From London With Love – Have You Giffgaffed?

Though my first prepaid was O2, but from the student survey – my friends generally – I found giffgaff suits me better than O2.

Why do I say that?

First of all, being a student does require me to save a lot and having Pay-As-You-Go package from giffgaff really intrigued me to try and use it.

I took the £12 package. With the unlimited internet and my always opening emails and bit of my social media antics really pulled me in to this package plus, I get free calls and SMS to other giffgaff numbers (^_^)V.

You should really know what type of user you are before jumping into this bandwagon. As for me, I usually use Whatsapp and other them social medias so the £12 goodybag is most decent package for me.

To me, the network is incredibly cheap paying just 10p/min for UK calls and only 6p/text. How cheap can you go? And the network reception’s good too.

But you might ask me; Won’t it be a hassle to keep changing phone numbers when you already shouted to the world of your new number, plus you already put your O2 number in your bank application?

Don’t worry, changing networks – atleast from O2 to giffgaff  for me- wasn’t a hassle at all. I still keep my old number but using giffgaff mobile network.

Have You Giffgaffed? Service providers numbers to get them PAC codes. Nifty little thing I found on the giffgaff website.

If you want to retain your old number to giffgaff, here’s what you should do:

1)            Call your respective service provider and ask them for your Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) code. PAC code only valid for 30 days. So I suggest you do this when you already have your giffgaff simcard in hand.

2)            Activate your giffgaff simcard, follow the instructions on the website.

3)            Fill in the ‘Transfer Your Number’ form on the giffgaff website. You’ll be prompt with a message saying that your transfer application has been received by giffgaff.

4)            The transferring process will take upto 24hours. Just keep using your old simcard until you get a ‘no service’ notice on top of your phone.

5)            Turn off your phone, switch to your giffgaff simcard. And let the magic happen by itself.  Your old number will reappear, replacing your temporary giffgaff number. Do check your ‘my giffgaff’ page every now and then to see the progress of your number transfer.

**Further information on how to retain your number old number to giffgaff, click here.

After you got all excited that you manage stick to your lucky numbers, you might notice – if you’re using iphone – that your imessage texts is being sent to your temporary giffgaff number, not your lucky numbers.

Don’t worry, this usually happens to iphone users. This was what I did:

1)            Got to Settings > Phone > My number. Notice it shows your temporary giffgaff number instead of your real number? Click on the number and change it to your ‘new’ old number.

2)            Go to Settings > Message > iMessage. Turn off your iMessage.

3)            Go to Settings > Facetime . Turn off you Facetime.

4)            Switch off your phone and restart it. Turn on BOTH your imessage and facetime feature. Let the activation finish.

5)            Viola! iMessage problem, solved.

I used to use O2 Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) mobile network when I first arrived in London but overtime the network’s credit seemed obsolete to me as I don’t use it often and it just went to waste as I have to top-up each month to use the data.

One thing though you have to know, once you decided to change your service provider, your old credit will not be retain into your new service provider package. I.e if you have £20 balance credit, you will lose this credit when you switched service providers.

**More on the giffgaff site! =)

That’s all from me. So, have you giffgaffed? Hehe.

HAH! So You Think It’s ‘Deleted’?

I found this article on Yahoo! Tech I think it’s interesting. It’s always fun to write about research that you can actually try out for yourself and according to Cristopher Null, it does.

Try this: Take a photo and upload it to Facebook, then after a day or so, note what the URL to the picture is (the actual photo, not the page on which the photo resides), and then delete it. Come back a month later and see if the link works. Chances are: It will.

Facebook isn’t alone here. Researchers at Cambridge University (so you know this is legit, people!) have found that nearly half of the social networking sites don’t immediately delete pictures when a user requests they be removed.

In general, photo-centric websites like Flickr were found to be better at quickly removing deleted photos upon request.

Why do ‘deleted’ photos stick around so long? The problem relates to the way data is stored on large websites: While your personal computer only keeps one copy of a file, large-scale services like Facebook rely on what are called content delivery networks to manage data and distribution.

It’s a complex system wherein data is copied to multiple intermediate devices, usually to speed up access to files when millions of people are trying to access the service simultaneously. (Yahoo! Tech is served by dozens of servers, for example.)

But because changes aren’t reflected across the CDN immediately, ghost copies of files tend to linger for days or weeks.

In the case of Facebook, the company says data may hang around until the URL in question is reused, which is usually ‘after a short period of time.’ Though obviously that time can vary considerably.

Of course, once a photo escapes from the walled garden of a social network like Facebook, the chances of deleting it permanently fall even further. Google’s caching system is remarkably efficient at archiving copies of web content, long after it’s removed from the web.

Anyone who’s ever used Google Image Search can likely tell you a story about clicking on a thumbnail image, only to find that the image has been deleted from the website in question – yet the thumbnail remains on Google for months.

And then there are services like the Wayback Machine, which copy entire websites for posterity, archiving data and pictures forever.

The lesson: Those drunken party photos you don’t want people to see? Simply don’t upload them to the web, ever, because trying to delete them after you sober up is a tough proposition.

PS: Gosh, makes me want to think twice now if I ever want to post my nudes..erk.. SNAP!

How To Boost Your Page Rank

I found this website on how you can boost you PageRank(PR) and I hope it helps. From choosing the right keywords to the leak of the Google website rate video that shows how the Google rater rates websites to be shown on the main search page of the site.

It’s fairly applicable as to when your website is constantly updated but never obtained enough unique visitors and has low PR.

But the most that caught my eyes is the article, ‘Think like a searcher’. It is interesting however yes, if you think like your a searcher for some things, you might be able to put the right keywords into your posts titles.

It also amazes me that even your title description can be the source that can boost you PR too.

So, how about it? You can find out more on boosting your PR by clicking this link.