Free philatelic catalogs and publications

For my second post, I thought of posting on one of my hobbies. Philately is said to be one of the oldest and widely followed hobby. I caught the Philately bug in my childhood from my Dad. That was the age when there was no internet and computers used to run on Windows 3.1 or DOS. Collecting new stamps of my own country was easy, just keep an eye on the release schedule, go to your nearest Post Office and get the stamps. To get stamps of other countries, old or new, used to be a challenge. I remember writing to my relatives abroad to send me letters stamped with new stamps from their country. Going to the Post Office to get hold of stamps on letters which did not make to their destination. One of course needs some contact at the post office for this. But it was still very difficult.

But with the internet revolution, that happened 10 years ago, keeping up with your hobby is now a lot easier. or might I saw a cakewalk in most cases. Now many post offices around the world publish Philatelic Journals which not only serve as a catalogue of the country’s upcoming stamp issues, but also are a great read, with loads of information about the country and culture. Below is given a list of philatelic publications and stamp bulletins along with their websites.

Different ways to activate an OEM copy of windows 7

I decided to write on this for my first post since almost all of us use windows and at some point of time need to reinstall it due to a variety of reasons. Be it a severe virus infection, a hard drive failure, a program installation gone awry, remove bloat that comes with OEM installations of windows or just for the sake of it sometimes because we feels its been too long since we did it.

 

If you are using a laptop or you are using a Branded PC from a big manufacturer like DELL, Sony, HP or Lenovo then chances are that it came preinstalled with a version of Windows 7. One thing to note here is that the Product Key which is there on the COA sticker on your computer is an OEM product key. This license is valid for installation only on that computer. Another thing to note here is that if you use a product key sniffing program like Speccy, you’ll notice that the product key on the sticker and the one used for installation is different. Here I am going to explain 2 ways to activate an OEM copy.