e-books attract higher tax in Ontario

In May I downloaded the Kobo e-book reader for my iPod Touch. I found my eyes had improved to the point where I could read the fine print of the reader. I started with some free books - out of copyright books, “classics”. And then I took the plunge and bought some titles. I really enjoyed the fact there was no thick pocket book to store or pass on. The price was comparable to buying a paperback with the usual 5% GST.

Imagine my surprise when I downloaded another paid book this month! Sales tax was now 13%! How can that be, I wondered? Why, our premier, Mr Dalton McGinty, had listed the items affected by the switch to HST and books were shown as 5% - even audio books were now 5%.

So I wrote the government. I wrote Kobo. Kobo said they were looking into it and would get back. Unfortunately the link they gave me chased its tail. When I signed in, the site said “no can do, that user is already listed”. A day or two later, the government responded and directed me to a FEDERAL CRA site that listed the ONTARIO HST rules. And guess what? The federal site lists e-books as separate from paper books and audio books and says they attract 13% HST.

How about that - a new technology that will hopefully help reduce the proliferation of waste is whacked with an added 8% sales tax. Nice. Just what I like to see - stomp on the new technology. Then again, if you have been reading about the screw-up in Ontario with the so called eco fee, you can see why some flunky can’t tell an e-book from a book...

JDiskReport

Even the Mac needs maintenance on occasion. Disk drive capacity is quite large these days, but not infinite.

This little multi-platform Java program is a great tool to help you when the time comes to houseclean your hard drives. It is offered free by Karsten Lentzsch in Germany. His company, JGoodies “is a product development, software consulting, and design company focussing on an advanced Java look, UI design and usability”. Karsten “is an architect and designer of Java tools, demos, and several professional Swing libraries. He is considered a leading expert in Java user interface technology and pluggable look and feel. He brings a wealth of experience in designing usable and elegant Java application to JGoodies”.

The program works on OS X, and Windows. It scans your hard drive and profiles the contents by size or age. The results are displayed as a pie chart, bar graph or simple list. You can drill down to lower levels by clicking on the chart. If you need to see what is filling up your disk drives, pick up a copy of JDiskReport, just be sure you have a recent copy of Java installed on your computer.

A New Cat in the House

The latest Apple OS X operating system is mainly an under the hood release focussing on stability, speed, and a smaller footprint. It completes the transition to a 64 bit system and adds more polish and refinement to the famous OS X GUI.

An hour after it arrived, I started the installation. Just past 45 minutes later, the new cat was purring on my iMac. True to the advance announcements, the system runs faster than previous versions. The installer runs on its own and installs over the old system, removing the old pieces and freeing up gigabytes of disk drive space.

The minor bumps I had were all tidied up by the next day. I had left my Time Capsule on during the install and the system lost track of it. When I noticed the lack of backups in spite of Time Machine starting up each hour, I opened the Time Machine preferences, repointed the program to Time Capsule, and logged it into the network again.

My Dashboard started acting strange and freezing at various stages. Puzzled, I slept on the problem and then tracked down the Dashboard plist file (preferences list , an XML file). I moved the file to the desktop and restarted my iMac to force the system to create a new plist. Yes! The Dashboard was back. A bit later, I was looking at the widget for backups when Time Machine started and Dashboard froze once again. Rats!

I pulled the plist file and rebooted once the backup finished. Yep, working again. This time, I opened the “Manage Widgets” panel and sure enough two widgets had a red circle bar symbol next to them. One was the Time Machine Buddy. Deleted the two and the Dashboard widgets are working fine once again.

I am waiting an upgrade from Reunion next week for my genealogy program, and a third party browser plug-in to let Quicktime play the Windows Media Player formats used by CBC. The plug-in I have won’t work with the new zippy 64 bit Safari browser. However; CBC conveniently released a free app for the iPhone, so I am using my iPod Touch as a radio while I work :-)

It is a real bonus to have an operating system that continues to improve and run faster on existing hardware - a far cry from my experience with Windows which slowed down with each new release (in some cases a release refused to install for me (98 to ME) unless I reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled everything, program by program - No thanks.)

As I pass my second anniversary of switching to a Mac, I am a very satisfied customer of Apple. Customer focus, attention to detail, and the integration of hardware and software make a huge improvement over the Windows world.

Modern Sales and Logistics

On Monday Apple announced that OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" would be released four days later on Friday August 28th, 2009.

I decided to order online and at the same time get an AC charger for my iPod. Tuesday evening, I checked my order status. The charger was ready to ship via FedEx. Wednesday the 26^th I checked again and saw it had been picked up at the factory in Shenzhen, China that morning. It was clocked in a bit later in the day at Lantau Island, Hong Kong, and then arrived that afternoon in Anchorage Alaska. From there it went down to the FedEx complex in Indianapolis, Indiana. From there it came back up to Mississauga on the following morning, the 27th. And before noon it arrived at my door.

Meantime, the Snow Leopard DVD left for my house on the 27^th via Purolator and next morning, the 28^th, The Purolator site had tracking records up telling me it was in Toronto and been loaded on a truck just after 8 am for delivery today. Shortly before 5 pm the DVD arrived at my door. We had a new cat in the house.

Philco 90A Radio c1929

I liked fixing radios when I was a kid. In 1952 our neighbour offered me an old radio and after school I took my wagon across the street and up the hill to her house to collect my gem. It came in a wooden box with a speaker mounted on the top. The radio was a c1929 Philco model 90A - the early version with a number 80 rectifier tube and a pair of number 45 tubes for class B push-pull audio power amplifiers. The old set worked great pulling in a raft of AM stations from Canada and the States.

A few years later I cannibalized it for part. The only piece remaining today is the little plate from the rear of the chassis showing it was a Model 90a made by Philco Products Ltd., Toronto Canada with a 90 watt power supply designed for 25-40 cycles, 115 volts AC. In those days Toronto was on 25 cycle power meaning special transformers and motors not required in other parts of the province which were powered by 60 cycle AC. Fortunately the 25 cycle transformers were fine on 60 cycle - just a bit over built.

Tonight I did a quick search and found a site with some radio schematics - including the Philco 90/90A. If you tinker with the old radios, drop by the site: The Old Radio fixer-upper Guy

Man of many talents

Last week Ed Warner dropped by to collect some old tools and iron artifacts my dad had collected over the years. Like my dad, Ed is a member of the Tool Group (and currently the editor of its newsletter). As we finished loading his van, I showed him an old Atwater Kent model L horn speaker. The instrument was in two parts due to the failure of a white metal casting some years ago through carelessness on my part. In a matter of minutes Ed had analyzed the break and figured out how to make a repair using a small piece of pipe flanged and threaded to size on his lathe.

Two days later, Ed phoned and asked me to listen to a sound - it was my repaired c1924 horn speaker connected to a modern 20 watt amplifier. Ed returned the horn to me yesterday, no sign at all that it had been repaired. It came with a warning that the horn would be damaged more if it suffered another mishap as the metal cover holding the flange of the new connecting pipe to the base of the horn would be torn open.

Others have mentioned Ed’s skill at repairing small mechanical devices creating any missing metal parts as needed. And we have all seen his skills put to use to restore old wooden view cameras, bellows and all. A true craftsman in this age of automation and throwaway. Thanks, Ed.

Distant Suns

In the 1980s a program came out for my beloved Amiga that was a serious package for amateur astronomers. Mike Smithwick’s Distant Suns offered an interactive galaxy and close-ups of interesting objects. Before the Amiga stumbled into oblivion, the program was ported to Windows where incantation 6.0 lives today.

More recently, last fall Distant Suns was ported to Apple’s fabulously successful iPhone/iPod Touch duo. If you own one of these little pocket marvels, a copy will cost you just under $4 US at the Apps Store. If you use Windows 95 through XP (or run the various emulations that bring the charms of Windows to the Mac) you can buy a desktop version on-line from the author. Check out www.distantsuns.com (or the App Store) for more information.

NB. Pardon my tone on Windows, my daughter was over yesterday with her Vista laptop which has been struggling since the Microsoft patch fiasco on June 6th. She was trying to write a paper. Since the “security auto update” mentioned, many keystrokes in Word, including a space, have a slight delay that throws off even a mediocre typist like me. I had to keep her away from (glass) windows for the well-being of her laptop and the safety of beings outdoors.