Rob's Blog

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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This will be my last post on the GDI (Global Domains International) scheme (probably)and is a bit of a summary. The story so far (in brief): I decided that while the many “Get Rich Quick” schemes advertised on the internet sounded too good to be true, I decided to try them out. The first one I tried was the GDI scheme through GDI Goldrush which claimed needed no investment. The claims about not needing investment were suspect at least, and certainly the earnings predictions were way off.

So, my earnings were: zero. I did however pay $10 for the first month of my GDI subscription (after a 7 day free trial), and $35  for advertising through Bidvertiser when the free $20 ran out sooner than I expected. So the bottom line for this scheme is I’m down $45!

Read on after the break for my experience in cancelling, and my thoughts on whether it’s all a big scam.

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I was going to write a post about my new HTC Hero, but instead I thought I’d wrote a post with my Hero! I’m pleasantly surpised how well the Wordpress admin page works in the browser, and I’m starting to get used to the onscreen keyboard and have got a reasonable typing speed.

I have found the phone lags occasionaly, and apps (mainly 3rd party) do sometimes crash, but it’s doing much more than the likes of the iPhone (multi-tasking for a start!).

I will leave it there for now and will try and find time to post a full “average user” review (from my computer) shortly.

I’ll get to the interest-free bit later. This post is about the great loans/investment service Zopa.

For those who haven’t heard about it, Zopa let’s people with money lend money to people who want loans, and it’s all relatively low risk. I’ve been using Zopa for a couple of years now (I’m a lender). Initially I signed up because they were offering a £30 bonus if you became a lender, but I since have gradually invested a bit more money in it (although a pretty small amount by most standards).

It’s quite hard to explain how it works, but once you get it, it is quite simple. As a lender you split your invested money into chunks (say for example £10 chunks), and set how much return you’d like on your investment.

Zopa then offer your chunks, together with chunks from other lenders, to borrowers who want to borrow money. The borrowers are split into categories, based on their credit rating.

Because (as a lender) you are not lending more than your specified chunk size to each lender, you won’t lose too much in the unlikely (Zopa only allows low risk borrowers into the markets) situation that one of your lenders defaults. Zopa take a small percentage of the money you lend out, and charge borrowers a small fee per loan.

The current economic climate means Zopa is great for both borrowers and investors: banks are reluctant to lend, and have pushed up the rates to those they do lend to, and savers can’t get a good rate on their savings elsewhere. This means savers get relatively high rates, and borrowers get relatively low rates.

Since I joined, my average rate is 8.91%, which I would struggle to get anywhere else! It can also get quite addictive adjusting your rates and offerings so that you get the most out of your investment, while making sure your money is snapped up quickly.

So, how can you get an interest-free loan? Zopa predict that their 10,000th loan will be made during July. If you’re the lucky borrower, they will pay your interest! Not a bad deal!

Use my referral link to Zopa, and I get a small bonus, but I would recommend them even if I didn’t get it (although being honest, I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to write this!). If anyone has any questions (I probably haven’t explained it all very well), let me know (or visit Zopa who explain it in a much better way!).

Disclaimer: I went to university with Natalie who owns Photolate.com, and had a sneak preview, but this is still an honest review.

Photolate.com (short for Photo Manipulation) is a new service that offers professional photo retouching for your own photos. The homepage is bright and cheerful and clearly shows what they offer with the simple claim “We retouch everyday photos”. The three packages “Natural”, “Rejuvenate”, and “Party Glam” start at just £4 per photo (£5 for Party Glam) and are described well with plenty of “Before and After” examples. They also offer addons for just £1.50

All packages offer basics like red-eye removal, colour and exposure correction, and blemish removal, as well as many more. Add ons offer to change eye colour, straighten teeth, blur the background or a bespoke add on which lets you ask them to do anything (although I’m sure there are limits?)!

I decided to try the service out with a photo and Abby and I at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich last year. As you can see, in the original we both have redeye, I have spots, and I’m very red (click for larger).

To place an order you must first sign up for an account. This is a pretty easy pain-free process (although you have to wait for a confirmation email), and once you have signed in to you new account you need to upload your photos. When I placed my order this was through a standard upload form, but now it’s been replaced with a fancy flash multi-file upload thingy – it seems to work very nicely. The size limit (when I ordered) was 10MB, which should be no problem for most resolutions.

Once uploaded, you’re shown thumbnails of your photos. These aren’t very good quality, but they’re good enough to chose your photo. Select your photo and you’re given the choice of which package to apply to your picture. If you can’t remember which is which, a handy help popup is provided to remind you – with more examples. You can also add any of the addons to your order.

I went for the Natural Package, with a bespoke treatment to get rid of the bandages on my fingers.

From here it’s very much like any other online shop: add to basket and checkout. At the checkout there’s a handy ’special instructions’ box to tell them what you would or wouldn’t like retouching (this is where I specified I wanted the bandages removing). Payment is made through Paypal (which I don’t personally like, but it is widely trusted, and ideal for a startup such as this).

They claim to retouch your photos (all by a real person) within 48 hours. I had to wait longer than this, but when I chased it up I got a prompt reply saying she wasn’t happy with the results so had to get it re-done. Quality control is certainly a good reason for a delay, and I am pretty confident this is just a teething problem.

A short while later I got an email telling me my photo was ready (“You`ve been photolated!”). I logged in to my account and downloaded the photo from the “My Orders” page. They only store the finished products for 2 weeks, so you have to make sure you are able to “collect” your order within this time. The finished result is below (click for larger):

My first reaction was “That’s not been retouched”, but that’s the whole point of the natural package – a natural look! The red-eye has been removed (on both of us and the random guy behind). My complexion is much improved, and the overall colour balance is better. The bandages on my fingers have been expertly removed. I still look slightly red, but I’d been in the sun, and I would probably look too strange pale or artificially brown.

Technically, the photo was the same resolution (2MP – this was taken on my old camera), and the EXIF data had been retained. The image was actually less compressed, although obviously this wouldn’t ‘bring back’ information lost in my camera’s original compression.

Here are some before and after closeups at full resolution (click for larger):

Overall a pretty good service at an amazing price. A few teething problems but they’re improving bits all the time. I would highly recommend this service.

Photolate are currently offering a limited offer of a free retouched photo for a limited time only (not sure how long for), so you’ve got no excuse not to try them out (enter free0805R at the checkout).

Our Wii Fit arrived yesterday! We found one in stock at Dixons, using the great Wii Fit Stock finder (you have to be quick off the mark, but can normally find one if you persist – actually as I write Tesco.com have them in stock and they’re £5 cheaper than most other places!). It arrived pretty quickly – much quicker than the promised 5 working days.

We have only had one evening using it, but here’s my experience so far.

The first thing it does is talk you though everything, which can be a bit annoying (an animated Wii Balance board starts talking to you!), but it’s only for the setup. You select a Mii to represent you, and enter your height, and Date of Birth.

Next, you stand on the Balance Board for a little while and it measures your weight and centre of gravity. Apparently a central COG means you are fitter! From your weight it also measures your Body Mass Index (BMI).

I discovered a) I am overweight, and b) My centre of gravity isn’t as good as it could be. It also told me my Wii Fitness Age, which was about 10 years older than my real age – not good. You can also set yourself a target weight, and a date to reach it. Nicely, it warns you if your target means you will need to loose weight too rapidly, and suggests you change it (I did). The idea is you re-do this test daily so it can chart your progress.

Next is the fun part – the training. This can be done at any time, and is the ‘game’ part of it. This is split into 4 sections:

Yoga Poses

Yoga poses are exactly that – yoga poses. I wondered what the point of using Wii Fit to do yoga would be, but it’s quite nice because when you are in the pose, it encourages you to keep your balance on the board by showing a dot you have to keep inside the circle. It then gives you a score based on how little the dot moves.

Some of the poses are simplified (for example the Sun Salutation) only has stages that keep your feet in the same place (who’d have thought I actually knew something about yoga eh!?).

Four poses are available to you to start with, and more appear as you train more (one more was unlocked for me). All are demonstrated pretty well by an animated trainer, and other sounds and animations encourage you to breath with a good rhythm.

Muscle Workouts

I didn’t do many of these, but they are things like press-ups and twists. They are also demonstrated by an animated trainer. The twists I did seemed easy, but the press-ups were much harder (although I got a good score!).

Aerobic

This is where it starts to get a bit more fun. It includes things like hula hoops, step aerobics and jogging.

The hula was quite fun, and tiring, although Abby struggled to keep the hoops going. Do it enough and you get a more advanced version (I was too tired by the time it appeared though).

Step aerobics was ok, but didn’t really get my heart racing – it’s a bit like a dance may game where you step on and off the board to the beat.

I didn’t really get on with jogging. This doesn’t use the balance board, but instead measures your speed from the Wii Remote which you are meant to put in your pocket. This didn’t seem very accurate and the speed kept changing even when jogging at a fairly constant speed.

Balance

These activities are all based on shifting your weight on the board to control the game. I was generally pretty bad at these – I struggled to move the weight anywhere but centred, or all the way in one direction or the other. I don’t think this is a fault of the games, as the idea is to train you to get better. They all seemed pretty good fun and will hopefully get better as I get more skilled!!

The time spent on all activities is stored in a graph so you can keep track of your progress. Another nice thing I liked is that you can add activities you’ve done outside the Wii Fit training on to the graph so it encourages you to train generally, not just spend all day playing on the Wii.

Overall first impressions are pretty good. One downside I haven’t mentioned is that if you have your location set as the UK then all measurements are in imperial, and there’s no way to change this. A minor point, but annoying as I work in metric most of the time.