Philip Nicosia

I received a fine in the post a few weeks ago of £80 (reduced to £40 if I pay within 4 weeks) for not taxing a car that I didn’t own.

I sold my Porsche to a dealer in October of last year and duly sent of my part of the registration document to the DVLA to inform them of this the very same day.

For whatever reason this was not processed and the fine was issued. I never received a reminder to tax the car and never thought any else of it. Big mistake. When I wrote back to the DVLA on receiving the fine enclosing a copy of the slip I had kept I was told I would still have to pay the fine.

Apparently it is my own fault for not making a note in my diary for 4 weeks time to contact them if I didn’t receive a letter from them thanking me for telling them I no longer owned the car.

Even if I had sent the slip by special delivery and had proof that they had received it, if for whatever reason they didn’t action it I would still be liable.

I’m starting to think the Government has these systems in place as an additional revenue stream. They can’t raise enough tax in the usual way so they dream up other ways of doing it.

Last year I was fined £100 for supposedly not getting my tax return in on time even though when I rang them they admitted I had and couldn’t understand why I had been fined.

Is it any wonder I don’t trust our Government or their departments?

In what has got to be one of the most ambitious projects ever taken on by a UK TV program, the presenters of Top Gear decided they were going to build a space shuttle based on an old Reliant Robin.

This much have cost the BBC a fortune but for entertainment value I think it was worth every penny.

If you missed this on TV chack it out below:

Part 1

Part 2

I sometimes wonder why Google bothers with their toolbar PR. It used to be that they updated it monthly but changed sometime back and now they roll out the updates every 3 months or so.

You’d think they would do it properly wouldn’t you? On one of my sites according to Google’s Webmaster tools the page listed with the highest page rank hasn’t changed in the last 3 months. This page previously had a PR of ZERO but now shows a whopping 4!.

What confuses me is that other pages on the site which didn’t have page rank before this update have now been given a PR rating of 5.

So Google, which one is correct? The toolbar rating or the Webmasters Tools?

I understand why they are rolling out at much larger intervals now but if your not going to give accurate results why bother at all? Why not do away with visible Toolbar Page rank and just show it to the webmasters in the Webmaster Tools Console.

Page rank doesn’t particularly bother me. I’d much rather have good search results with a Page Rank Zero than crap results and a Page Rank of 10. That said, I think they should either do it properly or not at all.

I came across this great site the other day that has tons of free mobile phone games - Mobilerated.com.

Normally when you see things like this your 1st thought is ‘What’s the catch’ and quite simply there isn’t one. You are given choices to download direct to your PC so you can then transfer your new mobile game to your phone with a datacable, infra-red or bluetooth connection, totally free and legit or if you want you can download it onto your phone by visiting their WAP site. Using your phone will incur a small cost by your provider for the data download but usually that’s pretty cheap.

I managed to download Sudoku for Motorola KRZR K1 and it works great.

I’m not big on playing games but for those of you who are it’s great site to find some free games.

We live in an iPod society now where for a lot of people most of their music in now in MP3 format. Making your own MP3 ringtones sounds like a good idea afterall why pay £4.50 for a 20 second clip of something you’ve already got the full version of.

To do this usually you would need software that you either have to buy or free versions such as Audacity are able to do this in conjuction with the lame encoder which you have to install seperately.

Audacity seems a bit overkill for doing this as it is a fully featured audio editor and can seem a little complex for some.

Well I’ve just found an easier way of doing this. A free online MP3 to Ringtone converter!

No software to download, no need to sign up for anything, no need to log into the site. All you need do is browse for your MP3 on your PC’s hard disk, upload it to the site, cut out the selection you would like for your ringtone and then download.

You can download the finished ringtone either to your PC or download it directly to your phone by WAP.

Couldn’t be easier.