Scratchcard winners want housing benefits.

I’ve written a few blog posts about silly people getting silly tattoos, I’ve even decided to have an ‘idiot of the week’ section. This week’s winners are easy to pick.

Meet John and Louise Nickels. The Nickels don’t have a dime to their name and as such are attempting to claim housing benefits. There is nothing unusual there however, thousands of people up and down the country are unable to work. The thing which marks out John and Louise is the fact that they won £100,000 on a scratchcard in 2006 and have spent all their money.

They are unable to work as John has a ‘frozen’ shoulder and Louise is waiting for a hip operation. They owed £11,000 in council tax and rent when they won the money and they paid this off. They are currently recieving £90 a week in incapacity benefit but are unable to survive on this.

Perhaps if they had been a little wiser with the £89,000 they had two years ago they wouldn’t be in this mess! GMTV interviewed the couple who said that their rent costs them £80 per week. They spent 5 years worth of rent money on a caravan!

The caravan they bought for £22,000 is apparently now worth £6,500 . This is a loss of £15,500! I no expert when it comes to money but surely they could have invested a little better. Even putting some of the money in a current account and not spending it within the first 2 years would have been an improvement. They could have opened an ISA account each which, if it had a 6.35% rate would have earned them £786 over two years. That’s two and a half months rent right there!*

It’s clear that whoever runs the GMTV website is not a big fan of the Nickels. The photo showing the couple in this article has the file name “Scroungers_m.jpg”

*Please note all sums in this post are for illustration purposes only and probably completely incorrect. To quote my old Maths teacher “Thomas seems to prefer being silly to learning.”

Cheap Broadband.

I moved in to my new flat several months ago now and I’m starting to suffer from Internet withdrawal. I have an Internet connection at work but have yet to get one set up at home. I’ve been doing some research into the best providers, aiming to get a good balance between cheap prices and reliable service - the holy grail of home broadband!

At first I was tempted to go with TalkTalk as they offer up to 8meg with a 40gb usage allowance for only £16.39 a month including line rental, this seems to good to be true and I think it is! A quick google search for ‘Talk Talk broadband problems’ turns up this BBC article about the amount of problems people have been getting and the lack of adequate support available.

Several Mobile phone operators offer money off their broadband prices for their pay monthly customers. I am still on pay-as-you-go as I mostly just use my phone to text, but my girlfriend has an O2 contract so that may well be the way forward. I am also considering using Bt as they seem to offer cheap broadband.

As well as the financial cost I have been reading about broadband speed. I like to download a lot of music, so a fast (and reliable) connection is important to me. I used Bt’s Broadband Speed Test which seems to suggest I can only receive speeds of up to 1mbps, which doesn’t sound too good!

Does anybody have any advice on broadband providers? Any good or bad experiences to report?

10 great online tools and resources.

1. Pixenate

Pixenate allows you to edit your photos online. Its useful when you don’t have access to photo editing software. I use it when I’m at work so that I don’t have to wait until i get home (where I use Photoshop). It’s quick and easy and doesn’t have lots of ‘advanced features’ which you need to register to use like a lot of other online photo editors. It is simple to use, simply upload your image from your computer, edit it using the menu (see below) which is quite straight-forward. Once you have, for instance, cropped your image and corrected the density, you just download the image back to your computer.

Pixenate - Online Photo Editor via kwout

2. Fat fingers

Fat Fingers is a site which helps you to find ebay bargains. Many actions go almost unnoticed because the seller has mistyped the name of the item they are selling. When you type what you are looking for into Fat Fingers it performs a search on ebay for lots of possible misspellings, allowing you to find items others may not have! Less competition = lowers prices.

Fat Fingers - eBay typos and spelling mistakes via kwout

3. Kwout

Kwout Allows you to grab a screen shot of any website to display on your blog, just like I have here. See the quote of Kwout below! You type in the address of the site you wish to quote, choose an area to show and Kwout outputs the code you need. This is much more straight forward than cutting down a screenshot then hosting it yourself.

kwout | A brilliant way to quote via kwout

4. Flickr color selectr

This site is perhaps more interesting than useful. It allows you to pick a colour (see menu below) then displays images from Flickr which feature predominantly that colour. The images are creative commons licensed so this site is helpful if you are looking for an image to use which will match a particular colour scheme. It is also an interesing way to browse images as you never really know what you are going to find.

Flickr Color Selectr via kwout

5. Skreemr

Skreemr searches blogs for free to download or stream mp3s. Simply type in the artist you are looking for and Skreemr presents you with a list of tracks to choose from. There is also an advanced search function but that never seems to work! The site gives you information about the files including the bitrate, this saves you from downloading an mp3 then discovering it is of a poor audio quality. This site is quicker and simpler than searching through sites like Last Fm for streaming tracks because of its simple design and lack of other features.

SkreemR Mp3 Search - World’s Greatest Mp3 Search via kwout

6. AlbumArt.org

Pretty straight forward this one: like google image search but for album (and DVD) artwork. Better than google image search as it takes you directly to the image.

Albumart.org - CD and DVD cover searchengine via kwout

7. Vector Magic

Vector Magic lets you upload an image from your computer then turn it into a vector. A vector graphic can be re-sized without any loss of quality. As an example, if you blow up a jpeg you can see the pixels and the image becomes distorted but this isn’t a problem with a vector. This tool is also useful to add a cartoon style effect to your images or avatars.

VectorMagic | Precision Bitmap to Vector Conversion Online via kwout

8. Remember the milk

Disorganized? forever writing lists then misplacing them? You need Remember The Milk! (do I sound like an infomercial yet?!) It lets you set reminders and create to-do-lists which you can access from anywhere (again this tool is useful for those of us who work at a computer). You can also use RTM offline and it will update when you reconnect.

Remember The Milk via kwout

9. Dynamic drive

Dynamic Drive has hundreds of free DHTML scripts to liven-up your website! They describe DHTML as ‘an advanced form of JavaScript.’ In practice this means you can add floating menus, thumbnail viewers and other such widgets to your site. You can even make it look like it’s snowing on your site, which is useful if you are trying to create the worlds most annoying webpage.

Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library via kwout

10. Money saving expert

A mine of information on Mortgages, car insurance store cards and stoozing (earning interest on money borrowed on interest free credit card deals). This site is worth visiting before making any kind of important financial decision to find out the truth behind all the jargon banks and large companies try to bewilder us with. Also worth a mention is the forum as some of the people who post actually work for the companies being discussed which means you can find out the best offers you might not be offered (if that makes any sense).

Money Saving Expert: Consumer Revenge - Credit Cards, Shopping, Bank Charges, Cheap Flights and more via kwout

Black Gold.

Apparently smaller, independent coffee shops actually benefit from nearby Starbucks stores. The theory goes thus:

Starbucks makes people who wouldn’t normally bother, try fancy coffee. These people are turned into caffeine zombies requiring a daily fix. The long waiting times and the exorbitant prices force these consumers to look elsewhere and they discover the little family run place next-door which has been there all along.

I can remember a time when my home city didn’t have any national chain coffee houses. There was just one local place which specialised in coffee and a load of cafes where you could get an bad to average cup dispensed by an old lady who had never even heard of crema.

I don’t often buy take-away coffee as I can make my own at home and at work but when I do I normally get it from one of the three big chains who now dominate the high street here. I find that the staff in this store are actually polite and attentive. The staff in the independent coffee house are often too busy thinking about how cool their dishevelled hair and I’ve-been-to-Thailand-on-my-gap-year jewellery looks (answer: not at all) to actually make my Mocha in under 10 minutes.

Anyway I’m not too bothered where people buy their coffee from, anybody selling something with a 400% markup is probably making more money than me. (Although what the growers are making is probably a different matter altogether).

All this reminds my of a joke by Lee Mack (and probably a hundred people before him) “I like my coffee how I like my women: hot, dark, from a street corner and for not more than £2.50.”