I took a couple of my old phones (E71 and k800i) on holiday to sell them but that didn’t happen so was looking to try one of those phone recycling by post companies here in the UK last week, I was about to pop down the post office with my jiffy bag full of phones last week to send them off to “Phone Recycle Bank” (found via moneysavingexpert.com) who had the highest payouts, but decided to google them for reviews where I found really bad writeups from people who had either had their phones lost or the company said the phone was not working and paid out less money.

So I did a bit more research and remembered all the mazuma mobiles ads on TV… googled their customer experiences instead where the ratings were far more positive so decided to go with them.

You start on the Mazuma website by entering the phone models  you want to sell and they give you the price they are prepared to pay, which was lower than “Phone Recycle Bank” but at least the phones don’t get lost or you offered less than you thought you were going to get. Then you wack in your address, make a username and a password so they can post you a prepaid bag to send your phones to them in with a delivery note already created.





After two days the envelope arrived, I popped the phones and note in then went off to the post office to get a FREE proof of postage which was just a sticker and a receipt.





The proof of postage give you free insurance up to the value of £41 if your package does not get to mazuma, so off went the phones…

I expected to get no feedback for 2-3 days however the next morning I got an email saying the phone had been received for processing.





And sure enough later the same day (just the say after putting the phones in the post office I got the payment is on it’s way email.





Day 3 (today) I checked the bank account and sure enough there was £49 from Mazuma… I’m very impressed, now rather than cluttering up one of our brand new IKEA cupboards they turned into cash!.

Strong passwords are a bitch to come up with, but become a lot easier with this simple rule below.

Need to turn a password you can remember in your head into one that looks like you could never remember it – or the person looking over your shoulder?

Keep your usual password if you need to; just move your fingers over one  space on the keyboard to the left or right.

If you want a secure password without having to remember anything complex, try shifting your fingers one set of keys to the right. It will make your password look like gibberish, will often add in punctuation marks, and is quick and simple.

• password => [sddeptf
• letmein => ;ry,rom
• money => .pmru
• love => ;pbr

It’s not as good as going for a complex strong password but it’s probably stronger than what you have now.

Do you use a program that requires you to push the same seemingly pointless “are you sure you want to do this?” type buttons?, wouldn’t it be nice if they were pressed automatically so you could save your fingers and do something else?

Some computer programs pester you with their endless dialog boxes repeating the same questions. Would you like to do X? Are you sure you mean to do Y? If you know what you want and are tired of telling your PC the same things over and over, use PTFB (short for “Push the Freakin’ Button”), a button-pressing utility I have been using since 2005 and has saved me tens of thousands of pointless clicks.

When a dialog box asks the PC equivalent of “are we there yet?”, in a few seconds you can tell PTFB which button it should press, and the program will take care of that specific confirmation button forever afterwards. You can set the program to press the same button in similar dialogs as well as it’s quite flexible if you need it to be.

You can download the free version here, or buy the pro version so the guy can make some money for his great software – the free version has been all I need for this sort of stuff for the past 4 years though.

Give it a try, keep away the RSI. No those are no my fingers in the image, make sure they are not yours either.

Woke up this morning to find the weather people were right on the money and there is around 10 cm of snow all over the south east of the UK today, this is what our car looked like when we woke up.

Even got to make a snowman for the first time in a LONGGG time

Snowmen get cold too so we gave him a bottle of Leffe to keep him going