hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4254.txt

Episode: 4254
Title: HPR4254: Cake Money Money Cake Money Money Cake!
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4254/hpr4254.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:05:02

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4254 for Thursday 21 November 2024.
Today's show is entitled Cake Money, Money, Cake, Money, Money, Cake.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 12 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Operator talks about web server monitoring and financial tracking.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
So if you want to manage your money, stay on the line and if you want to know about what
it's about talking about today, monitoring services, free monitoring services for websites
stay on the line.
So first we'll talk about probably my experience with robot uptime or robot uptime.
They recently got rid of their free tier, robot uptime, robot uptime, robot uptime, robot
uptime, one of them.
So basically you would pay R-O-R-O-B robot uptime robot, sorry.
So uptime robot was a service that you could get like, you could scan.
You could do like one or like five different ports or something for free, like one server
and five ports for thing.
It would just do basic status stuff so like you could check for like a status 200 or whatever.
So if your server was down, you know, if your webpage was up but the back end service
was down, it wouldn't really do any good because you'd still get a 200 but there'd be
nothing on the page or whatever.
So it's not perfect but it was free.
And I used that for five years, ten years to do uptime notifications.
So when you, you know, every was free for five minute pings or something.
So you define the service.
So if you have a web server, you'll do like most of them will do web servers and like
basic port checking, let me check status cake here.
So they basically went to a pay tier and their pay tier was something ridiculous like, you
know, $5 a month or something.
I'm like, I'm not paying $5 a month for basic, you know, uptime monitoring stuff.
So the one I have here is status cake.
And they support HTTP head TCP DNS, SMTP, SSH ping and push push.
Okay.
I don't know what push is, it's probably HTTP, HTTP thing pushed, push tests like reverse
testing instead of our server checking your site is up, your servers ping us to say, to
say they are.
Oh, that's useful.
So if you have like a, you know, they said it's useful for crime job validation.
Huh.
It's an interesting idea.
Similar to HTTP, TSS is not low to the body of the website.
So you can do HTTP head, which is actually more faster, more better.
And then DNS tests to make sure DNS resolves or whatever.
Expect that IPs, DNS server test name.
So that's what they do, status cake.
They are free for at least my one domain and three posts.
So I have three checks.
I check my armakery.com website and then I check my personal on B server and my Plex server.
And they're all HTTP checks.
I will say the experience has been good.
I think you can set more than one destination.
So my wife gets them and I get them.
Traditionally what happens is we notice that the internet's being weird.
And then finally, you know, five minutes later, when the phones give up on trying to receive
traffic from the wireless, I'll get a hit, you know, blah, blah, blah is down.
So sometimes it's helpful when, you know, I'm trying to do something remotely and I can't
get it to work.
And then I realized that I'll get a message from status cake from you like, oh, there's
I can't get this server because it's not because it's not on.
It's because, you know, the internet died basically.
So the next thing I'll talk about is switching from mint into it meant the financial tracking
or whatever.
Because then forever, it was free, free as in, they take all your data and sell it.
I just assume they all do it.
So even if you do pay, that doesn't necessarily mean your data is protected and privacy is
protected.
So I'm all fine for the whole, you know, pay for the thing, you know, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, pay for the thing because, you know, if you're not paying, then
you're the product.
But either way, you're still the product.
Unless we get like some kind of legislation that heavily, heavily penalizes people like
bankrupts companies that pay for privacy service and then they show that they're not actually
being privacy and they're selling off your data and they go bankrupt until that happens
to a couple of businesses, they're just going to say just like this company, rocket money
or whatever, rocket money is like, you know, give me a dollar or whatever, we don't
have privacy, like just assume that's not the thing.
So they all run the same amount, like $50 a year.
So there's rocket money, which was formally built something or other, it was formally
another name and they got in trouble with the BBC or something because they were claiming
to say people on money with their, you know, bills.
And I don't know if that's why they went, changed their company name or if they'd had
bad press.
But anyways, it was probably true bill or something like that.
And true bill company would basically negotiate with your provider like AT&T and Charter
or Comcast and they would negotiate a rate for you and save you money and then they would
take a cut of that.
They saved me and I've tried to do this before.
They saved me $300 a year on my bill and then they said, cool, we're going to save you
$300, but we're going to take a finder's fee of $90 for that saving you money.
And I said, okay, whatever, you know, I'll do that and they're like, oh, you want to
pay $3 a month for the rest of your life or just give us the $90 upfront and I'll just
give you the $90.
I quickly realized after I sent the, you know, sent the money, I realized, you know what?
Just because somebody says that they can save you money on your whatever and they send
you an email that says, congratulations, we've saved you $300.
You know, do you want to pay an hour later?
That doesn't necessarily mean you actually got your, your negotiated rate.
So I started searching on better business of your own.
They used to be true bill and now they're rocket money and maybe they've gotten in trouble
and they changed their name for branding reasons, I don't know, but so I'm kind of freaking
out thinking, you know, I just got bamboozled for $90 and you know, they said, oh, may take
up to, you know, two business cycles for this to show up or whatever, which means then
you're not saving me $300.
You're saving me whatever minus two months of $300 savings is, but regardless.
So I think about a week went by and then Charter finally sent me a negative, you know, a balance,
you know, credit.
So I'd have auto-paste set up and they sent me a, you know, whatever credit to my account
and blah, blah, blah.
So the idea is I had to keep it on that and make sure that they're actually still giving
me that credit, but I've been using them because I looked at some other ones, I started to,
I created an account with one of the other ones, let's see if I can find it, Spectrum,
I said, my, there's two or three of them, I probably deleted the list because I didn't,
I didn't like either one of them because they all smell the same, honestly.
The thing about Rocky Money is they want you to pay like the $50 essentially to get,
is basically any features at all.
So you get automatic categorization, you get a couple of other things by default for free,
basically you get mint, but without being able to do rules, I think you can do budget alerts,
but you don't get rules or anything.
And by rules, I mean you can set up like if a bill has a particular strain, you can
say, you know, if it's Charter then put it under this bill because you're flagging it wrong
or you're flagging, uncategorizing, it also will tell you when you have recurring payments,
it sort of kind of tries to guess reoccurring payments, I think reoccurring payments actually
have a flag in them, so they'll know that flag, that flag, it's sent over to them when
you connect your stuff to the thing, so somehow you can't tell that this would be a
recurring bill, but they can tell somehow when you sync your credit card information,
credit card account and all your accounts to them.
So they know like, like Patreon is, I guess maybe they just know that Patreon is a monthly
service and they just assume that it's a recurring bill, or they actually know the codes
and they can see on the back end, you know, if it's a recurring bill, but anyways, I'll
get notifications of reoccurring bills, the ideas I should get a notification if they
raise my Charter bill because I know that it went, it triggered because you know, something
raised by a dollar on another different bill, like my gas bill, so that happened.
So I've been using them for probably a couple of months now, and I put it all on my account
information, basically, it's like I said, the same as mint, you can't categorize things
without paying, and I'm like, I kind of refuse to pay because you already got $90 out
of me, you're not going to get another $50 for nothing, because like I said, you're probably
already selling my information, so you know, until you can convince me otherwise and, you
know, prove that you're going to go bankrupt if you do find out that, you know, somebody's
selling all your data, so anyways, if you're looking to switch for mint, I don't know what
to tell you, but I'm using rocket money because they saved me, you know, we'll see, they
saved me $300 on my bill, but at least for this month, they saved me some money, so that's
pretty legit. If you have any thoughts around any alternatives for those two types of services,
maybe you can host something on GitHub for free or like notifications, status notifications
of whatever, or maybe there's a local open source project to check your own, to do your
own, you know, banking stuff, but I doubt that's really a thing.
Anyways, hope you guys have some fun, record an episode, and have a good one.
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