Author Archives: Andrew Jorgensen

Surcharging

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Square charges a flat 2.75% as of this post, so let’s say someone wants to pay you $100 but you don’t want to be the one to take the hit for using a credit card. How do you arrive at the correct value for the surcharge?

You could add 2.75% to arrive at $102.75, but then when Square takes their cut you only get $99.92. You lost 8¢! That’s because 2.75% of $102.75 is more than $2.75. So let’s get our maths in a row and fix it!

We’re looking for the value x such that x-x*2.75%=y where y is the amount you want to end up with. Simplify that using algebra and you get x*97.25%=y or rather x=y*1/97.25% or x=y*102.8277635%. For you folks without a % on your calculator that’s x=y*1.028277635.

The generalized solution for finding what you should surcharge, compared to what you are being surcharged is x=1/(1-y)-1.

In the $100 range we can drop some of those extra digits to arrive at a surcharge of 2.83%. Since we rounded up this keeps you safe in the $1,000 range too.

Of cource it’s easier to calculate a surcharge of 3%, but that makes you a bit of a jerk. On the other hand you could take the 8¢ hit and call it even, or go down to 2% and share the cost more evenly.

Slim Wallet Reviews

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Your wallet itself–without contents–could be adding significantly to the bulk in your pocket. As mentioned in a previous post this is something I care a lot about. In this post I review some of the thinnest wallets available.

All-Ett Billfolds

All-Ett sells The World’s Thinnest Wallet. If that claim isn’t 100% true it’s very very close. Their signature wallet features two of the best approaches to slimming your wallet: thinner material and a split deck.

All-Ett uses ripstop nylon, the same fabric power kites are made of. Ripstop nylon is incredibly thin and light for its strength. Four layers of the material (the entire bulk of the wallet) only add up to about 1mm. Seams and stitching make it add up a bit more here and there but your cards and cash will add a good deal more. Two drawbacks to the material are that it can make a slight crinkling noise when bent and can wear small holes over time at the corners of your cards (though it won’t rip).
The World's Thinnest Wallet
The arrangement of the cards means that already, just by splitting the deck, your wallet is half as thick as it was. Cards are inserted horizontally so they don’t fall out when the wallet is closed. The material is a bit slick so you may need to be careful when opening your wallet.

Most of All-Ett’s products are also offered with a very thin, high quality leather exterior adding less than 1.5mm total. They also come in a recycled material which has a softer, less crinkly, less slippery feel but is about 3 times as thick as the ripstop. Still that’s only about 3mm, probably a lot thinner than what you’re carrying now, and you can help save the planet.

I am a big fan of All-Ett. I keep my lesser used cards in their original wallet in my organizer. I also own a card case which unfortunately is not large enough for credit cards, it was designed with business cards in mind.

Big Skinny

The thing that really struck me about Big Skinny is that their tri-fold (normally the fattest wallet design possible) is nearly as thin (8mm) when loaded with everything I normally carry (admittedly not much) as the leather card case I used to carry when it was completely empty (7mm). And that includes features, like a clear ID pocket and several overlapping pockets, you’d normally expect in a standard tri-fold. If you’re looking to replace your standard leather wallet with a better model but aren’t ready to radically change the contents of your pockets Big Skinny is probably your best option. These wallets still look great when loaded up with cash, receipts, and 30 or so cards.

Big Skinny has clearly spent some time thinking about the problems a wallet is supposed to solve. The nylon microfiber material they use is more flexible than ripstop and has a softer feel. It’s water resistant and machine washable. Their designs also make more sense. The Super Skinny, for example, also uses the split deck approach but orients your cards so that the wallet will bend only on the same axis as your cash. That’s a little hard to explain so compare the photos of the All-Ett above and the Super Skinny below. With the All-Ett your cash will get folded once and then bent along the other axis as the wallet flexes in your pocket.

The orientation of your cards also means a higher chance some of them could slip out but Big Skinny addresses this with a rubbery coating on the inside that grips your cards for you. My younger brother has been carrying the one pictured above for a while and tells me his cards still slip out sometimes. It does have this super cool hidden pocket behind the ID pocket though.

I carry the multi-pocket bi-fold because I like the dimensions and I can fit my wallet pen in the space just above the clear ID pocket. Let me add emphasis here: This is my every day carry wallet.

The one thing I don’t like about Big Skinny is the sewn-on rubber label they put on the outside. They say it provides a place to grip the otherwise slippery exterior but they could have accomplished the same with a printed label and it just doesn’t jive with the “every millimeter counts” mantra (the label itself is 1mm thick).

Money-band

“As simple as possible, but not any simpler.” The Money-band is a wide rubber band specially sized to go lengthwise around your cards (and cash if you don’t mind folding) and hold them securely. It works as advertised and the minimalism should appeal to many of you.

I confess I hoped it would be made of some higher quality material, silicone maybe. My initial suspicion that this was a re-branded broccoli rubber band from the produce section proved false, but if you want to give the concept a try without shelling out $4 the broccoli-band will hold your cards width-wise instead and give you that depression-era waste not want not satisfaction.

Disclaimer: Each of these manufacturers sent me samples of their products in exchange for links to their sites. I have personally used each of the products reviewed for at least a day, and in some cases weeks. Measurements were taken with a cheap caliper from Harbor Freight (some rounding applied).

Note: This post will be updated in the near future with more links and what-not.

Please comment if you would like to suggest another wallet for me to review!

Backing up your Nexus One without root

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Rooting your phone is a pain, especially if you have all the latest updates installed so that the known exploits don’t work. But the only reason I wanted to root my Nexus One was to make a full backup so that I could restore it after giving CyanogenMod a try. You can create a full backup without root privileges. Note that this very likely requires an unlocked bootloader (I can’t verify as mine is already unlocked). This is a quick howto and as such will presume you have a level of expertise.

If you haven’t already done so…

Download fastboot for your platform from HTC.

Shut down your device and hold the trackball button down while you boot up again. This will put the device in fastboot mode (the one with three skateboarding androids). Plug in via USB.

This will delete your data! Do some other kinds of backups and sync your data w/ Google first!

fastboot oem unlock

Follow the prompts on screen to unlock your bootloader and technically void your warranty.

Now on to making a full backup…

Ensure you have enough space on your microSD card (my backup took around 300MB).

Download a recovery image that does backups. Make sure you get one that’s correct for your device (one with passion in the name for the Nexus One). Checksum it to make sure it downloaded correctly. Get into the bootloader again.

fastboot boot recovery.img

This boots the custom recovery without flashing it. When it’s done booting use the menu it shows you to do a full Nandroid backup and then reboot. It will take a couple minutes.

When you want to restore your backup repeat this procedure but select restore instead of backup in the recovery menu. Restore takes longer than backup, be patient.

Slimmer Pants

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No, this post isn’t about how I lost 17 lbs over the last few months (more on that later maybe) it’s about how I don’t like to carry a lot of stuff in my pockets. It’s kinda one of my pet peeves. At the same time I can’t stand to find myself unprepared. I’ve learned a few things about how to accomplish both.

The first step toward slimmer pants is to stop carrying stuff you don’t need. My wallet contains my preferred credit card, a Visa card from my credit union in case someone doesn’t take American Express, driver license, temple recommend, and a pen. No cash, no receipts, no loyalty cards. I have a small key ring with the keys to the car, the truck, and the office. I’m almost ready to give up the key to the car and the remote key fob thingy.

I also carry a Kershaw Leek clipped to my pocket. If anyone asks me what kind of knife I carry I can say, “I gotta leek.” It’s a great conversation starter. I am in the market for a slimmer one but the Leek is pretty close.

Receipts go into my back pocket when they don’t ask me if I want one, and then into the recycle bin. I can look up transactions on a website if I need to. Cash also goes in the back pocket on the extremely rare occasion that I carry it. Loyalty cards can often be avoided by not shopping at places where they make a big difference or making the cashier look up your account by phone number. No need for a house key since I’m almost always driving and there’s a garage door opener in the car. The mail key I gave to my son so he can pick up for me after school every day.

Now that’s not to say I’m unprepared. You see the real trick is to put all the other stuff somewhere else. I have a man purse–a very manly olive drab one made of ballistic nylon. This thing holds almost everything else I might want to have with me but won’t carry in my pockets. It doesn’t look even slightly feminine. It holds a great many things: A second wallet with some emergency cash, medical and dental cards, lesser-used bank and credit cards, library card, etc.; A second key ring with house keys, the shed key, a mail key, etc.; A multi-tool and a flashlight; Digital camera; Various USB drives and flash memory cards loaded with software and media; Common medicines like excedrin, ibuprofen, and benedryl; Consecrated oil and some hand sanitizer; And a few other oddities like my spectrum analyzer, my square reader, and a tiny sewing kit I picked up at a hotel. I used to keep my e-book reader in there but there’s an app for that. The whole thing stays tucked away in the truck, in the office, or at home so that it’s close by if I need something but not on my person. Running out to get the insurance card is a small price to pay for having less junk in your pocket.

I’m in the process of choosing a new wallet and in the next weeks I will review some of the best options. Traditional leather wallets, especially tri-folds, can be thick without anything in them and enormous when fully loaded. Even the little card case I’ve been using proved to be much thicker than it needed to be. You can slim your pants even further by getting a much slimmer wallet. Stay tuned.

Square

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Last week I finally received my Square card reader!

Square lets you (yes, even you!) take credit card payments on your smartphone.  It’s easy and free to sign up and the card reader arrives in a week or so. The idea is to lower the barrier to entry so that anyone can accept a credit card.

Why would you want to do that? I’m planning on selling my lawn mower on Craigslist. My mom and my older sisters are amateur (in the sense that they don’t make a living off it) seamstresses and one of my sisters has had booths at craft fairs. Our local school could have a bake sale. And of course a yard sale is always possible. As more and more of us stop carrying cash with us everywhere we go it’s going to be more and more of an advantage to be able to take credit cards.

Why didn’t PayPal come up with this? I have no idea. It would have fit in perfectly with the kind of stuff they were doing already. I will be surprised if they don’t at least try to buy it.

Of course this is not ideal for everyone. Retailers can often get better rates than 2.75% + 15¢; And square won’t automatically update your proprietary inventory system. But if you’re running a side business, or even just a very small business, then square could be just the thing.

When you get your card reader you’ll probably want to practice swiping cards. Don’t do what I did and authorize large transactions and then cancel them. It takes a few days for those authorizations to fall off your account after they are canceled. Instead just swipe your card with the transaction amount set to $0.

The reader device plugs into your headphone jack so obviously it must send some kind of audible signal. What does the Square reader sound like?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

http://andrew.jorgensenfamily.us/files/2010/11/square.mp3

I used a card that expired years ago and for which the account has been closed so at best this gives the clever hacker an expired credit card number and my name.

Flaming Hoops

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Found this old assignment from my History of Creativity course while looking for something else. It supposed to be a sonnet? This is surely a first draft as I almost never had time or will to do a second. Enjoy:

University, such a backward place!
A place where patrons pay dearly to learn,
yet rejoice when excused early or told
not to come at all, or not to read.
And yet ’tis not such a surprise when one
considers the task, sisyphusian,
it is to toil toward graduation
whilst all pow’rs of earth and hell push back.
How oft have I been told that another writ,
thrice signed and copiously copied,
must in some dusty catacomb be laid
ere any writ in return they’ll give me.
Not that alone, but adamantian
chains of courses prerequiring me,
lest in less than the prescribed four years
their gordian labyrinth I penetrate.
Oh woe, that cleverness is rewarded
naught (without a fight) for cleverness gives
answers unexpected and none but those
expected are right when four hundred exams
between three TAs must be graded.
What then shall I have when all this flaus is o’er
and I be thoroughly colleged?
Shall I walk? Shall I sit where old men don robes
of a false priesthood, and young men are made
to where mortar-boards to show how flat
their heads have become?
Oh fat camels who spring through needles eyes,
quench these flaming hoops of academia!

Using osc build to make a jail on openSUSE

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Before I start let me say that there may be easier or more direct ways to do this.  This has the advantage of being pretty easy for me to do.  I’m not going to discuss why you might want to do this, or what a jail is, etc..

You can get the most recent osc and build tools from the openSUSE:Tools repository.  You will also need an account on the build service.

Create an empty directory
mkdir jail/

Go into that directory and create a dummy RPM .spec file
cd jail/
vim jail.spec

Name:           jail
Version:        0
Release:        0
Summary:        Jail
License:        Jail
Group:          Jail
BuildRequires:  vim gdb glib2-devel zypper
BuildRoot:      %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-build

%description

%prep

%build

%install

%clean
rm -rf %{buildroot}

%files
%defattr(-,root,root)

%changelog

The BuildRequires: tag is where you specify which packages you want installed in your jail, what I have listed there is just an example.

Also create an empty .osc directory (this prevents an ugly bug where the jail tries to delete itself)
mkdir .osc/

You’ll need to be logged in to OBS if you aren’t already
osc ls
Enter your credentials at the prompts

If for some reason that didn’t work you may need to put your password into your .oscrc file
vim ~/.oscrc
Toward the bottom…

[https://api.opensuse.org]
user=<YOUR USERNAME>
pass=<YOUR PASSWORD>

If your password changed you may need to delete any lines that say passx=<GARBAGE>, or manipulate your GNOME Keyring.

Now you should be ready to build a jail

osc build --local-package --root=</path/to/new/jail> --alternative-project=openSUSE:<VERSION> <ARCH>

<VERSION> is, for example, 11.2
<ARCH> is only needed if you want a different arch (i586 on an x86_64 machine)
</path/to/new/jail> is where you want the tool to put your jail (not the directory you’re in!), I use /var/tmp/jail
You may be prompted for your root password
When the jail is built (assuming it worked) it will fail complaining about an empty package, ignore that and get on with your life: you only wanted a jail, not a package.

At this point you can chroot into your jail
sudo chroot /path/to/new/jail
or if you are changing architectures…
sudo linux32 chroot /path/to/new/jail

Yay, you’re done!