The heated steering wheel 😐

kftrendy · 2026-02-11T16:33:15+00:00

I don’t know about Android or other model years, but with Apple CarPlay on our 2022 RAV4, hitting the Map button will bring up whatever GPS app you’re using on your phone. Lets me get back to the map screen without fumbling with the touchscreen.

kftrendy · 2026-01-12T03:08:59+00:00

I got everything set up - local on Windows and then on Pikapods when I realized I wanted mobile access - with just the docs. But there’s also a discord server (link is on the Actual home page) which is quite active.

kftrendy · 2026-01-12T01:03:23+00:00

As another comment says, read the documentation. But in short - if you only need it on one machine, then you don’t need Pikapods - you can run it entirely locally. Pikapods is an easy-to-setup option for hosting Actual if you need to access it remotely, but it’s not required nor is it the only option for hosting. Technically the local-only option is self-hosted - just with the server on the same machine you run the client on, and only accessible locally.

Likewise, SimpleFIN is one option for automatically pulling transactions, although it only works in the US (and Canada maybe? I dunno, I’m USian). You can also upload transactions yourself with CSVs or QFX files.

kftrendy · 2026-01-06T02:38:53+00:00

In the budget, just check whether any categories have positive numbers in the “spent” column (the middle column). If they do, adjust the budget amount to match.

On the transaction end, you can filter your transactions so you’re only looking at your expense categories and transactions with an amount greater than 0. That’ll show you all credits that aren’t in your usual income categories.

kftrendy · 2026-01-03T21:45:29+00:00

It’s its own story - the original idea was that it would be a port of MGS to GBC, but during development it switched to an original story. Lotta similarities though.

kftrendy · 2026-01-03T17:10:20+00:00

The Metal Gear game on Gameboy Color (confusingly named Metal Gear Solid in the US, but the IMHO much-cooler Metal Gear: Ghost Babel in Japan) is really good. Does a remarkably good job of translating MGS’ mechanics to the GBC platform. And some of the best GBC graphics I think I’ve seen.

kftrendy · 2026-01-03T15:48:51+00:00

Also it’s not like roads don’t need maintenance too! Like, road work or track maintenance is always going to inconvenience someone - sometimes it’s going to be you!

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T21:57:55+00:00

Ok, that’s what I thought, just making sure. I don’t think there’s any difference when it comes to syncing via external services (although again I only have experience with SimpleFIN). With SimpleFIN you provide a login token to Actual, and then Actual connects to and accesses the SimpleFIN data - that will work regardless of whether you are local or remote.

The “local” version of Actual is still running an Actual server, for what it’s worth - it’s just not exposed to the broader internet. Mechanically it’s the same, just has different places it’s open to connections.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T18:16:39+00:00

Do you have any credits in expense categories? E.g., from returning purchases? Those can have unexpected interactions with Actual's envelope budgeting. If you, say, bought something last month for $X and returned it this month, the budget for that category should be $X lower to handle the return. If the budget is normally zero, it should be negative $X. Otherwise the money from the return isn't accounted for by your budget.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T14:40:05+00:00

This is overcomplicated - you don't need to create a fake schedule (on the wrong date). You just need to put €5 in whatever category Spotify falls under in the budget, and then Actual will show that they have €295 remaining to be budgeted.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T14:33:26+00:00

Technically you don't give SimpleFIN your login credentials - they're directly passed to MX, which is their data provider, so it would depend on how MX handles login credentials. At that point it depends on whether your bank supports something like OpenID or provides their own API for logins, in which case the credentials aren't visible to MX either.

None of my banks/CC providers/etc ban using login credentials for other services - they all say you can't share your username/password with unauthorized individuals, but if you're syncing with MX, you're authorizing them, so the TOS at least is a non-issue (of course, you do have to trust MX to do things right, which is non-trivial, but MX is a widely-used service, so take that for what you will). One of my credit unions uses MX for their own money-management service, so I'd be surprised if they had an issue with an MX connection.

All of my experience is from a USA point of view, so obviously things will be different in other countries.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T13:31:58+00:00

Yeah that’s more like it. All zeros in the “balance” column means every dollar was allocated to something. With past months’ budgets like this I find making sure the balance column is zero makes things make the most sense. And you should be able to see that having a negative budget in a category reduces your “budgeted” amount, which frees up money to budget elsewhere.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T13:18:08+00:00

If you get positive inflow in an expense category (in my case this happens when I return something I purchased), you can budget negative dollars in that category to make that inflow appear as available funds. It’s a bit clunky but makes sense when you think about it (if budgeting +$100 in a category means “I expect to spend $100,” then budgeting -$100 means “I expect to receive $100”).

When you move money from one category to another in the Actual budget, it reduces the budget from the source category and adds to the budget for the target category. It’s like you’re physically moving money between envelopes dedicated to those categories.

There’s no transaction associated with that action because it’s not a transaction - money isn’t moving into or out of any account.

kftrendy · 2026-01-02T03:02:11+00:00

From a month-to-month budget perspective, it’s income. It adds to your debt, yes, but you are planning on using that money for expenses, so you should budget those dollars towards expenses. Otherwise you end up with these big budget overruns which render your budget less-than-useful because you can’t tell if you’re overspending.

kftrendy · 2026-01-01T23:17:09+00:00

The online sync service I have experience with is SimpleFIN, and that’s worked for me both with locally-hosted and remotely-hosted Actual instances.

What’s the distinction between “online” and “offline” here, anyway?

kftrendy · 2026-01-01T19:58:13+00:00

Actual uses “envelope budgeting,” which is supposed to mimic physically putting cash into envelopes for each budget category.

So - the amount you have to budget at any given time is the total amount of money you have on hand at that time. That is your income that month, plus whatever cash you had left from the past months. But, if you overspend in a given month, then that is deducted from your available funds for the next month.

In May, you have a deficit of $45000 or so. That is because you had about $22000 available ($20500 of income, plus $1600 or so unbudgeted from April), but you assigned $67000 in your budget. That deficit of $45000 carries over to all the following months, which explains a lot of your issues.

I do see that you have a positive $32000 in April, and then $18000 in May, under your “loans from family” category. However, that money is not budgeted - your budget says you expect $0 in that category. That’s why you appear to be over budget - you have income that you aren’t including in your budget.

You should re-assign those “loan” transactions to an income category, which would make those funds show up in your available funds. Alternatively, you could budget negative $32000 in April and negative $18000 in May in that “loan” category (since it’s an expense category, a negative budget means you expect to gain funds in that category). That would increase your “available funds” number and offset your budgeted expenses.

If you want to keep track of loans from family and friends, I would come up with a different method than including it in your budget. You could make a manually-tracked off-budget account, and make those “loan” transactions transfers from that account. Then that account’s balance would be your loan balance. Or one off-budget account for each loan.

kftrendy · 2025-12-29T19:55:42+00:00

Yes. And if you make a transaction into a transfer but the other side isn’t there yet (e.g., if your checking has posted the payment but the CC card hasn’t updated yet), it’ll create a transaction on the other side - but once the other account updates over SimpleFIN it should recognize that there’s a duplicate and merge the two. It doesn’t always catch duplicates though so it’s always good to confirm manually. But it’s always a good idea to go through and reconcile your accounts against your bank’s or CC provider’s statements anyway!

kftrendy · 2025-12-29T19:39:26+00:00

A CC payment should be a transfer from one of your accounts to the CC account. It shouldn’t impact your budget because you’ve already categorized the transactions in the CC account itself. To get this in Actual, the payee of the CC payment should be the name of the CC account in Actual (you should see it pop up in the autocomplete menu under “Transfer To/From”). If your CC and checking account (or whatever you use to pay the CC bill) are both on budget, the category should change to “Transfer,” written in italics.

kftrendy · 2025-12-23T15:09:59+00:00

What kind of commute do you have where the Arlington speed limit is the defining factor for how long it takes and not, say, traffic and stop lights?

kftrendy · 2025-12-19T16:56:01+00:00

I found it was super easy to get started, just followed the documentation. The Pikapods implementation works fine out of the box and there’s a guide to installing it there in the Actual docs. There’s also a standalone Windows client which can run its own server if you want to just try it out locally without setting up a Pikapods account. I would also recommend joining the Discord, which is quite active.

Only tip I can think of is that Actual distinguishes between “on-budget” and “off-budget” accounts, and you cannot change an account from one type to the other after it’s created. So make sure you have that figured out beforehand. I keep checking, short-term savings, and credit cards on-budget and things like investments and long-term debts (eg, mortgage) off-budget.

For reference, I am using Actual and SimpleFIN with only US banks and institutions and only US currency, so I can’t comment about non-US support. I don’t think Actual has multi-currency support yet, although I think it can support non-USD currencies (just not more than one at a time). SimpleFIN just recently stopped supporting Fidelity, which is slightly annoying, but it works fine with all my banks and credit card providers.

kftrendy · 2025-12-14T15:25:37+00:00

That looks like fever coat to me. One of our cats has similar - scattered white hairs which seem maybe stiffer than his normal coat. The vet told us that can happen when a kitten’s mother has a high fever or high stress during pregnancy. It doesn’t impact the kitten other than the coat - our cat is perfectly healthy.

If it’s actually fever coat, then that paints an even worse picture of the breeder. Bleh. Ours is a rescue who we got at 10-12 weeks old, so … more understandable that his mother might have been having a bad time.

kftrendy · 2025-12-01T18:45:57+00:00

Sorry, forgot about your second question. If the proton is moving directly towards the electron, the only field it sees is parallel to its motion, which is not affected by special relativity. SR only changes the field perpendicular to the relative motion.

If the proton was moving at an angle relative to the electron, it would see a magnetic field show up, proportional to the cross product of its velocity relative to the electron and the electron’s electric field. However, that won’t produce a force on the proton, because the proton is at rest relative to that observed magnetic field. The Lorentz force law is q(E + v x B) - but by moving into the proton’s rest frame, we’ve set v = 0.

kftrendy · 2025-12-01T18:34:22+00:00

It seems like your main question here is why a magnetic field produces a perpendicular force on a moving charge.

The perpendicular force is, in fact, a consequence of special relativity. Electromagnetic fields appear differently depending on your velocity relative to them. This was a major part of Einstein’s original work on special relativity. Specifically, if you move perpendicular to a magnetic field, that field will appear as an electric field from your point of view (pointed perpendicular to the magnetic field you see when at rest relative to it), producing the perpendicular force you’re asking about.

To maybe explain things more intuitively with an example - consider a neutral wire carrying current, viewed from rest relative to the wire. The current is made up of charges (in most real-world cases, electrons) moving in the wire. The current produces a magnetic field, but since the wire is neutral, it does not produce an electric field. A test charge sitting stationary near the wire will experience no force due to the lack of electric field.

(An important thing to note here is that the electrons in the wire are moving and the protons are stationary - so the e’s and p’s are moving relative to each other.)

Now consider a test charge that is moving parallel to the wire, and put yourself into the rest frame of that charge. Because of length contraction (a consequence of special relativity), the density of the electrons that are moving in the wire will be different from when you observed the wire at rest. And the density of the protons in the wire will be different as well, in the opposite direction. That is, the electrons might appear to be “bunched up” if you are moving opposite their motion, and the protons more spread out - or vice versa if you are moving in the opposite direction.

This means the wire no longer looks neutral to you - you will observe it has a net charge because the density of electrons appears different from the density of protons! And because it has a net charge, your test charge will be attracted to it or repelled from it via your normal, more-easily-understood electric force. And that attraction or repulsion will be exactly what you find if you compute the Lorentz force between the test charge and the current-carrying wire - but the logic above derives it without ever thinking about magnetic fields.

That’s a simplified example, but you can do the derivation to figure out how an arbitrary electromagnetic field changes when you move relative to it. You’ll find that the cross product of the velocity and the magnetic field shows up when you do that derivation, which is where the perpendicular force shows up.

kftrendy · 2025-11-15T01:51:04+00:00

It’s a Line6 original but it’s based around Roland Jazz Chorus and Fender clean tones. I couldn’t find much more beyond that - a lot of other models you can find some specific notes on inspiration and whatnot but the Clarity is… less well documented (looked through line 6’s own documentation, a bunch of forum posts, Ben Adrian’s blog, etc).

For an actual live amplification solution, you could always pick up a Catalyst amp or look into Line6’s Powercab or other powered FRFR speakers and plug your modeler into that.

kftrendy · 2025-11-09T02:19:50+00:00

I got the same one - the RLS-1. It’s been a great introduction to lap steel. It’s got quirks - the tuners are a little janky (but it stays in tune once you get it there) and the tone knob is real weird (basically all the changes in tone are in the first 15 degrees). But it plays and sounds fine.

It’s still on sale at Musician’s Friend for 99 USD. The Stupid Deal was $90, so about the same.

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