Peter's Useful Crap

It might only be a pilot program and only available in some cities for now, but Metro Vancouver, Delta, Coquitlam, West Vancouver, and Langley are going to start picking up your food waste, napkins, pizza boxes, and more to compost. This means that more of your waste can be put back to good use rather than being dumped in a landfill. Not everyone has the yard or perhaps even the inspiration to do their own composting, but this could get more people involved if it’s as easy as putting the food waste out next to your other garbage.

Be sure to check with your city for more information about collection eligibility and procedures. For example, the Metro Vancouver site has a good list of food scraps recycling FAQs including information about what can and cannot be composte . Here is a brief article about this from The Province newspaper. One thing to note is that you should not put your “compostables” into plastic bags — use either paper-based liners or put the food directly into the bin.

Previously I’d written a review about how Dropbox is a do-everything storage service. Dropbox continues to improve and continues to grow its user base, and my company uses it daily to instantly share files without conflicts. In this post, I won’t explain the basics of what Dropbox does; for that, you can check the Dropbox website or my older Dropbox review.

Most people use Dropbox as a desktop program, and as a desktop program there are countless useful and time-saving ways to benefit from it. However, one of its more obscure but powerful uses is on a web server, more specifically a VPS or dedicated Linux server where you might only have command line access (as opposed to a graphical interface to it).

Here are a few of the scenarios where you can benefit from having Dropbox installed not only on your desktop client but also on a web server:

• It provides an easy way to log and get instant notifications whenever files are changed on your website. I use this on speakoutwireless.ca, where files are not expected to change often.
• It provides an easy way to have an automatic and instant backup of the files on your site. Note that for the database aspect of your site, it is probably only good for storing periodic backups — you could dump the database once a day into the Dropbox folder.
• You can push some or all of your Dropbox files onto your web server and then these files could be publicly accessible on whatever domain name you have. This is in addition to the public links that you can generate for files in your Dropbox “Public” folder.

Before you install Dropbox on a Linux web server, make sure you know at least some basics about users and groups and that you are at least comfortable on the command line. Then, there is a good tutorial on the Dropbox wiki, and if your server is running CentOS, from Justin Kelly’s site.

Some additional notes:

• While Dropbox works well for backing up files from the web server to your computer (and to Dropbox’s servers), there is a limitation when you are pushing files from your computer to the web server: file permissions are not preserved when the file is updated on the web server. If file permissions are important for your website, you must re-do them whenever you push something to the server.
• The tutorials suggest that you install Dropbox in the desired user’s directory. It does not have to sit directly in the web-accessible folder (such as “www” or “public_html”). You can create a symbolic link in the Dropbox folder to the web-accessible folder with a simple command like “ln -s /home/youruser/public_html/yoursite yoursite” from within the Dropbox home directory.

One of PayPal’s recent fee structure changes makes it clearer and simpler for people to transfer money to each other for non-business purposes.

Now, the sender can choose the type of payment they are sending. If it is a “personal” payment funded by a bank account, the recipient will not be charged a fee regardless of whether they have a Personal or Premier account (I have both types, which has sometimes caused confusion and resulted in more fees).

For those who are familiar with the old way of doing things with PayPal, if you had a Premier account that also accepts credit cards, you would be charged a fee on every payment you receive, even if it were funded directly from a bank account. Now, there is a clear distinction between a business transaction and a personal transaction (and the fees associated with them) without you having to maintain two PayPal accounts, two bank accounts, possibly two credit cards, etc. Business transactions incur fees; personal transactions do not.

A bit of background for those who are unfamiliar with PayPal: first, you link your chequing account to your PayPal account (similar to how you set up direct deposits and direct debits). Then, when you send money funded by a bank account, if goes to the recipient’s PayPal account — not directly into their bank account. To get money out of a PayPal account, you can either withdraw it to your bank account or send it to someone else’s PayPal account.

But there is a fee at some point

PayPal does charge a fee for personal transfers at some point — when you want to withdraw your money from your PayPal account to your bank account. If you are withdrawing less than $150, you will pay a $0.50 fee. If you are withdrawing more than $150, there is no fee.

However, this is cheaper than Interac Email Money Transfers, where the sending bank often charges you $1.50, and then the recipient might even be charged to receive the money.

Also, with PayPal you have the option to accumulate $150 in your account before withdrawing, in order to avoid the fee. The trade-off is the interest you would have earned in your bank account, since PayPal does not pay you interest. That’s about $0.25 on every $150 for every month your money sits in your PayPal account, assuming your bank would have paid you 2% in interest.

Since Citizens Bank is closing and I can’t force my friends and family to all choose the same new bank, maybe we can start using PayPal to pay each other back for things… until a truly free inter-bank electronic transferring system comes along!

When we (my business partners and I) assumed ownership of Mugo Web, we decided to adopt the DIY approach for most of our corporate affairs. Since we had taken over a small-ish existing company, we didn’t have as much work to do to get everything in order, as compared to if we had set something up from scratch. However, we still want our customers to be paying for our website development work -– not for our lawyers’ per-email fees!

Our first order of business was to set up a “doing business as” name. The existing Canadian corporate entity that we took over had been operating under a long and relevant name to many existing clients. However, we needed to be able to move forward as “Mugo Web” while still keeping our old setup. In essence, setting up a dba name would allow us to officially operate as Mugo Web and also receive payments written to “Mugo Web”, without having to set up a new corporation, get another business number, and so on.

The process involved two simple steps.

First, we filled out the Name Approval Request Form available on the BC Ministry of Finance Corporate Registry site. Information required included applicant information, a description of the nature of the business, and our top three name choices. Along with a $30 application fee, we mailed the form to Victoria.

Three weeks later, we received notice of our name’s approval – our first choice was available! To complete our dba name process, we went to BC’s OneStop Business Registry website and registered a proprietorship under the name “Mugo Web”, owned by our existing Canadian corporation. This form was completed online, and required a $40 fee payable by credit card. We received instant confirmation of our registered proprietorship in PDF form, sent via e-mail. We forwarded that PDF to our bank account manager, and Mugo Web was officially born.

Mugo Web took $70 and an hour of research and filling out forms. It was well worth it!

Having bought and sold on eBay for over 10 years, I’ve learned some basics about being diligent about your purchases, and have never had a problem buying genuine products from honest sellers:

• Ask the seller questions
• Make sure the seller will ship to your area
• Check the seller’s feedback
• Find out as much background about the seller as possible
• Use PayPal or a credit card to pay
• Comparison shop with past listings

If you are looking to buy a GHD hair straightener on eBay, I would suggest that you be extra careful and that you consider whether the risk (of time spent researching beforehand and of time and money lost if you end up with a fake) is worth the potential savings. Also, if you end up with a fake, working product, you cannot be sure of the quality control done on it. And while I don’t use hair straighteners, I’m sure that the combination of hair and electricity in the bathroom is not something you want to mess with.

Recently, my friend wanted to purchase a GHD hair straightener on eBay. The price appeal is understandable — such a straightener retails for over $200, and there are many listings on eBay that have it for less than $150. And there are legitimate reasons for people to sell legitimate hair straighteners for less than retail: clearing of stock, closing out sales, and so on. Every day my friend would research the listings, sifting through the obviously fake and the somewhat sketchy listings. She found a couple of “how to spot a fake” guides (here and here) to help with the process. Eventually, she settled on a listing, which I thought looked fine:

• The seller was Canadian
• The seller claimed a genuine product
• The seller said he/she had stock on hand
• The seller had perfect feedback and had been on eBay for several years
• The product pictures looked real

So I bought it and we ended up with a fake. But at first glance it looks real:

Everything is included, and the presentation is slick.

Upon closer inspection, we found that some aspects of the product were just not right.

The product was shipped from a factory in China called “Tian Jin”. First of all, why in the world did it ship from China? Also, if you do a Google search, you’ll see that factory name on a long list of known counterfeit producers.

The seller had given me a tracking number that he/she claimed was a Canada Post number. As it turns out, it was a USPS tracking number.

There were spelling mistakes on the box and in the product booklets. These mistakes aren’t rampant, and are probably due to human error in reproducing the material or from stealing unedited versions of the material. Some examples:

• “… and the ghd styler gose to sleep”
• “… style with heat and style without feat.”
• “… it’s so easy to creat waves…”
• “… to straightening ro plumping-up volume…”

The inner box made a reference to the “pink styler”. The actual straightener was not pink. The product booklets were intended for the United Kingdom; however, the actual styler shipped is the North American version with the North American plug.

The serial number 6uveg v5myc wk15s is not unique, if you do a Google search.

Also, the serial number was attached to the straightener in two different places, and was different in both locations.

I was able to discover further disturbing evidence. In doing a Google search for the seller’s username (and full name and e-mail address), I found that he/she had been posting on a message board, where someone else was offering to sell their “get rich quick on eBay” scheme. That other person described this scheme as easy to do, where you don’t have to even touch the product, and it gets shipped directly to the customer. Based on that and a bit more of what was written, it was obvious as to what had happened.

I contacted the seller saying that I knew the product was a fake and I asked for a refund. I didn’t get a response. Since I paid via PayPal, I filed a claim under the category “Item significantly not as described” and included the evidence (and quite a bit more) listed above. After about two weeks and not a peep from the seller, the money was refunded. I think we got a bit lucky here, because if the seller had tried to argue the claim, it would have probably ended up with a long, drawn-out process.

eBay is a great marketplace for most products. But be vigilant about fake GHD hair straighteners! My friend’s fake styler sits in the box, unused, where it will probably remain. Undoubtedly, the counterfeit producers in China will get smarter, and correct some of the easy-to-fix errors while still churning out a product of questionable functional quality. Some tricks, like producing a randomized serial number, are hard to spot until you actually have the product; after all, even if you ask the seller for the serial number, a Google search would turn up empty, and you’re not likely to register it until you have it in your hands. Is it worth your effort to stay on top of that?