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PSA: Airbnb Gift Card Caveats

March 4, 2019 / / 14 Comments

I provide a lot of discounted Airbnb gift cards for my friends to save money on their Airbnb trips. Over the years I’ve learned a lot of nuances about these cards that I thought I’d share here. If you have anything to add, I’d love to make this a comprehensive post so please let me know and I’ll add it in!

Velocity Limit

There is a seemingly random velocity limit to adding cards to your account, and it seems that everyone’s account is different. Some that I’ve noticed are: Continue reading →

PSA: Keep a record of gift card multi-pack blister packaging

February 20, 2019 / / 2 Comments

This is just a reminder to keep documentation of EVERYTHING related to gift cards that you buy. I discovered multiple friends have had the same issue and made the same mistakes, so I wanted to get this PSA out there. I know most of you are totally on top of things, so you can ignore this post if so. 🙂

Inactive iTunes Gift Cards from Sam’s Club

I recently had an issue with Sam’s Club iTunes gift cards. They were sold as four $25 cards in a blister pack for a total of $100. I purchased 3 of these packs. I took all the gift cards out of their packaging back in December and scanned them, along with the packing slip. Continue reading →

Map of Marriott Category Changes Effective 3/5/2019

February 11, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Last week, Marriott announced even more category changes to their hotel list, effective March 5, 2019. Here’s the One Mile At A Time post about it with more information.

I wanted to quickly visualize the new categories on a map, so I took a few hours to throw this together. Caveat: Since I didn’t want to spend even more hours going over it, there might be a few mistakes and duplicates. Also, for some reason a lot of special characters turned out as gibberish that I couldn’t be bothered to fix. OCD doesn’t win today. Continue reading →

Trip Suggestions: Big Island (Hawaii)

January 26, 2019 / / 6 Comments

Aloha from the Big Island of Hawai’i, which is now easily my second favorite island (after Oahu)! I’m wrapping up a 7 night stay at the Marriott Waikoloa Resort, reviewed at the bottom of this post. But first, I wanted to share many hours of research for anyone who is planning their own trip to the Big Island. I found one particular website to be most helpful – Love Big Island. Definitely go to that site and browse like, every page. They keep it nicely updated and unbiased. Continue reading →

Why I Passed on the Cathay Pacific Mistake Fares

January 5, 2019 / / 7 Comments

Unless you are living under a proverbial rock (in which case, I’d love to know how you found this blog), you heard by now of the insane Cathay Pacific business and first class mistake fares that were available departing from Hanoi. Heck, my dad heard about it. The deal was insane — cheaper-than-economy price tickets on one of the best business or first class products in the world.

If you got in on the deal, congrats. To the confusion of my friends and family, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I missed the deal. I was online for it as it was discovered. Instead, I chose not to. Crazy, right?

Why We Travel (Hack)

If you’re like me, you probably got into travel hacking when a friend shared some mistake or cheap fare to a country you were interested in going to. For me, that was a $400 round-trip fare to India, which I took with my friend Jacob and kicked off a multi-year stint of jetsetting that made me the envy of many of my friends and family. (In the context of the Cathay Pacific deal, this one seems amateurish in retrospect).

Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated a wealth of incredible experiences and encounters. I saw a play at the Sydney Opera House, took a flamenco class from a world-famous dancer, visited the site of genocide in Cambodia, and hiked the W-trail in Patagonia, to name a tiny few. Those are the flashy ones, the ones that earn social “cred.”

Perhaps more importantly, I got to celebrate the holidays with my family, see my sister graduate from college, and kindle a burgeoning relationship with my partner. 

We travel for many reasons — to see beautiful things, to experience new cultures, to connect with friends and family — and we travel hack to travel better, cheaper, or more often. However, in the thrill of the deal and the likes and the shares it’s easy to forget that our travel is not free.

Climate Change

The cost of world travel is its contribution climate change. Every 1,000 (economy) passenger miles flown dumps about a third of a ton of carbon dioxide into the air, which has the effect of trapping progressively more heat in the earth via the greenhouse effect. This in turn affects global climate and weather patterns, destabilizing many of the natural environments that are often the destination of our travels in the first place.

We often think of climate change as affecting far off places like the arctic and beings other than humans. Unfortunately, in the last few years that’s ceased to be the case. Whether it be hurricanes, droughts, or forrest fires, we’ve seen the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters. I was among those who thought I was immune to the effects, given my position of relative wealth and status, until the recent forest fires that cloaked the Bay Area in smoke as damaging as smoking eleven cigarettes in a day

Aviation is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, and as travel hackers chasing mistake fares, we are culpable in contributing to the problem.

That’s not to say flying is evil. It’s transformative and has been essential to our steady progress in global health and well-being over the last century. It allows us to move vaccines from laboratories in France to warzones in Africa. It allows us to move food grown in California to a grocery store in New York. 

However, just as flying is incredible because humans are not equipped to soar in the air, flying is unsustainable because it leads us to do things we didn’t evolve to do. Unintuitively, flying is more energy efficient than driving, but flying makes it easier to travel unimaginable distances in tolerable times. Three years ago, Jacob and I hopped down to Los Angeles for a day to see my then-favorite band perform at a concert. Would I have driven the five hours to do that? Absolutely not. Going one step further, would I really spend three days to drive across the country to visit my parents? (For the sake of my familial relations, I will not answer that here, but you can read between the lines 😛)

Three Years, In Pictures

Thinking about this fact has led me to re-evaluate my travel patterns in the last few years, which is one of the reasons you’ve heard less of me on the blog. Here’s how things have changed:

(Maps generated using the Great Circle Mapper)

What I’m Doing

The simplest change for me has been to stop chasing mistake fares, and to let where I truly want to go dictate where I end up going. As painful as it was to see such an amazing deal as the Cathay mistake fares go by, buying a ticket would have meant two trips to Asia that I hadn’t planned for (four, if you count my partner or a friend) and would rather “save” for when I want to visit my grandparents in Japan whom I’ve only seen a few times in my life or a special event like attending my maternal grandmother’s 90th birthday.

The second change I have made has been equally easy and moreover, fulfilling — to find places closer to home that are just as exotic or wondrous as the other, farther places I could go. My partner and I visited Kauai last year instead of New Zealand, alternating hikes with snorkeling, kayaking, and seeing double rainbows. We took a trip to Vancouver instead of Europe, replete with a swanky hotel stay and delicious pastries. These sorts of substitutions have huge impact. They’re not just switching off a lightbulb. They’re switching off thousands of lightbulbs, thousands of times.

I believe that anyone can do this, and that everyone must do this if the places that we are visiting now are going to survive for our kids to see them.

Three Years, In Pictures

It’s true, my “world” has become much smaller. My travel maps have shrunk from needing the full globe, to a single hemisphere, to just a quarter of the earth’s area. Why am I doing it? I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

(Calculations generated using the Cool Climate Calculator from UC Berkeley)

What You Can Do

I understand those who don’t feel the same way as I do about climate and the environment, or where climate change sits relative to their wants and needs. I’d love to talk to you more if you fall in either of those camps, but at the very least, I’d like to offer you an indulgence: if you truly cannot reduce your travel and you truly want to do something about it, consider contributing to Rainforest Action Network commensurate with the “social cost” of carbon emissions, which has been estimated to be anywhere between $85 and $300 per ton. (Sorry, the $5-$10 offered by airlines through the Nature Conservancy doesn’t begin to make up for the damage we’re doing to human health and the health of the planet). If you have no upcoming travel, or jumped in on the mistake fare, contribute to offsetting 25 HAN-YVR round-trips here:

https://www.gofundme.com/dem-flyers-cx-mistake-fare Continue reading →

Amex and negative credit balances

December 13, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Just wanted to do a quick post for future reference. If you have a negative credit balance on one of your credit cards (i.e. from an overpayment or a huge refund that hit), most banks let you transfer that balance to another card you hold at that bank to decrease the balance owed on that card. I’ve done it with Citi and Chase.

I was chatting with Amex tonight to transfer a huge refund I got on one card to to 3 other Amex cards I have. Here is a quick breakdown of what I found:

  • You can transfer balances between personal & business cards, not just personal.
  • You can only transfer balances between cards where you are the primary cardholder. So you can’t transfer to your AU on someone else’s account.
  • If you request a refund, they can transfer it directly to your bank account instead of getting a check in the mail. So much more convenient!

Repurposing Amazon Dash buttons to add a line to Google Sheet when pressed

November 24, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Intro

A lot of us may have a ton of Amazon Dash buttons lying around because back in the day, they used to mean $5 off any product shipped and sold by Amazon. Since then, you may have sold your spent buttons on eBay or harvested them for the Duracell AA battery inside.

But if you still have some left…here’s a fun little beginner’s project where you can repurpose the button to add a line to a Google Sheet whenever you press it. The use case for me today is to record whenever I insert/remove my contact lenses, to track wearing time. I’ve also seen people set one up to record whenever their baby poops and they change the diaper. To each their own…

FYI: these instructions are for Mac OSX. It’s adaptable to other systems, but I won’t go into that today.

Preparation

We’ll be using Nekmo’s amazon-dash script for this project, specifically the instructions for Mac. I’m rewriting the instructions below in a more beginner-friendly language, so hopefully you can do this even if you don’t think you are very tech savvy. Macs come with Python 2.7 installed, and that is what this script runs on. If you run into any errors, it may be due to something wrong with your Python configuration, so we’d have to troubleshoot that separately.

  1. Open Terminal on Mac.
    1. To do so, I like to use Spotlight: press Cmd+Spacebar to bring up a little textbox in the middle of your screen. Start typing the word terminal, and press Enter as soon as you see Terminal.app appear.

    In Terminal, copy and paste in (press enter after you paste this whole command in): sudo pip install https://github.com/Nekmo/amazon-dash/archive/develop.zip

    1. It will ask you for your computer password first, so enter that and press enter. You won’t see anything being entered as you type your password. Don’t panic, this is normal. Just type your password, and press enter.
    2. Now it will download and install the amazon-dash app.

    Once installed, copy and paste in (press enter afterwards): sudo amazon-dash discovery

    1. It should say:

      Welcome to Amazon-dash v1.3.1 using Python 2.7.10
      The discovery command lists the devices that are connected in your network. Each device will only be listed once. After executing this command wait approximately 10 seconds before pressing the Amazon Dash button. After pressing the button, the Mac address of the button will immediately appear on the screen. Remember the address to be able to create the configuration file.

    Wait about 10 seconds, and then press the button on your Dash Button.

    1. Within a few seconds after your Dash Button fails to buy anything, you will see some magenta text on your screen. It should look something like this “69:55:fd:3e:cf:32 (Amazon Device)“. You may also see other text that don’t say “(Amazon Device)” next to them; you can ignore those. The random gibberish with the semicolons is called the MAC address.
    2. Copy and paste the MAC address before “(Amazon Device)” and keep it somewhere safe.

    Now press Ctrl+C on your keyboard to exit this discovery process.

    Set Up IFTTT

    1. Go to your web browser and navigate to https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks .
      1. Set up an IFTTT account if you don’t have one already, then return to this page, enable the webhook, and click on the button in the top right called “Documentation”.
      2. Copy and paste the alphanumeric key in really big letters to the place where you saved the MAC address of your Dash button.

      Still on IFTTT’s website, click in the top right corner on your username, and click “New Applet” on the dropdown menu.

      1. Click the +this and type in “Webhooks” on the next screen. Select the big blue button that says “Webhooks”.
      2. On the next screen, click the big blue button again that says “Receive a web request”.
      3. On the next screen, type in a name you want to give to your button, like “contactlenses” (remember this name for later). Click the Create Trigger button.
      4. On the next screen, click the +that and type in “Sheets” on the next screen. click on “Google Sheets”. (You may need to connect to your Google Sheets account if you’ve never done this before)
      5. On the next screen, click the “Add row to spreadsheet” button.
      6. On the next screen, fill out Spreadsheet Name (i.e. “Contact Lens Wearing Time Log”). You can delete “||| Value 2 ||| Value 3” from the Formatted row, and leave the rest the same. Click “Create action”.

      Configuring the script

      1. Now go back to your Terminal window. Copy and paste this command and press enter: cd /etc
      2. Copy and paste this command and press enter: sudo nano amazon-dash.yml
      3. Use your keyboard arrow key to get down to where it says “## Example of how to execute a IFTTT Webhook event”
        1. Change the text after name: to whatever you want, like “name: contact lens”
        2. Delete and replace the MAC address that’s already there with the MAC address of the Amazon Dash button you discovered earlier and saved.
        3. Delete and replace the key after ifttt: with your own IFTTT key.
        4. Change the name of the event: to the name you had used on the IFTTT applet, such as “contactlenses”.
        5. After data: {“value1”:, type in what you want to be recorded on the Google Sheet after the date and time. Like “Inserted/Removed” (of contact lenses).
        6. Once you’re done, delete the “#” symbols from the beginning of each line that you edited. Result should look like this:

        Press Ctrl+X to exit, it’ll ask if you want to save, so press Y, and then press Enter to save it as the same filename. You should now be back to the original window.

        Finishing up and running the app

        1. Copy and paste the following commands, pressing Enter after each command:
          1. chown root amazon-dash.yml
          2. sudo chmod 600 amazon-dash.yml (may require computer password)
          3. sudo amazon-dash (may require computer password)

          If all was successful, you should see the following message pop up:

          Welcome to Amazon-dash v1.3.1 using Python 2.7.10
          Listening for events. Amazon-dash will execute the events associated with the registered buttons.

          Press your Dash button. The window won’t seem to do anything or say anything, but go to your Google Drive and see if you see a new row. If you did, congratulations! You successfully hacked your Dash button!!
          You’ll need to leave this window running, so best to set this up on a computer or device that is always on.

          Let me know in the comments if you have success with these instructions, or if you have another project you would like to share with us! If you have any suggestions on how I can improve my circles and arrows, let me know as well. Enjoy!

          Similar Projects

          https://blog.cloudstitch.com/how-i-hacked-amazon-s-5-wifi-button-to-track-baby-data-794214b0bdd8

          https://alexmeub.com/hacking-amazon-dash-buttons/

          https://www.alphr.com/amazon/1001429/amazon-dash-button-hacks-6-ways-to-build-your-own-low-cost-connected-home/page/0/1

          https://www.hackster.io/ravi-sawhney/amazon-dash-reminder-app-79e6bb Continue reading →

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