3Bit Solutions: blog.3bit.com

Review: Asus Taichi

Sun, 26 May 2013 01:00 +1200

A few weeks back I was invited along to the Asus launch at the Novotel Hotel Ellerslie to see Asus� new offerings. They had your standard tablets and laptops that nearly all the manufacturers are pumping out at the moment. I had the impression that Asus didn�t really know what was going to take off next, so they were hedging their bets by having product offerings in just about every category imaginable (the 18.4� ASUS Transformer AiO P1801 tablet/desktop running both Android and Windows 8 deserves a mention).

The Asus Taichi was the product that stuck out the most to me. It is a hybrid of notebook and tablet. Open it up and it�s your standard 11.6� notebook; close the lid and it becomes a tablet. In notebook mode, you can turn on mirror mode, so the lid mirrors what�s on the screen. The practical application of this is you could show a Powerpoint presentation to someone sitting opposite you � they would see the slides, and you could see presenter mode.

This was the one feature I was most excited about, however there is a small issue I hadn�t thought about: it would be rare for you to use the notebook with the screen set completely vertical, but you need to do this for the other person to be able to easily see their screen. Angling the screen to either yourself or your partner puts the other person at a disadvantage.

If this one feature isn�t a biggie, this is a great combo. It has a good form factor, isn�t that heavy and is well spec�d with Intel Core i7-3517U, 4GB of RAM and 256GB SSD hard-drive.

If I was being picky, it could be a little lighter, it�s too thick when closed as a tablet, and the laptop screen should be touch screen as well (it gets annoying when you�re used to the touch screen tablet, and the laptop screen isn�t). Having two touch screens on this device would increase it�s weight, thickness and price, so I can understand why these decisions were made.

All in all, a good device, and perfect if you can�t decide whether to buy a notebook or tablet. With this, you can easily have both.

Vodafone speed test 3G vs 4G

Sat, 25 May 2013 04:41 +1200

Two different devices, Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung Galaxy S4, right next to each other, tested at Sale St (Auckland) last night.

Not too shabby at all.

Why so expensive?

Sat, 18 May 2013 22:59 +1200

This weekend I�ve been away in Rotorua speaking at a client�s conference about the custom software system we�ve designed and written for them. After shredding my fan belt on the way down (ended up missing my presentation slot as I was four hours late), it was nice to finally arrive.

There are around 150 delegates here from all over NZ, staying from Friday until Sunday. Nearly all are staying here at Rydges Rotorua � there�s all the accommodation, breakfasts, lunches plus the formal dinner that was held last night. The hotel will be making a killing out of this organisation.

For so many delegates with laptops and smartphones, wireless is a must. This is where I�m gobsmacked�

Internet here is 75cents/hour or $30 per day.

Surely free wireless is a service to provide, alongside food, tea and coffee? To expect every person here to sign up each of their devices is fanciful (the access code is tied to MAC address)? Another possible solution is to have one set fee for the conference, and everyone attending gets wireless access.

In my presentation this morning, it was annoying that while most people had laptops, they weren�t able try the demos I was doing (it would�ve taken far too long to get them all paired with their mobile phones). Why is this so hard?

It seems not all hotels/motels are ignorant to how important wireless is. Since Rydges is full, I�m staying at a motel two doors down�

They have free wireless.

Fancy a beer and a catch-up?

Sat, 4 May 2013 22:54 +1200

I�ve organised an evening for the Geekzone regulars and not-so-regular users to catch up over a beer and food. I�m calling it Geekzone IRL (Geekzone In Real Life), and it�s on Friday 17th May at 6pm.

Only $20 for a couple beers and lots of finger foods. A big thank-you to The Data Centre for putting on a generous bar tab.

Yes I am biased, as we are having it at my cafe, Tuihana Cafe in Mt Eden. Plenty of off-street car-parks plus it�s on a couple of main bus routes/short walking distance from Kingsland/Mt Eden train stations.

Registration is here, we have a plenty of places left so sign up online (payment via credit card).

The final piece in the SVOD puzzle

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 01:42 +1200

Streaming Video On Demand is a big paradigm change from TV as we currently know it. Instead of having a broadcaster dictate what we watch and when we watch it (alleviated a little by set top boxes such as My Sky), SVOD allows you to pick exactly what content you want. You can pay a set monthly fee (eg Netflix, Hulu Plus) to watch all and everything or pay for just what you want to watch (Vudu).

As Kiwis we aren�t allowed access � blame the content holders. This doesn�t have to stop you; with the advent of services to help get around the blocking (such as UnblockUS), you can enjoy all the TV from the States (see instructions here on the NZ Tech Podcast).

About a year ago I blogged about how I dumped Sky TV and replaced it with a TiVo. It was just before this that I bought a Roku to stream the above services on my TV. I�ve also managed to swap a few friends and family over as well.

One thing that has always been missing: sport. If you are a big sport fan, you really can�t beat Sky TV�s offerings.

It�s with great interest I read on the Roku blog this morning that Sky Sports in the UK is launching a sport channel. Hopefully as time progress we�ll see a local one launch for NZ, providing the final piece of the puzzle.

Kim Dotcom visits Giapo

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 06:00 +1200

As part of the launch of his new website, mega.co.nz, Kim Dotcom shouted free Giapo ice-creams, and gave away caps and t-shirts for the new site today at 2pm. Somehow I was roped in to providing sound for the event.

In a very Willy Wonka style giveaway, at the bottom of 10 random cups of ice-cream were tickets to the proper launch on Sunday at the Dotcom mansion.

Only a few people turned up. And some media.

Automating client payments in Xero

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:00 +1200

After a handful of requests to outline what else we've done with Xero, this is a follow on post from my original post about their API.

Cash-flow is king in any small business. If you aren't invoicing regularly, it becomes easy to miss things. If you wait too long before chasing up payment on late payers, it becomes harder and harder to get payment as time goes on.

We have a fair few web hosting customers, and two years ago we found that our accounts guy was spending far too much time chasing up late payers. It was at this time that for the smaller accounts, we would register a credit card against their account to debit any future invoices against.

Xero doesn't support any functionality like this at the moment, so we had to roll our own system.

It starts off that we can enter a credit card, which is saved with our payment processor who gives us back a unique token ID (we don't want to host the raw credit card numbers ourselves) - in our system, we associated this token ID with the appropriate Xero contact, which then lists on the screen below:

With this association it makes it very easy to pay invoices. The next screen shows all current outstanding invoices, with only the contacts that we have credit card details saved for.

We found that just going through and paying all the outstanding invoices listed wasn't a good idea - it's for this reason we added a checkbox next to each invoice. The user doing the billing run can select which invoices to include/exclude.

Behind the scenes, the system bills the right card with the right amount - in Xero it also loads a payment against each invoice, making bank reconciliation quick and easy (it also reduces the risk of allocating the payment to the wrong invoice). At the same time as all this, we email our customer with a summary of which invoices have been paid, for their records.

We use the BNZ Bank as our merchant processor as they are the only NZ bank who support multi-currency natively.

Though we don't have the need for it, it would be relatively simple to extend this process to support direct debits (such as BACS in the UK). You would store the bank account in Xero against each contact, and instead of debiting credit cards, it would instead produce a text file suitable for uploading to your processing bank.

Please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below.

Take the day off - go play some games

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 22:00 +1200

Back in July, Alienware flew me and lucky Geekzoner Stuart over to Melbourne for their FIFA Euro 2012 game off. The best part of the day (for me) was visiting GameMasters, the exhibition about all the games and consoles from yesteryear. At the time, I recommended flying to Melbourne just to see the exhibition (read my original blog post here).

I have amazing news - the exhibition has jumped the ditch and opens today at Te Papa.

I highly recommend skipping work for the day and spending all day in the exhibition. Even if you aren't a gamer, you will thoroughly enjoy seeing how far gaming has come, and actually being able to play on some of the older consoles. A full list of the available games is here.

GameMasters closes the end of April 2013.

ASB Mobile app now with TradeMe goodness

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 01:22 +1200

A couple weeks back, I was invited (along with a few others) to a super secret preview of the new ASB mobile app. We were under NDA until today.

I was involved in giving feedback on the very first ASB app a few years back - at that time it was just a wrapper around a mobile site, and we received it via Dropbox. It was a good first attempt at a mobile app, this latest release however is streets ahead of where ASB started.

The biggest killer feature in this app is the TradeMe integration - it makes paying a seller for a successful auction super easy. See the video below for more info:

(video here about collecting a payment if you are the seller)

Other nice changes are:

Multi-tasking ability - if you swapped to another app, such as Gmail, to check an amount or bank account details, and went back to the ASB Mobile app, you'd need to login again. They've now fixed this so you can return to the ASB Mobile app (within a 2 minute timeout) and continue on where you left off (this was my biggest pet peeve).
Branch locator gone - this has been removed from the initial login page. I had issues with this while in Europe, with it swapping between Cape Reinga and Invercargill as my nearest branches, based on what country I was in at the time.
Quick balance updates - you can now specific up to three accounts to view the balances off, rather than just one.

Great work ASB!

I'm only an ASB customer, I'm keen to hear how this compares to the mobile apps of the other competitors - please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

My Little Geek

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:42 +1200

The best way to summarise this book is from their website:

My Little Geek is an ABC book all about geekdom

I came across this book a few months back off a suggestion on Twitter (it's written by a Kiwi), but had to wait to blog about it until we've given it to friends who have just had their first child. With it's big colourful illustrations, and geeky theme, it's the perfect gift to get for new parents, to help their little one, on their way to becoming an uber-geek.

Available from the clever folk at Mighty Ape.

Review: Blackbox C20 noise cancelling earphones

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:00 +1200

I spent all of last week in New York for meetings - before flying out I attended the Sony launch, and after hearing about "must have" noise cancelling headphones for long haul flights, I decided to pickup some of my very own.

While Sony's offerings were nice, they were far more than I was prepared to spend ($600 range). Doing some quick research online, I found Phitek's Blackbox C20s, and at only $157 from JB Hi-Fi they were just what I was looking for.

The Blackbox earphones aren't new to the market - Rod Drury (Xero) reviewed them back in 2007, and Mauricio Freitas (Geekzone) later that same year.

The flight to the east coast of the USA isn't a short one - 13 hours to LAX, then 6 hours across the continent. I chose earphones as I knew I'd be spending much of my cattle-class flight asleep, and headphones aren't comfortable to sleep in (a trip earlier this year to Europe with my Bose AE2s taught me this the hard way).

The C20s are really comfortable to wear, and I kept mine in for most of the flight there and back (approximately 40 hours of flying in total). They come with a hard carry case to keep everything together (a blessing especially when trying to find them in your carry-on in the dark) and they come complete with an airline adapter (dual pins), extra ear-buds, cable clip and a AAA battery (if the battery goes flat, the earphones still work, just without the noise cancelling).

If you own an Apple device, it has a small remote on one of the cables to answer/end calls, plus play/pause/next/previous music track control. Included is an adapter to allow the earphones to work with all non-Apple devices.

After turning on the noise-cancelling (there's a small slide switch on the battery pack), the difference is phenomenal: the aircraft cabin turns to near silence. It doesn't block out all sounds, but the continuous, monotonous drone of the aircraft's engines disappears. Even when I wasn't listening to music, I kept them in my ears to block out most of the background noise.

The sound quality through these earphones is superb. While the devices I was using aren't known for their high fidelity audio output (my laptop and Android tablet), the earphones allowed me to fully appreciate the sound they do put out. I'm by no stretch an audiophile, but to my amateur ears these sound amazing.

I highly recommend these earphones - they look good, sound great, are a fantastic price, and, even better, are developed by a company here in NZ.

Sony’s 84” 4K behemoth TV

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 13:17 +1200

On Thursday, Geekzone moderator Stu (BighammerNZ) and I were invited to Sony's headquarters in Ponsonby, Auckland as part of their "Sony Open House" promotion. It was a launch to show off the new stuff in Sony's technology line-up.

In brief we saw:

VAIO Duo 11 - Sony's tablet offering, it slides up to show a full QWERTY keyboard under it's 11.6" screen. Wasn't too impressed with it as it felt too heavy and clunky when compared to the much nicer Apple iPad/Samsung Galaxy Note/Microsoft Surface.
Walkman F800 - slim, phone like device running Android. Much smaller form factor, and far more power than the old tape playing Walkman I used to own.
SANS410/SANS510 - new compact speakers offering 360 degree coverage, all controlled through an app through your home WiFi. Sounds great, packs a lot of punch, definitely see myself buying one for home.
MDR-1 headphones - with a wireless bluetooth version and a noise-cancelling option, very comfortable, over-the-head style headphones. My only concern was they are very pricey ($400-500 range)
Personal 3D viewer - these are a head-mounted display that when you put it on, it gives the impression of watching a 20m wide screen, 20m away. It's a surreal experience wearing them (this model doesn't have the integrated earphones as the previous one did) and with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, it's very easy to forget about the world around you. You can focus each eye individually, and the headbands easily adjust to fit any size head. At around $1,100, they are expensive for something that can only be used by one person at a time. Very cool tech none-the-less.

The real star of the evening was their 84" 4K TV, which I can only describe as:

Wow.

(sorry I have no decent photos from the event)

Pictures and video really can't do justice to how amazing this TV is. At 84" it really makes a statement. The 60" TV Sony had setup next to it was dwarfed in comparison. I kept reminding myself that it was just about twice the size of my tiny 46" screen at home.

4K is a stunning picture, 4x better than current HD. The big issue at the moment is there is little content (other than up-scaling existing HD which looks pants) available. The demo content we did watch was amazing - think of the first time you saw HD content when compared with standard definition.

If you get a chance to see this in person, I highly recommend. You'll be blown away with how truly amazing the picture is.

How much to get one of these bad boys in your living room? $35k.

I'll happily take any donations to my "buy Nate a new TV fund".

Extending Xero through their API

Tue, 2 Oct 2012 05:44 +1200

Xero is fantastic accounting software. Through their API (Application Programming Interface) they allow third parties to integrate into their main accounting engine. This allows developers to create more specific add-ons suited to their specific niches - there is already an extensive list of existing add-ons on the Xero site..

This post serves as an example of what can be achieved. Please note this is not a product we are selling, it's purely something we've created for our own internal use.

A small part of our business is the web-hosting of our development clients. With a few hundred clients, we were original using the re-occurring invoice function in Xero. As this client base has grown, it's become harder and harder to administrate these clients, and make sure that everyone is billed correctly.

Using data pulled live from our servers, we match a client with a billing plan, and send out an invoice on the first day of every month. An example of the email that's sent out is shown below (click to enlarge):

We've extended this over the default email out capabilities of Xero in the following way:

As this is a custom template, we have a lot more flexibility with formatting.
The invoice is always sent from our main accounts email (if one of our staff edited a reoccurring invoice in Xero, they would be set as the new sender next time the invoice was sent out, a very annoying quirk of Xero)
The subject line contains the invoice number and invoice reference
The body of the invoice contains the invoice number, the amount that is due, plus when the invoice is due.
We link directly to our payment gateway (powered by BNZ) which prepopulates all the values, and if a successful payment is made, creates a payment against this invoice in Xero, making bank reconciliation quick and painless.
If the client has overdue invoices, these are listed in a summary table, with a total shown at the top.
Each overdue invoice has a link which the client can click on to view the invoice as a PDF online
We stream down the original invoice from Xero and attach it to the email as a PDF

Hopefully this gives you some ideas of what the Xero API will allow you to do. As always, (blatant plug), if you're after any custom Xero integration, contact us.

Own thy domain

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:08 +1200

Domain names are the street addresses of the internet. From google.com, to nzherald.co.nz to geekzone.co.nz, most of us will easily identify our favourite sites by the address we type in the bar at the top of our browsers.

If you want a website, whether it's for personal reasons or for your business, having a domain name is a must. They are also very popular - Verisign counts 233 million domain names globally, a growth of 23 million since Q1 2011. New Zealand's .nz namespace is popular as well, with nearly 490,000 domains at the end of June this year.

One technicality that most newcomers don't understand is who owns their domain name. In their minds, they paid a hosting company/web designer for it, so they must own it right? Maybe not.

A recent thread from Geekzone user networkn reminded me of this issue - to summarise, a client paid a developer for their website, however instead of registering the domain in the client's name, the developer registered it in their own name. It may seem like a subtle difference, but it is a big problem. Legally, the domain belongs to the developer. If the client ever wants to move away from that developer, they won't be able to, as they don't technically own their domain name.

We see this issue that networkn describes often, as new clients have no idea who owns their existing domain name.

How can I be sure who owns my domain?

Check with whoever registered your domain name that you are the legal owner, or if you can, register the domain yourself. With every domain you can check the ownership and other technical details by doing a WHOIS - I tend to use Godaddy for .com's and the Domain Name Commission for .co.nz's. A sample whois record, from our main domain name 3bit.com, is below:

Registrant:
3Bit Solutions Ltd
Level 1, 6 Railway St
Newmarket
Auckland, Auckland 1023
New Zealand
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: 3BIT.COM
Created on: 14-Aug-08
Expires on: 14-Aug-13
Last Updated on: 30-Jun-12
Administrative Contact:
Dunn, Nathan hostmaster@3bit.com
3Bit Solutions Ltd
Level 1, 6 Railway St
Newmarket
Auckland, Auckland 1023
New Zealand
+95.233248
Technical Contact:
Dunn, Nathan hostmaster@3bit.com
3Bit Solutions Ltd
Level 1, 6 Railway St
Newmarket
Auckland, Auckland 1023
New Zealand
+95.233248
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.NAMESERVER.NET.NZ
NS2.NAMESERVER.NET.NZ
Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited

The registrant is who owns the domain. The registered through is the registrar, or who you used to acquire the domain. The administrative and technical contact are self explanatory.

Hopefully this helps keep you from being unnecessarily held to ransom by your web designer or hoster.

Clever tech and social media

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:14 +1200

I spoke at Gather earlier this month about some of the technology and social media we run at Tuihana Cafe. I've since had a few requests for copies of the slides which I've uploaded to Slideshare.

The cafe blog has a full run-down about my presentation.

(hat-tip to @DaveBremer for the heads up about Slideshare)

Game Masters Exhibition

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:59 +1200

Three weeks ago I said I would blog about this the next day (epic nate fail). I've been away on holiday so apologies for my tardiness.

I was flown over to Melbourne courtesy of Alienware, for their FIFA Euro 2012 publisher Game Off and to see the opening of the GameMasters exhibition in Federation Square - joining me was Geekzoner Stuart (stuartgr) who won the competition thread.

We turned up around lunch-time to an array of Alienware machines (which were very, very nice), and told we were team Italy. I'm not a big gamer, and Stuart hadn't played FIFA before, so it's not too hard to guess how well we didn't do - the winners taking home two brand new Alienware M14x laptops.

The most exciting part of the day for me was going through Game Masters - it's a massive exhibition filled with all the different gaming platforms and consoles from over the years. It starts off with arcade gems Pacman and Space Invaders, and finishes off with more recent offerings, such as Dance Central Kinect for Xbox 360. The most amazing thing is you can play each of the games, they aren't just locked away in glass displays. The wall display near the entrance sums up the sheer awesomeness of it all:

(it was not long after I took this photo that I was told we weren't allowed to take photos, and I had security following me from then on in)

If you are in Melbourne or have plans to get to Melbourne soon, I really couldn't recommend Game Masters more - it's a fascinating walk through game designers, platforms and games, and it is very worth while. I would allow a full afternoon so you can get to play all your old favourites. It closes end of October so there's plenty of time.

Sorry MySky. I have TiVo now

Sun, 8 Jul 2012 18:00 +1200

Today marks me having a TiVo, and not having MySky, for about a month.

As someone who grew up with Sky, not having it was very strange at first. I've had a MySky since they first came out, and I always watched recordings (never Live TV), and fast forwarded the ads. Even when visiting friends and family who didn't have it, I would praise how amazing the mighty MySky was, and that they should get one as well.

Once I started watching Netflix and Hulu Plus, my opinion of Sky changed. I was able to source much better and more up-to-date content, for half the cost of my Sky subscription. It was a no-brainer - I dumped Sky, and TiVo was the natural choice as a DVR for Freeview.

I'll admit that the TiVo has taken some getting used to. The remote is very different from the MySky remote, but after some practice, I don't look back.

The TiVo does lots of things better than MySky, my favourites include:

Like a particular program, say Top Gear? You can setup a recording so when it appears on any channel, the TiVo will record it. With a MySky, you have to select each and every recording, and if a new one appears on another channel, you'll miss it.
Rewind/fast forward - the TiVo shows you a few frames ahead/behind as you fast forward, so when you realise you're past the ad breaks, and click Play, TiVo will stop at the right point exactly. Clever.
You can setup particular shows (like the news) to delete after one show, so instead of filling up your hard-drive with old news, you only keep the latest (you can do the opposite for sitcoms you want to keep for longer). There's no option for this on MySky.
If you have multiple TiVos, you can watch any recording from any TiVo on any of them, plus you can export recordings. MySky can't even do anything close to this.
Bigger hard-drive - four times the capacity for HD content of MySky.
No monthly subscription.

MySky still has the upper hand with mobile apps for remote recordings (both iPhone and Android) and if you really like sport, there's not really a good alternative.

If you aren't a big sports fan (I'm not) TiVo works well, and we all know most of the stuff on Sky is repeats.

Game Masters Media Preview

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:48 +1200

I'm currently in Melbourne about to head across to the Game Masters Media Preview.

I'll be tweeting and posting pics as much as I can from my twitter account if you want to follow along (@nate), or I'll give a complete summary on my blog tomorrow.

Excel is not a customer database

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 18:00 +1200

With surprising frequency I'm meeting with businesses who are using an Excel spreadsheet (or spreadsheets) as their primary store for customer info. It's not until I point out some big flaws with this approach that they realise that this isn't a future proofed solution, and when it breaks, there will be tears.

It starts out innocently enough - with a handful of customers, and a staff member or two, a shared Excel spreadsheet is quick and simple to setup. To get around concurrency issues (not being able to open the same spreadsheet by two separate people) staff call across the office and get the other person to close their copy down. All works well until the company expands not only their customer base but their staff as well. Spreadsheets weren't designed to work this way.

Excel isn't the one to blame here. Excel was designed as a tool to do reports, analysis, what-if scenarios. It was never designed to be a database with hundreds of rows and multiple worksheets.

The three biggest issues I see with trying to use Excel this way are:

Data redundancy

Data redundancy is having information that is repeated in two or more places. The classic example of this is a customer's address and phone numbers. In an ideal world, you would store these details in one place, and they would flow through to all your different systems such as sales, support, accounts etc.

You can't do this in Excel - where you need the customer's details, you need to have another copy of them stored. When a customer comes to update these details, multiple places have to be updated, and if one is missed, this causes issues.

Reporting

It's not easy to run complex reports such as "what products have we sold the most of and to whom" or "what is the most popular product" - all you have is pages and pages of data.

Security

You may want some parts of a customers record (like their credit limit) not accessible/editable by some staff - can't do this in Excel. It is an all or nothing list.

So what's the solution? Find CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to keep track of all this or get a solution custom written (blatant plug: by someone like us).

Investing time and money when your business is small and easy to manage will pay big dividends as it grows, and allow you to expand easily without causing further headaches.

Save $600pa on your home phone and internet

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 18:00 +1200

Short version: Swap to VoIP and naked DSL.

Below is my example on how to reduce your home phone and internet bill by $50/month. Your mileage will vary.

I've been meaning to take a look at my parent's telecommunications for some time - they were with Telecom (and had been for sometime) for their phone line and broadband. When they received a call from a Telecom rep offering them a sharper deal and mum called me for my opinion, I decided to stop being lazy and work out a better deal for them.

Their April bill was pretty standard:

After doing some research online, I found Snap offered the best deal for naked DSL, and used 2Talk for VoIP (I prefer VFX but they don't allow multiple concurrent registrations, meaning, I can't have one number registered to multiple devices).

The spreadsheet I used to compare the two offerings was:

Foot notes:

Snap naked broadband is $60 a month for 10GB, I added a $15 data pack to take it to 70GB (Telecom was only 60GB)
I'm unsure about whether wire maintenance is still there, so I've added it to the Snap + 2Talk offering so as not to unfairly skew my results
There is a one-off porting fee of $20 per number.

By porting (or moving) their main phone number to 2Talk, they were able to retain their residential phone number. I also took their existing cordless phones and plugged them into the FXS ports on an old Draytek Vigor2700 router I had spare, which means they were able to keep using the phones they were used to.

New benefits:

Saving $50 a month on their phone and internet bills
Paying only 22 cents per minute for mobile calls (old rate was 46 cents). Unfortunately they didn't make any national calls, so I had nothing to compare with.
All of the 2Talk features, which include call waiting, caller display, voicemail-to-email to name a few (comprehensive list here)

The biggest vulnerability is if the internet goes down or if there's a power outage - since they couldn't remember the last time either happened, they were happy to resort to mobile, and didn't want to invest in an UPS (backup power supply).

If you lack the technical expertise to do this all yourself, the Orcon Genius can achieve the same thing in one device.

Finally, my biggest advice for anyone attempting this: porting numbers will drop any attached services. If you port a phone number, and there's broadband on that line, the broadband will be disconnected. Please check and double-check all details before attempting a number port.

User accessibility, and keeping the bad guys out

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 18:00 +1200

As a developer, all the systems we create have end-users. There is a delicate balance between make sure a user is who they say they are, and stopping unauthorised access. Make it too easy and their data can be compromised - too difficult, and our helpdesk gets flooded daily with calls from users who can't legitimately get into their systems. The tried-and-true method for user/pass combination is email address and a password.

As a user, I hate systems that impose ridiculously complex rules when it comes to me selecting a password. If I pick a password that is ridiculously simple, I should suffer any adverse implications for my poor decision. Making me remember a login that isn't my primary email address (such as a username/account ID) is just as annoying.

The worst offender for a system I use often is our credit card processor - if someone did get access to my account, the worst they could do is transfer funds to our company bank account. Nothing else remotely useful is available, yet they enforce a very complex pattern, and make me change it every month.

Another good example of this is in a recent thread by Geekzone user Lurch - he highlights the issue of signing up to Vodafone's careers site:

Please note that the password must respect the following rules:

It must contain between 6 and 50 characters. Use only characters from the following set: ! # $ % & ( ) * + , - . / 0123456789 : ; < = > ? @ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ [ \ ] _ ` abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz { | } ~

It must contain at least 2 letter(s) (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz).

It must contain at least 1 numeric character(s) (0123456789).

It must contain at least 1 character(s) from the following set: ! # $ % & ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] _ ` { | } ~

It must not contain more than 2 identical consecutive characters (AAA, iiii, $$$$$ ...).

It must not contain your user name.

It must not contain your email address.

It must not contain your first name.

It must not contain your last name.

Just to sign up to a careers site, you have to jump through all these hoops. Over the top much?

I originally had a whole blog post here outlining what I think is a better solution, but instead micsco's post from xkcd sums it up far better than I can:

Hungry?

Mon, 4 Jun 2012 05:29 +1200

As well as ordering around the troops here at 3Bit, I own a cafe in Mt Eden called Tuihana Cafe, which is run by my better half Leslie. I've been wanting to do a blog post about the cafe for some time now, but needed an excuse for some blatant self promotion.

A couple weeks back Hansomedan flicked me a PM about a charity auction on TradeMe, so we've donated a boozy lunch for two, all proceeds going to Starship:

(Full thread here, with lots of other auctions in support of Starship - auction closes Thursday night)

Being of the geek persuasion, I couldn't help myself with the cafe, so some of the tech we run include:

Vodafone Naked DSL in the cafe, with Eftpos over broadband (transactions are super fast) and Visa Paywave/Mastercard Paypass.
Voice-over-IP - Panasonic cordless phone (from 800voip.co.nz) and 2Talk.
Free WiFi for customers (thanks to @cisconz and @chris021 for their help with this) with custom landing page and session control, powered by Mikrotik.
Coffee and food ordering by txt, email and twitter (more info about all of that here)
Full featured website, with the contact form that prints out directly into the cafe's kitchen.
Presences on both Facebook and Twitter (@tuihanacafe)

If you're thinking of dropping in, flick me a tweet (@nate) and I'll make sure I'm around (I promise I won't make torture you with one of my coffees, as I'm crap at it, but my staff are amazing ;) ).

New Garden Shop

Thu, 31 May 2012 05:33 +1200

For the last four years, my Dad has been running his own garden shop, Just Add Worms (twitter: @justaddworms). Originally starting off as a blog about all things green and organic (which has been one of his big hobbies ever since I can remember), it gradually morphed into a blog with an online shop.

Initially we opted to use WP e-commerce, a plugin to Wordpress, but once you grow past a handful of products, with different variants, the plugin doesn't really cut the mustard.

A month ago I started hunting for an alternative, and ideally I wanted a cloud based solution so there would be no installation/maintenance from my end - Shopify was the front runner but too expensive to run for a small shop (there's a monthly fee plus a per transaction fee). Most of the other cloud based products were about the same, so I settled on installing Magento (open-source) on one of our Linux servers here at 3Bit. While it is a behemoth of a product, it covered off everything we needed and after many hours of customisation it was about ready to go, until I came across a big issue: Dad couldn't manage the store - it was just far too complex and my instructions were not helping. His needs were quite basic, and Magento was really overkill.

After a few Google searches, I came across Small Fish, a Kiwi created and hosted shopping site based out of Wellington. What really impressed me about their offering is how many features the software has, but everything is broken down into wizards which clearly explain what each option does. Add to this the Edit, Preview and Live buttons at the top (you can edit products and categories directly on the site then preview straightaway), it makes it a perfect solution for even the most novice user.

At a monthly fee of $39 with no transaction fees, it really is a great little niche product. It doesn't have all the features of Magento, for your average online shop, it definitely fits the bill.

This blog post was originally all about Small Fish but it's also Dad's birthday today, so how about the unique gift of a blog post?

Happy Birthday Dad, thanks for everything.

NZ Music Month - Tim Walker

Fri, 4 May 2012 04:21 +1200

UPDATE: Tim won best international artist at last night's Musicoz Awards in Sydney. Congrats Tim!

Since 2000, May has been New Zealand Music Month. While nearly all of the music played on the commercial stations is sourced from the US, it's always great to hear and support artists from a little closer to home.

Tim Walker is a mate of mine, and also an aspiring Kiwi musician. Anyone in the industry will acknowledge that trying to get commercial airtime is hard and the market is so small that artists often head overseas to make a decent go of it.

I've just received this video that Tim's uploaded, and decided to get him some more exposure by putting it here. Enjoy!

Follow Tim on Twitter or Facebook.

Blind helper app wins Microsoft Imagine Cup

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:56 +1200

I was lucky enough to attend the Microsoft Imagine Cup last night on behalf of Geekzone (with fellow moderator Stu Taylor, BigHammer, later joined by Paul Spain the NZ Tech Podcast-er), held at the Auckland Town Hall.

The Imagine Cup is a global software competition aimed at tertiary students - they create projects which answer the theme of:

Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems

The winner this year was Mobile Eye, with software designed to help the blind. Their promotional handout states that there are 40 million blind people across the world, with one person going blind every 5 seconds - truly mind boggling numbers for something we all take for granted every day.

It's all based around a mobile app (WP7 or Java for S60). Once the app is turned on it goes straight to camera mode. To take a picture tap anywhere in the screen. Swipe to the right and the picture is sent to their crowd sourced servers, and within 30 seconds an answer is returned and read out to the user. Swipe to the left and the picture is sent to an algorithm (most blind people know what object they are holding, they just need to know basic things like colour). The app gives out nice clear audible prompts throughout the whole process.

The most impressive part of the demonstration was when the team took a photo of a half full Coke bottle, and within ten seconds, the phone read out what the photo was. While it seems basic, the ramifications for someone without sight is life changing.

The other teams who participated should also be commended - some very impressive world changing ideas and unique implementations of technology to achieve them. We have some very smart up and coming students in ICT.

My congratulations to Aakash, In-Hwan and Jade of team Mobile Eye for their well deserved win. Also thanks to Microsoft for the invite.

Follow MobileEye on Twitter.