If you just want to copy a folder tree across, microsoft synctoy does the job, and is free.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en

If you want multiple old versions type backup, I'm not sure what does it that is free.

Joe

Well if you are clearing out the garden then i guess you will have plenty of stuff to have a bonfire, dig arround the offending stump, down as far as you can then heap a bunch of stuff on and go and find the matches. For a stump that size it'll take a few goes but i can think of worse things than having a bunch of mates rund to drink some beer and stand around a fire.

We did one years back like this, worked well, although was only a 1 foot stump.

the rapha stowaway jacket is windproof. quite close fitting too.
i'm slim and find it doesn't do the flap-flap thing at speed.

Blimey, for £170, it'd have to do the pedalling for me!

Mate and I got both versions of this jacket and its great – we got ours for birthday/treats as they are a little dear

Hmm, on the list of possibles. I wonder if there is something cheaper – I don't really care if it is breathable, waterproof or fancy in any way etc. I just want it to have arms, stop the wind, and not be heavy or non-aerodynamic.

It is weird, my current one doesn't feel flappy, but the difference is really obvious between wearing and not wearing it. Hmm.

I don't suppose anyone knows how tight the DHB Hunston [/url]is?

Joe

I wear an impsport wind jacket. It's made in my club colours, so not entirely applicable, but I bet they still make them.

Is that something like this:
http://www.impsport.com/direct1/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=14

cheers,

Joe

Er, just buy normal road kit. It does all of what you need.

Yeah, I imagine it does, but google hasn't come up trumps for me, as it seems hard to compare jackets for stretchiness/aerodynamicness online, I don't want to get another lightweight but wiffly-waffly jacket. Any tips on makes or particular jackets? I have loads of short sleeved jerseys, I just want something long sleeved and windproof to bung over it on cold days.

Joe

One at Llanberis just above the youth hostel lets you have fires, and is a pretty nice site. Very big site, close to Snowdon, nice waterfalls and river pools above them right near, short walk to pub / nice cafe (Pete's Eats), you can walk/ride up Snowdon from pretty much at the site (either by Telegraph Road/Ranger path for a long loop, or by fording the river just above the waterfalls and going up the easy Llanberis path).

I think it is this one.
http://www.ukcampsite.co.uk/sites/reviews.asp?revid=4631

It was not the quietest of sites when we were there, although if you pay attention to who you're camping near, that wouldn't be a big problem.

Joe

Did a quick 10 miler from Belper, Derbyshire just now and it was bone dry. Lovely.

Joe

aurigas, powerful enough for most xc stuff and only squeal when salty and i've never needed to adjust them at all. the only time i've needed to do anything to them is when i snapped the lever.

I've got these too, (Auriga Comp), and whilst they work very well (and the only thing that's gone wrong is the pad wearing out), they seem pretty squeaky on wet rides.

Joe

Oyster card always. You can get pay as you go, in which case it is £3.95 maximum per day if you only use buses, or you can get a bus pass on it for £16 a week / 63 quid a month.

Buses aren't too bad if the route has bus lanes, not much slower than the tube.

Bikes are obviously better – only sensible way to travel in London. If you need to catch rush hour trains too, then a folding bike is probably cheaper in the long term than public transport.

Joe

Oh, or you could go west through Ashbourne and then out towards Dovedale, which is very beautiful (nice walk too), but I don't know the roads to cycle on.

Joe

I'd take the mountain bike, loads of great rides round there – pretty easy to find off the OS map, and we've had good weather recently, trails are nice.

If you must road bike though, a few ideas, –

A load of stonking good hills but not all on perfectly kept roads (I'd happily ride it on my 23mm tyres) – http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3537188

Flattish ride for the area (although still probably 500m of climbing over the route) http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3537173

Good cafes in Wirksworth (french place on the square, or I think there's a bakery too), Cromford (nice but odd veggie café at Scarthin Books, or the greasy spoon at the crossroads),

Each of those is probably about 2 hours each for me, I'm not that serious a road biker, more of a commuter bike pootler, but I am used to riding in hills!

You can extend either by going out and back on the A6 further to the North – the A6 is a great road bike road – fast, smooth, great scenery in parts and if you ride it at a weekend, you are almost guaranteed to find some other road bikers to draft with. Lots of cafes along it too.

Or just a nice ride on the A6 out to Edensor and Bakewell, some nice hills and lots of fast A roads.
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3537203

Joe

Also, whatever you think of social services, as we've seen in Ireland recently, they are probably a lot better than farming it out to an church (or another organisation with absolutely no accountability and massive power).

Joe

Well you know who to blame for getting rid of them.

They weren't needed as 'Care in the Community' would deal with all the problems.

Isn't that an urban myth – long stay psychiatric facilities started closing well before the care in the community act, in the 60s, 70s & 80s.

Not that asylums have anything to do with it though, surely the vast majority of abuse is carried out by supposedly sane people?

Joe

how long do they take to upload the images?

About 6 months from when I saw the one that filmed me, the pic of my house is slightly before that.

Joe

me – on it for about half a mile on my commute – I followed the car along for ages!

Heh, but not half the locations in Derbyshire that we're looking to move to (Belper area)

Weird – are you sure – it has my road (an unadopted, very bumpy old road), and seems to have loads of little places like Shottle, Carsington, Blackbrook etc. done pretty thoroughly. Where is it that you can't find?

Joe

You tension your spokes by ukelele(sp?), I'd rather just ride my bike.

Ukulele. Saves you loads of time truing them compared to bringing it all up from nothing. Makes a wheel that tends to be evenly tensioned and not to need any extra truing a month later. So more time 'just riding your bike'.

Joe

Joe and his 'tuning'!

I have a good sense of pitch, and no tension meter, it makes sense. It wasn't my idea, I got it from here:-

http://www.bikexprt.com/bicycle/tension.htm

I guess I could use some less ludicrous source of pitch than a ukulele, like a mobile phone app that plays a pitch, but I the uke is cheap, reliable, usually somewhere to hand and I don't worry too much about getting it dirty, as it cost a tenth as much as my phone did (and a lot less than a tension meter), and the noise it makes is quite nice, not like some kind of annoying beeper. It is probably slightly less accurate than a tension meter, but very quick just to twang the uke, twang the spoke.

Joe

I've never built with a tension meter, just by eye, tried it once and the resulting wheel whils with perfectly even tension, was all over the place

What you do is take the spokes up to tension (or almost), then alter it to get the rim straight. If you're very lucky, at tension is pretty close to true (I've had this with a couple of mavic rims), but often you have to mess a fair bit at the end, but you supposedly end up with a much better wheel.

Personally I don't own a tension meter, I use pitch to get the tension. There is a web page that tells you pitches for spoke lengths, and I either sit next to the piano and bring the wheel up to pitch, or take my ukulele out to the shed with one of the strings tuned to the right note!

Joe

Rear wheels are under a lot more stress and fundamentally weaker.

My back wheel has stayed true ever since I fixed the terrible Bontrager factory build (which was everywhere tension wise). Certainly is under more stress generally though, especially on a loaded bike like my commuter, I just haven't built a back wheel to check whether I'm right about wheels staying true. I imagine once that rim wears out I'll build up something with a mavic open pro rather than the crazy low spoke count wheel that is on there now, so check in a year or two and I'll let you know!

Although the back wheel rarely hits a pothole, as I usually get it out of the way in time, whereas the front wheel, all too often I'm not paying attention and I get a "bang bang" "oh bugger" moment.

Joe

Just bear in mind any new wheel however well built will nedd a little love and care after the first few hundred miles

That is bollocks spouted by bad wheel builders. A well built and stress relieved wheel should not need truing unless you damage the rim. If someone spouts this at you (a lot of shops will), they are bad wheel builders, and you might want to try elsewhere.

Wheels I've built are at 8000km (road bike), 3000km (mountain unicycle), 1000km (24" unicycle) and a load on the 29er wheel I built years back. They are solid and true. I've also got a 29er wheel built by unicycle.co.uk which has at least 3000km in it, on everything from roads to rocky downhill tracks without needing truing – I've seen them build wheels, and they do it jolly carefully, using a spoke tension meter, and so do a good job.

If a wheel can stay true with a 110psi tyre, ridden through the year on potholed roads like my road front wheel (I've hit a good few potholes too), then any wheel should.

Although to be fair, I guess most shops take a lot less care over wheels than you would if you're building them slowly and carefully for yourself, so I wouldn't be surprised if a shop built wheel didn't stay true, but it would still be a bit unprofessional of them.

Joe

Try some unusual way of contacting them, such as contacting the director of the company, or twittering / facebook contacting someone high up or linkedin, as in my experience these odd ways of contacting people get stuff done *very* quickly.

for example, O2 are @o2 on twitter.

On linked in, there are a bunch of orange people
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/orange-personal-communications-services-limited

Joe

I do an hour each way on the bike, and that is at the top end of what is a sensible amount of time to commute, especially with a kid on the way. I'd certainly not do it if it was wasted time sitting in traffic jams. It is only because it is productive time (riding my bike, having fun), that it is worth doing. Same is also true when I commute by bus or train every so often – that gives me time to read stuff / do a bit of work, so I don't have to stay at work so long. 3 hours each way would drive me mad. What's the point in having kids if you're only going to see them at weekends (and you'll probably be knackered then anyway).

Repeat ad nauseam (I have for the last few years). Frustrating thing is it leaves no bike time really in the week. Short of living in Central London (tried it once and hated it with a passion) have no way to really reduce it with the job that I do.

Blimey, 52 hour working week before you even count the trains? Surely you could do some work on the train or similar, and leave 2 hours earlier – you can't be very efficient at work with that long a working week anyway? Presumably no kids / wife?

Joe

Assuming 8.5% growth (average over previous 15 years),

That's possibly a pretty dodgy point to take your averages from, as 1995 was bang at the bottom of the last recession and current prices look like still being at the high end. Isn't the long term trend more like 3-4% if you go many more years back?

Joe

As far as things go, you can pretty much guarantee long run growth in house prices…

real house price index for 50 years:
A pretty good bet in the longer term unless we get some kind of communist government that expropriates assets from the comrades etc etc…

Although that isn't true everywhere – e.g. Japan hasn't had it so well (if you'd done this any time in the last 30 years or so, you'd be way worse off by buying the interest only).

And the amount you need prices to go up for plan 1) to make sense is a very large amount – unless you bought at bang on the bottom last time prices went down (1995 or something), I'd be surprised if you'd be better off, bearing in mind that at the end of that cunning plan you need to sell and buy the smaller house anyway and that will also be more expensive.

Joe

You'd be a crazy nut to deliberately buy on an interest only mortgage. No sensible bank will lend you that surely, unless you have some kind of parallel investment that you claim will pay it off in 25 years (which ends up the same as a repayment mortgage, except you have to gamble on how well your investment works).

Buying interest only is just renting the house from the bank and gambling on house prices going up enough to make it worth while.

Assuming you're paying roughly the same in each case, they'd have to go up by enough to make the cost of the whole house (that you pay off), be as much as the rise in price of the more expensive house. Which isn't guaranteed for sure – only works if interest rates stay dead low, you get a good rate, house prices go way way up etc etc.

Joe

That's a tricky one. If you were an MP and were presented with that 'dodgy' dossier by the PM, categorically stating that we were under imminent threat-what would you have done Jerry? That's what makes Blair, Campbell and the rest of The Cabinets crime so awful in my opinion. The Tories were guilty of under scrutiny though, that's for sure.

Although the dodgy dossier was ripped apart in the media to such an extent that even without that information we had later, almost 50% of the public were anti-war. Oh and something like insane like 5% of the country came out to protest against the war. If they didn't smell a rat when half the bloody country did, they were either doing scummy political manoeuvring, or are very stupid.

Joe

possibly for you – but as a company car driver I don't have to organise that lot
I pay a set amount of tax on the benefit so the more I use it the cheaper each journey is

Is it really surprising that if you get a free car paid for by your company, driving might be cheaper? If your company paid for you to have train tickets, then it might be cheaper too! e.g. If you work for a train company in some jobs, you get free train travel. Would it be surprising to you that for those people, going by train was cheaper?

Joe

organise (and buy no doubt) railcards and oyster cards

Yeah that is true, you buy an oyster card once (ever), for £3 deposit (which you can get back if you never want to go to London again), and you have to buy a railcard once a year ( worth it if you spend more than £60 on train tickets a year) .

Although you could say exactly the same when making the comparison the other way round – if I did the same trip by car, I'd have to organise (and buy no doubt), a car, insurance, MOT, VED, a driving licence etc. By your maths, for me, a single trip driving to London would cost at least £2000. Blimey isn't private transport darned expensive?

It is an annoying fact of using transport in London that it is designed so that tourists (who are assumed to have money to spare), pay tons, to subsidise people who buy sensible tickets, meaning that like you've discovered, unless you get hold of an oyster card, you get completely ripped off.

Joe

look up aylesbury to underground 1

Ah, that's what you're doing wrong, those Underground zone 1 tickets are just traps they put in to catch the unwary. You can't get off-peak ones, so they cost zillions of quid.

It is £32 with family railcard to get to London and back (not as good a deal as Milton Keynes, but a whole lot less than £100)

Then kids under 11 are free on the underground, so nothing for them, kids over 11 cost a pound a day if you get them an oyster card, and for the two adults you should buy oyster cards, it costs £2 a journey on the underground up to a maximum of £5.60 in a day (if you are in Zone 1).

So at most £32 + 12 + 3 (if all your kids are between 11-16) = £46.20 and that gets you a full day of travel round London, not just one trip to zone 1.

Like I said, the fares are insanely complicated, but travel is usually nowhere near as expensive as someone who doesn't use trains will think it is if they look at national rail enquiries website and don't know how to work the off peak fares / London travel etc.

Joe

Where do you go from for it to be £100 for a 40 mile each way journey for 3 kids and 2 adults? Are you sure you're looking up the tickets right? It sounds very unlikely.

That sounds like a whole lot. For example from Milton Keynes (also in Buckinghamshire) the off peak day return (buy it on the day, leave after about 9:30am, don't come back in the rush hour) price is £49 for that lot, even if you don't have a family railcard. If you have the family railcard (costs about £20 per year to have one, so even one trip saves the money), it is £26.45. That is a 100 mile round trip – making it 26p a mile, which has to be cheaper than driving in and parking.

It is a sad fact about the way railway privatisation has worked that a lot of people who don't use the train often have real trouble working out how the tickets work, so end up paying crazy prices, when there is often a much cheaper ticket (even on the tickets where you just walk up on the day and buy them, rather than booking in advance). Loads of people post up prices saying 'I tried to use the train but I looked online and it was going to cost me a zillion quid', when if they'd just gone to the station and asked it'd cost them a quarter of the price or something.

Joe

Is this a modern thing as I know my 70s road bike at my parents has shockingly narrow handlebars – they must be a good 10cm narrower than my normal ones on my Trek.

Joe

You might need quite an old tablet (or possibly one of the several hundred quid pro ones might have a driver) for the drivers to work on the G4, also the operating system will be not so great, much newer software won't work, and a lot of newer hardware will be flaky.

For drawing with a graphics tablet you'd be best off just fitting the tablet to an existing PC. A G4 tower is really a creaking heap of badness, not to mention being incredibly power hungry, and very noisy sometimes (we used to develop with them, and half the time they sounded like a plane taking off). The G4 towers are a big part of the reason they went to Intel processors (the fact they could never make a decent laptop was the other big reason).

There's no massive advantage to an Intel Mac for drawing (potentially some other advantages of a Mac though if you like them), a G4 mac will be actively worse than even a £200 PC, particularly if you want to attach new hardware to it or browse the internet.

For a kid painting & drawing, you want a graphics tablet, and probably want Artrage (http://www.artrage.com/ ) which costs a bit of money (not much – I think it is $20 for an okay version), or potentially mypaint (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/ ), which is free and very powerful, but has quite a steep learning curve for a kid (artrage is dead easy to use).

I've got a wacom bamboo, and it is a pretty good tablet for the price – only has pressure sensing not tilt, but I didn't have £300 to spend on the intuous professional ones just to do a few bits of illustration. I have done a fair bit of work on it (probably 50 hours or so) and it is still great. I have the one with a touch pad on it – that is a waste really, I only got that version because the pen it comes with is better than the most basic one. I think all the wacoms support macs if you must go that way, although whether or not they will support as old an OS as you're likely to find on a G4, or non-intel macs, I don't know.

Joe

Sorry, you're massively understating the effort that'll be required here. Say you can do 60 miles, double your current distance; that still leaves another 40 or so miles to go. Just stop and think about that for a bit, another 40 off road miles after you've done twice what you've ever achieved… And the Traditional Winchester start point leaves the hardest hills (and they are relentless, and steep, don't go thinking that these are some softie southern England molehills) to the last part of the ride.

Yeah, I know full well what the SDW is like I've ridden most of it on a unicycle. I know it is kind of hard (although weather makes a big difference to how hard – if it is dry, it is so much easier).

It'd be hard, but 4 months is a long time to get from happy to do 35 miles up to happy to do 60-70 miles. Once you're happy to do 60 miles, doing 100 as a one off is just a mental challenge, about pushing yourself hard.

I am a big believer in mental strength being 99% of the work on getting through this kind of long ride as long as you have some kind of basic level of fitness and aren't doing the ride in a big hurry. My first 100 mile unicycle ride, a mate suggested we should do a 100 miler on the Tuesday night in the pub, so we did it on the next Sunday, I don't think either of us had done much over 60 miles before that, we just had basic riding fitness from our commutes and weekend rides. With a level of fitness that is easily achievable in 4 months, you'd be able to train up enough to complete a long ride like this, extra training would be nice for doing it faster and easier but not completely necessary.

Joe

If he'd watched the scene in a mirror it's fine and dandy. The fact he watched later makes him a filthy perv equal to a peado.

That's a great analogy as long as he has a magic mirror that only he knows about and that he can secretly look in whilst having sex.

Seriously, the key point is, if you say to someone "fancy coming back to mine for a shag", that is clearly not the same as saying to someone "fancy coming back to mine so I can film a home made porno film" is it? He clearly knows that the two things are different, and that people are likely to answer differently to each question, because he hid the cameras and recording equipment.

These people obviously did consent to one thing, but didn't consent to the other. In the same way as just because a woman goes for a meal with you, doesn't mean they have consented to have sex with you, the two things are different, so it is at least polite to ask. And whilst it is obviously not equal to having sex with a 6 year old or whatever, it is at the least a pretty nasty thing to do to trick people into making sex films, which even if you don't intend them to be distributed, may well end up public in the future (like they did in this case).

Joe

The cliff shot bloks are just fancy cubes of sugar. They are mostly rice syrup – same as jelly babies are mostly glucose syrup.

but do they work woody? do you get a spike then a big energy dip?

If you get it from jelly babies, you'll get that from shot-blox etc. that's why they recommend eating them one after the other one every ten minutes or something?

I've found skittles are quite a good haribo substitute – they come in big cheap bags, and you can just eat one a minute to keep you topped up.

I wouldn't do any of the energy products / tons of sweets just for normal riding mind – those things are for racing when you really need every bit of speed your body will give you. On normal rides cake is the answer, either stopping for it, or taking Soreen with you.

Joe

Honestly? Forget it. You've left it too late. The SDW is too hard to be starting training for now if all you do is 2 – 3 hour rides. I'm not being nasty, but really you're not going to be in a happy place for most of the ride, and if you can't enjoy it what's the point? Either aim to do this next year and work out a proper traing schedule, or if you're detirmined get your head around the fact that you'll suffer.

Blimey – the guy is suggesting a perfectly sensible sounding training plan. It's only 100 miles, in summer, and whilst there are some hills, there is nothing technical on the route. You have 16 hours to do it in the light. He's already able to ride a third of the distance currently, it isn't a massive step to go up to riding the SDW, should be easily doable in 4-5 months. Obviously it might hurt, and might take quite a time, but that is true even for fastish people once you get to this sort of distance.

Personally I've always worked on the principle that if you can happily / regularly ride x miles, at a push you can do twice as many, so I'd want to make absolutely sure that I was a happy bunny (like feel completely fine the next day) after riding a 50 miler before I gave the 100 miles a go.

Also, if you live less than about 15 miles away from work, then riding to work and back is a dead easy way to get fitness up quickly. I did my first 100 miler with probably 90% of the training I did on a 16 miles a day commute.

Joe

would it pick up any polar strap? i've got one spare from the monitor that died.

Polar for Nokia is a totally different strap – it talks using bluetooth (which phones speak), rather than the polar Wearlink protocol which is different (phones can't speak it).

Standard polar isn't bluetooth, so won't talk to a phone.

I imagine the 'heart rate monitor' app talked about in the first post is:
http://www.n97i.com/nokia-5800-applications/nokia-5800-applications-review-heart-rate-monitor-2941
which doesn't use a strap, you have to listen / feel for your pulse, then tap the screen in time with it.

I'd love to be proven wrong though – if anyone has a source of bluetooth heart rate straps that aren't dead expensive, please post detail up!

Joe

What heart rate monitor can you get that links to a nokia? I was only aware of the Polar-Nokia one which I thought you couldn't buy separately?

I imagine the app you are looking at is just one where you count your pulse and tap on the screen.

Can it fairly effectively replace all 4?

Probably not the heart rate.

Joe

Presumably you know about the Surrey Hills (Dorking train from Waterloo or Victoria) & Swinley (Martin's Heron – on the Reading train from Waterloo).

Although like everywhere else they will be mucky.

Lots of other places on the S Downs that are easy by train – Amberley, Brighton, Eastbourne, Lewes.

Joe

Maybe it is just me, but surely exposure, aperture and film speed are very simple and obvious in how they relate to what comes out the other end.

Obviously you have to understand what they do and what effect that might have on the final picture, but that is pretty straightforward and has to be like 1% of the skill of taking the picture. The skill is in pointing it at the right things in the right way at the right time, which is an art, whereas the settings are just something technical that you can pick up?

Joe
(who knows all about aperture and all that gubbins but still only takes okay pictures)