Peter's Useful Crap

Cell phone batteries rarely outlast cell phones. Sometimes you don’t properly charge the phone at the very beginning, sometimes it just loses its top charge after years (or less, in some unfortunate cases) of use, or sometimes you’ll purchase a refurbished phone with a mostly dead battery in it. If you can resist the urge to buy a new phone, it’s cheap and easy to get a replacement battery. And the replacement battery might even be better than the original battery was in the very beginning.

Unfortunately, unless you have a fairly popular phone, the usual places — wireless carriers like Rogers, Telus, Bell, etc., London Drugs, Future Shop, Best Buy — might not be of much help. They might simply turn you away or charge you an exorbitant amount with a long wait. Plus, it’s in their best interests to encourage you to buy a new phone.

You don’t have to waste a perfectly good phone because of a non-working battery! Depending on where you are, there are probably some local stores that specialize in replacement batteries. Or, search on eBay. I’ve had several good experiences in buying a replacement cell phone battery on eBay — it was quite cheap (less than $10, including shipping) and lasted longer than the original battery.

Remember to recycle your battery and/or cell phone if you are truly done with them. Or, especially if your phone still works well and takes a SIM card, give away the phone or sell it on Craigslist or this site — it will likely be snapped up in short order.

Back in 1997, ING Direct Canada launched an online, high interest savings account which, although was not the first of its kind in Canada, was by far the most well-known and in many ways was an important pioneer. Since then, most other banks have caught up, and ING Direct’s savings rates are not as competitive anymore. I started to wonder whether its slick marketing efforts cancelled out its savings from being an online bank. Also, you’ve always had to pair an ING Direct Investment Savings Account with a chequing account at another bank for full access to your money.

In spite of ING’s middle-of-the-road rates and lack of features, I’ve kept an ING Direct Canada account over the years because of its straightforward, easy-to-use online interface, good customer support, and occasionally decent promotions. Somehow it’s remained just relevant enough. (Why ING Direct Canada’s chequing account took so long to be unveiled is a bit of a mystery, since it has existed in the US for a few years now.) Today it launched a “preview” of its *almost* no-fee chequing account, called the THRiVE Chequing account. By “almost no-fee”, I mean that you still have to pay a small amount for the cheques themselves (after the first 20) and for other typically pay-per-use items such as drafts.

By “preview” I mean that it becomes available for use on September 14, and in its first phase, only to the first 10,000 existing customers who sign up before then. If you’re not already an existing customer, you can open any of its other accounts first (although, be sure to ask as existing customer for their referral code so that you can both get $25), and then immediately apply to get a chequing account. It will be directly available to completely new customers some time in 2011. While the official ING Direct reason for the phased rollout is to finetune the features based on customer feedback, there’s certainly an element of them needing to do more technical testing and of ramping up their internal resources to support such a huge endeavour!

Here are some key features of the ING Direct Canada THRiVE Chequing account. :

• free to write cheques; first 20 physical cheques are free, but each additional batch of 20 cheques is $10
• 1 free stop payment per year, then $10 each thereafter
• free debit
• free bill payments
• free withdrawals on EXCHANGE network ATMs, which comprise most credit unions and HSBC ATMs
• you can go $250 overdraft on your account without penalty as long as you pay it back within 30 days
• mobile account access
• customized e-mail alerts
• free e-mail money transfers; I believe that this is something that many people could benefit from
• 24/7 phone and e-mail support; there are also a small handful of ING Direct “cafes” where you can talk to someone in-person, although they can’t directly do that much for you
• $10 for Canadian drafts, including delivery (courier) costs

For a full list of fees, see this page, and for a full account description, see this page.

There is a nominal 0.25% interest rate (higher for balances over $50,000), but you can transfer money to and from an ING Direct Investment Savings Account that has a higher rate.

One thing I’ve always wondered with a fully online bank (or at least one with physical branches that are far away) is what to do if you ever need to deposit a US-dollar cheque. Apparently you can deposit it at an ATM as a Canadian cheque, and later when it’s processed (with something like a 30-day hold), the exchange rate will be applied.

Taking all of the information into account, I think that ING Direct’s new chequing account is an exciting new offering, one that I’ll certainly be trying out. Its feature set is quite complete.

If the THRiVE Chequing account is of interest to you, be sure to consider other options as well. For example, Coast Capital Savings in British Columbia already offers a no-fee chequing account, as does CIBC-owned PC Financial. PC Financial has lower interest rates, fewer features, and a clunkier interface, but does not charge you for the actual cheques.

GoodNews.com Vancouver officially launches today. The basic concept is simple: every day, there is a local food, adventure, fitness, product, or service deal / coupon for sale for up to 50% to 90% off. A few more details include:

• It makes use of group purchasing. Businesses can provide the deal because there’s an expectation that there will be at least a certain number of people buying it. In fact, there is usually a minimum number of purchases needed to “activate” the deal. If the deal is not activated, no one is charged. However, I expect that word of GoodNews.com will spread quickly and that almost every posted deal will get activated.
• It’s time-limited, with a prominently displayed countdown until the deal is no longer available. A big reason for this is that it makes more people want to get in on the “limited time offer”.
• Once you’ve purchased the deal, you get a coupon to print and bring it in to the relevant establishment.

If this sounds like Groupon and other deal-of-the-day websites, it’s because a lot of it is very similar. In fact, many of aspects of the GoodNews.com website follow the same model: playful descriptions of the featured businesses, savings percentages, communication methods (they want to e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook you often).

GoodNews.com is different in two ways. First of all, although they have expansion plans outside of Vancouver, they’re from Vancouver. So they’re local, and have a vested interest in supporting local business and a personal interest in seeking out cool deals in their own city.

Secondly, there’s the charity aspect. A portion of every purchase (10% at the moment) made will be donated to a local cause — currently Big Brothers Vancouver — giving money to the cause and also some publicity. (In fact, they are also donating a dollar to Big Brothers for every e-mail subscription sign-up until July 23. This is a good reason to check out GoodNews.com, and you can always unsubscribe!) The next cause is going to be the Celebration of Light. Of course, you could view the charity aspect as just a smart business move: they’re encouraging more people to buy the coupons because of the good cause. But at the end of the day, the charity or other local organization is getting some money that they otherwise wouldn’t have, and in a pretty cool way too.

GoodNews.com has been running in “soft launch” mode for about a week already, so we can already see some examples of what’s been featured: Hub Restaurant and Lounge, a jet ski or sea-doo rental, Piato Estiatoria, Regional Tasting Lounge, pilates, and Bonchaz. Technically there doesn’t have to be only one deal per day, but it’s a model that’s worked and it gets the featured businesses and charities some prominent awareness. I wouldn’t be surprised if down the road GoodNews.com finds a way to feature more than one business at a time. As for the types of deals available, you’ll probably see restaurant and other food deals most often, but I know that GoodNews.com wants to offer a variety of deals and welcomes suggestions.

For most people, taking advantage of GoodNews.com every day is not going to save you money unless you already have a lot of money and thus already go out all the time. Don’t get too caught up in chasing deals — remember that unlike coupon clipping, you actually have to purchase and commit to the deal before you use it! However, following their deals every day is a good way to find out new things about your own city! When you decide to purchase a deal, you’re supporting a local business and a local cause, and probably trying something new.

GoodNews.com is owned by Reinvent, the company with a domain name empire. While I’m not big on pay-per-click domains, it’s good to see them providing value to some of their domain names. And hopefully this means that GoodNews.com has the financial backing to become a solid business.

And a final green note — yes, it’s a bit wasteful to have to print each coupon. For those with smart phones (not me!), I’ve heard that there will be an app in the future!

The two main parts of WordPress and other popular CMS-powered websites are the database and the files. Your web host might keep regular backups of all elements of your site, but the unfortunate thing is that sometimes when your server is down, that is the most difficult time to access your host’s backups (as I discovered with a shared host). So it’s good to consider your own backup solutions.

If you have a MySQL database, a simple mysqldump command can save the database as a file and you can potentially e-mail it to yourself if it’s small enough. With or without the dumped database file, you then have to back up the rest of the files. Dropbox is a creative solution, but an easier and more direct solution is to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, otherwise known as Amazon S3. S3 is a service that’s part of the much hyped cloud computing, a land of seemingly infinite data and virtualized resources. Amazon S3 is cheap, well-documented, robust, easy-to-use, and there are many good scripts to interface with S3. It is more than just a good backup option, but for this post I’ll only talk about it within the context of backups.

Amazon S3′s costs are pay-per-use / pay-as-you-go and are split into a few categories:

• Storage: starting at $0.15 per gigabyte
• Data transfer in: Free until November 1, 2010; usually starting at $0.10 per GB
• Data transfer out: starting at $0.15 per GB
• Put and similar requests: 0.01 per 1,000 requests (if you have lots of files this will be the initial input)

Account management in Amazon breaks this down really well into minute details. My blog is relatively small, as I’ve only accumulated about 100mb of files in 4 years and the database is less than 2mb compressed. My monthly cost for daily and weekly backups is less than 20 cents.

Here are a few ways to get the most out of using Amazon S3 for backups:

• Back up only what you need to. Most CMSs let you place all your modifications in one or only a few places. In the case of WordPress, if your entire site is contained in plugins, themes, and uploads, you might only need to back up the wp-content/ folder, since you could restore the rest of the site from a downloaded instance of WordPress.
• Look into some of S3′s extra features, such as versioning and access control by IP as discussed in its FAQ
• Although Amazon S3 claims to be designed to provide “99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year”, it could still fail at the same time that your server fails. To mitigate this already-small risk, you could back up to multiple S3 regions, or look at a supplementary backup service such as Rackspace Cloud Files
• To actually access the backed up files, you can use the web-based AWS Management Console to view and download files, make them publicly accessible if needed, create “buckets” (top-level folders, which you can store in different physical locations). One of the more useful tools is a Firefox plugin called S3Fox Organizer, which lets you do much of the same stuff in a familiar explorer-like, two-panel interface (where you can drag-and-drop between your local file system on the left and the remote files on the right):

If you need a step-by-step process to using Amazon S3 starting with the sign-up process, check out this post. Below are my notes on how to use the free s3sync and s3fs tools for the actual backup process. Both assume that you’ve already created a bucket via the AWS Management Console or S3Fox Organizer, although you can also use both tools to create buckets.

s3sync

s3sync is a script written in Ruby. Ruby is usually installed on Linux servers and is easy to install if needed.

There are 3 main steps to start using s3sync.

Download and extract the script

You can currently download the latest version of s3sync at:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/ServEdge_pub/s3sync/s3sync.tar.gz

Then, you can extract the file through your control panel or with a simple tar command:

tar -zxf s3sync.tar.gz

Create a configuration file

You’ll need to make a copy of the included s3config.yml.example file. It is very simple and has only two required lines:

aws_access_key_id: your_access_key_id
aws_secret_access_key: your_secret_access_key

You can get both the access key ID and the secret access key on your account when you sign in to Amazon Web Services. Go to Account > Security Credentials.

As for where to place the configuration file, take a look at s3config.rb. Line 15 shows:

confpath = ["#{ENV['S3CONF']}", "#{ENV['HOME']}/.s3conf", "/etc/s3conf"]

So you can either place the s3config.yml file in a self-defined environmental variable (if you have command line access); or in your user’s home directory (usually /home/yourusername/.s3conf/s3config.yml) or in etc/s3conf/s3config.yml. If all else fails, you can just edit s3config.rb and hardcode a path!

Run the script

Before you set up your full backup, you can test that your credentials and connection are working properly by listing the buckets on your account. The command is simply:

./s3cmd.rb listbuckets

Note that s3cmd.rb needs to have executable permissions. If you don’t have command line / shell access to your server, you likely have access to a control panel where you can set up a cron job to execute s3cmd.rb. Just make sure that the cron job either refers to the full path where s3cmd.rb sits, or that it first changes directory (cd) into the folder to which you’ve extracted s3sync.

If all is well, you can then run the full backup script and then set up a cron job to back up your files daily and weekly (or at whatever frequency you’d like).

/path/to/s3sync/s3sync.rb -r /path/to/your/site theblog:daily

The command would back up your site to an existing bucket “theblog” under a sub-folder “daily”.

s3sync can also do many other Amazon S3 management tasks. Check the well-detailed README file for more information.

s3fs

s3fs is a simple solution for VPS and dedicated servers that enables you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket via a local FUSE file system. You can thus access your backup and sync it more or less locally.

(A quick note to VPS users — first, make sure that FUSE has been installed on the hardware node of the VPS setup! Your hosting company will have to do this for you. Otherwise, you might struggle with errors that seem to be file permission related (“fuse: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied”) but that are in fact not simply chmod, chown, or user group fixable!)

If needed, install the fuse, fuse-devel, and curl-devel packages on your server. If you’re on Red Hat, Fedora, or CentOS, you can make use of yum:

yum install fuse
yum install fuse-devel
yum install curl-devel

Then, download and extract the latest s3fs source files from the s3fs website. You’ll have to compile the source, but that’s usually a simple “make -f Makefile” command. Then, move the s3fs binary into /usr/bin and you’re ready to mount the Amazon S3 bucket!

/usr/bin/s3fs name_of_bucket -o accessKeyId=aaaa -o secretAccessKey=aaaa /mount_path


As noted in the above s3sync notes, you can get both the access key ID and the secret access key on your account when you sign in to Amazon Web Services. Go to Account > Security Credentials.

You can use the friendly rsync command to produce daily, weekly, or other frequency of backups:

rsync -av --delete /path/to/your/site/ /mount_path/daily


For the first time since possibly Fido (before it was acquired by Rogers), Canada has a new major cellular phone network operator: WIND Mobile. While many new wireless companies have formed over the past decade, such as Virgin Mobile, Koodo Mobile, and Speak Out Wireless, they are all either owned by one of the major operators (Telus, Bell, or Rogers) or they lease the usage of the major operators’ networks. WIND Mobile, on the other hand, actually operates its own network, and thus has the ability to be much more of a so-called game changer.

In many ways, WIND is different, for better or for worse! With WIND’s recent Vancouver launch, my curiosity has been piqued. Here are my thoughts and breakdowns of some of WIND’s major details. My goal is not to give a comprehensive review, but rather to share some details to think about when considering WIND.

No contract, almost

WIND’s offerings are contract-free, so figuring out how much the commitment really costs is straightforward… almost. You can cancel starting the next month and you can move on. And you can choose to go prepaid or post-paid on any of its monthly plans. (But don’t confuse prepaid with a true pay-as-you-go arrangement — WIND’s plans are still monthly plans.)

The catch, at least for now, is that you almost certainly will have to buy a WIND phone, and if you decide to leave WIND, you’ll have to have stuck around for 3 months before the phone is useful on other carriers. More details in the next point…

SIMs and phones

First of all, WIND will sell you a SIM card separately, which you could insert into an unlocked phone. So you can technically bring an unlocked phone to use with WIND. In the future this could be handy, but at the moment it is likely not so useful. Unfortunately, WIND uses the 1700 Mhz frequency band (also referred to as AWS), which is only used by some T-Mobile phones and the smaller Canadian wireless company Mobilicity. Up until now, most unlockable phones in North America are GSM phones, running on the 850 Mhz and/or 1900 Mhz frequency bands.

Once you’ve been with WIND for 3 months, the phone is quite useful because you can ask WIND to help you unlock it. WIND phones are 5-band phones, supporting the AWS band, the North American GSM bands, and the 900 / 1800 Mhz bands used in many other parts of the world, such as Europe. This is unlike some other Canadian carriers such as Koodo, whose phones will only work when you’re using Koodo, leaving you semi-stuck if you want to leave but don’t want to waste your phone. So the selection of WIND-compatible phones is somewhat limited, but WIND phones are compatible on a lot of other networks (even if they were probably forced to do this even be relevant)!

I’m not an avid cell phone model follower, so I cannot comment on the merits of the phones that WIND offers. You definitely don’t have your choice of all of the latest trends, though.

Yak bundles

WIND’s parent company is Globalive, which also runs Yak. Yak is best known for its long distance plans, but it also offers high speed Internet and home phone service. WIND’s website does not advertise this, but you can bundle some or all of its offerings in what they call Yak Paks. Pricing is competitive, but make sure you research reviews of Yak’s services and also decide whether you really want to put all your eggs in one basket!

Coverage, “zones”, and plans

WIND’s plans are good for the medium-to-heavy talk and text users. If you’re a light user (less than 100 minutes per month) look for something like pay-as-you-go with Speak Out Wireless. Data / web browsing is a standard add-on. It’s great to see that caller ID, call forwarding, call conferencing, and call waiting are included in all plans. Voicemail, though, is an extra $5 per month unless you’re on the highest plan. In keeping with the long-overdue trend in Canada, there are no extra 911 or system access fees with WIND.

An important and unique concept with WIND is the differentiation between a “WIND Zone” (aka local or almost-local) and an “AWAY Zone” (aka roaming). If you’re in one of the cities where WIND has built a network, you’re in a WIND Zone. Depending on your plan, you get province-wide calls from a WIND Zone; plus possibly unlimited incoming calls when in a WIND Zone; all the way up to unlimited Canada-wide calling from any WIND Zone. Because WIND’s network is relatively new (so far they’re in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Ottawa), this will be more of a perk as it grows.

AWAY Zone calls, including all incoming calls in an AWAY zone, are extra even on the most expensive plan. Their AWAY zone coverage map in Canada looks like Rogers’ coverage: in other words, coverage is as good as the other wireless providers but it’s obviously costing WIND to use the other networks. Other carriers have the benefit of a bigger network. At least with WIND you know you’re paying for what costs them and not paying so much when it’s cheaper for them… it’s semi-transparent. The within-Canada “roaming” rate actually isn’t bad (25 cents a minute extra for calls), and an unexpected advantage is that the US roaming rates are the same. WIND seems to beat Telus’, Bell’s, and Rogers’ US roaming rates by a large amount.

You can also roam and call internationally, although like any other Canadian carrier, be prepared to pay exorbitant amounts. If you want to make calls when you’re outside of Canada and the US, it’s usually best to get a SIM card from the local area. And if you regularly make calls internationally from Canada or from the US, get a calling card, use a landline, or use Skype or another VoIP option.

There is unlimited WIND-to-WIND calling (when in a WIND Zone) on every plan. This is consistent with WIND’s apparent approach of letting you benefit from their low marginal costs when you’re using their network — artificial charging of intra-network long distance calls is just not as bad with WIND.

Promotions

WIND usually has a promo going on. Some of its promotions have included $150 in credit when porting in a number; a free month of service for every new customer you refer; and 50% off plans for the first 6 months. Unlike the established carriers, these are deals worth being called deals, but remember to consider the regular price of the service once your promo has expired!

Also, if you’re an existing customer of another Canadian wireless company and you’re looking for a good deal, remember to try calling your current carrier’s retentions program!

Community

I can’t speak for WIND’s customer service, but they do have a community section on their website where you can post ideas and grievances, and share stories with other users. It’s one step below an actual forum or more fully-featured message board, which is likely a deliberate marketing move.

No WIND zone in Quebec

While you can still roam on WIND Mobile in Quebec, WIND won’t have an official presence in that province unless it partners with Videotron in the future.

Conclusion

Combine the fact that there are so many mobile company options these days, with people’s ever-changing and ever-evolving mobile needs, it’s quite tough to give an overall and/or standalone assessment of any company or its individual plans. WIND Mobile certainly has some unique offerings. It’ll be around for a while and needs to grow its network and phone selection, and see how its initial offerings go. And that’s the extent of what I can conclude. An effective search for a new provider starts with defining your own unique needs, and then seeing what’s out there — WIND Mobile is possibly a good option!