If you are running a business, and the ability to charge credit cards manually is crucial. You might have researched around and found that you need something called a payment gateway. But that cost money! The costs varies based on your monthly anticipated sales and percentages of your profit.

However there’s a way to do it all completely for FREE, except for what Google charges. No monthly fees and no minimums!

Here’s how! You will need two accounts, one Google Checkout Account where you will register yourself as a merchant, you will need a legitimate business with a EIN number from the bank. Then you will need a second account to act like a purchase account. You will use the purchase account as the buyer, with each transaction, you will enter a new credit card number (obtained from your clients) and simply charge it as if a buyer was purchasing from your store.

You may use Google Checkout’s link maker to create Quick BUY NOW links with preset prices so you can easily charge your customers and put them up on a web page somewhere.

Now you will be able to process and charge your clients credit cards manually, for free, no strings attached!

SB Training Wheels provides students in the greater Stony Brook University area with convenient affordable private driving lessons. We strive to help our students not only pass the road test but to learn the necessary skills of everyday safe driving. Our lessons are very laid back, are taught by instructors that are your age!

Prices start at just $29.99 per session.

http://sbtrainingwheels.com

Call us at (631) 240-6172 to schedule an appointment today!

Learning to drive with SB Training Wheels is a smart choice because we are affordable, convenient and more importantly we hold your hands through the whole process. Here are a couple of reasons why…

* Affordable – Only $29.99 for a 45 minute session. Other places charge up to $55.00 per 45 minute session.
* Available When You Are – Most driving schools close their doors at 5PM, we don’t, we’re 24/7! We’re on your schedule.
* More Driving Time – Most driving schools advertise 45 minutes per lesson but you really only get about 20, we give you the full 45 minutes! Down to the second and sometimes even more.
* Comfort – We hold your hands, not yell at you, we work with you, we’re here to guide you not instruct.
* Young and Vibrant – Most driving schools have old, creepy instructors, we’re young college students with experience!

I save a bunch of money by switching my car insurnace to Geico! I DID! My State Farm was $1,150 for 6 months, vs $650 for 6 months at Geico! Sweet!

This is shameless advertising for them but heck with that kind of saving, they deserve it.

Update!!!
They did a review on my account after 4 weeks and decided to tack on $3000+ dollars to my 6 month premium! Hell to the NO! I’m no longer a Brooklyn resident, now I have to send in multiple documents to prove that I infact do live on Long Island.

Customizing phpBB3 is actually pretty easy. phpBB has poor documentation on how to change the forum engine template to look like your current website easily. I customized the style “prosilver”, the default theme that comes with phpBB3 to look like a project website I’m doing. If you are looking to just remove the existing header and put your own header, then this article is for you.

To get started, make sure that your current design uses a <div> wrapper. This serves useful because it contains the forum template within your current template. The widths of the forum is determined by the wrapper.

Navigate to your style folder, find and edit “overall_header.html & overall_footer.html“.

Those are the only two files that you truly have to care about, leave the other ones alone. For SBUGuide, the picture above, I used the default ProSilver design that came with phpBB3. What you have to do is use a wrapper design to contain the forum category. You can now add your own header and footer, but forget to include a class and id in you body tag.

id="phpbb" class="section-index ltr"

That’s all you have to do, to make the forums your own!

Sorry I haven’ been posting lately, a little busy. Here is a little something taken stright from dailyapps.

Well its been only a day since the Mac OSX Leopard was released officially by Apple and the hackers have managed to create a patched DVD that everyone like you and me can use to install Leopard on PC’s without having to buy a Mac. Please note the tutorial that I am going to post is still experimental and things might not work the right way simply because it is still early days in hacking Leopard to work on PC’s. Well if you don’t mind your PC getting screwed then go ahead and try out this tutorial.

Make sure you backup all important data before you proceed. Here are the things that you will need before Install Leopard on your PC…

• The Patched DVD Image
• The zip file containing the patch
• One pen drive or USB Flash Drive formatted as FAT32

Well once you have all these you can go ahead and Install Leopard..

Step 1. Getting things ready

• Burn the DVD Image onto a Single Layer DVD-R using a software like Nero.
• Format the USB Flash Drive and the drive label should be “Patcher” without the quotes. Please note it has to be “Patcher” only and nothing else for the patch to work when we apply it later.
• Extract the Zip file and put its contents into the USB Flash Drive.
• Now your USB Drive should contain a folder called “files”, if it doesn’t then check to see where you have gone wrong.

Step 2. Installing Leopard

• Now that you have the Patched DVD with you, you can now install Leopard. Pop in the DVD into the drive and boot into it by pressing F12 at the BIOS Prompt.
• Boot into the DVD and the installer should now load. It take a while though, so be patient.
• Select your Language and make sure you select Customize and you need to deselect all the packages that are displayed.
• Leopard will now install. This can take a while, so go grab yourself a coffee.
• It will ask you to Reboot, so go ahead and Reboot. Before rebooting make sure that USB Flash Drive is connected to the PC.

Step 3. Patching Leopard

• Now that you have got Leopard installed, you need to patch it. Before we do that Boot into the Leopard DVD like the way you did before.
• Wait for the Darwin Bootloader to load. Once it loads up press F8. You should now see a prompt. Type -s and hit enter. The DVD will now load in Verbose mode. Watch for any errors. It should load without a problem because you have already installed Leopard.
• Once the setup is loaded select your Language. Once done you should now be seeing the Welcome Screen. Once there navigate to Utilities-Terminal.
• Once the terminal loads up, you now need to browse to your USB Drive, so follow the steps below, typing it exactly as it appears below in the Terminal. In the command line type the following as they appear herecd ..
  cd ..
  cd Volumes
  cd Patcher
  cd files Notice the space between cd and the 2 dots.
• Now its the time to run the patcher to make sure Leopard will work on your PC. Type the following into the Terminal. ./9a581PostPatch.sh
• The Patch should now run. You can answer Yes while removing the ACPUPowerManagement.kext
• After the Script is done, you should now be able to Boot into Leopard after you restart.

Step 4. Congratulations! You’ve done the Impossible!

Well that was it. Please note this has not been extensively tested, so most of your Hardware like Sound, Network may not work. If something goes wrong for you or you want to help us, then please join the discussion over at OSX86Scene. If you noticed I haven’t posted the links to the Torrent that contains the DVD image and the zip. Well I haven’t posted them because I am sure the lawyers over at Apple are going to sue the hell out of me. If you wondering where you can find them, then head over to Demonoid and search for it.

For help see this and this. Hopefully I will have time soon!

A current project (SBUGuide) I’m currently working on needed an extra boost of inspiration to push deadlines across to our staff. So I decided to create my own start page for the project. I then made all the staff members add that start page as their home pages on their browsers so they would constantly be reminded to do their work. (neat idea by Joey)

This start page consists of three parts which are easy to implement. The first part is inserting your company logo. Users have to know who’s start page they are seeing, it looks more professional and makes the page look a lot nicer.

Second is to including a simple search field so if at anytime, someone wants to use Google or Yahoo to do a search, they can do it right from the start page. It’s essential for any start page to have www search. Also in addition to adding search, it’s good to add other links as well so they are also quickly accessible by your users. Our staff requested Yahoo and Blackboard to be added as links.

The third step, which is exclusive for our project is the calendar by Google. Jobs and deadlines are color coded so our staff can easily organize and know when things are suppose to be done by when . Of course, the calendar is optional for your start page but it is essential to ours.

I will write up a tutorial on how to make your own start page step-by-step.

In the meantime you can check out our hot SBUGuide Start Page!

Let me know what you think.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the Fall 2007 semester. This post is a follow up to my previous post on instructions about how to get DC++ working at Stony Brook University. DC++ is a very fast and reliable file sharing client. But please do keep things legal. I do not endorse using DC++ for illegal purposes.

Please following the previous tutorial located here. The reason I wrote a part 2 to this tutorial is because after going though the tutorial, some people are getting this error.

<CroBot> This hub is running version 0.3.36 of the Shadows Direct

Connect Hub Software.

That error can mean two things:

• You are not sharing enough data, you need to share 2GB’s or more. Hash them.
• You have too few upload slots available. Go to settings and sharing and make 5 upload slots.

Doing these two things will allow you to connect to DC++ successfully!

Remember, our hub name is sbushare.no-ip.info. Use DC++ Legally!

I’ve been using a web 2.0 application that was in beta and required invites only for about a month now (called Mint), and I have to say that it is one of THE BEST web 2.0 applications out there. The reason I did not mention it sooner is because I had to respect the press embargo they requested. I could not blog or post screen shots about the beta experience. But if I blogged about it, it would have all been positive stories! This is highly recommended! Learn more about mint, keep reading… Introducing MINT!

So what is Mint anyway? “Mint allows you to view all of your banking and credit card transactions side-by-side, making identifying all of your transactions much easier and faster than ever before.

How does this help you? We make it easy for you to track down erroneous charges or bank fees, and keep a closer eye on your money.

Mint even lets you label your transactions so you know what bills you need to split with your friends or roommates, know which ones need to be reimbursed for your company, and more.”

Features? Wow features! Too many great features to list, read them all here!

I think everyone who has any type of bank account should have a Mint account, it is essential just like having a Google Account. The green interface is robust and sexy. It’s just so easy and friendly to use!

Sign up for Mint today!

Just released from beta literally 30 minutes ago, get it while its hot!

Never mind the “Rob K” part of the title, it’s an inside joke for a friend of mine!

Did you ever want to know your IP address but didn’t know how to get it? Well there are several ways. One with the ipconfig command if you’re on Windows or the arp command on Linux/Unix and two if you go to whatsmyip.org but there’s something way better for you guys out there! And for Rob.

There is MoanMyIP.com where a voice of a girl moans your IP address to you. Man, things you find on the internet these days… But I’d rather have a girl who’s about to have an orgasm scream out my IP address to me than to type having to type in a few commands to get it! Nothing beats this, not only does she read it out for you, but in a voice to die for.

DISCLAIMER: I’m not responsible if you get fired at your job for simply trying to look for your IP address. If you need to hear your IP at work, you can go to HearMyIP.com. It’s owned by the same people but HearMyIP allows you to hear it in a male robotic voice. It guarantees your job at the end of the day.

TIP: If you go and visit the site multiple times, she says some pretty unique things before she reads your IP address again. Check it out, go back a few times!

As you may know, I live in the big city of New York and our proud mayor has instituted the 311 service for the greater New York’s 5 boroughs. 311 is a number for city residents to dial to contact local government agency’s to report problems or to see non-emergency help. Bloomberg thought that it would be an easy number to remember and it consolidates all the city’s resources together in one number, not a bad idea!

But recently switching to ViaTalk VoIP, the 311 service was not activated by default, or I should say that ViaTalk didn’t have that feature. I then searched hoping to find a quick solution. I noticed that Vontage, the current leader in VoIP had the 311 feature so at that point I knew it was possible to somehow hack ViaTalk’s Linksys PAP2 VoIP device to get 311 working.

I have not gotten done yet simply because I need my Linksys PAP2 password from ViaTalk, they are currently receiving heavy call volumes due to SunRocket’s customer contract buyouts. I called this Sunday afternoon and I was 22nd in line for their phone support. So if anyone wants to hack the PAP2, I have the directions and you must have the password for your PAP2, if you don’t you will have to submit a support ticket or call to get your password. I have started a ticket about 2 weeks ago, still no response, so good luck with that. But if you already have your password, then read on.

The 3-1-1 number is just a short cut for this number (212) NEW YORK or (212) 639-9675.

1. Login to your Linksys PAP2 via the IP address (http://192.168.0.xxx/admin/).
2. Go to the dial plan section. Becareful not to edit what is already on there.
3. Add the following line to the existing dial plan.
4. |<311:12126399675>|
5. Apply, Save and Exit

As a temporary fix until you get the PAP2 password from ViaTalk, you can setup speed dial to 2126399675. This tutorial will essentially work for all 311 services from any city, you will just have to figure our their local number and then replace NY’s number with your city’s number.

I will post screenshots of the process once I get my password from ViaTalk.

To read more about the Linksys PAP2 Dial Plan, see here.