Vulcan, I often fail to live up to the ideals of stoicism. Let’s call it a work in progress. When I prevail in taking the stoic approach I find myself less riddled with stress and anxiety, and am generally happier about my lot in life.
Boiling it down
The easy 1, 2, 3 of stoicism may be presented as:
- If you can change it, it doesn’t deserve your worry. Go ahead and make the change. Just do it!
- If you can’t change it, it doesn’t deserve your worry. You can’t fix it, so why stress?
- If you worry about it anyway, you are simply inviting it to tyrannise and traumatise you, indefinitely. Rumination is the worst.
philosophy
July 10, 2019 at 9:53pm
A Guide to Using YNAB to Support NDIS Self-Managed Budgeting
As a self-managed user of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) it is necessary to budget, account for, and forecast expenditure over the 12-month period of the funding agreement.
The typical way to do this budgeting would be with a spreadsheet, laid out in the typical fashion with columns of months and rows of accounts. This is how I assumed I would do it. Yet as I got stuck into the job of building my spreadsheet I realised how much I no longer enjoy working in spreadsheets.
My feelings for Excel
For a period of my early career, Excel was life. But that was a different time, and a different me. I ain’t got no time for Excel now. I’m over it.
Leveraging YNAB
What I do have is a subscription to YNAB which happens to be the most effective personal budgeting tool I have ever used.
I thought it would be worthwhile to see if I could extract more value from my YNAB subscription by creating a budget specifically for managing NDIS expenditure.
My Venn Diagram
This is a niche solution for a niche problem. The Venn Diagram of people who are self-managed participants of the NDIS and use YNAB must be vanishingly small. But perhaps, one of those people might stumble across this post and find it helpful.
Build the framework
The following is a guide explaining how YNAB can be configured to support the budgeting and accounting tasks associated with a self-managed NDIS plan.
- Create a new YNAB budget file specifically for NDIS budgeting and expenditure.
- Within that budget, create
Category Groups to match relevant NDIS funding descriptors.
- Within the Category Groups built at Step 2, create
Categories for each service provider expected to be used through the life of the NDIS Plan.[^Remember that more providers can be added later, if necessary, so no pressure to get this completely accurate at the start.]
- Create
On-Budget Accounts for each of the relevant NDIS support budgets.[^There are three potential budgets: core budget, capacity building budget, and capital budget.] The NDIS requires that funding be expended for the purpose it is granted, so the creation of specific accounts prevents leakage across allocations.
- Inflow the funding received from the NDIS for each support budget into its associated YNAB account. This will become the starting balance from which to budget for the year.
Well done, your YNAB framework is ready!
Establish and run the budget
Now, you can build your budget using the standard YNAB approach of giving each dollar a job, but in the context of NDIS expenditure.
Based on quotes, service agreements and your own preference, allocate your total NDIS budget value across your service providers. Ensure that the subtotal for each Category Group matches the sum allocated to its YNAB account.
As services are delivered and invoices paid, input them as expenses within the relevant account (Core Supports/Capacity Building/Capital), assigning the supplier as the YNAB Payee, and the Category as the relevant provider you created as a Category. This is hard to explain, but easy to do.
For bonus points, you can choose to highlight the cleared icon once a rebate is received from the NDIS back into your transaction account.
The result
Following these steps will leave you in the enviable position of having up-to-date figures that can readily display:
- overall expenditure
- expenditure per NDIS budget group
- funds remaining per NDIS budget group
- budget allocations per service provider, but with the added ability to dynamically rebalance your budget using YNAB’s built-in
move money feature - as long as you only move it within YNAB’s Category Groups to maintain the integrity of the NDIS support budget allocations.
You also gain full access to the YNAB reports to more deeply analyse your expenditure should you wish.
Notes
- Remember, this is not a budget for your bank account. If you make payments and/or receive reimbursements the bank accounts transactions are not specifically recorded in this YNAB budget. Use your everyday YNAB budget for that.
- The YNAB system relies on maintaining the
To Be Budgeted figure at $0.00. Keep it at this and you will not go over budget.
NDIS
tutorial
YNAB
June 24, 2019 at 9:06pm
Nobody Wants to Buy Vocus
Vocus’ share performance over 3 years
Poor Vocus, it must be in bad shape.
From Bill Bennett:
Last week Australian energy company AGL withdrew its A$3 billion takeover offer for Vocus. This came only two weeks after Swedish private equity firm EQT halted its $3.3 billion transaction.
Bill goes on to reflect that as currently structured, Australia’s broadband market may not enable companies to make a reasonable profit:
All of which says bad things about the state of retail telecommunications. The private equity investors have looked and seen there is no quick path to profit.
More patient, longer-term investors like AGL, who have access to the magic formula of adding power sales to a broadband subscription don’t think it looks viable either.
The Australian telecommunications industry reminds me of how our aviation industry was in the 1980s and 1990s. Carriers would arrive, make losses, destroy shareholder value, and disappear. Now, instead of aeroplanes, it’s communication networks.
Same as it ever was.
equities
infrastructure
June 18, 2019 at 10:48pm
OpenDNS & Dynamic IPs
I have changed my DNS provider to OpenDNS. I have been using CloudFlare DNS and have nothing but praise for its speed and stability. However, with kids in the house, I need the additional network filtering and site-blocking that OpenDNS can deliver.
For OpenDNS to work it needs to be kept abreast of my home’s IP address. My ISP doesn’t provide a static IP. While my dynamic IP doesn’t change often, any change that does occur prevents the OpenDNS filtering from working. What’s more, it’s a non-visible problem. There are no error messages that pop up alerting of a problem. The filtering just stops working.
OpenDNS know this. They offer an app that runs in the background to monitor and update the OpenDNS service with the current dynamic IP address. However, that app isn’t nice. What’s more, I don’t like the idea of the network filtering being dependent on a laptop device that might not always be available on the network to perform the update.
Enter Raspberry Pi
I have a Raspberry Pi that provides ad-blocking throughout my home network with the brilliant Pi-Hole. Given it’s already important role in my network configuration, I decided the Pi should also be responsible for monitoring any changes to my dynamic IP address.
A bit of research led me to discover that ddclient was the tool for the job. It’s not installed by default on the Pi, but can be installed through the GUI package manager or on the terminal with:
sudo apt-get install ddclient
Once installed, I progressed to follow this solid step-by-step guide on how to configure ddclient with OpenDNS.
Success
The end result is that I now have ddclient running as a daemon process on the Raspberry Pi. It launches upon reboot and checks my IP address every 1 hour.
The best part is that I don’t have to run the very ordinary OpenDNS Updater app on my Mac.
configuration
networking
canion.me