6 - 12 Tasman Street, Bondi 2026 NSW - Location for The Block 2013 series

With The Block All Stars being promoted on TV I thought I’d check out where the next series of The Block will be. From what I can tell there will be two series in 2013. The All Stars and the regular series. It appears the regular series will be located at 6 - 12 Tasman St, Bondi in NSW.

A search of the internet shows Ray White was leasing 6 Tasman Street, Tamarama which has the same postcode as Bondi. You can see some pictures of what the property looked like here.

 

If you’re not the renovating type but looking to renovate your bathroom or kitchen you may wish to check out Master Renovators.


Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au
Low cost advertising for small and home based businesses.
You found this page so think about how JustLocal can assist your business.
Money back guarantee so you can’t lose.

Alert: Seat Selection Fee Receipt - Qantas Customer Services

I’ve received a number of malware emails today. Notably targeted at Jetstar (which I’ve documented previously) and also Qantas. The subject of the email is “Seat Selection Fee Receipt”.

Attached to the email is a zip file which contains malware. The malware file is designed to appear as a PDF but is actually an executable file. The attached zip file is named Qantas Personal Information ref 127434.zip where the number would most likely be randomly generated.

This malware is not currently detected by the majority of antivirus software.

If you receive this type of email you should delete it.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you required computer support.
Assisting businesses and residents in Doncaster, Templestowe, Eltham and the surrounding area.

Alert: Mildura located in National Park according to Apple iOS6 mapping application.

I've noticed apple maps has tried to send me via a road which if I did, would be an illegal turn and another time, through a section of road which has been blocked off for decades to my knowledge, but Mildura in the middle of a National Park has warranted a warning by police.

<<< photo missing >>>

Red pin is the location where Apple maps will lead drivers, where's the purple pin in the top right is where Mildura actually is, which is approximately 70km away.

Victorian police are concerned people using iOS6 map app could end up in a remote location on dirt roads and without water. As a result police has advised not to use Apple's mapping application.

My own experience was the Google map app on earlier versions of iOS had flaws so I would not rely solely on Apple's mapping applications.

Make sure you prepare appropriately and have appropriate travel aids as required. Sometimes low tech options such as printed maps make a good option.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you require help with your computer.
No problem too small.

Alert: Your credit card information has been changed! (PayPal)

I received a couple of emails today with the subject “Your credit card information has been changed!”. These are fake emails aimed at tricking users into thinking a charge has been made against their PayPal account. There is a link to enable to user to cancel the transaction but this link will send the user off into what I suspect is a malicious site.

You should delete these emails.

Kelvin Eldridge
Online Connections
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Servicing Doncaster, Templestowe, Eltham and the surrounding area.
No call-out fee or fixed minimum charge.

 

Alerts: Mastercard PayPass or Visa payWave cards make credit card fraud easier.

POLICE have warned "tap and go" contactless payment technology has given credit card thieves a new opportunity to steal other people's money.... Read More

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

Alert: 21 of December 2012- is the end of the Darkness!

I just received multiple emails to different email addresses with the subject "21 of December 2012- is the end of the Darkness!"

I'd suggest deleting this type of unsolicited email.

Be very careful with Christmas approaching. This time of the year is reportedly a time of increased scams and malicious emails.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you require help with your computer.
No problem too small.

Find Santa game - locations now available

The internet now makes it much easier to play games like Woolworths Find Sandta (yes Sandta not Santa) game. It is fun to play but if you just want to enter the competition you can find the location of Sandta each day at http://onlineconnectionsnews.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/find-sandta-to-win-prize-everyday.html.

Happy searching.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

Alert: Deals Extra (Enjoyment Fresh Pty Ltd) blog spamming to promote their site

Blog spamming is where others visit your site and add comments for the only purpose of adding a link to promote their own site. Today I had blog spam by Deals Extra to two of my blogs which contained the following comment.

“Your blogs and information attracts me to come back again n again.

cudo”

The link to their site removed.

If you have a blog you can often identify the blog spam because it is a generic comment and not specific to the post. Often it is a poorly worded compliment.

I recommend that business should not blog spam to promote their business on the internet. I’d also suggest that people do not use or support such businesses who use such practices and support businesses that use more acceptable businesses practices to promote their business.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au  

Alert: We Need Crusaders. How Fatima Started Islam. Amazon

I’ve received multiple emails promoting the book “How Fatima Started Islam”.  This is spam. Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t appear to care about spam. If an author is spamming to get sales then Amazon should take action. It is always possible it could be faked spam but more likely it is author initiated using an email marketing service. Often the author may not know the business they are using to market their book is using spammers to promote their book. I’ve seen this happen to Australian businesses where their web site developer uses low cost overseas countries to outsource promotional services.

Amazon should have a mechanism where spam can be reported. If they do have such a service I certainly couldn’t find it. There was information on spoofed email but nothing with product spam. Perhaps someone else knows how to report Amazon promotional spam.

This type of spam hurts all authors promoting their books on Amazon. Amazon may ignore the existence of such spam as a purchase is a purchase at the end of the day. But legitimate authors may suffer if spammers put people off using Amazon services. It certainly puts me off when they could so easily take action but don’t appear to be interested.

I’d highly encourage people to delete all spam emails promoting products and services from Amazon. If everyone deletes the emails the spam will stop. Given the volume of spam it only takes a few sales to make it worthwhile for spammers to continue.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you require computer support.

Assisting businesses and residents in Doncaster, Templestowe, Eltham and surrounding suburbs.

Alert: Woolworths Customer Satisfaction Survey, win $50

I just received a fake email with the subject “Customer Satisfaction Survey” pretending to be from Woolworths

The body of the text was the following which also included a link which appears to go to the Woolworths site but actually goes to a site registered in :

“You have been selected by Woolworths -- Supermarkets to access the Customer Satisfaction Survey and win $50.00 credit to your card. Please follow the link below and complete the form in order to receive your reward”

My concern is with the “Find Sandta” competition now running it is easy for people to think the competition and the $50 credit are related. I’ve found people being tricked in the past. For example one person just sent a parcel by UPS, when they returned to the office they had received an email from UPS. It was a coincidence and the fake email tricked him into infecting his computer. The person was an ex IT person so they were very aware and skilled in IT.

Treat all emails with suspicion and care. Your best defence against malware infection isn’t antivirus software (although that is recommended), it is you. Only you can stop the latest infections.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for computer support.
Assisting residents and businesses in Doncaster, Templestowe, Eltham and the surrounding area.

Internet Explorer 10 - The preferred Australian English spelling now available

I’m pretty excited to announce I’m now making available the preferred Australian English spelling file for Internet Explorer 10 running on Windows 8.

Internet Explorer 10 has Australian English spellchecking built in, but like Microsoft’s Office products, the spellchecker accepts thousands of secondary spelling variations such as words with “ize”, American spelt words such as “mom” and some errors. The preferred Australian English spelling file corrects these issues.

If written communication matters to you the preferred Australian English spelling file is a must have. If you’re a student, applying for jobs, or write reports or sales material, the preferred Australian English spelling file is a must have.

You can find the preferred Australian English spelling file for Internet Explorer 10 at www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
The creator of the preferred Australian English spelling dictionary.

Get $100* credit and expert help choosing keywords when you come back to AdWords

I received this email from Google offering a $100 credit to come back to AdWords. I decided to investigate. It was legitimate offer but there’s a catch. I have to spend $25 to redeem the $100. Sounds pretty good doesn’t it.

My past experience with spending a small amount of money, plus Google’s introductory offer of $75, is that I achieved no sales result. Google ended up with my money and because it is their own service, it ended up costing them nothing (I don’t advertise on third party sites so they don’t pay any third party commission). A win to Google and a loss for me.

If you’ve never tried advertising on Google and have the hours you need to invest in learning how Google Adwords works, then trying Google Adwords isn’t a bad thing. For me however I prefer to put my advertising dollar where I know I’ll get a return.

The JustLocal advertising service I run offers a money back guarantee. That beats Google’s offer.

I’d have no problems advertising on Google if it gave me a return, but so far there’s been no return and that experience has put me off.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au
Helping local businesses with low cost local advertising.
Guaranteed to work or your money back.

Click Frenzy servers appear to not be handling the load.

Not really interested in purchasing but I was interested in seeing how the technology held up.




Not a good start. In Internet Explorer 10 you receive the message "This page can't be displayed".

Hopefully things will start working. Good on them for getting the retailers going and putting some spark back into the market.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you require help with your computer.
No problem too small.

UPDATE: Just after 8:30pm and I managed to display the following. At least in the virtual crush people aren't getting hurt, frustrated, but not hurt.

 



UPDATE: 10:30pm. Click Frenzy site still unstable but here is a technique which may help others. Some of the individual companies advertising have the same specials available on their site. Check the image of Click Frenzy for a logo or name and then search for the business. For example www.oo.com.au lists their Click Frenzy specials. Doing this you can bypass the Click Frenzy site and go direct to the participating site if they're advertising the same special. Be careful however as some sites aren't promoting the Click Frenzy specials.

Here is a list of sites which I'll keep checking and adding sites in case it helps others.

www.oo.com.au
www.supercycle.com.au
www.justfitness.com.au
www.biasboating.com.au (Hard to identify specials.)
www.completehealth.com.au (Scrolling message for code "FRENZY" for 15% off.)
http://dicksmith.com.au/clickfrenzy/t/
www.addictedtoaudio.com.au/Click-Frenzy
www.annexproducts.com/pages/clickfrenzy
www.wireless1.com.au

UPDATE: 11:30pm. The Click Frenzy site now appears to have stabilised. The normal nightly peak for internet use is around 11pm and since we are now after that time we should be able to expect the Click Frenzy servers (or cloud services) should handle the load. Although tomorrow as they say, is another day.

Government spends many millions advertising on Google and then complains when Google only pays $74,176 in tax.

I read articles over time where Australian politicians complain that large multinational companies use tax minimisation strategies to reduce their tax liability in Australia.

 

For example it is estimated that Google earns around $2 billion in revenue a year from Australian advertisers and yet only paid a little over $74,000 in tax.

Google Australia declared a loss of $3.9 million last year, and paid just $74,176 in Australian tax... Read More

The politicians have a very simple solution. Redirect the millions of dollars (and if that figure of $2 billion a year is correct we could be talking about hundreds of millions spent by government and government agencies) to local businesses.

When Google wants to promote itself you can see their advertisements around everywhere and they’re not generally using the Google service. Letter drops I receive regularly in the post. Signs at Southern Cross station. A $300 million dollar deal (reportedly) with Mozilla (Firefox) to send 15-25% of internet search traffic Google’s way. If Google are using other advertising media to get their message across isn’t that perhaps what the government should also be using.

The best thing with not using Google is the government avoids click fraud which is estimated to a be a multi-billion dollar problem for Google. Click fraud is when people or organisations have a site and generate income from either their own activity of the activity of others such as clicking on ads on their site and not clicks by potential customers. I’ve been told of ordinary people doing this type of activity so you can only imagine how much activity is occurring due to organised crime.

If the government isn’t happy the solution is easy. Don’t advertise on Google. Google will quickly come around and pay a fair and reasonable amount of tax if that happens, and if they don’t, the government is putting their advertising dollar in to assist the local economy by supporting local advertising services. To me that’s a win either way.

My own tests of paid Google advertising is it didn’t yield any result. Those I’ve spoken to, with the exception one person, have had a similar experience. That person when I last heard, had suspended their Google advertising.

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

New site for The Preferred Australian English spellcheck dictionary

Recently Google changed their algorithm which significantly impacted the position of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary in the Google search results. From number one position to nowhere to be found. In essence traffic to the site dropped 80% overnight. This should be a warning for anyone who puts a lot of time and money into obtaining a position in Google. All your time, energy and money could be wasted overnight by decisions Google makes in terms of generating traffic to your site.

The preferred Australian English spellcheck dictionary is the only free service available to Australians to assist them with using the preferred Australian English spelling. Over a thousand people a week used the site and Google simply changed their algorithm making the page almost impossible to find. The original page will remain (www.justlocal.com.au/clients/oooau), but in addition, you can now find the main page at www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au.

 

The site www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au will become the main site for my dictionary work.

 

You can still find the main page if searching (“Australian Dictionary”) using Bing, where the site is positioned in first position and in Yahoo where the site is positioned second. My apologies for any inconvenience. What Google does is outside of my control.

I hope you find my work to be of assistance.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au   

MyAnswers: Free eBooks for Android, PC and Apple iOS users.

The following MyAnswers solution 2282 is now available:

Free eBooks for Android, PC and Apple users. Recently I helped a couple of customers who had purchased low cost Android tablets from Aldi. The surprise was that in order to get free eBooks from the Android Playstore, they needed to supply a credit card and they weren't happy to do that. This solution shows you how to obtain tens of thousands of free eBooks for Android tablets (and other devices) without providing your credit card details.

Click here to obtain the solution.

Click here for related solutions.

Kelvin Eldridge
MyAnswers
(An Online Connections service.)

Skype free unlimited worldwide telephone calls for a month.

Just read on the internet about Skype’s offer of free unlimited calls for a month. This offer can only be redeemed on the 15^th of November 2012. It is now after 9am on the 16^th in Melbourne Australia so if this offer is valid and applies to Australia, then you need to act quickly.

Free worldwide calls for a month... Read More

You need to subscribe to the service for one month. I’ve found these offers often encourage people to sign up and then they forget so they keep getting charged. Make sure you record the date for the end of the trial or set a reminder in your calendar a day or two before the trial is up if you wish to cancel.

In my case I have $13.02 credit. Don’t know what will happen to this credit. Hopefully I won’t lose it, but since I want to test if this offer is legitimate and works in Australia I’ll take a hit for the team. The amount normally charged for the plan for a month is $13.49.

Enjoy,

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 for help with your computer problem.
Servicing Templestowe, Doncaster, Eltham and the surrounding area.

UPDATE: Confirmation of free trial by Skype. This appears to be working. Now for a test call. Local call went through with no charge. Successful test. Note. The call quality was good but there was a delay at the start such that the person didn’t hear my introduction when I called them. I heard their response.

Alert: Telstra - You have received a new message

<<< photo missing >>>



I received three emails this morning to different email addresses all pretending to be from Telstra with the message:

"You have received a picture message from mobile number +61
To save this picture, please save attached file."

There is an attached zip file most likely some form of malware.

You should delete these emails.


Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Call 0415 910 703 if you require help with your computer.
No problem too small.

Alert: Richard Person Doggonit Obedience blog spamming

Another blog spammer today. Doggonit Obedience blog spammed my blog with a comment today. I expect overseas countries to blog spam but it is disappointing when Australian businesses resort to posting links in other sites just to promote their own.

 

Richard Person please check who you are using for internet marketing and drop them. They are blog spamming others and that is damaging your reputation. I wouldn’t use a business that has no respect for others and I suggest others not to use such businesses.

 

There are more ethical ways to market your business. Please use them.

 

Kelvin Eldridge

www.JustLocal.com.au

Dog Training Melbourne - Herding Dog Training with dog trainer Charlie Brincat

With the beautiful weather over the weekend I couldn’t help feeling an unusual and fun activity many dogs and their owners may have missed on the weekend, was the opportunity to participate in herding dog training. Herding dog trainer Charlie Brincat runs classes on weekends subject to weather and you couldn’t have had nicer weather than this weekend.

Check out Herding Dog Training videos produced by Charlie on his site www.herdingdogtraining.com.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au