Eddie Hobbs’ last episode of Rip Off Republic aired tonight and while it wasn’t as focued as earlier ones on consumer rip offs, it covered ground that we should all be familiar with: taxes. Eddie revealed that the average tax payer over-pays his tax by 700 Euro a year! Many people may not know that they can claim tax relief on their waste disposal charges. Did you? Here’s a page courtesy of Fine Gael giving summaries on medical, dental, rent and refuse expenses and tax relief. Damien has a few more links, including links to further discussion about Mr. Hobbs.
Cobh At Night
Cobh Cathedral.
1/2 sec, ISO 400, f/3.5, RAW. Hand held. Excessively sharpened on purpose!
'Why Rip Off Republic can help us solve our problems'
The SBP has an article from Eddie Hobbs explaining why his program is a success. It’s getting people talking, and hopefully consumers won’t be as ripped-off in the future as we are now.
I say “hopefully” but I doubt anything will change in the short term. There are far too many vested interests and lobby groups.
(via)
Snail
Snail, taken near Cobh Cathedral.
The Magic Bullet – a humorous look at camera tech
The Magic Bullet – Mike Johnston looks at the heated debate arising over how good the new Canon 5D will be.
Does it matter? Nope, as he says himself, “Cameras don’t take good pictures, photographers do.”
Whatever: Being Poor
Being poor is running in place.
Free Online Image Editor
This image editor is rather basic looking but powerful. You can rotate, resize, add text and clipart, colour correct and more. Unfortunately the license isn’t compatible with the GPL so it would be impossible to use in WordPress or other such licened projects.
Automobile/Motorcar Photography Tips
SmartyPress – Smarty Driven WordPress
SmartyPress is another Smarty driven WordPress project.
It looks interesting, and I had the thought that it might be possible to paste an alternative template system into WordPress by piggy-backing on top of the current system.
The home.php, single.php, index.php files of the various themes could be loaders for another more secure templating system rather than PHP. It would certainly make editing templates and securing them against abuse easier, although for WordPress.com we have even fancier ideas to be announced later!
What Bush Did Next
President Bush really has been caught on the hop again. A tale of two photos: Mississippi Goddamn shows what Bush was up to while people were being rescued from drowned cars.
Here’s a compilation of photos and commentary from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Satellite Photo of the area after the storm.
Why New Orleans is in Deep Water
Had a storm the size of Katrina just had the grace to hold off for a while, it’s quite likely no one would even remember what the Bush administration did two months ago. The national press corps has the attention span of a gnat, and trying to get anyone in Washington to remember longer than a year ago is like asking them what happened in Iznik, Turkey, in A.D. 325.
Just plain political bad luck that, in June, Bush took his little ax and chopped $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction.
This, friends, is why we need to pay attention to government policies, not political personalities, and to know whereon we vote. It is about our lives.