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If you are one of the hundreds of people that wants to know nothing about taxes until next year, sorry but here is yet another tax related post. While for most people this tax season is over, some still have some stuff to do. If you ended up owing tax money to the IRS, here are your options.

You can always ask for an installment agreement, I’m sure that you know this by now if you ended up owing tax money. But there is a little bit more to do to prevent this from happening next year, planning your tax year is important and if your accountant missed to help you on this subject you should consider seeking help somewhere else.

The IRS general rule is:

You must pay estimated tax for 2008 if both of the following apply.

·      You expect to owe at least $1,000 in tax for 2008, after subtracting your withholding and credits.

You expect your withholding and credits to be less than the smaller of:

·      90% of the tax to be shown on your 2008 tax return, or

·      100% of the tax shown on your 2007 tax return. Your 2007 tax return must cover all 12 months.

First thing to do is to inform yourself with what your responsibilities are, to put it in the lamest terms, if you owed more than $1,000.00 you have to do estimated payments during the year. Usually the IRS divide whatever you ended up paying by four, for example if you owed $1,000.00 you have to make quarterly estimated payments of $250.00.

There is a way of preventing this from happening all you have to do is update your W-4 with your employer, take out an exemption or even ask for more money to be taken out, the form provide for this type of request. Find links about all this information on this page, if you want to discuss further, leave a comment. I will be adding a forum soon, so stick around for that.

Royalty free stock photography for websites, PowerPoint, newletters, forums, blogs, schools and homework – FreeDigitalPhotos.net

That’s right, you too can download a free copy of QuickBooks for Windows XP/Vista, sure is the simple start version of the software but for some people this is more than what you will ever need. I’m an accountant and I’ve used QuickBooks for three years now, before I was using Peachtree, which has it merits, but the compatibility of QuickBooks with other software is far better than its competitors.

The QuickBooks Simple Start Free edition is a very simple program to use, as soon as you download and launch it, you get a questionnaire, like a mini interview that helps you set up your company file. Once you are in, you get a very simple interface with a map-like interface that drives you via the everyday tasks that every business do on their everyday operations.

You can easily create invoices, organize clients and vendors, and prepare payments, which you can choose to print on your own or just record the payments you make with your checkbook. It also lets you print the most common accounting and tax reports you will need to prepare your taxes and know what is the current standing of your finances.

This free version allows you to upgrade anytime, depending on your needs and growth. You can also save an accountant backup copy, which is what accountants and tax people will need to verify your books and prepare your taxes. It integrates with many other solutions like, payroll, credit card processing, and even allows you to download your bank statements from the web directly into QuickBooks.

QuickBooks is the best solution for those who are looking for a simple way of managing their business without falling into the mistake of missing features with personal management software that try to give you small business functionality. Unfortunately the only downside to QuickBooks Starter Free edition is that is only available for PC, if you own a Mac you need either to look for other solutions or buy QuickBooks Pro 2007.

Feel free to email me for questions regarding this subject, I do bookkeeping for a living, also I do taxes and help other get organized in their everyday business needs.

LwEEs.com is transitioning into a business blog, in this stage we are going to make changes to the type of content that is present in the main website. The regular topics on the blog are going to be posted on my new Wordpress.com site at lweesblog.wordpress.com.

The idea behind this strategic change is to apply the expenses of my hosted site directly to my business expenses, while having my blog hosted in a more community friendly place. I love Automattic products and that is why I’m sticking to products from this company.

I hope that you can follow me to my new blogging site where I will be talking about all things technology. No main topics or niche markets, join me to talk about anything and everything that has to do with our current technology.

During this transition LwEEs.com will keep all of the old posts, and I will address topics strictly about the art of doing business online, offering business services and products to other business. Feel free to choose a feed that fits better to your online interests. Find below shortcuts to both of my sites and their feeds, thank you for reading along for such a long time.

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I’m not an expert on predicting things like mergers and sell outs, but I do listen to many podcasts, read many blogs, I try to keep up with technology. I did not see this coming. In a move that left some people speechless (me) Amazon posted a news release initiated by Business Wire, with details of Amazon to acquire Audible.com.

I don’t know about you but I think Audible has a tremendous influence in their line of business, I don’t hear of any other company announcing that their audio books are compatible with iPods or that have a direct link to the iTunes store. I’m thinking that Apple fans are going to be out of luck when thinking about buying audio books but I’m sure this will hurt Apple.

Amazon.com is positioning themselves is a digital distribution market with strong changes to become a dominant player in the digital distribution arena. Last year, Amazon.com announces that they will be selling DRM-free music on their website at significant lower prices than Apple’s iTunes. Then they introduced the Kindle, an e-book reader that looks promising with the ability to download books and newspaper from Amazon websites directly into the device.

With the addition of Audible.com to their lineup, Amazon has a strong catalog to move many people to their store and move people away from iTunes. Amazon.com already has a way to purchase other content other than just music and audio books, the problem is that most are not compatible with Mac. If they come to fix this small issue, I think that the Apple will experience a slow growth on new people paying for content on iTunes.

The merger still needs the approval of the shareholders and the SEC (Security Exchange Commission) to take place but no one is looking at any that will prevent this from happening. I’m intrigue on how this move will affect many podcasters that have sponsorships from Audible and the many people that have subscriptions downloading directly to iTunes.

Leave your comments here on this post, share with our community your thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Image from wordcast.audible.com

Since last week people are talking about the MacBook Air like they own one, very little people have actually touch one and they are going crazy naming the faults of the product. I’m not reviewing it until I play with one, what I’m going to do is try to convince myself about why do I need one. Do you need one?

First of all, I need to keep in mind that this computer is not a primary computer for anyone, this is not going to replace a desktop or even a notebook like the MacBook Pro. I need a computer with a drive at home not because I don’t want to spend $99 on the external drive, but because the point of getting a notebook like the MacBook Air is to carry the least amount of weight when traveling.

I need to think if this computer can perform on my day to day business, I’m not a video editor, I’m not a photographer, I don’t need a firewire plug on the go. I do need portability, I need wireless connection and the ability to plug a USB EVDO device. Wouldn’t be great if the MacBook Air had an EVDO type device inside that you can activate maybe with AT&T, wishful thinking.

I’m doing consulting on business technology application, design, deployment, and maintenance. I like the fact that I can use dual boot technology and install Windows on my Mac, no all my clients are Mac centric, in fact, 85% of them are in the Windows world.

I’m ok with the battery life, I will be rarely running this computer on places where I won’t have a power outlet to use. I don’t care about the multi-touch trackpad but I’m sure I will be using it. Since is a secondary computer I don’t mind the 80GB limited capacity or the 1.6 GHz processor, and 2GB of RAM is more than enough.

I do have a worry, I think Steve Jobs said during the keynote that the software to allow using another computer’s optical drive comes in a CD, I’m wondering if I can get that software in a USB key for portability, allowing me to install it on my clients computers and using theirs optical drives when I’m on-site. I guess I’ll know this when people start doing testing when the computer ships.

I wish I could get a 160GB hard drive on this thing, and I wish it was smaller. I mean the screen, you know like a 12-inch PowerBook, but the size doesn’t bother me at all. I think the price point is too high for a second computer but competitive for an ultra-portable. My business can afford the expense, but I’m not sure about usability. I will be making up my mind when I can touch it and test it, even on an Apple Store.

What do you think? Does it serve your needs? If your line of work allows you to use a device like this one, would you get it? Would you settle for an EeePC with XP installed? Share your thoughts, try to convince me to get one or not to get one, all comments are welcome.

Every now and then, you need to run an application that was wrote specifically for a previews version of Windows and there are no updates for it. If you try to run the application on your current environment it will act on you and you will think that there nothing you can do to make it work better. This is something that can be address with the Windows compatibility mode options within Windows and here is a small tip for using this function.

I first came across this set of options not too long ego when I was trying to install QuickBooks 2006 on a Vista machine for a client. I searched around the web and one of the options that worked before for someone else was the Windows compatibility mode. It is very important to understand that this option is not perfect and it may not work every time but at least it did for my client.

The first step is to install the software you need, here is where you are going to have a challenge since the application is not compatible the system will try to persuade you from installing it. Give it a try and continue installing the application and if you are not successful try Google, most of the time someone try in the past and you will find tips and tricks to help you on this task.

After you have installed the application, look for it and instead of clicking on it to open it, right click, and open the properties panel. One of the tabs inside the properties window should read “compatibility” and here you have several options.

Compatibility Mode – in this option menu, you should see a drop down with several versions of Windows, read carefully your software specifications and select the correct one, click on the “Apply” button and hit “OK” to exit.

Display Settings – some software will require you to run it at a specific size or color settings, the performance of the software may be hit by the Windows user interface, this options allow you to set the software to ignore those too. Again, read carefully the software specifications, select the desire options, and click “Apply” then “OK” to exit.

Input Settings – this option is self explanatory, check the box inside this settings window to “turn off advanced text services for this program,” this might be affecting the general functionality of the software. Again, read carefully the software specifications, select the desire options, and click “Apply” then “OK” to exit.

The last thing you will notice on this screen is the “Learn more” link at the bottom, you can click there to learn more about this options and also to access a Compatibility Wizard that Windows has available for this purpose. Should you have questions feel free to post them on this article or use Google to find answers to almost all the questions you may have about this features.

If any of the information here provided is wrong feel free to point it out and I will make the necessary corrections. If you liked this post, share it with your friends and/or co-workers, you have the option to print this article below the title. Subscribe to my blog and tell your friends to subscribe too, and thanks for reading.

A week before Macworld, Apple released hardware updates for their Mac Pro and Xserve products, while I wont be covering the Xserve updates I have to say that they look strong. In the other hand the Mac Pro is the best machine I’ve ever seen and the fastest Mac ever -Apple said.

I’m very impressed with the technology behind this machine and definitely understand why Apple went with Intel for processing power. Not even AMD is getting close to the specs these new Intel Xeon chips have, up to 3.2 GHz Quad Core processors capable of managing 32GB of Memory, these specs are hard to match.

After reading the specs in detail and reading what the industry and bloggers are saying around the web, it looks like the Mac Pro still lacks some features people were expecting to see. The first one, a Blu-ray player option, Apple is a supporter of the Blu-ray format yet no one has seen anything Apple related with support for any HD format.

Apple 23 inch and 30 inch displays are advertise as HD capable and that’s it, no word on whether drives will be an addition on future dates and this drives people crazy (me on the one hand.) I personally think that they are long due to these offering and I can’t simply understand what the delay is.

Did anyone notice that Bluetooth is not an option anymore? WiFi is! This is very weird, the previous model had an optional WiFi-Bluetooth ad on for $99 USD, the new models have integrated Bluetooth and an optional WiFi Extreme card for $49 USD.

One thing I don’t understand, if you can stick up to 4TB why would anyone need a raid card that cost $800 USD to manage a raid on your Mac Pro. Is this true for all flavors of raid (0, 1, 5, and 10) I guess I’m missing something here, my experience with raid arrays is not enough to understand this.

With this new release, Apple included Memory running at 800MHz, which is nice to know that Apple is finally implementing this speed on their memory line. Almost all current processors have a system bus of 800MHz, maybe by Macworld 2008 we have iMacs, MacBook and MacBook Pro running same type of memory.

The addition of the NVIDIA 8800 GT makes this Mac the best choice for many people, let’s not forget that there is another optional graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, which is killer. If you are thinking on gaming, me too.

Finally, reading Apple’s website I notice something interesting, Apple advertise the Mac Pro as a 1600MHz dual independent frontside bus couple with the 64bit architecture capable of a processing power bandwidth of 25.6GB a second. At this rate, you can manage lots of application and files at the same time on one of these systems, making you the most productive guy/gal on earth.

Radiohead completed its transition to distribution channels like iTunes and Amazon without any major issues. As of today, January 5, 2008, you can get the band album for $9.99 USD on iTunes or Barnes and Noble for $13.99 USD or even Amazon for $7.99 USD.

The price seem to be kind of high because up until a couple weeks ego you could get this album for free, well they requested that you pay what you think it was worth which for some people was nothing. Did you download it? How much did you pay for it?

Radiohead released their album In Rainbows for download around October 2007, the idea was to get people to pay what they though was worth with ended up being somewhere in the $2 USD per complete album download. The so-called “experiment” was a success according to the band, leaving this approach as a good option for other bands to follow their example.

The music industry has had problems keeping up with their traditional way of doing business, mainly because of new distributions channel like iTunes among others. These new approach combined with the digital right management (DRM) issues the music industry is having are bringing changes.

Apple is claimed to have a monopoly in the music download industry, hard enough to being sued for monopoly and have other companies taking their content else where to gain control again over their media. Add all these together and I see strong controversies on 2008 about distribution channels.

So far my music collection is made of 60% legally downloaded music, the rest is CD’s that I had and I ripped them to my Mac. In 2007 I didn’t bought a single hard copy of music and spend little over $200 on music, the trend is pretty much like that, less people are buying CD’s and more are downloading from the web.

I will be monitoring the industry and writing more about peak industry news that are driving changes and will affect us as consumers from now on. Stay tuned for more great content right here at LwEEs.com. Images taken from radiohead.com and barnesandnoble.com

I just finished updating and setting up the latest version of iStat Pro and I decided to talk about it a little bit, this application has been very handy for me as I’m running some medium size applications on a Mac mini. The latest release of iStat Pro version 4.5 add several features that are a must have on a tool like this for the everyday user of Apple computers.

First let me talk about what iStat Pro can do for you, iStat Pro 4.5 is a utility software that loads on your Dashboard as a widget. It tracks your computer activities to give you fast access to statistic information about the performance of your Mac as well as hard drive space, temperature, networks available, etc.

Is a very useful tool for me because on my Mac mini (Intel) I can’t run applications like Photoshop Elements, Firefox, and Microsoft Office at the same time without having issues. This is just one example of applications that will consume all my resources very quickly, I can monitor memory usage and processor performance to identify when I need to close some application to be able to finish my tasks faster.

When I was running the same applications on my previous Mac mini (G4) I was having problems where everything would slow down on me for some reason from time to time, I installed iStat Pro and notice that my problem was Firefox. With Firefox updated and my recent purchase of an Intel Mac mini, now I’m running more applications at acceptable speeds.

I make good use of it when encoding movies, you can tell if your processor have some clocks speed available to check your email or not, you can tell if you network is moving information when is suppose to be static. The amount of information you get from this app is priceless, and everything is customizable. You can add and remove modules, monitor only some networks, and it even has a shortcut to Activity Monitor for more details.

The new version 4.5 brings some great new features, like details and controls for PPP/PPPoE connections, improvements to temperature monitoring service, shortcuts to access drives from the widget, and some bug fixes. Visit iSlayer.com for more details, I strongly suggest everybody to get this widget. I have used it for some time now without any problems and it’s FREE. Consider donating some money to this developer if you like this application, I think is worth it.

Anxiety is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that allows you to sync To-Do created between Mail.app and iCal.app, as well as create To-Do’s from the application. I downloaded Anxiety yesterday afternoon when I got back from work, immediately started playing with it but before creating To-Do’s in my Mail.app or iCal.app I went directly into Anxiety and created two entries. This was the beginning of the end, Mail.app would not respond and crashed about four times before I started reading my error logs.

The error was the same one all along, it seems that when Anxiety tried to create a new To-Do instruction in the Mail.app was not applying the instruction correctly. iCal.app got the instruction without any problems but Mail.app just kept crashing. Here is an excerpt of the error log for Mail.app

12/14/07 7:51:26 PM Mail[224] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInternalInconsistencyException’, reason: ‘trying to set a non-ToDo MailboxUid for a ToDo. The MailboxUid for a ToDo must be a ToDosMailboxUid’

I’m not an expert reading these error logs but it seems like the software was trying to create a non-ToDo Mailbox folder for a ToDo. I quit Anxiety, trash it, and erase it from the Trash and the error persisted in Mail.app. I was so frustrated that my only choice was apparently to erase the com.apple.mail.plist, which means I had to get rid of everything in my Mail.app.

After erasing the .plist for Mail.app I was able to set up my email accounts again without issues. I did not install Anxiety again, even when I think to know how to prevent this issue. If you are going to use Anxiety, before installing the application create one generic ToDo in iCal and Mail.app. Make sure that both of them have different instructions or words like, one that says, “Take out the trash” and another “pay bills.”

As long as they are different I think that Anxiety will not try to create new ToDo folders and will go directly to syncing them. This is only in theory, as for me I will wait until Anxiety release an update to their software before trying again. If you find this article useful consider Digg-ing it or give me a review in Stumble-Upon.