Author Archives: GEEK!

Upgrading 3 (Three) Pay as You Go phones

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I have my ups and downs with 3 (Three, otherwise known as Hutchinson 3G) – just recently I was raving about their speedy customer service.

Sadly, today I have a small complaint to 3 – their handling of Pay as You Go phone upgrades. It seems to be non-existent. I called up 3’s customer service asking about upgrading my current Nokia 3120 Classic and I was told that there was no way possible of upgrading 3 Pay as You Go phones. I was also told that 3 only dealt with contract upgrades.

I am somewhat confused. How can you have a huge mobile phone company and not deal with Pay as You Go upgrades? Surely someone must have come across this problem before.

I’ve searched and searched across the net but right now I can’t find anybody who has tried to upgrade their pay as you go 3 phone.

I don’t particularly want to move to contract as I don’t like having to be subject to payments when I might not take full advantage of included texts and minutes.

I’ve emailed 3’s support team to ask why they don’t have an upgrade plan for Pay as You Go users. I shall await a response and see what they tell me.

Has anybody else had the same problem with 3?

Firefox downloaded 1,000,000,000 times!

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Mozilla, founder of the open-source Firefox, today announced that the browser has now been downloaded one billion times!

It really shows how software that is totally open-source can be really successful.

Sadly I can’t say I’m massively influenced by this milestone, since I have been using Google Chrome for months now and have never regretted the switchover. Firefox is great but Chrome is so simple and easy to use.

Well anyway, congratulations Mozilla – and good luck for the future!

Top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009

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Back in February I did a top 5 WordPress plugins. Now, I think it is probably time I updated it a little, so I’m going to do another top 5 plugins. I use these plugins quite actively on GEEK! so I feel the creators of these plugins deserve a little thanks from me.

So, here are my top 5 WordPress plugins for April – July 2009:

  1. Executable PHP Widget: Sometimes it can be really annoying that sidebars in WordPress don’t support PHP code. Maybe you want to have a login/logout link to your blog in the sidebar. Sadly, the standard “Text” widget in WordPress only supports text and HTML, but not PHP. This plugin sorts that problem for you. Activate the plugin and then select the “PHP code” widget from the “Widgets” section of the WordPress dashboard. The new widget will accept text and HTML, as well as PHP, so it can be really helpful.
  2. Clean Archives Reloaded (external): This plugin lets you create an archive page for your posts really easily. It does all the work for you. You simply install the plugin and it does the rest. Simply create a page that you want to have the archive on, insert the code for the plugin, and the job is done.
  3. Full Comments on Dashboard (external): Find it annoying when WordPress doesn’t show full comments on the WordPress dashboard? I do, so I installed this plugin, and the problem was solved. There’s no configuration for this plugin – you just install it, activate it, and it starts working straight away.
  4. Lock Out: Need to do maintenance to your WordPress website or blog? This is a really simple plugin that locks all users out of your website, except yourself of course. You can set a customized message to let your viewers know that the site is offline for maintenance. It’s a very handy little plugin. Oh, a word of warning – the WordPress plugin site claims it only works to WordPress 2.5. However, I’m on WordPress 2.8.2 (at the time of writing) and the plugin works absolutely fine.
  5. Google XML Sitemaps (external): This is a great plugin that handles all of your sitemaps for you. It creates your sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file for you. It then hands over all the information to search engines such as Google, Ask Search and MSN Search (or Bing – whatever they call it now!).

Those are my top 5 plugins for now. I’ve used all of them for several weeks (some for months) and they’ve all been really helpful and easy to use.

I’ll do another top 5 in a couple of months, but for now – the above are my favourites! Enjoy.

Microsoft extending browser choice to XP and Vista as well as Windows 7

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Remember a while back when I was talking about Microsoft giving users the choice of which browser they use in Windows 7? Well, Microsoft is apparently now going extend this consideration to Windows XP and Vista too.

From what I’ve heard from various sites on the net, Microsoft will be releasing an update (via Windows Update) sometime in the next six months. The update will only appear in Europe and the update will be either a “high priority” or “important” update. Once the update is installed, the next time IE runs, a “ballot” screen will appear showing users all other internet browsers with more than 0.5% (per cent) of the internet browser share in Europe.

Users will then be able to choose a browser that appeals to them and install it.

Users can also choose to stick with Internet Explorer, or be asked again at a date in the future.

In my opinion, this is great news. We might actually be able to get accurate results as to which browser is most important, and users wont be biased into using Internet Explorer anymore.

Thanks Microsoft, this is great news!

The UK’s broadband REALLY needs to speed up!

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It amazes me – how does the government of this country get away with having such poor internet technology in this country? We are a very rich country (even in the economic downturn), yet the government still think 8MB broadband is good for most people.

OK, well I was reading Speedtest.net‘s world average speeds. The UK is currently (at the time of writing) 40th in the world for download with an average 4.99MB/s across the country. 40th? Yes I was a bit shocked to when I read this. And then you read what is ahead of us – Germany, Latvia, Sweden and Bulgaria are just a few of them.

Our average upload speed is even worse – we are 56th place! Our average is 0.68MB/s which, when considering countries like Latvia and Romania are miles ahead of us, is pretty poor.

Come on Britain – we are supposed to be up to date with technology – not on ancient copper cabling.