MyAnswers: Micro sim to sim adaptor.

The following MyAnswers solution 2107 is now available:

Micro sim to sim adaptor purchased for $10 in Melbourne.

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Kelvin Eldridge
www.MyAnswers.biz

Alert: YouTube sent you a message: Unique Offer

I received an email this morning with the subject YouTube sent you a message: Unique Offer and noticed a couple coming through so decided to check one out. These emails should be deleted. They aren’t from YouTube. If you check the links you’ll see all links lead a site with no connection to YouTube. For those interested the email I received came from Germany.

Kelvin Eldridge 
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

 

Microsoft Office 365 Beta - Australia - unable to create account

I’ve been watching Microsoft’s Office 365 for a while with the view of reviewing the service for my clients. What hasn’t quite sat right is the beta is not available for Australia. It states it is available for Australia but when you go to sign up you can’t select Australia.

I then read the following in the community blog.

Office 365 will not be available to Australia until GA (General Availability) and at that point it will only be available through Telstra, our Australian Partner.... Read More

 

If Microsoft are doing a special deal so the service is only available through Telstra they will lose a lot of business in Australia. I didn’t provide BPOS to clients as I felt in my previous dealings with Telstra both as a business and individually, the level of service I require for my clients wasn’t acceptable.

Sadly if it is true that Microsoft is only going to offer Office 365 in Australia using Telstra as their partner, it will make it very hard for me to recommend the service. I can understand that Telstra brings a huge customer base to Microsoft, but I feel Microsoft is being short-sighted by not providing the service in the same way as they are providing it to the many countries and regions listed. Our neighbour New Zealand is being provided with the ability to sign up to the beta.

If you’re in Australia and are thinking of signing up for Office 365 then wait for a while and see what Microsoft decides to do. For me if Microsoft don’t provide the service direct it will put me in a situation where I probably won’t be able to recommend the service because of my previous experience with support issues. At a minimum I will need to perform extensive testing and a lengthy trial period before considering Office 365 for clients.

My suggestion to clients is be patient and wait and see what happens.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Anthony Osborne Rowville and Lysterfield contributor

I'd like to welcome and thank Anthony Osborne for joining JustLocal as a contributor. Anthony will be post articles relating to council news, local news and local events in the Rowville and Lysterfield area. You can read his articles on the blog from either of the 3178 or 3156 postcode pages.

Anthony stood as an independent in the 2010 Victorian State election and has recently been nominated for the Pride of Australia medal. Congratulations Anthony.

Thank you Anthony for your support. I look forward to seeing the Rowville and Lysterfield through your eyes and sharing your experiences.

Kelvin Eldridge
http://www.justlocal.com.au/

Alert: A reminder to watch out for blog spam

What is blog spam?

Blog spam is when others use a blog to promote themselves. They post a comment which in some way links back to their site. It is fairly easy to spot because the comment is usually generic and doesn’t specifically relate to the post. Often it will be a compliment. For example today I received this comment on my blog.

I really like your article very much,its very informative.Thanks for the nice article.Keep posting.:)

Apart from the poor punctuation there is nothing obvious about this comment that would indicate it is anything but a compliment. It was posted by anonymous so from an owner of a blog you wouldn’t even think there was a link to anywhere. The problem is if you accept this comment it does contain a link to the advertisers site and you may potentially expose your readers to malware or even some scam.

Bloggers who leave their blogs open and accept this type of comment automatically are a concern. They may even end up harming their regular readers or those who search and end their site.

If you own a blog don’t accept blog spam. Don’t just accept a compliment because it feels good. It is usually just a trick to get past your defences. I receive quite a few of these every week and a search of the internet shows this technique has been used for many years to provide sites back to sites which are somewhere dubious. I couldn’t even guess how many millions of this type of comment has made its way onto the internet over the years.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

Alert: Notification from Microsoft Outlook - Please read.

I just received an email with the subject Notification from Microsoft Outlook - Please read.

The email has an attachment setup.htm.

This email appears to be a phishing attempt. You should delete the email.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
www.JustLocal.com.au (An Online Connections service.)

iPhone passcodes. Is yours one of the top 10 most common passcodes?

I read this article and thought it was worth sharing with others to help them improve their security. If you’re using one of the top 10 passcodes then perhaps it’s time to pick a new passcode. Before reading the article see if you can work out what you think the patterns are in the passcodes.

1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212, 1998

It turns out that of 204,508 passcodes collected by an Apple iPhone app that 15% or around one in six people use one of these passcodes.

There are two lessons that can be learnt from this. The first is how easy it could be for people with nefarious intent to break into a person’s iPhone. Actually think of it another way. All a person need do is to try to break into 6-7 iPhones and he’ll most likely find one they can. They don’t necessarily have to break into a particular iPhone to achieve the result of hacking into an iPhone. The second lesson is how easy it is for a developer of an app to collect information that you have no idea what they are doing with it. Yes this information is anonymous, but collected information often reveals patterns about people’s behaviour and often we wouldn’t even know that what we do is a very common pattern. If others know we’re likely to behave in a certain way that can be used for good, or it can also be used for not so good purposes.

Bad purposes doesn’t even really have to be bad in the normal sense of bad. It could be like the GPS data being used by authorities to determine better locations to place speed cameras which could be used to increase revenue. That’s not considered bad usage unless of course you’re the one who ends up getting fined.

How are your photos being used? How is your location information being used? How is what you search for being used? How is your voice being used? How is your “Like” information being used? I for one would never have expected anyone would have collected passcode information and sent that information outside of the application and device. Perhaps there’s a good reason. (Apple has since pulled the app.)

This is certainly food for thought. At a minimum check the passcodes and make sure you’re not using one of the top ten, or for that matter a year, which are also quite common. Whilst we are all so very different, it is amazing how we are often all so similar.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au  

MyAnswers: What anti-virus program do you use?

The following MyAnswers solution 2102 is now available:

What anti-virus program do you use?

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Kelvin Eldridge
www.MyAnswers.biz

MyAnswers: Top likes and dislikes of Apple iPad 2

The following MyAnswers solution 2101 is now available:

I decided to start documenting my top likes and dislikes of Apple iPad 2. There are some great features, but also many limitations that for some that might kill off the iPad 2 as a choice for them.

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Kelvin Eldridge
www.MyAnswers.biz

Alert: CUT Your AdWords Costs and INCREASE AdWords Sales!

I've received three emails to three different email addresses for this email from "The Adwords Guru" as they call themselves.

Had it only been one email I would have simply deleted the email, but when I receive three I decided to investigate. The emails appear to be coming from Spain with the domain registered in the US.

I would suggest deleting these emails. If you receive unsolicited emails I would highly recommend not responding. Contact a reputable company that someone has recommended to you, or that you have researched yourself.

Kelvin Eldridge
http://www.justlocal.com.au/

Is your neighbour's solar panels pushing your electricity bill up?

I read this article which is from the UK and couldn’t help feeling the situation in Australia is much the same.

Who's paying for your neighbour's solar panels? You are... Read More

I attended the local Manningham council bulk solar panel offer and one of the questions I wanted to ask was, “who is paying for the solar panels?” The answer I received was, “we all are”.

For me that creates the situation where those with enough money to install the solar panels puts the $5,000 subsidy onto everyone else. That doesn’t quite seem fair to me.

 

However there is a gotcha in there for everyone. Those who install solar panels are putting their own prices up as well. Yes they are saving some money, but not as much as they are lead to think they will, the increased prices from using time-of-day charging will put their electricity costs up, plus the future increases as a result of their subsidy will eat into their own savings as well.

Personally I think it would have been much better if the government had installed solar panels as larger projects where there would be economy of scale and the savings of doing larger projects would have meant a subsidy may not have been required. For example schools have very large unused roof space. Buying in bulk at government scale and negotiating on the labour for a larger scale job should have been able to achieve the same result for much less than many individual smaller jobs.

The bottom line is now we will all suffer increasing prices for years to come. For me the idea of taking other people’s money like this just doesn’t seem right. I’m not against solar energy, in fact I’m all for it. But it should be done as cost effectively as possible.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

MyAnswers: Google advertising or affiliate advertising from ClixGalore/Commission Monster

The following MyAnswers solution 2099 is now available:

Should I add Google advertising to my site or affiliate advertising from ClixGalore or Commission Monster?

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Kelvin Eldridge
www.MyAnswers.biz

Travelsure insurance by Covermore insurance

Recently we travelled to Western Australia. To see the places we wanted to see we hired a car from Avis. When hiring a car there is an excess which in this case was $3,017.03. We could reduce this excess by paying a fee of $35.35 a day. For our trip we needed the car for 16 days adding $565.50 which was a considerable extra charge.

A technique I use when travelling overseas and need to rent a car is to purchase travel insurance with cover for the rental car excess. This can save a lot of money and covers the excess. I decided to use the same technique for travelling in Australia.

I contacted an insurance broker I knew and asked for a quote. The price was $150 and whilst I only wanted the insurance to cover the car excess, that saved over four hundred dollars. The insurance was Travelsure by Covermore. It was actually quite difficult to complete the insurance process as the broker said Covermore required a form to be completed and signed. Given I was travelling and had no access to a printer, it took about an hour to create a replica of the form complete with signature which was acceptable. If I hadn't known the broker I would have looked elsewhere.

I have access to a number of companies I'm able to advertise, so I decided to check to see if I could find an insurance company which could provide a better rate. I found 1Cover.



I entered the information for a quote and found I could have obtained insurance for $113.10 which would have saved another $37, so it is good to shop around. In addition, if there was only one driver I could have obtained travel insurance for $58. The broker never provided that option so it really is a matter of looking after your own interests.

1Cover is underwritten by Allianz which provides confidence in that I've heard of Allianz. I should add I haven't used this company and I'm simply making the information available. Had I found this company at the time I would have given them a go.

Kelvin Eldridge
http://www.justlocal.com.au/

Apple iTunes Match legitimising pirating?

I watched the presentation by Steve Jobs last night for the World Wide Developer Conference 2011, but what really stuck in my mind was the pause by Steve Jobs at about two minutes before the end of the video.

Steve was presenting the iTunes Match service. As I understand it, this service will scan your hard disk, locate all your music tracks and then upgrade your music to 256kbps for $24.99 a year.

To quote Steve from the presentation, "most of our customers won't need this because they've already bought a lot of their music from iTunes, but for those that do, it's, ah, an industry leading offering, let's put it that way."

The pause and the phrase "let's put it that way" for me, begs the question which industry is making the industry leading offering. Is it the music industry, or is it the cloud based music service industry?

I honestly don't know what to think. Is the music industry using this as an opportunity to take those who have pirated music in the past, convert them to legitimate users, making some money each year for past behaviour with the yearly subscription, and perhaps hoping future purchases will be legitimate. If so that's a significant event in the music industry.

Personally I find the copyright laws to be a mystery. I've tried finding out more about what you can and can't do in terms of copyright, but mostly it seems like they won't let you know what you can do and try to scare you into thinking you can't do anything. I'd really like to see something from the Australian government written in plain English on the things people can do.

I just can't help feeling a little concerned this might expose many people in some way. For example, all of those who use this service will now able to be identified as to what music they have. Imagine if you've produced a song and made sales of say 10,000 to only find out you've now got hundreds of thousands of people with a copy of your music, should you be compensated? What protection is in place for those who use the iMatch service?

To me there are too many unknowns. The statement "let's put it that way" really should be clarified. This is a great opportunity in many ways. I can't help but feel this may be the start of the move of the music industry to a subscription service, a change in how music is consumed, charged for and musicians rewarded.

I will watch this area with interest.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Posting pictures to Twitter from an iPhone a hassle

Today I attended a cloud data storage seminar. To make the seminar interesting the organisers had organised a treasure hunt where you took pictures of six objects and post the pictures using Twitter. I'd previously used Twitter but didn't find it offered me much value at the time. I decided to give the competition a go. Take a couple of pictures during the breaks, what could be easier.

As it turned out it was amazingly difficult. Taking the pictures was easy. Setting up a Twitter account was easy. But Tweeting the pictures didn't work with Twitter's app on the iPhone which took quite some time to isolate and identify. Trying another app showed the Twitter app was the issue. However even this second app only worked for every second picture and the other pictures had to be done again. To ensure it worked I needed to double check all tweets as others would see them. That should not be necessary.

I thought this was a particularly poor experience with Twitter and something I'll avoid exposing my clients to. For me this was a real time waster. I'd have given up, but I felt knowing what was going wrong would enable me to assist clients in the future if they experienced a similar problem.

If you are going to add technologies to your client interaction it is a good idea to test it yourself and also on others around you first. Make sure the technology is easy to use and doesn't get in the way of your message.


- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Alert: If you blog expect your content to be copied.

With the recent post on the Apple iPad 2 (http://justlocal.blogspot.com/2011/06/apple-ipad-2-doesn-work-with-google.html) I noticed within 24 hours my blog (or part of it) had been copied and used by another site. The site purports to report US news and trends. There was no original content on the site and the only purpose I can see for the site is to promote Amazon ads as a affiliate so as to earn commission.

Unfortunately if you’re a blogger, or a business sharing your information and putting in your time and resources to create blog content, the reality is your information will often be copied by others to profit off. You’ll gain no benefit as these sites will rarely link back to your content.

What interested me in this latest post is I really found it interesting to see how a site not only took the content from my site, but then also decided to run it through an automated process to change the words slightly. I suspect in an attempt to make the content sufficiently different so as not to be detected as a copy.

Here is the start of my original content.

For some reason Apple has decided not to deliver the full browser experience for users of the iPad 2 (even if we ignore Flash). I decided to check out Google docs and Microsoft's Office web apps.

Here is the copy which has been modified by another site.

For some reason Apple has resolute not to deliver the full browser experience for users of the iPad 2 (even if we ignore Sparkle). I resolute to check out Google docs and Microsoft's Office web apps.

The word decided had been changed to resolute and the word Flash to Sparkle. Obviously the software product Flash has nothing to do with Sparkle.

In fact whilst the text looked visually similar, if we checked the source code many characters had been changed, perhaps to make a direct text comparison even more difficult. The following is the source code of the copied material on the site.

F&#959r &#1109&#959m&#1077 reason <em>Apple</em> h&#1072&#1109 resolute n&#959t t&#959 deliver th&#1077 full browser experience f&#959r users &#959f th&#1077 <em>iPad 2</em> (even &#1110f w&#1077 ignore Sparkle). I resolute t&#959 check out Google docs &#1072n&#1281 Microsoft&#39;s Office web apps.

The aim of sharing this information is to help others who are blogging and wanting to advance their business on the internet. Few people when they start blogging realise the level of copying on the internet. Most people will feel it is OK to copy a short amount of text and provide a reference back to the site, but that isn’t the way the internet or even many businesses tend to work.

Make sure if you’re providing content via the internet that if it is copied by others and used as their content, you’ll be OK for that to happen. If not you’ll need to put into place a strategy which helps you achieve your objectives.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

 

Apple iPad 2 doesn't work with Google docs or Microsoft Office web apps

For some reason Apple has decided not to deliver the full browser experience for users of the iPad 2 (even if we ignore Flash). I decided to check out Google docs and Microsoft's Office web apps. Whilst it is possible to purchase word processing, spreadsheeting and presentation apps, if you're a person using multiple computers (iPad, iPhone, desktop, notebook etc.) then having your document stuck in one device is very limiting.

To my surprise the online applications made available by Google and Microsoft are not useable at all on the iPad 2. Even my $400 netbook handles them without a problem.

My advice is if you are going to purchase an iPad 2, test all your current applications and make sure you know what you're getting and what you are losing. What the iPad does do it does well, but you'll be surprised at what you think it should be able to do but it doesn't.


- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Apple Keynote, Pages, Numbers now available for Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

1 June 2011—Apple® today announced that its groundbreaking iWork® productivity apps, Keynote®, Pages® and Numbers®, are now available for iPhone® and iPod touch®, as well as iPad®. ... Read More

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

The mail server at "mx1.hotmail.com" rejected the sender's address

I’ve seen the situation a number of times where a client sends an email to a customer where the receiving email server rejects the message. In this case the receiving service is Hotmail.

The mail server at "mx1.hotmail.com" rejected the sender's address, <[email address removed]>.  This is a permanent error. "mx1.hotmail.com" said, "550 SC-001 Unfortunately, messages from 74.117.222.13 weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.".

In the past when this has happened I’ve suggested the client contact the customer and ask them for an alternate email address. Another solution is to send the email using a different service provider.

The problem is companies like Hotmail/Microsoft are huge and they’ve probably identified spam or malware being sent from an internet address (IP) which the company sending the email is using and has no control over the IP address. The company isn’t doing anything wrong. The problem is when you send an email it has to go through your ISP. It is this ISP that is being blocked. One the ISP’s customers is probably sending spam or malware and the person sending the email is seen perhaps in the same range, or using the same dynamically assigned IP address.

The person who should receive the email thinks everything is OK on their end. The problem is Microsoft is blocking what the person can receive without their knowledge. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. I’d suggest a good way to fix this problem is to stop using Hotmail, or any other service that uses such a broad brush approach to blocking unwanted emails. Yes no one wants unwanted emails, but to block valid emails is just bad business practice and can lose companies business.

This is one reason I suggest that clients don’t use Hotmail for their business. If a potential customer sent you an email and it bounced you’d lose the business. I’m hoping that Microsoft does not apply the same level of rules to their upcoming Office 365 service or I’ll have to recommend clients not to use that service either. Given there is no way for me to know what Microsoft will do, it does make me now more cautious as to recommending Microsoft services.

In the past one approach clients have used is to simply wait for a few days and send the email again. With blocking it is sometimes done for a set period of time to stop and particular activity. In this instance the email worked perfectly yesterday but doesn’t work today. It is anyone’s guess if it will work tomorrow, but it is worth giving it a go. If it becomes a permanent problem you’ll need to look for a more permanent solution. It is a good backup plan to have a second ISP such as a mobile service provider or a web mail service provider to around this type of problem.

 

Kelvin Eldridge

www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Opera Mini 6 on Apple iPhone kills off Goggle advertising

Opera Mini 6 on Apple iPhone kills off Goggle advertising I have no idea if this is by design or an accidental side effect. I have Google advertising on some of my pages and noticed the Google ads had vanished. No big deal really as I do lose some potential income, but users benefit with just my content and that is also a good outcome.

WOW I thought. Does this also apply to results from Google's search site. The answer as you can see from the screenshot is yes. There are no ads appearing at the right or top of the results. That's Google's lifeblood. No ads, no income.

All those sites which copy my articles onto their sites largely for Google ad revenue are effectively useless for them. That doesn't make me unhappy one bit:-) Of course this won't really impact those sites unless a large number of people use Opera and the iPhone to browse the internet.

Seriously, I do wonder the reason for this with Opera Mini.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au