We’ve all been there, Mum or Dad, brother or sister, mates or work colleagues struggling with their computer at home and they are on the phone asking for help. If only you could see what they are doing or could show them what to do whilst talking them through it – without getting in the car! Well there is a really simple FREE way for you to do just that from remote desktop support company, LogMeIn, called Join.Me.
So what’s Join.Me, well it’s a slick browser-based solution to instantly provide invitations to collaborate, meet, train, demo or show-off stuff to someone else. The free version allows you to easily
- screen share
- chat
- file transfer
- remote control
Even better, you can swap who’s sharing which screen – just what’s required to provide remote IT support to your struggling family member, colleague or friends.
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Many low cost telephone and broadband packages in the UK have a free telephone call allowance as part of their monthly line rental costs. More often than not though, the free call allowance is limited to only local, 01 and 02 numbers. In the trade these are known as geographic numbers.
Unfortunately many large companies opt to advertise their telephone customer services only via 0870, 0871, 0845 and 0844 prefixed numbers – so called non-geographic numbers. Call to these 08** numbers can cost up to 11p/minute. Why you might ask? Well, guess what, those same companies make anything up to 1.5p/minute, even though these are supposedly not premium rate telephone lines. No wonder they like to keep you on hold for a few minutes “due to excessive call volume“!
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When it comes to unusual and puzzling Christmas messages, why not send your friends and family season’s greetings in a high tech form this year.
You may have seen QR Codes on tickets at airlines, on packaging and parcels, but did you know they are dead easy to create yourself. And, industry experts reckon most modern camera phones are now compatible with the FREE downloadable software required to read the codes. So, there’s no excuse not to give it a try. In the tests I’ve done, there are certainly readers for all the common smartphone formats available such as the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry, Sony-Ericsson and Samsung mobiles in our household (and some of those are quite ancient models!).
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My now ageing Sony Ericsson W910i is not necessarily the most modern of mobile phones but does for me. One of the most useful features is it’s ability to occasionally connect to my web mail account and other sites such as BBC Sport and News. 
All was working fine until whenever I tried to access Planet 3 or the Internet and it wouldn’t do so and prompted me with the following error message ‘Data account does not exist. Check your settings’. The phone itself was fine for calls and text messages.
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I guess this is not something we all need to do on a daily basis, but many of us have been faced with the need to occasionally join pages from separate PDF files together or extract specific pages from multi-page PDF document. There are quite a few free pluggins out there that help with creating PDF files in the first place, my personal preference is CutePDF, but I’ve always struggled with the join and extract stuff - like many of you I don’t want to spend my hard earned cash on one of Adobe’s expensive professional products.
That’s why 
was really keen to share my recent discovery of the ILovePdf website – such a simple website, “does exactly what it says on the tin” as they say in that well known UK advert, and makes the job of combining PDF files or extracting one or more pages so simple.
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