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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 :-)
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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.
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VMWare Fusion saves the day
While I was working on a ReceiptWallet issue, I needed an older data file, one that was in XML format and created from an older ReceiptWallet version. I have recent backups of all my data, but don't generally keep an archive of the data as the amount of storage space to keep regular archives is enormous and I've only thought about using archives once or twice in the last 10 years. I thought I was hosed, until I realized I had backups from my server before I retired it. Problem was that my server backup drive were formatted as ext3 (Linux format) and couldn't be read on the Mac without installing some extra stuff that might not even work on Leopard and could make my system unstable. So I looked for an alternative. I downloaded a CentOS virtual appliance from VMWare's Appliance Marketplace, ran it under VMWare, plugged in my backup drive, in VMWare, connected the USB drive, mounted the drive, found my backup, tar/gzipped the directory and then FTPd the archive back to my Mac. It sounds complicated, but the most time consuming part was downloading the 691 MB archive of the virtual application. The rest was just a few simple UNIX commands.
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iPhoto Subscriptions with Gallery2
We use Gallery2 to store and share photos of our son, dog, family, etc. While many people use free sites like Flickr, paid sites like .Mac and SmugMug, I like to have my own site that I can control and customize. Some of these sites offer prettier albums, comments, etc., I don't like giving up control. One of the cool features of iPhoto that is probably underutilized is the Subscribe to Photo Feed option. In the past, I've tried to set this up with Gallery, but have failed. My wife wanted to setup her mother's computer to get updated pictures of her son, so I gave it another shot in configuring Gallery2. Turns out, it is quite easy. Just choose Configure RSS Feeds for the album, change a couple of switches as shown in the picture below and then copy/paste the resulting URL into iPhoto.