Rare Properties for Maccas Monopoly 2017

Apart from the usual instant wins which are mostly self explanatory, all the other prizes require you to collect the whole set of green, blue or other same coloured properties. If you eat enough maccas,

you will find that you get the same properties for each set of colours and you're ALWAYS missing one property. So which properties in this year's McDonalds Monopoly Australia do you REALLY need to win? Here they are

1. Fleet Street
2. Piccadilly
3. Old Kent Road
4. Park Lane
5. Regent Street
6. Marlborough Street
7. Fenchurch St Station
8. Euston Road
9. Whitehall

If you get one of these, you will need to continue eating more Maccas to get the rest of the properties or ask a few friends to help you out.

It's time to admit NBN and ADSL is dead

In at least three separate conversations this week, the plight of NBN was mentioned. If you are like us, our ADSL is painfully slow, even taking a minute to download a pdf or sometimes just to load a website can be so slow! Don't even talk about videos. For us, NBN is not coming until 2019 or something far away so it is time for households like ours in Australia to think laterally and some providers have started to provide some viable alternatives.

We've been looking and it seems none have really offered a good deal until now.. Optus seems to have taken the initiative with a huge offering of 140GB over their wireless broadband 4G+ network for only $70 / month. 4G+ for the most part is much, much faster than NBN and the price is in line with what most people are paying for their ADSL, Naked or NBN connections each month. For this, you will have to get a mobile broadband modem or dongle and insert the sim card that you get. Or you can use an old phone and turn on tethering to share the wireless hotspot to the other devices.

A quick survey of other mobile broadband providers gives us this

Optus 140GB $70/month (one year contract minimum)
Kogan 30GB $50/month (no contract, first month you get 30GB but it is not ongoing)
Vodafone 50GB  $60/month (two year contract minimum)
Telstra 20GB $70/month (one year minimum)
TPG - not available?
Vivid Wireless 40GB $59/month (two year minimum)

We're still investigating but it looks like this could be a viable alternative to ADSL and NBN. If you see issues with mobile broadband as an alternative or you have other providers or suggestions, please leave a comment and we can incorporate them into this post.

Is bit.ly/payenergybill legitimate?

Many of you will probably be asking whether the sms that you received from Synergy was really from Synergy. It says something like this

Hi there. This is a friendly reminder to pay $X for account _______ by 30/08 to avoid late fees. Pay online at bit.ly/payenergybill Payment no. ____

The question is while we probably found getting a link like bit.ly/payenergybill, which is easy to remember, it is also easy to hoax. If a scammer uses a similar link (eg changing one letter to capitals such as bit.ly/Payenergybill) to redirect to their own website, they could potentially steal customer credit card numbers etc. In this case, we know that the bit.ly/link is legitimate, but it can be easily faked. A better way would be using their own domain and make a redirect from www.synergy.com/pay for example.

You can always find out where a bit.ly/link goes by adding a + at the end of the web address ie bit.ly/link+ From this you can see that almost 50,000 people have used the Synergy bit.ly/link to get to their bill.