May 10, 2020

I worked on using the “SC-IM” program to manage my yearly finances and expenses.

“sc-im” which stands for “sc-improved” which is basically a spreadsheet program that utilizes Vim bindings: https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

Two really good videos on how to use “sc-im” which I have found to be super useful include:

Luke Smith’s video on SC-IM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_8_gazN7h0&t=19s

gotbletu’s video on “sc”, which is the predecessor to “SC-IM” which covers some of the formula usage in “sc” which is pretty neat and not necessarily too intuitive in the man page for “sc-im”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrX2isHDQu8

With this knowledge, I’ve been able to make a master spreadsheet containing my finances for the year.

It took A LOT of manipulation from both the credit card and checking account based .csv’s, but hey, it can be done.

It’s pretty neat because by doing this, you can take charge of your finances and determine how much you’re spending month to month.

Some Useful Keybindings For “sc-im” That You Might Find Useful:

Once you have formatted both the credit card and checking account .csvs to the desired column formats, you can utilize the ‘cat’ Linux command to combine them and re-direct them to a single file.

For example, this command would take the credit card .csv and checking account .csv files and combine them into one master .csv file:

cat creditCard.csv checkingAccount.csv >> masterFile.csv

I keep it simple however, so its not as granular as something like a Credit Card statement that breaks down “food” vs “expenses”, etc.

However, I have the description fields intact within its own designated column, so I can check out line items if I want to for specific expenses.

To help anyone else who might be utilizing a Wells Fargo bank account, I created a webscraper with the Firefox Selenium webdriver.

You will need to have “pip3” installed Selenium, as well as “getpass” Python 3 libraries to utilize this Python 3 based webscraper script.

It aims to obtain the user’s latest balance to copy it into a file of the user’s choosing, or onto the clipboard (still deciding what would be the best for my particular workflow since I currently just need it to insert into a related .csv file, but most Linux users would probably want to just add it to their clipboard using x-clip).

My current “Wells Fargo Balance Webscraper” project can be found here: https://github.com/SBanya/WellsFargoBalanceWebscraper

I also played a bunch of games from the “bsdgames” repo from Debian’s repository: https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/bsdgames

Also, I checked out a few things from this cool older terminal program based blog: https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/

I highly recommend this blog if you’re getting into minimalistic terminal program software since a few things stand out as cool ideas to add to a computer workflow for the newer or medium level Linux user.

Debating what DOS games to play this weekend, and also I would like to un-break my Arch install on the desktop computer that I have Steam on since I’d like to keep messing around with it to see what games Linux can run with purely Steam, and also might try to load a few emulators on that same OS as well.

Also debating whether or not to put Gentoo on the other half of the same drive, since I really really really like their philosophy and take on free software (free as in “freedom”).

My Goals For The Upcoming Weeks Include:

My best advice for these days is to pretty much keep the motto, “God’s will”.

That’s been helping me a lot mentally in these times.

Living for today, and enjoy the blessings that you have each day.

Hope everyone is doing well, God Bless.