Have you actually been there? Just that while LA etc look lovely in films, in practice they are polluted too hot places where you have to drive to do anything and unless you’re quite rich, live miles from the beach or in a horrible area where people shoot at you. San Francisco is a proper place and is nice but not hot.

There are tons of places that are nice and hot in Europe, you don’t have to break any laws to go and work there, and you might have a chance of living somewhere within walking distance of the beach. They talk funny languages, but most of them talk English also, and you might well learn the language anyway if you live there.

I have still not yet figured out how to avoid getting gobfuls of sea water though.. almost puked last time

Easy, don’t breathe when your face is forwards, either:
1)eyes forwards and up slightly to sight then drop head to side and breathe,
or
2)breathe, then turn forwards and sight.

http://www.swimsmooth.com/open-water-swimming.html

Not that I’d try it when sharing a lane, but if you have a nice symmetrical stroke, it’s possible to swim a length eyes closed and remain in the lane. Easiest if you push off then close your eyes.

Oh, and kick along the pool and get someone to look at your feet, some people do some weird asymmetrical stuff with their kick.

Goggles and eyes open looking down will at least let you swim straight in a pool.

On the other hand, being able to swim straight without seeing is useful, particularly if you ever swim outside, and being symmetrical may avoid muscle strains and things.

Fixing it is probably to do with making your stroke even and not one-sided. You might not be rotating evenly to both sides, or you might have an inefficient pull on one side, or you might be crossing your arm over on one side or something. I knew a guy who used to pull straight with one arm, then slide the other arm off way to the side, never knew he was doing it until he saw a video.

Do you breathe on one side only? If you do, you could try breathing both sides (once per 3 strokes). A good thing to be able to do, as it encourages a symmetrical stroke.

Swimsmooth.com is great for tips and videos on crawl.

Orange shop did that to my wife too, she said can I buy one of those phones and use my Orange sim card in it, they said no, and told her to go across the road to the independent phone shop, where they happily sold her a PAYG Orange phone.

Presumably their thought is that while you’re on contract, you’re not going to go away anyway, so no point in helping you out, but it annoyed her enough that for the next one she’s changing networks, so they lose in the end.

As for the childhood study – again, how does a study of childhood ‘exercise’ (if you can call wii-fit type games ‘exercise’) bear on adult populations? Does the activity/rest model apply to kids in play, which they most often sustain over the course of a whole day?

Here’s a recent study about fat adolescents who were made to do high intensity and low intensity exercise:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2047-6310.2013.00148.x/full

The key thing is that ‘Total DEE[daily energy expenditure] was not significantly different between conditions in the three studies.’ ie. the people who did exercise didn’t overall expend more energy than on a resting day. Depressingly, it appears that this effect possibly isn’t true for thin kids, but is for fat kids (essentially the take home message for parents is to try not to let your kids get fat and unfit in the first place).

And something interesting about adults that certainly supports the idea of full time physical play and keeping active throughout the day rather than structured bursts of exercise – essentially saying that (on some particular measures) 1 hour of ‘proper’ exercise and then sitting down for the rest of the day is worse for health than doing larger amounts of low intensity walking.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0055542

Essentially they (and others) argue that reducing sitting down time is what is important for health, rather than a simple calorie balance equation which we can game by doing high intensity exercise for short periods of the day. Right bugger for those of us who sit in offices all day!

Not to mention the whole weight loss versus health thing – weight loss is what people want to sell, but healthy is what people ought to want to be (weight loss might come from healthy lifestyle changes, but making weight the one true goal probably isn’t the best.)

Our Quinny got pretty rough and needed a new frame. We live on a cobbled road which probably did it. I wouldn’t say they were very robust. I wouldn’t buy one for the money even second hand (ours was free, and was very welcome, but I wouldn’t buy one).

Lots of people get a Maclaren or similar small folding pushchair at 3-6 months, as they are way more practical if you don’t actually go offroad all the time (most don’t work for teeny babies).

We never used the big pram, as we live somewhere hilly, and it just didn’t work for our baby. We used the ability to bung the car seat in, and then later on got a foldy up Maclaren.

Whatever you buy pram / travel system / pushchair wise, second hand is good – ebay is full of people who buy some beast of a travel system, use it for 3 months, then get a cheap folding pushchair and sell on the travel system dirt cheap.

Unless you live in some miracle place full of wide but extremely bumpy and rocky tracks with no stiles, don’t bother with off road ability – that is what slings and baby carriers are for, and it just makes them bigger and more unwieldy. In practice hardly anyone goes offroad with a buggy (and once they’re older, you can make most bike trailers into a running buggy for offroad anyway).

There definitely should have been a ‘test-case’ along the lines of a sample of people who have made permanent lifestyle changes, e.g. commuting to work by bike/foot, doing physical activity every day, rather than ‘fad’ exercises.

My own slimming plan: Cycle 200 miles a week and eat carbs like they’re going out of fashion.

This is my point about intrinsic motivation – how many people who run every day, cycle every day, play sport to a serious level or whatever can there be who purely do it because they feel they should lose weight, or because their doctor tells them too. They do it because they enjoy doing it and like feeling fit and looking good.

The problem is that monetising and really convincing people to ‘go for a run because it is fun’ is much harder than ‘come to the gym because you’re fat’, even if the second has a very low long term success rate. The low long term success rate being part of the business model for gym based exercise anyway – their dream customer is someone who pays a subscription, then stops coming whilst still paying. It isn’t in their interests to turn everyone into regular athletes.

I think the theory from the study of children was that if you exercise then you rest afterwards to compensate. Which kind of makes sense, but they got the reality a little twisted. Modern sedentary lifestyles basically mean we are in a near permanent state of rest, and we actually need to exercise to compensate.

The study on kids and exercise, which provided the backbone to the contention that exercise does not help weight-loss, seems completely misguided IMO. How many fat kids did you know at school (in the pre-90s period)? When you played football/netball/skipped/ran about all break-time, did you then get away with periods of ‘rest’?

Hey, I actually know a little bit about the actual science for this, been reading it for work. This type of compensation effect is pretty well known – been pretty well documented with things such as exertion games (wii, Kinect etc.), for which the touted health benefits are very dubious (largely based on short term studies where people were actively encouraged to exercise, and ignoring the fact that the moment you stop actively forcing people to exercise, they don’t bother, and ignoring daily compensation effects).

There’s also evidence that asking people to exercise to help their health is of dubious use in the long term, because whilst people’s motivation for starting doing exercise is often health based, the only people who continue to exercise are those who achieve more intrinsic motivation from exercise, ie. people who actively enjoy doing exercise and feeling fit, rather than people who are only doing it because of the health benefits. Possibly why free gym referral programmes basically don’t work for most people (12 month ‘success’ rates of 20% or so).

Shall watch the second one today, but I thought the first program was quite good – made the point that pay/fad diets involving impractical amounts of change, the inevitable branded products and sessions, essentially don’t work.

As I understand it, the current evidence is that a combination of a sensible mixed diet without too much of anything, and doing outdoor exercise is the best thing to do for health. It hasn’t changed massively, despite many years of fad diets and miracle gym classes.

Downhilling just watch the video on Cancellaras descent, which put him back in the race.

I suspect the TDF is pretty irrelevant to my commute though, for a bunch of reasons:
a)Tour de France riders have a lot more energy than me.
b)TDF riders are often limited by terrain as to how much effort they can put in on some sections (downhills mainly).
c)TDF riders are limited by drafting as to how much effort it is worth putting in on the flat. Unless they’re going for an attack or trying to push the pace for tactical reasons, what is the point in powering hard in the peleton?
d)In the TDF, there’s a massive advantage in putting hard power in at some points in order to catch up with someone else for drafting.

Whereas right now I am a not that fit 2 days a week commuter, very rarely riding at a speed where terrain is what stops me going faster (I can think of one corner on my commute where I can physically get myself fast enough that I’d have to slow myself down for the corner. So essentially I have a total amount of energy to put in over the ride, and can choose whether I expend that energy in downhills, on the flat, or on uphills, and how I balance it. And it seems to me that if I put in minimal effort in the steeper downhills, I don’t lose much speed overall on the downhills, and can keep it pretty much always over 20km/h on the uphills. And 17mph (actual, not riding time) average despite being pretty unfit is not to be sniffed at, is a fair bit better than any rides this year before I started doing this.

Right, I have been experimenting, and maybe it is just psychology because I feel faster, but even in my not super fit state of the moment, I am 5 minutes faster over 16 hilly miles by attacking the hills and chilling out on the descents, as opposed to constantly slogging. 57 minutes today, I also don’t feel as knackered when I get in.

Result.

I know that it’s unfashionable to say this what with the trend for super low bars, but if you’re not using the drops on your current bike, why not pop a spacer under the stem, or flip the stem back up?

I have my bars quite high (no spacers, but flipped up, about level with the seat), and I’m nice and comfy on the drops for quite a time, but have nice high hoods if I need them. When I had it flipped down, my back ached if I rode too much on the drops so I didn’t use them much.

In the olden days, it used to be pretty normal to have hoods level with the seat on a tourer, but nowadays it seems like everyone and their dog wants to look like they’re in the Tour de France or something.

If you really don’t want to scare them, there is bike hire on the High Peak Trail, at Middleton Top, which is right nearby. Hybrids or cheap mountain bikes though, nothing you’d want to ride off road*. It is a boring flat railway path (as long as you don’t go towards Cromford, where it is a boring steep descent then slog back up a railway path), but great views on a nice day.

Otherwise, I think you’d have to go Dark Peak to hire proper bikes.

*although if you are mean, you could take them round the back of Black Rocks etc. where it is a bit technical in parts.

Even if you’re taking a purely financial / economic approach*, it is very hard to second guess what is and isn’t a good idea. Who would have guessed in 1950 that being a pure mathematician or a logical philosopher would be potentially extremely lucrative 10 years later.

Also, I don’t know what people mean by ‘a vocational degree’, but if you look at degrees and what people end up doing, it is hard to see the point in doing something with a ‘career’ attached – only something like 25% of law students become lawyers, many engineers don’t become engineers, probably the majority of traditional science graduates (physics, biology, chemistry etc.) from good universities don’t end up in science related jobs, teaching, some teaching jobs are massively hard to get (I understand primary is a nightmare) and then even once people are qualified a massive drop-out rate into other careers, and I’m sure the same is true of most courses. People just don’t follow that perfect well defined career path all the time. I don’t know the figures for medicine, but I know they limit numbers quite strongly, so I suspect if you complete the course you are very likely to stay in medicine, maybe that is the odd one out.

I would worry more about taking a too vocational course, that it might limit you, in that you don’t learn much about general stuff, so if you can’t get the exact job, you’re screwed. I’ve certainly heard that said about ‘computer games development’ degrees, both people in industry and people teaching the courses have said to me that kids would be better off doing a computer science degree if they want to develop games.

Oh, and I would do it again, but then I have a job which I really couldn’t do without a degree or two.

* Which you obviously shouldn’t, you should think, what am I interested in, and study something you’re interested in, and aim to do well at it. No point having a useless 3rd in something sensible when you would be excited by Medieval French enough to get a 1st in it.

Another positive note, apparently this includes the Pedal Peak District plan, which takes the old railway bike trails in the Peak District and adds sensible links so that the Monsal Trail and High Peak/Tissington Trail join up, and so that the various trails are joined to actual towns (Buxton, Matlock, Stoke, Sheffield). Just a recreational thing, but they are great for family rides, and it is nice that they are going to be sensibly joined up to towns, rather than having to drive to the middle of nowhere to cycle them.

http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/transport_roads/transport_plans/transport_funding_bids/pedal_peaks_phase_2/default.asp

On a related note, how do Red Bull have so much money? They do a ridiculous amount of stuff (F1 and various other motorsport teams, they own a load of football teams, Flugtag, Rampage, cliff diving, taking people into space etc) Is it simply just profit from the drink?

You know when you see the documentary about the man going into space on the TV. The TV channel pays them for that.

You know when 7 million people or whatever watch the man jumping from space on their website, that’s 7 million people watching 30 minutes of advertising. Goodness knows how much that would cost to buy in any other form.

Their stated aim is that the media & brand activities should aim to make a profit. Apparently they don’t get there yet, but they aren’t purely paying for them out of drink profits, their media arm makes quite a lot of money (they sell things like playback rights on the videos, images etc.), albeit not as much as it spends.

I once rode my unicycle from South London to Sheerness on Sea, on the Isle of Sheppey. I’ve never been anywhere so bleak. I think it’s the only seaside resort I’ve been to where I actually chose not to go swimming, and I’ve swum at an awful lot of dubious places, that is how bad it is.

The plus side is that because it’s so run down, they haven’t changed the arcade games for years, so you can re-live your 80s youth for about 20p a game while you’re waiting for the train to get out of there.

But these bins aren’t harvesting anything like that – they are just grabbing the MAC ID of your phone (if you walk past, with wifi on, and your phone for some reason tries to connect to the wifi spot the bin pretends to be)

No, that won’t be what they’re doing. It’ll grab the MAC address of your phone if you walk past with WIFI on, and your phone has connection settings for any wifi network (or is set to notify when it detects an open WIFI network). It isn’t pretending to be a hot spot or anything, just a passive radio receiver.

It is only luck whether the phone sends a probe request in the time when you’re near the bin, but for the speed people walk at, and the fact that people like their phones to connect to the wifi pretty nice and quickly when they get home, it is probably quite likely. Details here:
http://www.engr.uic.edu/pub/Bits/Musa/musa-eriksson-sensys12.pdf

And maybe I’m a bit of a spinner*, but 50×12 will surely get you up to 40mph no problems – that’s only 120 rpm, and 50mph is only 160, which isn’t too insane if you’ve got no resistance. I’ve got 52×12 and that is a ridiculously high gear.

*I’ve ridden an hour at 160 rpm on fixed a few times, so I guess I am

My record thus far is 52mph but my legs were going like roadrunner that day, and despite this, due to favourable weather conditions and someone having a bigger chainset (or faster legs), I was beaten on Strava within the hour

You might have been beaten by someone who didn’t pedal at all. Apparently pedalling at high speeds causes more turbulence than just keeping the pedals level and coasting. You can also tuck more if you coast. I have a short steep hill here that I can hit 40mph on pretty reliably, if I pedal to 30mph at the top then tuck very low and coast, I’ve hit 43mph, if I pedal like mad, even on the drops I can just about hit 43mph. I think once you’re over 40mph there’s got to be no point pedalling on many descents.

Even if you ignore the difference in aerodynamics, assume it’s the same when you pedal as when you don’t, and just look at the power, on a 5% hill, 245W of effort gets you just under 6mph advantage at 40mph. If you can get an even slightly better position without pedalling surely you’d make that difference up.

http://www.endurancecorner.com/Alan_Couzens/optimal_pacing

Kids sleeping bag and thermarest now at 3.

A readybed last year.

The surface RT is quite cheap now (£280 for the cheapest one), and a quick google suggests that office RT just doesn’t support add-ins and macros, but generally works the same so probably will do what you want. Presumably supports bluetooth keyboards, which are pretty cheap (or their super expensive keyboard covers), and is supposed to have quite good printer support. And if you actually like the Windows phone, then you might like it.

Although it is a bit of an unknown as to how long apps and things will still be made for Windows RT & Windows Phone, unless it has a serious up-turn in sales at some point soon. Don’t expect the latest versions of your favourite apps to be available.

If you buy a surface pro, which is the one with full excel/word on it, then it costs over 800 quid including the keyboard. Or more than the cost of a tablet plus a laptop.

There is a surface RT which has a version of office on it, but I don’t know how cut down it is, it isn’t a proper laptop, and you’re not guaranteed support for your printer either.

Also, you can connect cameras to the iPad using the camera connection kit. Lets you read the SD card, or USB connection to the camera if it supports it. So that would sort out your photo problems for £25.

You can print from iPad too, http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/apple/3456895/how-print-from-your-iphone-ipad/

Oh, and there are about a zillion keyboards that will work with it.

You can edit documents in various pieces of software for iPad or other tablets, but realistically if you want to edit anything serious in Excel/Word (things like if you need any complex formulas, or you need formatting to stay perfectly the same), you probably need a cheap laptop that runs office.

Personally I think the whole shebang could go one step further and ask people to pay for their own food and drink

Sounds like:”Hi, I’m having a big party, which you are under a certain amount of pressure to attend, please could you pay for it (ps. and we’re having it at some ridiculous hotel where a pretty poor 3 course meal will cost £70 a head, and beer is £5 a pint)”.

I guess people who have a pub or nice restaurant meal, without extra wedding tax, and if they’re the sort of people you’d go out for a meal with them anyway, it doesn’t sound so bad, but for most ‘wedding venue’ type places it would be taking the piss (and I bet loads of people wouldn’t bother coming if you did).

If minitool finds files, recuva quite likely will too, and I think it is completely free. In recuva, you can tell it part of the file name you’re looking for and it will get that out.

Apparently a linux boot disk will often be able to read disks that are in this state too.

Last time I knew anyone needing professional data recovery, cost them £500 for a single disk, although that was a proper dead disk which didn’t spin up, not just a little bit corrupted. Got all their data back though.

Something is messed up with Endomundo there. Your total times for the run if you add up the top left chart are about 3.5 hours. Which for 18 miles is about 11:30 min/mile.

Yet the trace say’s you’re doing roughly 7 min/miles for 18 miles. That’s very good club runner territory for a long run.

I don’t think I’d trust any of that data. Especially given your heart rates don’t really seem to reflect your effort either. I imagine the run felt a lot harder than a sub-140 HR should feel.

This guy has got confused about miles and km (look at the units on the left hand side of the endomondo graph, they say mins per km).

The heart rate thing, unless you noticed it, chances are it is that you knocked the strap at the first stop, then knocked it back at the second. Unless you felt like you went off faster, you would notice the difference between a steady 130 and doing anything that would make you spike up to 180. Stop scuntling your nipples every time you stop and it might fix itself or use a different strap, or gel it, or put cold tea on it, or lick it before you start, hundreds of different things people try to fix that. If you zoom in on your heart rate data, you can see a bad vs a good dataset pretty easily by the jumpyness.

I can swim in very cold water (e.g. 2 degree C for 10 minutes at -5C air temp).

A very fun but essentially useless skill (which took a hell of a lot of time to learn).

Death by dangerous driving is a crime

And is completely irrelevant when discussing whether drivers should by default have (civil) liability for crashing into cyclists.

Surely it doesn’t have v-brake mounts, so you’re limited to calipers and compatible levers (don’t know if that means mini-v levers will be right or wrong?), and even then maybe only the front brake unless you can drill a hole for the back brake? The forks on our balance bike have a hole for a caliper, think that is normal.

Oh, and take him to a big bmx track at a quiet time, good place to learn to go down hills with a decent smooth run out and no need for a brake.

Oh, and the otherwise absolutely brilliant strider balance bike has a stupid push down brake rather than handlebars, which they claim is better for little kids. Having seen it tested in somewhere with proper steep hills, and going onto a proper bike at 3 and a bit, I can safely say that I disagree with them about the brake, they should just bung a normal brake on there, way better even for a little kid than the silly foot brake.

The only problem with a frame fit pump is that any time anyone you’re with has a puncture, they want to use it, because it is so much more efficient than their aesthetically more pleasing ridiculous micro pump.

Then you can use a tiny seat bag rather than some massive beast of a thing, no worries about it swinging about or anything.

If you get on, there’s an app on google play called SMS backup which lets you backup SMS threads.

Oh, and stupid questions:

1)presumably you didn’t have USB debugging enabled, if you happened to have it enabled, you can view the screen of the phone on a PC.

2)If you are lucky and the touchscreen works but the display doesn’t, if you use the HDMI output (mini hdmi -> hdmi cable to connect to TV), can you see the phone screen?

Nothing goes on the SIM card any more.

If you are lucky, photos will be on the microSD card.

When you say you managed to answer a call, did you have to touch a particular area of the screen, or did you use a button to answer the call? If the touch screen is still working, you might be able to force a contact sync if you can find another similar phone so as to work out exactly where you have to press at each step.

My paypal never has any money in, I only use it to buy stuff, works fine, just comes out of my bank account.

Why it is worse than blurred figures and traditional compression artefacts is that an error is not obviously blurred and hard to read, it comes out as a perfectly rendered but wrong symbol.

The only people surprised by this are really failing to understand exactly what is going on inside a scanner- it’s not OCR’ing and then magically substituting characters, it’s simply a compression artefact.

No that’s not right, the compression format involved actually does OCR to find characters, so if the OCR has an error between similar characters like 6 and 8, then a completely wrong character gets put in. It is a symbol based compression format. Nothing like what is traditionally thought of as a compression artifact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2

The main thing is. How on earth do you make it work on 20k? If you’re take home is 1300 quid a month. you pay about £100 council tax, maybe £700 in rent, £20 on your phone, £30 on utilities, £130 on your travel card? It leaves you about £200 a month to live on.

You save 75 quid by getting a bus pass not a travelcard, you save a tenner by not having an expensive phone, you share a room with someone else which cuts down on the rent or live somewhere absolutely minging.

Median salary in London is about £34000, so if you get an average job in London, you don’t have it so bad obviously.

It’s weird. I’ve ridden thousands of miles on towpaths etc with bells, and never met one of these bell haters.every so often someone doesn’t hear your bell and you have to say excuse me, but 99% of the time, you just go ting ting and they look around.

GFor 2, the only thing you’ll ever get anywhere near him flying for some time is a basic one line kite. Don’t but any of the ones recommended above if you actually want to fly it while he is there, it is hard enough to keep track of a single line and a toddle and aviod them strangling, let alone something that if he got tangled in it, could chuck him in the air. Big kites and toddlers don’t mix well.

I would buy your basic 1 line, cheap from a toyshop, I have a brookite diamond for that. Think something that costs an amount of money that you won’t care if a dog eats it / a toddler jumps on it or whatever.