Chris: Geek Guy

Quidco is a cashback site which you can use to earn rewards for shopping at your favourite sites. You can also earn cashback without spending any money, simply by signing up for free trials of services such as CreditExpert, or by switching your utility or insurance providers.

Since I joined a little over three years ago, I’ve managed to amass a cool £1300 in cashback, so it’s definitely worth doing. By way of a membership fee, the first £5 you earn per year is retained by Quidco, but after this you get 100% of the proceeds.

There are a few notable omissions such as Amazon, but most of the big retailers appear on Quidco, typically offering anything up to 10% cashback. Some of my favourites are Play.com, Tesco, Debenhams, Argos, eBay and iTunes. They’ve also started a in-store cashback programme including retailers such as Halfords and Cineworld.

Plus if you sign up via any of the links in this post, you will earn £1.25 just for joining. I’ll also get £1.25 for introducing you. Once you’ve joined you can also earn up to £2.50 for each friend you introduce.

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The official Guitar Hero iPhone game was announced today at Apple’s 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference. While there have been many similar apps – such as the Tap Tap Revenge franchise and the Rock Band app – it’s nice to see an official GH game for the iPhone, and it certainly doesn’t fail to impress.

Expecting great things given its high-profile launch, I didn’t hesitate to purchase the app. I wasn’t sure that the concept would translate well to the small screen, but the developers (Vicarious Visions) have done a great job, squeezing in both tapping and strumming mechanics, unlike many competing games. Most of the notes are played simply by tapping, but some of the notes (signified by an arrow on the screen) need to be strummed by pressing the relevant colour then dragging your finger to the edge of the screen. It’s actually quite tricky, and I like to think of myself as a fairly adept Guitar Hero player.

When the game loads, you are first asked if you want to allow it to access your iPod music library, in order to notify you when your favourite artists have tracks available. You are then offered a brief introduction to the game before diving in to a selection of tracks from artists such as Vampire Weekend, The Rolling Stones, Rise Against, Weezer, The White Stripes and Queen. The app is stable and the graphics smooth, even on my aging iPhone 3G

There’s a music store which lets you download three-track song packs for £1.19 ($1.99), with 14 artists to choose from but presumably more to follow. There’s also Facebook integration, which allows you to brag about your progress to your friends, although I haven’t explored this functionality yet.

I’m not a big iPhone gamer, so this is the first game I’ve purchased in quite a while, and I’m glad I did. Attractively priced at £1.79 ($2.99), it’s well worth checking out, whether you’re a long-term Guitar Hero fan or not.

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Here are the 25 new wallpapers included in the iPhone OS (iOS) 4.0 beta. You can download them individually below, or get the whole pack here.

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I use Microsoft Outlook at work and have never purposely used the Ctrl+Enter keyboard to send an email. However, I am a fairly fast typist, and sometimes don’t let go of the Ctrl key quick enough after pasting something into an email before pressing Enter for a new line, the result being a half-finished email getting sent prematurely.

Fortunately there’s a registry hack to disable this annoyance once and for all:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\
Office\11.0\Outlook\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes]
"CtrlEnter"="13,8"

If you’re using Word as your email editor, add this too:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\
Office\11.0\Word\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes]
"CtrlEnter"="13,8"

Presumably, if you’re using a different version of Office, you will need to replace 11.0 with the correct version (10.0 for Office XP, 12.0 for Office 2003, etc.)

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Via Reddit.

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Free Rice is a fun word game that lets you build your English vocabulary and donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme for each right answer. It might not sound like much but the site has already donated over two billion grains of rice to help stop world hunger.

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There’s an awful lot that can be accomplished using only free software, and web design is no exception. All you really need is Kompozer (to create and edit web pages), Paint.NET (to create and edit images) and FileZilla (client version – to upload pages and images to a Web server).

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Microsoft’s free Office 2007 Compatibility Pack includes the new Windows Vista fonts (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel) so that XP (also Windows 2000/2003) users can enjoy them too. The “5 Cs” are very easy on the eye and it’s nice to be able to get hold of them legally without having to shell out for a copy of Vista.

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I have some invites for Vox, a new blogging & social networking service from Six Apart. If you’d like one, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

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A quick plug for a website I’ve just finished designing – Rugby Mortgage Solutions. If you’re in or around the Rugby (UK) area and would like some free mortgage advice, give them a try!

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