A new blog we’re hosting: “You’re not sushi – you’re Chicken!”

July 21st, 2008

Perceptus hosts a few sites for friends, family, and other non-commercial purposes.

We added a new one a few days ago for Leonard, his sister, and a couple of their cousins. This crazy subset of the Chan Clan is up to no good again.*

They are building a giant roast chicken on wheels and it’ll be screaming down the first Red Bull Soapbox Race in Canada, this September 7, 2008 in Vancouver.

So, check out the You’re not sushi – you’re Chicken! in Red Bull Soapbox Vancouver 2008 blog.

* They were part of the Red Bull Flugtag Vancouver 2006, with the amazingly large and beautiful craft, The Wild Sushi – this blog is also hosted by Perceptus Solutions Inc.

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I hate banning IP addresses…

July 6th, 2008

Today I noticed that one IP address has been using wget, a command line tool for grabbing web pages, to get random words from unique-names.com’s random word fetcher about once per second.  I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but I have stopped it today.

The way to ban an IP address on a single website on an Apache web server turned out to be easier than I expected.  Just edit .htaccess and add two lines similar to this:

# banned IPs
deny from 123.12.1.2

Actually, the line starting with a # sign is optional, that’s a comment in the .htaccess.

That’s it.

As for who was trying to use the Naque for Unique Names nefariously?  I’m not sure who it was, or what was the purpose.  Whoever it is, if you read this, and if it was for something reasonably worthwhile (i.e. not SPAM), then drop me a line and ask for permission.  Until then, you’re banned from the site.

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Posted in annoying, unique names | No Comments »

Summer Break Bingo

July 3rd, 2008

We meant to get this new word list ready about 2 weeks ago, but somebody spent a bit too much time enjoying the sun to finish on time… :)

We have a new word list for the end of the school year.  So, create and customize your bingo cards, by visiting print-bingo.com and opening our template word list for the Last Day of School bingo game.

As always, the basic use of the site is free.  You can currently unlock our Premium features for only $10.

Have fun in the sun!
Let’s see if we can get a Fourth of July word list done before midnight, shall we?

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Posted in bingo cards, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

Show GPS coordinates on Google Map

June 23rd, 2008

It is possible to get Google Maps to center upon a set of coordinates, such as those from a handheld GPS receiver.

The syntax is actually quite simple:

Search for latitude + longitude.  E.g. “22.4627+112.9176” will take you to a particular “little” town in China.

Or in URL format:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=22.4627+112.9176

Update, 2013-12: In the iOS Google Maps App, you can search for an address in the form of 22.4627,112.9176 and the App will find the right location. This is useful for cutting and pasting from your phone’s contact notes. Though, having typed this, I wonder if you can put coordinates in the regular address field…

Or if you want a web page to enter numbers into, this one works pretty well: http://boulter.com/gps/.

I tried that site above first, but I needed the “full” google version so that I could get custom links and other features, so I needed to get it straight from maps.google.com.
ばいあぐら 通販 ジェネリック

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Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

PayPal Changes it’s Canadian Pricing

June 8th, 2008

I read some good news for small businesses in Canada who use PayPal to receive credit card payments.  The transaction costs have dropped by $0.25.  I’m happy, especially since our print-bingo.com transactions upgrade price for Premium access price is currently $10 so percentage wise, the extra $0.25 has a noticeable benefit on our margins. *

The percentage that PayPal takes also drops if you’ve gone past the 3000 per month bracket.

In my humble opinion, PayPal is now an even better deal for small scale web sites. The threshold where I would spend the time and money to move to a merchant account with a bank just got bumped up by a lot.  I’ve helped set up a “proper” merchant account for a client in the past, and it’s not fun nor cheap.  And programming for PayPal is really nice in comparison.

Also note that the entry level currency conversion for Canadians at 2.5% still stinks.

At Perceptus, we use a US based USD chequing account through RBC Centura where we withdraw our funds in USD.  Then we either convert to CAD with the somewhat better bank exchange rate, or we pay Leonard in USD to avoid exchange costs altogether.

The PayPal blog post is here: http://www.thepaypalblog.com/weblog/2008/06/lowered-fees-fo.html

* Hmm… what’s with that emphasis on the word “currently”?

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Posted in annoying, canadian, print-bingo.com, small business | No Comments »

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