Category: Work/Technical

  • Removing the VAT from a VAT Inclusive Price

    Ok, so we just spent the last 30 mins figuring out how to remove the VAT (20%) from a VAT inclusive price.

    The reason for this, is a customer of ours has an awesome online shop made by us – and all his prices are INCLUSIVE of VAT/Tax. He trades internationally, so we’ve been working on a cool EUVAT/Vat Exempt module so that (example) if someone buys from the EU and is EUVAT registered, they input their EUVAT number, the site instantly checks it for validity and if its OK removes the Tax/VAT from the order.

    It has a whole heap of other “conditions” with it, but thats not the reason for this blog post.

    We wanted to bulk remove the vat from his products, but our initial plan fell flat on its face, becasue;

    £100 + 20% VAT = £120

    £120 – 20% VAT = £96

    Ah.

    The reason for this is that 20% of 100 is not the same as 20% of 120….

    So we racked our brains for all those formulas and junk we learnt in school, and asked a few friends who mostly pointed us to cool websites that seemed to do the job – but we were still no closer to actualyl figuring out what the formula was..

    Then all of a sudden, bingo!

    One of the lads figured it out, and here it is;

    (total_price/(100+VAT))*100

    So, as we break it down…..

    (120/(100+20))*100

    (120/120)*100

    1*100

    £100

    Bingo! 🙂

  • Your UPS Invoice is Ready – SCAM – Phishing Email – WARNING – Explained

    My spam box receives hundreds and hundreds of emails every day – on all my email accounts. Every now and then one slips the net (not that often though, thanks Gmail!) and due to me bein’ around these parts for a while i’m able to spot the warning signs that indicate that it is in fact a scam;

    ups_scam_phishing_email-top

    The email address looks legit, there are no formatting errors within the body text like previous scam emails have contained – from first glances this is a pretty convincing fake!

    So can you tell if its a fake?

    Place your mouse cursor over links but DO NOT CLICK ON THEM!

    ups_scam_phishing_email-middle

    Note the preview of where that links takes you?

    Im pretty sure UPS dont use n-moto.ru for their own website. In fact, the domain could be ups.ru for all i care, the .ru bit in it makes it (imo) stand out like a sore thumb.

    It must be horrible for the russian domain name authority – but if i see a .RU domain name extension i run for the hills. I know my personal site has a .im domain name extension but these are very rarely used for spam/dodgy sites – in fact the spam sites seem to keep their domain extension choices to a minimum.

    They either use .RU (Russia) or .CN (China) – probably because the chinese and russian governments don’t give a shit about what people do online from their countries.

    Anyway, if you are not expecting an email from UPS or any other delivery company/service or if ANYTHING – and if something arouses your suspicions – then google it, ask me, ask someone who knows more about these things – and if all else fails delete it and they will call you if its important!

    Thanks to GemmaBeans for sending me the email – she thought it looked dodgy and she was right!

  • Syncing my Social World

    Hello 🙂

    So for ages i have argued with myself about how i should use the social networks that are available to me – i use about 6 quite regularly but i feel that i repeat myself or end up writing the same thing, on a few of them, and i only have the same friends/followers on most of them anyway.

    I’ve been pondering over an idea to simply use each social network for the things it does best (or what it started out doing) and then bringing them all together using one of the 6.

    Here is my plan, i think…

    Firstly, YouTube and Miso don’t really come into the plan (as such) as they are specific social networks and you cant really do what you do on these on the likes of Facebook or Twitter. I will however bring these into one of the more generic ones so that all my social activity is linked.

    I am going to use Twitter to chat, talk, and post quick messages (that’s what its made fo’) and i’m going to start posting all my images through Flickr (again, that’s what its made for) but of course each of these social networks will link to the other, so Flickr will notify Twitter that there is a new image, which will in turn post to Facebook)

    Foursquare will continue to be my location based social network – i used it before Facebook introduced the ability to check in.

    Im going to try and only use Facebook to show my updates from everything else – i’m going to (try to) sack off adding updates directly to it and only use the app for replying to any notifications.

    And i’m afraid coming in last place – is Google Plus. I do use it and i’m trying to use it more, but at the moment the only thing it really gets used for is the instant backup of all my photos. I do use the communities and find it more of a nerdy social network than anything else – i guess i need to expand my nerd crowd a bit more 🙂

    Its all going to take some planning as if i’m not careful ill have multiple updates on the same networks for the same information – ill draw myself a nice diagram later!

    Let me know how you use your social network accounts – do you link them up? Do you use any cool tools or apps to enable you to never miss a trick? 🙂

  • Skype Payment Scam – Explained

    I’ve been around these parts (the Internet) since I was 13, and over those years i’ve noticed lots and lots of cyber scams in various shapes and forms – I find them funny to be honest as they are usually so poor, it amazes me people fall for them..

    I received a funny one today – thought i’d screenshot it and explain how its easy to tell its a scam;

    How to spot a scam!

    From the top down, firstly, the title of the email has a space before the exclamation mark. This is not proper grammar, and a company as large as Microsoft/Skype wouldn’t make such a schoolboy error.

    Next, the email address is “support@numberbook.com” which a) isn’t a Skype email and b) is sod all to do with Skype or Microsoft (MS own Skype now innit)

    Moving swiftly on, the wording of Skype and the orders@ email address are formatted so that its not picked up as an email address by spam filters, having a question mark instead of a fullstop and then not including the next full stop (before the UK) is again a huge error, and no reputable company would do that.

    The next part down is the same, the email addresses formatted so it still looks like an email, but spam filters wouldn’t be triggered.

    And finally, the last part of the email is the nail in the coffin IMO – PayPal is one word, not two – no official email from a huge company would make such an error – plus the “Pay Pal” link points to;

    hXXp://www.elrinconoculto.com/config.html (link nulled so you cant click)

    …Which is obviously not an official PayPal domain 🙂