Ben Kahn

I’ve been a Bank of America customer for 12 years or so, ever since I moved to Boston from New York. I picked them because they were everywhere, and I didn’t ever want to switch banks again. When the big “Bank Transfer Day” came, I decided to switch banks too. I was annoyed about the plans for the new $5/month fee, but I wasn’t all that happy with Bank of America anyway.

I decided on Cambridge Savings Bank because they are close by, they refund all ATM fees other banks charge you, and they pay 2% interest on checking account balances. (BTW — there are many banks that pay more than 2% interest on checking accounts. Check out depositaccounts.com to find banks near you. Don’t forget to change the filter options to show local banks and credit unions.)

However, I still don’t like switching banks, so I searched around for questions to ask a potential bank before you open an account. Here are the questions I came up with:

Fee Questions:

• Do you have overdraft fees and how can you avoid them?
• What fees are there for checking accounts?
• What fees are there for savings accounts?
• Are there fees to transfer money to/from my account?
• Do you charge debit card fees?

Convenience Questions:

• How many ATMs are available in my area?
• Which ATMS accept deposits?
• How long does it take for a deposit to clear?
• Are large deposits delayed? How much is a large deposit? How long is the delay?
• When we travel to…  XXX how can we get money and are there fees?
• XXX == countries and states and regions you typically travel to
• How do we make deposits?
• Bank ATMs? Smartphone app? Bank network ATMs? Local branch? Non-local branch? Affiliate bank branch? Computer application with a scanner? Mail?

When things go wrong:

• What happens if we lose a debit card?
• What are your procedures if a card is stolen?
• Do you look out for potentially fraudulent charges?
• What happens if we become overdrawn?
• How do charge disputes work?

Rates:

• How do I qualify for your best rate?
  

Anyway, it helped us choose our bank. Hopefully it will help someone else too.

Sometimes it’s easy to see why almost no one uses Linux on the Desktop.

I just got a Spotify invite, so I decided to try it out. Step one is registering at Spotify.com. No trouble! But then… how do I use it? Ah! The download link!

Spotify for Linux - uh oh

Sweet! A Linux preview! It’s available for Ubuntu and Fedora. Hey! I run Fedora! Awesome. Except, there isn’t a package available. The directory is empty.

Okay. So I download the Ubuntu package and use Alien to convert the file. Amazingly, it installs!

Amazingly, it runs!

Spotify Login Bad Device

Oh. Linux Desktops are considered devices, not desktops. You need to buy an ultra-premium service to use a device. (OTOH, then I could use Spotify on my Android phone as well.) But, since I haven’t even been able to try this service yet, spending $$$ seems premature.

Okay, so the other option is to run the Windows version in WINE. (a windows emulator) Blech. But okay.

I run it, and get myself logged in with a small amount of fuss. Until I try to play some music. Oops! Nothing plays at all! Oops!

I need to read the directions to add a sound device for the Windows emulator. Of course, the directions are out of date on the Spotify web site. I need to add the “PulseAudio” driver with Full Hardware Acceleration. It works!

Until I try to play my own music on Spotify. Oops!

“There is a problem with the sound decoder. Spotify can’t play music”

So look around for solutions and find this page. The instructions are Ubuntu specific (talks about /usr/lib32, which doesn’t exist on Fedora.) The correct command for Fedora is:

$ su

# wget http://blog.mrfjo.org/winemp3.acm.so -O /usr/lib/wine/winemp3.acm.so

But it still doesn’t work because the library depends on libmpg123 which isn’t installed by default. We need more software:

$ su

# yum install libmpg123.i686 libmpg123.x86_64

And now it works. Hopefully Spotify is worth it. How many people could have gotten through all those steps?

I’ve been trying to rescue my CD collection for some time. While I like to listen to music, I never listen to my CDs except for the few I bring with me in the car. It’s just too annoying to shuffle music 10 songs at a time and keep track of the disks and their cases.

I just bought a home NAS, the Western Digital MyBook Live.  I ripped all my CDs and loaded the songs onto it.  Then I tried to get the PS3 to play the songs.  Nothing.  They weren’t there.  Or, if they were, the album art didn’t show up.

I just read on a support forum for the drive the answer: On the PS3:
Go to : Settings -> Network Settings -> Media Server Connection.
Set it to Disable.
Set it to Enable.

Perfect. Sorry for the boring post, but this has been driving me crazy. I’ve been reading hex dumps of MP3 files trying to decode the problem.

A few years ago, I stopped running my email and web server out of my house.  I was tired of paying for the electricity and the static IP address.  I wanted to switch to FiOS which doesn’t allow me to host off of port 80.  I was sick of keeping my desktop computer ON ALL THE TIME.  I didn’t like the noise of the computer on.  And the room the computer was in got hot.  (Nice in the winter, but not as nice in the summer.)

So I paid Dreamhost a very small amount of money.  (If you’re interested, I pay them around $150/year.)  But Dreamhost really wants to get out of the email business.

Sending email. Checking Email. Delays. Spam. Filtering. Email forwarding. Mailing lists. Announcement lists. Archiving email. Automatic Emails. Form-to-email. Catch-alls. URGH!

It’s enough to make a poor host want to give up on providing it at all!

In November Dreamhost switched my spam filtering setup which worked nearly 100% of the time to one that doesn’t appear to work at all.  I complained to their support, but got this in response:

The following wiki page has details on how you can edit your spam settings:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Junk_Mail

From that page I can set blacklists and whitelists.  Ugh.  So I responded back:

Hmm… This page allows me to manage white/black lists for email addresses. But that’s not really going to help at all.

They agreed that it sucks:

Correct, blacklists don’t really work well. It’s best if you lower your threshold to 0 or 1, and use whitelists extensively. Make sure you’re using the “reply-to” from a message, and not just the “from”.

So the option is to only receive mail from people I remember to add to the whitelist, or to get spam.  WRONG.

So how do others handle this?  I’m looking for a email host that allows me to completely control my email, won’t advertise to me or track me, and has reasonable spam handling.  Help?

or: making your file uploads work over HTTPS when you are using a self-signed certificate or an authority Flash decides it doesn’t like.

Flash is a popular way to upload files to web sites. This is because you can have multiple files upload at once, give pretty progress bars, and can control the file upload UI. There are some alternatives that don’t appear to be cross-platform, but that seems self-defeating.

But there is a problem; if you are using a certificate that Flash doesn’t like, it doesn’t work at all.  And you don’t get an error message.  In Windows this is solved pretty well.  If Internet Explorer trusts a certificate, so does Flash.  But on Linux, flash only checks the system certificate store.  And on Fedora, it doesn’t even do that.

To fix it until Adobe fixes the bug, run as root:

mkdir /etc/ssl && ln -sf /etc/pki/tls/certs /etc/ssl/certs

Come to think of it, is there a way to tell where the system certs should be found?

Amazon MP3 on the Android

Amazon claims “We’re Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company” and they deliver.  Every time I have had a problem, they jump through hoops to resolve it immediately.

Unfortunately,  I am unable to make myself understood by the Amazon tech support team, which leads to lots of problems.

This weekend I purchased about $6 worth of music downloads from my phone.  (3 tracks, and a CD)  One of the tracks didn’t download correctly, and Amazon incorrectly charged my credit card  and not my gift certificate balance.  I sent this message:

I just ordered a CD and 3 tracks through my T-Mobile Android G1 phone.  The third song, “Crazy Love” did not download.  (The CD was purchased while not on a wi-fi network, so I’m not sure if it worked yet.)

My second problem is a billing issue.  My account has a gift card balance of $29.01, but my credit card was charged.  Please refund my card and remove the balance from my gift certificate.  I would like future purchases to come out of that balance as well.

So what did they do?  They refunded me the full $6 and told me to re-download.  Nice, but not quite right…

Android G1 by Michael Oryl. This file is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

I have a new T-Mobile G1 running Android from Google.  It’s an awesome upgrade from the Sidekick II I had been using.  Although it still feels very “rough” around the edges, I can see a lot of reasons why it’s exciting.

The architecture is pretty cool — applications are a bundle of entry points called “intents.”  An intent is roughly like a task:  make a phone call, change a ring tone, share a photo.  Any application can trigger an intent (within a permission system) or provide an action on an intent.

The phone itself feels solid, but has some problems.  Battery life is terrible.  The first day I had it, I had to recharge it 3 times.  Seriously.  Since then I’ve installed Power Manager to keep it charged the whole (or most of the) day.  I paid for the application although there is a free version as well.  Frankly, its amazing that this phone was released with battery life this poor.

The phone can be very sluggish.  There are two things that always need to work quickly:  the phone and the home screen.  The phone is obvious; when someone calls you, you need to be able to answer.  Although rare, you can’t always.  The home screen frequently takes 10 or more seconds to appear.  Since that’s how you launch applications, you’re just staring at your wallpaper or worse, a blank screen

No light sensor.  You can set the screen brightness, but since the phone doesn’t know when it is direct sunlight, it can suddenly be too dim.  I installed a application called FastBright which makes it easy to change the brightness, but doesn’t solve the problem

On the other hand, I’ve been very surprised by how many applications are available.  The Market has thousands and thousands list — many of them for free.  And there are even alternate Markets you can install and use.  Crazy.  Interestingly, there are reports that many of these applications are Open Source, but I can’t seem to find a way to list applications by license.  Or even a place collecting Open Source Android applications.  Does anyone know where this might exist?

So in the long trip to get a working TiVo with FiOS service, I’ve hit another snag.  Verizon insists on sending someone to my house to install the cable cards.  Why, I ask?  Because they are fragile.  (It costs $100 to replace them if they break.)  Yikes.

So after UPS (and I hate UPS) screwed up the TiVo delivery (and Amazon refunded 10% of the purchase price to ease the pain of that) I had to reschedule the technician visit.  That Friday, I reschedule for next Friday, which was the first possible day available.  *grumble*

On Monday, the technician showed up, of course.  So we sent him away, and I called Verizon again.  They showed no record of the cancellation or the reschedule.  So I scheduled Friday again, which was hard since Friday was actually full now.

Today, of course, no technician is coming.  I just called.  No record of my call.

Now, it’s scheduled for Wednesday the 6th.  But they gave me a confirmation # this time, so I guess it’s really true.

But, at least I’m not as bad off as this guy.

I ordered a TiVO on Tuesday night from Amazon with 2 day shipping.  It was too late in the day, so it counted as being ordered on Wednesday.  Estimated delivery?  Friday.  So, I called up Verizon to order cable cards for it.  They quickly scheduled a technician to come out (?!) and deliver them and install them Monday morning.  Perfect.

Then, UPS got involved.  Check out the shipping history of this package:

This is a UPS screw up.  It happens sometimes, right?  Nothing to worry about.  I’ve seen their ads where you can fix problems and they’ll help out!  So I call them and detail the problem.  I need the shipment before Monday. (the customer service rep mentions the package won’t arrive until the end of day on Monday)

“I need this before Monday, can you change it to Saturday delivery?”

“No, it’s on a truck right now with 5000 other packages.  We can’t pull just one package off, we don’t know where it is.”

“I need this before Monday.  This is your error, I paid for delivery to be on Friday, what can you do?”

“Call Amazon and have them pay for a package intercept back to them.  When it arrives (!) have them ship it again next day air with Saturday delivery.”

So, they can’t find the package unless Amazon (I can’t do it) pays them to find it.  In which case they can get it back to Amazon in time to reship it to me at GREAT expense for Saturday delivery.  Yes, that’s the case, although the original delivery charge would be refunded.

Awesome.

I hate you, UPS.

(Yes, I called Amazon to suggest this insane scheme, and they refused for some strange reason.)