Cheaper 3 dongles

Some good news for those who have been thinking about getting the 3 mobile broadband service. Just got to know that as of today, 3 is reducing the price of their 'Pay as you go' mobile broadband dongles (both E220 and ZTE models) from £99.99 to £49.99.

This should be welcome news to some of my friends who liked the service but felt that the modem (the dongle) was a little on the costly side.

Read about it on the Mobile Buzz site.

Testing out the 3 mobile broadband service

Finally got the chance to give the 3 USB modem a good test run. I am blogging this via 3's mobile broadband service.

I shut of the wireless network in my house and used the dongle to connect to the net.



The first thing I did was to check the connection speed. Here are the results according to Speedtest.net:



The speeds are nothing to boast about but I look at the possibilities - it's amazing to think that I can access the net from almost anywhere in the UK. According to the 3 website, their "network covers 86% of the UK population."



Found this old picture of my son (3.2 MB) in my computer. Uploading it to my Flickr page took around 10 minutes.

Next test area: Nottingham.

Free online storage with MSN SkyDrive

Good news for all of you guys who have an MSN, Windows Live or Hotmail account. In case you are not aware, Microsoft's Free online storage service known as SkyDrive has now increased the storage limit to 5Gb from 1Gb.

You have the option of keeping your files "personal", meaning that they are only meant for your eyes. You can also put them in the "Shared folder" to share with friends or in the "Public" that anyone can access.

The service is available in 38 countries/regions. In addition to Great Britain, India, and the U.S., it is now available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey. Unfortunately Malaysia is not in the list as yet.

Do check out the SkyDrive team's blog for more information.

Review of Blogger in draft

They have loads of new experimental features on the Blogger in draft site.

The best feature is the Scheduled Post Publishing which allows Blogger users to write a post which then appears on a scheduled later date.

There is also the option to add a "Blogroll" which some might feel is a replication of the existing "Link List" widget. However, the later involved multiple steps - first the url followed by the name, then you would have to click the "ADD LINK" button and finally clicking the "SAVE CHANGES" button. Now, you can import all your subscriptions from Google Reader and only need to paste the url of the blog then click "SAVE CHANGES" to add a blog to the blogroll.

Other features that Bloggers users have been demanding for a long time have been such as a Search box and Subscription link have also been added.

However, some of the features I really want to see as listed in my post "New features in Blogger that we want to see" are still not there.

Having said that, I was amazed at the number of widgets under the "fun and games" category that can be added to your blog - a total of 2776 at last count.

There are literally thousands of widgets available and you can add yours as well. Feels good to be a Blogger user.

WordPress users - Eat your Heart out.

Adsense optimisation guidelines

The latest post on the official Adsense blog -"Another look at optimizations" mentions two guidelines for optimising your site for Adsense, namely:

1. Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.

and

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

I have noticed a lot of web sites and blogs openly flouting these guidelines. Their intention is clear - to make it look like the ads are their own created content and thus increasing the click through rates.

On my blogs, the ads are either after each post and/ or on the side bar and visitors can clearly make out that they are ads.

I am wondering whether Google is going those sites that flout the guidelines. Will they be penalised in anyway?

Facebook problems on Firefox

Not sure whether any of you are facing the same problem but I am unable to create albums or upload pictures on Facebook using the Firefox browser. I am able to take the pictures and make comments but whenever I try to create an album, it will just hang.

However, I have no such problems using Microsoft Internet Explorer. As I use Firefox most of the time, this can be quite annoying.

Anyone facing the same problem?

Google adsense updates

I had not logged into my Google Adsense account for quite sometime and last week just signed in to see how much money I had earned since I was last paid. When I had initially signed up with Google adsense (several years ago) I had used my old Yahoo email address and have been using it ever since. I found out that now I had to open up a new Google mail account in order to access my account. I tried to use my existing Gmail account but I don't know why, it was refused.

After a few tries I decided to open up a new Googlemail (not Gmail) account. Yeah! There is a difference. Right after signing in with my new account, I was presented with a long TOS or something. I skimmed through it and of course said, "Yes! I agree". There have been other changes including easier management of ads but haven't had time to check them out.

I discovered that my overall earnings have fallen, no doubt due to the Googlespank my blogs received in January this year.

Changed my form of payment from Cheque to Electronic Funds Transfer. Figured that it would be less of a hassle and in the process do my little bit for the environment by eliminating use of paper.