How to Save Money in the New Year with Xpense Tracker

Creating a budget and saving more money is always one of the top New Year resolutions that I think we all have - but how many of us can actually keep up with it? You could try to keep track of your monthly expenses in a spreadsheet or use a full blown accounting software program like Quicken but that's a sure way to not meet your goals.

To set yourself up for success, you should try an online budgeting program like Xpense Tracker. This is a simple to use web program that allows you to create a monthly budget and track your actual expenses against it. Once you enter your budgeted items like groceries, gas, etc. you can put in your actual expenses as you go along during the month. You could enter all of your receipts once a day or even once a week. The advantage of using an online program is that you can login anywhere and get a snapshot of how your budget is doing.

A simple registration form gets you going using Xpense Tracker and after a 30 day trial it's an additional $3/month to keep using. It allows you to view your expenses and plot graphs just like a full accounting program would.





I setup a basic expense tracking sheet and was able to quickly put together a monthly budget and start tracking my expenses. This program is easy to use and pretty much free so start saving for the new year!

Backup Any DVD with AnyDVD

I backup all of my DVD movies on my hard drive for seamless playback on my Media Center PC. But some movies (like Deep Blue Sea) have programs installed like Interactual Video player that block me from using DVD Shrink or other programs to copy the raw video files to my hard drive. AnyDVD is a program that gets around these programs and allows you to backup your DVD’s.

AnyDVD works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive, allowing you then to backup the movie using a DVD backup tool such as CloneDVD and CloneDVD mobile. You can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software.

Use HandBrake to Convert DVD's to MPEG-4

HandBrake is an open source program that converts a DVD to MPEG-4 video. This could be used for video iPods or maybe Apple FrontRow in the future? I windows port is in the works. Here’s a quick snapshot of some of the features:

• Supported sources:
  • Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
  • PAL or NTSC
  • AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
• Outputs:
  • File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
  • Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
  • Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
• Misc features
  • Chapter selection
  • Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
  • Integrated bitrate calculator
  • Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
  • Grayscale encoding

Use WatchHDTV to Record HDTV Programming

WatchHDTV is a free program that allows you to record HDTV programming from your PC. This might be a good alternative/add-on to Media Center until Vista comes out so you can record HDTV. (I’m not sure if it only does over-the-air OTA or if it can record unencrypted QAM HDTV from your service provider) It supports the following HDTV tuner cards:

HDTV Tuner Card- currently supported cards: ATI HDTV Wonder, DVICO FusionHDTV, and AverMedia A180(VBox DTA currently being tested).