SNIP Blog

eBay used to be great. A truly awesome auction experience back in the day. Now it’s just a sellers playground cluttered with “Buy It Now’s” and shops rather than individual users dooking it out to get a bargain.

I’ve sold many an item on there and raised cash out of junk, but have always moaned and groaned at the fees you end up paying to eBay/Paypal. One of the ways to balance the load has always been to apply a decent postage charge to help cover costs.

I mean let’s face it, you may have to buy a box, some bubble wrap, drive and park to for the post office. Surely all though items should be recoverable?

Well not according to eBay it seems, they just want your cash. I’ve just tried to sell an XBOX 360 game aka a DVD. For some reason I could not apply a postage charge for this item. After some clicks I found out why. eBay have started apply postage limits to certain items and for DVD’s it seems postage should be Free:

Why are you requiring free P&P in certain categories?

Categories which require Free P&P are extremely competitive category in the UK with online retailers increasingly offering free delivery. Our analysis concludes that this is the market price for P&P for such items.

Reading around on they eBay site it appears that, after all these years, eBay have twigged that by charging a slightly higher postage cost, bidders will not bid as high for an item. This means that for the buyer/seller the exchange of money is the same amount, but for eBay (who make commission based on the amount of the winning bid) make less money.

Lets say eBay charge 10% on the winning bid for there cut. I list something to Buy Now for £1 but with £9 postage. The buyer/seller exchange £10 in total but eBay get 10% of £1 or 10p.

Reverse that and sell an item for £9 with £1 postage, £10 still exchanged but eBay get 90p.

I’ve done it myself – built in the cost of fees and commission into the price of the postage for an item. The bidder bids less but ultimately the loss is made up in the postage.

To me it shows that eBay is a failing company who have to offset its losses by applying ways to recoup from the sellers. Although I understand the rationale for curbing excess postage chargers being prosumer, to enforce a “Free Postage” rule for certain items, just because some online retailers do is pretty shitty.

I’M NOT PLAY.COM OR AMAZON you jerks – I don’t buy my envelopes and wrapping in bulk – IT COSTS ME MONEY!! So why should I have to offset my losses in the proce of the item I’m selling and not recover it in a postage charge?!?!?!

Honestly, I’ve been off eBay for some time but this for me, finally turns the milk sour. Maybe you could use some of your hard earn profits from selling Skpye and invest in some kind of website redesign at least – it’s so 90′s web 1.0.

and there concludes my rant!!

If I can get my self into gear (excuse the pun) I should be picking up my new push bike tomorrow.

A nice Giant Escape M1 hybrid mountain bike.

It seems a nice bike and fits my mind image exactly. Ally frame, rigid with dual disk and a-head steering.

Urban man – hear I come :S

It was brought to my attention the other day, that high street camera retailer Jessops could be on the brink of collapse.

The share price for the camera stockist is current at 1p per share. Yes, that is right, a mere ONE PENCE per share.

Only back in October this year was the share at £4′s odd. Naturally, I decided to take a punt and buy some. Well, only five quids worth, but should the share price ever return to that four pounds mark? Well – I’ll just say £2000

Click this link for current Jessops share prices.

It’s not all doom and gloom on my blog. I do have positive encounters as well as negative ones, and Redbox Cameras is one of those good experiences.

I had been in the market for a new DSLR, primarily the Nikon D80, ever since the D90 came to shelf. I had a suspicion that the D80 would drop in price with its release so started to add the potential of buying/upgrading to a D80 from my D40.

After spending some time looking into, I decided that a price of £380 was indeed amazing and should not be over looked. This is where Redbox comes in as it was them selling it for that price.

Before I leapt in to my web purchase, I decided to play it safe. After all, I had never heard of this website before and couldn’t afford to get stung this time. So, I checked the websites home page for a contact number – and there it was, as bold as day and it was a national number NOT a premium one.

I rang and within seconds a man answered. He answered my questions and I hung up feeling confident that this would be a good order.

As they shipped via Special Delivery, this would mean a Tuesday delivery where I would be at work, so I added a note requesting the camera to be shipped on Tuesday (the day was Monday) so that it would arrive Wednesday, when I would be at home. This was also agreed on the telephone when I rang to enquire.

Before I knew it – the order had been placed, and now it was just wait for Postman Pat on Wednesday

Wednesday morning came and I was, well excited to say but the least. I was slightly sceptical as I had not received any shipping confirmation, but still, I was excited.

At 09 am I had a phone call – It was Redbox Cameras ringing to say that they had completely cocked up the shipping instructions at their end, and that they had not yet posted the camera!!

I was initially furious. The man seemed genuinely apologetic and assured me that he personally would make sure it was shipped the same day. What else could I do?

After about 30 minutes, I had calmed down and accepted that fact my camera would not be there on that day. I reflected that it would have been easier just to have ordered it on Monday, let the postman try to deliver it, then I could have swung by the Post Office the next day at MY convenience to collect it. Never mind. I also thought that hey – people do make mistakes and at least the company made the effort to ring me and a) apologise and b) keep me informed.

I later found out that they had rung earlier that day, 0830am, when I was dropping the wife off to work, so the fact they tried again 30 minutes later to me speaks volumes.

Sure they cocked up, but the effort to resolve this is often more important and often more defining. The camera came later that day as intended – a lovely gorgeous new Nikon D80 in a big red box

I would definitely use them again – in fact I know I will.

RebBoxCameras.com 8/10

Recently I went to Disneyland Paris for a holiday with my family. This was a ripe photo oportunity and i had with me my trusty Canon G9 Powershot camera. Because I was also intending to use it for a small video recording device I decided to buy additional storage in the form of an 8Gb SD memory card from Play.com.

I chose this card because basically, it was cheap. £14.99 for 8Gb I thought was quite good (at the time). Whilst on holiday, it wasn’t long before I filled up my Sandisk Extreme III Memory card so I popped in the 8Gb card and began to shoot.

It was quite obvious from the first shot that the write time for the card was very slow. It took about 3-4 seconds for the G9 to dump the RAW image from its buffer to the SD card. Now this isn’t a huge problem but when you are snapping scenes of a fast changing once in a life time opportunity, 3-4 seconds is a long time.

Next time – I would get the best performance SD card that I can afford and to be honest, I didn’t actually save that much.

I’ve not had much luck with mobile phones lately. Infact one of the reasons I started this blog was to vent about contract Mobile Phone insurance scams. Since then nothing too major, until I decided to sell my Nokia N95 Black to buy an LG Viewty.

I did some research before i settled on this phone, and then set out to find the best deal, this took me to a web site called PrePayMania.co.uk.

The front end of the shop looked nice and all seemed legit (I know this is not a guarantee for a reliable eteller) but never the less it lured me in.

Read more…

Can’t remember now how I came across this news blog, but TechRADAR (seems to be previously tech.co.uk) looks to be a nice little UK based tech site.

It is backed by our old favourite publisher, Future Publishing, and from what I have seen so far of the site it seems to encourage heavily on user interaction. From their About Us page:

We’re able to promise this because we’re one of the largest tech sites in the UK, with our editorial independence backed by the weight of the UK’s largest technology publisher. Our experienced writers operate under Future Publishing’s 20 year old policy of a cast-iron guarantee of editorial independence.

TechRadar will tell you about the coolest new stuff. We’ll explain how it works and why you should care (or not). Then it’s up to you. Add your own comments and opinions. Review gear for yourself. Discuss the latest developments on our forums. There’s no monopoly on the truth here – tell us what you think.

Being from the UK myself, I am always up for supporting a fellow UK based site, so please link up and take a look at the site

Being a gadget freak, I had been looking at the EEE PC for ages. The one thing that put me off though was the screen res. With the launch of the EEE PC 901 though things seem to have changed, but so did the price.

Until the Acer Aspire One came down to £199 (and that was at Currys, even cheaper than play.com) was I not interested.

What decided whether I left the shop with one, was whether they had any in stock. A lot of webtailers were out, so it was in fates hands now – and Yay – Currys has a blue one in … just for me

To be fair, I’ve only used it for a week but am so far V pleased.

The build qual is great – a nice glos finish and sturdy hinge give it a good feel. The battery life for jst emailing and surfing is great. The OS seems snappy and it is quick to boot and the screen quality is fantastic. The speakers and audio are also great.

How can you NOT justify speding 200 quid on one of these.

I only have a couple of minor niggles. It seems I was nieve to think that as it was a solid state device, it would run totaly silent. It is much much quieter than my Acer Laptop, but the Aspire still has a little fan that screams into action every so often. I have read that there are hacks to keep the fan on a slow speed, but if the CPU is getting hot, it needs to be cooled right?

The mouse pad is a tad annoying but we know this.

Finally, if you YouTube search on how to upgrade the RAM, you may be put instantly off. It has to be on of the sickest upgrade tutorials I have seen. I thought the Mac Mini was bad but this looks awful. On a plus side though, the Aspire doesn’t exactly struggle on the 512Mb of memory so there may be no need to change, unless you are a hack-extremist.

Overall, I doubt you could spend £200 on anything else and get such great gadget return for your money

I often find my self wandering around PC World, looking for ideas of what to get next. Every so often, I get to listen in on the sales pitch from one of the PC World goons and it is often quite entertaining.

The first time I encountered this was when a young chav was asking about buying an XBOX. I only heard half of the conversation, but when I heard the sales assistant say:

“Depends on which XBOX version you get, as some of the older models don’t have an Ethernet socket”, I knew I had heard enough.

This time though concerned a Netbook. I was looking at the Asus EEE PC that was on sale. As I looked, a business man came along with a sales advisor. He was very animated and asking about the EEE PC. He wanted it as a portable device that he could use to carry presentations on to use at meetings.

The sales assistant asked him what software he usually used to which he replied MS Office.

“Oh, that could be a problem!”, replied the sales assistant.

When the business man questioned him about his response, the sale assistant replied (not directly quoted)

“The EEE PC doesn’t use any MS Office compatible applications, but uses one called Open Office. It is really REALY hard to get Word documents into Open Office as they are not compatible.”

Now the sales person really stressed the fact that it was “really REALLY” hard to import files, so much so that the business man moved on, uninterested. He next went to the cute little Advent 4211 Windows XP Netbook.

Now this seemed more suited to the business mans needs. It ran Windows XP so could potentially handle MS Office and being XP he would probably be more suited to the running environment. It wasn’t long though before things got sticky.

Business Man (BM) “Excellent, well great price and comes with an Office app I’m sure?”

Sales Assistant (SA) “Errr, well kind of – you see it doesn’t come pre-loaded with any Office software, you have to buy it”

BM “Oh, I thought they all came pre-loaded, never mind so how much would that cost?”

SA “Well, that depends really”

BM “OK – on what?”

SA “On what Anti-Virus software you want”

BM ” …….”

BM ” ….. I see”

They look at each other

BM “What does anti-virus have to do with choosing an Office application”

SA “Well ….. because it depends on what package you want, kind of”

After another pause where they just looked at each other, the Business man said, “Well it sounds kind of complex I think I will just leave it for today and have a think about it”

Business man left, £200 still in his pocket.

So if you are stuck for something to do, just take a wander around your local PC World and stand next to couples/people seeking technical advice, see if you can bite your lip too

If you know me, I get bored with my gadgets. Either that, or I can’t find that perfect golden gadget that keeps me hooked in for a decent duration.

When I started to get fidgety with my Nokia N95 Black, I started looking around for an alternative hand held device that would fill its shoes. During my research, two things became apparent.

1) The N95 was worth quick a bit of money

2) I did not want an iPhone.

After spending some time gauging how much the N95 should be worth on eBay (£200 it turned out) I came across two potential handsets. The first was the Samsung F480 Tocca and the second was the LG Viewty KU990.

Read more…

After a weekend break with my Sister, and checking out their juicer, I thought it was time to consider one of these as an addition to our household stock. After all, it could be a good way to gey some veg into our daughter

One quick spontaneous trip to Tesco left me with a Philips HR1854 juicer. The juicer was £39.97 and was about £20 off the retail price or £59.99. The unit is all setup in the kitchen and awaiting some things to juice – so I will report back in time on how it performs

I was trying to back up my movies today from an external USB drive to PC interenal drive, when I was greeted with the message of “Hard drive is full”

Ouch!

On looking at my PC setup, I noticed a few things, mainly that that back up drive was a mere 80gigs. Dam! Who has 80gig drives these days.

I hopped over to eBuyer to see how much a new internal drive was these days when I came across the Maxtor 500GB SATAII 7200rpm *32MB Cache* drive for 48 quid!!

And this is where things go downhill …

Reading the specs, I noticed it was SATA II – which has a data transfer rate of 3GBps. Now surely my MOBO was a SATA II board right?

Wrong!! My ASRock Mobo was only SATA I AND, when looking into it, only supportted a max of 2Gigs of ram. Double ouch. Quickly trolling the component pages of eBuyer I can across an ASUS board that supports SATA II and upto 8gigs of RAM all for 55 quid!!!

What is more, is that the mobo comes with free shipping. So after quickly popping in the order at 1950 on Tuesday, it should come between 0730 and 1200 the very next day.

So lets recap:
A new Hard drive, 500gigs with a 32MB cache and SATA II transfer speeds

and

A new ASUS mobo that has a faster chipset and more upgradeability

for just over 100 quid (not to mention what I can get in return for the old parts on eBay) to me spells a bargain

I will report back on how the upgrade goes …..

I went into town the other day to help a technophobe to buy an iPod. I spent some time with her (and the salesman) in the Apple store flipping between iPod Nano and iPod Classic, both of which are great devices.

After awhile I noted an Apple TV setup in the corner of the shop, so I wondered over to have a look. I had read about these devices but never seen one in the flesh to play with.

As it was an Apple shop, it was naturally all connected up and fully usable so I explored the menu system. The first thing to pull up was the Podcast section. To be honest, it was at that exact point I was SOLD on this device. It looked just amazing. All my favourite podcasts right there on the screen ready to go.

Further playing showed me the Movie trailers. Not an essential feature but nice to have I guess.

Then there was the Photos section, that can pull feeds from Flickr profiles. This for me was again another “Sold right there” moment. It’s great, you can subscribe to friends Flickr photostreams and view their photos direct to your TV as soon as they’ve been uploaded to Flickr – Fantastic.

So a quick sum up, good points:

• It’s Apple so the UI is just lovely
• It’s Apple so the hardware is sleek and sexy(ish)
• Links right into your iTunes software
• Can stream content from iTunes rather than sync it if you want to
• Adds a whole new dimension of media/content to your living room

Bad points:

• Is it really worth it for £200
• The device doesn’t turn off, just hibernates
• It gets hot, REALLY HOT!
• Usual Apple pricing structure, basic model is cheap but low spec yet just for a few quid more ……

Do I regret buying it? Of course I always regret buying most of my gadgets after all, they’re usually wantem lust. Regardless of that, it still possesses that feel good factor. You’re buying into a technology that you don’t really maybe need, but somewhere in your heart you think you do. To conclude, definitely worth a buy.

The bad thing about being into technology, is that when ever you buy a device there is always a better one just around the corner. This can work both ways though, because when ever a new device comes out the old ones get cheaper.

In real terms, this means things like the Nokia N95 mobile phone that was way out my price bracket at launch is now an obtainable target.

I braved the dreaded Phones4U mobile shop and enquired to see whether I could spring a deal. I still had about 9 months left on my 18 month contract. I was told previously though that after 9 months I could drop my tarrif down to something more reasonable.

This is what they did – Phones4U dropped my Vodafone tarrif down to £20/month from the initial £40/month. This meant that I had a buy out price of 9 x £20 = £180 should I wish to buy out early from my original contract. The next step that Phone4U did, and I’m still hazey on this one, was to give me £56 in cash back. Why? I don’t know, but as I left the shop I had £56 in cash in my hand. Weird!

This left my buy out price at £180-£56=£124. To subtract from this was also whay I could get on eBay for my Sony Ericsson K800i PAYG phone. I would of thought at least £40, which brings my buy out price down to £86.

So to recap, in final terms, I left Phones4U with a brand new Nokia N95 8Gb model, on the same monthly tarrif but with more minutes and texts thrown in, for just £86. That to me, was a bargain. The N95 is a lovely phone. Sure the software is still a shade slow and laggy, but the phone as WiFi, GPS, a large screen, FM radio, option to record phone calls, free Spiderman 3 movie pre-loaded on the phone and many more cool features.

I am happy – I think is fair to say

Dam it!! After listening to the TWIP podcast AND entering a photography phase, the net result was myself with a crave to buy a new piece of hardware. Unfortunately for me and my plans to save this year, the final result was a Canon powershot G9 compact camera.

This snazzy little device was bought on the premise that my DSLR Nikon D40 was too big and bulky to carry around for general point and shoot use. The G9 came highly recommended by the TWIP guys and showed a strong line of support across the internet.

It is a 12 Megapixel camera with 6x optical zoom AND has the ability to shoot RAW files – NICE

All of this lushness and tech does come at a price though, and fueled by my usual “but I need it now” mantra I was again forced to deal with the highstreet. Argos resulted in being the cheapest at £299.99 and I was able to price match it at Jessops to save the drive over town (how lazy).

It is way to far to pass comment on the product, but initial reactions are nice. It is very heavy for a compact but that provides a good construction feel. The LCD is gorgeous shining at a lovely 3″ and the zoom length is also nice at 6x. One thing to note though, that at 12 Megapixels and shooting in RAW, you need a pretty hefty memory card, hence the new 2Gb SD card that is on its way to me as I type.

One of my hobbies/interests is Photography. Since I was a Uni student and I blew my Student Loan on a Canon EOS 1000 I have been in and out of taking photos, and now that the digital age is well upon us, a Digital SLR (DSLR) was at some point, an obvious buy.

I have had a Nikon D40 for sometime now and LOVE IT. You hear me, I said LOVE IT!!

I have two lenses for it, the kit lens which is an 18-55mm DX lens and a Nikon 55-200mm DX lens. Both of which …. are great. But I want more

Recently, I subscribed to the This Week In Photogrpahy podcast, part of the TWIT network. During one of the shows, one of the hosts spoke about how he never used flashed (hardly) and that he had lens fast enough to allow this.

Never use flash? Have a small child and a Dad that likes to take photos of her? That is an equation that is too good to be true. So I searched the net and came up with the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D AF lens. Priced at only £75 inc delivery from PurelyGadgets, it seems like an absolute bargain. Yeah, their is a faster lens at f1.4, but that is over double the price.

As this lens is not a DX lens, it will not autofocus but it will still meter which is perfect. I look forward to blogging about its performance.

What with the recent official death of HD-DVD and the rumour of an XBOX 360 BluRay addon, I had a sudden moment of …. madness?

I decided to put my PS3 on eBay. You know what, I haven’t used it for ages. I have never bought one game for it and to be honest I hardly get time to play the 360.

So – when I saw that my mates launch model had gone for £380, I thought this is an oppurtunity I cannot miss.

Any bidders?

Well it almost happened again – my personal strive to not spend any money on gadgets that I don’t really need came VERY close to collapse.

This time I was actually at the till in PC World asking for an Asus EEE PC, only to find it was out of stock.

DAM! But good. I mean U have a laptop. A standard cheap thing from Acer that hums like a wind tunnel fan and grinds away with Vista. Huh – why would I want to swap that for an ultra light tiny flash based Linux driven ultra mobile PC?

Not sure really, but whilst looking at it in the shop it was placed next to a tiny little HP ultra mobile PC. This thing had an even nicer looking display, a load more connectivity and it ran XP. Now that sounds even nicer. But then on Unwired.TV there was an ultra cheap gloss black Samsung Intel Core Dup laptop for like £350. Oh god – I’m losing control again ……….

After surfing the net this morning, I came across a Zune 1 30Gb for £120 at Zunethings.co.uk

This seemed like a great price and before I knew what I was doing, the device was in the shopping basket and I was commencing the Checkout process.

Even though it was just a Zune 1, and not the more up to date Zune 2, Microsoft have allowed the 1st gen devices to be updated to the latest software making the 1st gen device the same as it newer 2nd gen partner.

This is a great move on behalf of Microsoft as it allows the Zune to mature without shafting all the early adopters in the ass.

The new Zune 2 actually looks quite slick in my opinion. It has built in Podcast surpport which for me, is a great plus.

There is only one problem though, I have an iPod Touch which does most of he above plus a little extra. For example, the Touch let’s me surf the web, check my emails, check stock and the weather and use Google maps.

Initially a Touch user had to hack their iPods in order to get the apps installed, but now with the new Touches, or by paying £12 you can get the Mail-Maps-Notes-Stock-Weather apps installed on to your iPod legitimately.

So, unless I was prepared to sell my iPod Touch to compensate for the sale, there wasn’t really much justication for spending out the £120. Yay – I controlled my spend, one point to me.

My year of the save has kicked off to a good start so far after selling a bunch of stuff on eBay, giving me some capital to …. save with.

The problem is that CES 2008 is here at the moment, hey you can be on a diet and still look at the menu!