I’ve previously blogged about how to use Google Adwords to get 10GB of free Dropbox for life.

Hyper has discovered that Dropbox are conducting a beta program of a new photo & video import feature. By installing their new beta software and importing 5GB of photos & videos to Dropbox with the new beta features, you will be rewarded with 5GB of extra space (in chunks of 500MB, separate from the referral bonuses).

Good find Hyper! Thanks for letting me know.

I’ve done it myself and have so far been rewarded with 500MB – it sucks being limited to 1Mbit upload on ADSL2+.

I also have a Samsung Galaxy Gio running Android which is currently the Cyanogenmod firmware. The best method to use contacts by far on this device is “in the cloud” on Google Contacts. The calendar is the same with Google Calendar. And so are notes with Notes in Google Docs.

I previously have had lots of problems sync’ing to Android. I first used Samsung Kies which seemed alright except it had a tendency to duplicate contacts and calendar events continually so that my phone’s memory eventually filled up. Cyanogenmod won’t actually support Samsung Kies, mainly because the USB device function seems to be broken on the Samsung Galaxy Gio port and Cyanogenmod also lacks the Samsung Apps framework.

I found GO Contact Sync Mod after trying several other methods of sync’ing. When run on a PC which uses Outlook, it essentially sync’s your Outlook Calendar & Notes with Google.

Google also have put out Google Calendar Sync which will sync your Outlook to Google Calendar.

So with those two apps, you have a total sync solution that doesn’t fuck out if you run it on two PCs – and it uses the Internet connection so no direct connection between the phone and PC is needed, just the Internet on both devices.

On Debian to setup a whitelist all you have to do is edit /etc/postfix/main.cf so that smtpd_client_restrictions includes something like ‘check_client_access hash:/path/to/rbl_override’

For example this is what I have in my /etc/postfix/main.cf:

smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated, permit_mynetworks, check_client_access hash:/path/to/rbl_override, reject_rbl_client tor.dnsbl.sectoor.de, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.ahbl.org, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net, reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org, permit

Some hosts use SPF records in DNS to specify what mail servers are safe to accept e-mail from. To lookup this information you can run:

host -txt bigpond.com

Then you need to create your rbl_override file. It should have something like this:

# Bigpond (taken from `host -t txt bigpond.com`)
61.9.168.0/24 OK
61.9.189.0/24 OK
61.9.169.0/24 OK
61.9.190.0/24 OK

You will also need to run postmap on the rbl_override file, to create a machine parse able binary with your whitelist database.

My Postfix installation is spread across several servers, however through a rig with rsync I regularly synchronize some binaries and configs to every server so I simply use this to send my whitelist.

eBay removed the duplicate listings citing a violation of their terms of service. So not only are private sellers unable to offer a quantity of the same item on a “Buy It Now” product, but they also can’t post more than one listing at a time. This means if the seller wants to sell the lot, they need to wait until one unit sells then immediately relist the item.

We recently removed a number of your listings because they violated the Duplicate items policy. The items listed below are just a sample of those that were removed. To see the full list, please go to My eBay, click the Activity tab, and then click the Unsold link under the Sell heading.

<insert eBay item ID here> – Mini PCI Express 802.11g WiFi Wireless Card

Please use the following information to ensure you are following this policy:

Sellers aren’t allowed to list multiple, identical fixed-price items on eBay at the same time. The purpose of this policy is to prevent search results from being dominated by duplicate fixed price listings of the same item from the same seller. This change will make it easier for buyers to gain a quicker, in depth view of a greater range of items.

This policy also applies to sellers who:
– Lists in more than one category
– Uses different user IDs

To prevent further listing removals and violations, please be sure to turn off all automatic relisting features and remove any duplicate listings from your account. Further duplicate listings may result in additional action including listing cancellation, loss of fees, limits on account privileges, loss of seller status, and account suspensions

To find out more information on our duplicate fixed price listings policy, please visit:
http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/policies/listing-multi.html

We do allow members to sell multiple items in a single listing. For more information, please visit:
http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/listing-variations.html

Please be sure to remove any other duplicates from your current and future listings. Otherwise, they may be removed, and you may be subject to a range of other actions, including limits to your buying and selling privileges and suspension of your account.

Your listing(s) may be eligible for relisting through My eBay. If so you’ll see the listing in your Unsold Items page within My eBay. Those that are not eligible for relisting will not be visible in the Unsold Items page.

To relist your item, sign in to My eBay, go to your Unsold items and select the item that was cancelled. (It’s highlighted with a yellow banner.) Before relisting, please make any changes necessary to ensure that your listing is in compliance with the law and eBay policies.

You might want to check your other listings for similar violations.
You can review our listing removal policies and seller rules by clicking the links below.

Thanks for your understanding.
Sincerely,
eBay Trust and Safety team

Why eBay may remove your listing:
http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/questions/listing-ended.html
Knowing the rules for sellers:
http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/sell/policies.html

However there is the current promotion that private sellers get up to 30 listings for free per month (which expires 1/1/12).

I’ll have to work on becoming a PowerSeller I think. It would appear that my eBay account only lacks the minimum of $3,000 USD of sales over 12 months.

That may be a challenge, then again it may not. My views on selling things on eBay is to sell stuff you get for free, because then ultimately it doesn’t matter what price you sell it for. Things my computer repair business would “throw away” I sell privately on eBay.

I found it interesting Yours 2 Take’s main selling points in this ad were that its a free service and the intention is to give your unwanted junk a more deserving home (better for the environment etc.). I found this interesting because I could see I wasn’t being charged insertion fees on eBay, other than when I purchased extras like more images (25c per image after the first free image), or extra categories (a further charge of the insertion fee).

I looked into the eBay fees and charges and discovered to my surprise that for a private seller that does not have an eBay store or is not a registered business, you can list 30 items for free per month. eBay will take a “Final Value Fee” of 7.9% if your item sells, but this charge is also capped to $49.95 for the higher value items so it seems a reasonable fee.

eBay does also have excellent shipping calculation through arrangements with Australia Post – when listing a product if you use the “Calculated” shipping and provide the packed items dimensions and weight, eBay will do all the shipping calculations for you. If you want to mark up your shipping costs, you can add a handling fee. Because of this it makes sense to box up items as you list them on eBay because you can then get the exact shipping costs calculated automatically for your potential buyers location.

So I ask when I can list my junk on eBay and potentially earn a few bucks from things that’d otherwise go in the bin, and pay nothing for the listing so if it doesn’t sell I haven’t lost a cent – why would I even consider Yours 2 Take?

I’ve been considering how this can be pulled off, but I think playing with it over the Christmas period will be the best plan so any downtime doesn’t affect business (as business is closed anyway).

My thoughts are that multiple Asterisk installs would run with a few different tasks. One task would be SIP registration where 1 to 3 machines would continually register to SIP providers like Exetel and Pennytel, and when any inbound call is received, try to dial it locally, if not use IAX to try dialling on every other Asterisk node. Another task would be SIP registration with end users where a number of nodes would be mentioned in DNS A and SRV records.

The real magic I’ll have to work on is a macro for the Asterisk dial plan, so that we can replace Dial(SIP/somedestination) with a routine that will attempt that destination on every node in the cluster before producing a failed result. But I can’t see any reason as to why this isn’t possible.

The complicated thing with day to day administration will be duplicating the same configurations on every node in the cluster. Perhaps at a later date the development of some scripts to assist would be beneficial. Naturally I’ll be blogging about this adventure as it progresses.

Another note on VoIP – today I changed my POST 15 VoIP plan with Exetel to the $5 per month plan. I also recharged my Pennytel account and am now using Exetel as a primary provider with the alaw & ulaw codecs and Pennytel for calls to mobiles and 1300 numbers with the g729 codec. I noticed there are some decent differences in price with this operation.

First of all there are a couple hidden charges with Exigent. If an invoice goes overdue, they’ll suspend your VPS just the same as any provider, but charge you a $35 late fee.

Last night there was also a scheduled outage as Exigent planned a reboot of their VPS servers. That all went to plan ok. But it would have been nice if Exigent restarted VPS containers, instead waiting for me to action a boot of my VPS.

And finally there is the memory weirdness. Fair enough, at Jumba my VPS with 512MB of memory did not offer enough to run LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) and a full fledged e-mail server with amavisd-new and spamd for filtering. The moment I setup amavisd-new I found the Jumba VPS would frequently have killed processes and crashed services etc. So I got the Exigent account simply for running an e-mail server. And guess what, with 1GB or double the memory, I still can’t run a full fledged e-mail server. Comparing the memory consumption between the Jumba and Exigent accounts demonstrates that the Exigent account requires more memory to run the same services with the same software versions. I’m yet to find an explanation as to why.

Over the Christmas period I’ll have to either figure out the memory issues I have with Exigent, or discontinue them.

A primary goal of the eBook store project wasn’t even to turn over a profit, it was to test and operate a store with very basic needs on its eCommerce package in order to gain experience.

Because of this experience I’ve realized quite a few things about Zen Cart and how I can make it work for my computer hardware business.

I’ll have to test a rig on how I can easily maintain thousands of products by using supplier pricelist files, over the Christmas break. If that works out well then I’ll just have to spend a stack of time photographing and writing descriptions on products.

I may even have to buy something like StoreManager for Zen Cart for the huge job of product data entry.

I feel the project is working as planned because in a week I’ve gone from no website to achieving quite a few tasks:

• Installed Zen Cart
• Found a template and modified the crap out of it with my own logos, favicon.ico, etc.
• Setup up the PayPal modules to automate the payment process easily
• Inspected the product download systems to ensure security of the products
• Figured out how to provide product images to Zen Cart
• Submitted an XML sitemap to Google which ultimately was the only links to the website
• Several days later after getting indexed in Google, having several specific keyword hits from Google where my website appears in the top 3 results for those search terms. Additionally for those keywords my website is certainly the most relevant result Google returns so I’m predicting the ranking will only go up

So far I’ve only added about one third of the total product range. I plan on investing all profits from this project for at least the first 6 months in product expansion. However it seems the challenge with this project is it may quickly become a full time occupation. Then again it may not, because I don’t really know the depth of the market and probably nobody does due to how unique the market actually is.

Depending on how sales actually unfold I may even invest in some online advertising but at this point that seems unnecessary due to the extremely good search ranking I’ve achieved very quickly at no cost. Perhaps with some of the products I intend to expand my range with, I may need to invest in advertising in order to bust into these markets.

I did actually manage to track down a single competitor. They also run Zen Cart except with a default theme and have quite a clunky website. Running the same scripts I’ve quickly out-ranked them on Google through the use of good design and the XML sitemap likely made a significant dent.

I should also make it clear that I won’t mention the name of this website because the topics I discuss with that business could potentially be useful to competitors, but I am trying to blog about it in a way that inspires thinking outside the box for new business ideas.