Laser printer emissions
Paper from Queensland comparing emissions from various brands of laser printers
http://cdn.sfgate.com/chronicle/acrobat/2007/08/01/printer_es063049z.pdf
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Wayne
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Wayne
Beware the telstra pre-paid cap encore offer!
I took advantage of the latest Telstra Encore offer on prepaid mobile where for $40 you get $550 worth of calls, but it ran out in the first day – very strange… how could I use $550 worth of calls in one day?
BEWARE THE FINE PRINT….
They dramatically increase the call costs if you switch to the Encore Plan… it’s a marketing lie…
So checking the special call rates for if you happen to take this wonderful telstra offer…
For example… calls to Vanuatu go up to $5.99 per minute compared to $1.45 on any other pre-paid plan.
USA rates go up to 99c compared to 15c on the simplicity plan.
The worst is calls to New Zealand are a massive $3.49 per minute compared to 20c per minute on the Simplicity plan!
So your $550 worth of ‘free’ calls on the Encore plan are actually worth as little as $31 depending on where you call – less than what you paid for them.
Thanks Telstra
Normal Telstra call rates for pre-paid mobile
Call rates are inflated when you go on Telstra Encore cap plan
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Wayne
Be careful of wp-secure plugin
wp-secure plugin has an option to ‘secure your wp’content’ folder.
I did this and look what happened to my traffic – it dropped from 6000 hits a day to 600!
The reason for this is that blocking wp-content via the htaccess returns a 403 error to googlebot and therefore google removes all your wordpress content from the google search results. It took me a while to work out what was causing the problem!
I’ve undone the wp-content protection and my site is back in google now.
Update: It’s fixed again! Took moat a week for Google to find it again though:
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Wayne
Basecamp is very good
websitemovers just moved a site for me and used base camp, it was real good and might be useful if i ever have to manage a project with multiple people.
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Wayne
Website hosting – Bluehost/Layeredtech/Rackspace
My blue host server has become a sluggish lately. The CPU throttling is on more than not and sometimes the webpages take a long time to load or I even get a “database unavailable” error.
My http://macintoshhowto.com site is getting 150K visits a month, http://dubbo.org gets 20K visits monthly and http://mac-host.com/support gets 60K, plus I host http://dpc.org.au and http://wpcc.org.au and a few other sites on the same server!
Currently I’m using bluehost.com and it costs me 6.95 per month – pretty cheap and very reliable, it’s just struggling with so many hits.
I have been looking into an alternate server. I want a really good quality server with no downtime for my macintoshhowto.com site. After some research I came up with the following as my top two options:
I could get a VPS server here with 2 gig of ram, 20% CPU usage, 60 gig hard drive and cpanel access for about $115 per month. I think they are used by ma.tt and WordPress.com. Their technical support was very helpful and they seem very reliable. It would come all setup with c-panel ready to go.
I could get a cloud server for about $100 pm but I’d have to install all the server and-panel software on it from scratch. I could get a cloud site which would come installed but now we’re looking at about $150pm. cloud sites looks like the best option, it can deal with 2 million page views per month.
Media Temple and iWeb were my other options.
Note the huge jump from $7 a month at bluehost! It seems that when you go from shared hosting to VPS it’s a huge jump.
So I decided to go a different direction. I split my bluehost sites up and moved macintoshhowto.com to it’s own server.
Bluehost had a reseller option for $20 but the total bandwidth was limited to the same as one account. They also have a pro option for $20 but it has no more CPU power. So it seems like multiple accounts is best back for the dollar.
To do this I used websitemovers.com and they did a good job.
How to split a domain off your account:
1. setup new account with dummy domain name.
2. move files across (websitemovers did this)
3. change local hosts file so you can test new site ‘live’
4. manually unnasign domain name from origin c-panel
5. manually add the domain (parked) to new domain
6. ask bluehost to make new parked domain the primary one
7. wait 5 hours, but I only had to wait 3 and it was working.Maybe I could have done it myself, but I’m happy to pay someone else as I don’t want this to take up any of my time.
If I want to do it again in the future I probably follow these instructions from media temple for the move across bit:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/1892/Migrate+to+a+%28dv%29+from+a+%28gs%29
Lower the TTL on the DNS. (not necessary??)
auto mysql backup to a folder like cpbackup/daily/domain/mysql/domain.sql and .create
maybe here search for old pathnames.
Then upload the SQL.
Backup from c-panel (to file like backup-mon-jan-etc zip file 140Mb – the file directory)
maybe unzip and check for pathnames in php files??????????
then upload the zip and unpack files
test
change DNS entries.
lower TTL again.I’ve upgraded to a dedicated IP with the new blue host account.
So far NO CPU throttling at all!
Here’s a good little site to work out how many other people are sharing your IP address on a server:
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Wayne
Altec Lansing speakers BXR1221 – don’t bother.
Lots of reviews say these speakers are pretty good “surprisingly decent sound for their size” and so on… so when they were 75% off at big W for $25 I bought a pair. They sound terrible. Not worth $25.
To me they sound ‘thin, harsh and muddy’.
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Wayne
Miele… very good.
Just got a Miele dishwasher and happy to find out from Miele support that you can use Vinegar instead of rinse-aid if you need to. Our family is sensitive to perfumes and chemicals so this is great news. Nice dishwasher. G4101 or something like that. The bottom of the line. Well designed and built. I like good things.
My recommendations for good things are:
Best 2nd hand washing machine: Fisher and Paykel
Best New or second hand Dishwasher: Miele
Best Factory Second cooktop: Electrolux
Best Computer: Mac
Best Wood Heater: Turbo Ten burning Log (Australian Company)
Best Portable Powered Speakers: Mackie or QSC.
Best general purpose mics for singing: Shure SM58.
Best People Mover: Chrysler Voyager.
Best ipod: 5th Gen classic iPod.
Best PA Mixer: Allen and Heath.
Best Blog Software: WordPress
Best Chocolate: Cadbury
Best Orange Juice: Nudie-
Samuel
So how are you enjoying it? We are torn between Bosch, KitchenAid, and just recently heard about the Miele. Would love an update.
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Wayne
No complaints, well designed, good support.
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Wayne
I love things that don’t make sense
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html
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Wayne
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Wayne
Good Places to print stuff in Australia
T-Shirts
Exceptional quality. $452 for 25 shirts front and back.
ECLIPSE SCREEN PRINTING 2/26 TATHRA ST WEST GOSFORD NSW 2250 1300 509 543
Postcards full colour both sides
A web console to tell you how it’s progressing. 100mm x 150mm 10,000 cards for $500 (plain) - $650 (matt cello glaze)
Business cards:
http://www.qldtradeprint.com.au/
Exceptional quality matt celloglaze 2 sided full colour business cards. 54mmx90mm 400gsm $45 for 1000. Look and feel great.
DL folders
Not the greatest quality finish but these folders are very expensive and at least this price was reasonable. $801.90 for 1000 folders.
These are folders that will hold DL flyers. We use them at church for a welcome folder.
Wayne, and 
Ahmad are discussing. 
Samuel are discussing. 
Ahmad 3:01 pm on March 7, 2012 Permalink |
That is because the Cap Encore uses a multiplier on your credit, whereas the other plans do not.
So assuming you recharge with the $50 voucher on a Cap Encore, you get $1000 of Cap credit, and that’s where the $6 per minute goes out of.
Effectively, the IDD rate on a cap is (Recharge/Cap Value)*(per min rate). So $6/min is actually 30c/min from your recharge.
So using that Vanuatu call rate as an example, Simplicity gives you only face value of the voucher, so $1.45/min from that will be 30ish minutes…whereas a $50 recharge on the Cap Encore gets you 150 or so minutes.
Wayne 1:26 am on March 8, 2012 Permalink |
So the so called $1000 credit you get is like monopoly money, it’s not really worth $1000. So they shouldn’t call it $1000 credit!
It’s like saying we’re selling $100 petrol vouchers for $20, but after you purchase one they charge you $10 per litre for the petrol.
Ahmad 2:22 pm on March 16, 2012 Permalink |
It’s true that this is a bit fuzzy, but the actual underlying call rates for most “caps” are quite nominal. Voda has stopped calling them “Caps” now (they just call them “plans)..
The inherent advantage for carriers, esp on post-paid plans is that when you go over the included value, you are charged the full “monopoly money” call rates in real dollars…
Wayne 11:46 pm on March 21, 2012 Permalink |
How is $5.99 per minute ‘nominal’? Do you work for Telstra Ahmed?