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Sunday, 6 February 2005

Norton - buy from US, not UK





If you're in the UK, it's cheaper to download Norton software from the US site where you:

  • already have a Norton product (e.g. anti-virus)
  • have broadband, and
  • don't mind having an electronic rather than printed manual, and printing it out yourself as and when needed.

I have various Norton products and just decided to upgrade to Partition Magic 8.0 and Ghost 9.0. I used the US site in the end - and you can buy any Norton software cheaper if you have ANY Norton product already, you're not confined to a newer version of the same product.

From the Symantec US site's upgrade center (or this link), including paying for the ability to download Ghost again within a year if all went haywire, it cost me US dollars 102 for the download (though admittedly it took a couple of hours on my 512k ADSL connection). That's about 54 pounds sterling at current rates.

The Symantec UK site's "upgrade" section would have charged me about 67 pounds sterling for the same downloads.

Big difference, and confirming it's the same ol' rip-off Britain again.

Obviously it's essential to check the total prices and currency exchange rates to see if it'll be worth it for particular software, but in my case it certainly was.

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Friday, 4 February 2005

Internet bank with no email??





Big marketing drives - you've seen the posters on the Tube. Internet bank with not only a good rate but the same rate for all customers, supposedly. And they say they can afford to be so generous to us lucky customers because it's all done online - no branches.

So how have ING Direct UK in their wisdom decided that UK customers should contact them? You guessed it - not by email, oh no - that would be going a step too far towards actually being an Internet bank, one assumes. No email address is given, not even a Web contact form. If a customer (or potential customer) wants to contact them, that has to be done by phone - or post. Very 21st century, indeed.

The company's US Website offers an email address, so why aren't UK customers afforded the same convenience? Welcome to the Internet revolution, indeed.
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Note-taking software





I've been looking for years for note taking software to assign a note easily to multiple categories, where I need edit the note only once for the changes to appear in all category views. Outlook with its Categories and Group By Category view was the closest I found, but its keywords are just arranged in a flat list - I want to group keywords into hierarchical trees and assign a note to more than one category in more than one tree.

Also vital to me is easy copy/paste insertion into a note of clickable links to a file on my system or a URL, to which I can add my annotation about the file or webpage etc.

My final essential requirement is keyboard shortcuts as I hate being slowed down by having to move my hand continually between keyboard and mouse. (Gmail is superb in this regard.) I feel such shortcuts provide flexibility, which is desirable (everyone works differently; a good program should cater for all the main ways: in this context mouse, keyboard, tablet). Also, keyboard shortcuts are of course a very good thing for reasons of accessibility for people who can't use a mouse - accessibility being now a hot topic, and in some countries essential for legality.

I have Microsoft's OneNote, but found that, for the way I work, it's cumbersome and unintuitive to use.

After some research I've settled on three possible options, and I'll be trying them all out over the next month or so and reporting on the results:
  • Evernote, currently downloadable as a free beta and using a "endless tape" system
  • Zoot, an "information processor" which is available on a free trial and
  • General Knowledge Base from Baltsoft, shareware which seems to have Outlook-type categories and a full Word-like editor for individual notes.

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