It's been snowing all afternoon here in Shrewsbury and it's just taken me 90mins to drive home from town (a journey that usually takes 10mins). There is gridlock everywhere and noone is driving over 20mph.
I've not had much chance to take some photos and I don't have a waterproof cover for my camera but here are some of the photos I managed to get from my house including Shrewsbury Business Park.
This is the view from the front of my house, usually you can see the south Shropshire hills, today everything is white.
Here is my car, I had just driven home in it so there was not too much snow.
Here is the Shrewsbury Business Park, people usually work here.
Here is my back garden, usually you can see the different areas including the lawn, patio, gravel and woodland. Today is it all white.
Finally here is a the other side of my back garden.
I will try to get some more photos tomorrow when its light and the snow has stopped!
Last April we looked at how you can use the website Quidco to make cash back on many of your on-line services and how to exploit free gambling offers. This second article looks at the website Rpoints (affiliate link) and how you exploit it in a similar way to Quidco.
Like Qudico, Rpoints offers a cash back mechanism for your purchases. An example being I want to buy a DVD, I find website under Rpoints with the highest cash back then I buy the DVD through this site. If the cash back is 2.5% on a £10 DVD I can expect to get 25p back. Multiply that by all the purchases you do over a year and it soon mounts up especially with a few big purchases like TV's, game consoles, computers, insurance or holidays.
With Rpoints as the name suggests you collect points, each point is worth 1p, so 100 points is £1 and 1000 points is £10. Points soon mount up and there are a number of daily free points that can be collected.
Rpoints offers 500points (£5) bonus just for signing up, claimable once you have made 2500 points. Rpoints also has a nice affiliate scheme so if you get your friends to sign up through your link to can get more 500 points bonuses. Rpoints doesn't take £5/year like Quidco does however the cash back amount is not always as good as Quidco so its important to weigh the two sites up before purchasing an item.
On the Qudico article we discussed how to make money through signing up with gambling offers, spending the bare minimum to make the most back in Cashback. We showed how it wasn't hard to make at least £200 and have a lot of fun in the process gambling. The process it very similar with Rpoints however they have nicely put together a page with all the gambling links and how many points they are worth.
Even if you have completed most of the gambling links through Quidco there may still be some on Rpoints that you havn't done. I recently signed up for the National Lottery gaining 200points for just buying a lottery ticket. Many of the gambling offers are a lot higher - upto 4000 points (£40) though its important to look at what the requirements of the offer are. Some of them are not specific and it is best to stick to the offers that state the exact requirements e.g. "Earn 1000 points when you deposit and play through at least £10".
In order to access the forum you need to be a member however membership is free plus you get a 500 points bonus for joining.
Post below any questions of your experiences with Rpoints.
Update 10/04/07: Rpoints will match any other cash back sites with their Highest Cashback Claim, so if you do happen to find a site that offers better cash back then you can claim the difference through Rpoints.
I came across FacebookSync yesterday on TUAW, the application allows you to synchronise your Mac's Address Book with all your contacts in Facebook. For the majority of my contacts it added pictures, email addresses and birthdays to my current contacts and for those that weren't in my Address Book it added new contacts.
(TUAW Pic)
Most of my contacts are on Facebook and the program did a nice job of matching contacts up. For those that it couldn't match I had to select contacts then merge so that there were not duplicate entries.
Once synchronised I could use iSync to copy all the updated contacts to my phone. (iSync supports most Nokia, Motorola , Samsung and Sony Ericsson phones, for Windows Mobile based ones try Missing Sync).
Overall its a nice utility that makes good use of Facebook.
We?re now over a month into the new round however Planetarion has its lowest turnout ever with less then 6000 players. This may seem good but considering in Planetarion?s prime they had over 100000 players 6000 is poor.
The round seems as dull as ever with no major power blocks and most alliances running for themselves. My galaxy for one gets incoming every 2-3 nights and has a serious problem with trying to get any defence, this is a shame as we do have some good veterans to the game. The graphics have still failed to get an update and we haven?t heard from the creators it seems in weeks. Rumour has it that they are still working on another game or what ever they decide to go into after Planetarion finishes. The game at the moment seems to being run by what?s left of the pa crew.
It is unknown the financial status of fifth season AS at this current time but as the round did have a fairly poor signup its not looking good. It seems that Planetarion is coming to the natural end of its life cycle and people are a bit fed up with Planetarion as you do with all games. Planetarion has however lasted a lot longer then many other games and what it has created is a massive community on irc and the forums that will be around for a long time yet. The future of netgamers is still uncertain as it looks for more partners to continue to keep the irc network popular.