Uni Student Finance 101

advice on repaying from moneysupermarket:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-repay

Who offers these loans?

http://www.slc.co.uk/about%20student%20finance/index.html

How and when you repay your student loan:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/UniversityAndHigherEducation/StudentFinance/RepayingStudentLoansCoursesStartingFrom1998/DG_10034866

"repayments are collected automatically through the tax system"

Repaying early:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/UniversityAndHigherEducation/StudentFinance/RepayingStudentLoansCoursesStartingFrom1998/DG_10034868

Interest etc:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/UniversityAndHigherEducation/StudentFinance/RepayingStudentLoansCoursesStartingFrom1998/DG_10034867

"Interest rate from September 2010 to August 2011

The interest rate on income contingent loans will be 1.5 per cent from 1 September 2010 across the UK.

Between 1 September 2010 and 31 August 2011, the interest rate may change because it is linked to the rates charged by high street banks. The rate will be the lower of the Retail Price Index (RPI) in March 2010, or 1 per cent above the highest base rate of a nominated group of banks. As March’s RPI was 4.4 per cent, the maximum rate of interest you may be charged between 1 September 2010 and 31 August 2011 is 4.4 per cent.

This rate applies to all income contingent loan customers including students currently studying at university or college."

ghostscript to compress or reduce a pdf file

ghostscript allows you to do amazing things with pdf's etc from the command line. this:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

compresses a large pdf into a manageble size for (eg) email. Replace your file names output.pdf and input.pdf files with your file names.

example: a 17 page scan at 300dpi colour = 135mb - after running it through gs with the settings at 'SCREEN' gives a low quality (just about good enough for screen reading) pdf of 800kb. 'EBOOK' setting gives a nice quality 3.5mb version (recommended).

Other quality settings:

-dPDFSETTINGS=/screen (screen-view-only quality, 72 dpi images)
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook (low quality, 150 dpi images)
-dPDFSETTINGS=/printer (high quality, 300 dpi images)
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress (high quality, color preserving, 300 dpi imgs)
-dPDFSETTINGS=/default (almost identical to /screen)

These tips from: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/ubuntu-tiphowto-reduce-adobe-acrobat-file-size-from-command-line.html and http://milan.kupcevic.net/ghostscript-ps-pdf/ Thanks.