Our merchant services provider, Global Payments, sent us a letter stating that we must be PCI Compliant, or face consequences such as fines, termination of our merchant account, and general woe and spiders. We already follow the prescribed standards. So, no problem? No, problem: they want us to pay $90 to fill in a self-assessment questionnaire.
HA! HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA! HA!
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The federal government has announced that Canada will withdraw the penny from circulation in 2012. This means if someone offers a penny for your thoughts, they will have to pay by cheque.
I think they have not fully considered the ramifications of their decision. For example, anyone selling something that costs a pretty penny will now need to sell a five pack if anyone wants to pay by cash.
If someone usually has to think for a minute before the penny drops, they will be in trouble.
Finally, people who are used to putting their two cents in will need to have opinions that are 2.5 times better.
One can never start saving too early for their child's education. An RESP can even be opened for a newborn, as long as he or she has a Social Insurance Number. Once you've opened an RESP, you'll be eligible for many government grants, such as the Canada Education Savings Grant (20% of your contributions up to $500 per year and a lifetime maximum of $7200), the Canada Learning Bond ($500 first year plus $100 subsequent years, if you qualify for NCB supplement), and several provincial grants.
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If you like to do most of your banking online, there's no reason to pay fees for everyday banking, maintain minimum balances, or be limited to a certain number of transactions per month. Here's a comparison of three selected Canadian financial institutions offering bank accounts with no monthly fee and no fee for typical banking transactions, and requiring no minimum balance:
|  |  |  |
| Cheques | First book of 50 free, then $0.25 each. | First book of 25 free, then $0.20 each. | Free |
| Canadian ATMs | >2300 | >2500 | >3800 |
| Savings Account | Yes | No | No |
| Chequing account pays interest | Yes | No | Yes |
| Branches | Yes, five cafés across Canada. | Teller-assisted deposits at over 900 branches free; other transactions $1.00 each. | >200 Pavilions across Canada, no teller-assisted transactions. |
| Free email money transfer | Yes | No | No |
| Link your other bank accounts and transfer funds back and forth | Yes | No | Yes |
| Overdrafts | Free, up to $250 for 30 days. | $2.50 per month plus interest or minimum $5 per transaction for a transfer from another account. | $4.97 per month in which it is used, plus interest.
|
| Not Associated with CIBC | Yes | Yes | No, PC Financial services are provided by CIBC. |
Notes:
- BMO IGA/Sobeys does offer a savings account. However, a fee is charged for withdrawls and the minimum balance is $5000. Since this is the No-Fee, No-Minimum Bank Account Comparison, it is not considered in the above table.
- PC Financial offers a savings account; a minimum balance of $1000 is required to earn interest.
- In the event of a discrepancy between this comparison and the official terms of service of the financial institution in question, the later shall prevail. (Please notify us if this is the case!)
Mango's
ING Direct account is another one of these things that makes him go, "Shoot! Why didn't I do this years ago?"
- Through their association with THE EXCHANGE ATM Network, ING Direct effectively has well over 2000 Canadian ATMs.
- Owe someone money? Giving a gift? You can transfer money to any Canadian bank account, as long as you or the recipient know the transit, institution, and account numbers. It works in a similar way to Interac e-Transfer, but it's free. (They also offer Interac e-Transfer; receiving is free, sending costs $1.00.)
- There is no transaction fee on ING Direct's Investment Savings Account. You'll earn a higher interest rate than the big banks, AND you can use your savings account for as many bill payments, pre-authorized debits, and direct payroll deposits as you like. (Similarly, there is no fee and no minimum balance required for their chequing account.)
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We never knew until recently that a Canadian could request a copy of his or her credit report, for free, by mail. This seems like it would be a good thing to do every year or so.
In order to do this, you should contact both of Canada's credit-reporting agencies. You can contact them by phone, mail, or fax.
http://www.transunion.ca/ca/personal/creditreport/consumerdisclosure_en.page
http://www.consumer.equifax.ca/cs7/Satellite?pagename=EFX/Wrapper&simpleurl=credit-product-list-ca/contact_us&locale=en_ca
If you need access to your credit report right away, you can order it, along with your credit score, online for a small fee. You may also pay a monthly fee and be notified periodically of any changes. Your credit
score will not be disclosed to you, for free. However, typical use of having this information is simply to verify that what is on your credit
report should indeed be on your credit report. For this use, the free report will be perfectly adequate.
The report we received in the mail had our information obfuscated. Though it provided us with the information we needed, it provided little information that could have contributed to identity theft, should the mail have been misdelivered.
For more information, see this document about
requesting your free credit report from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada.
 |  |
| Beanstream is compatible with many Canadian merchant accounts or will provide you with a blended-rate merchant account with no contract and no minimums. | Authorize.net works only with Global Payments in Canada (high but negotiable setup fees / 3 year contract / $500 early termination fee) and cannot provide you with a Canadian merchant account. |
| Beanstream provides Pre-Authorized Debit and Direct Depost for Canadian and US bank accounts. | Authorize.net's eCheck.net product supports debit from US bank accounts only. |
| Basic fraud detection tools are free. | Basic tools free, Advanced Fraud Detection Suite available at a cost. |
| Phone and email support available. | Phone, email, and live chat support available. |
| Cutoff time is midnight Eastern. | Cutoff time is configurable. |
Both Beanstream and Authorize.net support payment profiles (new to Beanstream), batch processing, recurring billing, and virtual terminal; they have good reporting, and a powerful API. Their fees are similar. You may be able to obtain better rates from an Authorize.net reseller than by dealing with Authorize.net directly. It may be worth it to note that our Authorize.net sales rep
underquoted our fees, in writing, by $20/month, but refused to actually provide us with the quoted fees after we'd signed a 3-year contract with Global Payments. This caused us to investigate Beanstream as soon as they released their payment profiles feature.
Beanstream and Authorize.net both provide excellent service, but we prefer Beanstream for its better support of Canadian merchant accounts, its PAD/Direct Deposit product, and its local staff.
 |  |
| Budget has a new fleet of trucks. | U-Haul's trucks may be new or ancient. |
| For one-way rentals, only a 16-foot truck is available, in limited parts of Canada. | Almost all types of trucks are available for one-way rentals anywhere in North America. |
| Depots are in major cities. | Depots are just about anywhere. |
| Trucks have a low deck. | Trucks have a very low deck; very easy to load; lower clearance required. |
| $944.23 tax included for a one-way rental from Vancouver to Red Deer | $1059.52 for the same move with a truck 57 cubic feet smaller and same insurance |
| You rent an empty truck. | A dolly and furniture pads takes up valuable space in the truck; you can't remove them unless you want to pay for them. |
| Our truck was provided to us with a full tank of diesel. | Our truck was provided to us with less than a quarter tank of gas. |
| Cube truck | "Mom's Attic" over the cab |
| Diesel or Gasoline fuel | Gasoline fuel |
The verdict: If each end of your move is in or near a city with a Budget depot, and a 16-foot truck will suit your needs if you're doing a one-way rental, we recommend Budget for their newer trucks and competitive prices.
If you're picking up and dropping off your truck at the same location in a major city, you may also wish to investigate Penske and Ryder. (Note that these two companies have different insurance terms than Budget and U-Haul.)
If your move isn't near a large city, you're doing a one-way move outside of Budget's area, or you're doing a one-way move and a 16-foot truck isn't appropriate, U-Haul will often be your only option.
My case has terrible ventilation at the front and as you will see, an intake fan doesn't really do much. I tried every configuration to find out what the best possible cooling would be under my circumstances. I don't own a hard drive, so perhaps my temperatures are a little cooler than they otherwise would be.
These measurements were taken at stock speeds with stock CPU cooling. The case fans are Zalman ZM-F1 Plus 80MM, which come with a noiseless adapter that lowers the speed of the fan by about 1000 RPM. I eventually settled on a single rear fan with noiseless adapter.
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Do you use PHP from the command line and need a password prompt? This is how you do.
Windows:
$scriptpw = new Com('ScriptPW.Password');
$password = $scriptpw->getPassword();
The Windows version requires the file scriptpw.dll. This comes with some versions of Windows, such as XP, but not others, such as 2000, Vista, or 7. If you don't have the file, simply copy scriptpw.dll from the system32 folder of another machine to the system32 folder of your machine. Then, from a Command Prompt window (running as Administrator for Vista and 7) enter the command
regsvr32 scriptpw.dll
Linux:
system('stty -echo');
$password = trim(fgets(STDIN));
system('stty echo');
echo "\n";
Everyone seems to have their list of free Windows applications they can't do without, and here's ours. All of these are free for the download and their authors deserve a serious hat tip for all of their excellent work. We list them in alphabetical order:
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is the quintessential keystroke and mouse automator that you really must try to see just how powerful it is. You can automate almost any program by sending it keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can remap keys on your keyboard or mouse. One of our favourite features is that you may compile your finished script into a single EXE that may be run on any Windows computer.
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These opinions were formed based on recent use of Sony Vegas Pro 10 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 on a computer running Windows 7 with a quad core Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.4 Ghz and 8GB of RAM.
Spoiler alert: Sony Vegas Pro wins!
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When something is this good, we feel it is our duty to let everyone know about it...and for us, "everyone" is the readers of this blog.
We're referring to
Juke Box Print Shop, which in our opinion qualifies as the coveted trifecta in any industry: good, fast, AND cheap! How they do this, we're not sure, but we like it. Here's our Juke Box Print Shop Review:
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In case anyone's wondering, and since we couldn't find any references to this anywhere, a Dymo LabelWriter 400 will work perfectly well with a Tomato Print Server. We used an ASUS WL-520gU router with the Teddy-Bear build of Tomato firmware. Setting up the printer on the router was just a matter of plugging it in, and installing the printer within Windows simply required a TCP/IP printer port to be created, using the IP address of the router, and the settings for Generic Network Card.
Let us start out by saying that finding a fax-to-email solution that met our requirements was a chore. Most people we asked for advice told us, "Faxing is archaic. Forget that and use email instead!". We agree, but as long as people insist on sending us important things by fax, we will need a way to receive them.
Allow us to introduce you to a telecom company called AcroVoice. AcroVoice is based in Victoria BC and provides
business and residential VoIP service, and also wholesales
Canadian VoIP 9-1-1 and American E911,
411 Directory Assistance,
Caller ID Name / CNAM Lookup, and of course, it also provides
fax-to-email. Keep reading to find the criteria with which we evaluated their fax-to-email service, and how AcroVoice performed.
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Because we're sure some of you who adore ClearType will ask, yes, we tried it for well over a month and just couldn't get used to staring at what looked like (to us) blurry text all day. Fortunately, we found this:
Disable ClearType in Windows 7
It is interesting to note that we had to use the "Auto Adjust" feature on our monitors after doing this.
We wanted to upload some of our video projects to YouTube. But which format would produce the highest quality, after YouTube's processing? We decided to test four of the most popular formats: MPEG-2, AVC, Windows Media, (16Mbit/sec each) and uncompressed (over 800 gigabytes per hour!). Which do you like best?
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I was working my company's booth at a trade show last weekend. I know - mistake. But it did provide some excellent entertainment. I had the most interesting customer strut up to me and ask if I believed in the supernatural.
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Mango runs the IT department at his day job, which involves evaluating business equipment for purchase or lease. Here are a few tips that we would really like everyone to know. Or if you don't care about leasing but like making fun of sales people, you can just skip to the bottom.
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We don't like Skype. Actually, that's not true. We like the
concept of Skype, that is, making free calls to people via the Internet. We just don't like having to use a computer to do it. We got all excited when we read about Skype for Asterisk, thinking it would be an easy way to receive calls from our Skype-using friends, on a regular phone.
But then we kept reading and said, "Sixty-six dollars
per channel!? Forget that!"
Fortunately, there is a cheaper - and in fact, free - way of accomplishing the same thing.
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Those of you who run your own email servers will likely need to move from server to server from time to time. It would be nice if you could just change an MX record and have all email instantly arrive at the new server. Unfortunately, for various reasons, not everyone obeys TTL, and may cache the old MX record for an unknown period of time. Here's a list of basic instructions for how to migrate your email from one server to another, guaranteeing that no email will fall through the cracks.
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I hear that some places around the world have banned plastic bags. Vancouver is not included in this, however some stores such as Whole Foods have voluntarily quit giving them out. Others charge for bags to encourage customers to bring their own. And when you think about how many plastic bags probably end up in the trash, I think it's a great idea! So I, being relatively environmentally conscious, bring a reusable bag for my shopping as much as possible.
Of course, me being Mango, and thus more than relatively eccentric, I take things a bit farther than that.
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In Simply Accounting, the Session Date is used for default dates of transactions. When one creates, for example, an invoice, the date is automatically assumed to be whatever the Session Date is. We've found no way to change the default of the Session Date from within Simply, but this can be accomplished by this handy script.
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Over the past few weeks we've been testing the Microsoft ComfortCurve Keyboard 2000 and we love it! Its keys are nice and responsive, it's comfortable to use, and its buttons are in very intuitive places. The best part is it's practically a steal - we've seen it for as low as $15. It has only one minor flaw which is that there are very few multimedia buttons. There are play/pause, volume up/down, and mute. But there are no buttons for stop, previous, or next.
There were however browser Back/Forward buttons. And we never use the mute button. For some reason, SharpKeys, which we've used in the past wouldn't do the job. The keyboard came with software called IntelliType but it used a great deal of RAM and, oddly, slowed down our cursor a great deal. No matter. This is an excellent excuse to point out again just how much we like
AutoHotkey.
#NoTrayIcon
#SingleInstance force
Browser_Back::Media_Prev
Browser_Forward::Media_Next
Volume_Mute::Media_Stop
A company called Targus makes remote controls designed for use with PowerPoint presentations. They allow you to control your presentation from some distance away from the actual computer running the show.
While this sounds like a great idea in theory, in practice these remotes are BEYOND frustrating. The reason is that there are too many buttons, and pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make the presentation quit working. And no matter how carefully we instruct the presenter to recover from such incidents, ("If everything stops working press this button labeled Magic Fix-It Button!") ostensibly they will forget. Every. Single. Time.
These buttons, they must be disabled.
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