Category: Hints & tips

Importing items from China via Ebay and other online stores – customs duty, VAT and handling charges

Update Jan 1 2021: ***The information below may no longer apply. There have been a number of changes to the Customs Duty & VAT regimes following the end of transitional arrangements following the UK’s departure from the EU. Unfortunately Post…

How to improve signals on your mobile cell phone

The way you use your mobile phone can makes quite a difference when you are in a weak signal area or indoors. Some time ago we discovered you could improve the received signal level on a Nexus 4 phone simply…

How to enable IBM Trusteer Rapport in Firefox Nitro (Firefox 57)

IBM’s Trusteer Rapport banking security plug-in doesn’t currently seem to work with the latest version of Firefox. Fortunately there is a way to manually enable it: Ensure you have the latest version of Trusteer product installed. You may need to…

How to use an external keyboard with your Acer Google Nexus 7 tablet

The Google Nexus 7 is a great mid-sized tablet. It isn’t over heavy and performance is snappy. The screen is large enough for the Nexus 7 to be used for taking notes, say in a lecture or meeting. You can use the on-screen…

HTC Desire secret menu

The HTC Desire has a secret menu, which can be accessed by entering a special code as if you were dialling a phone number. The menu shows a wealth of interesting information including IMEI, phone number, usage statistics, wifi information, accurate battery voltage and…

Spotify stopped working? – how to fix the problem

Due to a foul-up by securty firm Symantec, users of Norton anti-virus products found that Spotify had mysteriously stopped working today. The reason was that the security product had falsely identified the program – Spotify.exe – as a Trojan Horse…

How to fix the Windows XP speech recognition SAPISVR crash problem

Got the message “SAPISVR 5 has encountered a problem and needs to close” and found that neither Windows speech recognition nor your Office programs will work? The problem is caused by your speech recognition user profile having become corrupt. You…

How to fix an unstable Thomson DTi6300 Top Up TV recorder

The Thomson DTi6300 PVR can become slow and unresponsive if the available free disk space falls below 15%. This easy to fix by deleting a few programmes. Sometimes however these boxes can get their disks in a twist, which can result…

How to install RealPlayer in Ubuntu

Real Player is a high quality media player, which is freely available for Linux operating systems. It isn’t included in Linux packages because it is not a fully open source program. There are .rpm and .deb packages available for RedHat…