HSBC has terrible foreign currency exchange ATM fees

HSBC customers beware! Your world-wise bank may be ripping you off! 

The worst part of it is that the fees are hidden, and to add insult to injury, the bank markets itself to world travelers ("the world's local bank.")

I have been on and off living in Brazil for the past year. When I use my Well Fargo bank card in the local ATM machines here, Wells Fargo charges $5 for each transaction!

OK, so I thought I'd be clever, and open a new HSBC account back in the United States, since there are local, convenient HSBC machines in my neighborhood in Brazil. As an experiment, I used my Wells Fargo ATM card and my new HSBC ATM card to withdraw the same amount of money, at the same time. 

Wells Fargo ATM card

Withdrawal amount: R$ 650 BRL

Deducted from account:  $ 403.50 USD

Non-Wells Fargo ATM Fee: $ 5  (this is on top of the $403.50)

HSBC ATM card

Withdrawal amount: R$ 650 BRL

Deducted from account: $ 416.17 USD

No ATM Fee

But even without the ATM fee, I was still coming out behind with the HSBC card!  I had no idea that the currency exchange rates could vary so wildly between banks.  And it seems extremely devious of HSBC, which markets itself as a bank for world travelers, to rip off consumers with such bad exchange rates.  The truly worst part of it is, it is totally hidden.  You don't even know you are getting a bad rate, and you would likely never even notice how bad it is.  In fact, the receipt that the HSBC ATM machine issued did not even tell me how much, in USD, was being withdrawn -- I had to go look online a day or two later.  Tricky indeed!

Going into more depth, the interbank exchange rate, for USD->BRL, on June 24, 2008, according to Oanda.com, was 1.61330. So, the 650/1.61330 = 402.90.  Which makes it seem like Wells Fargo was converting the currency essentially at the interbank rate, while HSBC charged  3.3% over the interbank rate!  And the WFB website appears to back this up: they mention the $5 ATM fee, and a 3% fee for purchases made with the ATM in foreign currencies, but they do not (yet) have a surcharge for currency conversion.

The BBC has reported that HSBC's exchange fees are unfair and getting worse.  Apparently they charge 2.75% for the exchange, plus 1.5% (and now 2% as of July 7) for the foreign ATM. I am unclear on whether this is charged when using foreign HSBC ATMs.  Either way, the numbers don't lie.  HSBC is giving me a truly bad deal. I am better off using my Wells Fargo card and withdrawing large sums, to offset the $5 ATM usage fee.

Gen 4 iPod IDE hard drive to CompactFlash conversion

My old Click-Wheel iPod hard drive finally died. Clickety-click-click-click was the sound. Sometimes the music would play okay, other times it would choke and stall until the failing hard drive finally managed to get a few more kilobytes of data read. Either way, it was bad and getting worse.

What to do? Trying to avoid the throw-away engineering that was built into it, I thought, I will replace the hard drive! And indeed, I could have -- there are excellent tutorials and guides on the net, like this one at Command-Tab. But, as I have an old iPod, the parts are not exactly commodity-priced anymore, and it was going to end up costing almost $100. (Planned obsolescense lives!)

Why not spend slightly less money and convert the iPod to flash memory? There are intrepid geeks who have gone this way ahead of me, laboriously soldering an IDE to CF connector. And another one here.

But I wasn't that committed.  But then on Ebay I found this character in Hong Kong, who sold me the same connector for 99 cents, and delivered for $5 shipping, fast!

Cheap flash memory bought somewhere, don't remember where.

Here is it is just before sealing it up. Notice the business-mail-reply card that I folded up and tucked in there to shim the new memory -- it being a little thinner than the hard drive it replaces.

An overview.

It works great again!

movies

Movies watched

(while in brazil)
Death Proof
Battle of Algiers
Last King of Scotland
Fight Club
Jimmy Carter, Man from Plains
Labrynth
Lola (Fassbinder)
Rashomon
Nan King
Last Tango in Paris
The Pornographers (Jinruigaku nyumon: Erogotoshitachi yori, 1966)
Heart of the World (5 min flick of Guy Maddin)
Careful (1992, dir Guy Maddin)

How to import into EndNote from Pybliographer

In Pybliographer, export your library as "Refer".
In EndNote, open the file you just exported. (Don't choose import, use the open command)
Choose an EndNote database into which you want to place the refereces.

It should work. There are probably other ways to make it work, but I found this way only after going through about 20 different ways that do NOT work. Thus the posting.

This works for EndNote 9 and Pybliographer 1.2.11. And perhaps other versions too.

Windows Vista, VoIP, and the Toshiba Bluetooth stack

For those of you who, like me, occasionally obsess about having things work just right, I am posting this success story. I was trying to make my new Sony VIAO laptop work with a Bluetooth headset while talking on Skype. The laptop does not have bluetooth built-in, so I got a cheap USB dongle. The generic sort of device that doesn't come with drivers (at least not for Vista) and doesn't really have the name of a manufacturer. Only hints were the P/N on the bottom (MBD-C4.20-1) and the words "Cambridge Silicon Radio" when you look at the details in Windows Device Manager.

There were problems. Everytime I plugged it into the laptop, Vista would complain about not having the drivers to make it work correctly. Although, it still basically worked: I could sync my Nokia phone with Nokia PC Suite, and when I turned on my Bluetooth headset, Windows would recognize it as an audio device. Occasionally I could even make a Skype call with it. But most of the time it would not allow me to hear the other person, or I would be muted so the other person couldn't hear me. Even though the settings in Skype were correctly set to Bluetooth audio device.

So after the usual web searches, including a blurb in Wikipedia I became slowly convinced to try the Toshiba Bluetooth Stack, which I downloaded from this Toshiba server in Germany. I crossed my fingers, installed the package, and was rather shocked that it works. Perfectly. The Headset now has full VoIP functionality with Skype.

What surprises me mostly about this is that nothing I own is manufactured by Toshiba. But somehow they have produced a better set of Bluetooth drivers than Microsoft!