Something to do with the roof, maybe?
Here's a reminder for Avis of what convertibles used to look like.
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03/17/2010
02/16/2010
Official rip-off at Woolworth and Amazon
Search for 'rip off' on This is Money or Google for that matter and you'll be encouraged by Woolworths and Amazon.co.uk to visit their sites for a rip off.
OK, so it links to a DVD called Rip-Off but as my search coninutes for genuine offers it's worth bearing in mind that they're getting harder and harder to find - unless you want to buy stuff that you don't want.
Related
02/04/2010
Kodak Zi8 HD video camera for around £120
It's been a while since I've had a 'fairly priced thing worth buying' to write about. Frankly, most recent offers have not been offers at all but cynical tricks to get the gullible to dispose what remains of their disposal income and credit card debt on crud.
Then this comes along: a pocket camcorder for not much more than the opportunity cost of trawling voucher sites all day for 10p off a tube of instant fish paste.
Ignoring the silly oxymoron that it boasts a 'large 2.5in screen' [in what world of augmented reality is six-point-three-five centimetres large?] the Kodak Zi8 is a real beauty. And it it's simple to use. The main criticism has been the fact that this is a basic camcorder. For normal people that should be a bonus.
Don't take my word for it.
Read these:
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10/30/2009
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10/01/2009
Drop this Readability button into your browser menu bar and never struggle to read Web pages again
Three clicks and one drag of the mouse and this fantastic little tool will provide you with an easy-to-read version of the article on the page. It's brilliant. Have a go...
>> Readability - 'the tool that makes reading the Web more enjoyable'
09/29/2009
Desert Island Discs finally available on iPlayer
The programme has been around for 67 years and yet only now is it available on the BBC's 'listen again' service - or, assuming one week online is a year in the old world, the equivalent of around 167 internet years.
For the uninitiated, Desert Island Discs sees famous people invited to Radio 4 to chat about their lives and choose a selection of music, a book and a pointless luxury to accompany them on a lonely sejour on a desert island. It's presented by Kirsty Young but the rights to the show still belong to the family of its erstwhile creator, Roy Plumley, who have now agreed a deal that allows licence payers to listen to repeats on the iPlayer and as a podcast.
The first show online features Kirtsy chatting to Barry Manilow. And coming up, according to Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer, 'I still yearn for Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Madonna, Arsene Wenger etc. etc. Stay tuned. We're trying.'
Listen to the first show this lunchtime. Here's Barry...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr
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09/22/2009
40 ways to download free music
Good news (for the both of us in the country who give a damn): my favourite band, The Toy Dolls, are playing my favourite venue (in Paris) on Saturday 5 December: La Cigale.
Bad news is that with the spending power of our pound abroad taking another sewer-bound turn, the chances of me attending are as likely as my team, AFC Wimbledon, winning the Champions League my lifetime.
Still, here's a great piece on 40 ways to download free music.
Definitely worth a read one lunchtime.
Related- I'm working till I die, by pension correspondent Philip Scott
- The best music download sites
09/10/2009
08/04/2009
Compare music download prices
Welcome to 'Stuff the music industry should have been doing 15 years ago, part 994'.
Finally, a site is here that compares legal music downloads.
Even if the prices can be pretty much the same across various sites, this one saves you the hours it can take to trawl through the myriad scammers before working out which site to trust with your 79p.
Find out more about comparedownload.com
It's great for more esoteric stuff. I got a Kathleen Battle spiritual I've been looking for ever since the version I had on cassette melted.
07/24/2009
How to remember internet passwords without losing your head
A friend of mine once studied how many sub-clauses a human can cope with in an English sentence before the brain explodes. I don't know the results because the paper was too badly stained to read when his head blew up.
His research went along the lines of: the man who lives in a house with a green door in a suburb of Liverpool where the courts are full footballers who are overpaid like musicians used to be until the internet that legitimises theft of copyrighted material from which artists earn money to pay the rent for the house with the green door and so on. Pause for breath. Bang!
I feel, had he lived, his life may not have been the worthless irritation it became for him because his knowledge could now be put to good use to help a human try to remember the hundreds of internet passwords that we now need to access anything useful, that we're not allowed to write down, must be unique, a combination of eight letters, some uppercase, and numbers that we all have to memorise.
Luckily, you don't have to remember them or write them down. His life would still have been worthless. For there's a little piece of software called Password Agent that securely stores all your passwords and, even better, automatically fills in the login details of all the sites you save. Check it out here:
http://www.moonsoftware.com/pwagent.asp
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07/09/2009
Polaroid inkless Pogo photo printer: £35 down from £99 (65% off)
Yep, inkless.
No ink.
Just special paper, which costs around £13 for 70-sheet packs.
This is a tempting offer for people who like an easy life.
Check this out.
07/06/2009
Missing the tennis already? The Wimbledon spirit lives on at y8.com (well, sort of)
Now that Wimbledon is over for another year and as a nation we collectively return to the view that tennis doesn't exist until it returns to south-west London in the final week of June 2010, here's something to keep the memory alive. And what a fine way to waste a lunch hour. Or an entire evening.
The massively popular website Y8.com has hundreds of free games you can fire up and play at your desk.
There are more than 800 hundred sports games alone.
Such as this one:
Tennis Game
Click here to play this game
Or if tennis really isn't your thing, there are more 80 money-related games to enjoy.
Monkey cliff diving anyone?
Monkey Cliff Diving
Click here to play this game
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07/03/2009
06/24/2009
Sub £10 Blu-ray discs at Play.com
The latest attempt to get the viewing public to replace their movie collections, this time with Blu-ray, feels, predictably, like a con. Why the high prices for a Blu-ray disc when DVDs are now retailing for a few quid?
Obviously, the movie business is suffering at the hands of pirates and they have to make a return on their investments.
So make the movies available and affordable! People will then buy them. And you remove much of lure of the black market. But no, the films are being drip-fed on to the market and the prices are laughably high.
It is, however, slowly improving.
I'm delighted to see that Play.com has just announced a sale with its own selection of Blu-ray films (others have similar deals) under a tenner. They're also advertising DVDs from £3. Worth a mention because the prices include delivery.
As ever, check out the useful Find-dvd.co.uk for price comparisons on DVD, Blu-ray, books, CDs and games.
Check out the Play.com summer sale
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04/29/2009
03/17/2009
Sub £100 flat-screen TV, finally
I've been waiting for this for a while, a flat-screen telly with Freeview for the bedroom for under £100. And this one seem to fit the bill: a 15" TV for £90 - down from a claimed £225. It doubles as a PC monitor. Order today for delivery tomorrow.
Vistron DB15-BD 15" TV Black Digital Freeview
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03/04/2009
£22.99: is this the cheapest digital photo frame?
One of my guilty pleasures, apart from poring over the attendance statistics for lower league football matches on a Monday morning, is wasting entire evenings looking through our old photo albums.
The former frequently gives rise to moments of incredulity. Chester FC often attract barely more than 1,000 people into the ground! How do they make any money? The latter, however, is the source of a tremendous amount of pleasure. For this reason, I've not bought in to the digital photo frame phenomenon. But here's an offer that is sorely tempting.
Ebuyer has a 7" frame for just £22.99, backed with a decent number of reviews that suggest it may be good value rather than merely cheap. You can easily pay up to 100 quid for something similar. Check out...
>> Extra value photo frame £22.99
PS> Another guilty pleasure of mine is listening to Joss Stone. Why rubbish football teams get such poor crowds is perhaps understandable. But why one of our greatest ever singers gets such a bad press is a complete mystery. Here are a couple of shots that might be on my photo frame if I ever got one. And if I'd taken them, of course.
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02/19/2009
More free legal music
(I've always wanted to start a piece with the words 'why' and 'quite' with the first line in brackets. So here goes...)
Quite why, in the days that music downloads rule the audio waves, HMV doesn't offer an in-store facility to download music on to your pod or player is beyond me. You can do it on the website. In spite of this anomaly. HMV seems to be doing pretty well. It has just bought some of the vacant Zavvi stores.
Visiting Zavvi with its ridiculous over-the-top security presence often felt like you were visiting a crime scene rather than a shop with a few CDs and loads more CDs out of stock. I gave up with them ages ago. And this is someone who used to spend all day every Saturday in the Eldon Square Virgin Megastore who still spends stupid amounts of money on music. Dear old defunct Woolies frequently offered a similar experience; like visiting a badly organised jail with heavily guarded sweets, cheap tellies and Shania Twain CDs lining the aisles instead of cells. HMV take note - from my recent experience you seem to be filling the gap on the security front these days, it's not pleasant.
Aside in small print: I did a quick reccy yesterday in the High Street. At 1.30pm, peak lunchtime shop-a-thon time, the shops were almost all, almost completely empty - apart from Tesco (big queue at the cigarette counter) and WH Smiths (big queue at the cigarette counter). The Smiths branch is closing down at the end of the month.
If High Street retailers won't adapt the game's up. Sky has just anounced an online music service to rival iTunes. Amazon and Play.com are doing a fine job offering music downloads. There a loads of others. But these are the paid-for ones.
The free legal stuff is incredible. If you haven't checked out Spotify do it now because, frankly, I can't work out how they plan to make proper money.
And for today, here's another legal one.
Wolfgang's Vault has a smallish but worthy archive of concert and interview footage of some of the greatest bands. It won't suit people into the more modern stuff on show in last night's Brits - but hey what's modern about Duffy? There's some interesting 'old' U2 footage that fans may want to check out. They were on the Brits too.
http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/
You need to do a quick registration but unlike Spotify and our erstwhile music retailers it shouldn't be blocked by any workplace's overzealous security presence: the firewall, that is.
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DIY business cards £10.99
Just when you thought Christmas in Discount Britain, circa 2008 recession, couldn't get any more bizarre than every company offering 20%-offs, P&O Ferries, the ferry company that operates ferries for a living, has upped the ante with the launch of its Reindeer Training School. It's good to see marketing departments haven't lost sight of the important elements of keeping business afloat.
Speaking of which, if working for yourself is either how you operate now or is looking like a distinct possibility in the near future here is a great site for creating your own business cards and more. No more hanging around those printing machines at train stations for the internet generation. On Moo.com you can create lively calling cards with a different photo on each one if you so wish. And starter packs of 50 come in at £10.99. Just remember if you want your image and your business to succeed - be sensible. Leave the wacky stuff for the, um, experts.
Check it out, watch the video, at Moo.com
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12/17/2008
Most popular free downloads of 2008
Trying to find money-saving discounts worthy of posting is becoming increasing difficult. Almost everyone is cutting prices so there's not a lot of point singling out the most desperate offers. They all seem to be. Suffice to say that come January it will surely be a case of which chain will follow Woolworths into the mire.
Some of these offers are nonetheless better than others. For instance, Threshers/Wine Rack is currently offering 40% off wine. But let's take a closer look.
The popular French table wine from the JP Chenet label - the one with the funny shaped bottle - sells at Threshers / Wine Rack for £5.99 a bottle. Tesco is shifting it for less than £4 if you buy in bulk. But cross the Channel for a better idea of the true price and you'll see it's under £2 a bottle. Even at 40% off and considering the duty that UK Customs and Excise imposes - and even admitting that it's not an entirely accurate like-for-like comparison - it is a rubbish discount compared with its true French value.
Far better then to concentrate on some true bargains. Here are some of the best and most popular free downloads of the year. These offers are genuinely worth checking out.
Most popular free Windows downloads
Most popular free Mac downloads
Also worth checking
Songbird - open source music player
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12/12/2008
12/04/2008
£3 albums to download - and they're DRM-free
I don't know why I'm publicising Amazon again, the stock levels they hold of my book are up and down like something I can't even think about without being sacked from my day job. Keeping stocks low and a tight rein on the supply plain is why they are so successful, I'm told. And now they look like capitalising on that success by moving into the download music business with DRM-free MP3 albums from £3.
If that sounds like algebra extracted from a txt message, it means that for three quid you can buy an album that you can then burn on to a CD or play on any music device. You can't do that with DRM (digital rights management) protected music.
For £3 there are albums by Seasick Steve and, pictured below, Take That and Leonard Cohen among others.
Check out:
£3 DRM-free album downloads at Amazon
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12/01/2008
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11/17/2008
USB turntable for less than £60 (perfect for old punks)
As a former fanatical collector of vinyl 7" singles I fully understand the appeal and the addiction of collecting, however irrational and expensive a past-time it may be.
Sadly, my desire for gatefold and other rare sleeves and dodgy picture discs and colour vinyl isn't matched by anyone these days who is prepared to pay money for it. So I console myself with the knowledge that my great, great, great grandchildren and their grandchildren will one day be proud owners of Public Image Ltd by Public Image with original newspaper sleeve, the Undertones' Teenage Kicks with original fold-out poster sleeve and, one strictly for other John Peel (right) fans of a certain age, the Shapes EP (pictured above).
It's not the same for everyone, however, as our new section on collecting shows. Some of these people manage to hoard a fortune.
Me on the other hand will be spending dark the winter evenings this year converting my beloved collection into faceless electronic files on the computer. This is being made possible because finally the prices of USB turntables are tumbling. And while I know you can do it with the right cables from any old hi-fi, mine's out of action and in the loft - about to be joined by a couple of thousand singles.
>> USB turntable for less than £60 - from Maplin (also enables the transfer of music from cassette).
11/05/2008
Save 40% off the Philips Wake UP Light
Greetings fans of the tenuous. After last night's historic election victory across the pond and we find ourselves waking up to the promise of a new dawn - you can have one too. In your bedroom. In the form of a wake up light. An alarm-clock-cum-bedside-lamp that slowly recreates dawn in your bedroom in winter.
Everyone I have spoken to who has one says how much better they feel at the start of the day as a result. Online critics are horrified by the price: £100 for a clock, bulb and a plastic cover. But it's coming down.
Argos is selling the The Philips Wake Up Light for £66.59
Amazon, meanwhile, has it for £59.99, a saving of 40%
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