• A Coast Capital chequing or savings account (its best to use one with no transaction fees like “The Free Chequing, Free Debit and More Account” or “The High‑interest, No‑fee Savings Account“)
• A PayPal account. Its important that your name is entered exactly the same on both your PayPal and Coast Capital accounts.

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.

1) If you have cheques for the account you want to add, then all you have to is follow the instructions on the PayPal site. Copy the information from your cheque using the diagram supplied.

2) If  you only have online banking there’s a little more leg work to do. Start by logging in at Coast Capital, then open the summary for the account you want to link with PayPal (by clicking on its name). On this page you need to copy the account number (the number circled in red). This number is unique to the actual account, is not the same as your membership number, and is usually 12 characters long. Enter this number in the “Account Number” field on PayPal, and re-enter in the confirmation field.

Then you’ll need to find the transit number for your branch (usually the Coast Capital branch where you opened your account). Look for your branch on this page and copy its number into the “Bank Transit Number” field back on PayPal. Enter 809 in the “Institution Number” field.

And submit! That’s all. In a few days you’ll receive two small deposits, and then you can go back to PayPal and confirm your account. You’ll be able to fund purchases from your bank account, as well as withdraw funds from PayPal into your Bank Account.

Coast Capital will not charge you for PayPal transactions if you have a bank account with no transaction fees, although PayPal will ding you $0.50 for transfers less than $150CAD. This is cheaper than using hyperWALLET ($0.85), and its a lot more versatile. Using PayPal is also a great way to accept credit card payments without having setup a merchant account.

1. Click the Account tab on the right.
2. Click Edit Friends (the first link under your name)
3. Type the person’s name under the Facebook logo
4. Click the X to the right of the their name
5. Wonder why they made it so difficult??

I posted this information on Howard Forums a week ago:

-The issue has a KIT (known issue ticket) with hundreds of customers attached, this is likely only a very small fraction of those affected.
-Only [some] CDMA –> HSPA accounts are affected, and only iPhones. New accounts appear to be fine.
-Telus has known about the problem since November 20, and Operations has been working with it since.
-Up and ups at Telus have been alerted about the issue and its a ‘priority’.
-They couldn’t figure out what’s wrong, so they had to contact a third-party. Sounds like its Openwave since they control MMS gateway.

And the biggest news is that the KIT promised more information this week. So hopefully tomorrow or early next week we should at least know what the problem is, and hopefully see a fix.

But more than a week has passed and no update is available. I am extremely irritated by how closed Telus has been on this issue. I’ve spoken to more than a dozen reps that, while friendly, have been given absolutely no concrete information about the problem. I want to know what the problem is yesterday and I want a solution now.

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.

It looks pretty expansive although I can already see some potential problems. I can’t wait to see what coverage will actually be later this quarter in Q1-Q3. Feel free to comment and share.

UPDATE: There’s an awesome, updated map available now. You can even overlay different carriers and zoom in on your area.

Wind Mobile base stations in Vancouver (licensed). Click to enlarge.

• I can’t send MMS to other Telus clients
• I can receive MMS from other Telus clients
• I can send an receive from non-Telus clients (Rogers, Fido, Bell)

I don’t know what’s going on at Telus. They have been very friendly and understanding on the phone, but the data department seems a little brain dead on the issue. Its a “known issue”, but it hasn’t been resolved. They also closed all the tickets related to the problem without a fix. The rep I spoke with today said I should “check from time to time”. That’s not really an acceptable solution, but I have received a credit for %50 off last month and the promise of another if the issue isn’t resolved.

So no progress yet, and my only suggestion would be to email pictures instead at this point. Are you having the same problem?

Also I’ve attached the latest Telus Carrier Update file (5.1) for others who are on the troubleshooting journey….

Quack!

Here’s wishing everyone a ridiculously great holiday season, and a happy new year!

This is a card I received last year. Pretty neat, eh?

Best,

Brendan

There’s actually a surprisingly wide selection out there, and these are some details you should pay attention to when looking for a backup / external battery for your phone.

• Capacity: iPhone’s have about 1200 mAh capacity, so bear in mind how many times you mind want to charge your phone.
• Size/shape: For this to be useful you’ll have to carry it with you. Pick a battery that fits in your bag, case or purse.
• Price: Prices range from about $9-$60. More expensive batteries aren’t necessarily any better. Read on for my suggestion.

I chose the Monoprice iPhone Battery Pack (1900mAh). Its holds enough to charge my phone 1 and 1/2 times, its small enough to slip in my bag and it was super-cheap! $9 + $2 shipping to Canada got this to my door in just under two weeks.

Monoprice is an excellent company; in my experience their products are exceptionally high quality and very reasonably priced. The backup battery was no different-it does exactly waht its supposed to. You charge it with your iPhone cable or dock and pack it away for when its needed. Then when you’re running low on power just plug it in the bottom and the phone starts charging immediatley.

So if you’re thinking about getting the Monoprice device, or any backup battery, go for it. You won’t regret having the security.

I have four email accounts that I want pushed to my iPhone. 1 Gmail, 2 Google Apps, and 1 external account. Since you can only use 1 Exchange account (Google Sync) on your iPhone I had to come up with a crafty solution.

You could forward all mail to one MobileMe / Yahoo / Exchange / Google Sync account. The problem with that setup is that when you reply to emails they will all be sent from your push enabled account, and not necessarily the one they were sent to.

Instead, I setup all of my email accounts using IMAP and set the fetch interval to 1 hour. This way I can open emails on the right account and reply normally. I’m still not getting push, so I also went into the online settings for my email accounts and setup forwarding to a single Google Sync address (eg iphone@mydomain.com). Now I have the four normal email accounts and one push (iPhone Pushmail) that receives all mail from the others instantly.

Another problem. Now I receive immediate notifications of new mail, but once I open up Mail it fetches from the IMAP accounts, and now I have duplicate new emails. Gross. To solve this problem I logged into to my iphone@yourdomain.com Google Apps (Google Sync enabled) account, and setup a filter that makes all messages “skip the inbox” and applies a label “iPhone” to them.

Then I went in to my Mail settings on my phone and enabled push for the new “iPhone” folder on my iphone@youdomain.com account.

The result: when new mail is received, I get an instant notification. The counter on Mail doesn’t increase, but there is a sound and the phone vibrates just the same. From this point I can open Mail and new messages are quickly fetched from the IMAP accounts.

This solution is far from elegant and I hope if you find something better you’ll share it with me. Hopefully Apple can work with more email providers to make push support a little more common.