If you live on Fernwood the options for public transport unfortunately are limited.

There is the 341, which drives around the village (anti-clockwise, so Dale Way then Goldstraw Lane) Monday to Saturday and goes to Newark Bus Station.
The 24 goes between Newark and Grantham passing Fernwood along Great Northern Road (near the Tawny Owl), visiting Claypole, Dry Doddington, Westbrough, Long Bennington and Great Gonerby (Downtown). This runs Monday to Saturday excluding Bank Holidays.
The 90a will get you to Nottingham on weekday mornings and back in the evening (if you work 9-5 and are a short walk from Nottingham Bus Station) from Great Northern Road (again near the Tawny Owl) and on Sundays the 90 has three services to and from Nottingham.

There are also the numbers 2 and 3 which start in Balderton, but you’ll need to make your own way there.

Continue reading Fernwood Bus Times →

I’ve got to say that 12 months ago I didn’t think I would be writing one of these posts, and my WordPress account hasn’t been hacked.
I’m not going to suggest doing a million product reviews or surveys, or suggest you join an eBook pyramid scam, but instead make the most of Matched Betting.

Now this isn’t some kind of trading scam or one of those turn £10 in to £10,000 by doing a 50 fold accumulator, but instead playing the maths behind making the most of free bets that a bookmaker gives out.

Imagine you’ve just popped to Ladbrokes and stuck £10 on Millwall to beat Leicester. They’ve offered you 2/1, which means if Millwall win you make £20 profit.
Now you are down the pub and tell Barry what you’ve done, but you’ve lost confidence in your bet. Barry however thinks that Millwall will easily win and offers to buy the betslip off you.
To make it worth while you sell it to Barry for only £9. Now no matter what the score is you are down £1. Whereas Barry now has a £9 bet to win £21 (Ladbrokes return your stake, of which Barry didn’t pay a pound for).

However what you didn’t tell Barry was that Ladbrokes gave you a free bet token to use on another game and for a laugh you’ve gone for a long shot of Oxford to beat Middlesbrough at 13/2. If Oxford win Ladbrokes payout £65, but again you’ve not too confident in this bet either. So Dave offers to buy this betslip off you. Now because Ladbrokes don’t return the stake when you win with a free bet, you need to price the slip so that Dave will make more than if he went to Ladbrokes. So we sell this one for £8. Now no matter what the result is in the game you are £8 up, and for Dave if Oxford win he gets £57 profit, which is a fiver more than he would have got if he placed the bet himself.

So for a quick trip to the bookmakers I’ve just made £7.

Now it’s a lot easier than this. All the bookmakers are online and Dave and Barry are just other users on the Betfair and Smarkets betting exchanges, where you can lay your bets off.
Most bookmakers will have nice welcome offers like bet £20 get £20, but the bread and butter of matched betting is making the most of the ongoing offers the bookmakers have. These include free bets if your horse comes second (you’ll get weird looks when you cheer on a horse not to win), extra winnings if the crossbar is hit, free bet if you have one losing leg in a five fold acca.

In the last 12 months I started with just £200 and placed 2191 different bets, totalling £32,000 in which I’ve made £5,000 from. Throw in some advantage play casino and bingo offers and my total was £8,000. I’ve been on holiday, purchased a new Pixel XL, iPhone 7, iPad Mini and had lots more meals out with the family.

Now how do I know which bookmakers have offers on, and the best way to make the most of them? I use OddsMonkey.com their forums are full of really useful advice (including a lot from me) and they have odds spotting software to help you find the best matches available to back and lay. It’s £15 a month, but worth every penny, and they’ll even give you a free trial to get you started.

Thanks to the wonderful people at Aukey they’ve sent me some stuff to test.

Next is the Aukey USB Wall Charger 50W / 10A 5 Ports.

This 5 port UBS charger can knock out up to 10A, so around 2A per port, which is enough to get your iPad, iPhone, iPod, Google Pixel and Bluetooth Headphones charged.
Continue reading Aukey USB Wall Charger 50W / 10A 5 Ports →

If you’ve noticed that the green ready light has now turned yellow your machine is telling you it needs descaling.

The machine does this based on the number of runs it’s been through and not how blocked it might be, so you can reset the light back to green by running through the service settings but without the descaler if you wish.

Just hold the power button down for 5 seconds until the light begins to flash, run through a cup of hot water, than a cup of cold water, then turn it off. The light should now be green next time you use it.

If you do want to perform a real clean of the machine, steps on what to do can be seen in this official video.

Oooh the moon is all super, it looks huge.

Except it doesn’t. When it’s high in the sky it looks a similar size to what it always does.

The moon through a smartphone always looks like a small blob pic.twitter.com/jCLcvvwHQM

— Ryan Cullen (@artesea) September 27, 2015

Continue reading Can we stop all this about the “Supermoon” →

The following is the relevant code to get Tasker, AutoLocation, Zooper and Forecast.io to display the one line weather summary on your phone.

It’s possible to not need AutoLocation and use the Tasker lat/lng but I was after testing the application, and you could use a different widget tool like Minimalistic Text, or even just a notification in the status bar.

Continue reading One line weather summary →

I mentioned before that I have a MiFi device. It’s a TP-Link M5350. It’s light, portable and easy to use. However one thing I noticed was getting the battery level.
It has an OLED display, which shows the signal bars, number of connected devices, if WiFi is running, the network you are on, the up and down speeds, the current usage and a battery icon.
From quick tests it would always show empty to full animation when on charge and it only had around 4 icons for normal usage.
But what I wanted to know was a percentage level for the device.

Logging in to the web-gui for the router you get more icons along the top, however a title element on the battery shows the current level of charge. Although getting this number to appear on my phone was going to be tricky.

So I wondered if I could get my devices to make a HTTP request to the device, get past the security, find the relevant code and output that in a clear way.
Continue reading Tasker, Zooper and my TP-Link M5350 →

Do you use Twitter Tools on your blog to autopost your new posts, or to show a daily record of all your tweets?
Did is suddenly stop working yesterday?
Unfortunately twitter removed the end points which the plugin spoke to. They did announce this would be happening over a year ago, and have since even released a new version of their API.
Whilst you are waiting for an official fix, you can make this small change to the plugin code to sort it now.

In WordPress admin go to Plugins, Editor, select Twitter Tools from the drop down.
In the code box find

define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/show/###ID###.json');

and replace with

define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show.json?id=###ID###');

Then hit the Update File button.