With the news that Royal Mail wants to end Saturday delivery, I got to thinking about how I'd try to innovate a way out of the mess they're in. The facts are that the critical mass of letter delivery has gone. It isn't coming back. Yes, I know your grandad likes receiving his bank statements in the post, and it's occasionally nice to receive a postcard from your mum when she's on holiday, but email and IM have comprehensively won. Sure, vinyl sales are up, but stamp collectors aren't going to …
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This is mostly written so I can copy-and-paste it on to forums where people keep getting this basic information wrong. If you've ever moved house, you'll know how annoying it is to receive mail for the previous occupants. When those letters have a big red BAILIFFS ARE COMING warning on them - it is especially distressing. The relevant section of the law is: A person commits an offence if, intending to act to a person’s detriment and without reasonable excuse, he opens a postal packet which h…
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For the last few years, I've been trying to opt out of having any postal mail sent to me. Wherever a company offers online billing - I sign up in a flash. My insurance company are now bored of me saying "rather than posting the policy - can you email it to me instead?" I've opted-out of receiving unaddressed mail and I've signed up to stop junk mail. Mostly, I'm pleased to say, it has worked. The only things dropping through my letterbox are small packages from Amazon, the occasional…
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What Are Twitter Favourites? Twitter allows you to mark certain posts as favourites. You may do this for a number of reasons - because you thought it was funny or interesting, because you want to reply to it later, or as a general bookmark feature They're Private, Right? Wrong. You can see any Twitter user's favourites - even if they've protected their tweets. You can't see the tweets of protected users. Here are my favourites http://twitter.com/edent/favorites You can also see who has m…
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VoteUK is no more. In order to precisely show you where your electoral registration office was, I needed to take its postcode and covert it to latitude and longitude. That's the service Ernest Marples provided. A few days ago, the Post Office - in their infinite wisdom - set their legal dogs on those running Ernest Marples. The Post Office charges for the file that they generated which converts post codes to location. It can cost anywhere from £1,000 to £4,000 per year to get accurate data…
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