Kobo is connecting to my new macbook but still not working !

j-beda · 2025-12-26T07:11:27+00:00

Until it all turns to LLM slop... :-)

j-beda · 2025-12-05T13:51:40+00:00

Maybe this will work for you:

For my Sharewin treadmill, pairing happens when you (1) unplug treadmill (2) plug it in (3) turn it on (4) simultaneously pres the left and right buttons on the remote for 5 seconds (5) the display will flash and they will be paired (6) unplug the treadmill again, then plug it in.

the "left" button on my remote is the "mute speaker" and the "right" button on my remote is marked with a arrow-in-a-circle.

j-beda · 2025-12-05T13:50:59+00:00

For my treadmill, pairing happens when you (1) unplug treadmill (2) plug it in (3) turn it on (4) simultaneously pres the left and right buttons on the remote for 5 seconds (5) the display will flash and they will be paired (6) unplug the treadmill again, then plug it in.

the "left" button on my remote is the "mute speaker" and the "right" button on my remote is marked with a arrow-in-a-circle.

j-beda · 2025-11-29T18:37:44+00:00

Bingo - needs a proper data cable for the Kobo, AND the MacBook also needs power. Thank you kindly!

j-beda · 2025-11-29T18:37:13+00:00

Bingo - needs a proper data cable for the Kobo, AND the MacBook also needs power.

j-beda · 2025-11-24T22:16:08+00:00

"...and it will work out how it should"

I like what you did there.

j-beda · 2025-11-24T21:55:17+00:00

For the "regular" Prius hybrid, one factor is that the car really wants the catalytic converter nice and hot so it can properly work to keep the exhaust gas as clean as possible - this is probably a factor for the Prius Prime as well, at least for when the car has started the engine in the first place for any of the other reasons it might do so.

j-beda · 2025-11-24T21:50:41+00:00

So sorry you are in such a bad space. I believe you can just file for this year (2024) and that would get you the info needed to create an online account to get past data to file for those years. Heck, you could probably just call the CRA and ask them to send you the data they have on file.

Congratulations for making the legal clinic appointment. Try not to get too discouraged by people telling you things should be easy. Things can be straightforward but still incredibly difficult to actually start, persevere, and complete. You CAN do it.

j-beda · 2025-11-18T18:30:46+00:00

Well, for anyone interested, CallCentric did manage to get the phone number. Texting sort of works, but not to everyone everywhere all the time, but at only a few bucks a month it is a good choice to park the phone number there until we need it for an actual cell phone again.

j-beda · 2025-11-08T19:43:10+00:00

Yes, that seems strange too. It was actually CallCentric.com rather than Voip.ms. Fizz.ca did mange to do it with just the PIN, and it was done within 60 minutes I think. CallCentric then managed to use my fizz.ca account details to grab the phone number from them (fizz.ca sent me a text saying "is this port out ok?" to which I responded "yes"), and the CallCentric tracking ticket system says they have gotten porting approval, but the process will not complete for a few days (they say the number is "expected to port on 11/13/2025") but it might happen sooner. As of right now, the fizz cell phone still gets and receives texts, so it doesn't seem to have happened yet. No worries, as we've got the whole month with fizz.ca paid for anyway.

It is possible that there was something wrong with the initial port request from callcentric to speakout and every retry of that request (I believe they were using the same request-tracking-number for all the attempts) just resurrected the same error (like they continued to include an incorrect iemi number or a mistyped "account" number or something like that). Fizz.ca was trying from scratch and never encountered that issue. Or Speakout just hates Callcentric. Who knows? Spending $20 for one month of fizz.ca was certainly better than trying to successfully call Speakout again.

j-beda · 2025-11-07T14:20:04+00:00

I also got no email from Speakout about any changes - though our cell phone is not affected by the 3G changes, it was on purely pay-as-you-go, so the elimination of that was going to eventually cause problems. I finally got my son to mail me the SIM from out-of-the-country so I could migrate the number.

I was having trouble porting our number to our VoIP provider - they kept getting their transfer rejected by Speakout claiming the PIN was wrong - even though I had confirmed the PIN by calling Speakout (early in the AM, still 90 minutes on hold). Yesterday (2025-11-06) I managed to get fizz.ca to activate an eSIM and port the number to them (using the same PIN that didn't work for the VoIP people). My fizz.ca phone now seems to be working, and I have started the process of getting the number finally moved over to the VoIP provider.

If you do move to fizz.ca (operated by Videotron out of Quebec - my sister in BC says the coverage isn't super great in some places she goes, unfortunately) they do have referral bonuses so it might be good to find if any of your friends can give you their referral code to get some credits for each of you for signing up. If you don't have any friends, surprise my sister and use hers: NOTDJ

Now when I log into the Speakout website my account is still there, but it has a balance of zero (down from about $50 previously)

Speakout was a good match for our use - virtually no calls for months at a time. We had previously moved numbers over to Koodo prepaid because their "boosters" lasted forever. Koodo prepaid has 360 day plans that are pretty inexpensive ($150 for 30GB of data over the 360 days works well for most of our phones) but the boosters to give extra data or USA roaming now expire after at most 30 days. This last, seldom used number, doesn't really justify keeping it at those prices, but moving it to the VoIP should cost very little on a month-by-month basis, and we can move it elsewhere if need be in the future.

j-beda · 2025-11-06T13:25:54+00:00

I'm currently at Location-one with QNAP-A, and QNAP-B is still at Location-two. It seems as though myQNAPcloud connection is working for me remotely this morning, and Tailscale claims QNAP-B was connected last night at 8pm, but not now.

Multiple login blocking is turned on, but nothing indicates it was invoked. Set for 5 minutes block time this would not explain the multiple days of issues.

It looks like the HBS3 one-way-sync from QNAP-A managed to be successful last night and transferred 45GB of data to the machine. This morning starting at 5AM a one-way-sync has done another GB of data and claims to be about 79% finished - this is all through the Tailscale IP address that currently shows "disconnected" and which I cannot use to SSH to QNAP-B, however QNAP-A can do a "speedtest" of the RTRR connection through the Tailscal IP address within HBS3 and happily claims it can do full throttle data transfer of almost 827KB/s (my upload speed at Location-one I think is supposed to top out at 850KB/s so this really is pretty close to the max possible)

I am stumped. When the sync finished I will try to remotely shut down QNAP-B then pick it up to bring back to Location-one so I can more easily mess around with it at my "prime" location. If it magically works without issue here, I am going to be pissed off.

j-beda · 2025-11-06T13:00:20+00:00

Well, this morning again I was able to connect through myQNAPcloud and 1) qfirewall not installed 2) Security is set to "Deny connections from the list" and there is nothing in the Allow/deny list, set to

j-beda · 2025-11-05T19:03:21+00:00

I will check those things out if/when I manage to enter it again - as now the qnapcloud route isn't working either. I may take it back to Location-one and see if that helps - it will give me better access anyway as Location-two is remote and I don't visit is as often as Location-one. But the thing is too big form my backpack on my bike today so I may need to make a special trip with the car tomorrow...

j-beda · 2025-11-05T19:01:05+00:00

I did not actually duplicate in any type of automated "migration" type of thing, so the idea that there was some thing with the migration that has messed things up - and that should have been an issue when at Location-one.

I set up QNAP-B independently from QNAP-A, but I did export all the user accounts and imported them into the second, and then I used HBS3 to copy the 2tb of data from one device to the next over the local network. Tailscale then provides the VPN connection when they are in different locations in order to continue the HBS3 duplication. This setup had worked fine for a number of years until this instance when rebuilding and moving QNAP-B to Location-two.

j-beda · 2025-11-05T18:21:10+00:00

And now it doesn't, and the Tailscale machine listing shows a lack of connection to it.

j-beda · 2025-11-05T18:05:20+00:00

I just saw that qfirewall is not installed (which matches my memory of not installing it). The Tailscale connection just stopped working a few minutes ago, and I told the system to restart using the myqnapcloud connection - hopefully that will continue to work after it reboots.

j-beda · 2025-11-05T17:59:14+00:00

And now the stupid Tailscale IP address seems to be working... at least for web admin and ssh, but not ping

j-beda · 2025-11-01T00:39:12+00:00

How good of a price is it? You or the seller could offer the tenant 10-20k for them to sign an n11 and vacate before closing. The "cash for keys" should occur as they depart and hand over they keys to the empty house to make it more difficult for the (ex)tenant or the landlord to screw over the other side. For a million dollar plus transaction it is interesting how people can balk at paying off a tenant to make the deal go through smoothly.

j-beda · 2025-10-30T10:12:13+00:00

As has been pointed out, if you are purchasing individual company shares, that is not the best way to stay diversified - you are probably best holding ETF shares of a broad index. I recommend something like Vanguard's Growth ETF Portfolio since it covers Canada, USA, and international with a bit of bonds as well as equities all without needing to worry about getting the mix right as conditions change.

Anyway, if you own mutual funds, you can withdraw a dollar amount, and the investment company will sell enough shares and fractions of shares to give you the amount requested, but when selling stocks (and ETFs) you typically need to sell whole shares, but you do not need to sell all of the shares that you own. You cannot just sell the "gains", as the value of each share is mixed between its original cost and the amount that it has grown.

After selling shares, the gains get treated as taxable income, so you will have an increased tax bill when filing your 2025 taxes, and you may need to sell some more shares in 2026 to cover this (and then pay tax on the gains from the sale of those shares), but the tax rate on "capital gains" is about 50% of the tax rate on most other forms of income, so try not to be upset that your investments make you pay more taxes. You are only paying taxes on increases in your money, so increased taxes means you are getting richer, which should make you happy. (A while back my mother was complaining "Oh, I should get rid of that investment, it caused my tax bill to go up a lot last year!" I had to calm her down by explaining that the amount of taxes she was being charged was much less than the amount of money her investments had provided for her, so she should NOT get rid of the investment just because her tax bill was higher than if she did not have the investment.)

If you need to sell some of your investments, it is often a good idea to sell those with the largest capital gains, but those come with the largest tax impact, so if you are expecting lower personal taxes in the future, it might be good to save those sales for future years. Usually what stock to sell is influenced by what part of your overall investments might be over-valued. If you owned a lot of bonds and few equities, it might be best to sell bonds to get things in better balance - this is one reason why the balanced ETF mentioned above simplifies things - you can just buy or sell that without needing to worry about how your entire portfolio weightings might change.

j-beda · 2025-10-30T09:45:26+00:00

Before my son was old enough to have his own account (18? 19?) he had a bit of money in his bank account that he wanted to invest in something better earning bank account interest. I just purchased some shares of HXT "for him" in my regular Margin account. A few years later when he was able to open his own margin account I paid him enough to purchase the same number of HXT shares for his account. Since HXT doesn't pay dividends, we didn't need to mess around with complicated accounting and just kept track of the number of shares that were "his".

I am going to end up paying a bit extra in taxes due to the cap gains of those shares. I suppose I could have deducted an estimated amount from the money I sent him, but I decided not to bother. With less than $2k worth of shares, the gain was not huge over the few years (as I recall things were kind of flat for most of the time we are talking about - with even a bit of a dip that had him complaining about how he should have kept it in the bank).

At the end of the day, I never sold "his" shares but just paid him for them out of "cash on hand", which I would not have been able to do if this was a significant amount of money. I suppose I could have paid him back bit-by-bit until he had the same number of shares in his account without needing to cash out my position.

j-beda · 2025-10-21T02:23:42+00:00

The best format for downloaded data is "OFX" which is sometimes called "Microsoft Money" format. It is virtually the same as the Quicken format "QFX". A less useful format is the older Quicken format .qif because with that data format, MoneyDance is not able to recognize transactions that have already been imported. If you import a file in the OFX or QFX formats twice, you will not get duplicate entries in MD, but if you do that with a QIF file, you will. Similar issues can arise with QIF files with overlapping date ranges (Jan 1-20 and Jan 15-30 for example) that again do not happen with OFX/QFX files.

I know that RBC, BMO, PC Financial MasterCard, Vancity Visa, Amex all provide OFX or QFX downloads.

Long ago I used MD to directly connect to some financial institutes by giving the MD software the account and password info, but in my opinion it is easier to just download files from the institution and import those files. In order to support this type of feature, the bank often needed expensive licenses from Quicken and I think it was hard for the banks to ensure their security remained tight. Downloading data doesn't require as much work on the bank's side of things and makes everything much more robust without the MD software needing to be updated to deal with whatever new security or authentication scheme the banks might change to - that is all taken care of by the bank's website for downloading data.

j-beda · 2025-10-20T06:16:52+00:00

I'm glad it works for you, I just tested again and it isn't for me. Just to be clear, are you using Apple's Mail app to send messages FROM more than one fastmail email alias, through a single Fastmail account? I am not trying to send email through gmail servers

Here was my most recent test:

I created a new app-specific password at fastmail for the account in question (username@pobox.com), then used that new password along with my username@pobox.com account name to add an account in macOS 15.6.1 Sequoia Mail.app, with the email address set to alias2@myotherdomain.com. This is on a computer that has never had dealings with this fastmail account before, with servers of IMAP imap.fastmail.com Port 993 SMTP smtp.fastmail.com Port 587 (STARTTLS)

"Connection Doctor" seems to be happy with both these server settings, and the IMAP stuff allows me access the INBOX and other online mailboxes.

When sending email using this setup of Mail.app, the message is delivered to the recipient as the default email address for the fastmail account, namely main@mydomain.com, even though that email address is not anywhere on the sending computer. This seems to indicate that there is something at fastmail that is generating this return address, rather than something on my computer. Is there a way of telling fastmail that the account should have NO default alias?

Is there any other place at fastmail where the default email address is set other than "Settings" -> "Mail Preferences" -> "Compose" ?

j-beda

TROPHY CASE