tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63493482024-10-24T12:41:22.405+01:00Reducing your costs without cutting your lifestyleLesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-62136680767796081222012-06-19T20:28:00.000+01:002012-06-19T20:38:32.667+01:00

All of the big 6 energy provider in the UK offer very cheap heavily discounted deals to encourage you to switch your gas and electricity but does this cost you more in the long run. It's really rather clever because after that tempting deal that encouraged you to switch expires you automatically go on to a tariff with no discount, usually after a year. If you do a price

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-30831804002151961762012-06-05T19:50:00.000+01:002012-06-05T19:50:25.548+01:00

Have you ever noticed how some offers only seem to save you money for a short period of time? I'm sure you know the deals I mean the ones that say something like only £5.99 a month in big letters and then somewhere in small print its says for the first 3 months. Of course after that deal clinching special offer expires you find yourself having to pay the piper and your locked into a contract for

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-69592900441423328032012-06-05T19:29:00.005+01:002012-06-05T20:28:40.241+01:00

We are back with a new look and a new format we will be focusing now strongly on recession beating

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-5703292185732829702009-10-05T14:29:00.004+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.092+01:00

The new release of Picasa 3.5 contains some amazing if slightly scary face recognition. Picasa will now scan your photos for faces once you tag a face it's pretty good a labelling every picture where that face occurs. It works really well, though it does seem to get occasionally confused with siblings.What's so scary? Well if free software can pick your face out of a photo graph and recognise you

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-14026196492295057502009-10-01T13:41:00.002+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.072+01:00

It's essential that you have antivirus software installed and running on you machine. Not only will it protect your machine and data but it will stop your machine from being used by others to send out spam. To aid in the fight against malware and computer viruses Microsoft have release Microsoft Security Essentials free software that will guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-37131549898638295842009-04-13T17:31:00.000+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.083+01:00

This photo recovery program took 24 hours to scan my 16GB SD card by which point I got feed up and quite the program at this point it had not restored any images as it does a scan of the card first.

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-61795451346034907182009-04-09T12:56:00.003+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.095+01:00

Art Plus Digital Photo Recovery 3 managed to recover all of my RAW format photos from a 16GB SD card overnight. The resulting images were full size. Not only was it the fastest solution I tried to recovery my photos it was also the most successful. This is the only one of the three photo recovery programes I intsalled that I will be leaving on my machine. It works quickly and provides excellent

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-32896365968621368562009-04-09T12:49:00.004+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.081+01:00

This photo recovery tool took about 24 hours to scan my 16Gb SD card and restores all of the photo. However all the restored files were about 15Mb each the program restored these as TIFF images of 160 x 120 pixels, considerable smaller that 3648 x 2736 they were taken in. As I did not really want thumbnail photos this was not really useful. It's important that any photo recovery program you use

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-87907901175743620772009-04-05T07:51:00.006+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.097+01:00

If your memory card is corrupted and you can't read it to get your photos off of it what do you do.First don't try to take any more pictures on the card, be assured all is not necessarily lost, it may be possible to still retrieve your photos. I've looked at three programs that can retrieve photos from a formatted or corrupted memory card. The card can be any type of flash card SD, MD, MCC,

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-29430936149553021222009-04-05T07:42:00.002+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.079+01:00

With huge SD cards being so cheap you may be tempted to buy a cheap SD card and save a few pound but if you are using the SD card in a digital camera this may be an unhappy choice. I brought a cheap 16GB SD Card and have had nothing but problems with it. I had to return the first two cards because they kept giving write errors. I would take a photo and then find that it could not be saved to the

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-11161176937252046132009-03-16T19:24:00.005+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.071+01:00

The most obvious difference between Wayfinder and CoPilot is that CoPilot is installed on your phone and requires no Internet connection to work. The CoPilot user interface uses good size icons so you never need to reach for the stylus. So from a usability perspective it beats Wayfinder. However it's voice directions are not as good as those on Wayfinder, it is often a little late with it's

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-92194797005565572122009-03-07T17:31:00.005+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.099+01:00

I had a few problems getting Wayfinder working on my Sony Experia X1 but with the help of the excellent customer support It wasn't long before I was navigating with ease. Let me just make two things clear the problem in getting Wayfinder to work was actually to do with the way Vodafone had set up the access point on my phone and secondly Wayfinder customer support is without a doubt the best

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-25483012213518375612009-03-07T17:23:00.003+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.077+01:00

I've been looking at two SatNav programs that can be run on a mobile phone. I tried Wayfinder requires and online connection and CoPilot which runs directly on the phone both were run on a Sony Experia X1 and I'll be posting my findings over the next couple of posts

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-45538516429250207632009-02-23T11:08:00.002+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.090+01:00

There's nothing worse then trying to send someome a message and notbeing sure if you have their latest number or email address. Sign up forPlaxo and get your friends to do so to, then whenever they update theirdetails your contact list will be updated to reflect their changes. Whenyou change your details your friends get the update to you don't have tocall or email eveyone you know to update then

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-38932022055844724002009-01-29T13:15:00.004+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.084+01:00

It looks like printed circuits could really be printed soon. Research in the US is paving the why for soluble semiconductor ink allowing electronic circuits to be printed just like news paper. This could finally make RFID tags cost effective enough to put on consumer goods and see the dawn of flexible display that you can roll up and put in your pocket.

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-41851813077936247532009-01-25T16:53:00.005+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.085+01:00

With the announcement of SDXC at this years Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas it leave me wondering how long it will be before we see reasonable priced terabyte Solid State Drives (SSD) in PCs. Current SSD are expensive for 60GB or 120GB drive. SDXC promises SD cards of up to 2 terabytes that should be enough storage for most PC users needs for a few years at least.

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-57997008433694913562009-01-25T16:41:00.001+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.094+01:00

Want to know the state of the world then checkout this page of world statistics which updates in real-time click here.

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-1757899056296292622009-01-18T15:59:00.003+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.074+01:00

There's a lot of talk about Windows 7 (Microsoft's next desktop OS) , but given all the problems I've had with Vista I'm not too sure I want to give Microsoft any more of my hard earned money. With this in mind, I've started looking at Ubuntu, which is supposed to be an easy to use Linux distribution. I've installed Ubuntu on my main PC so that I have the option when I start my machine to run

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-30220303216801102982008-12-19T17:19:00.002+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.080+01:00

All of the options looked at previously have required you to purchase an new car. So what are the options if you want to keep your existing car?You could convert your car to run on LPG, this is taxed at a lower rate the petrol and diesel and produces less CO2 but it's not as fuel efficient so your MPG will drop a little and a conversion will cost around £2000. Unless you do a lot of mileage it

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-44510168448627736062008-11-02T10:09:00.002+00:002012-06-05T19:28:34.087+01:00

Hybrid cars are part battery-electric and part conventional cars. They use of a temporary energy storage device (usually a battery), which enables the main engine to be operated at close to its maximum efficiency.There are two types of hybrid car, those that use an engine to produce electricity and then use an electric motor for propulsion (these are less common.) And those in which the

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-45193582191834540282008-10-17T13:31:00.006+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.089+01:00

There are basically two types of hydrogen powered cars, those that burn hydrogen in a combustion engine and those that use fuel cells to generate electricity which powers an electric motor.There are an increasing number of hydrogen powered cars to choose from sports cars like the Shelby Cobra with a 351 engine that runs on hydrogen, the Nissan Frontier pickup powered by fuel cells and even a

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-5411338825101557482008-10-09T16:44:00.005+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.091+01:00

There are an increasing number of electric cars to choose from like the gwiz which is cheap to buy and incredibly cheap to run, but it's really a town runabout at best with a range of up to 48 miles on a full charge (typically 30 - 40 miles in normal road conditions.)At the other end of the spectrum are cars like the Tesla, a full high performance sports car with 0 - 60 in 3.9 seconds and 244

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-10206604128139231262008-09-25T21:30:00.003+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.070+01:00

With the government set to dramatically increase road tax of cars that emit high levels of CO2 and the continuing uncertainty about fuel prices, what alternative does technology offer? That's what I'll be looking at in my next few posts

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-88142411216648892322008-08-02T21:36:00.003+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.098+01:00

Google know all about your search habits and constantly gathers data about you from your searches. If you are concerned about Googles domination of Internet search or the fact that they track everything you search for. You might like to try cuil and new search engine by former Google staff.Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6349348.post-22986484798226486752008-07-30T17:01:00.002+01:002012-06-05T19:28:34.076+01:00

This week around 3,000 blank British passports due to be sent to embassies around the world have been stolen from a van that was hijacked near Manchester, in what the Government admits was a major security breach.It is claimed that these can not be used as they have security chips on them, however this article on the BBC website ePassports 'at risk' from cloning, 15 December 2006 explains how

Lesliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16603578606696979487noreply@blogger.com