Friday, December 26, 2008

How an old phone can make money at Fonebank

 How an old phone can make money

Old mobiles

It is unlikely that the global recession has completely dampened people's enthusiasm for new gadgets this Christmas.

But for cash-strapped consumers with a shiny new mobile in their
hands, there is a way of making money from their old, unwanted
handsets.

According to mobile phone trade-in website FoneBank, only 20%
of UK consumers are recycling their mobiles but those that do can
recycle their old mobiles for cash.


During November Fonebank sent out £200,000 worth of cheques,
with an average per person of £50, although an iPhone can raise
much more.

"One of the most popular ones traded in during October was Nokia's N95 which can raise £102 for the owner," said Mr Tagg.

"People recycling their phones make a bit of money and feel they
are doing the right thing. The whole process takes three minutes online
and then they just have to stick their phone in a jiffy bag," he added.

This year Fonebank has teamed up with Oxfam to donate a minimum
of 10% of the value of the phone to aid the charity's work in the
developing world.

Other charities, including Age Concern and the British Red Cross, are also offering people the chance to donate phones.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

U.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO

U.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO

By Peter Griffiths




LONDON (Reuters) - Two U.S. fighter planes were scrambled and
ordered to shoot down an unidentified flying object (UFO) over the
English countryside during the Cold War, according to secret files made
public on Monday.




One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the
object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like "a flying
aircraft carrier."




The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said it spent
periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more
than 7,600 mph.




After the alert, a shadowy figure told Torres he must never talk
about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.




His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defense ministry files released at the National Archives in London.




In a written account, Torres described how he scrambled his F-86 D
Sabre jet in calm weather from the Royal Air Force base at Manston,
Kent in May 1957.




"I was only a lieutenant and very much aware of the gravity of the
situation. I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking
contest," he said.




"The order came to fire a salvo of rockets at the UFO. The authentication was valid and I selected 24 rockets.




"I had a lock-on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft
carrier," he added. "The larger the airplane, the easier the lock-on.
This blip almost locked itself."




At the last moment, the object disappeared from the radar screen and the high-speed chase was called off.




He returned to base and was debriefed the next day by an unnamed man who "looked like a well-dressed IBM salesman."




"He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word about it to anyone," he said.




The documents contain no official explanation for the incident,
which came at a time of heightened tension between the West and the
Soviet Union. Planes were on constant stand-by at British bases for a
possible Soviet attack.




The files blame other UFO sightings on weather balloons, clouds or
normal aircraft. Torres said he had been waiting 50 years for an
explanation.




"I shall never forget it," he told the Times. "On that night I was
ordered to open fire even before I had taken off. That had never
happened before."




UFO expert David Clarke said the sighting may have been part of a
secret U.S. project to create phantom aircraft on radar screens to test
Soviet air defenses.




"Perhaps what this pilot had seen was some kind of experiment in
electronic warfare or maybe it was a UFO," he said. "Something very
unusual happened."




The files are online at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos


Monday, December 22, 2008

YouTube lets you turn videos into greeting cards

YouTube lets you turn videos into greeting cards



For the second year, YouTube
on Friday unveiled a holiday feature that lets users create hosted
video cards to send to friends and family. Users can select this option
from any YouTube video, or from a special page that houses selected community videos and links to a user's own clips.


There's also an option to make a more personalized greeting straight
from a connected Webcam. For now, only one video can be attached to a
given greeting card.



When users are finished picking a video for use in a greeting card,
they can choose from a handful of themes that house the video player,
then add up to 230 characters of text and send the complete card to up
to 25 e-mail recipients.



According to YouTube's company blog, more than a million of these greetings were sent out last year, before the feature disappeared in January.



Most Popular How-To Features of 2008 via Lifehacker

Sunday, December 21, 2008

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL


MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL

thanks to Jacquie Lawson

Click on The Match the
Dogs Puzzle

 

 This is pretty neat and
fun.
 . 

 

 Enjoy!  

 

 

        Match
the Dogs
   

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Zamzar (online video converter)



Zamzar.com
gets my vote as the best choice for online video converters. All the
online solutions work in about the same fashion. They all have ads on
the pages. They all upload your file to their server,
allow you to choose an output format, and then provide a way to get
your file when the process completes. One particularly handy feature of
Zamzar is the ability to grab a video from a URL and convert, so if you
upload videos to a directory or find something on YouTube, you can
covert the videos without downloading them to your computer first. Limitations for the free version of Zamzar are 100MB file sizes and no more than 5 concurrent conversions.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Online onscreen virtual multilingual keyboard, From any pc everywhere

Online onscreen virtual multilingual keyboard

Write in your own language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator.
The
main purpose of this site is to let everyone who gets stuck without the
ability to write/type/search the internet in their own language be able
to do just that . usually travelers/tourists or anyone in front of a
foreign computer.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Do more with e‑mailed photos using Windows Live Mail

Do more with e‑mailed photos using Windows Live Mail

Sending
photos from Windows Photo Gallery works just fine, but it sends the
photos as attachments that the recipient must click individually to
open, which makes it tough to browse the photos all at once.

Picture of a photo attachment in an e‑mail message
Photo attached to an e‑mail message

To
present resized photos in the message, you can use a feature in
Windows Live Mail called Photo e‑mail. You can download
Windows Live Mail for free online at the Microsoft website for Windows Live.

Picture of a Photo e‑mail in Windows Live Mail
Send a Photo e‑mail using Windows Live Mail

You
can quickly send e‑mails of photos in a variety of size and layout
styles with Photo e‑mail. You can autocorrect and rotate photos; add
effects, such as borders; add captions; and include any text in the
e‑mail that you want to send.

If you create a Photo e‑mail while
signed in to Windows Live Mail using a Windows Live ID,
there's an added bonus: the option for recipients to view the photos as
a slide show hosted by the Windows Live Spaces website. The people
you send e‑mail to can view larger versions of the photos if they want
to, and they can also download the larger versions at their
leisure—all without them having to enter any user name or
password to view the pictures. Plus, there’s no uploading or
managing by you—you get the benefit of posting photos online to a
website without any of the fuss.

If you already have a
MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, or Microsoft Passport
account, you've already got a Windows Live account. You can go
online to sign in now with your current account information to start
using Windows Live. If you don't have a Windows Live ID, you
can get one online at the Microsoft website for Windows Live.


To use Photo e‑mail


1.

Open Windows Live Mail.

2.

Click the arrow next to the New button, and then click Photo e‑mail.

3.

In the Add Photos
dialog, browse to the folder containing the photos you want to include,
click the picture that you want to send in e‑mail, and then click Add. To select more than one item, hold down the CTRL key while you click the items that you want to select.

4.

Keep adding photos until you are done, and then click Done.

5.

On the toolbar, click Layout,
and then choose how you want the e‑mail message to look and how large
you want the images in the message to be. The larger the images, the
larger the file will be.

Picture of the photo layout option in Windows Live Mail
Configure the layout of the Photo e‑mail message
6.

If you create a Photo e‑mail while signed in to Windows Live Mail using a Windows Live ID, on the toolbar, click Photos. Choose the resolution of the photos that are uploaded to the Windows Live Spaces website when you click Send.
The resolution you choose determines the quality of the photos when
viewed as a slide show, but it doesn’t affect the size of the
e‑mail message itself. For example, you can send small thumbnails in
the e‑mail, but upload large versions that people can view (and
download) if they want to.

Picture showing upload options in Windows Live Mail
Choose the resolution of the uploaded images
7.

Enter
the e‑mail addresses of the recipients, type a subject, and write a
brief message. When you have finished composing the e mail message,
click Send.

Viewing a slide show

When
your friends and family receive your Photo e‑mail, they’ll see
the photos in the layout and size that you chose. That alone is great,
but if you created the Photo e‑mail while signed in to
Windows Live Mail using a Windows Live ID, they can also view
the photos presented as a slide show, and then download larger versions
of the images if they choose to do so.

Picture showing a slide show link in a Photo e‑mail message
Play a slide show from the Photo e‑mail message

When they click Play slideshow,
a Windows Live Spaces website opens up that displays the images in
sequential order. The recipient can vary the speed at which the photos
display, download the larger picture from the website, and view
larger-resolution versions of the file.

Picture of the slide show controls
Change the viewing speed or download a higher-resolution picture

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday Season.

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday Season. And of course a Healthy New Year!!

Click here: Santa's
Jigsaw