It never fails to amaze me the amount of spam I get in my inbox. The latest thing seems to be these Google Adwords phishing emails. I’m currently getting between 20 and 50 of these a week and they do look remarkably similar to genuine emails from Google. The emails ask you to either reactivate your account or change your credit details. The site you are redirected to looks genuine and could easily fool people. The purpose of the exercise is obviously to collect your account details so that unscrupulous people can steal your credit card details. Don’t be fooled.

PC2Paper, the website that allows you to send real letters from the internet has just launched a new and easier way to use their service. It is called the PC2Paper Virtual Printer and basically allows you to print your letters as you would do to a normal desktop printer. The letters are then passed to PC2Paper who print and mail them for you. To use the service you need to have a PC2Paper account with credit in it. Then you simply download the PC2Paper printer from the website and install the driver. When you have a document that you want to mail, you just select the PC2Paper printer from the list of printers on your computer. Then just enter what sort of paper you require, what class of postage and what printing station you want it mailed from. You will then be asked for your PC2Paper user name and password. Once you input these, the letter is passed to the PC2Paper printing station and they take care of the rest for you. It has currently only been launched as a beta but it seems like a really good idea. There is more detail on how to use it on their blog.

Weather balloons could be used to provide mobile phone and broadband services to rural Britain. An American company called Space Data has already used small phone masts attached to balloons to provide wireless internet access to remote areas. The group has supplied military and commercial clients for four years but is now preparing to link with broadband companies to offer services to residential customers. Space Data has patented the service in 41 countries and is now considering the US as a potential market. The service uses a small transceiver attached to a balloon which then rises to an altitude of 30,500m after it has been released. The company says that one balloon can beam a signal to an area equivalent to 80 mobile phone towers. The service does have one drawback, the balloons only last for 24 hours before bursting which means a constant supply has to be released to maintain the connection and the radio equipment on the burst balloon has to be retrieved by a team using location devices.

I find that the Christmas break is a good time to catch up on a lot of those of jobs that tend to get neglected. I have just spent most to the day working my way through a huge pile of documents that require shredding. It’s a very boring and time consuming task, especially when you let the documents build up. I have managed to do about half of it, despite the fact that my little shredder frequently overheats causing the motor to cut out. I think its time to purchase something a little more meaty.

BT has claimed its place as the UK broadband market leader. It has added double the amount of new customers that its nearest rival the Carphone Warehouse has in the last three months. BT now has over 4 million broadband customers compared to the Carphone Warhouse which now has around 2.5 million.

There has been a lot in the news recently about unfair bank charges. If you are looking to claim back some of those charges and get a bank charges refund then you might want to have a look at this website. It takes you through everything you need to do if you want to claim back charges including how to find out what bank charges you are owed and how to threaten your bank with court action. It also goes through how to take your bank to court if necessary. The website contains a lot of really useful information and is definitely worth a look.

Nintendo has managed to double its profits in six months due to the success of the Wii. The Wii console is still outselling both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360. Nintendo are also doing well with sales of the DS console. They are currently expecting to sell around 17.5 million Wii consoles this year.

Further to yesterdays post about the overpriced public toilet that sold for £120,000 I read this interesting article that suggests house prices in the UK rose by 1.1% in October. This doesn’t really come as surprise to me. Whilst I have also read articles recently that predict a slowing in the housing market we are certainly still seeing high prices in our area. Not only that properties still seem to be selling extremely quickly especially the smaller one to two bedroom properties. These smaller properties only seem to be on a market a week whereas larger three to four bedroom properties can be on the market for a month or more. The question remains, however, is now a good time to sell?

Microsoft has recently paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook. This puts the current value of the website at $15bn. Facebook reportedly turned down an offer from Google before agreeing the Microsoft deal.

I came across this website called all-local.co.uk. Basically it’s a uk advertising network that allows you to list your business on a free listing. In addition to the free listing if you require more exposure you can pay for a text link back to your website or and animated banner. You can choose to advertise just in your local town or across the whole website. I’m not sure that I really want to go with the paid advertising option but I will certainly be taking advantage of the free listing.

Tesco is to start transporting some of its goods by canal in order to take some of its lorries off the road and cut carbon emissions. They will use the Manchester Ship Canal to move crates of wine from the Port of Liverpool. The service will include three journeys a week and move an estimated 600,000 litres of wine. Currently the wine arrives in the UK at various ports and is driven to the bottling depot at Manchester. Tesco is now looking at transporting other goods by water.

BT have confirmed that they will create a partnership with Fon, a company which was founded in Spain in 2006. Fon’s users currently agree to share their Wi-Fi connectivity through a separate secure channel. They can either have a 50% cut of the fees charged to their visitor or alternatively to surf other users connections for free. However, their expansion has been limited by ISPs who do not allow the sharing of broadband connections. BT has now given its approval to do this and has effectively extended its OpenZone network across 3 million BT Home Hubs, or the proportion of those that agree to share their broadband connection. They have not currently said whether they will offer a reduction in rates to customers that do agree to do this but it is likely that those customers will have access to BT’s new wireless network and Fon’s global network of around 200,000 hot spots. It all sounds very interesting and as a BT Broadband customer, I am interested to see how it work.

I recently purchased a new colour laser printer from Dell. After much deliberation and looking at several printers including an all in one printer scanner copier, I decided to go with the Dell 1320C. The printer is Dells lowest priced colour laser printer and after I had customised it to be network ready it cost a very reasonable £260. The printer came complete with a pack of high yield toner and a three year warranty. At that price I must admit I was not expecting great things from the machine. However, it has really surprised me. The print quality is excellent, especially when printing photographs. I tested it by printing a picture of Oscar and could see all the individual hairs on the cat. Another thing that amazed me was the speed of the printer. I currently also have a HP laser printer which is designed for large print jobs and is very quick, to my surprise the Dell was just as fast. I tested the two together printing 75 pages and within just over five minutes they had both completed the job within minutes of each other. To sum up this is a really nice printer especially when you take into consideration the price. The only issue I have had, it that the toner does not last very long, as its only designed to print 2000 pages on one set of cartridges. It still works out at around 9p a printed page, so is quite good value for money.