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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As the head of IT in our household, whenever we get a new computer my first task is to install all those FREE useful utilities and essential software tools that make modern computing fun. I’ve managed to get downloading multiple different software packages and then installation them down to a fine art. Aided by an increasingly long mental list of free software tools for improved browsing (Firefox and Chrome), PDF file creation (CutePDF), image manipulation (Paint.Net), telephony (Skype), ……….etc.
The only problem is this list of free and useful essential stuff keeps getting longer and longer. Especially when you add in those all important security tools like anti-virus (AVG), spyware (SpyBot) and malware (MalwareBytes) removers.
The bottom line is that this all takes time, searching the web and selecting all those individual separate downloads
Thankfully there is a really neat site out there
Nitnite.com that makes this job a real breeze by packaging all these tools up in to one handy selection, download and automated installation interface.
As one commentator put it recently, even your granny can use it!
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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The strange thing about writing a WordPress blog is that the posts and the feedback your receive is never quite always what you expected. In my case, I couldn’t understand why I kept getting search hits for queries about Windows 7 users obviously looking for hint and tips on how to access there Plus.Net web mail. Turns out this blog has all the right words to trigger a high search engine ranking, but unfortunately for passing visitor not the right content.
Well the good news now is that thanks to this post, they will (hopefully) be able to find out what they are looking for.
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