Retro Yakking

It’s the beginning of December, and that can only mean one thing - skyrocketing prices and packed out shopping arcades worldwide as consumers look to get involved in what is commonly known as Giftmas. I mean Christmas.

With the analogue switchoff fast approaching — just days away in the North West region, in fact — Retro Yakking takes a look at the various options available to the analogue widow/widower this festive season. By this, I mean we’re going to rate and slate a selection of the most popular set top boxes on the market for the benefit of those who don’t really care about all these technological upgrades and rescans and such.

Yes, this will be a simple buyers’ guide free of confusing jargon and unnecessary technical information to give you the lowdown on the best and worst in the free-to-air market. Mint, eh?

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One part down and nine to go in Retro Yakking’s new(ish) series that’ll be a godsend to spongers, cheapskates and homeless people everywhere: useful stuff you can do with newspaper.

Today’s list has a distinctly delicious air about it, with ten tippety top food-related tips for reusing your morning paper once you’ve done completing the wordsearch and attempting to laugh at the cartoon strips.

We shall steer clear of the overused ‘newspaper cuisine’ idea of cooking and eating The Times with your Sunday lunch, mostly because everyone already knows about that. Indeed, our paper recycling bag is pretty much empty in these times of economic hardship since King Henry VIII raised taxes and introduced a ban on five pound notes.

Nope, we’re going to try and be a bit more original to actually provide some useful information for those of us living on the breadline. After all, that’s the idea of a ‘tips’ post, isn’t it?

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As a renowned scrounger who’s actually won awards for his utter cheapskateness (yep, you’re in fact reading the blog of Harry Yack SkN Flnt TYT RS), I feel fully qualified to share with you the best one hundred things you can do with The Daily Mail once you’ve finished ‘reading’ the ‘informative’ ‘content’ (read: sensationalist moaning old codger literature).

Not that I would ever consider reading such a ‘publication’ without the slightest grain of salt, else I’d most likely be reduced to putting inverted commas around each word of my posts… as I did in the previous sentence. Oh, whoops.

I did intend to introduce this new series — which will probably stumble after the second or third instalment — in a rather grandiose manner, but decided instead to dive into the meat of the content as I’m aware a lot of Retro Yakking’s readers are eager for me to cut the silly small talk that generally precedes this kind of post.

Yeah, let’s get straight to the point with the first ten of Retro Yakking’s 101 best uses for newspaper, ranked by absolutely no parameter.

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Contrary to what Derren Brown may tell you, it just isn’t humanly possible to predict the National Lottery numbers.

Notice I did say ‘National Lottery’ and not ‘Lotto’ there because the latter sounds puny and I have never actually heard anybody outside the advertisements refer to it as such. Anyhow…

You might think that’s the end of it and there’s no point reading on, but hold on a minute! There are other ways to get your grubby mitts on the big prize, and none of them involve numerology or sociological ‘experiments’ that pass as scientific fact.

So, follow these simple steps and you too could become a millionaire like those gloating idiots on the front page of yesterday’s Metro!

We’d best start with the classic conspiracy: Rig the machines. You don’t have to work for Camelot, but it really does help: you’re going to need some blank balls and a black marker and take it from there. This method is, however, bloomin’ difficult, so alternatively…

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Britain’s Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox will lobby politicians to help get 4 million of the country’s poorest online. The Government-appointed spokesperson for web and digital issues wants MPs to get more involved in helping the remaining percentage of British people become ‘tech-savvy’.

According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, households can save upwards of £270 a year — and that’s “proper money, not the Monopoly money the Bank of England prints” — just by going online. Ms. Lane Fox, who commissioned the survey, explains how that cash could be put to better use.

The money you save online could fund a week’s worth — well, maybe an afternoon’s worth — of beer binges, bets on the horses or on a day’s supply of cigarettes, so in the long term it’s certainly more beneficial to learn what a web browser is. — Martha Lane Fox

Many libraries now provide an ‘Internet for poor people’ service, which includes 52k dialup connection, access to newsgroups and IRC chatrooms with lag of less than two minutes per message.

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