Four years of going Paperless

I've always been good about keeping receipts, but I just shoved receipts in folders sort of ordered by date. Just over 4 years ago, I was looking for a receipt and got frustrated that I couldn't find one. The idea for ReceiptWallet (now Paperless) was born as there was no other Mac product on the market tailored to receipt management. Two weeks of work later, I had a working version of the software and released it to the world a few weeks later.

Ever since then, I have scanned every paper receipt, stored every web receipt, as well as every manual I've received. To many, this may sound like overkill, but I've had no problems easily pulling up receipts for everything I've bought. Some stores accept copies of receipts and I hope that more will do so in the future. I've gone one step further and pretty much every piece of paper that comes in our door gets scanned as it make it so simple to find documents that there is almost no reason to use a regular filing cabinet (OK, I still file the paperwork after scanning and storing) as scanning is easy and storage space is cheap.

More and more documents are being delivered electronically, so it makes sense to store everything electronically (as long as you have sufficient backups). Printing out documents is usually a waste.

I still keep the paper receipts, but this year, I'm going to do more cleaning and get rid of all the ones I can no longer read and ones for items that I'll never return.

If you haven't started a system for storing documents electronically, there is really no reason to delay; scanners are cheap and fast and storage space is plentiful. I highly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner and have recently been impressed with the Brother MFC-7840W all-in-one (more on this device in a future entry).

Computer sleep vs hibernate

While troubleshooting my computer today to see if I could prevent it from crashing if it went into hibernate mode (where the OS saves out the contents of RAM before sleeping to the disk and completely shuts down the system), I again came across information on how to disable hibernate. I've seen this information a number of times, but didn't really pay attention to it. Recent Mac laptops, by default, have hibernate turned on which is great if your machine loses power completely and you haven't saved your work. However, I always save my work and rarely let my machine get all the way down such that the battery is completely dead. So, hibernate simply makes it longer for my machine to sleep; with the addition of 2 more GB of RAM, it takes even longer to write out the contents of RAM.

Basically to disable hibernate mode, you issue the following command from terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

To re-enable hibernate mode, you do:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

(Information from Apple's documentation.)

So with that set, my machine should goto sleep faster and no longer crash on wake (due to a firmware issue with my SSD).

Picking smoke detectors

Fire protection experts recommend replacing batteries in smoke detectors every year when you change your clocks for daylight savings time. So this year, I heard an ad that also recommended a carbon monoxide detector which we didn't have. I started looking at combination smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but quickly dismissed that idea as all the reviews indicated that the combo units ate batteries like crazy (my house is older and only has 1 hard wired unit). In addition, my reading suggested that houses have both ionization and photoelectric type smoke detectors. No combo unit had carbon monoxide and the 2 types of smoke detection.

Once I resigned myself to getting a separate carbon monoxide detector, I decided on a First Alert Carbon Monoxide Alarm. This was based on reviews by Consumer Reports, I believe. That was the easy part; I got one for upstairs and one for downstairs. Right now our son sleeps on a bed in our room, so we don't need one in his room. When he moves back into his room, I'll get one for his room.

The second part of this equation was finding ionization and photoelectric smoke detectors. Photoelectric detection is supposed to be better for smoldering fires and ionization is better for flaming fires according to the US Fire Administration (who even knew that this agency existed?). There are a small number of units that do both, so my choices were very few. It's really surprising to me as the recommendation is to have both types. After going to Home Depot and looking at a few (after some research), I decided on the Kidde PI9000 Battery-Operated Dual Ionization and Photoelectric Sensor Smoke Alarm. I had to replace 7 smoke detectors and install another one, so this wasn't cheap.

After I replaced all the units, I saw that most of the units were manufactured over 10 years ago. The US Fire Administration recommends replacing the entire unit every 8-10 years, so it was about time anyway to replace them.

So far, I know that at least one of the units works as it went off last night when my wife burned some pizza and opened the oven. Luckily the units have a hush button to temporarily shut them up (much safer than yanking the battery and forgetting to put it back in).

Why was this process so hard? Are my sights too high in trying to protect my family and my house? How many average homeowners learn so much about smoke detectors? My guess is probably quite few. I'll just add this as another topic that I have more than cursory knowledge.

(Newer houses are required to have interconnected smoke alarms which sound all of the units when one goes off; retrofitting a house for this is not easy and there are only a few that offer wireless interconnect and none of those are both photoelectric and ionization. I did consider this for a few minutes, but quickly dismissed it.)

Unsupported MacBook Pro RAM upgrade

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to get more performance out of my 2 year old MacBook Pro. When I purchased machine, I got it installed with the maximum amount of RAM that I could, 4 GB. Newer machines support up to 8 GB of RAM and I'll definitely get 8 GB when I get a new machine. I had read reports of people putting 6 GB of RAM in my vintage machine and as RAM is one of the limiting factors in performance, I did a little investigating and everything I read said that there were no issues. Typically putting more RAM in a machine than the hardware supports leads to kernel panics and random crashes.

I decided to give the 6 GB of RAM a try as it would let me put the 4 GB in my machine in my wife's machine (she had 2 GB) and speed up her machine a little. OWC had a 6 GB upgrade kit that wasn't too expensive (the drive has dropped $15 from when I got it a month ago. (I realize it sounds like I'm spending money like crazy on things, but my computer is a tool that I use to earn money, so getting better tools, I can do my job better.)

The only downside to 6 GB is that there is a slight performance increase by having paired memory modules and 6 GB comes with a 2 GB and a 4 GB module. However, what I've read has shown that the increase in RAM outweighs the paired performance.

I easily installed the RAM and so far, I haven't had a kernel panic due to the RAM (only kernel panic has been due to my machine hibernating with my new SSD). The extra RAM has been quite nice as I can run more apps at once without apps paging out to virtual memory. If you have a machine that is the same vintage as my MacBook Pro, I'd definitely recommend this RAM upgrade. It's not that expensive and has huge benefits (more RAM is always better).