Sticking it to the TurboTax Man

Any TurboTax user needing to file forms in more than one state will quickly find that they need to pony up $39.95 per state after the first free state. Almost $40 just for a bunch of electronic forms? Puh-leez. That’s probably enough to buy ANOTHER copy of TurboTax! Considering the current state of the economy, Intuit sure doesn’t seem to be helping its customers.

Naturally, this led me to some tinkering with TurboTax’s innards. I gotta give them some kudos here – a registry and filesystem sweep turned up nothing on how TurboTax keeps track of what states you have and whether to charge you. Nevertheless, I came to the conclusion that this data must still be present locally as a fresh install on another computer still allowed me to download the first state for free.

After installing TurboTax on a VMWare Workstation install of Windows XP, I was able to download the first “free” state. The downloaded state forms are located in folders in C:\Program Files\Intuit\TurboTax 2008\forms\  (e.g. the Michigan forms are in a directory named mii_08). After zipping that folder up and copying it to the corresponding TurboTax folder on the real computer, TurboTax happily detected the new state forms. Voila – talk about increasing your refund by $40!

Cat and Mouse: uTorrent IPFilter v1.5.5 released

Today marks the release of version 1.5.5 of my uTorrent IPFilter Updater. The application logic has been expanded again so that both .GZ and .ZIP file formats are supported (whatever the people at blocklistpro.com feel like using…they keep on changing it!) Hopefully, we’re getting to a point where the amount of changes to the website and download interface/methods has arrived at a minimum.

On a side note, Vista 64-bit is now officially supported.

Hit ‘er up below, as always.

http://sites.google.com/site/whitehat2k9/Home/my-programs/utorrent-ipfilter-updater

A Car in the Sky

 Beat the traffic: take the flying car

This. is. awesome. The Terrafugia Transition is perhaps the world’s first viable flying car as it just completed its first road test…err, flying test. It seats two and is said to have a range of 4 hours at 180 km/h. Two caveats, though: it’s expensive, at $194,000, and requires a pilot’s license (for the flying feature, anyway). And for those of you who are bad drivers/pilots, there’s the option for a “full vehicle parachute”. Intense. It’s a car! It’s a plane! It’s…both!

uTorrent IPFilter Updater to be updated, again

 

Blocklistpro.com pulled another switcheroo with their latest March 20th blocklists. A new version of my Updater will be out soon to address this.

Classified Blueprints for Presidential Helicopter found on Iranian P2P

DailyTech - Defense Contractor Leaks Obama's Presidential Helicopter Plans to Iran

Wow, talk about an epic fail. The article states that one the defense contractor's computers with the blueprints on it also had file-sharing software installed. The military and Secret Service must be having a fit...

Well, at least Obama can't complain now about the government not being transparent!