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Tough Economic Times, 9.5% Sales Taxes…
Add those together and you start looking for ways to reduce your costs for technology acquisition. What some companies are doing is purchasing equipment online and/or from companies outside of Washington State so that they don’t have to pay Sales Tax on equipment. For a $10,000 purchase, this saves the purchaser $950 - not exactly chump change. Recently I’ve seen promos where out of state vendors tout this sales tax savings as a reason for doing business with them.

So, What’s the Catch?
It’s true. For online our out of state purchases, you don’t have to pay Washington State Sales Tax. However, what a lot of people don’t know is that you’re still responsible for paying Use Tax on those purchases. So, how much is Use Tax? You guessed it - the same amount as the Sales Tax. Not only are buyers responsible for Use Tax, they are responsible for reporting it to the State of Washington Department of Revenue.

I am not a Lawyer, …
… and I don’t play one on TV. (But we do have more and more attorneys as clients and happy Mac and OS X Server users!). But I can direct you to the authority on the subject, which is:

The Washington State Department of Revenue Webpage on Use Tax

If you had any doubt about whether or not an internet purchase is taxable, this excerpt should clarify things for you:

Goods are purchased out of state by subscription, through the Internet, or from a mail order catalog company. Many of these companies collect Washington’s sales tax, but if the company from which you order does not, you owe the use tax.

The Doctrine of Wilford Brimley

One of my Attorney friends once said that when confronted with an ethical dilemma, one should invoke the Doctrine of Wilford Brimly, which encourages the decision maker to make the correct choice:

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

That pretty much sums it up. So, the answer to the question posed in the title of this post is, “You pay Use Tax” or risk the wrath of the State of Washington. While you may be tempted to buy computers, software, networking infrastructure, and other equipment online to save Sales Tax, please keep in mind that you’re still responsible for paying Use Tax on the purchase. Also, purchasing these things through IrisInk supports a local business like your own.

I had a problem with selling my client a upgrade from CS2 to CS4. When they put in the install dvd it looked for CS3 and complained because I sold them the wrong upgrade. I got some bad advice from Adobe sales that said I would have to return the product and re-sell them the correct upgrade.

I called Adobe customer service and things got a lot better!

They told me to install CS4 from the dvd and select 30 day trial. Once it was done I called Adobe back and control clicked on the enter your serial number screen. It popped up a challenge/response dialogue. I told Adobe the challenge number and they gave me a response code. After that CS4 was licensed and all good.

Before this would work you need to have a qualifying upgrade and give them the serial number.

Cheers!

I found this and it works for me:

1. Open print/fax pref in System Prefs
2. Go to + (add printer)
3. Go to IP and drag down to HP Jetdirect.
4. Open Airport Utility and click on express to get IP address (mine was 192.168.10.20) I set the Express to Manual IP outside the DHCP Range.
5. Type this IP in “Address” back in Fax/print.
6. Change the “Name” to whatever you want (for example Samsung ML).
7. Print Driver to use is ML-2010 (look in M’s), not any Samsung listed driver (in the S’s).
8. Restart Airport and the Printer is suggested but mine worked without ding this.
(.You will have to go to all the computers and delete the old printer and re add using the above instructions.

Just updated, still cool
As the only team member at IrisInk that uses a Blackberry instead of an iPhone, I get the pleasure of testing out anything new for Blackberry and Macs. Sometimes that’s not such a good thing, but there are products like Missing Sync that are definitely in the “Good Thing” category. PocketMac is free, but I never was able to get it to work correctly. Of course, that might be attributable to User Error and your experience may differ, but the bottom line is that I finally gave up on it.

Instead, our Chief Engineer Chris Williams turned me on to Missing Sync from Mark/Space a while back, and I’ve been a happy, somewhat satisfied user since I forked over the $39 or so and loaded it on my MacBook Pro. It’s been reliably synching up my Red Pearl with my Address Book, Calendars, Task Lists, and notes via the USB cable without any major problems. Also, thanks to the syncing features built into Daylite (our “CRM” or Contact Management System) I’ve got all of my Daylite contacts synched up to my Blackberry Pearl since Daylight keeps it’s contacts synched with Address Book. We use iCal in conjunction with Kerio Mail Server, so my phone synches up with the calendars I have in iCal. All in all, very cool.

Bluetooth Synching, finally
There’s nothing wrong with the USB cable sync connection, but I have to remember to do the sync and to dig out the cable to do it. Also, the left side of my unibody MacBook Pro is already chock full of connectors, and my sausage fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be. The one feature I did wish that Missing Sync would have is the ability to connect and sync via Bluetooth since it’s on both the phone and the laptop. This feature is in version 2.0, and after some initial futzing around with the programs on the phone and the MacBook Pro it’s working like a champ.
Proximity Sync
One of the things that Bluetooth does well is to sense when there is a local disturbance in the blue side of the force. Why not take advantage of it? Missing Sync built into 2.0 the ability to have the synch happen on a regular basis whenever the two paired devices are within range of each other. By “regular basis”, I mean a definable time interval between 1 minute and 8 hours, which gives you some flexibility in determining how you want this to work for you. If you’re updating your Daylite contacts or Calendars constantly, you might want to do it more frequently. Once activated, the computer will launch Missing Sync and you’ll get a notice on the phone that it’s being asked to sync. Once you approve, it starts the sync. After the initial setup, I haven’t had it fail to complete, even while chugging through 800 or so contacts. Here’s a picture of the preferences screen to show some of the options:

Setup isn’t 100% there, but OK
Ordering the upgrade from Missing Sync’s website is easy and straightforward, so no problems there. Same goes for the instructions on downloading the software to the computer, and also downloading a program on the Blackberry. When you register, you’ll get links e-mailed to both your computer and to your phone, which is important because it requires an application to be loaded on the Blackberry. Following the on-screen instructions on both the computer and phone is easy enough, and the connection is soon established. The first synch has to be done via USB cable, then after that the Bluetooth sync can be done, and it appears that it works fine the first time.
However, after that, I couldn’t get the laptop to recognize the phone that it had just connected with. The computer could see the phone, and the blue light was flashing on the phone, but no linkage was occuring. I checked the phone and found the application that had been downloaded now needed to be run, and once I did that it works flawlessly. The cool thing is that I can run that sync from the phone with the application and it picks up all the add/edit/delete changes I’ve made on either the computer or the phone. That was the only hitch I’ve run into regarding installation. I have noticed a couple recurring appointments in my iCal calendar that are synching in a wierd, not so good way, but I’ve also seen a few examples of that just within iCal itself.
Media synching, too
I’ve already got an iPod, so I don’t take advantage of the synching of iTunes on the phone. Also, since the camera on the Blackberry is not all that amazing, I don’t sync up pictures or videos with Missing Sync, so I’m not help to you there. I can’t tell you how well that works or not, but I’m guessing that if it’s a sizable enough image or video file you’ll want to sync it up via the USB cable. But for keeping on top of contacts and calendars, it’s worth the $39 and I highly recommend it if you want to use your Blackberry with a Mac.

Apple’s Mac OS X Server Apache install includes some cool modules to interface directly with Open Directory, if you host your sites on a Mac OS X Server box.  If you are working on a Linux system, one of the easiest solutions is to engage the ldap modules to get authentication and authorization.

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The 8-core Xserve platform has often seemed overpriced and overkill for many IT server applications that require less performance, but must have server isolation for industry compliance, security, and high availability.  Parallels has made a welcome step forward in virtualization on the Xserve platform, with Parallels Server for Mac.  For an initial release, it has proven quite dependable despite a few issues with recent X Server updates.  No doubt this product will continue to improve in the near future, and it’s exciting to see the Xserve hardware used more efficiently.

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Taking Advantage of Luxology’s “user-friendly” Licensing

One of the best things I like about modo is the licensing, which is so much easier to live with and work with than other 3D applications. Instead of licensing the software to a machine, or worse yet to a dongle, Luxology assigns the license to you, the user. That means a lot of things: you can install the software on as many computers as you like as long as you’re personally using them and not other people using them. You can install it on your personal laptop, your work desktop, a machine at a client’s site, etc.

Or, as in this example, you can use it to set up your own network rendering “farm”. All without buying any more licenses or installing any network rendering software. Got some older machines that meet at least the minimum requirements for modo, or have some under-utilized desktops or servers in your network? Then you can use that power to speed up your rendering! This capability works on both Mac’s and Windows PC’s by the grace of Bonjour networking.

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A new month, and new toys!
Besides showing some of the new features on tap for modo in version 4.xx, Luxology has released the import/export tools for Rhino and SketchUp. I’ve been trying these out for the last few months, and it’s really good to see these things being released and available to current modo users. I’ve also been kicking around the Mac OS X Beta version of Rhino, and while it’s not quite ready for Prime Time, it is really a joy to use.

Also just released was version 4 of Parallels, and some casual testing on my MacBook Pro has been very positive. Where previous versions simply wouldn’t even start modo, Version 4 seems to cook along smoothly. You can even setup the number of processors in Parallels and you’ll see the corresponding number of buckets in a modo render. So far so good.

But, back to our post. This one is going to show some of the basics in working with the Rhino plugin for modo, and I’ve used the Beta of Rhino Mac OS X to generate the test files.

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Booleans Suck!

Actually, they don’t suck that bad, at least in the right hands. The problem I have when I use them is that they do weird things, and it doesn’t really seem to matter what program I’m using them in. Sometimes they work great, but other times they leave all kinds of nasty things to fix. Usually it’s duplicated and/or orphaned verts, as well as duplicated lines that need to be merged. That kind of stuff.

I had a recent project where I had to cut some slits in a disc that I was modeling, and it got real ugly using Booleans. I even tried stenciling (projecting the curves) on the surface, which helped, but I still had all kinds of things to clean up afterwards. It occurred to me after the project was done that I could have gone about it in a more simplified way if I had planned things out a little bit beforehand. The easy way would have been to cut holes in the surface by beveling a central vertex in the polygon, which is about as “old school” as you can get in poly modeling. And if I duplicated and slid some edges on that polygon, it would make it really easy to cut some slits.

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The simple way to do natural light in Modo 302

When it comes to lighting, texturing, shading, and all that stuff, Modo really is fun and easy to work with. One of the new features in Modo 302 is a simple Physical Sun and Sky setup that gives great results without requiring a lot of tweaks or time. Of course, if you want to tweak, you’ve got all the controls available, but the defaults are pretty good right out of the box.

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