Fido LCA (roughly the same as Telus)

Recently I was wondering what the borders of my ‘local calling area’ were. The LCA is the set of boundaries, on any provider, in which you can place calls without being charged long-distance. Telus Mobility doesn’t have a public map (or even a list) available of their LCA.

So below I’ve placed a list of townships you can call, while physically in the Greater Vancouver Area, without being charged long distance.

Abbotsford, Aldergrove, Aspen Park, Bowen Island, Cedar, Chemainus, Cloverdale, Coquitlam, Duncan, Fulford hrbr., Gabriola, Ganges, Gibsons, Gulf islands, Haney, Ladner, Ladysmith, Lake Cowichan, Langley, Lantzville, Mission, Nanoose, New Westminster, Newton, Pitt Meadows, Port Coquitlam, Port Mellon, Port Moody, Qualicom Beach, Richmond, Sardis, Sechelt, Steveston, Vancouver, Whalley, White Rock, Whonnock

If you leave the Greater Vancouver Area (but are still in one of the townships above) incoming calls will not be charged extra, but outgoing calls will be charged long-distance. Its complicated, but this is how the carriers have decided to handle long-distance in our country.

Telus, Koodo, Rogers, Fido, Bell, Solo, Virgin and other sub-brands share loosely the same local calling areas across the country. Fido provides the best maps, you can see Fido’s LCA maps on their site.

New wireless carriers like WIND and Mobility generally have province-wide local calling areas, but you have to pay roaming fees when outside of their respective coverage ares. Interestingly, its cheaper to roam with either WIND ($0.25/min) or Mobilicity ($0.20/min) then pay the incumbents long-distance rates (around $0.45/min).

You can avoid just about all long-distance charges by using a combination of nationwide favourite numbers, Skype (on Wifi and 3G) or other VOIP services. Long-distance is a scam.

The next theme to get its 1.6 update is Realize. I’ve gotten more emails and PMs than I can count, and I promise its coming within the next 48 hours. Thanks for waiting everyone! Here are some screenshots, enjoy.

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

New login box

New search box

My latest issue with them resulted in more than a week of technical issues and wasted time. It was only resolved when I moved my domain to a different company. I was further irritated when they billed me for the domain, that had been transferred to another company a month earlier, and forced me to fill in a form and fax it across the continent to be reimbursed.

A word of advice for 1&1 customers trying to setup or change GLUE (nameserver IPs) for their domain. After making changes to your subdomains ns1 and ns2.yourdomain.com, you must go into the settings for yourdomain.com and click “update” to start the update process. Otherwise nothing will happen and your GLUE will not be updated, and sometimes even this doesn’t work. Best of luck.

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.

2) Tiger + ATV4mac

Because I already have an unused Mac mini, this option removes the up front cost of running my media center. AT4mac is a really cool project that lets you run the Apple TV OS as an application on any intel Mac running Tiger. It requires OS X 10.4 because the Apple TV OS is based on the older version, and it turns out that installing Tiger on my mini was the most difficult step. I installed Perian to cover those missing formats and picked up an Apple DVI to Video converter to connect to the television. Audio went through a headphone to composite adapter directly into the receiver. The procedure to get ATV4mac up and running was quick and painless. Afterwards I was able to sync, stream and play with my media flawlessly. All the functions of the Apple TV were present and functional. 

The problem is, once again, that I’m using an SDTV (See update below). While the ATV4mac brings down the resolution, it still has a widescreen ratio. This means the right most 1/4 of the picture is cut off. By using this solution I avoided all the issues surrounding the Apple TV except for the problem related to my SDTV. 

3) Leopard + Front Row

Until an HDTV enters the equation, it looks like the Apple TV route isn’t the way to go. The next obvious solution is Front Row. I had problems with Front Row on Tiger crashing, so I reinstalled Leopard on the mini and chose some tools to make things work. 

I installed Perian again, and I also got a copy of Sofa Control. It lets you do almost anything you can do with your mouse and keyboard right from your Apple Remote. Then I installed Syncopation. This little app is idea for our project. It connects to iTunes libraries on the network and automatically merges them into to one. All the media can then be played in Front Row. Its pretty slick, but I’m disappointed that there isn’t a free alternative. I’d really like to sync remote iTunes libraries just like you can an Apple TV. You can’t buy or rent content directly from Front Row either, and there’s also the missing YouTube and Flickr access. This solution is less than perfect, but at least it works without cutting off the screen.  

In conclusion I have to say none of these solutions turned out to be all I hoped for. The good news I can watch video and play my music, even if the process to do those is convoluted. I hope that someone finds a better solution or that I get an HDTV, and I’ll update this story once one of those things happens.

Update: I found a solution (SwitchResX) to the ATV4mac / SDTV problem. I’ll provide a tutorial soon outlining how to get your intel Mac and old SDTV to work together.

Here are some complaints I’ve heard:

• I don’t like the new wall
• I can’t see all the stuff on my profile now
• I can’t find x or x, and I don’t know where x went
• Its too wide and theirs too much whitespace

At first I was complaining too. When I stopped and looked at the changes objectively, however, I realized that all of these complaints were drop dead stupid. The new wall is an improvement, it consolidates the massive amounts of information people share on Facebook into one easy to read cornucopia of awesomeness.

The Facebook developers took out all the boxes that applications made and put them on their own tabs. They’re still easily accessible, but without having to scroll for decades or wait an inexplicably long time for profiles to load.

People are having problems finding things because they’re still thinking about the original interface. Let go. Approaching the site as if you had never visited makes it easy to figure out, its really well laid out if you forget about the weird conventions of the old UI.

The width makes way for new, better ways to organize information on Facebook pages. It also allows for that whitespace, which we really should love. Most people prefer living and working in open and clutter-free enviorment, so why not Facebooking? 

The reason comes back to what I was talking about before, the status quo. People are used to the old Facebook, they like the old Facebook. Some have even vowed to stop using the site over the change. Its time to forget all that hate and move on.

You know what I hate? Junk mail. And starvation. And cancer.