Jean Galea

Health, Wealth & Happiness

How to Remove DRM from Amazon Books

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remove drm amazon

If you buy ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle, you’ll have realized that they come with copy protection called Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Unfortunately, the Kindle format is not compatible with all other ebook reading devices, so you’ll run into trouble if you want to use a tool like Calibre to convert your purchased books into a format compatible with your reading device unless that device happens to be a Kindle, in which case you’re good.

The solution is to use two plugins for Calibre as detailed in this excellent guide. Since I’m on a Mac, I could not get an older version of Kindle to work on Catalina, so I installed a virtualized Windows 8 and I was able to set up everything without a glitch.

Is it Stupid to Travel While Still Renting Back Home?

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travel while still renting

I spent the latter half of my twenties traveling the world, and now that I’m in my mid-thirties, a topic that comes up with my wife and friends is whether it makes financial sense to still do any long term traveling while also renting an apartment at our home base.

In our twenties, we could fit all our possessions in a pair of suitcases, and once we left a country we would terminate the rental agreement and then rent another apartment in the new country we move to. However, since we settled in Barcelona we have a nice apartment that we rented long-term, and rental prices in Barcelona are not exactly on the cheaper end.

Hence if we were to consider spending a few months every year traveling and therefore renting an apartment in another city or country, it is worth considering if that would make financial sense.

The initial knee jerk reaction is usually that it doesn’t make any sense to be paying two rents. However, let’s see if we can assuage our panicking brains.

Before I continue, I need to say that as a family we would never be comfortable renting out our apartment while we travel. There are many people who feel totally comfortable doing so, and that was actually the motivation behind Airbnb, however, it’s just not for us. Our home is too much of a personal space to be able to rent it out.

That is why if we travel for a few months every year, we would not be able to offset the extra costs by renting out our home.

Now let’s move on to see if we can figure out a way to make this work.

A good apartment in Barcelona costs around €600,000. We could buy an apartment and then still travel, thus having no guilt feelings about paying rent for two places while only using one.

Buying the apartment outright, apart from requiring a big sum of money to be tied up and practically killing any notions of diversification in our net worth, would eliminate any possible investment income.

There’s also the other option of taking out a loan, but you’d still need to pay the mortgage which of course includes interest apart from the principal. For the purposes of this calculation, and because I am not a big fan of debt, I’ll leave that option out of the equation.

I feel confident in being able to make 8-10% per year when investing, so that would return €50,000 if I invested that sum of money. Remove tax of around 30% and we are left with €35,000.

The rent per month of that same apartment costs around €2,000, so we get a total yearly cost of €24,000. The money earned from the investment more than covers the rent, meaning that I should not be worrying about whether this traveling is a bad financial decision.

Every financial decision has to be taken in the context of life ambitions and what we want to achieve. If traveling for a few months a year will really enhance our enjoyment of life, and we are earning enough money from investments to cover the costs, then there is absolutely no problem in doing so.

Do you agree?

Letting Go

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letting goWhen I was a young kid I was brought up to always strive for excellence in academic subjects and in sport, although it applied to most other areas as well.

Perhaps the area in which this strive for excellence had the biggest impact on me is the academic. Education in Malta in my time was very competitive, with exams being a do or die affair that determined whether you would advance to the next year or not.

Failing, especially in the year end exams, was pretty much unacceptable as it would mean a ruined summer studying for the resits in September, potentially losing all friends if you fail to advance to the next year, and feeling like a total failure. Not to mention the scolding to be received from parents and teachers for not trying hard enough.

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What’s In My Bag – 2020 Edition

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northface borealis

One of the things I did this year was to buy a decent multipurpose backpack (The North Face Borealis) that I keep packed and ready to go.

This is one of the productivity hacks for this year. Instead of having to fumble around for stuff everytime I need to travel or leave the house to make sure I have everything I need, I just keep my bag stocked and ready. This applies to my travel cosmetic bag too. It means I have to own two copies of certain items, but it saves a ton of time and worry.

My Backpack

  • Macbook 12 inch – still my favorite for travels and coffee shop work sessions
  • Macbook power supply and chord
  • iPad Pro 12.9″
  • Two pens (one multicolor)
  • Small notebook
  • USB pen drive with attached USB-C adaptor
  • Smartphone/Kindle holder
  • Credit card wallet
  • Hand cream (Cicaplast or L’Occitane)
  • Raw Bite energy bar
  • Pair of lenses
  • Packet of tissues
  • W5 wipes for glasses
  • Hand sanitizer
  • QCY wireless earbuds (I own several pairs of these as they are quite cheap, and just leave a pair of each in different places for convenience)
  • Rode microphones (in case I want to interview someone)
  • Round band aids (in case I have any sores while walking; sometimes one of my toes gets a bit bruised during padel matches)

I experimented with using the iPad Pro as my only device when going out, but I found it hard to get used to working on iOS. It’s doable especially for simple writing activities, and it feels more powerful than my Macbook, however, I just never felt 100% comfortable.

The new magic keyboard that Apple released this year feels really good, and the addition of the trackpad really gets it close to a laptop experience. In addition, you get a really nice camera, which is great for video calls, although I don’t like the weird angle that much. I tried out the keyboard for a week and felt good with it, and I especially like the fact that the base of the device is always cool, perfect for working on your lap during summer months. In the end, though, I returned it as I prefer the Macbook. I just wish the Macbook was more powerful and had more screen space. That would probably put me in Macbook Air territory, but the Air is not as handy and lightweight as the Macbook, even though the difference is small.

The great thing about working with the Macbook and the iPad is that I can easily have a dual monitor setup even when working in cafes or coworking spaces. That makes it excellent for productivity as I like working with dual monitor setups. All I need is a cable and the new Sidecar functionality on MacOS Catalina. Alternatively, there is the Duet app which works very well for me too.

How to Claim Capital Loss If You Lose Your Crypto Private Keys

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If you lose access to your cryptocurrency, then you may be eligible to claim a capital loss. To claim the loss, you will need to be able to provide the following kinds of evidence:

  • when you acquired and lost the private key;
  • the wallet address that the private key relates to;
  • the cost you incurred to acquire the lost or stolen cryptocurrency;
  • the amount of cryptocurrency in the wallet at the time of loss of private key;
  • that the wallet was controlled by you (for example, transactions linked to your identity);
  • that you are in possession of the hardware which stores the wallet;
  • transactions to the wallet from a digital currency exchange for which you hold a verified account or that is linked to your identity.

Jean Galea

Online Entrepreneur. Global Citizen. Padel Player.
Founder of WP Mayor & WP RSS Aggregator.

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