I picked up my Wireless Deskset at my local supermarket for £15 (about  $23.70 at time of writing) and at that price I wasn’t expecting too much.

First Impressions

Straight out of the box, the keyboard looked like any other. It has a fairly standard layout including the group of 6 keys above the arrow keys in the arrangement that I prefer – 2 rows of 3.

The mouse was also fairly standard – designed to be used by left or right handed people, so not sculpted in an asymmetrical shape.

The USB receiver is very small, looking like a tiny flash drive about 1 inch (2.5cm) long.

Installation

The set comes complete with two AA size batteries – one for the keyboard and one for the mouse. Trust claim that their smart technology extends the life of the batteries compared with other wireless sets. I guess they go into a sleep mode when not in use.

Apart from fitting the batteries, the only other part of the installation was to plug in the USB receiver into a vacant USB slot.

Windows detected the new hardware and it configured itself to work straight away.

In Use

The keyboard is not bad to type on. I’m not a touch typist by any stretch of the imagination, but I can type reasonably quickly and I had no problems with this keyboard. Key operation is relatively quiet compared with many keyboards – especially the Dell ones I use at work.

One thing I notice about the keyboard was that there are no indicators for Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock. I guess this omission keeps the costs down, but the Caps Lock has already caught me out once when trying to enter a password. I suspect that if I opened the keyboard casing there might be contacts on the circuit board for the indicators, in which case I could modify it. However, I imagine that the addition of these lights would reduce battery life. Having said that, I rarely use Caps Lock and Num Lock, so it wouldn’t make much difference to me.

At first, the mouse was very sensitive. For my old mouse I had the pointer movement set to a fast setting which was much too fast for this mouse, so I had to reduce the speed considerably. Once done I found the mouse to be a little erratic – it wasn’t possible to precisely position the cursor at times. Then I realised that with the receiver at the back of the PC, it might be having trouble with the signal. So rather than using one of my precious two front-panel USB ports, I used a USB extender cable to bring the receiver out to just under my monitors. This done, the mouse performed perfectly.

One thing that has always annoyed me about the computer mouse is the wire. I have often found that it restricts the movement of the mouse in confined spaces, or if the wire falls off the desk, it pulls the mouse along. Being cordless, this one is a pleasure to use. I find the switches in the mouse buttons require a firmer press than my previous mouse, which for me is a bad thing, but it’s not as bad as the buttons I used on a Compaq mouse several years ago.

Being able to sit back in my chair and move away from the desk with the keyboard on my lap is a real luxury for me. I was always very dismissive of cordless input devices because of battery consumption (if the battery fails, I can’t use my PC so I’ll have to keep a wired keyboard and mouse handy or make sure I have a good stock of batteries), but this freedom to move around is really quite good.

It doesn’t matter how swish your PC case an monitors look, you can’t make the cables look neat and tidy. Removing the cables completely is just excellent.

If you can live without the Caps Lock and Num Lock indicators, I’d recommend this set if you are looking for a budget keyboard to replace a broken or worn out one. That is unless you are used to one of those curved, ergonomic keyboards.

The odd thing is, it was only support for Windows Mobile that was dropped.  You can still get Skype apps for Symbian, Android and iPhone.

I just tried running Skype for Windows Mobile on my PDA.  It runs, but after entering my login details, it simply fails to connect.  So I guess that Skype haven’t simply removed the download link for the Windows Mobile application – they won’t even let it log in any more.

So the big question is….

Now that Microsoft have bought Skype, will we see a new Skype client for Windows Mobile?  My guess is that there probably will, but I’ll bet that it won’t work on Windows Mobile 5 or 6.   That’s the way it seems to work with Microsoft.  They don’t care about their existing users – they want you to go out and buy the latest Windows 7 Smartphone.

Most people who have had the luxury of hundreds of channels on satellite or cable TV are not usually very keen to give it up. But did you know that it is possible to watch thousands of TV channels directly on your PC or Mac without paying a single penny in subscription fees?

Whether you want to watch sports, movies, comedy, news, business, soaps or general entertainment, there are channels out there for you. In fact, there are over 3,500 of them, all available directly on your computer.

Missing your home country? If you have moved away from your own country and want to catch up on TV channels in your own language, then you need look no further than your own PC. Here in the UK, my wife gets a handful of Russian channels on our satellite system and we need a big dish to receive them. Having switched to Satellite Direct, she can now watch and incredible 179 Russian channels!

And it’s not limited to Russian. We can now get TV channels from 96 different countries.

Simply install Satellite Direct and choose the channels you want to watch and they are streamed directly to your computer. No complicated installation, no expensive installation fee, and no subscription.

As you might expect, you’re not going to get all the premium pay channels, but with 3,500 channels available, you’re bound to find something interesting to watch.

Recently, I have been looking at some of the spam emails that have come in so that I can fine-tune my filters, and some of them are beyond belief with regar to the stupidity of the spammers. There are some fundamental errors that the spammers are making which make the whole process of sending the messages completely pointless.

So here’s a message to all spammers…

Random Email Addresses
As I own my own domains, I know exactly which email addresses are valid, so if I get an email addressed to some randomly generated name, such as george.hackenbush@mydomain.com, I know that it must be spam. So my filters reject it straight away.

Random Names
You wouldn’t believe the number of spam messages I receive to phil.rogers@mydomain.com, which then contain a message saying “Dear Mary”, or something along those lines.
Ok, not everybody uses their real name for their email address, but many do, especially within companies. At least get the letter to match the addressee!

Those of you who use software to generate email addresses from random words are even more idiotic. Today I received a message addressed to MeringuesGladdened@mydomain.com. What a well-chosen name that is! There’s sure to be somebody in my company named Meringues Gladdened! I’ll just check…
No! Well, I’m surprised! Oh well, that explains why the mail server put it in the trash.

No Content
I thought the whole point of spam was to sell something. Hundreds of the spam messages I receive contain some garbage text. No mention of any products, and no links to websites. Do you just get off on cluttering the Internet with your junk?

Maybe you’re just trying to get people to reply to the message saying “you have the wrong address”. Then you know that the address is a real one. I think most people are smarter than that.

Invalid Headers
Emails sent with an invalid time and/or date are almost always going to be spam. Easy to filter out.

Unbelievable Headers
The headers in emails contain a lot of information that most people never see. One example is the name of the program used to send the email. I have received numerous emails purporting to be from companies such as PayPal, which were sent using Outlook Express. I find it hard to believe that PayPal would use this as their automated mailing system!

Phishing Emails
Banks NEVER send emails requesting people to log into their online accounts. Furthermore, they all use domain names for their web servers – not plain IP addresses. My email client program displays the actual address of links, so these are glaringly obvious to me.

Multiple Messages
Do I really need to see the same message, with the same sender and subject sent 14 times within the same 2 seconds? Don’t you think this alerts me to the fact that it’s spam?

If my bank really wanted me to log into my account, they wouldn’t send the same message once every 30 minutes for 2 days solid. They would send me a letter by snail mail.

Do you not think that receiving emails every day from almost every bank that ever existed would alert me to the fact that they are spam? I use just one bank, and so far I’ve never received a spam email purporting to be from that one!

Not Even My Country
I’m based in the UK, so many of my email addresses end with .co.uk. It doesn’t seem to stop me getting spam emails that claim to be from American banks. Although it is possible, it’s not easy for somebody to open an account in a US bank if they don’t live there. So why send your US-specific junk to non-US addresses?
Yes, I know you send millions of messages and you don’t care, but what’s the point of sending a message to people who have no chance of responding? Heck, it doesn’t matter to me either – it makes it easier for me to filter out your junk, so I never even see it.

Those of you who send spam containing advertisements and web links etc., must be making some money from some poor, gullible souls, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. You’d do a lot better if you put your efforts into finding genuine customers and targeting your emails instead of sending out millions of messages to all and sundry, or to non-existant addresses.

Before XP came out, other operating systems such as Linux offered a huge selection of different styles and colour schemes thanks to the Gnome and KDE display managers. Other software developers started producing “skins” for their applications, which allowed the user to change the program’s appearance, and even create their own in some cases. Winamp is probably one of the most well-known skinned applications.

Microsoft have long been fans of “cool” user interfaces. They saw what was going on elsewhere, and they saw that it was good. They had to have this capability in Windows.

When XP was born, it supported Windows “Themes”. Now the users could add new themes to Windows and make it that little bit more personal. To get people started, they provided the default XP Theme (called Luna) with 3 different colour schemes; Blue, Olive Green and Silver, with the promise of many more.

Alas, those many more never seemed to arrive, disappointing thousands of XP users. To rub salt into the wound, it wasn’t possible to create new Themes because to run under the XP Theme Manager, the theme files had to be “digitally signed” by Microsoft. This means it had to meet their approval and have special codes attached to it for it to work.

You could modify the colours of the Luna Theme, but it still had the same look.

A number of third-party theme managers have appeared on the scene, which overcome this problem. Unfortunately, they all have to “tweak” or replace one of the Windows system files in order to work. This is frowned upon by Microsoft and they do not support it.

So what can you do if you’re bored with Luna and don’t want an unofficial tweak on your Windows XP machine? There are a few additional themes that have been signed by Microsoft that will work on XP, but not many. In fact, after a lot of searching, I have found just three. In the meantime, Microsoft have moved on to Vista and Windows 7, so there’s no way they are going to release any more XP themes, despite the millions of XP users out there.

Here are the signed themes that I have found:

• Zune. Microsoft’s answer to the iPod and iTunes was the Zune. This theme gives XP a shiny black/grey appearance, with bright orange buttons. Download the Zune Theme here. The file is a Microsoft Installer (.msi) file, so after downloading, simply double-click it to install it.
• Royale. This also goes under the name of Electric Blue as supplied with the Media Center version of XP. Once installed you can choose from Royale (blue) or Royale Noir (black). Download the Royale Theme zip file, and unzip it. Copy the Royale folder to your Themes folder.
  This is usually
  C:\Windows\Resources\Themes
  so you should now have
  C:\Windows\Resources\Themes\Royale
  Open the Display control panel as usual to select the Royale theme theme on the Appearance tab.
• Embedded. Some electronic devices are small computers running Windows Embedded, which along with PocketPC, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, is a variant of Windows CE. This version of Windows comes with its own theme which works perfectly under Windows XP. It’s running on my PC as I type this. Download Embedded Style and unzip it. Run the file “Official Embedded Theme for Windows XP and 2003.exe” and the theme will be installed in the correct place. Open the Display control panel as usual to select the Embedded Style theme on the Appearance tab.

Not a fantastic selection of themes, but almost anything is a welcome change from the standard Luna theme supplied with XP.

Additionally, when the user wants to remove the software from their computer, an uninstall feature must be provided in the Add or Remove Programs section of the Windows Control panel.

If, as a programmer, you use Microsoft’s Visual Studio you have the option to create an MSI installation program for your software.   If you’ve never created an installer before, this can be a little tricky to get to grips with – there’s nothing to guide you through the process, or even to tell you what is required of an installer and what it does.

Users of Professional versions of Borland/CodeGear products such as Delphi and C++Builder had the relative luxury of a free copy of InstallShield Express.  This is a special, cut-down version of a wizard-driven setup program creator, which takes you through each stage of the process.  Unfortunately, since these development tools were sold off to Embarcadero, you don’t get InstallShield Express supplied.  Furthermore, if you work with the lower-cost versions of Delphi/C++ Builder, you didn’t get it anyway.

One option is to purchase products such as InstallShield, but some of these commercial products can be quite costly – especially if you’re writing software as hobby or as a means of generating additional income.

There is, however, the free alternative.  The phrase “you get what you pay for” often proves itself to be true when it comes to free software, but I am happy to report that I have found an excellent installation program creator that is not only free, but is easy to use and just works!

The software is Jordan Russell’s Inno Setup, which you can find and download for free at jrsoftware.org.

Inno Setup runs as a “wizard”, prompting you for various aspects and options that should be available within the Setup program.  Simply run the program and answer the questions.  In many cases, you can keep the defaults that the program supplies.  Once you have finished, you can compile the program and your Setup is ready for distribution.  I’ve used InstallShield Express before, which I thought was incredibly easy to use, but Inno Setup is even easier.

Inno Setup is completely free and it’s the fully working version.  It doesn’t insert advertisements in your installer or play any tricks – it’s just a decent piece of software that does exactly what you want of it.

Setting the Standard
I recently watched an interview with the head of Tesla Motors. Tesla are an American car manufacturer who make electric cars. They’re not a huge company. They don’t enjoy the economies of scale of companies such as Mitsubishi. They have, however, produced a very attractive, high-performance electric car that has a useful range. They quote the range as 244 miles, but independently verified tests have shown that this can be considerably more. performance is 0-60mph in around 4 seconds and the top speed is limited to 125mph.
The car can be full charged up in 4 to 6 hours (depending on the charger in use) from any domestic electrical supply, and the cost is in the region of 2 cents per mile. For most people, the lack of charging points is not an excuse – you could charge it at home, at the office, at a freined’s house etc.
The car looks like a sports roadster which anyone would be happy to park outside their house.

The problem with the Tesla is that it costs £94,000 in the UK. That’s way outside my motoring budget, but it’s something to aspire to.

Requirement
My journey to work is an 86-mile round trip, so if I bought an electric car, I would need a good range. The Tesla’s 244 mile range would be just fine. I could drive to work and back every day for a week on just 2 charges. In fact, at 2 cents per mile my weekly mileage would cost $8.60 (about £5.38). It currently costs me about twice that per day in petrol (gasoline).

I have a wife and 2 children, so any car that I bought would need at least 4 seats, which also rules out the Tesla.

Enter the Big Guns
With the Tesla car out of my reach in terms of price, I had a look for alternatives from the major car manufacturers. The first one I came across was the Mitsubishi i-MiEV.
This car sounded quite promising as it has space for 4 adults. They also claim that it can be charged from flat to 80% in just 20 minutes. If there public charging points on our motorway service areas, that would work out fine – plug in the car, go and have a cup of coffee, and then ready to go.

Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it sounds. You’d really need to like coffee if you went on a long journey as the range of the i-MiEV is only 100 miles. Charge to 80% in 20 minutes and that’s down to 80 miles. If I went to visit my parents, I’d need to recharge twice along the way.
More impressive though is the claim that it will travel 10,000 miles on £45 at the UK’s current electricity prices. That’s equivalent to about 0.72 cents per mile, compared with the Tesla’s 2 cents per mile – about 1/3rd of the cost.

No Oil Painting
And then you see the pictures. The i-MiEV is hideous. Park an i-MiEV alongside a Tesla and you can see that they are worlds apart. I would be embarassed to park an i-MiEV outside my house. I’d have to rent a garage in another street to avoid the embarassment.
In addition, Mitsubishi are considering lease-only on these cars, at a staggering £750 per month. I wouldn’t pay £750 for a car that runs out of juice after 100 miles.

Next up was the Renault ZE (Zero Emission). Sadly, still a concept car; not due for release for another 2 years.
Again, it’s not a good-looking car. The acid-green windows on their demonstrator don’t do it any favours. Cunningly though, it has a solar panel in the roof, but I suspect that you don’t get much of an extra charge from that.

Having now seen the pictures of just two examples of electric cars from major manufacturers I decided to see if anyone made a good-looking electric car. So Google Images came to the rescue, and it was just as I feared. All of the major manufacturers seem to think that an electric car should look like a golf cart, an egg on wheels, or a milk float.

Not many of the cars seem to be available to buy, and those that are available, are outrageously expensive. £25,000 for a plastic egg sitting on a huge battery? I could buy a beautiful, new, petrol-driven Alfa Romeo for less than that. Good looks, room for the family, high performance and outstanding handling.

I can’t be the only one who wants a good-looking, practical electric car that I would be proud to own, can I?
Mitsubishi’s mileage costs are very impressive, but at 3 times as much, so are Tesla’s when you compare them with the cost of running a petrol or Diesel engined car. So why don’t the big companies look at what people want and need. Compromise. Produce a good-looking family car with a decent range. If it costs 7.2 cents per mile to run instead of 0.72 cents, that’s not a problem – it’s still a lot cheaper than the combustion engined cars, and a lot cleaner.

Tesla got the range and the performance in a small roadster. Surely the big companies could scale that up into a useful family car.

A few months ago, I was in a Brantano shoe shop in the UK. I was approached by a member of staff asking whether I would like to join their email mailing list, in which I would be sent news of upcoming discount promotions before they were made public, special offers etc. I filled in the form and returned it to them. I was assured that there would be only about 3 or 4 emails per year.

A couple of weeks later, I received an email from Brantano. From the tone of the message I got the feeling that there would be more than 3 or 4 per year. Add to that the fact that they had mis-spelled my name (I wrote it clearly enough on the form), I decided to unsubscribe from the the newsletter.

So I clicked the Unsubscribe link, which failed to do anything. I tried the same link in 3 different browsers in case there was some sort of incompatibility, but it still failed to work.
So after a lot of searching on their website, I found an email address for their webmaster and sent an email requesting that my details be removed from their database.
I received a reply stating that my details had been removed as requested.

A few days ago, what should appear in my email Inbox, but a newsletter from Brantano. Clearly they had NOT removed my details from my database as requested.
I clicked the Unsubscribe link in this new email (assuming that they had fixed it), and it took me to a Subscribe page. There was no option to unsubscribe at all.

On the basis that

1. I had requested to be removed from the database
2. I had been assured that I had been removed from the database
3. I continued to receive emails from them
4. Their unsubscribe link doesn’t work

their messages are technically classed as spam, and therefore, illegal.

So beware Brantano’s mailing list. Once you’re on there, you can’t get off!

If you visit http://news.google.com/ you can see a selection of news items aggregated from a selection of news sources. When news items from any of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation sites appear in these pages, he believes that Google should be paying him.

It seems that Mr Murdoch isn’t seeing the big picture. All you see on the Google News pages are headlines a a single sentence from the editorial. To read the entire story, you have to click on the link which takes you to the originating site. So anyone wanting to read a story related to headlines taken from a News Corporation site will actually be taken to that site.

Google are, in fact, driving traffic to those news sites. Personally, I never choose to visit any of Rupert Murdoch’s sites, but I do look at Google News. If I’m interested in a story, I’ll click the link and may end up at one of his sites. Therefore he gained a visitor who wouldn’t choose to visit. Heck! Shouldn’t Rupert Murdoch be paying Google for that service?

Any website owner can prevent Google from indexing their site by adding the two lines of code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
to their “robots.txt” file. It’s unlikely that the News Corporation webmasters are unaware of this, which suggests to me that they are simply trying it on by suggesting that Google should pay.

If I owned Google, I would simply drop the News Corporation sites from the search database. After all, I’m sure there are plenty of other news services out there who are only too happy to have links to their stories featured in Google.
I would be delighted if Google featured stories from one of my blogs!

Other restrictions require 2 different payment methods (Visa, Mastercard, PayPal) for purchases, and there have to be at least 5 different credit-card numbers.

To read the original article, go here.

Beginners just finding their feet with affiliate marketing can find it frustratingly difficult to make enough sales to comply with these rules, give up, possibly with the intention of coming back to it later when they have more experience. What they don’t realise is that when they leave their account dormant (i.e. there is no activity on it), and it contains a positive balance, they get stung for account charges. The longer it remains dormant, the higher the charges get. If it remains dormant long enough, all the commissions accrued so far will just disappear.

It’s the initial 5-credit card rule that causes so many people to give up and let their accounts go dormant, so this is what needs to be overcome. So, here are some solutions.

Affiliate Exchange
One reader who read the original article had experienced these problems first hand. He decided to do something about it and set up a kind of exchange for ClickBank affiliates in which you buy ClickBank products from other members, and they buy from you in return. The idea being that you quickly build up your 5 different credit cards, and 2 different payment methods.

This is not a bad idea as long as it is managed fairly. Somebody who signs up and makes his purchases from other members doesn’t want to be left waiting for months until enough people have bought from him because there hasn’t been a proper queuing system.

The initial outlay could be costly – 5 items bought – but of course, commissions would be earned on the reciprocal sales made.

ClickBank for Newbies
There is an easier way to achieve the same result using a system set up by ClickBank king, Harvey Segal. He set up a simple, low-cost, viral way of overcoming the problem with his product ClickBank for Newbies.

This is a free-to-download report that explains every detail of the problem, and presents in itself a means of overcoming it. Not only is it free to download, but you don’t even have to sign up to get it. It’s just there for the taking.

If you want to read more details, read my review of ClickBank for Newbies at my CBIntuition blog site, or go straight to the Download Page.

If you follow the incredibly easy instructions in this guide, you should get past that first 5-credit-card hurdle with no problems.

Viral Marketing Method
Viral marketing Method is a new system for promoting any product virally using a selection of powerful tools, including Twitter, the QKR link shortener, the PDF Power Brand branding tool and an ingenious cloaked RSS feed system. The system is so easy to use. It takes about 1 hour or less to set up a campaign, and once you have pressed the button to start the viral system, it just keeps on going.

Unlike those systems being sold to you by the marketing “gurus”, Viral Marketing Method won’t cost you a penny. It’s totally free and you can use it to promote as many products as you want. In fact, it works so well that the owners of Viral Marketing Method use it to promote itself! You can get more details of the system and how to obtain it from Viral marketing method.

There’s really no charge to use this system. It’s not a 30-day trial where you get stung a monthly fee after the initial free period. However, that might change in future, so sign up now while it’s still free.