Site changes coming

As frequent visitors will definitely have noticed, and as occasional visitors may have noticed, DieselTekk has not been updated for sometime, despite many promises that it will be.

Well, there is a reason for this, and it is for you, the reader, to decide whether my reasons are good or not.

I have recently started my own retail business, Evolve.  A computer retail and repair shop in my local town of Bodmin in Cornwall.
This has taken a great deal of planning and above all, TIME.  Time used to build Evolve, and to do the work it brings forth has meant little time for writing for this site.

Now that things have settled a little at Evolve I plan to resurrect DieselTekk and to take it in a slightly different direction.
DieselTekk will continue to be focussed on making computing a little simpler, while still offering product reviews and so forth, however it will offer some new content also.

I have other blogs too, these include the Single Sentence Review, a site I created to review products in a single sentence, and to encourage others to contribute to the reviews in the comments with their own opinions.  Single Sentence Review is a new site and therefore requires some traffic to get it off the ground (please link it).

The Learning Curve Is Steep is my personal blog, a diary of thoughts and so forth.  It has been quite personal up until now, with only a few of my close friends knowing about it.  However since I am not only into blogging for the fun, but also to make a few pennies from the ad’s on my sites, this one also deserves some traffic.  So, if you are at all interested in the musings of a (nearly) 30 year old Cornish guy with a very topsy-turvy life, then please read (and link) on.

Of course there is also Evolve.  The website at www.evolveyourpc.co.uk is something the company is very proud of, designed by my good friend and colleague Andrew, who has unfortunately fallen ill recently. As such I am unable to ask him to update the site frequently, and since a lot of the content is hand craft at time of posting I cannot reproduce the content easily.  So, in Andrew’s absence I have created evolvebodmin.blogspot.com which shall soon have the evolveyourpc address redirected to it, along with all it’s current traffic.

My intention is to bring an aspect or two from each of these other sites into DieselTekk, and also to direct DieselTekk visitors to articles on these new sites, all of which may be of interest to my readers.

Along with this new approach I shall be looking at a new template design for DieselTekk, something a little more clear and easier to navigate easily, so please check back often to stay on top of all the changes.

Now, as a footnote I would like to mention North Cornwall’s BC Radio.
North Cornwall’s BC Radio consists of a small, tight crew of young broadcast enthusiasts from the Bodmin area.  They have started their own internet based community radio station, and are fast developing a following in the North Cornwall area thanks to their fun narratives and excellent playlist choices.  Of course, they are also sponsored by Evolve!

Please take a look at their new website at www.bc-radio.co.uk!

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Join the PC News & Tips Blog Portal

Community Aggregators, also know as blog aggregators or Blog Portals are a portal-like web app that displays blog articles from a group of closely related but separately hosted blogs and provides newsfeeds so that readers may subscribe to the group as a whole.

Blog Portals are also a great way to receive targeted traffic.

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PC News & Tips

I could have killed my gaming PC!    Free Windows 7 Themes For Netbooks – Part 5    Looking For Linux, Finding Nothing Here    Free Windows 7 Themes For Netbooks – Part 4    More on Audiobooks    Free Windows 7 Themes For Netbooks – Part 3    Free Windows 7 Themes For Netbooks – Part 2    Free Windows 7 Themes for Netbooks – Part 1    Free DieselTekk Desktop Wallpaper    Pornography! How Do You Detect It?    Holodomor    Where Can I Find A Good Source Of Information About File Extensions?    Windows 7 (and Vista) on the Netbooks – Set Up For Best Display    Sorry Readers    100th Article! - Trying Out Quake Live Beta (and a shout to Hawk12Online)    ThePirateBay.org’s Ship Is Sinking! - Updated    How To Take Apart The LaCie Little Disk – Photo Guide    The Death of Two Acer Aspire One’s    Transferring Files Over WiFi    How I’ve Managed Without Broadband At Home

Sorry Readers

I have still not had a chance to take a look at the Quake Live Beta yet, I haven’t been feeling too well these past couple of days, nor have my children.

Plus I've been working on a new blogging project call The Anything Review, where you can have anything you like reviewed for a small fee.

At the moment though, if you are one of the first 10 to request a review, you will get it for the grand price of…nothing at all!  Just click on this link to get your free review promo code.

How I’ve Managed Without Broadband At Home

As I have detailed in previous articles of late, I have been temporarily without an internet connection at home for the last couple of months.

Keeping this, and my other blog (Our5Kids), up to date has been difficult.  As such I decided to instead concentrate my efforts on DieselTekk and allow Our5Kids to fall by the wayside – something I feel incredibly guilty over since Our5Kids keeps many family members and friends up to date with what is happening in our children's lives.

Anyhow, this is a short story about how I have managed to maintain some semblance of internet normality while by internet connection at home has been disrupted.

1.  The Mobile Phone

Not the best or cheapest method of keeping up to date online, but it worked for a while.  I have a network contract with ‘3’, who I thought were quite reasonable with their charges.  It wasn’t until I found out that I had ”reached [my] credit limit” that I noticed that internet usage charges amounted to an excess of £70 for just a couple of weeks use that I realised I was wrong.

In future I will keep a closer eye on this, as it appears email access, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger is free, whereas Skype, and the rest of the internet is not.  Strangely, a friend who has the same monthly contract as myself – but has a different mobile phone – pays nothing for Skype, in fact it’s encouraged by ‘3; that he use Skype on his handset!

2.  The Coffee Shop with Free Internet Access

There is a stunning coffee shop in my town called Tengo! which offers free WiFi internet access to all it’s customers (and those camped outside on the street or on the roadside huddled in their cars!).  The download speed seems quite quick, in line with the rest of the town centre at around 4-6Mbits/sec, and allows me to use my Aspire One netbook without issue.

It is an open connection though, with no WEP key for access or and kind of security, so does carry a little worry.  I don’t have a great deal on my netbook that requires me to worry a great deal about security, however my emails and contacts etc are all held in an Outlook PST file.  So should some unscrupulous fool manage to snoop within my system, he could potentially grab a great deal of my personal info in one fell swoop.

Using Windows 7, with it’s enhanced security, and ZoneAlarm (albeit the free version) installed helps prevent this kind of action, but you never really know who is on the snoop!

The other downside to using an internet cafe,is cost.  The internet access may be free in Tengo!, but you have to be a customer which does mean you have to actually buy something!  For an hour of use I will go through at least two regular cappuccino’s, and at £1.50 each it may be only £3.00 but I have a lot to do online in a single session, so 2 hours would cost me £6.00 plus a great deal of time on the loo.

3.  Another House

I have also been using the internet at the mother-in-law’s house, which is a little slower than I am used to, but more than adequate for what I need.  The benefits are clear – free drinks, free food etc, but the downside is that I have to talk which means if I am there for an hour, I will get maybe 33% done of what I need to get done.  Not so good.

The same would be the case no matter who’s house I was to go to, another family member or a friend.  Ah well, it’s still free though!

So there you have it, the three main ways I have been getting online over the last couple of months.  Not so easy as opening my laptop in my home, in switching on my main PC, but it’s helped.

If you have any tips, or past “missing net connection” stories that you would like to share, please leave a comment below!

The Trouble With Broadband

BT are rubbish, Sky are better!

After a two month battle with British Telecom I have finally managed to get my telephone line reconnected. 

However, I then found an additional problem in that Sky, who supply my broadband internet connection had been cancelled due to inactivity!

I spent a couple of hours yesterday on the phone to the cheerful people at Sky who initially told me that they would have to charge me a £75 connection fee as a new account would have to be opened!  Now, the thing is, I have already paid £75 to get connected the first time around, and did not see why I should have to foot the bill for BT’s mistake… and after being referred to several different departments one extremely helpful lady in the cancellations department sorted out everything for me.

The £75 fee was waived and my broadband connection should be active once again in a week or two.  that’s good, because the cost of using the internet via my mobile phone means that I now own nearly £100 on that bill, and accessing the internet via Tengo! (a cafe in St Austell with free WiFi access) is all well and good, but I don’t think I could manage to many more cappuccino's just to access my emails!

So this means that within the next one or two weeks updates to this site should once again be coming thick and fast, but for now please be patient… there are plenty of older articles for you to look over and comment on so please feel free to look around.

This Month’s Top EC Dropper

Congratulations to this months Top EC Dropper, Internet Marketing & WebSite Tools!

This site is now listed in the blogroll in the footer of this site.

Want to get on the blogroll? Click here for more information.

DieselTekk Services – Optimise IT

Since I was smacked with the redundancy stick last Friday I have had to take a look at how I am going to keep my family with food in their stomachs.

So, after years of learning and gaining experience I am now offering my knowledge and time to people in my local area in need of help with their computer systems.

Yesterday I walked around dropping 100 leaflets through the doors of homes in my immediate area, in a day or two I will do 100 more.  The leaflets are double sided, one side promoting this website, and telling a little of what I do and can offer, the other side is a service promotion “Optimise IT”.

About Optimise IT

These days everybody is feeling the pinch financially, but nevertheless computers still cause users trouble, thus creating a thought in the owners minds that it’s time to replace their slow PC with something new.  However many people just do not realise that the slow down is normal, and all that is required is a little technical know-how and time to gain back a bit of that speed, thus ensuring their computer can carry on for a bit longer before needing to be replaced.

Optimise IT is a service that provides just that; a computer that is optimised for the user, that performs better, performs faster than before.

Get in touch to make an appointment

So, if you are interested in this service and live in the St Austell area please give me a call on 07846548210 or email me.

Appointments can be made for morning, afternoon or evenings, the work will take place in your own home (so you can see exactly what is being done, and ask any questions you like) and you will not be overcharged!

Currently I am only offering my service in St Austell, Cornwall (UK) so please, if you live outside of this area just watch this space… more towns will be served as soon as possible!

New Article Drought!

Regular readers and RSS feed subscribers will have noticed that new articles on DieselTekk have been few and far between over the last week, and for this I am very sorry.

This is due to an issue with my internet connection at home – it seems that BT have got a little confused and stopped my service for both telephone and broadband.  This is an ongoing issue that arose a few weeks ago, when I noticed that BT had stopped taking payments for my bills from our bank account.  Despite several attempts to sort out the issue at the banks end,and a few attempts to make payment over the phone BT have continued to seemingly refuse our payments for some reason that they have thus far been completely unclear about.

I hope to have this issue rectified soon, and will then be able to put a new articles as regularly as before.

Once again, I am very sorry for this, but rest assured, DieselTekk has not been deserted and new content will soon be made available.

EntreCard - 5 Top Droppers

As you may have noticed already (if not please take a look) I have added a new widget called 5 Top Droppers to the sidebar, just underneath the EntreCard drop box.

This is my little way of saying thank you to those who take the time each day, week and month to stop by at this little crevice of the web and click on my drop box.

Now, the top 5 droppers from the last 30 days will each have a link to their blog or site here at DieselTekk for as long as they stay in the top 5, hopefully meaning another click or two to their homepage, but also another link for the likes of Google etc to pick up on.

If you would like to appear on the 5 Top Droppers list, all you need to do is be an active member of EntreCard and stop by here as often as possible to rank higher on the list.  The more clicks you give, the higher you go.  Simple!

So thank you to the current 5 Top Droppers, and in advance- thank you to the next batch… and the batch after that!

For now though, a special thanks goes to BMWF1Blog for being the number 1 top dropper this month!

Advertise on DieselTekk

You may have noticed the new Your Ad Here boxes at the top of the page [well, hopefully you have]?

I have decided to start selling ad space as maintaining Diesel-Tekk with new articles and promotion takes quite a bit of my time, and as they say, time is money.

If you would like to advertise on Diesel-Tekk, possibly for free the sign up at Project Wonderful for a free account and to find out more.

If you are already an advertiser through Project Wonderful all you need to do is click here to advertise or you can contact me.

Contact Me

It’s pretty easy to get hold of me, and here is how:

Email Facebook Blogcatalog Twitter Digg LastFM MyBlogLog StumbleUpon Technorati Steam Project Wonderful KernowLAN KustomPC's

I am usually pretty good at responding when people contact me, but for the fastest response please use the email link.

About DieselTekk

DieselTekk.co.uk is a blog with a dual purpose. Firstly it is dedicated to technology of interest to PC enthusiast’s and gamers. Secondly it is somewhere for all and any computer user to find a useful nugget of information that they may perhaps not find elsewhere, or if they do, here they will find it a little easier to understand.

Not everybody understands computers. I understand this and liken it to not understanding cars.

I use cars everyday, I know they need fuel to keep going, they need tax, insurance and MOT, a car has four wheels and brakes and so forth… but that’s not to say that I understand how it all works, but more to the point I don’t want to know either! All I want is for the thing to work.

There are so many computer users in the world, it would be daft to think that each and every one of them knew the difference between a 250W PSU and a 780W PSU (or even what they are). DieselTekk is here for those people.

Gamers and enthusiasts will find some interesting news here too, because I too am a gamer and an enthusiast, I like to share the information that is of interest to me too.

If You would like to contact me, please click here

If you would like to advertise on DieselTekk.co.uk please click here or contact me.