Neil Turner's blog

Dear wonderful hive mind of the internet: I'd like some advice.

My girlfriend Christine currently has a bank account with the Royal Bank of Scotland, but has been notified that RBS has sold its branch network to the Spanish bank Santander and that Santander will be taking over her account in the near future. This is despite RBS owning another high street bank, NatWest.

Santander have grown quickly - they took over Abbey National a few years ago and have since gobbled up the 'good' half of Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester. But this has been at a price - a recent poll on Money Saving Expert rated them by far the worst bank for customer service, and that former Alliance & Leicester customers have had the worst problems. These have included having their accounts essentially frozen for days at a time during the switchover.

Obviously, Christine would like to avoid this, so we're on the look out for something new.

Santander, for all its faults, does have a good deal at present - new customers get £100 and a high interest rate on the first £2,500 in their current account for 12 months, but to qualify she would have to move to them now to be classed as a new customer. Similarly Halifax's reward current account, which I have, pays you £5 for every month where you pay in at least £1000, though again Halifax does not score highly for customer service.

The best of the larger banks seems to be The Co-operative Bank but there isn't a branch in her home town of Blackpool - the nearest one being 12 miles away in Preston.

So, internet people, what are your suggestions? Ideally she needs an account she can access online as well as in branch, and one with a bank that isn't likely to cause her problems. How do you each feel about your current bank, and would you recommend it? Please let me know in the comments.

In the latest edition of 'send Neil cool stuff in return for a blog post', OpenDNS sent me some stickers, a bottle opener and some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups (which aren't normally sold in the UK) as a prize for following them on Twitter (@opendns).

I've been using OpenDNS almost since it started 4 years ago. For those unfamiliar, DNS is the system that translates address like www.example.com into numerical addresses that your computer understands; while all internet service providers will have their own DNS servers, OpenDNS has introduced various innovations to make using the internet a more pleasant experience.

OpenDNS aims to be faster than your ISP's own servers, and has phishing protection, a caching system to help you access web sites when their DNS systems are not working, and content filtering. Best of all, it's free and doesn't necessarily need any software installing.

While other competing services have launched since 2006, I personally believe that OpenDNS is still the best. No wonder, according to its statistics, it handles around 1% of all internet users in the world.

I've been sent a package by the PA to the National Railway Museum's Director of Fun, Sam Pointon. While it may not seem odd for a museum which is popular with families to have a director of fun, Sam is only 7 years old, and he's been there for a year now.

Sam, or rather his PA, has asked me to write about my experiences with the museum and tell you about some of the events that are being held this summer, so here goes.

Like Sam, when I was his age, I was also very keen on trains - having a father who worked for British Rail helped as it meant lots of free rail journeys. I also grew up in York, home of the NRM and was a regular visitor - at one time, my mum took me almost every Sunday, even when there wasn't free entry like there is now. My earliest memories were of its 'Great Rail Exhibition' in the former York Goods Station, as at the time the main hall was receiving a new roof - now both the main hall and goods station are used for the museum and open to the public, and further expansions have added a workshop where you can see classic trains being overhauled and restored, as well as access to some of the museum's archives.

Moving out of York in 2002 has meant that my visits have been sadly less frequent; the last one being in 2007 which included a trip on The Yorkshire Wheel, a London Eye style big wheel which was unfortunately only a temporary attraction and is now elsewhere. As well as seeing classic trains from both the UK and overseas (there's a driving car from Japan's Bullet Train, for example), there's plenty of information about the history of Britain's railways, and various interesting artefacts.

This summer, a sand sculpture is being built from 20 tonnes of sand by the same people who created a sand sculpture of Charles Darwin in Centenary Square in Bradford last summer. There's also a major 1930s exhibition, linked in to the recently restored streamlined steam engine the Duchess of Hamilton, which you can see in the photo at the top of the page.

The National Railway Museum is a really great museum and you can easily spend a day there. There's plenty to do, whether you're a young child or a grown-up child like me. Best of all, it's free, and only a few minutes walk from York station. You should go and visit it sometime.

Theoretically I should be posting about App of the Week today, but instead I'm going to gloat about being in the beta for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

I haven't posted much about my exploits in World of Warcraft of late; the continued unreliability of our wireless internet makes playing the game difficult and I haven't taken part in regular raids since last April. However, I'm still playing it regularly, and have four characters at level 80, with a fifth at 75 which I'm concentrating on at present.

I got picked for the beta for Wrath of the Lich King too, although the servers were often going down so I lost interest. In fact, I think Hari spent more time on my beta account than I did.

I'm hoping to participate a little more this time. I'm quite excited about Cataclysm as it completely changes the 'old world' - i.e. Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, where you spend levels 1-58. The old world zones haven't changed much in the nearly 6 years since the game was released in the US, and compared to Outland and Northrend which have been added in subsequent expansions the quests and landscapes feel uninspiring. Thanks to 'The Cataclysm', the old world areas should now be re-invigorated with a new levelling experience that reflects the improvements made to the game over the year.

As you can see from the screenshot, I'm still waiting for it to install (and have no doubt got a long wait for the remaining data to download), but it will be nice to see what Blizzard has done first-hand. Sometimes screenshots don't do justice.

This is a camera made by the Eastman Kodak company in 1917, as part of their 'Vest Pocket Kodak' range. It was given to me by Christine's grandparents. I haven't tried taking any pictures with it as it didn't have any film in it; the film is apparently still available from specialist retailers though.

I gather that it gets its name from the fact it could fit in one's vest pocket, as folded up it's quite small - about the same size as a modern compact digital camera. One such Vest Pocket Kodak model has been up Mount Everest before.

I'm not sure quite what to do with it. I will probably ask the National Media Museum if they are interested in it, since they're in Bradford and have a large photography gallery; however, several hundred thousand of these cameras were made and so it's possible that they aren't interested in it; nor will it make a lot of money second hand (examples in better condition are available for about £50 on eBay from specialist camera sellers). Still, I've taken a few pictures of it and may be willing to give it a worthy home if approached.

This is the latest music video from The Guild, following last years Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?.

The Guild is a webseries about 6 players of a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), all of whom are in a guild called Knights of Good. It's now in its fourth season, having won several awards. In particular, Felicia Day who plays the main protagonist Codex, is due to start in a new series on the SyFy channel as well as having minor roles in several TV shows and adverts.

It's a good series, which is faithful to the idea of MMORPGs but is accessible to those not familiar with them. And their latest music video is hilarious. It's also available to buy as a song or HD video from iTunes.

Yes, App of the Week is back, albeit temporarily, as I only have a handful of new apps to review.

Picture Finder is a Mac application designed to help you find pictures for entries in your Address Book. Address Book lets you store a picture or photo with each entry - which is useful if you have an iPhone as you'll be able to see the picture of the person who is calling you, for example.

Picture Finder queries the Gravatar service to see if a selected contact has uploaded an image to it, and, if so, lets you use this image as their picture. If they haven't, then you can instead select a computer generated image, such as a Wavatar, Identicon or MonsterID which is generated from the user's email address. Alternatively, you can have Picture Finder generate a QR Code or a picture based on the contact's name.

It's useful if most of your contacts are of the geeky sort who regularly comment on blogs and therefore have a Gravatar, or if you like all of your friends to be represented by cute cartoon pictures of monsters. If not, then this program is of less use.

It's time for yet another massively-discounted bundle of Mac apps - this time it's the VoteBundle. For $39 (about £25), you get 10 applications, including Speed Download (which I reviewed here) and CrossOver Mac Games which lets you play Windows games on your Mac. Separately, they're worth around $360 - so it's a good deal.

You can also get an additional app - DreamCatcher - for free by posting about the bundle on Facebook.

The promotion will run for another 4 days, and you can download trial versions of some of the apps if you remain to be convinced.

For the best part of four years I've been a member of last.fm, which is a sort-of social network based around the music that you listen to. In a way, last.fm is to music what Flickr is to photography.

It's hard to definitively describe last.fm in a sentence because it does a variety of things. Probably its most well-known feature is to list what songs you've recently listened to, which is done through a client program installed on your computer which uploads whatever track you've just listened to on your favourite media player (called 'scrobbling'). But last.fm is clever - it can use that data, and make recommendations to you. Over time, as you feed it more data, it'll notice trends and start to recommend other artists or bands that you don't listen to but it thinks you might like.

There's more than that though. There are groups you can join, like on Facebook, and the music you scrobble is aggregated in these groups - and you can discuss things in them. Each artist/band page and every track is also a Wiki, so you can find out information about the music you listen to. And it will show you events near you which feature bands or artists you like, and recommend which festivals to go to.

And then there's the radio stations. As the name 'last.fm' implies, this could be the last ever radio station you listen to, because last.fm will be able to create your own station playing the music you like, or that it recommends. Royalty reasons mean that this feature is somewhat limited to non-fee paying users, but it's still useful.

Finally, open APIs allow other applications to use this data - Tweekly.fm for example posts a weekly summary of the artists I've listened to the most to Twitter on a Friday. You can also create a tag cloud of your most listened-to artists.

Thanks to last.fm, I've discovered a range of bands that I wouldn't have known about otherwise, such as Delain, Epica, The Rifles, Nemesea, Boy Kill Boy, Son of Dork and SR-71. last.fm usually lets you listen to samples of songs, or offers links to Spotify should it be available in your country.

Over the past 4 years I've scrobbled over 20,000 song plays, mostly from either iTunes, Spotify or from my iPod. Almost all media players are supported in some way, either using last.fm's client, an alternative such as iScrobbler which I use or because the media player natively supports it (VLC, Spotify and Songbird all have native support or through an official plugin).

All in all, if you like music, last.fm is a great way to find new music or connect with people with similar tastes. Long may it continue.

First of all, good news everyone! App of the Week will be returning this Wednesday, since I have a couple of apps to review.

Second of all, one of the apps I was intending to review was iPlayer Downloader, which is a program allowing you to download programmes from BBC iPlayer without DRM. The main reason for mentioning it was less its DRM-busting abilities and more down to the fact it actually works. I've had problems getting BBC's iPlayer Desktop application to run on my system - it would start, with the icon appearing on the dock and its menu appearing in the menu bar, but the window wouldn't load and it wouldn't download anything. Other times it would work perfectly. Even after re-installing the iPlayer Desktop application, Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash, getting it to run was still a hit-and-miss affair.

Turns out the BBC have a re-installation instructions on their site, including a handy video. However, you needn't follow all of their instructions each time - I've found that if iPlayer Desktop refuses to launch properly, simply deleting the following folder gets everything working again:

/Users/[your user name]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS/BBCiPlayerDesktop.61DB7A798358575D6A969CCD73DDBBD723A6DA9D.1/

Obviously, [your user name] is the username you use on OS X.

Unfortunately I now have to delete this folder regularly to get the program running and should probably create an Automator script so that I don't have to drill down each time.

Also, deleting this folder won't affect any programmes you have downloaded, so you shouldn't end up accidentally deleting that episode of Top Gear that you've not yet got around to watching yet.