This is a quick guide to using Expendable for modelling home finances. If you want to be able to predict how much time or interest can be saved on a mortgage by using an offset facility, or want to see the effects of using a cash ISA or regular saver account, or any other type of savings account, this might be for you.
I’ve just uploaded a rough-and-ready program for modelling mortgage offsetting. Mortgage offset accounts are like savings accounts linked to a mortgage, but instead of earning interest they reduce the interest charged by offsetting the loan amount.
Like many ISPs in Britain, mine allows me unlimited downloads during off-peak hours but has a monthly restriction on downloads during peak hours. Peak currently means 6pm until midnight, although next month it will be changing to 9am until 11pm. I thought it would be a good idea to monitor how close to my quota I am, to see if this will affect me.
I’m not even sure where to start. In HPLIP-2.8.5 there is a new ‘hp-systray’ program which is meant to be started at login.
Its purpose is to ask the user for a fax number when it receives a D-Bus signal from the hpfax backend. That’s all — so why does it sit there with a big fat ‘HP’ logo all the time? Unlike Windows, our notification area is not an advertising board.
Not that the logo is even in the notification area. Instead, it gets placed like a window, just anywhere there is space on your desktop. Nice.
That’s all disregarding the fact that none of this is any use at all if your fax queue resides on a networked CUPS server. It can send D-Bus signals if it likes, but they won’t be heard over the network.
Bruno Haible’s git merge driver for GNU-style ChangeLog files (available in gnulib) is really useful for those of us who prefer to document changes as we go along rather than all at once when committing them. Paolo Bonzini has posted a script for packaging it into a tarball.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to cope very well with having multiple ChangeLog entries added on the same date without separate date stamps, and I don’t know how to tell emacs to always add a new date stamp line when using it to add ChangeLog entries (C-x 4 a).