Rob's Blog

I quite often sell my old stuff (mainly DVD box sets once I’m finished with them) on eBay, but I know you can also sell your stuff on Amazon and Play.com (and probably elsewhere).

I’ve created this simple tool which I’m calling “Make the Most” to help be (and you) calculate which site will let me make the most profit.

It’s pretty simple. You decide what you want to sell, tell it how much posting it will cost, have a look at each site to see how much they are going for, and it will calculate all the fees and tell you how much profit you expect to make on each site. It has to make some assumptions, but it should give you a good idea.

Currently it only has data for CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays, but I may add more shortly (let me know if there are any requests).

Of course there may be bugs, so let me know your comments and suggestions below. I accept no responsibility for any errors etc.

Update (02/02/2010): It would seem from the comments that this was a legitimate request for an autograph! MAybe I’m more famous than I think? Original post continues:

A few days ago I got a surprising email asking for my autograph (full text below). Despite getting literally tens of visitors to this blog per day, I am by no means a celebrity, so this either there is some famous person with my name (so famous I’ve never heard of them), this person is just trying their luck sending hundreds of emails hoping to get a real one or two, or this is some new scam to get my signature and use it to steal my identity.

I’ve searched for the sender of the email (Lalit Kumar Bajaj), and I can only find a few comments on blog posts requesting autographs and not much more, but it could be very new, or could be the scammers (if they are scammers) are using multiple names.

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I am guessing with the number of invites that Google have given me that they aren’t exactly in short supply, but in case anyone still can’t find an invite for Google Wave, let me know and I’d be happy in add you to my invite list.

Once you are on Wave you may find you have no-one to wave to, so check out my list of people who want contacts.

We’ve owned our house for three and a half years now, but it’s only relatively recently that we’ve had to start using local tradesmen for maintenance etc. I found it very hard to chose who to call. There are loads in the Yellow Pages, but without personal recommendations it’s hard to tell one from another.

In order to help others in a similar situation I’ve decided to write a review of all the tradesmen we use, starting with Nortons Heating in York.

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I just had a customer contact me asking if I had any idea why his email was being rejected by the Yahoo mailservers (which also deal with all BT addresses).

The rejection message said:

554 Message not allowed – [320] (in reply to end of DATA command)

A quick Google search, and a look at the message that was rejected, told me that the time on the sending machine was wrong – it was set 1 month in the future. It seems Yahoo won’t accept mail sent from the future, so if you are getting similar rejection messages check your system clock!

I hope this helps someone.

I watched last week’s Gadget Show last night (I’m a week behind), and saw their review on the Sanyo Xacti WH1 waterproof camcorder. They listed it as “from £165″ which sounded amazing value, and considered buying it. Unfortunately it looks like they made a mistake on the price, as I couldn’t find a price anywhere near it.

I did find it at £189 however on a site I’d never heard of: Electronic Megastore electronicmegastore.com. I’m not sure what first made me wary of this site. Probably the fact it was at such a great price, and I’d never heard of the site before.

A quick Google Search came up with a page of customer reviews on Shobby. Some are great, but appear to be from similar IP addresses. The rest all talk about them being a scam run from a petrol station! This could be innocent and just a disgruntled customer/employee trying to spread rumours.

I decided to do my own investigations into the site, and have concluded that in my opinion the site is a scam, for the following reasons:

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Last weekend we went to  a wedding (at which we had a very good time). We had Izzy with us, for the day, and of course had to feed her.

Abby was all for buying some pouches of mush, but we decided there is no reason we couldn’t continue with our baby led weaning. We chopped up some fruit, put it into small pots, and took it with us. We were provided with a high chair, which is where our first realisation comes. One problem with baby led weaning (at least with Izzy) is we can’t really use plates – she just picks them up and tips them over – we have to put the food onto the highchair tray. This is fine at home, but when out and about you don’t know how clean it is. We wiped it down with a baby wipe, but are going to get some anti-bacterial wipes to keep in the changing bag for future.

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If you’ve been following this diary, sorry for the lack of entries. I decided it was getting a bit samey and have decided it’s likely to be better to make occasional entries  when we have any new developments.

Izzy’s been eating that same sort of stuff. She’s really learning to pick things up on her own and put them into her mouth. I’m quite mean with this – I’ll hold something up for her, but won’t put it in her mouth when she “calls” for it. Instead I let he watch me put it down so she knows where it is, and she quite often picks it up on her own. Sometimes I put it into her hand, and sometimes I give in and put it in her mouth.

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Today was a little odd as we had a very broken night (Izzy was suffering from constipation) and then we slept quite late. This meant meal times were all over the place.

Breakfast:
Stewed apple and pear. At first she didn’t seem bothered at all, but she did have a small amount of apple.

Lunch:
More apple and pear, but still didn’t eat much.

Dinner:
Same again, plus some melon. The melon was a bit hard so she didn’t have much, and she wasn’t very hungry overall.

Breakfast:
Banana, and mango. She wasn’t very hungry.

Lunch:
Mango pear and kiwi. The pear was a bit too hard though.

Dinner:
Slightly stewed apple and pear, and some steamed parsnip. She ate loads as she hadn’t had very much earlier in the day.