The bit allthepies mentioned west of Jevington pre-sanitisation

And a couple of others …

Lumicycle one if you already have one of their batteries

Sussex's finest, Montezuma's Dark Chilli is ace, as are all their dark chocolate bars. I've not tried their lime & chilli as i don't do milk chocolate, but it sounds a great combination. (CFH, Waitrose do Montezuma's 😉

+1 to much of what Spongebob said. Ripping to a lossless codec is a good idea, but MP3 is a lossy codec, even at 320k. I'd rip to something like flac (which is lossless).

If you're planning on expanding this setup in the future i'd suggest looking straight away at a RAID5 array which is much easier to expand than a mirrored one.

A linux box is ideal for something like this.

Get into the habit of taking regular, weekly incremental backups.

If you're worried about the long train journey back, consider leave your car midway & get the train over to Winchester. There's plenty of long term parking at Brighton station.

Amberley's a nice place to stop but leaves you with a couple of extra climbs for the long second day. You might be better looking for somewhere around Steyning or Beeding.

lol @ Drac. God knows how many times I've had that conversation.

AndyP, you don't have the delight of having these drop through your letterbox once a month ?. Think yourself lucky. The ones i get seem to be mostly in grubby reused plastic bags that look like previously it was used to hold one of those incontinence jock straps after it's been used.

I wonder how anyone doing this makes any money. They pay for the catalogues. Round here they don't seem to get many back, i can't see many of my neighbours going for this sort of tat. I suspect the only people making money from it is the catalogue sellers.

Alan, Potdog, sounds promising. I'll go take a look 🙂

I've no real dates in mind, probably just after easter i guess.
If i get a decent week in cost isn't a huge issue.

Another vote for Zen. I've worked from home for over 10 years. The odd times i need to speak to support their people actually know what they're doing. Their response times to newly open tickets is good.

The linux version of firefox allows you to have multiple profiles (eg "work", "home"). You can then launch firefox with the appropriate profile. If you don't specify one it'll use the default. I'd assume the windows version has something similar.

Going into the direct input in the car, the signal is quieter than the iRiver's direct out, even on full volume. It clearly requires a different EQ profile than the one i use for the phones. I'm sure with a bit of experimentation with EQ & tone settings it would be fine. Unfortunately (unlike rockbox) it doesn't have multiple EQ profiles so it would require changing each time you swap between outputs.

About 7 years ago I got a Merlin XLM that was shipped about 8mm out at the back axle, measured with a frame alignment tool. It's replacement was spot on.

I've not tried using mine in the car, i use the iRiver which has proper line out. I assume the headphones only output will work with the car's audio system. Let me know if you want me to see if it works/how it sounds, i'm happy to give it a go.

I doubt you'll have any trouble with it with Vista. As i said, it appears as bog standard usb mass storage, so you won't have any of that hassle about lack of drivers, & you can use any playlist creation tool.

I'm linux only here & it works fine out of the box on that.

I've had an 8G one for about 10 weeks now. It has it's good points & bad.

Short answer, yes i'd buy another. For the price & it's size i can live with the niggles.

Long answer ….

I use almost exclusively with music encoded as flac. Headphones are Shure SE420's.

Sound quality doesn't come close to my trusty old iRiver H40 running rockbox, which i still use, now upgraded with a 120G drive & a 26 hour battery. Out of the box the Clip+ sounded, well, a bit lifeless. Using the EQ i've got it to sound acceptable, but still not close to the iRiver. Couldn't say about comparisons to anything else – i'm not an Apple fanboi & never used an iPod etc.

Convenience is it's big winner. The thing is tiny. It easily clips to things & you don't notice it's there. It's great for running, which is what i mostly bought it for. Situations where the brick like iRiver is too big.

Battery life isn't quite as good as advertised, i assume because i'm using the EQ. It'll happily go for a day on a charge & it'll charge easily on a laptop if it starts to run low when i'm out & about. Recharge time is surprisingly good – about an hour i think.

I don't use playlists. I normally select a directory of files & expect it to play them in alphanumeric order as any other player i've used. Sometimes it seems to have it's own idea of what order to play tracks in. Annoying for a continuous mix split into multiple files. I've not done much investigation into what order it is playing & this might well be down to the version of id3tag i label my ripped music with.

It doesn't take much pressure on the external SD card to make it think it's got a new card. When that happens it'll rescan the card & pause the track that's playing. This happens more often than i would like. The SD card & the volume control both extend from the case by the same amount & have a similar feel.

USB transfer speed isn't full USB2 – seems to be about 9MB/s. I keep music that i never replace on the internal storage & use the external SD card for stuff i swap about. The ability to plug the SD card into a card reader that transfers at full USB2 speed is very handy.

I've only used the radio a couple of times & that seems to mostly work.

EDIT: as a USB device it appears as normal mass storage so you treat it any other USB drive. You don't need special drivers etc & it doesn't use any DRM.

thanks for the heads up Rich 🙂

Some great recommendations, it's difficult to know what to add ..

Harold Budd – Luxa is quite lovely (his stuff with Eno is probably some of Eno's finest work).
Woob – 1194 has to be one of the all time great ambient albums, tricky to get hold of now.
Gas
Pole
William Basinski
Monolake
Deaf Centre
Foehn
Isan
Tetsu Inoue
Pete Namlook (actually just about anything released on Fax)

Oh and some Eric Satie

I've been veggie for close to 30 years now, & i don't have problems getting up the hills. Wish i could say the same for getting down them though …

z1ppy, yep sometimes i've had to put sealant in to get it to finally seal. I'm reluctant to do initially that as sods law says that i've got the tyre orientation wrong & when i swap it round i'll get sealant all over the floor.

Stopping for a cuppa when you're about to give up helps too 🙂

First off, fit the tyre with an innertube & get both sides to seal. Deflate the tube & remove it from one side, keeping the other side sealed.

Then (a tip from my LBS), assuming you have the presta valves with the removable core, pump it up with the core removed as that offers a lot less resistance. Refit the valve core once both sides are sealed.

From what i've read in those articles, the blockages tend to be from lumps of undigestable meat. I've often wondered what they find from the output of those who (like me) have been long term veggie or vegan, with a diet that tends to have a higher fibre content & no gristle.

Donk, i remember that article. You're right, it was in a weekend supplement for either the Guardian, Observer or Indy.

All they said to me was "Basically, Pace RC31's are not suitable for use on a Roadrat frame as they are about 2 inches too long which will cause undue stress on the headtube aswell as impairing the geometry."

woody2000 that Kinesis fork seems to be just the job. Loads lighter than the standard fork and a good price too. Are you running one ?.

I looked around for a disk tab carbon fork with the right a-c & couldn't find one. When i bought my rat Cy warned me off putting an rc31 on it – the ones they were selling at the time were the wrong geometry.

+1 for carbon bars. They made a huge improvement to the ride comfort on my rat.

+1 to what Napalm said.

Nobody's ever said anything to me when i've cycled on the cliff top footpath from Telscombe to Newhaven. It seems like a lot of cyclists do it.

Roughly equal weight of the following (250g of each is about right).
Puy Lentils
Onion
Leek
Celery
Carrot
Stock if you have it, else enough water to cook the lentils.

Simmer until the lentils are cooked.
Whiz in a blender if you want a smooth texture.
Serve with lots of black pepper.

(I think this is a French or Italian recipe & they add Sausage).

Also makes a great base for veggie burgers, when thickened with similar weight of ground soaked chickpeas.

If it's a tear, get some Seamgrip. Most decent outdoor shops do it. Costs about a fiver. Apply to the inside of the fabric, with some sellotape or similar temporarily on the outside to hold the tear together. Dries in about 12 hours. Remove the tape & you're done.

Woodsman, iirc you're in Brighton. I got mine from Open Spaces on Trafalgar St.

KevinPP, well done carrying a bike along there. I walked up there late in the afternoon & it was a struggle just walking through those drifts.

a couple of thoughts …

1) someone in the vicinity has a new wifi that's interfering with yours. try chaning the SSID.
2) NetworkManager is now trying to connect to a different router
3) you've updated NetworkManager recently & that's broken. Colleagues have been having problems on Fedora the last couple of days with it, though i've been ok. I think Ubuntu tracks upstream pretty closely, so if Fedora is suffering an issue, it's also likely to. Might be worth going back a release of NM.

Watching them here for the last couple of days, i'm amazed that they flock in such numbers. Rather than eating, which is what i'd expect them to do in these conditions, the Fieldfares seemed to have spent most of their time either fighting each other or threatening any bird that comes in range. One of them is even having a go at the Wood Pigeons when they get too close, which is great to watch. I doubt it would be quite so belligerent towards the local Sparrowhawk.

I'm not sure what the Redwings gain from flocking with the Fieldfares. They don't seem to have the same aggressive nature & being smaller lose out on the choicest feeding opportunities.

Nature is odd sometimes.

I seem to be feeding a sizeable proportion of the Sussex population of Redwings & Fieldfares right now. A "normal" winter here on the coast i might be lucky & see two Redwings, never Fieldfares. Yesterday i lost count at 60 🙂

Chunks of apple are popular. I normally put some in the trees/bushes for Blackcaps who don't seem to like ground feeding, but those get eaten by the thrushes, so i use the RSPB "guardian" fat ball feeders filled with apple chunks.

Nyger seed & sunflower hearts from normal feeders, sunflower hearts & peanuts on the ground for the ground feeders (and unfortunately the bloody wood pigeons).

Dried mealworms & shredded fat balls for the robins, tits, wrens etc. put in saucers in places that the larger birds can't or won't get to.

Don't forget to keep the water sources free from ice.

The most unusual sighting so far this snap has been a female Black Redstart.

Zen have an unlimited option.

Juan, the original Phoronix article is here, and the forum discussion including (iirc) some mention of how to get it working on Ubumgo is linked at the top (or here. The article is a couple of months old now – they test it on the f12 beta. I'm sure if you go hunting round their forums you'll find a newer discussion.

If you go down the Fedora route (you never know, you might like it 😉 you can get the latest f12 driver from koji, currently this one[/url]. You'll need some of the other packages in that directory to satisfy install dependencies, depending on what packages you have installed.

Depends how old your GFX card is & how much 3D support you need.

If your card is recently new (r500, r600, r700 etc) & if performance is your #1 consideration then go for the closed source ATI driver & their stack.

If you have an older card or if you're happy going with open source solution then you're best off finding something that's tracking Dave Airlie's work. That's being pushed into Fedora (in "mesa-dri-drivers-experimental"), but i think other distro's are re-packaging it.

I'm running the bleeding edge experimental drivers from koji on f12 with a 4870 dual screen & it's working really nicely.

TBH, you're best off going searching around in the Phoronix forums for an answer.

If you can get to the (normally hidden) grub menu, you might find that there's a backup kernel you can boot from. Try hitting tab intermittently between the screen clearing after the initial bios messages & getting the error 18. You'll hopefully be presented by a menu that lists the kernels you can boot from, with the default one being highlighted. If it shows more than one, use the cursor keys to select the another one & hit return or "b". It should boot normally if there's nothing else wrong.

If that doesn't work then as others have suggested a live USB key rescue image would be the next step. Be aware though that if the filesystem is a bit corrupt & you run an "fsck" (filesystem check) on it you might do more damage that someone else could recover.

That grub error 18 to me suggests that there's some filesystem corruption. As you get as far as that error, the grub bootloader is ok, the filesystem is partially ok as it can access the grub.conf configuration file, but there's an issue with the disk address the kernel is at.

I pre-ordered a King ISO to QR15 converter from the LBS back in the spring, aware that availability wasn't "until the summer". It finally turned up, after frequent chasing by the LBS, in October.

I can't remember the exact price. Something like 50 quid i think.

fedora

Having an old or new system doesn't necessarily determine the impact on cpu utilisation these ads have. It's as much to do with how well the graphics driver can render the output.

An old PC with an old gfx card with a well written driver with good hardware support in the kernel will have lower overhead than a modern gfx card in a modern computer with a crappily written driver that requires the cpu to assist the gfx hardware in rendering the output.