Having just cancelled my subscription of PC Pro due to the finanical restraints of Christmas I have been on the lookout for an alternative (cheap) manazine to buy until I can afford to renew my PC Pro subscription in the new year.

Having a quick look around I managed to find an offer for 3 Issues of Computeractive for £0.03 and as I do not think I will be able to find much better than that so I am now awaiting my first of 3 Issues of Computeractive for £0.03.

This seems to be only one of 850 Christmas deals on over magazine subscriptions so if you are not into computer magazine then I am sure you will be able to find another magazine subscription you will enjoy.

Currently the whinge list consists of:-

• Change of Domain because of a Cyber Squatter – The domain I originally wanted was already taken so I was forced to chosen an alternative.
• Wordpress Snow Effects – Silly visual effects on Wordpress blogs making me question my vision.

I have decided to allow visitors to The Weekly Whinge to submit their own whinges via the Have Your Whinge page and I will endeavour to put these whinges up on The Weekly Whinge along with my own.

So do not bottle it all up inside.  Share your whinge and see it posted on The Weekly Whinge!

Heart Internet are constantly bringing in new features and facilities to help with managing your websites and domain names and I have recently found out that Heart Internet provide a free web hosting service for those individuals and companies are in need of ways of reducing costs, which is ideal for small start up companies.

Unlike a number of other free web hosting services Heart Internet does not need you to purchase a domain, does not have any popups and the free web hosting account is allowed for commericial use.  In addition to this the Heart Internet free web hosting account has a decent amount of websites, mailboxes, FTP access but is a little lacking in the bandwidth and does not have any database support but there has to be some incentive to upgrade to a paid for package.

As well as low cost web hosting they also provide cheap domain names and although I have found certain domain names cheaper elsewhere, I like the ability to manage all of my domains centrally in my reseller account so a few extra pennies here and there is fine for me.  You can often transfer .co.uk domain names into your Heart Internet account for free and Heart Internet run other special offers from time to time meaning you can save a few pounds if you keep your eyes open.

Heart Internet have a couple of additional features I have not had the chance to try out yet but I am very interesting in, including:-

• An iPhone application to manage your account.
• HeartDrive – An online storage services with 10GB free space for Heart Internet customers but this can be increased to 100GB+ for a small fee.

All in all you are getting a lot of features for a very small price and Heart Internet is a service I would recommend to anyone looking to purchase a domain name or hosting.

For Totally FREE Hosting with No Pop-Ups, Commercial Use Permitted, No Purchase Necessary, Instant Activation from Heart Internet click the “Free Web Hosting” link in the footer.

I have just installed F.lux on to my Windows XP laptop (there are Mac OS X and linux versions too) and as it is about 8pm it has changed my display colour so it looks to have a hint of orange which seems quite warm and not nearly as painful to look at.

Now that I have been using F.lux for about an hour I do not really notice anything different, however I really notice how bright and painful the screen is to look at when I turn it off.  For that reason along I would say that F.lux is a must have for those who like to use their computers late at night, or first things in the morning before they get out of bed.

I have found over the last couple of weeks that the display of my computer at work is extremely bright after about 4pm and I imagine this is because it has got dark so I will be looking forward to installing F.lux on my work  computer tomorrow and see the difference come the end of the day.

The 181 Free Twitter Buttons, Badges, Widget and Counters to Help You Find Followers article links to a lot of cool twitter images you can use on your website or blog such as:-

and

Ultimately I went for something a little simpler:-

You can get an image similar to this from the http://labs.creazy.net/twignature/ and although the site is in Japanese you can easily see how to complete the setup form to produce your own twignature.

• Enter your twitter username into the “username” box
• Select the type of twignature you want (see bottom of the page for the different representations)
• Click Make and you’re done :

Out of Canon and Nikon, which brand do you think make the best cameras?  Digital Rev wants you to vote on whether you think Canon or Nikon make better camera in their Canon vs Nikon competition and participating could would you an iPod touch.

The idea is simple, just re-tweet for whichever brand (Canon on Nikon) you prefer from their Canon vs Nikon Competition page and you are automatically entered into the competion.

Good Luck

This was a fantastic find for me and one which really helped me out of a sticky situation.

Having recently moved address I had to go through all the hoops with moving my services to this new address.  Unfortunately moving my Sky Television and Broadband services did not go as smoothly as I would have liked so when I found this 3 Month Free Broadband offer from O2 it seemed like the perfect time to change.

The services provided by Sky had been rather poor prior to changing address and since they had failed to get anything installed 2 month after we had moved into the new property, and being advised it would be at least another 3 months, it was definately time for a change.  I was being driven crazy with no broadband.

I signed up for O2 Broadband on a Thursday morning around 9.30am, had the router delivered to my work at 6.30pm on Friday (yes the following day) and the activation took place on the Wednesday just like I was told.  How it can take Sky 3 months for the same thing O2 provided in under a week is beyond me.

As I am an O2 mobile phone customer I also got my broadband a bit cheaper (£7.50 pcm for existing mobile customers instead of the standard £12.50 for non-existing customers)  so I’m saving myself money and my 8mb broadband is now up and running and I’m much happier with the performance I am now getting.

As a result of my own experience I have no problems recommend O2 broadband to anyone.

Having seen the price of these Harry Potter Years 1-5 box sets in the high street I was extremely scheptical but never-the-less I tried it anyway as I was bored with what was on Sky Television and a few good movies sounded just like what I was needing.

At the end of the 14 days I cancelled my trial and there was even an option during the cancellation process for “I only signed up for the free gift” so clearly this is not uncommon.  I waited about a month before I received a letter from Tesco DVD Rental which advised me they had ran out of the Harry Potter Years 1-5 box sets due to high demand and therefore they would send me individual DVD’s instead and true to their word theses DVD’s arrived about 2 weeks later.

This was perfect timing… one less Christmas present to buy!

There are a number of network providers offering free PAYG sim cards and to make things quick and easy I have included a small list of some of these.

• 4 Free PAYG sim cards from O2
• 4 Free sim cards from Orange
• 2 Free sim cards from T-Mobile
• Free sim card from Tesco
• 2 Free sim cards from Vodafone
• Free Sim Zero from 3

I have listed a few of the benefits of some of these PAYG sim cards below:-

3 – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

• Free Calls Forever – Just put your free SIM into a 3 mobile to make free Skype-to-Skype calls & send free instant messages, forever. There’s no need to top up ever again.
• Free Texts & Internet with every top up – £5 = 25 Free Texts, £10 = 300 Free Texts, £15 = 500 Free Texts, £20 = 1000 Free Texts, £25+ = Unlimited Free Texts

O2 – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

O2 has several different pay as you go (PAYG) free sim cards including their O2 Unlimited and O2 Text Anytime with varying benefit depending on your selected pay as you go sim card type.  For example:

O2 Unlimited
Top up £10 – £14 and receive Unlimited texts O2 to O2
Top up £15+ and receive Unlimited UK calls and texts O2 to O2

O2 Text Anytime
Top up £10 – £14 and receive an extra 300 UK texts each month
Top up £15 – £29 and receive an extra 500 UK texts each month
Top up £30 and receive Unlimited UK texts each month

And on top of this O2 Rewards gets you 10% back on all your top-ups as a thank you for your loyalty.

Orange – Free Pay As you Go Sim Card

• Join Orange now and get £5 free credit with your first £10 top-up
• Animal packages – Free texts, minutes, facebook – for the rewards you want, choose your animal.
• Bright Top Ups – Instant win, top up for a 1 in 3 chance to win texts, holidays, bikes and more.
• Orange Wednesdays – 2 for 1 cinema tickets every Wednesday.
• Magic Numbers – Talk to your friends on Orange for up to an hour for just 20p.
• Phone Fund – For every £10 you top–up we’ll put £1 aside towards the cost of a new phone.
• Reserve Tank – Never run out of credit with our pay as you go overdraft.

T-Mobile – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

Vodafone – Free Pay As You Go Sim Card

• Call any other UK or standard landline for just £0.20 per minute
• No peak or off peak charges – it’s always the same price
• Make top ups go further with freedom packs, Unlimited Texts or Free weekends
• Great network coverage and UK call centres
• Call anywhere in the world for £0.05 with Vodafone international

• A friend or client wants CD burning software and doesn’t want to pay for it
• I’m re-installing a PC where the owner does not have the key for it
• To replace an unlicenced copy of Nero

Over time I have come across my favorites to replace these programs and in this case I have found a free alternative to Nero which fits the bill quite nicely.

CDBurnerXP is a free alternative to Nero which runs on all windows operating systems from Windows 2000 SP4 upwards (so it is not restricted to Windows XP as the name might suggest) and can perform all the operations you would expect with Nero.  The dialog options appear slightly differently but you can find your way around the software very quickly and can perform all the normal operations you would expect from Nero including:-

• Copy a CD or DVD
• Burning an ISO file to CD or DVD
• Create an audio CD
• Create an data CD

In addition there is also a very clear FAQ section with helpful tutorials for those who are not familiar with the software and an active user forum with over 23,000 members (at the time of writing this post) so help is not far away should you run into any difficulties.

All in all this is a very nice, user friendly free alternative to Nero which I recommend to all my friends and clients and I have even gone as far as replacing Nero on my own machines with this.  Nothing seems to sell a product better to your client than the fact that you are using it yourself.