Washington State has the Worst/Highest Cell Phone Taxes and Fees in the country.

Washington Taxes SuckDo you live in Washington State? It turns out it’s not just your cell phone provider that’s trying to steal your money, it’s our local government as well.

It turns out, WA has the highest rate for local and state taxes on cell phones in the nation.

Rank State State-Local Wireless Rate State-Local Sales Tax Rate Federal Rate Combined Federal-State-Local-Rate
(USF)
1 Washington 18.59% 9.00% 5.05% 23.64%
2 Nebraska 18.39% 6.50% 5.05% 23.44%
3 Florida 16.26% 7.25% 5.05% 21.31%
4 New York 16.05% 8.19% 5.05% 21.10%
5 Rhode Island 14.62% 7.00% 5.05% 19.67%

How does the rest of the West Coast and HI/AK Compare?
20 California 10.67% 9.10% 5.05% 15.72%
37 Hawaii 7.75% 4.00% 5.05% 12.80%
43 Alaska 6.69% 2.50% 5.05% 11.74%
47 Montana 6.03% 0.00% 5.05% 11.08%
49 Idaho 2.20% 6.00% 5.05% 7.25%
50 Nevada 2.08% 7.91% 5.05% 7.13%
51 Oregon 1.74% 0.00% 5.05% 6.79%
National Averages:

US Simple Average

 9.73% 6.26% 5.05% 14.52%
US Weighted Average 10.96% 7.26% 5.05% 15.75%

These numbers shouldn’t be shocking to anyone who has actually looked at their cell phone bill recently.

If you haven’t looked at your WA cell phone bill, go check it out.

/insert rant about our government’s spending problems and their joy to tax everything in our state.

Source: http://www.mywireless.org/50-state-ranking-2010

Note: Oregon is 51st because the original list includes DC.

How to find the Wireless Channel of the Access Point you are connected to, using netsh

Have you ever tried figuring out the channel of the Wireless Access Point you’re CURRENTLY connected to?  If you’re in a office/corporate environment and have several APs set up in the same area that share the same SSID, knowing which specific AP you’re connected to for troubleshooting can be a pain in the butt.

For Windows users, try this:

In Command Prompt: “netsh wlan show interfaces” (without the quotes)

This is the easiest way I’ve found to quickly help me diagnose which AP I’m connected to when several share the same SSID.

Anyone know an easier way?

A Fix for Google’s GMail HTML Signatures Not Showing up in your Settings

So Google hasn’t ironed all the kinks out yet for their help and support regarding the newly rolled out HTML Signatures, as this simple fix alluded the Google Support team for a week.

If you’re having trouble finding out why your GMail won’t show an HTML signature, try this:

Switch the Email Composer to Rich Formatting, instead of Plain Text.
1. Click compose mail
2. Click on “Rich formatting” (under Subject and just over the message textbox)
3. Go back to settings (no actual message has to be created, this is just to change that setting).

Why this isn’t simpler in the settings, I don’t know.