February 2014 – TheBoohers.org

Code beats Bureaucracy: Tax Form Automation With Ruby and FDF

February 23, 2014 by tim

The City of Kettering decided to tell me they wanted my Schedule E’s from 2007 to 2012 and to fill out an income tax return for each of these years. We have a rental house there, and had no idea we needed to file a local tax return. I hate manual data entry and wanted … Read more

Analysis of The Boohers’ Energy Usage

February 16, 2014 by tim

Using my Vera Lite and Z-wave home energy monitor I was able to record a week’s worth of electricity consumption at 30 second intervals. I was surprised how hard it was to use the data to do anything, but amazed with how my behavior changed when I knew our household consumption was being tracked. Again, if you want to improve something, I feel it needs a tracking system. Electricity usage is a nice case study for this, because it has a clean metric (wattage) over a time series.

Home Energy Usage

February 15, 2014 by tim

I decided to look at my home energy usage. Below are notes on how I’m approaching it. I wish I could get insight from the MIOS graphing plugin, but it is pretty basic and can’t throw out outliers and has terrible zoom capability. I also never figured out how to set the y-axis. In order … Read more

OFX for USAA via Ruby

February 11, 2014 by tim

My wife and I have been through roughly 10-15 different budget/financial tracking systems. We started with every penny in MS Money, used several different spreadsheets, spent several years in Mint and have pretty much dropped all of that for a top-down strategy that has us budgeting savings, non-discretionary spending, and a rainy day buffer and … Read more

Setting up the Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave Smart Energy Monitor

February 9, 2014 by tim

I struggled for awhile trying to set up the Aeon Labs Aeotec Z-Wave Smart Energy Monitor to monitor my electricity. The manual or any instructions were difficult to find online. The first article that was absolutely necessary explained how to pair the device. After reading this article, pairing was pretty trivial. Great details in the … Read more

MiCasa Verde (MiOS) DataMine Logging

February 1, 2014 by tim

For my home automation goals, I chose MiCasaVerde VeraLite due to my friend’s recommendation. The VeraLite is a small linux controller that runs the MIDIbox Operating System MiOS and gives a homeowner the ability to easily control lights, security cameras, door locks, alarm systems, and even the thermostat, among many other home systems. For example, … Read more