Tips and Tricks - Kogan Egift cards

If you are a skeptic when it comes to gift cards, I don't blame you. Retailers have found gift cards to be a great way of selling something in advance and even better if people never use it. Now, most gift cards are not allowed to have a one year expiry but you also need to know how to use them properly.

For Kogan Gift cards sent electronically you need to note the following things

• Searching your email for egift, gift card or egiftcard will not turn a result. The email that your Kogan egiftcard came in is actually with the subject "You have received a gift" so you should search for that instead. 
• When you go to Kogan.com to redeem your gift card, note that the website asks you for the Gift card "pin" not the Gift card Number.  

I wonder whether anyone will search Google about this and find these tips about how to redeem a Kogan gift voucher, as my suspicion is that the design of this redemption is to make people think that their gift card has expired. If it has you fooled, you have three years to wise up before the gift voucher expires. Click thanks below if you found this useful or leave a comment.

Where are the New Years Eve Fireworks in Perth and WA?

Here's the official list of fireworks events that are happening tonight from the Department of Mines and Petroleum.

31/12/2019 8:45 PM BEST WESTERN HOTEL  CAR PARK BROCKMAN ST PEMBERTON WA 6260 BEST WESTERN HOTEL PEMBERTON NEW YEAR EVE

31/12/2019 8:00 PM PULU MARIAH  WEST ISLAND  COCOS ISLAND WA 6799 NEW YEARS EVE CELEBRATIONS

31/12/2019 11:59 PM SWAN RIVER  EAST PERTH WA 6004 CROWN NYE  FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 11:59 PM SWAN RIVER  APPLECROSS WA 6153 RAFFLES HOTEL NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 9:00 PM VAL STREET JETTY  VAL ST  ROCKINGHAM WA 6168 ROCKINGHAM NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 11:59 PM GLOUCESTER PARK  NELSON CRES  EAST PERTH WA 6004 NYE FIREWORKS  WA

31/12/2019 8:00 PM WACA  NELSON CRES  EAST PERTH WA 6004 SEASONS MUSIC EVENT

31/12/2019 10:00 PM CITY BEACH SHORELINE CHALLENGER PDE  CITY BEACH WA 6015 CITY BEACH NYE  FIREWORKS

31/12/2019 9:00 PM JETTY LOCATION –  HANOVER BAY  PRINCESS ROYAL DR ALBANY WA 6330 ALBANY NYE CELEBRATIONS

31/12/2019 9:00 PM RUSSELL SQUARE  JAMES ST  NORTHBRIDGE WA 6003 COP NORTHBRIDGE NYE CELEBRATIONS

31/12/2019 8:00 PM THOMSON BAY  ROTTNEST ISLAND WA 6161 ROTTNEST ISLAND NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 8:00 PM MINDARIE MARINA GROYNE ALEXANDRIA VW  MINDARIE WA 6030 NEW YEARS EVE –  MINDARIE MARINA

31/12/2019 8:30 PM
11:59 PM MANDURAH  EASTERN FORESHORE  LEIGHTON PL  MANDURAH WA 6210 MANDURAH NEW YEARS EVE

31/12/2019 9:00 PM TANKER JETTY  THE ESPLANADE ESPERANCE WA 6450 ESPERANCE FORESHORE FESTIVAL AND FIREWORKS

31/12/2019 10:30 PM BUNBURY TROTTING CLUB HANDS AVE  BUNBURY WA 6230 BUNBURY TROTTS NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 11:59 PM CANNINGTON GREYHOUNDS STATION ST  CANNINGTON WA 6987 CANNINGTON  GREYHOUNDS NYE FIREWORKS DISPLAY

31/12/2019 9:30 PM NICKOLBAY SPEEDWAY CINDERS RD  KARRATHA WA 6714 NICKOLBAY SPEEDWAY  NEW YEARS EVE

Free Parking in Perth City only on one street

As many retail tenants move out of the city, they cite low patronage and high rents as the reasons. If you ask most residents in Perth, the issue is parking fees in the city. Why would you buy something from JB Hifi in the city when you can go to your local shopping centre's JB Hifi which doesn't charge parking fees? Well the City of Perth has started a trial of free parking in the city but it is only on Hay Street between Hill and Bennett Street. A quick Google search only shows one newspaper article alluding to this trial. No official CPP websites seem to mention it which makes us wonder whether they are looking to prove that this trial was unsuccessful. So if you are looking for free parking in the Perth City centre, check this street out and remember to swim between the flags (Hill St and Bennett St).

Free Parking in West Perth 
If you are visiting West Perth, they are also running a free parking trial for Hay Street between Outram and Havelock Streets.

Free Parking in East Perth
The free parking trial is running for Royal Street from Trafalgar Road to Fielder Street.

Where's my $1,080 tax offset?

If you have completed your tax return and received your refund, you may have been like us wondering if you already received the tax cut that the federal government announced a few weeks ago. The short answer is yes, your refund already includes the change in tax rate.

The amount that you receive will depend on your taxable income - if your taxable income is $125,000 or more, you should see $1,080 in your notice of assessment. The tax cut shows up as a credit under the "Low and middle income tax offset" (in yellow below). You will notice that this line was not in your tax return last year.

How to spend 30 seconds to maximise your NBN speed?

Are you getting slower NBN speeds than you expected? It could be a 30 second fix.

We moved from one internet service provider who was offering 12MBps plan to one that was providing 50MBps for the same price but for some reason while the download speed improved significantly, the upload speed stayed around 1Mbps. Surely switching to a faster provider should also result in a faster upload speed right?

When logging into the modem settings (eg  go to your internet browser and type in 192.168.1.1 or 10.1.1.1  If you get a login screen, login with the default admin login and admin password), there is a section called bandwidth control. In our case the upload speed was set at 970kbps! Unticking the bandwidth control and then running the speed test resulted in the upload speed changing to 20Mbps! If you haven't gotten on to check this, you might want to do this now!

How to get your VOIP phone working when you churn NBN providers (using the old ISP's modem)

We recently moved from ADSL to NBN (I know, right?) with iiNet and in the process, they changed our Toolbox to one which TPG has been using since probably 1990 or something. There was no longer the daily bar charts of data usage and instead an interface that wouldn't even let you change your payment method. This was enough to cause us to shop around, landing with Exetel with their $60 NBN50 month by month offer.

It took about five weeks for them to finally get the VOIP transferred over from iiNet, while we were paying for both iiNet and Exetel. This was when after two hours of digging around in the modem settings, I came to realise that internet service providers are locking people out of the VOIP settings when they give you a modem. The router we had from iiNet which worked perfectly with Exetel's NBN wouldn't let me see the Telephony menu! The only way to overcome this is to find out your super-user login details for your modem. That is, instead of logging in with admin/admin (and then changing your default password), there is a login for example with TP-Link's vr1600v router called su (for super user). The default password for this login is a little tricky to find but once you find it, you can change your SIP settings from iiNet to Exetel as well as the login and password for that VOIP phone line to work.

For the TP-Link vr1600v, this is how you find out the su password.

1. Login to 192.168.1.1 or whatever it is for you (eg 10.1.1.1?) in Google chrome
2. Go to the Advanced menu then click on USB Sharing 
3. Right click on the web page and clicking Inspect
4. Click on the USB Storage Device
5. In the Inspector screen, click on Network at the top and you should see a list of CGI lines. One of them has cgi?5&1&1&5&5&1&5&5&5&5&1 - click on this 
6. You will see the contents pop up in the right hand column.  Now scroll down and you will see something like this 

1. adminName=su
   adminPwd=ygRW52!au8

7. Your super-user login is su and the password is ygRW52!au8
8. Logout of your modem and login using the above
9. You will now see the Telephony option and you can replace the SIP Details with that of your new NBN provider.