I’ve had a similar problem on mine for a few months now. The display can be saying 37% battery life and then in the space of a few minutes go immediately to the low power warning and then completely dead. Charge it for a few minutes and it turns on and the power is back up to 35% almost straight away.

I need to find some time to call Apple…

I tried them twice. The first order took ages to turn up even though it was “in stock” when I ordered. Emailed several times and never got a reply. The product was faulty and it was a complete ball ache to get the refund after they had received it back.

My second order (ordered before the first item failed) didn’t turn up at all. It took nearly 2 months to get them to refund from them – they bill when you order irrespective of whether the item is in stock.

He has a great record for overturning local borough councils planning permission refusals, approving 17 out of the 17 developments that he has called in.

This is a bit of an exaggeration – there are 32 boroughs in London so this represents calling in less than 1 application in each of the boroughs in his whole term in office – and that’s on tens of thousands of planning applications.

I can’t find any figures but my perception is that the previous mayor was far more inclined to use his powers on local planning applications when he was in office.

beefheart – with some careful cost control elsewhere there’s plenty left over for the essentials!

Pretty poor show by the Tories. They would have been much better off copying Labour and just organising themselves to corrupt the postal voting and engaging in the sort of systematic outright electoral fraud of the sort we’ve now seen quite a few cities.

Both of these practices are outliers though – generally our electoral system is pretty transparent and thankfully not muddied by the £Billions that get spent in the USA. I think all parties combined spent less than £30m at the last election – and that’s probably a good thing.

I’ve run a virtual budget for years and it forces me to be quite disciplined. I started out with simple lists in spreadsheets but switched to an iphone app called “ace budget” on more recently to Goodbudget which is a webpage and app – the free version works well enough.

Goodbudget and Acebudget both allow you to set up a series of simple envelopes for different types of spending. Once you’ve figured out how much you can afford to spend you can set them up to add money weekly, monthly or yearly.

After that, you just need to record what you spend. The apps tell you visually whether you are underspent or overspent. If you don’t spend all of the weekly amount you can set it to roll over any surplus so you can spend more the following week and be confident that it’s within your budget. Both of the apps record the names of what you type in so after a week or two it just takes a few seconds to write down what you’ve spent in a whole day and it will automatically post the item to the right envelope.

With this system it’s quite hard to overspend as long as you’re disciplined about writing down what you spend. What’s nice is that you can spend without worrying and any additional income e.g. selling bike parts, just goes back in to the bike envelope as additional spending for later.

The image below is from the Goodbudget app and gives an idea of what you see when you use it for a while for a household budget – the envelopes are all underspent apart from clothes so some reigning in is required on that one for a while.

The downside of this approach is that you can get a little OCD about not spending when you’re overspent but the upside is that you never blow the overdraft limit.

The new (2016) Touran is worth a look if you can find one – the demonstrators come up on Autotrader now and again but the “new” stock is very limited.

The new model has 3 rows of seats (the back rows fold flat) and a massive boot that’s almost as big as a Galaxy or C4 Picasso when the middle row of seats are slid forward a bit.

MPG is mid 50s to mid 60s on a good run (diesel version) and it’s pretty comfortable drive.

The one caveat is that new VWs do seem to have buggy software so some of the “extras” don’t work as reliably as you might expect e.g. city parking brake, radar collision detection, park assist etc. The sat nav on ours sometimes gets stuck “calculating” to the route and the only way to fix it is to stop the car, turn the engine off and lock the doors.

It goes without saying that VW dealers per the parent brand appear to be complete shysters and getting them to fix these problems is only marginally less difficult than pushing water uphill with only your nose or a sieve as the available choices.

Our recent experience with Neff is that they are absolute Papp – within 2 years of owning and very limited use in between:

– the dishwasher developed in intermittent fault on the door contact
– the main oven started to short inside when the fan was on for more than 1/2 hour
– the internal lights in the fridge, cooker hood and microwave needed replacing

I also wouldn’t touch Beko – their conduct in regard of the fires and deaths caused by their faulty appliances are inexcusable as is their heel dragging unwillingness to do a major recall to avoid any further loss of life.

Why is his face blurred out?

If someone chooses to urinate in a public street and abuse policemen at the same time we should all be able to see who they are!

footflaps, yes we do have a tramp in the house but coincidentally only when the father in law visits. Looks like I’ll be having a Rod Hull moment on the roof at some point while I try to fit an anti downdraught chimney cowl.

Thanks for your advice STWers.

deuter cross airs are great ruc sacs for bike commuting – they keep the heavy load suspended off your back. I’ve used one for more than 10 years now.

andyl – no, or in the kitchen

Junkyard – no, no wood in the house

Spooky – no extractor in another room and the vents are closed. Cowl fitted on the chimney.

Neighbour’s aren’t having a bonfire so does this mean we have a Polterfiregeist?

I personally think a revenue tax is the only way to really deal with social media companies. Amazon is a bit different because they are really an infrastructure company with nearly all returns ploughed back into CapEx that can legitimately be offset against corporation tax.

As consumers though we do have choices. I personally decided to forego the services of a number of companies who appear to be playing fast and loose with their tax arrangements in the EU and UK. To that end I don’t spend any money in:

Starbucks
Caffe Nero
Ikea (which is still run as a charity based on its governance structure)
McDonalds

As an aside, there’s a pretty strong correlation between aggressive corporate tax structuring tax dodging and poor quality / unhealthy food.

I’m guessing as much as everyone else here but having grown up very close to where his daughter lives and went to school I have consistently heard a very different narrative as follows:

– the daughter’s home and school were not made public due to the IRA bombing that happened in the same period – at the time the MP was seen as a “star” performer with the consequence that by extension any attack on his daughter and the mother would have represented a major publicity coup. The family home by virtue of their location were actually very difficult to secure either from prying eyes or those with more malign intentions
– the nature of the daughter’s disability and desire of both parents for her not to be chased or upset by the press explains the limitation on photography.

His daughter’s whereabouts were very much local common knowledge although not discussed with “outsiders” for the reasons above.

Just what MSP says – a second calendar set up in iCloud can be accessed and edited by both phones or via web browser. There’s also a plugin that will show the iCloud calendar in outlook if you have a work computer.

we got shot of Virgin after 18 months of constant outages and shocking speeds – the “headline” speeds are good but the real speeds can fall to 1/10 (or less) of that most evenings. A quick check on their message boards suggests not much has changed in the interim:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/bd-p/Speed

BT worked out cheaper than Virgin with BT sport and BT Wifi thrown in free – I didn’t think the latter would be useful but I’ve actually landed up using it more than 4g data when out and about. Although the headline speed for BT is half that of Virgin we actually get the promised speed and touch wood have only had 1 outage in 3 years, and that was when someone drove a car into the nearest BT infinity street cabinet.

I used them twice – the first time took ages for the in stock item to be delivered and the second time I cancelled after more than a month of waiting. It then took another 2 months of repeatedly contacting them for them to refund the money they charged to my card for an item they hadn’t even despatched.

Just to clarify – the local supplier is the installer. I have no contract with Nolte directly but the local supplier has looked to them as the manufacturer for an explanation of why the units have cracked. Rather conveniently for Nolte they have just dismissed out of hand any scope for the cracking on the majority of doors being a manufacturing fault which I think has left the local installer / retailer in a rather tricky position.

The local installer have been good to deal with so I didn’t want to go in “guns blazing” without a second opinion first.

The Flying Ox beat me to it!

Forgot to say – for any old school Goldie / Bukem / Adam F aficionados, there’s a great free podcast on iTunes from Hospital Records with an hour or so of great new (and very diverse) music every 1-2 weeks.

They’ve got a pretty big stable of artists now but some of my favourites are:

More Atmospheric:

Netsky – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU4cnelEdi4

Etherwood – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jnm9eP9guM

Nu Tone – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWvHHN3gBeI

And a bit more mainstream

London Electricity – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbXJ1PaRrQQ

High Contrast – this set was incredible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZHbBK8Za2k

And plenty more here – all on spotify:

https://www.hospitalrecords.com/artists/

If you get the chance, go and see the orchestral performance of Timeless with the Heritage Orchestra.

They’ve performed a small number of sets in the last 2 years in Bristol and London, all with Mr Gold Teeth “conducting” and the performance really is tremendous, The drummers in particular are easily on a par with the performances in the film “Whiplash” – especially a bearded percussionist that looks like he just stepped off a viking longship. It’s probably the first and last time that drums are at the front of the stage and centrepiece to a whole performance.

If you like Timeless, there’s plenty of old school stuff from Good Looking Records on the web – look up LTJ Bukem to get started.

He wouldn’t – If for some reason he feels we need to move some of our bombing to the other side of this imaginary line as PM he can just order it. It’s quite within his rights, and Paris was a perfect excuse.

This is an interesting interpretation of recent history – people seem to have quickly forgotten that Blair / Brown went into war without a parliamentary mandate to do so – David Cameron said this was wrong and that if he became Prime Minister he would seek parliamentary approval first even though as Prime Minister he doesn’t need to.

What happened 2 years ago is that a proposal was put to Parliament for military action in Iraq / Syria – it’s quite possible that had action been taken then Isil would not have been emboldened or able to seize the heavy military hardware they now possess. Due to some pretty shameful party politics Ed Miliband initially supported the action but then at the vote Labour MPs scuppered the parliamentary motion.

What happened after this is that David Cameron did what he said he would do – respected the parliamentary vote – and two years down the line we are now dealing with a much bigger problem where ISIL now has more land than the whole of the UK and tens of thousands of people have been brutally tortured and murdered in the interim.

they played the whole of Cameron’s speech to Commons on Radio 4’s “PM” earlier. I actually thought it was pretty balanced – it certainly wasn’t “warmongering” and he echoed many of the views already expressed on this thread.

Personally I’d vote “maybe”. There seems to be a pretty good logic to using air strikes to degrade ISIL’s supply of military hardware (US hardware left behind when Iraqi forces fled) and also taking out ISIL’s fleet of 500 or so oil tankers that they are using to secure £1/2 Bn a year from oil sales.

Our local GPs are apparently overwhelmed but are mostly not there after 5:30 on weekdays, after 2 on a wednesday or on Saturday mornings. The local pharmacist has funding from a Dept of Health trial and can diagnose patients and prescribe – they are open from 8am to 10pm 6days a week and sundays by appointment.

So guess which group has been most vocal at the new services offered by the Pharmacy and have consistently tried to have the trial terminated via completely unfounded “safety” concerns?

another bit of home sleuthing here:

http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/

To the OP – if you want to go for a low-tech proposal you might want to consider this set up:

1. Get a “tracca” nano GPS / mobile tracker for dogs- they are £100 with their current Facebook discount code:

http://www.traccauk.com/tracca-dog/

2. Get a sim from http://www.anywheresim.com . This roams across all UK networks so unless you’re in a cave there’s a good chance it will get a signal from one of the networks. A 1 year sim with texts and data is £60 – the tracking device uses a tiny amount of data and will only text if it’s called.

Pop the tracker in a freezer bag and put it your back pocket / back of your helmet / in your camelbak

The tracker bit can be used as follows:

1. It updates its location every 1-5 minutes to a web service. If the wife in the OP has the app on her phone she can see where you are now, or failing that where you were before falling off the grid

2. She can use the app to immediately find you right now using the web service, or failing that:

3. She can call the phone number for the sim card. It will ring twice then hangup and text back a location with a map link that opens in google maps. If it doesn’t ring she can see where you were when the device last uploaded its position.

Edit – forgot to say that the battery life is a good 24 hours when set to update every 5 mins.

I personally think the latest increase in stamp duty on BTL and the previously announced tax changes for BTL income are both good things.

Aided by weak regulation and cheap credit from 2000 onwards, it was Gordon Brown’s tinkering with private sector pensions that really stoked the BTL bubble in the first place just as the critics at the time warned it would – final salary schemes closed and money purchase pensions have achieved lower returns care of the dividend tax….both of these encouraged people to look at property as an alternative investment and reduced investment into equities which has undoubtedly made it harder for companies to expand.

We can’t have a housing sector where massive speculative buying often by overseas investors causes price bubbles and lack of supply for those who actually want to own their own home.

The only change still required is to reduce stamp duty at all levels for non BTL property – the stamp duty is now causing a distortion in that on many properties the cost of moving is now so prohibitive it reduces labour mobility -there’s no point taking a job paying £10K more a year when it means moving house and finding £20K up front in stamp duty. The stamp duty threshold also means that those who do move for jobs are less likely to sell and more likely to rent – creating artificial demand along the way.

not a bad budget overall:

– a lot more cash for the NHS
– additional £1/2 Bn ringfenced for mental health
– more hammering of buy to lets to reduce foreign buyers
– no cuts to the police budget
– on housing, more help to buy (demand side) and help for builders with release of public land and working capital (supply side)
– and we still have the living wage and now no changes to tax credit so no-one’s worse off

The look on Andy Burnham’s face was priceless when no cut to the police budget was announced – he’d said he would be “comfortable” with a cut up to 10%!

Stephanie Flanders left the Beeb in 2013 to go and work for the banking overlords at JP Morgan (boo hiss – it’s behind you etc etc)

+ 1 on the chemfix that davosaurusrex mentions.

I’ve used this one to fix everything including the fixings for a very heavy steel gate that even wall anchors wouldn’t hold without slipping:

http://www.screwfix.com/p/no-nonsense-polyester-resin-175ml/53359?cm_sp=Search-_-SearchRec-_-Area2&_requestid=40782#_=p

I’ve got the extreme gtx boots and they are great – I put the cuff of a washing up glove round the top to seal properly between my leg and the boot.

very cool effort there but at the risk of being a killjoy, probably best not to do it on a public road or do it next to any fields with livestock in them – you don’t want to start animals panicking and running into fences etc. Other than that, top marks!

£7 and a £3 tip -but this is in the South East.