Dan Knight
- 2007.06.08
Cleaning Up eBay Feedback
Ron Silva writes in response to eBay Feedback: Proceed with
Caution:
Mr. Knight,
The information you posted incorrect. You can remove it if you
follow the links below.
G'Luck,
Ron Silva - Long time eBay seller..
Ron,
Thanks for the info. I've never had to deal with
abusive/retaliatory feedback myself. I'll forward these links to
the two parties in hopes it may help them.
Dan
Mutually Withdraw eBay Feedback
Mike Richardson writes:
Hey Dan,
eBay users can use a feature called "Mutually Withdraw
Feedback". Although the feedback text remains on the user's
feedback page, it no longer counts against them anymore.
Thanks,
Mike Richardson
Mike,
Thanks for the info. I'll forward it.
Dan
Getting Around Negative eBay Feedback
Phil Alexander says:
What you can do in that case is have Used Macs quickly put up
another auction (for $1) and have Dave buy it now.
Then they can feedback again, and use that to "Take back" the
other feedback. True, the negative will stay, but Dave can reply to
the negative telling people to "look further".
Yea, not perfect. But better than private! I hate private
feedback!
Dealing with Online Scammers
Dennis Smith writes:
Hi Dan,
After three months of promises - "will ship tomorrow, have
shipped" - false tracking numbers, and finally no response to
emails, I left negative feedback describing the facts. He responded
with negative feedback that included name calling. One email to
eBay and they removed the feedback he left for me due to the name
calling. This happened within two days. My negative feedback to him
remains on his record. I finally got the item damaged and useless
and eventually did get a full refund.
Another eBay seller tried to scam me for 'handling' charges
beyond the stated charges on the eBay listing. Negative feedback to
him had no effect. I had PayPal freeze his account for not shipping
the item. He ran a music website that solicited donations thru the
same PayPal account. I contacted his host, who shut down that site
based on the PayPal documentation. He listed a PO Box for
'donations' and payment for eBay sales. I contacted the postmaster
at that zip with copies of the information, and my next
correspondence to him at that P O Box came back 'box closed.' I was
surprised when the item showed up in the mail twelve months
later.
Along with several others, I was scammed by a guy on the
Swap List 3-4 years ago. He
contradicted himself with promises "will ship, have shipped", etc.
He said he spent the money I sent (yet continued to sell on the
list and receive new PayPal payments). He mentioned in an early
email that he worked for a local TV station. That was the only
truth I got from the guy. His town had only one TV station, and a
couple of calls to him at his job caused him to provide a refund. I
think others were not so fortunate. The guy was banned but has
reappeared on the list under different emails. Each time I report
the guy to a nanny with the history, and they are good about
getting him off the list. I haven't seen anything from him in a
couple of years.
You are right to not rush to provide bad feedback. Even a deal
gone sour may eventually be resolved.
Dennis in Buffalo
Dennis,
Thanks for sharing your horror stories. Hitting
people where they live - their PayPal account, their PO Box, at
work - can do wonders when someone is trying to scam you. We've
recently taken steps on the Swap List to make it easier to track
down people.
Dan
Installing Tiger on an iMac without a DVD
Drive
Matthew Wright says:
Hey Dan,
I helped another friend install Tiger on an iMac without a DVD
drive, only this time I didn't have a Tiger disc that would boot my
laptop (a recent Intel MBP that needed at least 10.4.6) in order to
choose the iMac as an external drive in Target Disk Mode.
The following might be old news to you, but I'd never heard of
this working before: Just out of curiosity I tried something. I put
the Tiger (10.4) disk in the MacBook Pro, then booted it into
target disk mode, and then connected the two machines together. The
iMac mounted both the MacBook Pro and the DVD in its drive
on the desktop. After that System Preferences' "Startup Disk"
(after a lot of spinning) recognized the install DVD on the MBP as
a boot disk, and I was able to restart the iMac from the MacBook
Pro's DVD drive.
If this is old news, sorry to tell you something you already
know. I just thought it was so cool that it worked. if this bizarre
two degree of separation install is any help to you or LEM, thought
I'd drop you a line.
best,
matthew
Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your experience. When you boot
a Mac in FireWire Disk Mode, all its volumes are available to the
machine booting from it - even the Tiger install DVD.
Dan
OS X Boot Problems with a Blue & White
G3
Mark Looper writes:
Hello-
A few month ago I bought a blue &
white G3/350 to use as a backup server; I intended to install
OS X 10.3 on it and use external SATA drives with it via a PCI
card. When I bought it, it had a non-stock video card that did not
work with OS X, so I picked up a stocker on eBay. In this
configuration, basically stock (768 MB RAM, 6 GB hard disk -
well, RAM's not stock!), I found that the machine would boot from
my DiskWarrior 3 CD that had OS X 10.2.3 on it, but not from
my newer CD with OS X 10.3.7; however, it did boot from
my 10.3 install CD.
Odd, I thought, but what the heck; I then installed the PCI card
and external SATA drive, and installed 10.3 on that drive (and
updated to 10.3.9). The machine, at the time, booted from the
external SATA drive without problems. The PCI card was not
recognized by OS 9.2.2 when booted from the old 6 GB drive (it
was the card that came with the LaCie external SATA drive), but I
could force it to boot from the OS X drive by holding down
Cmd-Opt-Shift-delete to bypass the OS 9 drive. (Firmware is
fully updated, BTW.)
However, it was always my intention to boot OS X from an
internal drive; for one thing, that would be recognized in
the OS 9 Startup Disk control panel! So recently I got around
to transplanting my 120 GB drive (biggest the Blue & White G3
can handle on its internal controller) from my G4/933 - and at this point, the machine
refused to boot from the OS X 10.3 install CD!
Moreover, it now refused to boot from the external SATA drive with
10.3.9 on it! What the heck???
I have installed 10.2.8 on the internal drive and am now able to
do just about everything I'd planned (one of the advantages of
Retrospect being updated so slowly is that the current version runs
on anything back to OS X 10.1.5!). However, I wondered if you
or any of your readers has any experience with this kind of
behavior.
Did I somehow mess up something in Open Firmware? That's about
all I can guess. I removed the PCI card, which is always a suspect
where there is flaky behavior (despite earlier success), but it
made no difference. Again, I can live with 10.2.8, but I want to
make sure that, over time, the system won't regress to only booting
10.1.5, then 10.0.4, then the Public Beta....
Thanks!
-Mark Looper
Mark,
I've had weird problems with my own blue &
white G3 as well. Again, a pretty much stock configuration, but
once OS X 10.3 (IIRC) was installed, it wouldn't boot into
OS X. That was going to be one of my testbed Macs, so it kind
of went on the back burner.
One thing to keep in mind is that OS X is much
more picky about RAM and OS 9 was. You might have some luck
removing 1 or 2 RAM modules - although that didn't help in my
situation.
Best bet is probably to join our G-List mailing list on Google Groups.
Search the archive, and if that doesn't help, ask. We have over 900
people on the list, so there's a good chance someone will be able
to help.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
