Peter's Useful Crap

Airbnb has become a very useful option for business travel. It can be cheaper than a hotel, but you can also often get a more convenient location and better amenities such as a kitchen. You also have many more options in case you want a place with multiple rooms.

Airbnb for Business has made normal Airbnb much more convenient for my small business. Just like Uber for Business, you can have multiple sub-accounts that can all charge trips to the main account and credit card. This way, employees can choose their own accommodations and book their own trips! Before I started using Airbnb for Business, I’d have to play middle man and make a booking on behalf of my employees; this took up my time and I’m sure the hosts would have preferred dealing directly with the person who would be staying at their place.

Once an employee is added to an Airbnb for Business account, they have an option to specify on a booking that they’re on a business trip:

This then allows them to select the option of charging the trip to the company credit card. This way, they don’t have to use their own card and wait to get reimbursed. They also don’t have to have the company credit card in their possession.

If an employee already has an Airbnb account, they don’t have to create another account for business purposes. They can simply add their work e-mail to their existing Airbnb profile:

From an administrative standpoint, I can see all trips made by my employees in the Airbnb for Business dashboard. This centralizes the information I need to do accounting.

I can of course add and remove employees under the business account. I can also add “bookers” who can book on behalf of other employees, and “managers” who can view the report information.

I can also manage the credit cards on the business account and assign different cards to different groups if needed.

Lastly, there are e-mail notification settings. I can choose to receive an e-mail for every booking, and I can also get special alerts if the nightly rate exceeds a particular threshold.

I highly recommend Airbnb for Business. While the basic Airbnb service has its own merits, I appreciate how it is providing tools for my small business that traditional hotels could have provided long time ago!

(And no, they did not pay me to write such a positive review!)

I decided to try the Scrub Daddy kitchen scrubber, which became famous mostly through Shark Tank. It cost $6 at Bed, Bath, and Beyond — it’s cheaper in bulk packs, but still at least 2-3 times the cost of normal kitchen scrubbers.

The Scrub Daddy is very good at scrubbing, and should not scratch most materials. Things don’t generally stick to it, so it’s easy to get the Scrub Daddy itself clean as well. However, I have 2 main problems with the Scrub Daddy:

1. It does not last long. After 2 weeks of normal, daily use on kitchen dishes, it started to fall apart. This is in contrast to a standard kitchen scrubber, which lasts for at least 1 month before I consider replacing it.

Once the Scrub Daddy starts disintegrating, little yellow pieces of the scrubber come off pretty much every time you touch it. While this deterioration happens to normal kitchen scrubbers and sponges, the rate at which the Scrub Daddy falls apart is significantly faster than any other scrubber I have used.

2. It does not hold soap well. This is probably a side effect of the Scrub Daddy’s scrubbing effectiveness, but if you’re used to putting soap onto your scrubber, you will probably find that you end up using much more soap with the Scrub Daddy.

When I Tweeted about Scrub Daddy’s durability issues, I got a quick reply from them, suggesting that I contact their customer service. Customer service over e-mail was very friendly and prompt. Basically, they asked for more information about how I used and cared for the scrubber. My use was nothing out of the ordinary, and the care instructions for the Scrub Daddy are no different than any other scrubber. They kindly sent me another Scrub Daddy, suggesting that I should get better results than with the first one. However, I found the same disappointing durability as before. When I searched online for other reviews of the product, I found that most people have a similar experience. I was impressed by Scrub Daddy’s customer service, although customer service is not something you expect to need for a kitchen scrubber.

In short, the Scrub Daddy is smiley, good at scrubbing, and a great success in marketing, but I cannot recommend it over a standard kitchen sponge. You could keep it on hand as a special-use scrubber for a small percentage of your dishes, but that seems like a lot of trouble, not to mention the cost!

The Nest Cam is a souped up webcam that is marketed primarily as a security camera. It also works well as a baby monitor, which is what this review will focus on. Is the Nest Cam worth the $250 CAD (+ $100 per year for video history) cost?

Main features: video and audio

Video and audio quality with the Nest Cam is good. You can choose between 360p, 720p, and 1080p. The higher the quality the more bandwidth it uses, of course. For my purposes, even at 360p there is sufficient detail to see what a baby is doing, although I have it normally set to 720p. The camera captures a wide angle, and has good zoom capabilities. Night vision is a key feature — I use the camera exclusively at night — and works well.

The only challenge with the night vision feature is that the lighting and thus the clarity get messed up if there is an object between the camera and what you’re trying to watch, even if that object is off to the side. Thus, you have to make sure there’s a clear path to what you’re watching, or configure the camera to zoom past the other object.

Access to the Nest Cam’s video is through its website or a smartphone app. This is very convenient because you don’t need additional devices if you already have a smartphone, and multiple people can access the video through their own devices. Using either the website or the app, you can see the video and hear the audio, but also speak through the camera.

Setup

Setting up the Nest Cam is really easy. It comes with a 10-foot cable that you plug into the wall. Using the app, you scan the QR code on the back of the camera, name the camera, and enter your WiFi details. That’s it!

The Nest Cam is only 4.5 tall, and can either stand on its own or be mounted.

It’s quite portable — if you need to use it somewhere else in the house, you just move it and plug it in, and it automatically connects to the network again. If you need to connect it to a different network, then you just follow the same simple setup steps.

Supporting features: history and notifications

The Nest Cam has nice history and notification features, although after 30 days you have to pay for the history feature (which starts at $100 per year for 10 days of rolling video history retention).

The video history is summarized with a list of sound and motion notifications through the app or website.

When you’re logged in through the website you can also view the entire history, clicking through the hours and days of video just like any online video.

The notifications can be quite useful, with or without the video history feature. You can configure sound and/or motion notifications that will alert you via e-mail or through an app notification:

Other options that can be configured include video quality, a talk and listen chime, a status light, and more:

Although the general status light can be turned off, there is a specific case where a light shows even with that setting “Off”. When the camera has a temporary Internet connection issue, its blue light pulses, which could disturb a sleeping baby.

Plugged in and WiFi

The Nest Cam needs to be plugged in all the time, and does not have a battery backup. If you have frequent power outages, then this camera is probably not for you.

The Nest Cam also requires a good WiFi connection. This can be an issue if it needs to be placed in a room that does not have a good wireless signal from your router. It is also susceptible to any general issues you have with your Internet connection. Also, if you’re travelling with it and need to connect to a network with a login screen in addition to the WiFi password, you must use something like Connectify so that you can log in via another computer and then have the camera connect through that computer.

Bandwidth could be an issue, depending on your Internet connection. If you have the video history feature, it will be constantly streaming its video; otherwise bandwidth is only used when you’re watching the video. I measured 1 week of use (with video history) at 360p, and it used 5.05GB. Nest claims that at 720p with video history, the total bandwidth usage of your camera when it is on 24/7 is 60GB to 160GB per month. If you’re using it as a baby monitor, you probably won’t have it on all the time, though. In addition to the total bandwidth usage, you’ll need to consider its speed requirements in terms of amount of data per second. At 720p, this can be between 200Kbps and 500Kbps. You can consult the Nest website for the data speed requirements at the various video quality levels.

Conclusion

If the Nest Cam’s rich set of features are of use to you, and you have a good and reliable Internet connection and power, it might be worth the cost as a baby monitor. It might also have some good resale value. Otherwise you could stick to something cheaper and more basic.

Web developers have started to pay more attention to secure connections due to vulnerabilities such as POODLE and the general push for HTTPS everywhere.

Some aspects of SSL / TLS are quite complex and generally not well documented for the level that most web developers work at. The issue of ciphers is one of the challenges. There is a long list of possible ciphers, and you might find yourself maintaining a limited list of ciphers that your application supports. One of the problems is that the cipher names are not the same across technologies.

If you are making PHP cURL calls, you can limit the supported ciphers using the CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST option. However, if you want to support the cipher TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA for example, you cannot pass PHP (or cURL directly) that identifier — it will complain that no such cipher exists. If you inspect the results of the function openssl_get_cipher_methods, you will find identifiers such as rsa_aes_256_sha, which happens to map to TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA.

In order to find cURL’s mapping of cipher names, you have to inspect its source code! There, you will find the complete mapping, with entries such as this:

{"rsa_aes_256_sha",            TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA}

Thus, you can set the cURL cipher list in your PHP call like this:

curl_setopt_array( $curl, array( CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST => 'rsa_aes_256_sha' ) );

(Bonus tip: you can use cURL on the command line for quicker testing: curl -I https://site.com –ciphers “rsa_aes_256_sha”)

Lastly, it is important to note whether your server is using mod_ssl or mod_nss. If you want to support multiple ciphers, the PHP documentation says to separate them with colons. However, it does not state that with mod_nss the separator is a comma!

I was recently travelling out of Vancouver with a baby and a car seat and figured that parking at the airport would be relatively convenient and cheap. The main long-term parking options appeared to be jetSet and Park’N Fly, and I decided to try out Park’N Fly based on a recommendation.

I was impressed at how straightforward and convenient Park’N Fly is. It’s on Miller Road about 5 minutes away from the terminal. When you drop off your car, you just park next to the lot’s “lobby” and leave your keys in the car. You go in and register, then take a shuttle that runs about every 15 minutes to the terminals. Someone at Park’N Fly parks your car somewhere in the lot. There is an Air Canada check-in counter at the parking lot if you need it.

I didn’t end up taking all the bags and passengers on the shuttle — I dropped them off at the airport first — although it seemed like there would have been plenty of room to do so.

You can get a cheaper price than the walk-up price at Park’N Fly if you pre-book online, and also if you have one of various memberships, such as BCAA or BCTF. You can also earn Aeroplan points.

When I registered the car at check-in, I was sent a text message from Park’N Fly. When I returned back to YVR, I replied to the text message once I’d landed, which presumably triggered someone at the lot to get my car.

After taking the shuttle from just outside the terminal back to the Park’N Fly lot, I paid at a self-serve kiosk and picked up my car, which was waiting once again just outside the lobby.

Since the lot is a few minutes away from the terminals and you might have to wait for the shuttle (I got lucky as it was already there both times) you should probably plan up to an additional 30 minutes to the start and end of your trip. However, I found Park’N Fly about as convenient as it could have been given the circumstances!