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“!
Read more…
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!).
Read more…
Solved at last. For months I’ve been trying to work out how to do it. Get my old war horse of a laser printer (HP LaserJet 4L in this case) back in operation since getting a new Windows 7, 64bit PC.
Turns out the secret was a £4 USB Parallel Printer Port Cable 25 pin female socket
cable from Amazon, given there are no parallel printer ports on my new desktop PC.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
I love your feedback – thanks!