For one, it is almost forbidden for any form of cutlery to be used mainly due to the lack of clean cutlery around the house, but other reasons include barbecues held on the university fields, or the laziness of not being bothered to walk back inside once everything has been set up.

This however causes a problem as substitute cutlery has to be made, but feer not as one thing students are capable of doing is improvising. The most common student cutlery is that of the cardboard packaging found around the food as this can be used for almost all needs. If folded up into a strong rectangle it is perfect for flipping those burgers and sausages, or if lay flat is a perfect subsititute for a plate.

Other common instruments used are sticks to flip the food, or keys used as a fork to eat the finished product. The drawback however to these inventions is the almost inevitable fact that along the way your hand will get burnt from the meat, which despite optimism is always going to be hot when touched straight from the coals.

The other difference from a student barbecue, to the traditional family meal is the choice of food, with almost all student barbecues consisting of mainly burgers and hot dogs, with the accompanying slices of cheese to add the flavour. The reason for this is simple, and that is the price, however it is important to include at least one really good bit of meat and a good recommendation is chicken, as although hard to cook is always the best part of the barbecue.

However the best bit of it being BBQ season is the people you get to eat it with, as being students each BBQ is accompanyed with cold beer and cider, and is the perfect way to spend a summers evening.

Summer is fast approaching and we’ve already been teased with some recent good weather. However, for many, summer has an unwanted side effect of puffy watery eyes and runny noses. Hayfever is the culprit and Times Online have outlined 10 possible hayfever remedies which should at least ease some of the nasty effects of pollen. Here is our summary below:

1. Drugs

There are plenty drugs littering the pharmacy shelves that claim to reduce the effects of hayfever. The majority of these are antihistamines which can provide some protection but many find these a little weak when the pollen is at it’s highest. Nasal sprays are also available and are recommended for prolonged use.

2. Honey

Research has seen that honey can provide some sort of immunity to pollen if taken regularly, even when pollen is not in season. Plus, it tastes great.

3. Nettles

Research has shown that nettles have the ability to reduce the production of some chemicals involved in an allergic response.

4. Self-hypnosis

“A two-year study, completed in 2005, suggests that self-hypnosis may help hay fever. The patients received between two and five sessions on self-hypnosis and recorded their symptoms as they practised the techniques over two hay fever seasons. In year one the study group showed a significant improvement over the control group, who were not taught hypnosis. In year two, this group were also given hypnosis training and showed the same benefits as the first group.”

5. Avoid the pollen!

The most obvious remedy would be to stay away from pollen all together, but unless you want to spend the rest of you life in bubble wrap it’s probably not the most practical.

Some steps you can take:

1. Avoid going outside when pollen count is at its highest.
2. Avoid drying your clothes outside.
3. Using a blocking cream up your nose e.g. Vaseline.

6. Capsaicin

“This hot chemical from chillies does seem to ease hay fever. Normally applied as a spray under medical supervision, patients taking it report a rapid and long-lasting relief. Capsaicin taps into a particular cell-signalling system in the human body. There is a considerable amount of research into its many effects and it appears to have the potential to treat a number of conditions, including hay fever. Be warned though; the nasal membranes are very sensitive and snorting ground chilli could be extremely painful and might even cause blistering.”

7. Butterbur

“Also known as Petasites hybridus, extracts of butterbur plants are found in a number of herbal hay fever remedies. And there is some evidence to suggest that it is effective.”

8. Acupunture

“Acupuncture is often offered as hay fever relief but the evidence on whether it works is not clear-cut.”

9. Onions

“There is a suggestion that the chemical quercetin, found in many foods, can help to ward off hay fever. Onions contain a particularly high concentration of the chemical. There is no evidence that eating lots of onions is harmful.”

10. Sublingual Immunotherapy

“A common method of easing hay fever is to desensitise the sufferer with regular vaccinations of pollen about eight weeks before the season starts. A newer technique is sublingual immunotherapy (Slit), in which drops are placed under the tongue. The membranes in the mouth allow the active ingredients to penetrate, preparing the body for the pollen onslaught. It is not yet widely available.”

[Via Times Online]

The British television viewing public has been dominated by ‘Sell Your Unwanted Mobile’ adverts for the last few months. Mazuma, Envirofone etc are all different companies which offer to buy your old mobile phone from you. But who’s the best and what do they actually do with your old mobile?

Many of us have multiple unwanted phones lying idle around the house, in odd drawers and cupboards so it seems a great opportunity when someone wants to buy them off you! If the number of television adverts is anything to go by, this industry is big business.

What do they actually do with your old phone?

According to Mazuma Mobile the phones are “reused in developing markets such as China, Africa, Pakistan and India.” Some companies also break the phones down into it’s component parts which are then sold for reuse.

The process.

Many of these companies work in the same way. First you sign up to their website and select which phone you want to sell to them. They then send you a freepost envelope which you send back to them with your unwanted mobile phone inside. They then examine the phone and send you a cheque with the monies!

Who gives the most cash?

We’ve done a little investigating on which of the big mobile recycling companies gives you the most cash for your mobile. The companies we’ve examined are: Envirofone, Mazuma Mobile, fonebank, zonzoo and mopay. We also took a look at the current market price on ebay for our three handsets: iPhone (16GB), Nokia N95, Samsung E330. Below is a table showing our findings.

As the table shows for the N95 and E330 the prices amongst the companies where quite similar and didn’t vary much. However, the iPhone has a large range of about £30! fonebank seemed willing to pay the most cash out for both the N95 and the iPhone. What is surprising though is that many of the companies where offering more cash than the value on eBay.

The very helpful website MobileValuer.com has been created by the guys behind MoneySavingExpert.com to find the best price for your mobile phone from these different recycling companies. It compares the different companies through one search therefore saving you both time and effort in finding the best deals around. Whilst using the tool we noticed that it didn’t show us results for fonebank so we recommend using the tool in conjunction with your normal searches.

IT HAS come to the time of the term when student loans are running out, and the question that affects most students is back, what do you spend your money on, food or alcohol?

Food is essential to live, but alcohol is essential to live well so here I weigh up which is more important, while trying to find a way of incorporating both into the remaining pennies of the loan.

Food tastes good, in fact it tastes so good that it drives many to obesity, however food is also a pleasure that many students can do without, instead deciding to go for the value cheap as chips alternatives.  The reason I see behind this is simple, very few students look forward to what they are going to eat that evening, or plan days in advance how they are going to cook their dinner.

Alcohol however is different, so much thought, anticipation and excitement go into a night out, it is something to look forward to all day, and often all week and so it is important not to miss out on this due to lack of funds.

With a limited amount of money the secret is to drink at home before going out, and with supermarkets always having cheap deals on drinks it is easy to chip in with a couple of friends to get a lot of alcohol for a fraction of the prices at the local pub. There are always friends willing to have pre drinks at their houses, and this is where you can make use of drinking games. The thing to remember is to stay at the house until as late as possible, not getting into the student bar until about half an hour before the doors closes, maximising the cheap drinking time, while avoiding the prospect of being some of the first people in the club.

As for food it is easy to shop on a budget by just buying value food from the supermarket, including such things as chicken noodles for 9p, or a loaf of bread for 40p, it may not be as nice as the finest range, but it still does the job. Also lets not forgot the essentials, with things such as a 12 pack of toilet rolls for £1.11, or a set of sponges for 12p, Bargain!!!

A student is about living life, not living well, so get the value meals, get out on a night out and enjoy yourself!

The annual Reading and Leeds Festivals see over 150,000 music fans ascend on their locations to see a mass of bands spanning many genres. Bands that have played the festivals in recent years include Rage Against the Machine, Arctic Monkeys and The Prodigy.

The general public will be able to purchase tickets to this year’s Reading and Leeds Festivals online from 6:45pm tonight (29/03/2010) with the highly anticipated lineup being revealed from 7:00pm. The festivals take place traditionally over the August Bank Holiday (this year 27th – 29th August).

Reading Festival

Tickets can be bought in person for Reading Festival from 7am tomorrow (30/03/2010) at the following places:

• Selected HMV Stores:
• Reading, Oracle (weekend and day tickets available)
• Southampton (weekend tickets only)
• The Hexagon, Reading (face value for cash)

Tickets can also be bought online (see below).

Leeds Festival

Tickets can be bought in person for Leeds Festival from 7am tomorrow (30/03/2010) at the following places:

• Selected HMV Stores:
• Leeds, Headrow (weekend and day tickets available)
• Manchester, Arndale (weekend tickets only)
• Newcastle, Northumberland St (weekend tickets only)
• Leeds Visitor Centre will have tickets at face value for cash

Tickets can also be bought online (see below).

Buying Tickets Online

For a number of years now tech savvy festival goers have been able to purchase their tickets online from a number of different websites. Buyers should be wary when purchasing from websites and ensure they only have over money to official Reading and Leeds Festival retailers.

• SEE Tickets
• HMV.com
• Ticketmaster
• NME
• Ticketline
• Gigantic
• Stargreen
• Ticketqueen
• Lastminute.com

If you plan on buying tickets tonight or tomorrow morning, good luck – you’ll need it!

Chatroulette for all it’s eccentric people and penis’ has become a way of life and another distraction for many students around the world. Now, a singer improvised songs in front of an audience of 2000 about those he met on Chatroulette.

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers using webcams and allows them to communicate using microphones or by text.

Ben Folds, an American singer/songwriter, improvised comical songs about those he found on the Chatroulette service whilst performing in concert. With over 2 million views on Youtube the video, titled ‘Ode To Merton’, has been an overnight success.

Update: Folds has an additional video floating round the web.

Watch the videos below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

People are creatures of habit and predictable nature, this predictability has followed many onto the virtual world and is threatening to bore the users of social networking websites. Every day my Facebook account is bombarded with the standard four types of Facebook status update.

1. “Great night last night!”

Yeah no one cares if your night was good or not, chances are, those people on your friends list were either there themselves or couldn’t care less.

2. “I’m hanging hard!”

Often Facebook status 1 and 2 are joined to form, yeah you guessed it, “Great night last night but I regret drinking so much – I’m hanging hard”.  Tuff shit. Don’t act so surprised – it’s widely noted that when people drink alcohol they suffer from headaches, grogginess and possibly vomiting. If you are going to suffer, please suffer in silence; don’t burden me with the knowledge that you are hungover.

3. “Another day – another day of work “

None of us like work but take your crying elsewhere and man-up! Consider yourself lucky that, in these times of economic hardship, you even have a job.

4. “Wish I didn’t have to do this coursework/revision”

Hmm.. yeah… wasn’t it mentioned in the course open days that you’d actually have to do some work? We may be students, the laziest of humanity, but for goodness sake you only have 8 hours of lecture a week and you’re still whining about doing work.

OK rant over.

Maybe I just don’t ‘get’ Facebook updates like all these other people do, but my philosophy on this is if you aren’t saying anything productive, why say anything at all. So I urge all you Facebook users to consider whether or not you are adding productively to the billion or so Facebook updates that the world receives.

If you think I’ve missed any types of Facebook update please submit any ones as a comment below.

Join our Facebook group to join our discussions and get our updates.

I’m too young to really remember music formats that couldn’t be copied and distributed quickly and easily with nothing more than a standard home PC. The release of cassettes opened the door for music piracy and that door was blown apart with the introduction of MP3′s – we can thank Napster for that. However, the authorities are getting wise to our virtual ways of distribution and the only time will tell if we will be able to maintain our love for free music. Thankfully a new type of music distribution has rapidly been expanding and it’s a method that the music industry seem to be slightly happier with – Music Streaming Services.

There are a huge number of different music streaming services out there: some free, some paid for; but the general consensus can only offer these services  by funding it with advertising. As we all know first hand, students are pretty cash strapped and we’ll try and save pennies anyway we can without compromising a good time – as a result, free music streaming services are an obvious choice for debted students.

The Ernie Say’s team have compiled a list of their favourite 6 free music streaming services below:

Spotify

First up, Spotify! A fantastic service and favourite of many in the UK. The service is provided through a downloaded program onto computers much like your standard media browsers (e.g. Windows Media Player, iTunes).

Spotify is powered by P2P technology which means Spotify has an enormous library of music and streaming services are incredibly quick.  The service is unfortunately only available in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom and France, but will be extended shortly.

Spotify subscribers (just £9.99 a month and advert free) are able to download an application for mobile devices to stream music from the Spotify service on the go.

Spotify website

Last.fm

Last.fm is slightly different to Spotify in the sense users don’t have to download a computer program. Last.fm is a website which is driven by its massive music collection and social networking features. Users are also able to watch music videos online.

Last.fm website

Myspace Music

Although the original Myspace website has had it’s day in the social media circles, battered by the unstoppable Facebook, Myspace is trying to reinvent itself as an online media service. The website allows user to interact with their favourite bands and listen to their tracks that they have uploaded. Unfortunately the service is fairly limited as it requires the bands and artists to upload music rather than the users.

Myspaz Music website

Hype M

The internet is jammed to the rafters with music blogs, people writing about their awful tastes in music (hell even Ernie Say’s does it). Hype M is an aggregator for many of the great music blogs dotted around the web. The website constantly updates with content from these blogs. Music blogs are fantastic for free music – legal or not – new releases can be uploaded onto the web within seconds of their official release (and often before).

After registering on the website, users are able to stream all music straight from Hype M without the need to download files from the music blogs it links to.

Hype M website

SkreemR

Simply a music search engine which searches the vast web for music you specify. It’s a great tool but doesn’t always work particularly well but as long as you are looking for ‘mainstream’ music you shouldn’t have a problem – you may want to look elsewhere for your underground Russian Hip-Hop though. Whilst SkreemR isn’t really a streaming service, it does locate the music files.

SkreemR website

Deezer

Deezer is a music streaming website which is similar to Last.fm in many respects. One of the positive differentials is that Deezer gives it’s artists royalties if their music is streamed. The business clearly shows a great ethical stance and respects the industry many other online music sources seems to be destroying.

Deezer website

Once you signed upto one of these services you may dance around in joy like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Once people experience a fantastic digital sound epiphany they never want to go back to the old ways of playing 128kbps MP3 tracks out of a crappy set of iPod headphones. There are a number of audio solutions that can transform your tired music collection to an orchestral haven.

Wired magazine have published an article listing these different solutions and explain why a good audio setup will change your perceptions of your music collection.

“For a number of years I’ve been on a mission to help the sonically sick and needy appreciate this fact. I’ll offer them some better-than average headphones — headphones comparitively ten times better than the ones you get with your iPod. “Wow,” they always say. “I never knew music could sound like this.” And in such demos, these headphones were never worth more than £40 or £50. You could say I’m like Mother Teresa, only with headphones instead of medicine, and Dream Theater instead of religion.”

Read the full article here.

Every year, for the last 10 years, Radio 1 have been putting on their ‘One Big Weekend’ which takes place in a different location each year. The early summer festival caters for thousands and gives tickets away absolutely free! This year is no different and the event is to take place in…

BANGOR!

Yep, the event is to take place in sunny North Wales at Faenol Park, Bangor. 20,000 people are expected to attend the event with the majority of the tickets going to local residents. Tickets will be available shortly from the Radio 1 website, details to follow.

Pixie Lott (picture above) is currently the only announced act – let’s hope she’s not the only one!