You can link PayPal with your Coast Capital Savings account very easily. You’ll need to have two things in order before we start.
To link a new bank account you’ll want to start by opening PayPal and logging in there. Under My Account click Profile, then under Financial Information open Bank Accounts, and from this page click “add”. Depending on your situation, there are a number of ways you can get the rest of the info you’ll need.
Continue reading ‘Using PayPal with Coast Capital’
I wrote about my experience with the EyeTV in Canada about a year ago. After my praise was concerns that the EPG (Electronic Program Guide), that let’s you schedule recordings and see what’s on, comes with an expiry date. Well for me and other early-adpoters, that date is January 21, 2010.
Look. I’m not one to complain about paying for things. I understand that nothing is free, and someone is paying for services I use even if they don’t cost me anything. But this is 2010 and TV listings are everywhere. I can go to canada.com and get listings for free, or stop at the gas station and grab a TV Guide for free (this is same company that’s making us pay for EPG). Forcing us to fork over $19.95 USD just so we can use the listings in EyeTV is absolutely ridiculous. Its not a huge expense, but the irritation of the whole process just puts me off.
Making the situation worse is that most Canadian cable providers encrypt their digital channels. So even with the listings I can still only watch and record in standard definition. The experience is just dismal in comparison to what’s available in the US (for almost nothing or nothing at all). I won’t be purchasing a subscription. Best wishes for those of you who decide to get one.
If anyone is considering creating Canadian EPG alternative, please contact me and I will provide help and server resources.
My on-contract mobile died the other week and I had to consider my options. I’ve been using a Nokia 6265i with Telus for the past two years. It was pretty good phone, if not way too bulky. Then it started doing strange things. The phone would reboot for no reason, drop calls for no reason and it would forget the theme it was supposed to use. Then it started to take longer to boot up. That problem grew exponentially worse until one day on a trip to the US the phone stopped working completely. Apparently this a common problem with the phone; it just decides to drop dead on a whim.
Telus told me that, because I was already on contract and out-of-warranty, I would have to pay $250 for a “software fix”. I was also welcomed to pay the unsubsidized price (about $350+ for anything from this century) for a new phone, plus a $10 new activation/transfer fee. I understand that Telus is a business and needs to make money, but since I’ve been a customer for several years, and have three lines on my account, I figure they could have offered me something a little nicer. Tough luck.
Continue reading ‘Replacement on Telus: KRZR k1m’
I’ve long dreamed of setting up a Mac based media center. So during the past few days I’ve been testing out some solutions to this little problem. There are the obvious ones, like the AppleTV, and then some more complicated mixtures of hardware and applications.
My goal is to sync or stream all of my digital media (music, TV shows, movies, pictures etc) to a large SDTV (standard definition television) in the family room.
1) AppleTV
The AppleTV is an amazing little box. It’ll sync or stream nearly all of your media from any computer that can run iTunes. There’s also some nifty plugins to extend its functionality. On paper it looks perfect, but in practice it caries a number of limitations.
- Initial cost
- File type limitations (think DIVX etc)
- Limited configurability/tweaking
- No support for SDTVs
These limitations are somewhat superficial, I could solve most of them by hacking and having a bigger wallet. At this time, however, the AppleTV just isn’t a viable option.
Continue reading ‘Big Ideas for a Mac mini’
The world is full habits and quirks, and over time people come to accept all that quirkiness. A lot of the time it seems that acceptance evolves into some sort of dependence. Soon we find ourselves addicted to the way things work. This can be observed in everyday life, but if you’re looking for some proof right now take a look at the reaction to the “New Facebook”. It sounds like a great number of people absolutely hate it. But what is it that people hate?
Continue reading ‘Change is Strange’