Monday, April 15, 2013

Search Mint.com Transactions by Date with Firefox or Chrome

 If you're a Mint.com user, you've probably noticed that the search interface isn't all that great.  For one thing, you can't search your transactions by date.  When tax season rolls around, it is absolutely necessary to search and display only the transactions from the previous year.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this oversight.  Look at the discussion on the Mint.com help blog here.  At that time (2009!) Mint representative Matt Snider posted the following response:



You can, but currently only by modifying the URL directly. We intend to someday expose this functionality in the user interface, but have not been able to agree on a minty enough design. Anyway, go to the transaction page, and you should see "https://wwws.mint.com/transaction.event" in the URL. Add the following "?startDate=06/01/2009&endDate=06/30/2009" at the end of the URL and hit enter. Change the start and end date to the dates you want to search. The complete URL should look something like this:

https://wwws.mint.com/transaction.eve...

Here Mint admits that they've been unable to come up with a "Minty enough" design in four years time!  In addition, this post reveals a semi-official interface to do this filtering yourself.  With this information, at least we are somewhat equipped to fix this problem ourselves.
  • If you use the Chrome browser, check out this extension in the Chrome Web Store.  I'm not a Chrome user so I can't comment more on this solution but it looks pretty sweet.
  • If you use Firefox, you can use my Greasemonkey script.
The basic interface.  Both dates are OK, so they're colored mint green.
Prerequisites:
Using the script:
  • Load the "Transactions" view on Mint.com.
  • Two input fields will appear below the search box. 
  • Set the start date and end date.  
  • If both dates are valid dates the page should reload automatically click the "Go" button.
  • If either of the dates are invalid the invalid date will be marked as pink.
  • You can get pretty crazy with the input date.  Try "Jan 1 2013" or "12-Jan-13" or whatever you want.  This functionality comes from the awesome datejs library.  Read more about that here.
  • It is possible that you get into a situation where the dates aren't updating, in this case you may need to start from "Transactions" again.
Here are some more clips of what the interface looks like:

Hover over either date to get more information.  Note "yesterday" works fine.

...just using a different entry format.


Here is an invalid entry.

It isn't perfect, but better than nothing!  Check out the source at github, change it, and push it back to me!




Saturday, April 13, 2013

Linux Tweaks (Mint 13)

This is just a list of simple tweaks I've made to my Mint system.  This post has been sitting as draft for some time and I thought I'd post it tonight -- I'll add more to it as I go. 


Default low display brightness setting on boot:
http://www.faqforge.com/linux/remember-screen-brightness-settings-in-ubuntu-and-linux-mint/

Keyboard brightness key skips brightness steps:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/173921/why-does-my-thinkpad-brightness-control-skip-steps/178003#178003

Install updated kernel (in my case 3.4) to address freeze-ups with my Intel Ivy Bridge video card (this worked):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11391743#post11391743

Adjust wireless mouse sensitivity:
http://leftbraintinkering.blogspot.com/2012/12/wireless-mouse-too-sensitive-in-linux.html

Enable CPU scaling for better laptop battery life
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_Frequency_Scaling

Get HDMI audio output to work
http://askubuntu.com/questions/112512/ubuntu-refuses-to-output-audio-via-hdmi

Synopsis: Check 'alsamixer' and make sure the HDMI device isn't muted.  Then, try to test the output:

wskellenger@marquette ~ $ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: Cirrus Analog [Cirrus Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

wskellenger@marquette ~ $ speaker-test -c 2 -t sine -f 261 -D hw:0,3

After running the above test, it suddenly started working.  Prior to this it was not working so I have no idea what changed.  Maybe just *running* alsamixer was what fixed it.

Emulate middle button click on touchpad
http://askubuntu.com/questions/130393/how-to-configure-the-touchpad-middle-click


Thursday, April 11, 2013

Will the Real Dukes of Hazzard Theme Please Stand Up?

With streaming as common as it is today, you can easily watch all of your old favorites.  From Mr. Wizard's World to MacGyver to Knight Rider, all of my faves from the 80s are just a click and maybe two bucks away.

Seriously, a Coke from the vending machine at work is $1.50, so I won't sweat paying $1.99 to watch a favorite show from my childhood.

My son Ian is crazy about anything with an engine in it.  Since I have fond memories of the Dukes when I was a kid and played with my General Lee Matchbox car in the sandbox, I thought it was time to introduce Ian to this and see what he thought of it.

I mean, what's not to like about a couple of guys sliding across a car hood and climbing through the windows?  What's not to like about awesome CGI-free car jumping in almost every episode?  I knew this tire-smoking show would get my son's gears turning.  And really, even COMMERCIALS on TV today aren't kid-friendly.

TV of 2013 pretty much bites if you're a kid.

Well, after one viewing he loved it.  We've watched two episodes so far.  There was gratuitous car jumping and tire spinning in both shows.  I loved watching it as much as (probably more than) he did.  We were about 3/4 of the way through the first show and he goes and grabs one of his toy trucks and starts racing it around on the floor with one hand -- the other hand is maneuvering another truck that was a 'police car' in hot pursuit.

Awesome.  :-)

So, I can't get enough of it now, and I wanted to add the theme song to my Google Play library.  Well, there are lots of options and some of them bad.  First off, you'll probably encounter this one, plunk down $1.29 and think you're done:

C'mon, the Ultimate Waylon Jennings compilation album...  This has to be what I want.  Well, it isn't.  This song sounded totally different.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but this was not the same as the theme from the show.  I listened to it a few times and I realized that besides a verse at the end that I've never heard before, I was missing the lyric about "fightin' the system like a true modern-day Robin Hood" (or something like that -- I find out later this is wrong).

Hm.  Well I'm a little disappointed but I wasn't about to give up that easily.  I came across this one:

Okay, here we go.  We've got the high-ish premium of a popular song ($1.29 instead of $0.99).  We've got the entire cast on the album cover, including the General.  This has to be the 'official' theme.  We've even got a 1982 date on the album in the Play Store.

Oh my word.  This sucked.  What you've got here is the entire cast of the show singing their interpretation of the opening theme.  We've got the music fading into the background while J.D. Hogg makes a little commentary.  This was enough for me.  I pressed stop and actually DELETED the song from my music collection, thereby blowing $1.29 out the window.

Now, I guess I should have previewed the song first, but I was on my phone and it wasn't really convenient.  Later on, from my laptop, I did some more investigation.  I found this version on the same album.  Now with my laptop, I previewed the song a few times.  It was exactly the same as the one from the Ultimate Waylon Jennings collection!

Hm.  Time to dig a little further.  Can you believe that Wikipedia actually has an entry for this song?  Yep.  Theme from The Dukes of Hazzard (Good Ol' Boys)

The article explains pretty clearly what I'd discovered:

As the narrator for the 1975 movie, Moonrunners, Jennings was tapped to serve in the same capacity for The Dukes of Hazzard which premiered on CBS in 1979 and was based on Moonrunners. Jennings wrote the theme song for the show and recorded two versions: the television theme version and a slightly different version made commercially available on both single and album which received radio airplay.[1]
The television show version features a banjo which the commercially available version does not. Additionally, the TV version's third verse contains the lyric, "Fightin' the system like two modern-day Robin Hoods", which is accompanied by a "Yee-haw!" said by characters, Bo Duke (John Schneider) and Luke Duke (Tom Wopat), though it is in fact Schneider's vocal used twice.

The article also says:

Most of Jennings' greatest hits albums and various compilation releases containing the "Theme From The Dukes of Hazzard (Good Ol' Boys)" feature the commercially available version.

Well, I see the word "Most" there so that means I've got to find the real version.  The banjo version.  The version with the Robin Hood mention.  I'd even appreciate the yee-haw at the end but I won't get too picky.

Google Play has live versions, karaoke versions, instrumental versions, covers, you name it.   I previewed many and didn't find the original.  I've got to have the original.

Without stretching this on much longer, I found it.  Amazon has it.  At $0.89 it didn't pass the popularity test.  It failed the album cover test miserably.  There's no mention of Waylon.  But trust me, this is the original TV version.  The banjo is there.  The lyrics are there.  It's all there.  (Bummer, we don't get to hear Schneider's 'yee-haw').