About this time of year i start to get blackcaps in the garden. I put apple segments into the trees, but when food is short the blackbirds/thrushes/fieldfares etc monopolise them. As others have said, i’ve tried fat balls in the past but nothing seems to want to eat them as is. So I ended up with one of those RSPB fat ball feeders with a mesh cage around it that wasn’t getting used. I’ve found this is ideal for feeding the blackcaps. Put the apple segments into it instead of fat balls. The cage stops the larger birds from getting to the food.

If you end up with fat balls that won’t get eaten, shred them. The wrens, goldcrests, dunnocks etc will eat the shavings.

If they can, Dunnocks are going to get confused.

Anyone recommend a pub for a warm up?

If decent beer/cider is what you're after, the Evening Star up by the station has the best ale in town.

Built in 3g (Ericsson MBM) works on F13 on my Thinkpad T500. It intermittently refuses to work after unsuspend, but toggling the rfkill button invariably fixes that.

Sounds unconnected but try raising your brake levers up a little so tey are not at the 45 degree down angle that everyone seems to use. It tends to help you keep yourself a bit more upright and looking ahead

That was one of the things that Jedi suggested doing when i did a skills session with him, as i was looking down at the wheel the whole time. It's certainly helped me.

Or there's get_iplayer

anything with Michael Buerke

+1 there's nothing that's more likely to make me switch the radio off than him

… er or anything with Paul Gambaccini, Quote Unquote, the daily service, Money Bags Live … actually the list is quite long. I also regularly rant at the radio, especially when i don't turn it off & end up listening to something like the Moral Maze.

The nature programs with recordings by Chris Watson are ace. As if the guy isn't cool enough for being an ex-Cabaret Voltaire member.

I saw a couple of adult white fallow deer in a herd of ~20 in a field adjacent to Wepham Woods near Worthing a few weeks ago. I assume a parent & it's previous years offspring.

Definitely need to find a footprint for it for use when i don't need to save the last gram of weight. I can see the floor getting punctured.

One ordered here. Thanks for posting that shedfull.

Slightly longer than half an hours drive – Houghton Forest, Rewell Woods.

I can't say i've noticed much of decline in quality of the higher end of the range Thinkpads i've had for work over the last 10+ years. The only one i had die, got accidentally drowned.

Writing this on a T500 with Fedora 13. No problems with support for any of the hardware. It just works.

Planet India in Brighton. Great Gujarati food, proper beer selection (including Trappist), reggae on the sound system.

Surprised nobody's mentioned Diwana, around the corner from Euston Station.

get_iplayer will do what you want

there's some interesting photos of a break in on that photobucket account 😀

You want
Yamuna Devi's "The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking"

Don't be put off by the Hari Krishna link (the recipes are Vedic so contain no onions or garlic). I have a lot of Indian cookbooks & this is the one i turn to first. Recipes here will turn out like the Southern Indian ones you're looking for (and also Gujarati, Bengali etc).

You'll find many of the recipes at the Krishna's recipe page

Anyone got one of the iRule jerseys (apart from NZCol obviously 😉 ?. I like the look of the Primo.

I'm getting about 50 miles with Squirt. The first application to a clean chain only lasts about 25. With the next few applications it seems to go further & further.

I can't say i've noticed any more build up of crap on the chain, nor any more attraction to trail side foliage than with any other dry lube. A quick wipe down of the chain with a cloth after a ride, it's clean & good for the next application.

Ideally id like a ti 29r ss with the option to run it geared I mainly ride rigid but might want some bounce at one point geo not too dissimilar to my cotic soul

That's how i started geometry discussions with IF last year. I wanted a long travel version of my old Merlin XLM but with some of the ride characteristics of my (then recently deceased) Soda. I'm really happy with the end result, it rides exactly how i wanted/expected.

I'm wary of those geometry measurement systems. I got measured up once at Omega. The result they came back with looked like an overgrown farm gate. My Merlin fits me perfectly, so that was a good point to start discussions.

Slightly OT, i went down the decidedly un-niche geared 26" route.

Just walnuts (ideally fresh), rocket, garlic, sea salt & good olive oil for me. No cheese or pine nuts.

Lemon zest sounds interesting. I'll have to give that a go.

Don't you mean community model, as I suggested? If you have a product that you give away for free , the fact that the community increases innovation maybe a valid point but how can it drive down costs when there are none to start with? Surely one of the significant drivers for a busines is to make money – at a minimum to cover your costs. If you give your stuff away for free where does your revenue come from? Ergo, it is not a very good business model.

You give your product away for free, but charge for support for those that want it. If the product is of high enough quality, there will always be people who want to buy an SLA for it, or to buy influence in the development of the project.

The main OSS communities now are not really "free" resources, so there are associated costs. The majority of the key developers are paid by the major OSS contributors, they're no longer people doing this as a hobby. So developing in a community splits the costs amongst the contributors, & also provides the for-free distros with development. There's been analysis of the theoretical cost for developing a Linux distro from scratch using the old proprietary software model, & it's a prohibitive amount. There's few if any companies who could afford that nowadays.

And where would they get the money to pay you or would you do it for free? And if doing it for free where would your income come from?

From a rich benefactor like another Linux distro mentioned in this thread relies on ? 😉

What you mean is the product is not a good busines model. It only works when you wrap a service around it such as the SLA / support. Which for Joe Public is not going to happen.

It sort of happens with some of the larger desktop companies providing hardware with Linux pre-installed. And Linspire had a go at it. I can't see anyone supporting it on random hardware though.

The reason that Red Hat and the like are making mooney these days is because they have developed chargeable services around the free product. The basic premise of OSS is not a good business model. Great as a hobbyist movement but not a busines model.

The OSS community model helps drive down costs & increase innovation etc. That gets passed on to the customer. From that perspective it's a good business model.

I'm not sure I agree that the large proprietary software companies are trying to copy it. What they are doing is, to a degree, hedging their bets and mostly protecting their revenue streams. IBM are not entirely altruistic about their involvement in the OSS space. Neither are Oracle. These are cpmanies that generate vast sums of revenue and claerly don't want to lose them. Do any of these proprietary software companies give their proprietary software away for free? Oracle 10 free for Linux? I don't think so.

Sun in their dying days tried it. I'm not sure where Oracle are going right now 🙂

IBM do make some key contributions to OSS. They also have some apps that clearly are threatened by OSS projects like JBoss. (I used to work for IBM BTW 😉

So, if Red Hat didn't have a chargeable support business would you still be working for them?

Yes i would, if there was a job available for me.

Well quite, but then the 'it's free lol' argument doesn't work so well.

If you want it for free then don't expect an SLA for a fix 🙂

Main Red Hat UK office is in Farnborough, & a smallish office in London.

– Ubuntu's support can be poor (I've had bugs open for years with loads of "me too!" posts but no proper reply from the devs, I've also got so tired of waiting for Ubuntu to look into a sound problem that I learned C and fixed the driver myself).

That's the problem with using a distro that leeches from upstream without contributing anything back. Distros like Fedora, SuSE, Debian etc have upstream developers working on them & you're more likely to get a fix. With Unbuntu you're stuck waiting for someone else to fix the problem. Most of their developer effort goes into their management product or into basic usability.

But isn't that the point / selling point for open source software? It's free. But you can't expect someone to rustle up a fix for your problem overnight as there isn't anyone paid to do that, so you either need to do it yourself or you wait for the community to help you out. It's a great concept for those who don't like paying for stuff but at some point it will fail, surely, as giving something away does not pay any bills or put food on the table. Hardly a great business model.

Open Source Software is a great business model. If you want an SLA with OSS you can pay a company such as Red Hat, Novell etc for it. Look at the number of large proprietary software companies that are trying to copy it. OSS frightens them.

I work for Red Hat. We're a $5B market cap. company included on the S&P 500, totally built around OSS. It pays very nicely thank you. 🙂

+1 clip+

I was there 79 & then 81-86. Got fed up with partly too many people & the mud. 79 was nice, with about 10000 people. We used to go more for the vibe than the bands.

I'm trying to think of bands i saw that i thought were any good (sorry Woppit 🙂 New Order i guess were the highlight. The Pop Group were great (iirc they played a double set after the UK Subs discovered the backstage mescal tea), and Tim Blake at the very end of '79.

We much preferred the Elephant Fayre in the 80s. Much nicer venue, bands we actually wanted to see, chilled vibe, and river estuary mud for proper mud baths.

If it's a BBC radio program, there's tools like get_iplayer that you can use to download the streams. get_iplayer has a pvr mode that you can use to automate downloads.

dragonfly larvae ?

The Leftfield essential mix from 1994 is one i return to time after time.

Squarepusher

God yes, i forgot him.

Not seen mention of Percy Jones (Brand X) or Mike Howlett either.

Bootsy
Robbie Shakespeare
Bill Laswell

+1 to rocket.

Also try walnuts instead of the pine nuts. Walnut & rocket pesto is ace.

If you want to grow it at home, get a tub of supermarket basil & gently prize the plants out & plant those into a few bigger pots with some decent soil.

Don't feed them to snakes. We lost a number of pythons after doing that

Oh, yeah, just bloody leave us hanging like that why don't you ?!

(do hamsters eat snakes? )

We never worked out what killed them. Someone suggested it was the fur. Normally we used mice or rats for live food & never had any problems.

I did see a mouse having a chew on one once where we put too many mice in the tank & not removed the survivors after the snakes had fed.

My after school & weekend job as a teenager in the 70's was at a pet wholesalers. Alongside interesting exotic stuff like parrots, monkeys, reptiles we sold a lot of the usual pets, tortoises, budgies, goldfish & thousands of hamsters. Wholesale quantities of them. 500 to a large glass fibre tank. They soon lose their appeal when you have to muck those sort of numbers out.

They can scrape/chew through a smooth glass fibre tank. When that happens you have 500 of the things running around. We had permanent colonies living in the walls of the building & outside in the summer, feeding off the uneaten birdseed in the sawdust/shavings/birdsh1t that got tipped out the back.

Don't feed them to snakes. We lost a number of pythons after doing that when the boss was too tight to buy in baby rats.

+1 to the comments about rats.

Badly worded … if i have headphones on, be it walking or riding, i tend to take a second look. Probably more so when walking as i tend to have the volume up.

I find if i'm wearing headphones when riding on the road i actually pay more attention to whats going on around me.

Same if i'm walking & about to cross a road – i'll take an extra left/right look.

Shure SE420's. Fit well enough not to suffer from wind noise etc & mask the background noise probably too well for riding on the road unless at low volumes. Good enough sound quality, that I also use them in the house for the infrequent occasions i need headphones.

I am getting to the stage that i am getting fed up with going out on my mtb as i lack so much confidence.

I can sympathise with that. Downhills to me were the obstacle that had to be overcome getting to the next climb. I used to get moaned at on the Merida enduros etc for holding people up on the downhills whilst mincing down them. So I've stopped doing enduros.

After going by the recommendations here, I've done 2 sessions with Jedi this year. I can't recommend him highly enough. He's got me riding down stuff 6 months ago i probably would have walked down. I doubt i've ever enjoyed my riding as much as i am now. I'm actually enjoying riding down as well as up. Money very well spent.

Or Susan Carter murdered by anybody, for any reason.

That wouldn't be murder thought would it ?. It'd be a mercy killing. Same with Vicky. Someone had clearly got out the wrong side of the bed the day they decided on that character.

Creepy Paul killing Matt ?.

The experimental-mesa-dri-driver should run at similar speed. That the open source drivers run really slowly sounds suggests you don't have direct rendering enabled. Does "glxinfo" show you're actually using DRI ?.

$ glxinfo | grep -i direct
direct rendering: Yes