According to a recent press release from uSwitch.com, since the start of September, several unsecured lenders have increased the rates they charge on loans for new customers. The increase in rates could see the interest paid on a typical loan of £10,000 jump by £322.There are currently just 36 personal loans available to consumers, compared with 57 this time last year (a fall of 37%), while the average loan rate has moved from 9.04% to 9.08%.Louise Bond, personal finance expert at uSwitch.com, said: “As consumers struggle to make ends meet and manage their finances, loan providers are looking to offer…

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The University of New South Wales (UNSW), which is celebrating the 60th anniversary its founding, will hold its annual alumni celebration and graduation ceremony in Beijing this year. The function is being organized to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Australian university said in a press release. The 60th Anniversary Alumni Celebration and Graduation Ceremony will take place from October 16 to 18, 2009, and will provide an opportunity to bring together an important regional network of alumni and researchers, along with senior staff of UNSW including deans and the vice-chancellor,…

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DVDFab is the most powerful and flexible DVD copying burning software With 8 copy modes you can back up any DVD to DVDR in just a few clicks DVDFab is brand new is completely rewritten is based on more than 8 years of DVD copy software development DVDFab is simply the easiest way to copy a DVD movie Just insert the movie and a blank DVD then press Start Your entire movie including menus trailers and special features is copied to a single DVD with just one click and everything happens automatically Backup your entire DVD including menus trailers and…

Did your battery finally run out of juice? It can be frustrating, trying to replace a watch battery when you don’t know how. Luckily, this simple guide will walk you through it, step-by-step. If you follow these instructions, you should have nothing to worry about.
Step 1: Place the watch, face down, on a soft surface such as a towel. Inspect the rear of the casing, and find a tab-like indentation near the rear-edge of the cover. Use a tool with a wedge-head, something dull, like a butter knife or screwdriver. Shimmy the wedge into the back of the indentation.…

Last week we wrote about Facebook’s new tagging functionality but as of this afternoon the feature finally went live. While the functionality is no different than initially described, many users are finding that this transforms the overall user experience. There are also many objects on Facebook which still can’t be tagged with applications and pages such as photos. You also can’t include tags within Facebook messages but I’d expect more robust tagging functionality to be added over the coming weeks and months.

So does this new functionality eliminate the need for Twitter? No, but it most definitely helps users to…

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This week was another busy one for Facebook who made a number of large announcements on Thursday. Facebook has been pretty consistent with rolling out relatively significant updates and announcements on a weekly basis over the past month. With Facebook beyond 275 million users, based on our internal numbers, Facebook continues the march toward 300 million. Hopefully Facebook continues pushing out weekly news stories so our job of chronicling the company’s activities can stay exciting!

Facebook for Android Launches
As we expected, Facebook for Android officially launched on Tuesday afternoon around the time of Facebook’s mobile press event. Initial reviews…

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A new report published yesterday suggests that Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days to post status updates on Facebook. The reason is that click through rates are dramatically higher on those two days. It’s not surprising considering that this is a trend found around the web in traditional publishing channels. If you do a press release, the best days have traditionally been Monday through Wednesday as those are the days that most people read the news.

What was somewhat surprising was the substantial drop off in click through starting on Thursday. Content published on Thursday receives half the clicks…

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Drilling precise grids without a CNC machine can be tough to pull off. [Ookseer] has come up with a nifty method for dilling aligned holes with a drill press. He uses a right-angle jig on a Dremel drill press with stacks of business cards as spacers. The same number of cards is added between the substrate and the jig to space each new hole evenly. This method comes in handy when drilling grids in an enclosure for speakers, temperature sensors, or for an aesthetically pleasing design.

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