Both my Virgin credit card (for work) and Barclaycard went up in balance by 4.97% (£495). This is for a single reason, that being that I have dont a few days work this month away from Birmingham. As a result, I have put on travel expenses, and also was eating out a bit more than I hoped. Since I can’t claim back all my meals from work, I put some of the meal costs on my personal credit card.

In the next week or so, I’ll be refunding some money on my Virgin card, which should reduce the balance on that.

Another change is that I am going to be cancelling my Barclaycard. While it has the lowest rate of interest, it has a significant balance on it and it makes sense to move it to an Interest-Free card. So I’ve applied for a Halifax Credit Card, which currently offers 20 months interest-free, with around a 3% balance transfer charge. This means I’ll be paying about £80 in fees, but since my interest is around £45 per month, I will recover that in two months, leaving 18 interest-free to help reduce the debts.

The scary thing is that for a time, I will have 5 credit cards. But its only for a week or two.

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With this being January, I have taken balances as of the 1st, and will continue to do so each month.

To summise, I currently have 4 credit cards, each with a balance on them. One of these, a Virgin Money card, is almost clear, and is intended to be useds for business expenses and should be paid off each month. However I am including this for completeness, and ot show I’m not just accumulating more debt elsewhere.

In addition to these four cards, I also have a loan on my car, which is being paid off over a fixed period of 5 years, and accounts for £166 of my outgoings each month. This is not going to be included on my report.

So with this, please find below the details for January 2012. I will be showing a breakdown by card, totals and percentage changes, month on month. Clearly for January, this is 0% as I am counting from today.

As many other people in the UK do, have a growing amount of debt in my life and want to reduce this to zero. I know thats a big task to accomplish, and will take me a long time, but I decided I wanted ot share my progress online.

Unlike Flexo, I’ll only be posting the monthly changes in my credit card balances. I have some additional debt, which I’ll detail in the first of the series, which I won’t cover, since its pre-determined in its type.

My goal is reduce overall debt by £3000 by the end of they year.

I actually found it cheaper at Café Blend, an independent coffee shop run by grumpy staff, than on Amazon.
In the time it takes the kettle to boil the water, you can grind your beans, set up the Aeropress and then it takes about a minute in total to push the water through, top it up for an Americano, or drink for an espresso.

Highly recommended.

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In particular:

Skyrim, available for Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows

…and…

The last item on my list is the Microsoft Kinect

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Recently I bought a Lexmark P205 S500 Printer/Fax/Scanner/Copier All-In-One device from Best Buy at Merry Hill. It seemed to be the best combination of affordable, support for Mac OS X and included an Auto Document Feeder (ADF) which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of paper I have to scan.

After unboxing and setting it up, I installed the included software on my MacBook Air and gave it a test scan.

The included software allows you to scan with its own Scan Center, or you can use Image Capture which is built-in to Lion. I gave both a try, but neither offered the sort of functionality I needed given I was archiving a few years of documents.

I took a look around at other software available. I tried Yep which offers a really nice interface for browsing files, such as PDFs, txt, images and some other file formats, and gives you the ability to tag them with keywords to help you sort and organise them.

I also took a look at the demo for PDFPen from Smile Software. It is probably the most well known PDF editing software besides Adobe Acrobat, and at a fraction of the cost, you can understand why. It will let you mark up, redact, join and split PDFs, and OCR your PDFs. However it isn’t built for bulk scanning.

I finally took a look at PDFScanner (iTunes Link), available in the Mac App Store. It offers a basic way of scanning but had a few features that made it ideal for me.

Firstly it allows you to scan in as many pages as you like. Once scanned in, PDFScanner automatically deskew’s and OCR’s each page. You can then scroll through the thumbnails of each page, and drag to reorder them. If you scanned in a long document, you hit Save and name your file, or use the auto-naming setting to build one based on date and time scanned. If you have scanned in multiple pages from multiple documents at once, as I have done, you can select the necessary pages and click Save Selected. This makes it really simple to just scan a bunch of pages and deal with them later.

The last stage of my paperless solution I have still to decide on, is the organisation. I have been putting some PDFs into Evernote, which allows me to sync the documents to the internet, and access them on my iPhone or iPad, as well as use Evernote’s own OCR for searching and tagging documents. The other option is to manage them locally, which I could either do by date or by subject/company.

Either way, I’m on my way to archiving my old documents and clearing a lot of paperwork. For £10.49, PDFScanner is a good spend, and was fit for my task.

The new 2011 MacBook Air came with a few ports missing. Most people miss their FireWire (I do sometimes) or ethernet (I do sometimes) port, and there are solutions coming for this, beside’s Apple’s Thunderbolt display. But what else is it missing? A little port known for its fondness of Kensington locks. The rectangular hole in many people’s laptops is often overlooked, but for some people, like college students, or small offices (or even big offices) this is critical to reducing the change of your precious laptop being stolen. But my MacBook Air doesn’t have this.

There could be two explanations to this.

1. There simply wasn’t enough room in the tiny case to make an extra hole. Besides, 5 is too many anyway.

2. Its so small and light, that there is no reason to need to lock it anywhere

Personally, I think its a little of both. I’m sure neither Jony Ive nor Steve wanted to make extra holes in the body of the Air, but when you’re carrying around a 2.96lb laptop, is it ever really that problematic to take it with you?

You should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone

Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.

This certainly explains Google’s interest in putting NFC and Google Wallet into Android. Its for a phone call.

Siri isn’t just a way to talk to your phone. Its a conversation, but with an end goal, be it to create a text message, set up a meeting, or respond to email. Its not trying to beat the Turing test, its just trying to make it quicker and easier to get things done.

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As usual, Merlin Mann offers his unique view on the update, and how its helped him read more, rather that flinging something red at something green

Spend the $4.99 and get this. Then add the bookmarklet to your Safari Bookmark Bar as Command + 1.

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