To be fair to the guy, whilst he is obviously a complete idiot, it is a bit annoying when people ride down that path (and why, given the lovely descent the other way!), maybe he is wound up by that and takes it out on people bringing bikes up.

Like someone says above, it is a bit of a dull slow way up, and there’s a much better nice way to ride up just round the corner which is surely quicker than carrying up those steps?

In general though, even with relatively useless degrees, go to the best place you can get into. In London, I’d go for LSE or UCL. Otherwise, consider commuting to Cambridge or possibly Oxford.

LSE only does a limited range of courses with an economics / social / political angle. I don’t think they even have an English department. I know from experience that Oxford and Cambridge are nice places to learn at, but they are absolutely not always best for every course and can be extremely old fashioned. For example in my subject, Oxford have a rep for being extremely traditionalist, whereas Cambridge is about cutting edge research, so I’d never bother going to Oxford for the kind of stuff I do.

Basically I’d say ignore any advice about universities that isn’t considering subjects, like that list above, because some universities specialize in particular subjects, and particularly at masters level, other universities will be better. There is also often a lot of snobbery in them, for example in London, Queen Mary is very good at quite a lot of things (better than Kings, UCL etc. for many subjects), but is in the East End of London which means it gets recommended less as some snobs don’t like it, whereas UCL is pretty posh, so gets on their list.

In London, there are two tiers of universities – those that are University of London, and those that aren’t. Personally, assuming you can get on a course okay, I wouldn’t spend my own money on a non Uni of London course.

Within the University of London universities, there is some variation, but they are mostly okay universities. Some of them are more focused on particular things like LSE (economics etc.), Birkbeck (mature part time students), SOAS (smoking dope and hanging out in the bar*, oh and oriental studies) etc. Be aware that Royal Holloway is not in London (realistically going to be an hour’s journey from many parts of London, and the trains aren’t that convenient), and possibly doesn’t have quite such a good reputation, although I don’t know about English.

For a masters, you will be doing something specialist. So, one thing you want to do if you know you want to live and work in London, is look at all the masters courses at all the University of London places, and see who is doing ones that sound interesting.

List of the places here:
http://www.london.ac.uk/colleges_institutes.html

Also, for postgrad stuff, the quality of the people teaching you should make a big difference – one way of looking at this is by looking at research rankings – here are the last lot – there are a bunch of London ones in the top 20 for English:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2008/dec/18/rae-2008-english-degree

Oh, and one thing I can’t emphasise more, is don’t be shy about phoning up or emailing and asking questions about courses. You’re thinking of spending vast amounts of money, and 2 years of your life, you’ve got to be certain about what you’re doing. Also, make sure you have all dates and deadlines clear, so you actually get on whatever course it is.

If either you’re non-British, or you’ve been living abroad for greater than 3 years, you may well count as a foreign student, if in doubt, read all the bumph carefully and check with admissions tutors to find out what your status is before you get a big money shock (extra £10k a year on some courses).

Joe

*or at least they always used to have the reputation as the stoner university.

If I can hijack this informative thread briefly: how do you cope with her on hills joe? Do you run along in front/behind? Or just teach well and hope?

On roads, running shoes on, and I usually stay quite close to her.

On the really steep hill, I started off by holding the bars while she zoomed down it, and sometimes do still if she’s tired or something. Nowadays she’ll usually go down it herself, quite gingerly on the really steep bit, then shouting ‘zoom’ on the slightly less steep rest. I’ve taught her to stop at the side streets and only cross when I say, and to stop any time I say to stop.

I can just about run fast enough to stay in front, so traffic on cross streets permitting, I’ll just run in front and tell her it’s okay to cross, so she just keeps going all down the hill (unless there’s something shiny and interesting like a slug, in which case we stop for a while).

I also bought a Chariot Trailer too which at the time wasn’t cheap but it’s proven it’s worth in two years of use. Again, the cost may offend some folk but I’m happy with the amount of use it has gotten and the wee one is happy in it so why not eh? Someone has to try and prop up the UK economy

Adding up Rose’s balance bike and her (Croozer) trailer, they cost about the same as my mountain bike. Which is quite a painful thought, but I’m still glad we got them. I reckon they’ve had more use in terms of hours than my mountain bike over the last couple of years – we use the trailer an awful lot, and she rides her bike most days, whereas I mostly ride the road bike.

Oh and

http://www.unicycle.uk.com/12-hoppley-beginner-unicycle.html

can cut down to 35cm = short enough for a 2.5 year old! Not that I expect her to actually learn to ride it while she’s two, but she quite likes pedalling round the front room while I hold the seat!

Toddle North is now 2 and a couple of months. She’s v small for her age, so can;t yet reach the pedals on her Little Tikes trike.

Will the Rothan be too big? What’s smaller?

We had similar question (at 18 months though!), and the Strider was slightly smaller standover (28cm I think). It was accurate, she was just on it at 18 months. There are ones with smaller wheels that are quite a bit shorter though.

As for the whole expensive vs cheap – having gone out riding with two quite small kids, one with an 80 quid strider bike, and one with a ‘raleigh strider’ (which is still fifty quid), there was a massive difference in weight when carting it about, which you do a lot of when they’re small, plus the strider bike they could pick up, whereas the raleigh was too heavy. Oh and some (but not all I think) of the cheap ones are poorly designed with things like the massive wide handlebars on the Raleigh Strider, which makes them very difficult to steer, particularly round tight corners or round berms and on off road stuff.

Oh and shoes for brakes is great, but going to get expensive where we live – her shoes are already pretty worn down from coming back from childminders down a street which is so steep it has handrails on the pavement. She’s just starting to get braking sorted now at about 2 and a half, but still prefers shoes for anything steep.

I was just thinking about this thread. On Monday, at playgroup, Rose got scratched on the face by another girl in some kind of kiddy tussle, and for the rest of the week, she’s been saying ‘no playgroup today’, all the time. So yesterday, when it was actually playgroup day, I popped her in the bike trailer and went round the corner to her friend’s house and gave her and her best friend a lift to playgroup, so that they both got there at the same time. When we got to playgroup, they both raced to get in, and there were no problems.

So my new top tip for this kind of thing is if she already knows some kids who go there, to offer to give one of them a lift there with her, so that she doesn’t have the ‘going into a big noisy room on her own’ thing. If she doesn’t, maybe it’s time to make friends with the parents and see if they’d like to bring their kids over to yours to play.

I’ve seen the islabikes one and the Strider, and I personally thought the Strider was better, hence we got it. Lighter, lower standover, really well designed (little things like grips, the funny brake that is actually usable by a 2 year old, the very light wheels, lovely smooth frame with no bits to catch clothes on, designed to be easy for them to pick up off the floor)

They also run tons of balance bike events (weekly in some cities) and seem like they are building a real community around their bikes. Which is nice.

Probably going Islabikes for first pedal bike, but I didn’t think the Rothan was as good as the Strider as a balance bike. Obviously I’m biased now, as we have one though.

Whilst some people are scumbags who don’t care about county court judgements against them, other people will want to apply for a mortgage, open a bank account, or whatever in the future, so will pay up. If you think the person is someone like that (for example, are they the sort of person who owns a fancy mountainbike and probably doesn’t live with their parents), it is only £25 to take a court case for £200.

In a lot of cases, just sending a letter saying if you don’t pay in 7 days, I’ll go legal on your ass (you have to do this whatever, it’s called a letter before action), will produce the desired payment.

It is absolutely dead easy to do if you are sensible and persistent, and well worth £25 for a try.

Read this:
http://www.doyourselfjustice.co.uk/claims.asp

and write the letter before action today and send it off straight away. Put a reasonable time limit for payment on it (7 days is fine if it has been going on for a bit).

In a weeks time, put in the claim on moneyclaimsonline. Twenty five quid.

If they don’t pay up (including the £25) straight away, wait and you should get a judgement against them.

If they don’t pay the judgement, having a CCJ against them can be a big hassle, plus you can do all manner of things that cause them hassle, depending on how much you can be bothered (and how much money they’ve got, whether they have a job, or own a house), and how much you’re willing to risk in fees.

Assuming the 3rd party ever pays up – in my (limited) experience this is where the system falls down. I lost a couple of thousand on a custom electric bike, eventually the bailiffs were sent around and apparently if they’re told “Sorry, Mr Smith moved away last month” there’s nothing more they can do..

For that sort of money, you can send it up to high court enforcement if you’re in England, and they are paid by results, as opposed to normal court bailiffs who are salaried. In my experience, they are extremely efficient at getting money back.

Not true for £200, where I think you’re limited to county court enforcement like you say.

You should try an actual bmx track, there are loads of them, and they’re brilliant fun for balance bikes. Although it is a bit terrifying watching your teeny tiny little baby launch themselves down those great big start ramps!

It is much more useful to them switched on, although they still have some capability (e.g. rough positional tracking) when it is switched off as long as it has charge on the battery.

Really? Like how?

If mobile phones transmitted at all when turned off, they’d be in breach of aviation regulations and would never get approved.

They can be tracked when not making a call obviously, but not when actually turned off and not transmitting anything (or in airplane mode). Unless someone has physically installed some kind of wireless bug inside your phone, but they might as well have installed it in your car, in your house or whatever. I reckon there is no way an unmodified mobile phone can be tracked while the power is off.

The actual surfing bit is fun, but it doesn’t last long and the rest of the time you need to be quite fit, fit enough to paddle out through the break, fit enough to hold your breath for what can seem like ages as you go through the rinse cycle and fit enough to paddle fast enough to catch the ride, which is all about timing.

I would agree with this – times I’ve tried surfing, I was pretty fit, and am a pretty strong swimmer, but it absolutely broke me after just 3 hours of it. Not sure what it is, I can swim underwater for ages, paddle a kayak okay, swim crawl quite well, but the whole thing just does something to your upper body that swimming doesn’t do.

Was so cold here this morning that I broke the British Shorts Time rule and actually had covered legs for once. Forgot my gloves though which was a pain.

On the other hand, speedos and a swim hat are still the required gear for Thursday morning swim time. Half an hour in the Derwent was pretty chilly last week and it was only 9 or 10C air temp then. Slightly scared about this Thursday.

Personally I think there are basically two interesting things you can do with camera apps, panoramas, and stupid effects. There are decent panorama apps, and instagram and various similar things on both Android and iPhone. Oh and basic editing I guess, but that usually boils down to stupid effects + clipping. Other than that it boils down to the quality of the camera, and how smooth the camera app works (eg. the HTC One X has an extremely fast to take pictures camera app, think the iPhone is okay, not sure about others).

I guess add on hardware is maybe an advantage on iPhone if you really are very serious about mobile photography, although why you’d want to carry extra expensive photo hardware for a phone, which is fundamentally not that good a camera, rather than a camera I don’t really know.

iPhone people have moaned about really bad purple lens flare on the latest iPhone. Don’t know how bad it really is – supposed to be worse than old iPhones or some other phones. Depends how careful you are about not taking pictures towards the sun ever I guess.

There are a couple of cameras that are android based, but not actually phones.

They’re wifi only for uploading, but it means you can do things like facebook uploading directly from the camera.

They are standard compacts, so have bigger lenses and sensors, so they’ll almost certainly take much better pictures than any cameraphone.

I don’t know how much they are, or whether they’re widely available yet though.

Encouragement is the key, not pushing. If your lad fancies a go at a drop let him, if he doesn’t dont call him a big jesse, just find something he can do to build his confidence up on.

I’d agree with this too – same approach I take with my 2 year old on her bike. If she wants to try something and it isn’t stupid (riding along high walls with her current level of skills was ruled out already!), then she can. If she crashes, I’ll pick her up, give her a cuddle, say she’s very brave, all that.

But then I’m blessed with a nutter I hold back rather than a timid person who I push. Different possibly for other kids and other parents.

look at the stats for injuries occurring in horse riding I think they are way worse than for cycling.

Or football for that matter. Saw a stat somewhere that skateboarding in skateparks was responsible for far fewer injuries per person than football.

Oh and trampolining – really dangerous, massive cause of injuries (we’re not allowed one for that reason).

Having said that there’s a difference between ‘cycling’, and riding Whistler Bike Park or whatever.

Hmmm.. in our case our little un’s body clearly tells her she needs choc chip brioche, ice pops and “bitey cheese” (aka Grana Padano).

We still have charge of the cupboards and the money to take to the shops though, so she doesn’t get to choose exactly what she wants, she just can not eat things. If she chose to only subsist on babybels, which she’d happily do (we’re obviously less posh than you!), she’d get hungry pretty quick as we only buy them when we’re going on journeys.

So I guess I’m in favour of some control, but just not in favour of forced eating.

I’ve got a genuine question for the adamant disciplinarians.. crikey, tootall et al.. How do you know that the method of parenting that you’re prescribing is the best and how are you certain that nothing else could be more effective..? What sort of person are you intending to create with your ‘system’..? How have your own children faired under your guidance..?

Same is true for us hippy wasters too though to be fair. Personally, I was brought up forced to eat food and ended up a super fussy vegetarian, hence my hippy waster ideas about not forcing food. I can’t pretend I have evidence for them, just that I find them easier and more relaxing to apply, and with my child it seems like she is just as good an eater as any other child I know.

On t-mobile, you have to send an mms using the sim so that they know it can receive mms – so worth trying her sending you one to see if that fixes it.

Especially when you are FREQUENTLY obliged to force one of the parties to do something they don’t want to do. Like eat their dinner

Going off topic, why do you have to force kids to eat their dinner?

You’d never force an adult to eat dinner, you’d just offer a dinner, and it’d be up to them if they ate it, depending on how hungry they were, how much they liked the food, how tired they are etc.

I don’t know, personally we don’t force any particular eating, because that seems weird (and because I was always forced to eat and hated it), we just make sure that we provide healthy meals (and a couple of healthy snacks) and it is up to her what she chooses to eat. Seems to work okay, and is a whole lot less hassle than having a fight if for some reason she isn’t hungry. I don’t think she eats any different amount to other kids her age – all kids I know have some meals where they eat everything and others where they et nothing, the onl’ difference I can see is that they have more arguments.

Same with finishing first course before puddings – sometimes I’m not savoury hungry and have a tiny first course and devour a ton of cake. That’s because my body is telling me that’s what I need. I feel it is only right to respect that everyone has different needs and let her work out what she needs right now. Seems to work fine – she’s usually more of a savoury person now, but has the odd meal in the wrong order, or skips the main course.

We do have one rule about food, which is that if you don’t want it, daddy can tidy it up. Tht serves two purposes – firstly I’m a greedy bugger. Secondly, it makes her consider whether she actually wants to et something if she has got distracted by something shiny.

Rose didn’t like being left at playgroup, but really liked it once she was there.

We deliberately talked lots about playgroup with her, and how much fun she’d had, so she hadn’t forgotten that bit by the time next time came round. We also had a strategy for her if she got scared or worried, which was that we told her if she is feeling scared, she should go over to the drawing table and ask to do a drawing. Having said that, also last week her best friend started at the same playgroup, which might have made all the difference.

Today, she walked straight in, and said ‘hello. I’d like to draw slugs and snails please.’ to the playgroup lady and was off, so either one of the above has worked, or she is just suddenly used to it.

So the key question is: Does the Tissiington route you mention have loads of those loathsome bike crush things which prevent you getting through on a trailer?

Nope. I’ve cycled that entire route with a trailer (Tissington -> Cromford) and it is all fine. They hire bike trailers at both ends of the Tissington and High Peak trails. Downhill from Middleton Top is quite steep, but fine.

The Tissington Trail is a slight upwards incline, but really very slight, you don’t notice it at all. There is one slight bump right outside Ashbourne, but nothing else.

Don’t be tempted to take what looks like a shortcut between the Tissington Trail and the High Peak Trail, goes across somewhere around Biggin, I think it is National Cycle Route something. It is quite rocky in parts and has a big section of loose massive gravel, was quite an experience on a road bike with 23mm tyres towing a trailer. Much quicker to cycle up to the junction at Parsley Hay.

You make a good point about trailer time. We don;t use it that much – mainly because the weather’s been dreadful and, well, for a whole host of reasons.

The magic of the trailer is that the weather is always good inside it (except for the one time when we had a flash flood and the water was so deep it came up from the bottom and was up to the seat, leaving Rose not entirely impressed, oops!) As long as you own a waterproof, you can pretty much always go out in it. Loads of room for jumpers, waterproofs, spare clothes etc. in the boot too.

I always tell Rose that we’re going on an adventure, wherever we are going, so we have shopping adventures, going to cafe adventures, park adventures, picking up dry cleaning adventures, camping adventures, swimming pool adventures. She seems to fall for it too – as long as you make it sound exciting, she believes it will be!

Trailer time with a kid depends a lot on how used to the trailer they are. Rose is happy enough doing 5 hours riding in total in a day two days running (that was only about 30 miles a day in the hilly Peak District!), and has done a 40 miler once. I know of other kids who aren’t happy after 45 minutes. She has gone in the trailer an awful lot though – at least once a week on average since about 6 months old, and quite often long rides. I would try and regularly get out with the trailer a lot now before you go. Trailers are brilliant in winter, because they keep lovely and warm and dry inside compared to a bike seat – been on rides with snow on the ground, where I was bleeding freezing, and she was sitting happily inside chatting away, still toasty warm.

Naps help too, she’ll happily do a 2 hour nap in the trailer, so starting a ride before a nap is a top tip. Other than that, obviously cuddly toys in the trailer, going interesting places so that she can see fun things and pointing them out to her, singing songs together, chatting, telling her that you’re about to zoom down a hill really fast, telling her stories as you ride (I don’t know about you, but I know all the words to at least one of her bedtime stories). Oh and plan stops for picnics and swings and wee stops obviously.

To be honest, with an inexperienced cyclist you’re probably going to be most limited by your wife’s endurance. I would be looking at 10-15 mile days maximum, which gives you plenty of time for pottering slowly, and lots of break time / picnic time for the kid. That kind of distance means that if the weather is truly minging, or the kid has a grump or whatever, you can pretty much always hammer it with the kid and the trailer to wherever you’re staying in an hour. And if she gets knackered, a taxi to the next place won’t be too expensive! Remember for a non-cyclist a 10 mile ride is quite a big challenge.

Norfolk as suggested above would be brilliant, although it is a right pain to get to. Don’t be tempted by Lincolnshire, it is mainly a bit dull, and worth driving the extra to Norfolk.

One possible short and flattish 2 day weekend tour that is closer to you would be to do Tissington Trail from Ashbourne to Parsley Hay then High Peak Trail to Cromford (do it this direction and there are no noticeable uphills – don’t be tempted to do it the other way with an unfit rider!). I’m pretty sure there’ll be some bike friendly B&B places somewhere around Parsley Hay, and there are places to stay in Ashbourne and Cromford. You’d have to bike over to Ashbourne to pick up the car once you’d finished, but it’s only 10 miles, and Cromford is a nice enough place for your family to be waiting for you (nice bookshop, tea room, canal with ducks, lovely playground etc.) You get to end the ride with a massive zoom down a great big incline which is fun with the trailer.

Also, not what you’re asking, but I can recommend trailer camping – done it twice with Rose, can easily fit a 2 person tent plus camping gear in the trailer boot of my Croozer. She loves it. I get a massive ride, plus a nights camping. What could be better.

Also, about Linux. I work in a Computer Science department, at an okay university. We do a lot of development and most people are quite techy to say the least. There are certainly projects using Linux for development and most of the servers are Linux, but I can’t think of anyone who I work with regularly who runs a Linux machine as their main desktop machine. I’m sure there are a few people dotted round the lab, but almost everyone seems to be either Windows or Mac.

pretty pants for kids level serious work. think equations etc.
?? Pretty sure iPads can do sums.

Equations in documents. Dead easy in Word with the built in (and jolly good) equation editor, a pain in some other word processing things.

Things like equation editing are part of why completely web based things aren’t quite there yet. Google docs has an equation editor, but it a)is dead hard to use and b)isn’t compatible with word doc files (it just puts them in as images in the doc file).

The thing about anything other than office that is conventional software (eg. openoffice, apple pages or whatever), is that it’ll be a pain to implement and support currently in a world where probably 90% of students have access to office already, and only a tiny minority have the alternative software installed. The obvious future thing to do is move towards some kind of web technology based thing that will just work anywhere on any device, but we are still way off having a decent web based word processor or page layout package, let alone a decent spreadsheet. Which is a bummer. Maybe in 5 years or so, google docs / drive will be good enough, but right now it isn’t even near a really old version of Word, let alone the quite polished current versions.

If as well as the lessons, you want to learn lots of vocabulary, this site is good for it:

http://www.memrise.com/welcome/

The big pain with anything other than something that can run full office, isn’t that you can’t create documents on it – most things will let you create documents. It is that some swine carefully crafts a document and expects you to edit it and then send it back to them, without messing up anything at all. If you find they’ve used some obscure feature, or done absolutely millimetre perfect positioning, or something else that isn’t exactly the same in your ‘word compatible’ office suite, it all goes wrong. It is quite annoying in word, and can be nightmarish in Excel or PowerPoint.

Get this all the time with publisher templates – where the article has to be in exactly the right format to look correct against other articles. It never quite works with open office or any other non office product.

In some ways it’s all Microsoft’s fault for Word being such a nightmare format full of so many backwards compatibility kludges and little fixes and stuff, but unfortunately that is how it is. The flip side of it is that if you only use Word, it pretty much just works – even really old word docs layout pretty much the same in the latest Word.

I do not understand the tri comments – ok so triathletes are not allowed to draft, may have tri bars ( hopefully removed for group rides) and may be less used to riding in groups. But why the need to generalise? There are considerate cyclists and sloppy cyclists – how they use their bikes (ie which discipline) is irrelevant surely?

Point is that triathletes are often people who ride bikes because they are good at swimming or running, whereas most people come biking because they want to ride bikes.

Definitely a wider range of abilities at tri club than at our local road club ride.

Kew Gardens is magical when the autumn colours start kicking in.

For someone who is “a bit skint”, I suspect the 16 quid entry is a bit much though (not to mention the really very expensive food once you get in if you don’t take a picnic).

They are cool and fun toys, but they’d probably be a bit slow for the web stuff except for the video, and I don’t think they run flash which might limit some games. They’re not really a general purpose home computer – think more mobile phone level of processing power & technology.

My delightful daughter last time I took her on a plane (at just over 1), screamed her head off full pelt from the moment we queued to board, and continued to scream through all the safety announcements, to the point that they turned the volume on the announcements up to ear bleedingly loud. They gave us a whole row to ourselves as obviously no bugger would want to sit next to us.

I hadn’t done anything wrong that time – she was well fed, clean, had been entertained etc. she just got tired just at the time of going onto the plane, and was not impressed with the whole business of planes and being strapped into things and the like.

Fortunately, the moment the plane took off, she went fast asleep until it landed, so it was okay in the end, but really, there was nothing I could do except cuddle her.

I don’t mind kids on flights – if they kick the back of my seat all the time or whatever, I’ll tell em off, which is what anyone should do – sometimes any kids have moments where they are being deliberately obtuse and their parents are unable to control them, and being told off by a stranger is often way more powerful than being told off by their own parents.

The ferry is brilliant with a bike (or at least used to be) – first off the boat in front of all the cars, no matter when you get on. Dead easy.

Not as slick as the Eurotunnel maybe (and driving I’d go Eurotunnel every time), but I do like a good boat.

Joe

The 584mm is the important bit. It is the diameter of the tyre bead.

What it tells you is that no normal 26″ tyre will fit.

It is a trendy size for mountain bikes, or an ancient city bike size.

You can get trendy 650b mountain bike tyres that cost a fortune, or dirt cheap old fashioned tyres from some old shop that carries parts for granny’s ancient roadster (what you probably need).

Like this:
http://www.acycles.co.uk/michelin-world-tour-rigid-tyre-650x35b-black-brown-sidewalls-326.html

We had ours done by a solicitor. My wife is a law lecturer, and she thought that the reliable indemnity insurance and the way that they are regulated & trained, unlike will writers, meant that it was worth paying slightly more. It wasn’t super expensive either.

It possibly depends if you have anything complicated (like you want to specify particular arrangements for kids in the event of both parents dying) or out of the ordinary, but she is the expert and she thought it was worth paying slightly more.

She’d also seen one written by an online will writer, following the instructions of someone well off who had quite complex intentions about a wide variety of assets, and it was complete unclear gobbledegook, along with including factual innacuracies, all of which would probably lead to years in court if anyone decided to challenge it on their death.

More on this:

http://www.moneywise.co.uk/investing/financial-goals/will-writing-scams-to-avoid

You’ve got Gov looking to a medical community, for what the advise to the public should be. However, that commuity do not appear to be able to agree on what the message on nutrition should be. .

Worse than that, you’ve got the government looking to the food producers for their advice on how to promote healthy eating (ie. how to battle against the advertising and marketing of, oh hang on, the very same food producers), and ignoring the medical / research side of things. Now if that isn’t a sick joke, I don’t know what is.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/health-advisers-spend-millions-promoting-fast-food-2145789.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k0fs0

So I guess what I’d prefer is that phone OS retailers were forced to allow multiple different map tile providers for their map app.

Problem is that map providers are moving towards exposing the vector basis of their mapping rather than providing tiles (google has already on mobile, and is moving towards it on desktop, Apple is, I bet Bing, Yahoo etc. are considering it). Which means that a map layer is now a combination of a load of vector data, plus rendering software. Which is more complicated to switch about than just a load of pictures.

The real sad thing about iOS maps, is that people are moaning about how much worse it is than the old iOS maps, which in itself had missed about 2 years worth of the latest mobile Google Maps features and was pretty poor.

Things like very high quality vector mapping (it is rendered as nicely as google maps tiles, but is vector based, so downloads really quick and can be rotated), 3d buildings, decent road and pedestrian navigation with turn by turn and live traffic information, download of map areas for offline use. All missing.

So you can see why Apple needed to do something about maps – it was glaringly bad in comparison with the full mobile Google maps. It is just sad that they appear to have done such a piecemeal job.

In fact looking at that list of new features that have come out in Google Maps vs. the new but poorly implemented features in Apple maps, it seems like they had exactly the same checklist of missing features that they needed, they just haven’t had the development capability to pull it off yet.

I suspect that for iOS Google maps they’d paid Google to develop specific features (like image tile based maps, and static directions), and Apple just weren’t willing to pay for Google to develop the newer features and thought they’d have a try at doing it themselves – doubt that it would be Google refusing them the chance to get those features, as given Google’s monopoly on high quality online mapping, it’d be just begging for some kind of competition law complaint.

If the boiler power light isn’t on, then there’s most likely going to be a problem with the power for the boiler or something electrical- if it’s anything like ours, gas problems cause flashy lights to happen.

Pretty obvious but have you checked all the fuses (ours there is one in the boiler itself, one where the external power switch for the boiler is, and obviously the main circuit breaker or fusebox).

Maybe I just put a TRV on the “always on” rad given the whole system is going to be always on.

Not that I’m an expert on these things at all, but when I asked why that existed (the always on radiator), I understood it was that if all radiators had TRVs, on an old boiler (without a separate bypass circuit), you would be stopping circulation and the pump would blow.

Even with a modern boiler with a bypass circuit, you’ll still be running the pump and wasting energy anyway. And a TRV costs almost as much as a cheap thermostat, and fitting it will probably mean draining the heating system, compared to connecting 4 wires to the boiler.

Essentially, your original question is ‘how do I efficiently and simply do what a thermostat does’. And the answer is ‘fit a thermostat’.

heating is controlled by a timer panel, can be on/off timed

So when you turn that off, you don’t have hot water to the taps either?

If not, and you have a timer panel that switches the heating independent of the hot water, then the timer panel is going into the switching circuit. You can go into that with an external circuit, which is what the external thermostat does.

they might be just what I need. A simple thermostat switch won’t work so easily on my boiler as it needs to be on to feed hot water to the taps

So do all combi boilers. They usually have a separate switch wiring for this. Assuming it’s some kind of combi boiler. Thermostats don’t wire into the main boiler electrical connection, they go into the switching circuit which turns the heating on and off, the boiler has a place to run a 4 core wire into, and terminals to screw the right wires into.

Check the manual for your boiler (online if you don’t have it), should show the wiring.