Well, this is where VoucherHub steps in. These nice guys and gals keep track of all the latest offers from the big name shops, fast food outlets and other fabulous stores. The site is very easy to use. Just head on over to voucherhub.com and search for the retailer you want a voucher code for, or select one of “Today’s Top Vouchers”, click on the code and it’ll take you directly to the site! Simples! I did it for the Domino’s Pizza voucher, and I got 25% off my total bill! Nice!

So a big thank you has to go to the VoucherHub folk – I can return to my miserly ways and keep the missus happy all in one go! Cheers!

So far, the wallpaper has been stripped, walls have been sanded, the woodchip wallpaper is off the ceiling, and we’ve started sticking up a false wall. Jen (SWMBO) managed to get stuck up a set of ladders whilst stripping the woodchip off the ceiling. Being the good husband-to-be that I am, I helped her down… didn’t I? Apparently not:

Well, that’ll be me in the bad books. Anyway, moving on from that.. We stripped the wallpaper and started prepping the walls for paint. I say ‘we’ – in reality it was SWMBO and her dad. Here she is in her sanding get-up:

For me though, the most interesting part of the work is being carried out on the opposite wall. This is the wall where the tech is going. My 32″ Sony Bravia will be going here. Along with some coax cable, Cat5e and power. Click on the thumbnails to get a view of how the wall is progressing:

Hopefully tomorrow night I’ll be able to get the remainder of the plasterboard up with Robert’s help and we’ll then be able to get it plastered and painted. After that, we can start moving in – and get started on the living room.

I’m pretty pleased with the way things are working out – it’s taking just a little bit longer than expected, but once it’s done, I’ll be a happy man. A tired, but happy, man.

Oh, I almost forgot – here’s a video look at the bedroom as of yesterday:

Anyway, we got the keys on 30 June, and we’ve already demolished the living room. At this point I have to thank a few people; Gael, Robert, Craig, Andrew, Gordon, Jen: THANK YOU. Without you all, we would still have a crappy concrete/faux marble fireplace & entertainment centre with arches which would put the Vatican to shame. Thanks to you, we had a nice bomb site:

(that’s Robert & Gael, in case you were interested)

Well, it was a bomb site until Gael, Jen and I got all the rubble into bags and Robert and I got it all to the dump. Thanks for getting the van, Robert! Things look a whole lot better now the rubble has vanished, and Jen got to use her new Dyson DC24. The carpet is now spotless:

Now all I’ve got to do is get the new wood frame up, the cables run, get a couple of spurs from my sockets, get the plasterboard up, get it plastered, change the carpet, paint, get the curtains up, get the furniture in and we’ll be laughing. Easy enough? *sigh*

The key element of any smart home is structured cabling – in my case Cat5e. I was planning on running HDMI to a couple of different rooms, but in lengths greater than 10 metres, its unreliable and expensive. So, how do I plan to get the HDMI signal from my V+ box in the loft, to my TV in the living room? By using a pair of HDMI baluns, of course! By using a pair of these boxes, I can use my structured cabling to send the HDMI signal from the V+ box to my TV. Simples! In case you’re wondering what these baluns look like, here they are:

Quite small and unobtrusive, I think you’ll agree. It’d be easy enough to cable-tie one of these bad boys to the wall mount or the VESA fitting at the back of the TV, or just to hide away with the rest of the cables, so SWMBO will be happy, and this leads to a quiet life for me. Its really a win-win situation. SWMBO is happy, I don’t have to spend loads of money on long HDMI cables and these boxes are £30 on Amazon. In fact, you can buy them here.

I’ll post a review when I put them to use, but all in all, these look great!

ReboundTag takes an old idea to a new level, but it does it with such elegance and ease that my inner geek struggled to get to grips with it at first. Let me explain.

Each ReboundTag contains three things: a tag number, a barcode which equates to that tag number, and a microchip which also contains that tag number. So, how does it work? Well, first of all, you need to register your tag on the ReboundTag site. You enter your personal information (email address, telephone number, etc), the description of the item the tag will be attached to, and your itinerary. Then you attach it to your bag. That’s it. You don’t need to do anything. With any luck, your bag won’t get lost.

If you are unlucky enough to lose your bag though, help is at hand. Thanks to the human-readable tag number printed on the tag, the person (or airline/travel company) who finds your bag can visit the ReboundTag website, enter your tag number and state that they have found it. As soon as they submit those details, you get an email/SMS making you aware that someone has found your bag so you can arrange for its safe return. You can even mark your tag as anonymous so that the finder doesn’t see any of your details, just a notification that you’ve been alerted to the fact that they have located your luggage.

Another feature ReboundTag have included in their product is a second RFID chip which is readable and writeable by airport/airline security staff. This allows them to enter your flight details, onward destination, etc., making it very easy to return your luggage to you in the even of a loss. If this was where it stopped, I’d be happy, and this would be the end of the review. However, I have a privacy concern regarding this second RFID chip.

From the ReboundTag front page:

Since our microchips contain several memory banks, if desired it is also possible to have security information added to the chip through a password protected layer. The security information can be changed by the airport/airline whenever the person travels and cannot be viewed or changed without the password.

Wait. WHAT?

It would appear that ReboundTag are giving airlines and airports the ability to store information, presumably about you, to YOUR microchipped tag, and then allowing them to password protect it so others – including you – can’t read, amend or delete it. I have very real privacy concerns with this ‘feature’, and whilst it may be immensely useful and/or popular with the security fraternity, the fact that you aren’t able to choose whether you have this second RFID chip or not, ReboundTag may find that they lose out on the business of those who value their privacy.

I’ll be giving it a go on my upcoming honeymoon. Hopefully the security services don’t leave a note saying ‘Suspected Terrorist’ on the chip.

If you fancy getting your hands on a ReboundTag, you can get one for £19.99, three for £49.95 or ten for £149.99. All are available at www.reboundtag.com.

Kirk (Jay Baruchel) is a pretty average guy with a pretty average job and pretty average friends. A high school graduate with no other qualifications, he works in an airport as a TSA agent and dreams of one day becoming a pilot, but is content in the knowledge that he’ll never really amount to much. Until Molly (Alice Eve) walks through his metal detector.

Let’s face it. Molly is a hard 10. Kirk is a soft 6. There’s no way she’d look twice at him, right? Well normally, no. However, a girl this hot as gotten the attention of every single guy in the place. Especially Kirk’s sleazy workmates, and more importantly, his extra-sleazy boss. When Kirk pisses off his boss to defend Molly’s honour, she sees him for what he is. A nice guy. A hard 10 in the nice guy stakes.

Once past airport security and onto her flight, she realises she has lost her iPhone. Her phone is her life; she’s a party planner and losing it would be the end of the world to her, so she borrows her friend’s phone to call it, and who answers? Kirk. When he agrees to return the phone in person the next night, he seals his fate. A hard 10 is into a soft 6. In other words, Molly likes Kirk.

No-one believes it. Not Molly’s friends, not Kirk’s friends, not Kirk. Why does Molly like Kirk? What does Kirk do to impress Molly? I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to find out for yourself.

I thought it was hilarious. The non-gay pube-shaving by another-straight-man scene is particularly funny. If only for childish reasons.

She’s Out of My League is out on June 4.

I’ve been a fan of home automation for a long time, and whilst still living at home with the parents, I’ve been able to experiment with X10 with great success. Thankfully, the house is all on one level, with loft access. So far, it’s been decided that I’ll be running Cat5 cable to every room – maybe not the bathroom, but there’s still potential for that if I can justify it – along with speaker cable and possibly two or three HDMI cables.

I’ll have an automation server running Homeseer as a backend to the house, which will pull together pretty much all the tech in the house. My main media server will run Windows Home Server, serving up audio and video to Windows 7 PCs which run Windows Media Center.

Broadcast media will arrive in the house in a variety of different ways: 2 Virgin Media boxes will provide cable TV to either the TVs directly, or to the Windows 7 boxes to be played out via WMC; at least one Freesat box (there’s already a satellite dish feeding into the house); and regular old council telly – Freeview.

My studio equipment will live in its own room, herein referred to as my studio. The studio PC will live in the loft along with the servers so I can reduce the equipment noise in the studio itself. Monitor and keyboard/mouse will arrive in the room via an Adder standalone KVM box.

I’m sure there will be all kinds of pitfalls along the way, but with the help of the folks over at Automated Home, I’m sure things will go pretty well! Stay tuned for more news on the tech house. I can’t wait!

I was booked on the 4×4 Off-Road driving course. Its taken me a while from booking the course to actually being able to attend – it was cancelled due to the bad snow the last time I was supposed to go, but when I found out how bad it really was, I didn’t relish the thought of trying to get there.

So yesterday rolled around and it was time to go. I had to be there at 9:15 for a 9:30 start. This meant being out the door at 8:00, and out of my bed at 7:00. On a Sunday. Hmph! Thankfully I didn’t have to do the driving. Jen got that pleasure. An hour and 7 minutes later (according to TomTom), and we arrived. It was cold. We were something like 800-85o feet above sea level though.

I was greeted by instructors Bill and Eric, and a long with the other people on the course, we got our safety briefing and instructions on how to operate the cars – Jeep Cherokees to be specific:

I was with Eric. Eric seemed to be a bit more easy-going than Bill, but still mindful of our safety. I was right. We got talking about all sorts of things: cars, how girlfriends and wives spend all your money, the bad snow, to name but a few. Not only were we getting a top 4×4 training course, we were getting to shoot the breeze with the instructor too! This course could have easily been a very dry one, with nothing other than “foot off the gas”, “careful on this turn”, but thanks to Eric the whole experience was great.

We all got 2 goes around the course. The first time around, you do the ‘easy’ part which gets you used to the car and how to control it. The second time around, you get to do the ‘hard’ bits. When I say hard, I mean hard. Going down steep hills where you can’t see the bottom from the top, going up steep hills with loose rocks which create wheel spin and driving through a river. Not across the river, through it.

The whole experience takes around 2 hours, and when you’re done, you get a certificate to say you’re a great 4×4 driver. I thought I was going to be terrified the entire way around the course, but with Eric next to me giving me all the tips I needed, I was fine. I highly recommend this particular driving experience as a fun day out. Head on over to the Knockhill site and book it!

So, tomorrow is my birthday. Yes, 28. I’m not completely sure what I’m getting this year, but some cash wouldn’t go amiss.. I’ve still got a wedding to pay for! If you’d like to donate some cash, just leave a comment, and I’ll be round to collect..

I still haven’t been on the Off-Road driving experience which Jen got me for my last birthday. I am, however, going next weekend. I can’t wait! You don’t get the opportunity to wreck a Land Rover too often. I’ve got my neck brace on order, just in case!

Who fancies going out for a drink in Glasgow to celebrate my birthday then? Come on… it’ll be fun!

So what’s all this volcano business about? Personally, I think it’s just a misunderstanding on the Icelandic government’s part. We, in the UK and also The Netherlands, got stung when Icelandic online back Icesave went under, and we’re now looking for that money back. We asked Iceland to “give us cash”, and well, I guess they misheard or misunderstood.

So, the result is a massive cloud of volcanic ash, containing rock and glass. It looks a bit like this:

Image by Árni Friðriksson. Used under licence.

The effect this has had on the UK, Europe, and to a lesser degree, the rest of the world, has been huge. With UK and European airspace essentially closed since last Thursday, the whole world has pretty much ground to a halt. With no planes in the air, holidaymakers are experiencing huge problems either getting to or from their holiday destinations, children and teachers have been unable to return to school for the start of the new term, air freight is waiting around in airports, and fresh fruit and flowers are rotting in warehouses. You see, we rely so heavily on air travel in our every day lives, that when we find that planes can’t get into the air, we’re affected in ways we’d not ever considered. You don’t need to be trying to get on a plane to be impacted by this problem. You just need to try and get an orange from the supermarket.

As I write this post, there are tweets flying around on the Twitterverse suggesting that the other volcano in Iceland has erupted. At this point, it looks like this may not be true, but if it is, we may find ourselves noticing the impact of the eruption in something other than the hypothetical.

Maybe now is the time to look at our lives and investigate how we can be more self-sufficient. Not in a living-in-the-woods Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall kind of way, but we can maybe try not to rely on as many imported goods. Try sending an email instead of a letter. That kind of thing. It can’t be that hard, can it?

One of the most bizarre news stories to come out today was that British Airways has asked the EU and UK Government for compensation for the lost business due to the closure of UK and European airspace. Seriously, BA? You’re really asking for compensation? Is this because your insurance company won’t pay out due to an ‘act of God’? You asking for compensation for closed airspace is like me asking for compensation from my local council when they close a road because it’s dangerous. Your test flights and those of your competitors didn’t actually fly at the height you usually fly. Those that did (KLM) flew directly into an area with no ash – how are those proper test flights? You’re all saying there’s no danger, but NATO have already damaged a couple of F-16s by flying proper test flights.

I’m sorry to say it, Willie Walsh, but it’s things like this which show up weaknesses in your industry’s business model. A lot of your competitors are ‘staring bankruptcy in the face’ if you believe the news reports. Well, that’s just the business world. If you can’t afford to pay your bills, you go under. Only the fittest survive. The Free Market’s a bitch, eh?