For about nine years now I have owned a black American freezer – a Maytag.

It has pride of place in my kitchen; in fact I designed my kitchen around it. I have not regretted the decision, especially when entertaining for dinner parties and celebrations. For parties, having easy and constant access to ice and pure water is an invaluable asset, as well as all the food storage it provides.

On my site –http:// www.best-freezer.co.uk – you will find an amazing choice of freezers, including American and American style ones in a glorious range of colours.

In Britain we spent more than £1 billion last year on ices, from a Rocket or 99 from the Mr. Whippy van stationed on the seafront to tubs of luxurious bourbon vanilla that round off a meal at the smartest dinner table. Add to that the craze for frozen yoghurt and you can rightly say we are in the grip of a second ice age. Heston Blumenthal is famous for his egg and bacon ice cream, of course, but it’s safe to say that as a nation we prefer our ices to be sweet and comforting rather than savoury and adventurous. Within that range though there is a whole spectrum of variety, from light refreshing sorbets and granitas to indulgent ice creams rich with eggs and double cream.

Ice lollies are the simplest style; a combination of water, sugar and flavourings frozen into a solid block. Of course, using pure orange, or apple juice, say, is a very healthy alternative.

If you have been wise enough to buy summer fruit when it is at its cheapest and sweetest you can store it in the freezer for use throughout the year for ice lollies, ice cream or a variety of other recipes.

You will find a wide range of recipe books on Amazon.  Some can even be downloaded to your kindle. What could be easier!

For windows users it’s no problem to use the free Nokia connectivity software.  But because I only use Ubuntu I can’t use their software so I need another solution.

The answer is the linux tool Wvdial which allows your computer to make a modem connection.  All I had to do was configure the config file at /etc/wvdial.conf as follows:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ,”IP” “INTERNET”
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Password = A
Username = B

Then to use it I just plug my mobile in with the USB cable I got with the phone and run:


sudo wvdial


On iPlus I can by a monthly allowance of 100MB of data for 8 zloty which I think is good value and is more than enough data for me to check email and surf the net.

I considered working out the country based on which languages the visitor’s browser is happy to accept, but decided I wanted something more accurate than that.

In the end I decided to use an IP-based solution and so downloaded the CSV file from http://software77.net/geo-ip/ which is a great tool to be able to quickly map countries to IP addresses.

Then I created a table in MySQL to hold this data:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `ipLocation`;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ipLocation` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`ipFrom` int(11) NOT NULL,
`ipTo` int(11) NOT NULL,
`reg` varchar(50) null,
`assigned` int(11) NULL,
`countryCode` char(2) NULL,
`countryAbbr` varchar(5) NULL,
`countryName` varchar(50) NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Then from the command line I ran the following snippet to import the CSV data into the table.  Note that I am using user root with no password (yeah naughty I know, but it’s only my dev box).  You will also need to change the path location from the one shown:

mysqlimport -uroot bip "/home/ben/ipLocation.csv" --columns=ipFrom,ipTo,reg,assigned,countryCode,countryAbbr,countryName --default-character-set=utf8 --fields-terminated-by=, --fields-enclosed-by=\" --lines-terminated-by="\n" --local --delete

I personally don’t care about some of the columns such as when the IP address was assigned, or the countries’ 3 letter abbrevation codes so I dropped them:


ALTER TABLE `ipLocation`
DROP `assigned`,
DROP `reg`,
DROP `countryAbbr`;


Finally to speed up query access time I indexed the ipFrom and ipTo fields:


ALTER TABLE `ipLocation`
ADD INDEX ( `ipFrom` ),
ADD INDEX ( `ipTo` );


Now your website can grap the REMOTE_ADDR header from the webserver, convert it to a long number with something like this:


$blocks = explode('.', $ip);
if(count($blocks)!=4) return 0;
return ($blocks[0] * 16777216) + ($blocks[1]*65536) + ($blocks[2]*256) + ($blocks[3]);


and then look up the country code with a query like this:

SELECT countryCode FROM ipLocation WHERE ipAddress_as_long BETWEEN ipFrom And ipTo

And now you have a free, quick, easy and fairly reliable way to work out the visitor’s country. For more accuracy you should update the table with fresh data periodically.

Buy Dishwashers lists appliances from every major UK supplier such as Comet, Currys and Dixons.  We also stock from online retailers such as Amazon and Tribal UK, plus specialist suppliers like Kitchen Science, Appliance Deals and Appliances Direct.

With 18 stores stocking 34 brands, Buy Dishwashers is the best place to find the best deal on the best dishwashers.

At the time of writing the  top five searches are:

• Integrated Dishwasher
• Slimline Dishwasher
• Silver Dishwasher
• Bosch Dishwasher
• Smeg Dishwasher

This discount includes the Delonghi Bar and Bosch TAS4011 best sellers.

Compare prices on these and all other coffee makers at Best Coffee Machines UK

Hotpoint WMD960P – Tribal UK’s price today is £317 which is a fiver cheaper than the next cheapest (Electrical123.com) and &pound140 cheaper than Littlewoods!

Hotpoint WMD960G – £319 at Tribal UK which is £20 cheaper than anybody else and a massive £160 cheaper than Littlewoods.

Hotpoint AQ9D69IV – £399 at Tribal UK which is just a silly price.  The only other two stores who are stocking this digital washing machine are charging £579 (Bennetts) and £599 (Currys).

Buy Washing Machines updates its stock list twice a day so you always have the latest prices. Find the cheapest washing machine appliance deals online.

Buy Washing Machines currently lists 1000 washing machines from 14 suppliers such as:

• Coment
• Currys
• Dixons
• John Lewis
• Kitchen Science
• Laskys
• Littlewoods

The stock list has 40 different manufacturers including top brands such as

• AEG
• Baumatic
• Bosch
• Electrolux
• Hoover
• Hotpoint
• LG
• Miele
• Samsung
• Siemens
• Whirlpool
• Zanussi

All stock information including prices and availablity is  updated everyday to help the user  find the best deal on washing machine appliances.

Site visitors can compare prices on front load washing machines, top load washing machines and integrated washer appliances.

The site has an intelligent search page, a ‘most popular’ page to track the 10 most popular washers in real time plus contact and links pages.

• Best Cross Trainers
• Best Exercise Bikes
• Best Multi Gyms
• Best Rowing Machines
• Best Treadmills
• Best Vibration Trainers

Best Steppers currently stocks 90 steppers, mini steps, thigh trainer steppers, air gliders, twist steppers and swing steppers from 13 UK suppliers including high street names like Littlewoods, Tesco and Sainsbury’s plus specialist stores like Gym Company and Sweatband.com

The most popular selling products are:

• Mini Stepper
• Reebok Stepper
• Thigh Trainer

Best Coffee Machines is a UK comparison website which lists the most popular brands of coffee machine including:

• Siemens Coffee Machines
• WhirlPool Coffee Machines
• Morphy Richards Coffee Machines
• Krups Coffee Machines
• Gaggia Coffee Makers
• Delonghi Coffee
• Bosch Coffee Machines

Users can compare prices from top online stores such as Sainsbury’s, Littlewoods and Amazon.  Prices and stock are updated daily.

Any IP address that falls into the bot-trap now gets banned from not only Best Exercise Bikes but also from every other partner website on my server including the newest sites Best Coffee Machines and Best Steppers.  The log of banned IP addresses is publicly available here: spammers.