You can avoid paypal fees entirely if you do these:
Setup personal account (not business)
Only receiving payments for Services. For the other types (eBay Items, Auction Non-eBay, and Goods-Other), there is a $500/month receive limit on personal accounts.
Notes about the person sending you money -
No fees if sender has enough money in paypal account to cover sending amount.
No fees if sender’s balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a US checking account
Yes fees if sender’s paypal balance falls below $0.00 AND is reloaded by a credit card - Paypal charges 4.9% + $0.30 USD, plus limited to only 5 of these per 12 months.
Now that i’ve had my iPhone a while, here’s some tips and tricks i can share.
Get a case to protect your iPhone. Following most apple store employees, i bought Agent 18 eco-friendly.
MegaPhone - mac application - see your call log, SMS/TXT log, iphone filesystem, read/write to iphone notes from your MAC, etc.
Disk full? 8GB or 16GB iPhone actually has 2 filesystems, first is only 300MB and might fill up if you install lots of apps. In addition to moving /Applications to bigger partition, and chmod +s Installer, i did this cp -Rv /opt/iphone/lib /var/root/lib
rm -rf /opt/iphone/lib && ln -s /var/root/lib /opt/iphone/lib
Couple months after I replaced a drive in my terastation, another drive died. Sigh. Time to upgrade. Took many many hours, but I upgraded my 1TB Buffalo Terastation (4 x 250GB) to 2TB (4 x 500GB). Of course its less than 2TB - once RAID 5 is setup, it comes out to about 1.4TB of usable space. And you definitely want RAID 5 - that means if any one of the 4 drives dies, you don’t lose any data, just replace it before a second drive fails.
My last backpacking trip to Sykes was great, but my GPS watch ran out of juice after a second full-day of use. Sigh. I figure if I ever do any multi-day backpacking trips and want to record the GPS waypoints the whole time, i’m gonna need a way to recharge. Plus I like being green, so I looked into a solar panel charging device.
My goals for a device, most important ones first:
Recharge my Garmin Forerunner 305
Recharge my 5G iPod
Recharge my iPhone
Can’t break easily
Lightweight, small
Under $100
Bonus: works with AC outlet and DC car cigarette lighter
Bonus: work like my current iPhone AC to USB charger
Bonus: minimal attachments
This roll-up solar charger looked cool - It can recharge a laptop - but was too big and expensive. Solio was pretty popular on the ol’ google search results, and they have 2 models that met my goals - the Solio Classic and the Solio Hybrid 1000. Looking at the tech specs, the classic has a bigger battery and more juice, but the 1000 is a bit more rugged, as this guy suggested. The H1000 doesn’t charge as well as the other Solio products, but I liked that it was the most durable and cheapest. We have a winner that meets all my goals. Watch video. I paid $74 including shipping/taxes at thenerds, and it arrived 2 days after I ordered it. I confirmed it worked as expected with my GPS watch, iPhone, and iPod. Hurray.
It’s on. Shayna and I are volunteering this Saturday 9am-1pm, it goes 2pm-2am, and tons of our friends will be going to south bay to check it out. But chad, what is it? Well, lets let Yuri’s Night Bay Area do the talking:
“Yuri’s Night is a celebration of space exploration—and mankind’s curiosity, scientific ingenuity, technical achievements, and spirit of collaboration that have made it all possible. This year, NASA’s 50th anniversary, the Bay Area will be home to the largest Yuri’s Night celebration ever, with 8,000 people joining astronauts, artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians to pay tribute to our global space heritage and to celebrate how much more is out there to be discovered!”
Personally i’m going to have fun and listen to music - one of my favorite DJs ever, Tipper, will be playing a twilight set. But there will also be fun costumes, interesting art, fascinating science, and friends. What more could you want for a saturday? Buy your ticket now!
I just got an iPhone, and its great, but Apple does not allow 3rd party applications out of the box (games coming soon). So what to do? Well, if you want more apps, you must jailbreak your iPhone. Before Feb 2008, it was a bit complicated, but since apple released 1.1.4, its easy as apple pie - here’s what i did:
Following instructions from iPhone Atlas, I changed Settings/General/Auto-Lock=Never, downloaded and ran ziphone app on my mac, doing jailbreak-only (i’m already using the official AT&T carrier). It took less than a minute to reboot back into iPhone and there i saw 2 new apps - Zibri’s Blog and Installer. The Installer app is how you easily install your favorite games, utilities, and other apps. Hurray.
After browsing top 20 apps, I installed these (and you should too, copycat)
Sources/Community Sources - do this first, gets list of available apps (packages).
System/BSD Subsystem - some other apps need this first, including OpenSSH and NES. If you install this, change password from default “alpine” using openssl. Do not use passwd - you may get stuck in “edit home screen” reboot loop
Games/Caissa Chess - better graphics than other chess
Games/Chess - not sure if its better than Caissa
Games/FiveDice - Yahtzee
Games/HuaRongDao - puzzle game, simple yet hard
Games/iCave - simple, reminds me of vanguard
Games/iSolitaire - you know it
Games/Labyrinth - tilt iPhone to guide marble around labyrinth
Games/Mahjong - classic chinese game
Games/Othello - another classic
Games/PuzzleManiak - combo of different games, online scores
Games/Sudoku - latest fad
Games/Tris - one of many Tetris games
Multimedia/CameraPro - like default Camera app, but you can zoom, black and white,
Multimedia/MobileScrobbler - last.fm client
Multimedia/TuneWiki - play music with this, and it downloads lyrics and advances them to the music
Multimedia/iFlickr - upload to .. you guessed it
Productivity/WebSearch - shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
Productivity/Sketches - like the old “paint” .. you can take a pic of your friend, give’m a mustache, then email it.
Toys/Flashlight - very simple - get a bright screen to find those keys you dropped in the bar
Utilities/iSpit (geeks only) - turn your iPhone to a simple HTTP server
System/OpenSSH (geeks only) - lets you wirelessly connect to your iPhone like its a computer (copy/move/delete files, etc).
System/Term-vt100 (geeks only) - get your xterm on. if you got login problems, try this vt100 fix.
First time i did all this I ran into some issues, had to restore back to 1.1.4 (damn broken passwd). Second time was no issues - so you prolly won’t have any. But here’s notes on what happened to me in case it happens to you:
First was that calling/SMS didn’t work. On the ziphone app i clicked “Help & Info”, then Troubleshooting, and found the following which fixed it.
Tap on Settings from the home screen.
Choose General
Choose Reset (all the way on the bottom)
First try “Reset Network Settings” - The phone will reboot. If things still aren’t working, go back and try “Reset All Settings”.
Phone rebooted and now i saw my AT&T and Edge network logos again. Hurray!
The second issue was that the installer could not install anything, which turned out to be a temporary issue. The first time i ran installer, it updated itself (checking sources, refreshing sources, update, restart) .. which is normal. As soon as installer works, the internets say to install Sources/Community Sources, then System/BSD Subsystem, then System/OpenSSH. “Community Sources”, which contains list of things to install (games/utils/etc), installed OK, but i got stalled on BSD with a “Package Download Failed (null)” msg. I did alot of digging, found and did this troubleshooting checklist, but still no luck. Then i figured out I was in a temporary vortex - others noticed as well - and waited till the next morning when I had great success installing many packages.
I finally broke down today and got a 16GB iPhone. I mean, seriously, a geek like me waiting like 9 months to own an iPhone? WTF? Well, not not a big fan of the phone and SMS part - the main reason I bought it is to have a mini web browser internet device with a nice user interface. I’ve always loved the iPhone interface - half my friends have iPhones and i’ve been jealous for a while. I considered waiting for next generation iPhone (3G phone, GPS, etc), but according to appleinsider, it’ll be summer/fall before they come. I just couldn’t wait!!
I bought it at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. It took about an hour from walking into the store till chadPhone was totally up and running. Breaks down like this - Buy iPhone .. 5-10 mins. Open iPhone, plug into your mac (I brought my macbook pro with me, so i could register it quickly). iTunes notices iPhone, leads you down registration process. I chose the $59/month (450 mins, unlimited data, 200 SMS TXT msgs/month). For $10/month more, you can get 1500 SMS msgs/month, or unlimited SMS for $20/month. I love SMS but i’m pissed that Apple/AT&T are charging that much for SMS when it basically costs them nothing. I much rather use safari/gmail. Anyway, registration ends with giving AT&T your credit card, and done - 10-15mins. So less than half hour my iPhone was registered and i could make outgoing calls. They said up to 6 hours to route incoming calls to my new iPhone, but really it took another 20 mins. Total .. 50 mins.
Already found these 22 tips, what are your favorites? anything to avoid?
Update - Download hundreds of cool games and applications from people besides apple by jailbreaking your iphone.
Back in 2005, i bought a Buffalo Terastation 1TB NAS (Network Attached Storage). Basically its a backup device - a mini-computer box with 4 harddrives, each 250GB, or 1TB total. Last week one of the drives died after a power outage (we get a lot of outages on san jose ave), and today i fixed it. However, it wasn’t that easy - I spent over 3 hours on it - when it should have taken less than one. So i’m just gonna note a few things so the next guy might have it easier. Now here’s where i’m gonna geek out, so all non-geeks .. move along.
When i first setup the terastion, i did a RAID5 + RAID1 - that means i got a 750GB partition out of my 4 250GB drives. So if any one of the four drives dies, i don’t lose my data. I just pop in a new drive and rebuild. Easy. This worked great for 3 years, never had to replace a drive. Every now and then we’d lose power and when i powered on my terastation, it would take 1-2 days to check the disks before we were good to go.
Last week Terastation would not recover - it would boot up for a minute, do disk check, then turn off (power light was off). However, each of the four drive status lights would stay red, with disk 3 blinking red. After reading the manual, I decided to replace disk 3. I also read the wiki FAQ, so i knew i could replace with any same-size or bigger drive. I did this, spending almost 45 mins opening the terstation up, switching the drive, and putting it back together. Turned it on, and it stayed on. Yay!
So now all i had to do is connect to the web manager interface and “rebuild the raid array”. Once i logged in, it said Raid array 1 error - i clicked it, and I’d get to array 1, and it listed disk 1, 2, 3, 4 .. but the checkbox to disk 3 was greyed out. I spent a while looking through the web pages and decided something might be wrong with my new disk. I turned it off, took the thing apart (only took 15mins this time), pulled out my new disk, and basically connected it to my PC in a external USB drive box. It worked fine. Ugh. Was terastation broken? I tried the old drive, that terastation thought was dead. It also seemed OK by PC standards. Ugh.
After going back in forth and trying different things, it turned out that the new drive had to have the jumper in Cable Select to work. The older 3 western digital drives were not in Cable Select mode. Whatever.
Also, the LED lights on the front don’t always do exactly what the manual or FAQ says. Specifically, i loved this blog on replacing terastation drive, but at the what he says is different than what i saw. Once I clicked ‘Restructure RAID Array’ , the lights were all going nuts and within a minute it went to a page that said “Restructuring has completed successfully” “Checking RAID Array”. At this point my 8 drive lights are blinking red and green - the 3 old ones have solid red status, new one is not lit, and all 4 have blinking green activitiy. Power light is on, diag light is blinking green. On web interface, i clicked on Raid Array 1 and it says it is “Rearing (x.x % Complete)”. I waited a few mins and refreshed page .. percent complete is increasing. It’s working !!! 4 hours later it finished - my setup is as good as it ever was.
I love YouTube, but i wish they supported higher quality - 320×240 just ain’t enuf. Enter vimeo - 640×480 and .. 1280×720 - thats right, full 720p HDTV !!! Here’s a video recorded at 720×480 (480p) and uploaded to youtube (right below), then vimeo (below youtube).
Or if you want full HD, check out this HD Video - The Art Of Beat Making - make sure you watch it fullscreen size to fully appreciate it.
For the techie, the only constraint is you get 500MB a week - no 10 minute limit. And they give you instructions on how to encode it depending if you want 1280×720 (HD Help) or regular tv quality around 640×480 (imovie help).
Social Networking is hot right now. Myspace is huge, facebook is growing super-mega fast, and even Google is backing open standards with OpenSocial (tho, not perfect).
Tagging is also a somewhat new (few years old). You can tag photos (flickr), tag websites/blogs (digg, del.icio.us, technorati, furl, etc) .. why not tag friends? Specifically, I have different circles of friends, some friends overlap, and would love to be able to group them more effectively than i can today. Examples
babysitters
coworkers
work project A
work project B
lunch friends
church friends
hiking friends
drinking buddies
college friends
star trek fans
DJ/dancing crews
One thing to point out is how this compares to the existing concept of groups on social networking sites. Tagging people with “hiking” is promoting MY view of the world - I get to control who i want to talk to when i want to go hiking. In contrast, a hiking group I join is not my view - I don’t have control on that case. It’s more random, usually controlled by the loudest people (loudest meaning more volume of info and higher frequency), and most likely less personal, therefore a different usage paradigm. But the most important difference is that friends tagged with “hiking” are friends first, hiking people second. Social networking groups are groups first, and may or may not contain friends.
Everybody likes to spend time with friends, so why not change the paradigm to make friends come first?
How would it work? Simple - while looking at profiles on a given social network site, there’s always a section that has “add friend” or “marked as friend”. Around there you could add a tag to that person. Then, on your home page, you could have a friend tag cloud or list of friend tags. You pick a tag and it jumps to a dynamicly created page containing summaries of each person you tagged, with the following options:
email - easier to manage than creating new email lists all the time
calendar or event planning - requires them all to use the same calendar system so it can find time when all are free .. not easy
person summaries, including existing tags (with ability to add/delete here, too), latest posts, pictures, status, …. optionally filtering posts/pics by the current tag (oooo.. advanced)
