megabytes , mobile phones and unlocking

We are soon off to scotty for the big push.
In other words...
DD is moving out of the flat and we can get in to clean it up and put it right prior to letting it.

DD has been there rent free for about 6 months so we have felt no qualms about her putting up with it as is.

I bought a steam cleaner from Ebay to take up with us to make sure the place is thoroughly clean .
I have tried it out at home and it is a good little machine.
The freezer was rather startled to discover it was going to get defrosted for the first time in about 18 months.
We have an old Aqua Vac that we bought years and years ago to cope with all the mess of pets and small kids.
It mostly lives in the shed as it is so noisy that the user has ringing in their ears after using it  which can't be healthy.
Anyway,armed with the Aqua Vac and the Steamer, our freezer became the cleanest it has ever been except for when it was new.

The flat has had new radiators,a new cooker and a new shower.
We are probably going to paint the Bathroom .
I think we will be buying a new mattress for the bed too.
We have a new extractor fan to fit in the bathroom.
A sparky will actually fit it so that it is in compliance with safety regulations.

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While we are up there, we wont have TV or internet access.
We can take our laptops so we will take some films to watch .

I have joined Samba so that I can take one of our unlocked mobile broadband dongles for light surfing and emailing.

I have only just discovered Samba.
It is a company that sell a sim or a sim with a dongle and then you access their webpage to watch video adverts which credit your sim with megabytes.

So far I have been a member for 12 days and have about 900 megabytes for using when we go.


If you are interested in joining them, they are here http://www.sambamobile.com

I bought my sim using a code from moneysavingexpert which allowed me to get it for £1 delivered.
I dont know how long the Code is valid for but it is worth taking a look if you are interested in joining      

OR

I can refer you and we each recieve £3 worth of credit....
My referral is here click here to be referred

The sims are quite cheap once you consider that the credit is free .

Sims and microsims are £5
A sim with a Dongle is £25

You can use the sims in any unlocked dongle or I believe in a 3 dongle as they work on the three network.
The microsims work in some tablets.

You can also add credit using your paypal account or debit/credit card .

Credit that you add with your money lasts 30 days.
Credit earned by watching ads lasts until you use it.

 I think anyone who wants to surf away from home every now and then would find it useful.
If you were hoping to use it every day instead of broadband,it would only really be for very light use unless you were going to top it up .
 3 ads a day  would give only 10.5mb which is enough to view '30 web pages and 100 emails' (quoting their customer service). I have never had less than 3 to watch .



I also have Joikuspot on two of my phones.
It is a wifi access point program that turns your phone into the hotspot.
I wont use it much as mostly I will use the dongle but it might fill in when the dongle is running low.
I'll only use it with K-meleon which is a light weight browser.

These two things together are better than buying another mobile broadband sim with credit on.
I can get some data credit for 50p a day on my phones and will only use it if the samba sim runs out.

To see how much data I will use, I have  Bitmeter on my laptop. You can monitor your connections with it so you dont go over what you have allowed yourself per day.
On my phones I have DataMonitor which does the same but just for the phone.

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I unlocked all our broadband dongles.
We have huawei dongles .
One was a BT dongle and the other three were from 3.
The newest one is a HiLink dongle and I had to find a friendly forum with a person in the know who could give me the unlock code but it worked and all are now unlocked for free.

I have several Nokia phones as each time OH upgraded,he handed me his old phone.
The most recent two are on three because they are the kind that need a machine especially for unlocking. One I use as a camera and calculator and dont keep a sim in. It still works on our home wifi as a browser.
The other is my used phone for calls.
I also have an older version that is unlocked and on a different network.
In my drawer I have an N-gage which I unlocked with an unlock calculator and a 3310 also unlocked via calculator.
The N-gage is unlikely to get much use, its battery is too weedy but it does work.
The 3310 cant use 3g and most networks rely on 3g these days.

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chopping down the clover field

Well it isnt a field at all but I liked the sound of it.
I chopped the clover that has been growing in the onion beds.
It stays in the earth and helps to improve the structure of the soil.

The Phacelia still has bees buzzing to and fro so I will leave that for longer and then chop and dig it in , in the same way.

I still havent got the new onion beds sorted.
Yesterday I dug over half the spud bed (the half that is now empty).
The onions and garlic will go in there to over winter.

OH bought me and himself new (2nd hand) leathers for the motorbike.
Mine are a very fetching white with green and purple zigzags.
His are black and have a wolf logo.

We are going to look the Bees Knees next time we go for a ride together.

I canned quite a lot of Pumpkin on Monday.
The biggest pumpkin yielded 11 jars .
Then I roasted the seeds which are quite like crisps (to snack on).
I did mine with no oil by using a browning plate in the microwave.
You are supposed to use oil but they are much healthier without .
OH tends to glutton-out on anything the least bit snackable so I put them in a screw top jar and whisked them away out of sight .

There are 2 more pumpkins out there but I don't know if they have time to ripen off as we are already getting ground frosts in the morning.

Indoors it is about 15 degrees c in the mornings.
The front room warms up to 17 once the sun hits it.
I brought the greenhouse heater in so that we could give the bathroom a 10 minute zap before bathing or showering, rather than turn the heating on all over the house just for the same effect.
The heater is from OH's work and was being thrown away but is really for a greenhouse.
It would be far too expensive to run it over the winter for the amount of food I might produce from the greenhouse.

The greenhouse is now empty of plants except the box of carrots.
It becomes a store room over winter.

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My online earning is going well.
Today I cashed out 10 pounds in Amazon vouchers from Ipsos
There is a 25 pound voucher to cash in from another survey site and nearly 30 pounds from one other so Christmas and the last birthday of the year are accounted for.
We are lucky with birthdays as they are evenly spaced across the year.
I go on Mccains site once a week and play their games which pay in spud shillings.
The shillings go towards a voucher and I am hoping to have 10 pounds to redeem in a couple of weeks.
Sadly they are winding up their voucher earning scheme in december .

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At the moment I am reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo which you can find on Guttenberg
I'm also reading Micah Clarke by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (free on Amazon).

Les Miserables is very long and a little hard going with its turns of language and descriptions.
If you think Dickens is too descriptive, you wont like this one but if you don't mind long detailed outlines,you will most likely love it.

Micah Clarke is one of Doyles Historic Novels which are by far his best genre and although they are very prose filled, they have a huge lot of history and factual information also.
This one is about the Monmouth uprising (after the English Civil war).  

OH had his exam yesterday which he sits at home with a transcriber to do the writing.
He can manage to write fairly well but his reading speed is painfully slow due to dislexia.

I took myself off into town to save being a hovering prescence.
First I went to the take away and bought my lunch.
I could have taken a sandwich and a drink from home but it is October and there is nowhere really to picnic out of the weather at this time of year.
Our town is notorious for having nothing to do and nowhere to do it.

I spent an hour sipping a big cup of tea and reading my ebook but ofcourse one cant keep that up indefinitely and even take away shops need their tables to be filled and emptied to remain in business.

Next I went for a roam around the charity shops.
I have nothing that we need so although it was an interesting browse, there was no buying involved.

After a long walk around of about 2 hours and feeling quite thirsty again, I stopped at a cafe and bought a huge mug of tea and resumed my ebook.

Around 3pm I met up with OH at the cinema so that we could see the film Looper which is on at the moment.
I had 2 cinema tickets from my online earnings at maximiles so it cost us nothing.

DS had an interview for a possible job so couldn't come too.
It turned out to be door to door canvassing which he is definitely not cut out for so I guess he wont be hearing back from them.
DD did a similar job a couple of years back and found it tedious even though she was marginally successful at it.
She also did something similar for a couple of days a few weeks back and was chased by a dog at one house. She discovered that the charity company wanted their canvassers to appear for work 2 hours before they were paid and to work through any breaks to 'make up the quotas'.
Needless to say, she found something else as quickly as she could working less hours and paying actual regular wages.

I wish the government could see the sort of jobs that are available themselves 'fly on the wall' style. I think they would then understand why people have trouble finding work.


I have resumed my skipping (jump rope) today.
5 minutes this morning without shoes was about all I could manage.
If you have only skipped when shod, try 'no shoes' it is a whole new ball game.
I was going to resume last week but OH has been at home revising and there was nowhere to skip without it sounding .
Outdoors has not been an option due to the rain.
We haven't run in ages as OH twisted his knee and I ususally only run with him.

I have been keeping an eye on eating though and still weigh the same as last year when we ran, worked out and skipped .
OH has had to reign back on his snacking as he had put on a bit of ballooniness (2 stone).
He is a bit of a chocolate addict which is fine when he is cycling,running and karatiing but not when he isn't.

A quiet weekend.

Our DD is gone back to university.
We are 3 again .
It means less having the dishwasher on, less cooking, less breadmaking.
I shall miss her chats though .

I am still reading my wheel of time ebook, only half way through, they are very long but worth the time .

Today I put the pull up bar back on DD's door frame and managed to do 4 each time I tried a pull up.
It will take time to build back up again.
I did a bit of indoor skipping too.

I am averaging 135 points a day on swag bucks which is nice as it is about £5 a week in Amazon UK vouchers.

I bit the bullet yesterday and ordered my vegetable seeds from the Us Amazon store where I accrue a few vouchers. They should be here by the end of the month.

Busy with little projects

I have been surveying like mad today.
No not for the building industry !
This is my Trickle feed income when I have no other .
That is most of the time!

I thought I would make a separate page about it and add new links as I discover where the most reliable or useful places to earn a little bit extra ,actually are.

Often the survey companies start to become busier as the season turns towards Christmas or other major Holidays .

Today I have done about 10 surveys and about 3 hours of  other stuff.

Anyway if you are interested,pop over to the new page,the link is at the top.

Still pulling on the bar

The OH went back to work today so our pull up bar made it back upstairs where it is used the most.
I managed 10 and lots of lesser amounts till I had done around 58.
I am still improving on the one legged pistol squats. Less wobbling.
The temperature is finally beginning to kick in here and it was only 17 degrees downstairs so we have been upstairs in the warmer rooms all day.

Making spare cash trickle feed style


I joined Shop and scan this week. It is a company that asks for you to scan all the bar codes on your shopping and you upload the scans( they loan you a scanning device) and a picture of your receipt (to prove you didn't just scan the contents of the shop) and send to them once a week. 

They reward in vouchers which will be so handy for Birthday present buying.


I am trying out Amazon MTurk too.
This is an american company .
You sign up and do little tasks on line for small payments in cents.
The UK participants are paid in US Amazon com vouchers only spendable on the US version of Amazon , so I thought I would have a go and see how handy they are once I have earned some.
If they are not really very spendable because of import duties making them worthless ,I will stop doing them.


I enjoy this kind of thing though, it is my trickle feed approach to life yet again.
If you stick at anything long enough, you will see rewards or at least know why you shouldn't continue.
Most of the tricklers have proved useful in one way or another .
Now the freelancing has dried up ,this is helping to fill in the time and provides a little bit of something for the very few times when I feel like parting with earnings.