This is actually a general one, though I had the issue with Nationwide this morning. It’s all in the T’s and C’s of just about every credit card I’ve had, though. I just forgot about it.
When I was in Japan I had to take a cash advance on my Nationwide credit card. Normally I just use my debit/bank card in the ATMs but for some reason the one in the 7-Eleven near my hostel just wouldn’t accept it despite it having worked two days previously in the airport. Fortunately the same machine accepted my credit card. I knew I’d get hit for the cash advance fee, but I didn’t have much choice.
What I didn’t realise was that interest is accrued on these withdrawals/advances from the moment the cash is in your hand until the time you pay it off. This means that if you withdraw cash two days after you’ve just paid your monthly credit card bill you’ll be hit for 28 days’ interest on the next one.
The way round it is to get to the bank or pop online and use your internet banking. As soon as you can after the withdrawal, make a manual payment onto your credit card.
As it happened, I’d have been really stiffed if I’d not noticed the interest on my statement online. I’d had a large refund come through before the withdrawal which paid off my previous balance. As such, no direct debit dropped out of my bank account this month and so nothing was paid off towards the cash advance (which, I believe, takes “priority” over purchase debts on the card which is at least one bit of fairness in the whole thing).
As a rule, I never use cash advances if I can avoid it. I’d recommend sticking to the same principle. But if you have to, as I did, the simple rule is to pay it off as soon as you can.
So I start following Gateshead FC… and they lose a large leading margin at the top of the Blue Square North, allowing Tamworth to clinch automatic promotion. Gateshead will now find themselves in the playoffs at the end of the season. Congratulations to Tamworth, though.
Let’s not even go near the subject of Newcastle United‘s run-in for the end of the Premiership season. I really, really hope I’m wrong but deep down I just know we’re ******.
I shifted from Vodafone to 3 last week after Adam kindly told me of a nice tariff they have. For £20 per month, I get unlimited texts, internet and calls to other 3 mobiles(subject to the usual “fair use” policies which make them limited…) and 200 minutes for everyone else. And a shiny Nokia E71 to play with.
I do recommend it. It’s a good deal. And if you decide to go for it, please get in touch and tell me beforehand. If I give you my number and you quote it when you sign up, we both get £30 – more if you get a mobile internetdongle for your laptop as well.
However, a few points to note which aren’t made clear. I’ve spent a little while on the phone to their support (in India, but all three people I spoke to were really good) which has clarified a few things. They did credit some of the cash back as well. I’ll detail as I go.
First up, you can use the Nokia E71 as a modem. Either through the included USB cable or with a little utility called JoikuSpot. The “Light” version is enough for general web access though you do have to tweak your proxy settings to access “https” resources. This means the roaming internet dongle isn’t so useful, although it does have the benefit of ease of use. On the other hand, it’s £15 per month for 5Gb usage. The telephone contract offers unlimited downloads on the same 3G network regardless of whether it’s on your phone or your laptop via the phone.
Next up – video calls ain’t included on your tarrif. They’re 50p per minute so that’s an expensive assumption to make. The charge for the one I tried out (which never even connected – thankfully) was 48p and not refunded.
Using the Three mailserver costs you if you’re sending emails. Ditch the “Mail on 3” or “3Mail” settings ASAP once you unpack the phone. Replace it with GMail, Hotmail or whatever you use. Just make sure you don’t send any emails through their SMTP servers. The costs for the couple I sent when I was tinkering with the phone were refunded.
Nokia Maps, supplied with the phone, costs cash after a while – I think 90 days (at least the very useful Drive and Walk features do). It’s a nice bit of software but Google Maps does just as good a job and costs nothing. I’ve not been able to uninstall Nokia Maps, though – it seems it’s part of the firmware and can’t be completely removed. To get Google Maps, use the browser on the phone to go to google.com, click the link at the top for “More…” and then scroll down to “Maps”. Download and install.
Here’s a biggie, though. Twitter have a UK (+44) phone number you can use to send SMS‘s to for publication in your Twitter stream. They do say on their FAQ that some networks see it as a foreign number… and Three is one of these networks. It seems that despite it having the UK prefix, it’s based in Ireland and therefore subject to international charges of 25p per text.
This does worry me. Not because of Twitter per se, but the fact that some numbers can be “international” without appearing to be so. How on earth has this situation arisen?
It is a shame as sending an SMS is quicker than using the Twitter web page on the mobile or an alternative utility. On that score, however, I recommend Twim. Locate the current stable release’s .jar or .jad file, click on it in your mobile browser and install. It does give the occasional error message, but on the whole it’s pretty reliable and the Twitpic integration new with the current release is ace. The author says it uses about the same bandwidth as using the web page, but it’s far wasier to use. On this tariff, it’s irrelevant anyway. And, hey – it’s free.
I’m happy with the package, don’t get me wrong. A little more clarification on what is chargeable would have been nice. Oh, and there is nothing in any of the paperwork I received that told me the voicemail number! For those also looking… it’s “123”.
Now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I though I’d give you an update on Dropbox. And it’s all positive. It does a lot more than I realised when I first signed up.
First up, you don’t need to have the Dropbox applet installed to access your files. This is useful if you want to get at your documents when you’re on a public machine. You can upload and download files via a very simple web interface. Of course, the ideal situation is to have it installed and the applet seems to work perfectly on Ubuntu. It’s quick, registering changes to documents and replicating them online very swiftly.
Within Explorer, or whatever you use to browse your PC files, those which are replicated are clearly marked with a big green tick (I assume this is the same for non-Ubuntu systems). Context-sensitive options are added to these files which are worth checking out. Again, all of these can also be accessed via your account on the Dropbox web site.
One I spotted which could be incredibly useful is “revisions”. Every time you re-save a document, Dropbox backs up the last version so that if you’re made a huge mistake it’s really easy to recover an older backup. I don’t know if there’s a way of limiting the number of revisions or whether these take up any of your alloted space [update: no, they don’t – found the info on their FAQ] but it’s an excellent facility and one they should advertise more.
When you start up, Dropbox automatically creates two folders: Public and Photos. Anything stored in your Public folder can be accessed by anyone if you give them the relevant URL. This can be obtained via the web page, or by right-clicking on the file. Popping pics into the Photos folder will share them on your personal page on the Dropbox website in a gallery format. Simple as.
I’ve also tried the page on my Nokia E71 and it works pretty well. The only thing is that it’s the same layout as the default web page so there’s a lot of scrolling involved. I’ll feed this back to them.
Overall, I’m even happier with it than I was before. A great resource, especially if you only need a couple of gig and go for the free option. As before, if you’re interested then please sign up via this link as then I’ll get a little boost on my storage space. Chris did!
This Traveler IQ was calculated on Monday, April 20, 2009 at 01:12PM GMT by comparing this person’s geographical knowledge against the Web’s Original Travelogue‘s 3,938,360 travelers who’ve taken the challenge.
Globetrotter XL is another geography game similar to one I linked ot a long time ago. Give it a shot. It’s pretty good, though if I recall correctly the other one did let you pick continents and countries to test your knowledge of as well as just a world map. Having said that, I can’t find the game link anywhere on my blog so if you can find the page it’s on…
[update] OK, I can’t find it anywhere on my blog which is weird. Maybe I emailed it out. So here’s a link to it on TravelPod – it’s called Traveler IQ. My top score so far is 271,821 reaching level 8.
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