UK Weather

The reason that we British like to talk about the weather so much, is that it is always changeable - there is always something to say about the weather over here... Recently the nights have been too warm to sleep comfortably and no doubt sales of fans and sleep aids have responded accordingly.

I quite often leave windows open to allow a refreshing breeze in, but unfortunately, it also allows in the loud voices as people tumble out of house parties in the wee small hours. Shouts and laughter are all very well when you are being bundled into the taxi nicely inebriated after an evening with friends - not so amusing when you have just dropped off to sleep for the fourth time at 2am with the prospect of being woken by a small child just a few hours later...

Scanning software

I have long been running a 'paperless' office at home running the scanning software that came with my combi-printer. If you don't have suitable software for organising scans, then I can thoroughly recommend doing an internet search and seeing what is available. Using this software, I am able to record every document we receive and happily get rid of the original, safe in the knowledge that I have an electronic copy at my disposal 24 hours a day (fully backed up onto my new NAS network storage of course).
Due to privacy issues, we tend to destroy anything with personal information on it (even merely our address) making it essential that we are able to recall important documents at a couple of mouse clicks.
We actually burn all scanned documentation in an open fire, and if you think that is a bit extreme, my wife and I have been attempted victims of identity theft even before it was fashionable! Our data was taken from the electoral role - they were able to guess our age somehow, but importantly did not know our actual birth dates, so their information did not tie up properly. This is why I never give my correct date of birth except for things like tax and driving licence, insurance etc... If a website asks for my date of birth, I use a bogus date because they don't NEED to know, and I do NEED to keep that information private.

Streeeetched

'Stretched' certainly describes how I feel at the moment, not only by the demands of the day job, but by all the 'projects' that I have on the go...

I have an SEO project that I wanted to develop, I created the first site, but my intention was to develop 'sister' sites too in order to guage the impact of combined SEO techniques over a group of sites effectively 'supporting' each other... This is on hold due to pressures of other projects, plus the site I created is kind of self-sustaining now and will make a small profit even if I don't touch it... I still feel that I will come back to this at a later date - but even if I don't, I have definitely learned a few things.

I have some updates to do on older sites that I am still trying to make my mind up on - primarily this is a face-lift for the site, but I have used the opportunity to make some strategic changes which could see me split the site over several domains. The truth is that domains are cheap, and splitting a site up and cross-linking could give an SEO boost. Added to this, I have lost page-rank on this site in the past, nothing I have been able to do has restored it, so I may resort to just using a totally different domain and re-thinking the whole project. Linked into this, is a new project that I want to pursue (when I have the time) which will involve selling some open-source software and an associated PDF guide.

I have yet another project that is almost ready to launch (this is the one that has been occupying my time lately). It will be a service for building and hosting websites which I am going to aim at local businesses. If this attracts some interest, then it could potentially take up a lot of my time which will once more prevent me from pursuing the lapsed projects....

What it is teaching me (or maybe re-teaching me, as I have talked about this before) is to carefully discern which projects are worth spending time on, which projects are not working, and which projects could work if a totally new approach is taken. There are a couple of blogs that I have been blatantly neglecting - this tells me that they are off my radar a bit (and therefore I am justified in trying to sell the domains...)

Car Insurance

It is quite a while since I have been in the market for car insurance as I have been the grateful recipient of a company car. However, the emphasis of my work has shifted and I have less need for the car than I used to, in fact it would be more helpful for my wife to have use of a car during the week.

I am contemplating putting in an offer for my company car, so have been frantically looking for the cheapest car insurance that I can find. Unfortunately, they all seem to be incredibly expensive, but that could be because the car is probably in a high insurance group. Our alternative would be to spend the money on something a little more economical, but having the car we have had for the last few years seemed like a good idea.

Making Money by Saving Money

It has long been my motto that the fastest way to make money is to save money and I recently took to trimming my hair rather than pay for it to be cut by a barber. The results are a bit drastic, but I reckon I have used it about five times now saving me around £40 or so. The trimmer cost about £25 so I have already saved quite a bit and am looking at serious savings in the long term...
Munny4Hunny is mostly about making money from various internet activities, but it is worth making the point that a few good savings can be more effective than a couple of hours hard work..

World Cup updates

It has not been a great World Cup so far in that we have seen very few good performances, and some teams have really not lived up to expectations. England were expected to win all the games in their group, yet have only managed two draws. Spain have lost to Switzerland, Germany lost to Serbia and many of the teams have underperformed. Maybe it's the altitude, or maybe it's an indication that the 'lesser' teams are catching up.
Whatever the reason, I hope the games become a little more memorable, that some real stars emerge and most of all that somehow, England make it through at least the group stages....

TV on your PC

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of SeeSaw. All opinions are 100% mine.

I have been watching TV on my PC for a while now and I have used three different methods:

• The first was through a 'Freeview' box which is fed through a SCART to composite lead, and then a Pinnacle 'Dazzle' USB video converter. This works, but the solution involves some relatively expensive hardware, and the results in terms of picture quality are not really that great...

• The second way was through 'peer-to-peer' services which don't cost anything, but do involve downloading software (and seeing as the service is a bit on the 'dark-side' you wonder whether the software is trustworthy..). Once you have your software, there is quite a good choice of stuff to watch, but the time it takes to get a feed and the widely varying quality of broadcast can leave you very frustrated.

• The third way is a service called SeeSaw which offers both free and 'rented' broadcasts from broadcasters like the BBC and Channels 4 and 5 along with other independent studios. SeeSaw has a stunning Comedy Section with the likes of 'Only Fools and Horses', 'Men Behaving Badly' and 'Alan Partridge' on offer, they even have some World Cup content too.

Watching SeeSaw is perfectly safe and legal, which is more than can be said for peer-to-peer broadcasting, not only that, but the quality is far and above much of TV content that you can currently access online.If you are already using 4oD and Demand5, you can also pick up that content for free on SeeSaw, and you can then share what you watch with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Suffice to say, that the Freeview box has been put to better use, and the peer-to-peer software has been uninstalled, as they are not a patch on the quality of viewing offered by SeeSaw.

Latest Gadgets

I am still playing with my new NAS that I bought from eBay, and so far have found that it works pretty much as I hoped. Access speeds are hardly blistering, but I only really want to use it for back-ups anyway...
I have installed to hard drives (400GB each) and set them up to be seen as a single disk. I am currently moving my current back-up files from my USB drives onto this new 800GB drive. Once these are safely done, I can wipe to old USB drives and then add them onto the NAS as extra storage space available to the network. My next task will be to configure my backup software to carry on backing up the various files that I need - I am also considering moving all my pictures onto the NAS so that they are available across my network and maybe backing them up onto one of the USB drives - I have already moved my music files (which I will also need to back up).

So as it stands, I have found two distinct uses for the NAS, firstly to back up files that I want to keep, and secondly to make certain files available across my network - where this has been done, another back-up will be required for which I will use the USB drives that the NAS has replaced. I have found the free back up software 'SyncBack' from '2brightsparks' to be perfectly adequate for my needs, so I will control most of the back-ups using this software, although I do have the option of the software that came with my Packard Bell external drive - this software is a lot quicker to set up, so I may try to see if it will work across the network.

The final task that I want the NAS to do for me is to provide a folder for other to access remotely with a password, this should be possible using the FTP server, but I haven't tried his yet and am not sure how it will work out.

Toys for all ages

At the weekend, we will be attempting to make room for new toys and making money to buy new toys by attending a car-boot sale. We are combining eBay and car-boot sales as a way to turn our old stuff into cash - mostly to buy new stuff!
We have done well with things such as stair gates and baby clothes, but have noticed that VHS tapes do not sell at all, although a few CD's have been sold.
For my own 'toys', I am completely reliant on my internet earnings - if there is something I want (such as my new NAS system - see last entry...) then I have to get stuck into some paid blogging or wait for an Adsense payout. On that note, I am due another payment now as I have just crossed the payment threshold again. I am keen to develop passive earnings, but am concentrating more on some other projects at the moment - the good thing about passive earnings is that even if you do nothing - they can just keep earning for you....

Latest Purchases

My quest for improving my PC set-up never ceases...which ends up costing me a bit, at least I rarely have to use my 'own' money as my internet earnings cover most of my purchases...
It's not like I have the latest CPUs and Motherboards, but I do like to build new systems from scratch using old components, then add big hard-drives and plenty of RAM... currently I have two socket 939 board systems, one with a 2.2GHz single core, and one with a 2.0GHz dual core. I have a USB back-up hard-drive on each machine, but they are both pretty much full now. There is a 250GB backup drive on one, and a 150GB backup drive on the other.
I spotted a NAS (network attached storage drive) system some time ago, and have been interested ever since. The NAS works as extra storage just like a USB drive, except that it is connected via the network router and is therefore available to the whole network. Not only that, but some of them have USB ports so that USB drives can be added, plus many of them offer options for remote access. I tracked some on eBay and ended up with the IcyBox (pictured) this one takes two SATA drives (I also got 2 x 400GB drives from eBay), plus it has two USB ports to accomodate my existing USB drives which will give ne a total storage solution of 1.2TB. You can set up the IcyBox to RAID settings so that one drive is backed up by the other, but my intention is only to use the system to back up my PC's, so I don't really need to back up my back up!
I intend to use the system as a server for some files that I want to share over the network, so it will be interesting to see if that will work as I want it to. I am also quite excited about the internet access features, particularly if I can use it to host files that I use for websites - in theory, I could place all my blog pictures on there which would mean that I no longer needed to upload pictures...
I will post about how this new 'solution' works out in practice, so far I can only report that the 'refurbished' model that I bought looks cosmetically pretty much perfect, and the English version of the manual is not the best translation I have ever seen - hopefully the product itself and it's associated software will be fairly intuitive and I won't need to refer to the manual much..

Online business

With the phasing out of older forms of payment like checks, one can't help wondering how far we are away from the truly cash-less society.
Suffice to say online businesses cannot really operate without some form of dedicated online credit card processing, and although there are other online payment services available, they do not really give the right professional impression - not only that, they can be a pretty expensive way to complete transactions online.
I am branching out into a couple of extra online ventures in the coming months, and will have to choose whether to team up with a dedicated online credit card processing service rather than continue to rely on the more common online transaction service used by bloggers and online auctions...