Peter's Useful Crap

I drink apple juice daily. But I was getting tired of the rising prices of Sun-Rype juice, with the once-in-a-blue-moon sales at regular grocery stores clocking in at $1.33 CAD for a 1 litre carton (which I think is the regular price at Costco) and the regular price of around $1.79.

Other juices (which aren’t really cheaper) are from concentrate. So for the not-from-concentrate stuff, I’ve been stuck with Sun-Rype.

Luckily I found D’Angelo apple juice on sale at Zellers for $0.99 for a 1.36 litre bottle. I bought a few bottles to try and quite frankly, it’s just as good as the Sun-Rype variety and also not-from-concentrate (only ingredient: apple juice).

The regular price at Zellers is $1.49, which is the equivalent of $1.10 per litre. I’m a D’Angelo convert.

Pardon the randomness, but during my first Eurotrip I’m going to see the French Open (aka Roland-Garros, the tennis tournament on clay). Sourcing tickets is not easy and my advice is to… plan early, like as early as November (the tournament is at the end of May and beginning of June).

Anyway, from what I’ve discovered, there are three kinds of tickets (Philippe Chatrier — center court + general grounds, Suzanne Lenglen — court #1 + general grounds, and just general grounds) all good for access for a day. This is described quite well on the websites of ticket resellers such as this one. There’s also a 4th kind of ticket that you can buy the day of, in order to see night matches only.

I ended up buying a ticket to Philippe Chatrier (and the other courts except for Suzanne Lenglen) on eBay. Yeah, probably not the best place to get the ticket, but I don’t really have any contacts in France to line up for the leftover tickets sales and I don’t really want to rely on the scalpers. The big confusion for me is that my research about Philippe Chatrier reveals that there are three categories of tickets for that court — red, white, and blue. But the map that accompanies the ticket seller looks like this:

Yeah, no red, white, or blue. So how do you know what tickets you’re getting in advance?

Well, the lower-level seating AB, BB, CB, and DB are the red section. The middle, front of the upper-level of sections A, B, and D are the white section, while the corner and back sections of A, B, and D are the blue section.

I managed to get my hands on a perfectly functioning but cast-off Nokia 3100 cell phone that was previously with the Fido service… now, I wanted to use it with a 7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless SIM card I had (which came in a pleasant but black & white Nokia 1112), but of course the moment I put the 7-Eleven SIM card into the Nokia phone, the phone said that it was locked to Fido…

So I guess this is my first foray into the whole cell phone unlocking thing. Luckily, I’d heard that Nokia phones are usually easy to unlock… just find the correct code! I was a bit scared as I tried a few codes from a Google search and they were wrong. And, as I’ve read:

If the unlock code has been entered incorrectly 4 times or more then only a professional unlocker can help you by using an expensive cable solution.

Thankfully I found this site (there’s Peter in the address, but it’s got nothing to do with me): http://www.peters1.dk/webtools/nokia/nokiaonline.php?sprog=en

All I had to do was:
1) Find the IMEI code, which can be found behind the battery
2) Enter the code into the form on that website (along with model number, service provider, and country) to generate the unlock password
3) Turn on the phone without a SIM card in it, then enter the unlock password

Success! Perhaps I was lucky with the Nokia 3100, as I’ve read that with some phones, you have to use some sort of unlocking clip, or connect them to the computer to interact with software, or even pay someone to unlock it.

Got a Nokia phone that isn’t listed on the site above? Try posting in this forum (edit: that site is no longer around) and they’ll probably reply with an unlock code for free.

August 31, 2007 Update: I’ve also found this site, where I was able to unlock a Nokia 6101b that was locked to Rogers Wireless in Canada.

Need to pay your friend back for those concert tickets? Having trouble meeting up? Sick of writing cheques? Forgetful? Well, if you both have Citizens Bank accounts, just transfer the money over Internet banking. All you need is your friend’s account number. Then log in to your account, follow a few steps and poof — instant transfer! I just did this for the first time to pay my friend back for some contact lenses and was surprised at how easy it was. Not only that, I was happy to see that the money actually transferred instantly. At some banks, I’ve found that even to transfer money between two of my own accounts takes a day or more.

Most of the banks actually have this feature. However, it’s not really talked about much (and hey, I just discovered it myself). On most of the major bank websites I see that they advertise their Interac Email Money Transfer service a lot more heavily, which costs $1.50 for the sender. Of course, that service allows you to transfer money to your friend’s bank at a different financial institution other than yours, but if you’re going to go that route, get personal PayPal accounts and pay each other back without fees! (No more fees, OK?)

So, in the spirit of “friends don’t let friends bank with other banks” (or something), bank with the same bank and enjoy the convenience of free instant money transfers. I’ve touted (and reviewed) online banking in a previous post, and because I’m so excited about how fast and easy it was to pay my friend back with Citizens Bank (no, I don’t work there), I’ll show you how it’s done:

Log in to your account, then click the Transfers button at the top. Specify that you are transferring money to “Another Citizens Bank Account”.

Specify how much money you want to transfer, from which account to which account…

Then voilà — better than cheques!

At which point your friend logs into their account and sees that they have money, along with a quirky memo that you wrote.

Guest post by Kristian

I was asked by Peter to write some useful crap about Google Earth, since i keep talking about it all the time. So here it comes

Google Earth 4 is a brilliant piece of software for exploring the globe. Wikipedia says:

Google Earth is a virtual globe program that was originally called Earth Viewer and was created by Keyhole, Inc. It maps the earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe

This does not sound very exciting, but it is In addition to the very nice imagery, it also has an excellent system that allows anyone to add additional information relevant to what you are looking at, called layers.

Google Earth comes with a lot of layers out of the box. Geotagged images are one of my favorites. I have used this on a few occasions to find attractions before traveling to a new place. If you are going somewhere you have never been before, turn on the “Panoramio” layer and start looking at your destination.

This layer shows a little icon on the map where people have taken images and uploaded them to Panoramio. Where there are attractions there are normally lots of uploaded images, and this is easily identifiable as a cluster of icons.

Here is an small cut out from Oslo, Norway (click to view a bigger image):

If you look to the top left side of the screen, there are a lot of circular icons seemingly separated from the rest of the images taken in that area. This makes us curious! The neat thing is that we can now click on the icons to see the pictures that have been taken at that location. If I click on one of the icons, I get a screen like this (click to view a bigger image):

Very nice. By clicking on a few images, we realize that we have now discovered a park called “Vigelandsparken” which contains a lot of stone and metal statues. (And it's a nice park — I've been there.) By looking around like this you get a good feeling of interesting new places to visit

In addition to the layers that comes with Google Earth, you can also load additional ones. One example is geotagged Flickr images from around the globe.

If you want to see a lot of more interesting layers/plugins for Google Earth, there is a lot of good ones on Google Earth Hacks. For example, here are all the buildings in downtown Vancouver in 3D!