New phone forum - foneforum.co.uk

foneforum.co.uk is the new forum discussing pre-dial and other call through services. The latest information on pre-dial can be seen here [requires login].

Update on pre-dial geo call through service

The pre-dial geographical call through service has had a lot of issues since its inception. The latest news is that the service has been reduced to weekday peak time and the reliability of even this is hit and miss. There is talk on the niftylist forums of a new possibly low cost service coming in the near future. Stay tuned.

Firefox 3 RC1 Released

Firefox 3 is almost here with the release of the first Release Candidate (Firefox 3 RC1). The final version should be out some time in June.

More info on pre-dial geo call through service

The following updated info on calling non-geographical numbers using the pre-dial geographical call through service is mentioned on niftylist forum.

List of geo call through numbers:
01635 578 107
01635 578 562
01793 23 82 80

Calling Non geo number availability:

	Weekends**	Evenings	Daytime
0044870*	YES	NO	NO
0044845*	YES	YES	NO
0044800*	YES	YES	YES

*You must use the full international format when calling all UK numbers.
**Midnight on Friday to midnight on Sunday [Updated 22/4/2008].

Note that as mentioned previously the numbers can be used to call some destinations abroad in addition to calling the non-geo numbers above. My previous post on these numbers can be seen here.

Calling 0800 numbers via mobile

Calling 0800 numbers via a mobile are not usually counted as part of inclusive minutes. However, the following geographical numbers can be used as a call through to 0800 numbers and will be inclusive in your minutes:

pre-dial > 0200-222-0700;
pd-dial > 0200-222-0900;
QX Dial+ > 01635-774-305
QX Dial+ > 01635-774-325

The information is taken from this post in the niftylist forum. [Update 15/4/2008 - added QX Dial 305 number found here]

Rolling coverage of reaction to interest rate decrease

thisismoney has rolling coverage of how banks and building societies are reacting to the decision on 10/04/2008 by the Bank of England to reduce interest rates by 0.25% from 5.25% to 5.0%.

RE: Problems with the geographical call through numbers...

There is some capacity issues with the geographical numbers mentioned on my previous post. This is being discussed on niftylist:

Yes, it is weekend congestion that is causing it!
The current capacity is used by 11am on weekends, and stays fully used until about 11pm.
The best times for people to call would be during weekday afternoons before 6pm, or after 10pm, as there is spare capacity at those times.
We are getting more capacity soon, and then we should be able to resolve these problems.

More call through numbers

Call through numbers that are free via inclusive minutes are scarce these days so its always good to see new ones come out. Following from this post, pre-dial have re-launched 2 call through numbers

01635-578-107  and  01635-578-562

in addition to 01793 23 82 80

See this post at nifty list forum to see how the 2 new numbers work.

0845/0870

the 01635 numbers allow you to call 0845 and the 01793 number allows 0845 and weekend 0870. Please check the forum for updates on 0845/0870 usage. You can test it yourself as well to verify.

Winsupersite

I have updated my favourite links and have removed bink.nu and replaced it with Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows aka winsupersite.

bink.nu is a news aggregator for Microsoft product stories. I rarely read bink.nu anymore as it contains too much news about products I simply am not interested in. winsupersite, however, primarily consists of reviews of core Windows products like Vista SP1, XP SP3, Vista 64bit etc as well as many standard applications. It more closely reflects my interests and is much more useful. Check out this post for example.

Rolling coverage of reaction to interest rate decrease

thisismoney has rolling coverage of how banks and building societies are reacting to the decision yesterday by the Bank of England to reduce interest rates by 0.25% from 5.50% to 5.25%.

Keep apps up-to-date with Update Star

Following from my previous post, I have discovered another free-ware application which can help keep your computer up-to-date with the latest application patches. Check out Update Star for more info.

Keep apps up-to-date with PSI

The Personal Software Inspector (PSI) application from a company called Secunia is a really useful application which can help keep your computer up-to-date with the latest application patches.

The Secunia PSI is an invaluable tool for you to use when assessing the security patch state of software installed on your system. It constantly monitors your system for insecure software installations, notifies you when an insecure application is installed, and even provides you with detailed instructions for updating the application when available.

The application version is RC1 0.9.0.0, so not fully released yet, but should be stable enough for most people.