Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Archive for April, 2007
How to Start Accept Credit Cards Online At Your Website
Apr 12th
If you’re an entrepenuer that owns an off-line store that’s now just getting onto the web to sell online as well, you will need a couple of critical tools to succeed. One of them is the ability to accept credit cards.
If you haven’t been accepting credit cards at your offline store, you will have to get a merchant account to accept credit cards online. Of course, you can set-up a PayPal Business Account (free) which allows you to take any major credit card and e-checks. PayPal now even has the option of accepting credit cards at your website WITHOUT the customer knowing about PayPal — thus they become just like any other merchant account credit card processing company in the background.
The other option is to open a more traditional merchant account like from a sponsoring company called Advantage Processors. There are plenty of companies that offer services to e-merchants specifically as well. One option that might be important when you’re choosing is to find that that does both online and offline sales, so that you can start to accept credit cards at your own store as well.
That’s the 1st step before you set-up your site — get a merchant account so that you can get paid. Otherwise, why set-up a website store if you can’t sell?
Poor Man’s GPS: Getting Step-By-Step Directions When You’re Lost (with your phone)
Apr 11th
You’re driving somewhere and inevitably you get lost. What do you do? Sometimes you don’t even have the telephone number of the restaurant or office that you’re going to. You do have their address, but you STILL don’t have a GPS system in your car. Ok, Ok, yes, you’re still lost after kicking yourself for not splurging on that nice and shiny new GPS gadget you’ve been eyeing for yourself. Your current situation would have rationalized that purchase right there and then. Oh well. What to do? At least you have your cell phone…no you don’t have to do any James Bond or McGyvver type operation on your cell…instead you can dial yourself to destination. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Call Any Airline Free Without Knowing Their Toll-Free Telephone Number
Apr 11th
There are many things in my brain that are completely useless facts. Like I actually remember the toll-free numbers to American Airlines and Delta Airlines. But I don’t know any of the other gazillion airlines out there including JetBlue and Continental which my family flies often. And when my wife travels on business, I like to loosely keep tabs on her flight back to make sure it got off the ground on time, or if it will look like it will be late, etc. But this means I’ll make several calls to the airline during those flight days.
So I just pick-up the phone, simply say the name of the airline, and I get connected free of charge — all without every knowing or looking up the toll-free customer service number for any airline. How? Are you saying “c’mon, Tell Me!” Read the rest of this entry »
How To Jump To Another Email Account On Your Samsung Blackjack Cell Phone
Apr 11th
One of the better features of the Samsung Blackjack i607 is that since it uses Windows Mobile, you have the ability to set-up multiple POP3 email accounts so that you can read & respond to emails using each respective email account — I have a personal email account, gmail email account, a business email account, the synchronized Outlook account from my desktop, and the SMS/MMS messaging account that I manage on my AT&T Blackjack PDA phone right now.
Instead of “backing out” of an email account to get back to the total list of email/messaging accounts and then selecting the next email account you want to manage and drilling down again to get to that email list, there’s an easier shortcut that bypasses all that clicking. Read the rest of this entry »
Tips to try out if have trouble sending faxes with Vonage VoIP. How to make it work.
Apr 11th
VoIP isn’t the best friend of faxing because of the nature of the technology. VoIP doesn’t compress analog fax signals the way it should; the VoIP system misunderstands the fax tones for echo on the line and shuts the call down; and the issue of using “packets” of data makes for an “unreliable” stream of data necessary for fax machines to continue listening and receiving the faxes.
If you subscribe to a Vonage business acount (or sometimes regular VoIP lines from other providers), you’ll get a free additional FAX line. I used to think that this ”FAX line” service add-on was just a way or “re-packaging” the VoIP line, but apparently it’s legitimate in that it’s because faxing over VoIP takes a different protocol to make it work which the Vonage “dedicated fax lines” do use.
Usually you can get away with faxing a couple of pages on a regular Vonage broadband phone line. However, longer length faxes will fail, almost always. Here’s some tips to increase the odds of it working consistently… Read the rest of this entry »
How to transfer VHS VCR video tapes to digital video and DVD format
Apr 9th
Here’s a question from a friend today about converting video piled up on VHS tapes into a digital-friendly format so that they can be used for the long-run:
What do you think is the easiest way to set up a way to transfer my old VCR tapes to digital media? (Ideally to mpg or wmv files on the pc) I haven’t looked at doing it yet, and it is time before the tapes die.
There are various ways to get the video off VHS videotape into your PC. But dealing with complicated issues around video capture cards, installation, etc just isn’t worth it, especially when there are much easier ways of getting that video off the tape and into your PC…
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!