Time to see the man about my taxes

Oh good, it’s tax time again. Which once upon a time involved me breaking out a bottle of red wine and the tax pack from the local newsagent (in that order) and then doing it three times with varying results. Then came online which made things far simpler, right up until the time when my tax got a little more complicated with many more moving parts.

Luckily I now pay a very clever tax agency to cast their eyes over things so I don’t have to. And they have been great in doing a far better job than I have so which is very helpful you see…because my mechanic just called and he seems very keen on buying his kids a boat.

Remember: Reliable motoring doesn’t necessarily mean cheap motoring

I was just thinking the other day how fond I am of cars that go and go and go with barely a hiccup and that’s been the case with my Mazda 6. It’s coming up to a years ownership now and at 140kish kms on the clock, just keeps going. And it’s so nice having this, compared to the lemon previously that had me breaking out the tools about once every two weeks to get it to behave.

However even I know that the Mazda’s big bag of reliability magic doesn’t just happen automatically, occasionally it needs someone with a shop full of spanners to poke around and make sure it hasn’t been infested with giant spiders or something or more likely, needs things fixed. And so clever me did budget and bank away some spare bounty (thanks overtime!) to get it a service and whatever else it needed. I don’t usually have a spare $600 for possibilities (or anything really) and when I do, it doesn’t usually last very long.

However it turned out today that what it really needed was new front brakes. And not just the brake pads for said brakes, but nice shiny new brake rotors to rub up against less I plough my Mazda into the back of a school pickup SUV come 3:30. The damage all up? A spare $1019. It looks like I know exactly where my next few overtime hours are headed. (And it’s not like I can put it off til next service)

So I’m really hoping the tax man can perform his own magic with the numbers I provide him because car rego is also coming up soon and that’s going to be roughly in the same ball park. To help him out this year (and stop him cursing at me), this time around I’ve hired another set of professionals to make sense of another batch of potentially chaotic numbers.

Thousands of transactions, choose one

Starting off in 2017, my cryptocurrency records look like an absolute dog’s breakfast with thousands of transactions all over the shop. And I can’t even admit to them being major level transactions either, we’re talking the occasional dollar and then even worse, lots of transactions worth even less than that (and why did none of them shoot to the moon? Beats me). But still, eventually the ATO was keen on someone trying to make sense of it all and taking the cut they were entitled to over any gains I hopefully made, so for the past few years tried to do it myself.

And reluctant to pay someone to do it, I do want to send a shout out to the free option of Rotki I came across in the last 12 months because it was my temporary go to in trying to turn great excel files of data into something relevant. The biggest issue I had though was there was no obvious way of getting all the data from Coinspot crypto exchange into Rotki and get it to gel harmoniously. It’s not one of the exchanges it usually works with.
And so I entertained things in manually.

And even though it was just one tax year of crypto number crunching, there still were a lot of manual entries given than most of the crypto I sold at the start of this year hailed from previous years. Which meant so much back tracking and balancing. Boy was that fun. Especially a week before my tax appointment and I still had 20 missing entries to track down.
I tried to do it myself, I really did.

Thankfully on their own website, Coinspot suggested the service Syla as a possibility and even provided a discount code. No not the bad guy from the awesome series Heroes from back in the day, but an Australian Crypto Tax calculator ready to crunch the numbers I was getting headaches from. And after linking up Coinspot to it, I watched it spew out a tax ready report in less than than Rotki took to load up on my computer. Unbelievable.
(Especially when I think back to how many hours of data entry I slaved over to find out how preciously little I made, awesome.)

The more I find myself doing it, the more I’m coming around to the idea of paying someone to do something. Saving money is one thing, saving time and frustration though? Let me do some more overtime and book you in. And off that back of that, maybe it’s time to get someone in to take a look at my 3d printer (or set it on fire, whichever one is cheaper!)

I will not balance, I will not print

I suppose it’s my own fault really, because my Ender 3 V2 was working, mostly. But like servicing my car, I figured it was high time I did the same for my 3D printer including a full plate cleaning (because it was covered in the markings of many a failed print) and the latest version of firmware available. And so off I went scrubbing things down and vacuuming away all the small fiddly filament bits in the nooks and crannies of the machine while installing the latest Marlin 2.1.2.4 firmware.

And at the end of things I now had a far cleaner and more up to date machine with a few new features…
…that then went on to cause no end of frustration when I tried to get it level again.

One side of the plate touched the hot end, the other had a gap you could park a bus through and it took quite a lot of work removing and tightening up bolts, spinning wheels and threatening to drown it in holy water if it didn’t behave before it started to comply. Eventually when I did get it level, a tried a few prints and watched filament go everywhere except stick to the plate.
Which may be too much moisture in the filament or it might be a still slightly unbalanced plate. Either way, I’m getting very tired of pressing print on things only to watch them fail within minutes.

(I know the Creality Ender 3 V2 is a okay entry level printer but once I get all my mechanical issues out of the way and hopefully land a decent return, the next printer I buy is definitely one with auto levelling built in..)

Which makes me wonder now if my tax guy or local mechanic knows anything about 3d printing..

Later on

Just got the car back and now that it brakes better, it needs two new front tires due to inside wear. Great.

And the 3d printer is printing now with thinks sticking to the plate…because I swapped the unreliable white filament out for some far dependable green stuff. Go figure.

Okay Tax man, time to do your thing tomorrow..