Matt’s Journal

I saw this shirt linked via BoingBoing and thought it too good not to buy, it will cost about £12 from the US, which isnt bad when you factor in the shipping.

What do you think?

Internet commerce has boomed in the last decade with UK online retail sales estimated to be above £8.2bn. Many people are familiar with the online entities; Amazon and Play.com and their high street counterparts like John Lewis, HMV and even Tesco.

With the boom in internet commerce, many opportunities have opened to the consumer. Here are some of these opportunities that might help you when buying online.

• Use price comparison websites. Online portals such as Kelkoo, Froogle and PriceRunner index thousands - if not millions - of products, sorting them by relevance, price and ratings, they are able to guide you to a cheaper retailer of your wanted item, allowing you to save some more of your hard earned cash or even buy a few more products!
• Use shopping forums to find great deals you were not even aware existed. Using these sort of sites, you are able to sign up to their updates and alert yourself of any product that is either going cheap, has just come on the market or even just to grab yourself a freebie. The sites I use are HotUKDeals and MoneySavingExpert. The latter allows you to save money not only on your purchases but gives great advice on all manner of financial matters.
• The online voucher code. Many retailers prefer consumers to shop online, this is because it saves them from having to employ customer facing staff, renting of premises etc. So to reward the online buyer, many sites offer discount coupon codes that will knock off a certain amount of money from your purchase. Buy entering these codes, you can save yourself a packet each time you shop online.

  The site I use for the discount codes is again, HotUKDeals. They have a vouchers section which lists all the codes by retailer, so you just find the code and copy it into your checkout!

They are just a few ways to save money online.

You must also be aware of the dangers that online transactions propose. Here are a few pointers to help you from being a victim of internet fraud:

• To gain a helping hand with your browsing, download Mozilla Firefox. Firefox comes with a built in Phishing Filter that will flag any potential hazardous sites that could pose a threat to your online transactions.

  N.B - There is also a button on the right hand side of the page which can will direct you and help you setup your Firefox installation.

• If a deal is too good to be true, it normally is. Most people who have used Ebay will either know somebody who has been duped or have been duped themselves. As with buying on the high-street, common sense prevails.
• Try and stick to the more reputable online retailers. Using the Amazons and Play.com’s of this world, you are less likely to be scammed and these sites tend to have very favourable consumer policies.
• If you cant find something online, phone the company in question and see if a) they have a shop you can reserve an item from or b) to physically check their stock and alert you if they do indeed have any.
• Use strong passwords for your sites. I would say it doesnt overly matter if you use the same password of many sites, just make sure that they are strong. This normally means having an 8-digit password with at least two numbers in them. For my Ebay and Paypal accounts, I used this website to generate a strong pass for my use.

  It is recommended to have different passwords for all your accounts, this will stop attackers from using all your details on all your favourite sites if your password becomes compromised.

I hope that these tips help you save a few shillings here and there, if it does, drop us a comment and show us what you bought and how much you saved

This is more of a multimedia update, I bring to you suggestions and purchases I have made over the last weekend.

1. A new Mobile Phone
For 6 months I have put up with the god awful Samsung E900. The touchscreen was too sensitive so that when you tried to show a text message or a photo to a friend, it would cancel what you had at that time and take you back to the main screen without any warning. The ringtones were tinny, you couldnt customize much and basically it was only a matter of time until I got a new one.

The mission on Saturday on morning was to get a new Sony Ericsson phone, I had money from selling a few bits on Ebay so I could afford to get something I wanted. I searched around the main dealers in the high street when my girlfriends mother suggested I use her upgrade to shave some money off the phone I wanted. I managed to secure a Sony Ericsson w850i which came with a 1GB memory card and lots of useful features like 3G calling, complete customization and very good battery life. I went home a happy chappy!

2. Download these Albums
Just Jack - Overtones (if not the album, make sure you get the song “Starz in their eyez”.)
Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion (the best way to describe this is Freddy Mercury meets Scissor Sisters)
Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City (download the song “The Prayer” for a taster.)
The Feeling - Twelve Stops and Home

There are just a few im listening to on my iPod at the moment, hit me up if you wish me to recommend any more.

Ciao for now!

I have a couple of betting accounts around the web, mainly for adding a bit of interest to an otherwise boring weekend on football. I set aside £10 a week in the interest of predicting the weeks Premiership matches.

What I tend to do is predict the outcomes of all ten matches and then use the combined odds to place a bet of small value with a high pay-off. From those ten games I normally use the Seven-Fold Accumulator which basically means that from a result I get right, the money is reinvested back into the next game for the rest of the matches, I have seven matches I need to get right. In Lehman’s terms, if you get any seven results correct, you win money resulting in the combined odds of those seven games (if you get all ten, you get a greater payout).

The reason I say betting is a mugs game is because you can be so close yet so far. Two weeks running now, I have placed 6 correct outcomes and needed one more to come in to return some winnings…..did they come? No. I tend to lose about £5 on each bet, I have pretty much stopped going out so I see it that I would normally have spent it on beer so £5 on a bet a week isnt that bad.

I think I will have to learn the ways of cover betting, that way I can make some money!

Does anyone have any good resources or tips? I could do with some!

[tags]betting, football, soccer, tips[/tags]

Yeah, I went through with it and did it. I decided to go with Acer and plumped for a Aspire 9301AWSMi. This baby features:

• AMD Turion 64 MK-36 2.00GHz Processor
• 17″ WXGA Widescreen TFT CrystalBrite Display
• 100GB HardDrive
• 1024MB DDR II RAM Memory
• DVD Super Multi Double-Layer Drive
• Acer InviLinkâ„¢ 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, 56K ITU V.92 modem
• Built-in 5-in-1 Card Reader
• Built-in 0.3 megapixel OrbiCam
• NVIDIA GeForce Go 6100
• Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition and MS-Works

The RAM can be upgraded to 4GB, the screen is large and is a nice new Turion.

But thats not all, I also ordered a new wireless router so I can surf on the move:

The credit card is suffering but I am happy!

For quite a while now I have been looking at getting a laptop. I like the idea of being able to move my work about with me, connect to the internet wirelessly, take it on holiday etc. I have also been especially interested in getting a Mac. The new range of Macbook’s are a little more powerful than they used to be and they also run on the Intel processors now. This means I can get Parallels for it and boot both Mac OS X and then Windows via the Virtual Machine.

I do have the money, a small voice tells me I should spend the money on other things. I also have heard that the Macbooks are suffering from overheating.

Should I wait for a newer batch? Should I get a normal laptop? Should I get one altogether?