Navigating with printed directions

Last night I had to pick up something for my wife. Unfortunately it wasn't going to fit in her car which has built-in navigation, so I had to take my car. As I gave my Garmin iQue 3600 to my father and haven't replaced it, I had to print out directions and follow printed directions. It seemed so archaic to have to do this, but I didn't have a choice. I guess I'll have to wait for a new car to have navigation again as I still can't justify getting a portable GPS unit for the little driving I do in my car to places I've never been.

Watched my first movie rental on TiVo!

Awhile back, Amazon Unbox came to TiVo. I thought this was great as my wife and I are a bit too lazy to goto the store and rent a movie (even more so now that we have an 8 month old son). Well, nothing ever came of it as we never rented a movie. The other night, when there was nothing on TV because of the writer's strike, I mentioned it again to my wife and she checked out Amazon, saw that Ocean's Thirteen was available for rent for $0.99, so we set it up and started the download. It was quick and easy! Last night we got around to watching the movie and must say that the experience renting the movie was excellent. I think our threshold is probably $3.99 for movie rentals. The problem with Unbox is that the selection isn't all that great for rentals. Maybe I'm just picky, but not a whole lot jumped out at me.

The rumors are circulating that Apple will have a rental setup for the iTunes Music Store soon which would be cool as we could watch stuff from our AppleTV. However, it will require an upgrade to the AppleTV's software which will knock out my Squeezebox hack on it. We'll just have to wait and see.

Flexible spending reimbursement is as easy as pie

Every year we have to fill out the paperwork to get our money back from my wife's flexible spending plan. I don't ask much of her in terms of accounting, so this has always been her task. She had to copy all the receipts and assemble them from a big mess of receipts. Well, this year, thanks to ReceiptWallet, that was different. I simply selected my "Medical" collection, selected all, hit print, and then filled out the paperwork. It took maybe 15 minutes to fill out and fax in the paperwork. A week later, we received a check for the full amount we requested with no problems. This paid for my copy of ReceiptWallet, just in the time it saved me to do this :-)

Bug in Gmail's SMTP Server or bug in Apple Mail?

Today I tried to send a zip file to a client (I'm using Google for Domains so I use their SMTP and IMAP server) and was unable to do so through Mail.app. It got part way through the transfer and said it couldn't send it. After a bit of trial and error, I discovered the problem. I use Hazel to automatically move files and set the color of items so I know what is new. When I created the zip archive, Hazel automatically colored it. I reset the Finder label and presto, the file went through.