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Showing posts from January, 2016

UK Tax Credits 2: The tax credits

In the last post I looked at how much of your pay check goes into national insurance and tax both in absolute value and percentage. In this post I look at how much it is possible to claim in tax credits and how this would have changed under the now scrapped cuts proposed in the summer. The tax credit system as a whole is pretty complicated and there are many rules and regulations about who can claim etc. There are also added complications when situations change during a year, for example due to change in earnings or birth of a child. I will not look at the complicated edge cases but rather some simple situations so that trends can be seen. I am also not in any way an expert in taxes, in fact I have spend the vast majority of my life in education and therefore not paying any tax. Furthermore even though I currently have a job and pay tax it is in Germany, so I have no first hand experience. This study is purely for curiosity's sake. To accurately calculate your own claim to tax c...

Garmin Forerunner 305 and Linux

I have been struggling to get my Garmin Forerunner 305 to work with Linux Mint 16. I have tried the plug in developed for Ubuntu ( here ) but kept getting an error about my device not being supported despite the software detecting it. The key ( described here ) to getting it to work was to create /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules then add (sudo vim) ATTRS{idVendor}=="091e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="666" save and restart. Now when I type "lsusb" I get Bus 003 Device 015: ID 091e:0003 Garmin International GPS (various models) showing that the device is connected. Now I can use the Garmin Connect software on firefox as long as I am in "classic mode". It is possible to use "gpsbabel" and the frontend "gpsbabel-gui" (in the software centre) to connect to the Garmin and save the tracks to a .tcx file so that you can do a manual upload. As a non-software fix, check the contacts on the watch and the USB ...