They state the the site will cease trading on friday 30th May 2008, the last date for listing items will be the 9th May, and the last day to bid and buy items will be the 19th May.

Now although I have had a qxl account for many years I have never actually bought or sold anything due to the fact that i’ve found eBay to be much better as far buyers are concerned.

What are peoples thoughts? Are you going to miss QXL? Thoughts on why etc are all welcome

- Roamer

Ok, after a long time of debating this, I’m finally at a point where, in a few days, I want a few people to beta test a new piece of software, and hopefully a lot of people out there who use Amazon’s astore offering will like the sound of it.

As we all know, ever since Amazon launched astore, the problem has always been how to make the store appear on an actual domain instead of the normal http://astore.amazon.com/blah-20 or http://astore.amazon.co.uk/blah-21 domain. Alot of people use the iFrame method, which - although it allows you to integrate it successfully - doesn’t allow search engines to traverse your store at all, thus you will never get any traffic from search engines. also you can’t integrate any advertising systems into the astore to generate extra revenue.

These are some major hang-ups to people making money without having to have the technical know how to write their own solution, or having to pay $99 for a product such as Associate-o-Matic - In itself a very good product - but what if you could “domain-ize” your Amazon astore for a much smaller outlay? sound good? then read on

I have developed a piece of software, which is still in alpha testing, but soon to be released to a small beta group. This software will allow you to have your Amazon astore on your own domain, have advertising units to generate extra income, and all for much less than any other system out there right now. This will give you a fully crawlable store, so that with a bit of extra content per section - which it will also let you put it, you should get some good search engine results

So, I’d like to offer this software out to the first 5 people who comment for free as long as I get some good user feedback, and of course I’ll give the 5 people full support to get them up and running

So please, if you’re interested in it, comment below with an email address and the first 5 will definately be the beta testers, oh, and if anyone can come up with a name for the product, the person who comes up with the best name will get a copy free of charge once it’s released, and of course we’ll use your suggestion as the product name

-Roamer.

I was going through my credit card bill yesterday, and found that they had charged my for a month after I’d switched to my new provider ….. so a phonecall was is order.

First customer service rep I talked to seemed to be helpful, put me on hold for a moment, and then the phone was picked up again, I was asked for my telephone number and hay presto - I was told that it wasn’t a Virgin Media Telephone number - well no, I was ringing up for an ADSL billing problem LoL - then she forced me to take down a number for their customer services - the one which I had already rung, and yes, she was telling me that I had to ring back…… not a happy bunny ….. I basically said that she was the second person I had talke to and that I’d like her to redirect my enquiry back to someone who can deal with an ADSL billing query…. hold music …. don’t you just hate hold musak?

So, finally I get through to someone, and they sem to be helpful, after asking why my “transaction date” had changed to the 27th in Feb instead of the 28th which it had been for ages, he said he didn’t know (no surprise there I guess), and I asked why they had taken a payment on the 28th Feb when I’d switched to my new provider on the 12th Feb, he said that it was basically because my contract billing date was the 26th of the month, and they’d therefore billing me until my end date of the 28th - great, ok, fine, contract is a contract, but then if that was the case then why was has the transaction date changed? dunno was the response….

And then, the greatest Virgin Media money maker (whilst customers are leaving them), are you reading closely? THEY DON’T REFUND UNLESS THE CUSTOMER SPECIFICALLY ASKS FOR IT. Yes, you heard me correctly, if YOU don’t ring them, THEY will not give you YOUR money back. I questioned this policy with them and he stated that they couldn’t do it as they didn’t know where the money should be paid back to as they wouldn’t know if a card was still valid or not - very odd, since they’d just TAKEN money from MY credit card, so they KNEW it was valid, and he also stated that if they took payment via Direct Debit that they couldn’t refund to a DD - why he was telling me this I’ll never know, but he seemed to need to tell me even though I’d only EVER paid by credit card, and therefore a refund was never an issue to them. Also if giving a refund was such a minefield - wy didn’t they try making contact with myself and find out where I would like MY money refunded to? He said it wasn’t their policy to do so, and it was up to the customer to contact them to gain their refund.

I told him to refund onto the card and also told him that I was VERY glad to have moved away from Virgin Media, I mean, they have kept hold of money that hould hae been refunded to me for over a month, and think about how many other people may be in the same situation as me currently, and how many of them do you think will know that they have to contact them in order to gain the refund that they are entitled to? not many, and so Virgin Media are able to stash this cash and earn interest from it, but of course when you get a refund you don’t get the interest on the money you are owed as well, so as far as Virgin Media goes, it’s a win win situation for them.

Thankfully, I’m away from Virgin Media now, and am very glad, my own company is now supplying a great service to myself, and I will soon be launching this service to the general public, at a good price, for a good service and a good transfer limit with a HUGE off-peak usage as well. Keep reading, or indeed subscribe to the feed in order to find out more when it launches

-Roamer

1. WordPress Automatic Upgrade
   This is an absolute lifesaver, after having to upgrade the site a few times manually I really got to grips with how much of a pain it can be, and this plugin really helps to ease that pain. Now I’m not saying that it’s faultless - infact when I installed it to help with the 2.5 upgrade it had a bit of a wobble, but after running the automatic upgrade again everything was fine
2. Google Analyticator
   If you are serious about your WordPress site, you should be serious about your site statistics, and Google Analytics provides great stats without putting extra load on your server. Google Analyticator is a simple and effective plugin to enable Google Analytics. Once you have signed up to Google Analytics you simply paste your UID into the plugin options page, and away you go, statistics will start showing within 24 hours and from there on in you can track visitor patterns, referring sites, search terms etc all via your Google Analytics account.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
   Now this is a great little plugin, we all know how important sitemaps are in the scheme of things don’t we? Well, this little plugin is just what you need. Everytime you create or update a post this plugin will jump into life and regenerate your sitemap.xml - AND it will notify sites such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask so that they can grab your new sitemap and make sure your site listings are up to date - Fantastic.
4. All in One SEO Pack
   This plugin is another one you really shouldn’t do without. Straight out of the box it will optimize your post titles, and automatically create your META tags. It also allows you to manually set your meta keywords and description, plus fine tune just about anything you want - seriously, if you want to get anywhere near good search engine listings and rankings - this is a MUST HAVE.
5. I Love Social Bookmarking
   Now I know that there are lots of plugins which give your readers the ability to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites, but for my money, this is the one that I like the most. It gives you the ability to choose which pages it appears on (Be it the homepage, single posts, single pages, archive pages),change the style of the drop down list, and even whether it appears vertically or horizontally. I’ve now changed to horizontal as you will see at the bottom of this post - personally I think it fits better. If you’re wanting to be socially bookmarked this plugin certainly gives you control over how and where you want to be bookmarked - although I’m sure some of you out there will suggest alternatives which I’ll have to take a look at LoL
6. Akismet
   Now, as standard we all get the Akismet plugin, and every single one of you out there should sign up for your own WordPress API Key so that you too can stop any spam comments from reaching your public postings. It’s not an option, it’s absolutely essential - especially in these days of mass spammings - I mean, who wants huge comments all about Viagra??? LoL
7. Shutter Reloaded
   There are a few plugins around which give you similar functionality to Shutter Reloaded, such as Lightbox, Thickbox etc, but I think that Shutter Reloaded gets it just right, it’s a tiny payload of only 10kb, and allows automatic resizing and viewing of images on any posts without intervention, you can just set it up once and let it go! Fantastic!
8. AdSense Manager
   All of the plugins so far have been very functional, they have extended functionality of your WordPress installation to make your life easier or better in some way, with this one you get something back (Hopefully!) - AdSense Manager allows you to embed adverts within your site. Not only from Google AdSense but also AdBrite, Commission Junction, Yahoo!PN and many more. Done right, adverts should integrate into your site design, not stand out from it. The better they integrate, the more likely some of your readers are to click on the links, and therefore you may earn some beer (Or in my case coffee) money - never a bad thing

Now, theres one plugin which I would find superb, but I haven’t found one that specifies that it works with 2.5 yet, and that is a plugin to allow automatic upgrading of WordPress Plugins - a little self-referencing I know, but upgrading plugins via FTP takes a bit of time every now and again, and to save that little bit of time in a busy life would be great - so if anyone out there can recommend one to me, please let me know

-Roamer.

Today on my searches round Google today i came across Scribe a blogging client written for PyS60 (Python for Symbian S60). Now, currently I’m writing this post on my Nokia N95 and i’m feeling quite happy about using Scribe right now. It doesn’t have any way of being able to upload images as far as i’ve seen, but this maybe a limitation of the interface used to communicate with Wordpress.

I’m going to continue using Scribe and see how it goes over the coming days and weeks whilst I’m out and about, and will keep posting about it as I go.

it would be great to get comments from any other Symbian bloggers who are using Scribe or any other blogging tools which i haven’t come across yet

-Roamer.

Sony BDP-S300
Sony’s BDP-S300 is one of the more affordable blu-ray players on the market, and has sparked a fair amount of interest in the hi-def disc battle. The player outputs at resolutions up to 1080p/24, decodes Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital and DTS, upscales DVDs to 1080p, plays MP3 and JPEG files and even plays high-definition MPEG-4 AVC-HD footage stored on a DVD, and it supports x.v.colour. The BDP-S300 is a bit slimmer than some of its competitors, with eject and power buttons on top of the equipment. The player features the usual assortment of component, HDMI, composite and s-video connections but, as is common with current blu-ray players, ethernet connectivity is notably absent. Picture quality is excellent on blu-ray and DVD upconversion to 1080p, but there is no Dolby TrueHD decoding and load times are slow, particularly on newer BD Java discs.

Sharp BD-HP20H
The Sharp BD-HP20H is Sharp’s first entry into the blu-ray player market. It includes an HDMI 1.3 output, capable of outputting video up to 1080p/24, plus 7.1-channel audio bitstreams, but DVD playback when upscaled to 1080p has been criticized as softer and noisier than other players. Unfortunately you won’t find an ethernet connection, and the BD-HP20H is a profile 1.0 player, which means it won’t support advanced BD-Java features found on forthcoming profile 1.1 blu-ray discs, such as picture-in-picture. The deck’s firmware can’t be upgraded either, so it will never deliver the full blu-ray experience.

Samsung BD-P1400
The BD-P1400 has seen a radical change in design since Samsung’s previous blu-ray player, with all-over gloss black finish, sloping fascia, and subtle blue lighting. The player supports Dolby True HD, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital, DTS and DTS HD and can output blu-ray movies in pure 1080p/24 over its HDMI 1.3 connection, but its digital media file support is fairly limited, restricted to just MP3 and JPEG playback. Rare among blu-ray players, the BD-P1400 comes with an ethernet port for making firmware updates, but unfortunately the BD-P1400 is a profile 1.0 player and not 1.1, so it won’t support advanced features found on forthcoming BonusView blu-ray discs, and like all profile 1.0 players (with the exception of the PS3) it can’t be upgraded to 1.1.

Sony Playstation 3
The Sony PS3 accounts for the vast majority of blu-ray players finding their way into people’s living rooms. What’s more, it has cool written all over it. It’s all curves and gloss black, and can be oriented horizontally or vertically. The power supply is also integral, so there’s no power brick or wall-wart to spoil the aesthetics. Manipulating high-definition video and graphics as high in resolution as 1080p at high speeds requires a lot of processor power. At the heart of the PS3 is the Cell Broadband processor, developed jointly by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It’s a multi-core design, with eight “synergistic processing elements”, each of which is capable of true parallel processing. The PS3 is the fastest BD player on the market. Sony has included full support for Dolby’s lossless TrueHD codec, in addition to Dolby Digital and DTS. The PS3 is also fully upgradeable so it’s possible that support for other audio formats could be added later. The PS3 has an ethernet connection, which makes firmware updates simple to download. Built-in networking is an advantage for the PS3 over standalone BD players, few of which currently have an ethernet port.

So which to go for? Thankfully, all these players offer 1080p/24 output and DVD upscaling, with a variety of audio formats to choose from, but all except the PS3 have a limitation. The blu-ray format was rushed to market in a half-finished state to compete with Toshiba’s rival HD-DVD format, so many of the features found in HD-DVD right from the start will only appear in blu-ray profile 2. This means that profile 1.0 or 1.1 players will be unable to play all the features of newer blu-ray movies. But the PS3, basically a very powerful PC in a box, is fully upgradeable and therefore a good deal more future proof than the others. It’s already been upgraded to allow 24p output and DVD upscaling (considered to be just about the best on the market). So for anyone concerned about full compatibility with future blu-ray releases, the PS3 is the obvious choice.

A friends HP desktop machine had mysteriously lost it’s cdrom and cd burner, they were there, listed in device manager, but marked as having problems - so I did the first thing we all try, uninstall them, reboot and let XP do it’s magic and bring them back again - but this time no joy… so I did a bit of searching…

It’s been a while since someone had brought me this problem, mainly it happened when people got SP2, but still, these things always raise their ugly heads when you least expect, but today I was on top googling form and found the solution I was looking for to make the little beggers come back from the dead.

The solution is actually very simple, as follows:

1. Start Registry Editor (Start, Run and type in regedit then click)
2. Find “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters” (and “UpperFilters.bak” “LowerFilters.bak“, if they exist) value under the following key in the registry, and delete it: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Quit Registry Editor.
4. Reboot.

You might have to re-install your CD burning software after the reboot, but this should bring your CD drives back to life, if it doesn’t, well don’t come running to me, I can’t claim to know everything out there, but a good google session normally can find you the solution to anything

-Roamer

I’m interested to see if anyone else gives this a try. I tried it out on Casino Splendido (not with real money of course (yet?) ). My tactics were to triple the bet each time to see if I could up the winnings quicker. This did work until i raised the initial bet to 50. I then discovered that when using the instant play at least, on that particular site there was a bet limit of 200. This obviously meant that I couldn’t keep tripling the bet. The system definitely seems to work as long as you don’t get too greedy or impatient and come across this problem. Keep the initial bet low or make sure there is no bet limit and it seems like you cant lose. Or is that just what they want you to think?

- eekins (itching to play for real)