Archive for November, 2017

Unrecognizable Credit Card Descriptions

Monday, November 27th, 2017

I’ve decided to start journal some undecipherable credit card descriptions. For my own future reference.

Maybe it will also help clear up some confusion for others. Feel free to comment with your own strange ones.

“1717 GB VANCOUVER MARI VANCOUVER” – It took me some guessing and testing (while I was on hold with my credit card company) to figure out that this was legitimate, it’s the Gas Bar at the Superstore complex on Marine Drive in Vancouver. I can’t be the only person who couldn’t recognize this charge at first!

“CPC SCP/0000320901359” – If you guessed Canada Post, you win! Seriously? How can you not get charge backs?

Update: Apparently I’m not the only one making a list. TD has one here.

 

fping (Windows) – Download the last version.

Friday, November 10th, 2017

Hmm… two posts in a row about stuff I’ve used for years that have now gone offline. There’s a statement here about the so called longevity of things in the digital era. Hey, looking at the calendar widget at the right of this blog, it just hit 10 years of age!

fping, apparently short for “Fast Pinger”, is a really handy tool I use when I want a simple way to monitor an IP address over a period of hours or days. A ping response implies that at least the Internet connection and router/firewall at the remote location are up – so any claimed problems would be further downstream. The built in ping in Windows does not have a date or time stamp, so it isn’t useful for longer term tracking. And a lot of intermittent problems really do need to be monitored over periods of time.

e.g. fping google.com -D -T -l -c -L F:\temp\log.txt

will get you results something like this (on screen and in the text file):

2017/11/10 17:13:57.780 : Reply[1] from google.com: bytes=32 time=42.6 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:58.824 : Reply[2] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56
2017/11/10 17:13:59.869 : Reply[3] from google.com: bytes=32 time=43.1 ms TTL=56

There are a ton of other options… but, I haven’t played with them much.

Originally from http://www.kwakkelflap.com (which is now just serving ads). By Wouter Dhondt – Thanks Wouter!

I haven’t been able to find any new address for the tool, so, I’ve decided to host a copy.

This is the latest version that I could find (using archive.org from September 2015): fping300.zip

Not to be confused with fping on Linux (Unix?) which is entirely different.