Until now, cashback web sites have been entirely online affairs. To qualify, you go to the cashback web site, and then click through a referral link to an online retailer and make a purchase. The cashback site then pays you the referral commission generated from that purchase, rather than keeping it for itself.
The ClickSnap app takes this offline, and into real-world bricks and mortar shops. Once you have downloaded the app to your phone and signed in to your Quidco account, it will show you a list of products that have cashback offers available. This can be filtered by store, as not every offer is available everywhere.
The clever bit happens once you have bought the products. Open the ClickSnap app, and then tap the camera button in the top right-hand corner. To prove that you have bought the products, you use your phone’s camera to take photos of the receipt, showing your purchases. The app will allow you to take multiple shots and stitch them together if it has been a particularly large shop.
Once submitted, it usually takes a couple of days for the cashback to appear in your Quidco account. So far, I’ve used it for four purchases, and received cashback for three of them. You can chase up missing cashback after 14 days if you haven’t received it, but it can never be guaranteed that you will get it. Bear this in mind if you buy something just for the potential money back.
Most of the deals in ClickSnap give you money off the product – usually 20-40 pence – but one actually gave you the full cost back as a rebate. So there’s a pack of Hartley’s Raspberry Jelly in our cupboard that effectively cost me nothing, rather than 44p. Some offers require you to buy combinations of products, such as the Coca-Cola and Walls sausages deal in the screenshot. And not all offers are available at all retailers – again, in the screenshot, one of the deals is only redeemable at Sainsbury’s and another at Asda. There is also a limit of how many times you can redeem the offer – usually three or four times.
You will also find that most of the items that are eligible for cashback are branded items. I tend to buy own-brands and usually they’re cheaper than the branded items, even after cashback.
Because of the small amounts, this is unlikely to save you big bucks, but the potential savings may add up over time. And it may make some premium brands more affordable.
ClickSnap is free, and is available on Android and iOS. A Quidco account is required to use it.
I’ve recently volunteered to part of the INTERVAL study, which will look into how frequently blood donors can give blood.
At present, the guidelines are very rigid: men can give every twelve weeks and women can give every sixteen weeks. What the interval study aims to do is allow some people to donate more frequently, whilst monitoring samples of blood taken at the donation. The hope is that, in future, regular donors will be able to give blood more often than at present, boosting blood stocks.
The NHS Blood Service is already facing challenges. The recent heatwave in the UK has led to fewer people giving blood and current stocks of O- and B- blood groups are critically low (less than four days’ worth). The UK also has an ageing population with people living longer, and more blood will be needed to support the very young and very old who can’t donate themselves. And despite recent drives to recruit more donors, only around 4% of people give blood.
Some other EU countries already allow people to donate more frequently. In Austria, it’s eight for men and ten for women. However, there may be factors that affect how regularly individual people can donate, which is why samples will be taken at each donation. This may mean that, following the outcomes of the study, some people will be able to donate more frequently than others. What is most interesting about the study is its size: in total, 50,000 regular donors are needed – 25,000 men and 25,000 women.
I’ll admit that it took me until last year to give my first pint of blood, but I’ve donated twice since then, and agreed to be part of the interval study. Of course, with my luck being as it is, I’m in the control group and can therefore still only give blood every twelve weeks. But some men will be selected to give every ten weeks or even every eight weeks. Women will be able to donate every sixteen weeks (the control group), fourteen or twelve weeks.
There are a few caveats with the interval study. Firstly, you will have to, as far as possible, keep to the regular donation cycle that you have been placed onto with minimal variations. Secondly, the study is for two years, so you will need to sustain the regular donations for this period. Finally, the donations you make will need to be at one of the 24 dedicated blood centres in England; thankfully there’s one in Bradford which is within walking distance from work. But my friends in York would have to go to Leeds, for example.
Hopefully the results of the interval study will confirm that it is safe for people to donate more frequently. Until such a time comes when we can safely and efficiently manufacture replacement blood, our hospitals are reliant on a regular supply of blood from donors. Being able to make optimal use of the small minority who do give blood regularly will benefit so many more patients in urgent need of a transfusion.
I’ve got my hands on a brand new BT Home Hub 4. This is the latest update to BT’s own-brand wireless router that it provides to its broadband customers. We’ve been with BT broadband since we moved to Sowerby Bridge in November 2010, and, apart from one broken promise regarding an activation date for the flat move we’ve had no problems.
During this time we’ve had an older model – the BT Home Hub 2 (model B), which is fine – but this newer model is better. Namely it supports dual-channel Wifi, so as well as using the 2.4 GHz channel, it supports the 5 GHz channel. Devices which can use the 5 GHz channel can therefore run at faster speeds – theoretically 300 Mbps is possible.
Unboxing
I’ve posted a few unboxing photos on Flickr. The most interesting thing about the box is that it is designed to fit through a letterbox – therefore, customers won’t have to wait around for a delivery or have to retrieve packages from their local sorting office a day later. It didn’t fit through our letterbox, but that’s because we live in a flat and ours is tiny – I imagine most people with a proper letterbox will be fine.
Inside the box, the Home Hub is in one compartment, and the cables and manuals are in the other. You get a Cat5e ethernet cable, a modem cable, microfilter, and a USB wifi dongle. The dongle enables dual-band Wifi on computers which may not otherwise have it, although unfortunately it’s only compatible with Windows Vista, 7 and 8. The manuals are brief, and just cover what you need to set it up and some troubleshooting.
The BT Home Hub 4
Physically the BT Home Hub 4 is quite small – it’s wide, but shorter and thinner than the BT Home Hub 2, on the left in the picture. It also looks nice, which is what you want from a device that is most likely in your front room, and carries on the good design that BT have had in its routers. It’s also very light.
The back of the router has an RJ11 socket for the modem cable, and five RJ45 sockets. One of these supports gigabit ethernet, and three others support standard 100 Mbps 100BaseTX ethernet. The fifth is a WAN socket for BT Infinity customers – unfortunately BT haven’t upgraded our exchange for fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) so we have to use standard ADSL. There’s also a USB port, for which there’s no documentation but apparently you can connect a printer or hard drive to it and it will be shared across the network. And finally, unlike our current model, the BT Home Hub 4 has an on/off switch, so there’s no need to pull the cable out.
On the top, there’s a reset button, and a button to use WPS – Wifi Protected Setup. This allows compatible devices to automatically configure themselves without needing a password, and indeed the USB wifi dongle provided also supports WPS. And there’s a holder for the card with your SSID, default wireless key and admin password, which is handy.
Once everything is plugged in, it’s time to turn it on. There’s a pleasant single light at the front, which initially glows green, then orange whilst starting up, and then blue when it’s ready to go. If there’s a problem, then some red or orange icons appear in the silver strip below. This is different to the BT Home Hub 2 where there were five icons that were illuminated all of the time.
Connecting for the first time
The first time a device connects, the web browser is redirected to a setup screen. By default, this happens with every new device, although thankfully a mobile-optimised version is available for smartphones. You can turn this off later so that new devices connect straightaway. The main purpose of this is to ask whether you want to install parental control software, as current UK guidelines for ISPs seemingly require.
The admin panel
Logging into the admin panel for the first time gave me an error: ‘Sessions Number – no more than 100 sessions at a time are allowed. Please wait until open sessions expire.‘ Clicking ‘Retry’ or any of the options didn’t make any difference. This problem affects other BT Home Hubs, but thankfully it’s easily solved by doing the usual thing of turning it off, and then turning it back on again.
The admin panel on the BT Home Hub 4 is largely unchanged from previous models. Whilst BT have dramatically redesigned the outside, the admin panel uses the same basic design as before, but with a few more advanced settings to go with the extra features. However, the default settings are pretty good for everyone so there’s no real need to change them. OpenDNS users may be disappointed that it still isn’t possible to change the default DNS servers on the BT Home Hub 4.
Speed
The device reported that it had managed to connect at a very reasonable 23.15 Mbps downstream – faster than the BT Home Hub 2 which managed around 17 Mbps. Upstream speeds are low but this is to be expected on a consumer-grade ADSL connection. We’re fortunate that we live very close to our exchange – we’re only around 200-300 metres away.
And thankfully the actual speeds aren’t far off – here’s a link to my SpeedTest.net result. Essentially 20 Mbps, which is a notable improvement, and not far off the limits of ADSL technology. I also pinged www.google.com 20 times and the average round trip time was 23ms; the longest was 25ms so it’s pretty consistent.
As for Wifi speeds, they seem fine. We have five Wi-fi devices in our flat – my Mac Mini, iPhone 5, iPad, Christine’s Acer laptop and Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone. My iPhone 5 and iPad both support the 5 GHz channel, but the others don’t – which in the case of the Galaxy S3 is a little odd in my opinion. We briefly tried the USB Wifi dongle on Christine’s laptop but it didn’t seem to like it – I may need to do some further investigations. My iPad still had a good signal at the furthest point away from the router in our flat, which is a distance of around 20 metres with several walls in the way.
One minor disappointment, from a geek perspective, is that the BT Home Hub 4 doesn’t appear to support IPv6, either on the home network or on the internet.
Summary
Overall I like the new unit. It’s smaller size is nice, and it looks good. Most importantly, it seems to perform well, with good speeds both on the internet and the home network. New BT Broadband customers will get the BT Home Hub 4 as standard, and existing customers can currently upgrade for £35, plus an extra £9 for the USB Wifi dongle.
My unit was given to me for free by a PR company acting on behalf of BT, in return for writing this review. However, these are my honest opinions, and I would recommend the upgrade if you need faster or more reliable Wifi speeds.
Lactose intolerance is when your body can’t produce enough lactase, which is an enzyme that breaks down lactose into simpler, more absorbable sugars. Lactose is found in cows milk, and therefore cream, butter, ice cream, yoghurt and anything else containing milk.
Lactose intolerance is not an allergy; this means most sufferers can consume small amounts of products containing lactose without problems, and even when they do consume large amounts it usually isn’t a medical emergency like with nuts. But it can lead to some unpleasant symptoms.
I’ve always had problems with consuming large quantities of milk, and when I was a toddler I could only have goats milk, as regular cows milk didn’t agree with me. As I grew older it didn’t seem to be too much of a problem, but over the past few years, the symptoms of lactose intolerance have become more noticeable. I’ve frequently been quite bloated after meals, and unsavoury things would make their way out of my rear end at regular intervals.
And then we went to Paris for our honeymoon. Whilst we were there, my symptoms were much milder, and I eventually deduced why. On a morning, rather than having cereal with milk, I was having croissants instead.
A few weeks after we returned (and after having seen my symptoms return), I switched to LactoFree milk. This is regular cows milk which has been treated to remove the lactose, but keep everything else. I also cut out yoghurts from my lunch (although only after buying a large multipack). Since then, I haven’t had any of the earlier problems.
This should be a happy ending, but unfortunately it isn’t. Because so many things have milk or dairy products in them. I am now beginning to understand how hard it is to be a vegan (even though I still eat meat). The LactoFree milk is okay – it tastes like regular cows milk and doesn’t cost much more, although it is imported from Denmark. LactoFree cheese is, however, disappointing – rubbery, and largely flavourless, reminding me of the ‘cheese’ I used to get as part of my school dinners in the early 1990s. There are other products in the range but these aren’t stocked in my local small town supermarket, sadly.
Some sufferers of lactose intolerance can manage to have yoghurt – this is because yoghurt is a fermented dairy product, and so the lactose is already partly broken down. Sadly, as mentioned before, this isn’t the case with me, and so I now have to eat soya-based equivalents. Similarly, some people can have goat or sheep milk based products, others can’t.
On the odd occasion when I drink coffee, I have to ask for soya milk. I don’t particularly like soya milk as I find it very sweet when compared to cows milk, but it’s better than feeling awful later on. Sadly Starbucks charge an extra 35p for soya milk in their drinks; I’m not sure about Costa Coffee or Caffè Nero and whether they charge extra too.
If you’re reading this and think that you too may have lactose intolerance, then by all means try cutting out diary products from your diet, but please also make an appointment to see your GP to discuss it. Don’t self-diagnose; your GP may refer you to have a blood or breath test to confirm. Mine didn’t, but this was because I’d already cut back on dairy products and we agreed that it probably wasn’t necessary. However, some of the symptoms of lactose intolerance appear to be the same as some more serious diseases such as bowel cancer, so it’s really important that you see your GP just in case. It also means that, if you are lactose intolerant, then it’s on your medical record. Some drugs contain small amounts of lactose in them, for example. And if your symptoms are serious, then your GP may need to refer you to a dietician who can devise a suitable diet for you to eat.
There isn’t a cure for lactose intolerance. As well as avoiding dairy, it is possible to take lactase substitutes, which essentially act like lactase to break down lactose in your stomach. You add them to your food before eating. They’re available from some health food shops, and on prescription in some circumstances.
