Pinterest Has Stopped Being Really, Really Picky

August 12th, 2012Curious Stuff, Tech News No Comments

When we signed up to Pinterest, it was a couple of months before the overlords accepted our request to join. We sent fruit baskets and let them whip our children, and still they made us wait wordlessly for ages!

But it seems our cries (and perhaps those of all the children) have finally been heard. Pinterest has agreed to open its pretty little hipster floodgates and let anyone begin to pin. Of course, they realise this may invite uncool people to the party, but when you’ve gone from nothing to being the no.3 social networking site in the world in less than two years, you can afford to let your guard down a little!

Our Money4Machines Pinterest account is a great way for us to share cool tech images, weird stuff and interesting visuals that are very much of the ‘misc’ tag.  But we’re looking forward to seeing a suspected influx of new users too. One of the main problems faced by Pinterest is quite simply how to make money without alienating their users. They’re still a bit hazy on the financial plan (as in, there isn’t one)

If you want to sell consoles and iPods and old Kindles and tablets and stuff, head over to our quotes page now. If you want to read geek humour and learn a bit about what it’s like to be in the Money4Machines office, go here!

Goodbye and thanks for all the Hotmail

August 1st, 2012Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News, Tech-y Life Advice No Comments

Our resident SEO girl has had the same hotmail.com password since the beginning of time (i.e. when she first went online in about 1997) Pretty much everyone in our office started their online life with a hotmail.com account!

But our buddies over at Microsoft have decided to abandon our favourite free webmail brand in favour of Outlook.com- the humanity! The idea is to revamp the service to incorporate Skype and help us declutter our inboxes (which frankly feels like when our mothers leave clothes organisers in our bedrooms ‘to help’ – hey, mum, if I want to organise my dirty and clean clothing by crispiness, I will!)

The BBC reported that a huge part of the move is to launch an attack on rival Gmail.com, which is currently more popular with free webmail users. The idea is to win over Gmail.com users with a sleek new-but-familiar service. The revamped service will connect to Twitter , LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Skype.

Their new promotional garb is full of the usual ‘user experience greatly enhanced by a feed of friend and family photo straight from their smartphones blah blah blah’ but we reckon it’ll be like all new software and technology – old Kindle to iPod, old iPad to Canon 350D camera – it will be what you make of it, and with enough effort you can make a mess of anything!

But if you’re not up for the move just yet, Microsoft say hotmail.com users can stick with the original system… for now *ominous music* Those who make the move can keep their @hotmail, @msn or @live.com email address endings, but can also add @outlook.com.

Want a shiny new device to browse the new Microsoft system on? Why not sell laptops and whatever else you’ve got lying around to fund an upgrade? Our sell for cash UK rates are really quite splendid!

4 Tips for Better Playlist Management (Including Guilty Secrets!)

June 29th, 2012Uncategorized No Comments

Keeping on tops of playlists is like an Olympic sport here in the Money4Machines office! We can pretty much take or leave Facebook, but our world would honestly come crashing down if our meticulously organised, historically accurate digitised music collections were somehow stolen by fairies or gobbled by a virus!
Keeping our digital music libraries in tip top shape is all about keeping on top of the little things. So, while we run data erase software on your old Kindles and help you sell your iPad, here are some super tips we reckon can help keep your music library in proper shape!

1. Pay attention to genres
There are about a dozen default genres on iTunes, and bothering to use them is basically like creating twelve playlists. It’s also a superb way to create more playlists without doing that thing where you let your eyes scan all songs hoping to catch a good one.

2. Rate songs
Everyone has favourite songs. Our social medial girl’s favourite song is “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World. Our marketing queen is a Foo Fighters Fanatic (trust me, she deserves the capital ‘F’!) and has rated every song they’ve ever released to make here playlist creations even easier. And remember that this is YOUR collection, so rate stuff honestly and give your guilty pleasures the recognition they deserve – who says Enrique Iglesias can’t be the soundtrack to your life?!

3. Tag songs
Using the ‘Grouping’ tool on iTunes, you can basically tag songs as you upload them to form a kind of smart playlist. Let’s say there are a bunch of songs that remind you of Glastonbury ’94; you can tag individual songs with something like ‘glasto94’ But here’s where it gets really clever, you can add more than one tag to a song, so your tags for one song could look something like ‘glasto94. Summer. Guilty pleasure. Feelgood’ It saves you from having a thousand playlists to scroll through.

4. Never, ever, ever add unnamed files!
Ok, so adding tags, genres and correct titles might eat into your lazy evening viewing by about seven minutes, but if you want to get the most out of your iPod, you need to put the minutes into not ever, ever, ever, EVER adding files without all the appropriate admin details!

Guy Shoots New iPad to Death. For Some Reason.

March 20th, 2012Curious Stuff No Comments

We buy laptops, iPods, old Kindles, yada yada yada. We buy them, we refurbish them and we give them a happy second life. We also occasionally drop things. Introducing, someone’s old iPad… smashed to pieces on the floor!

Taking a little creative destructive force to technology is nothing new – remember the scene in “Office Space” where they smash up the photocopier with baseball bats? – but today’s mishap  got us thinking about all the bizarre, ingenious ways folks have a) accidentally wrecked their Xbox 360s and iPhones, and b) deliberately wrecked their Xbox 360s and iPhones!

A bunch of our favourite print media buds carried a brilliant story in today’s paper; a gun-loving guy called Richard Ryan decided the best way to test his New iPad was to shoot it. Not with sponges or even ping pong balls, with real bullets making their merry little way out of a Tech Assassin HK53 assault rifle covering 2460.6ft/second.

You can watch the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L3sOweGk30

We love how he starts the video with a spec rundown of the New iPad, before shooting the mother-loving proverbial out of it to a soundtrack of the kind of metal that reminds us of The Good Old Days, when we used to drink coffee and play Codename Eagle all night.

A cursive bit of internet research turned up heaps of super ways to destroy your old iPad – blender, drop test, drop kick, turn it into a firebomb, let cows run over it, throw from a moving vehicle, bungee, let the dog play with it, etc. But we reckon you’re better off selling old iPads and devices to us. We only destroy things by accident when Office Cat gets under our feet!

Last Night a GPS Saved My Life

March 19th, 2012Curious Stuff, Eco Living No Comments

(It didn’t really… but we love a witty title!)

Stumbling about in the dark using your old iPad1 as a torch, it might occur to you that relying on finding Wi-Fi on Rannoch Moor was, perhaps, a rather regrettable assumption. There are two things our outdoors-y M4M team members love – exploring the grime of the U.K’s landscape by hook or by crook, and blending the latest tech wizardry with good old fashioned orienteering skills.

We buy laptops and iPods, old Kindles and old iPads; we also love to indulge the odd GPS device sale! GPS devices essentially do your map reading for you – you can buy superb apps for your smartphone or tablet that basically do the job – calculating routes, plotting your exact location etc. Hurray! Nothing can possibly go wrong as we prance across Dartmoor, GPS in hand, there’s an OS map in the bag but – meh – who cares when we have super awesome GPS guidance!

Maybe we’ve become a little theatrical. Sorry about the prancing.

The point is that technology, whilst awesome, is best not relied upon 100% if there’s a practical backup, e.g. being able to read the damn map by taking a compass bearing.

"Here be dragons.......we that doesn't bode well."

Rather than go into detail about how to read a map using a compass, we recommend this link http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/media/news/2008/feb/mapreadingpodcast.html The Ordnance Survey are the Apple of the global mapping community; folks from other countries literally have dreams about maps as clear as our venerable OS prints. How do we know this? Some of our team worked for the OS during their student years and could map read your socks off from inside your hiking boots!

The Shrinking World of Memory Storage

March 17th, 2012Electronics Industry Chatter, Tech News No Comments

One of our team recently traded in her 1st gen iPod Classic for a shiny new 8GB iPod Nano; she refers to the new Nano as “too small to be taken seriously” So far she’s left it at the gym, in the car, at our favourite post-work drinking hole and very nearly in the pocket of her skinnies on laundry day! Our point being that technology that relies heavily on memory capacity is getting small – super small!

Flash Memory
We want our flash devices to do two things – transfer data fast and be effective at cross-platform application. It’s what we hate most about our old iPads – no USB or SD slots! Plug in and use with any device is the point of our favourite flash devices.
A key development is going to be in replacing silicon with atom-thin pure carbon layers of graphene. In the most reductive definition possible, this basically means we can store more data because the graphene layers remain stable at much smaller sizes than silicon. Samsung are already pioneering the technique in the hope it’ll enable memory storage to reach much smaller physical size to maximum capacity ratios.

IBM’s Atom Experiment
We buy laptops and desktop PCs from pretty much every brand. Did you know we can also offer great deals on bulk technology like office computer systems, business smartphones and tablets? IBM are heroes of the business tech world, and their latest research proves their worth even more than their awesome 1980s TV adverts (check them out on Youtube for some brilliant nostalgia!)
Researchers at IBM have successfully stored 1 BIT of data on just 12 atoms by aligning their magnetic properties so the 1 group and 0 group don’t interfere with each other. Just to set that in perspective; currently 1 BIT of data can be stored on 1 MILLION atoms! The implications of their latest bit of wizardry are potentially game changing in every sector of technology.

"Do not get wet by leaving in jeans pocket on laundry day (like you did with my predecessor!)"


Still, for those absentminded amongst us, we reckon some things are best left just big enough to instinctively notice when they’re not in your pocket!

Commute and Bear It

March 14th, 2012Curious Stuff, Device Reviews, Tech News No Comments

"It's just a ride.... every....single....day!"

Green travel is big with us, but since we can’t all drive in the Prius car-share, cycle or jog like a smug fit person, some of us have to… commute! Nooooo! The Man may have got his claws into you years ago, but we reckon there are plenty of ways to ease up on the commute stress, so here are some of our favourite apps and gadgets. After all, it’s just a ride!
• Decent wireless headphones. We love Zumreed, but that’s mostly because they come in awesome colours. Maybe the top pick is AKG’s K450 headphones – comfy, super bass, fold away and a great comm. kit for calls.
• Amazon’s Kindle. There are some paperback devotees in the office, and even they’ve been turned by how the Kindle adds reading pleasure to their commute – lightweight, 3G optional and space for hundreds and hundreds of books (or the Twilight series, which we didn’t feel comfortable including as “books”!)
• Smart touch gloves. These are more of a winter thing; perfect for playing furious Fruit Ninja on your iPhone under the gaze of cold, jealous station orcs, whoops, we mean commuters.
• Spotify. Love it for giving that old iPad a musical redress on the go when you just NEED a fix of Bittersweet Symphony to get through the commuting crowds (although he’s quite pushy in that video, so maybe not!)
• Any puzzle game. Nottingham Trent University researchers found that the most common effective coping method (aside from a sick day) is cognitive distraction, e.g. puzzles, games, reading etc.
You can sell consoles for cash, use your old iPad to fund an upgrade or finally put that spare iPod to good use. Just remember not to bite people on the commute, not matter how abruptly they stop right in front of you on a crowded pavement!

4 Android Alternatives to the New iPad

March 9th, 2012Device Reviews, Tech News No Comments

We’ve already got lots of iPod trade ins and folks who want to sell iPad 2s heading our way to make some dough for their New iPad upgrade. But we know not everyone is sitting round the Apple bonfire reading the lyrics to Kumbayah off their retina screen! Here are four of our favourite staff-recommended Android tablet alternatives to the New iPad!

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Habitually ranks high on tech review sites thanks to its lightweight, slim design and superb Honeycomb 3.1 OS capabilities. Fast, easy to use (and isn’t that kind of the point of tablets!), front and rear camera, and basically excellent at everything you want from a tablet.

Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition

Stuff magazine named this tablet their issue test winner back in Feb 2012 for the best all-round tablet performance. Super thin and strong, the Xoom is probably the best option in terms of finding a screen size midpoint between a full-size tablet and a smartphone. No 3G or SD card though – bad Motorola!

Huawei Mediapad

1280 x 800 pixels crammed into a 7” tablet screen = superb on-the-go fun with no frills. Our favourite of the small tablets, especially if the xbox 360 is at home and we’re on a train!

Sony Tablet S

First and only gripe – no 3G! With the New iPad carrying 4G capabilities, it’s tough to see why investing in a tablet without 3G is worth it. That said, we still reckon this is one of the best, most productive and high performing tablets on the market. If you want a tablet to get work done, boast of a great gaming experience and basically have as much dexterity as possible in terms of what your tablet can do, it’s a great pick!

We buy iPods, old Kindles, tablets and even sat navs, so head over to our quotes page and see if you could get paid, then upgrade!