The overuse of the word ‘narrative’ by anybody from southern England when interviewed on radio 4.

Wife has got them on her car….I think they are OK. I think the ride is slightly harsher than non-run flats, but no so much so that I’d get excited about it.

I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but personally I think they are a good idea and I’d be happy to have them on my car. I’d deffo prefer them to the can of goo I have currently. I believe they have also got better in the last few years, and also suspension is getting better tweaked to handle them.

Pierre Moerlen (RIP) who played with Gong in the late 70’s. He’s just incredible. Amazing technically, never overplays, really supportive of other players, really stylish and kicks major ass when needed.

When your 6 year old is giving you a thrashing at Mario Kart and takes pity on you “Dad, do you want me to wait for you?”

Very sad news :-(

Any transmitter which supports will EPA (End Point Adjustment) will allow you to limit the maximum speed. I went through a lot of broken cars before I bought Maverick cars, which allow the speed to limited to any value you like.

Without the speed limiter, we would take a car out..it would get smashed up…order the parts to fix it…wait for them to arrive, fix it…repeat.

We now have two Maverick’s (Strada XT and a XB I think, non brushless, but running on lipo’s) and by limiting the speed, we have finally been able to repeatedly take them out to race without smashing them up.

Two cars racing is a million times more fun than one car on it’s own. Buy a few plastic cones to race round and you can have hours of fun. Honestly, me and my 9 year old have probably never laughed so much as racing cars together.

I’d highly recommend the Mavericks….they are pretty cheap, spares are easy to get. Even the brushed ones go fast as you like off road…the brushless ones must be mental :-)

Shame if he’s no longer playing drums….class drummer in his day.

We have one on our s-max. I love it, makes the car feel nice and light. It’s also good for seeing what straps are flapping when carrying Kayaks or checking bikes are OK when they are on the roof.

35mm on FF.

I’ve not seen a new mondeo, but I had a look at a new smax and I thought it was a step down in terms of interior quality. Typical Ford really, they make advances against the German alternatives, then make a mess and have to catch up again.

I had a 2.5T TitX with 18’s and sports suspension. Honestly, here was nothing harsh about the ride. It was a great car, and although it averaged about 28-29mpg, I think the 2.5T’s at the age your looking at make a lot of sense.

I bought it nearly new for 13K, when the 2.2TDCI’s were like 19K for 1 year old.

The ‘Sony’ head units are no more Sony than Dansette. They are made by Visteon. I had one in my S-Max and they are horrid. The ones with Sat Nav are made by Blaupunkt and sound a lot better.

Having just done it, personally, I wouldn’t buy a car from a dealer who is more than an hour away…it’s a PITA if something is wrong. There must be other options closer to home?

Best Ian Brown live vocal performance I’ve ever heard during those Reni drum solos.

Janet Weiss (Sleater Kinney / Jicks)
Billy Cobham
Dennis Chambers
Bill Ward
Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction)
Travis Barker (https://youtu.be/DFaN-78dOnE)

I wish him every success for the audition :-)

I have a seasonal problem with headaches caused by my body producing more urine in Autumn. It starts in October, and stops before Christmas. It gives very distinctive headaches, a bit like a hangover, but without drinking anything.

By chance, I got diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency…I dunno if the two are related, but this year I’ve been taking vitamin D supplements and I think it’s helping.

Might be worth a try?

I had a reasonable amount in them for about 8 years. I won next to nothing, far less than the average ‘interest’ you are supposed to get. Personally, I’d avoid.

Are you buying new or s/h? There are a very small percentage of s/h petrol S-Max’s on the market. I wouldn’t be surprised if you can’t get a new one for a while…Ford have been struggling with production, and people ordering anything unusual have had delays / orders cancelled. I wouldn’t be surprised if they concentrate on diesels for the next 6 months.

I had a look at the new Smax last week, which was enough to convince me to buy another old style one….the build quality looked awful on the one I saw (admittedly, it was a low spec in flat white). Quality wise, it felt like a big Fiesta, where as the old ones in a good spec are nice cars.

If you do low mileage, a petrol one sounds sensible, but the last generation had pretty bad economy (think c.24mpg :-(). I can’t see diesel tax changing much in the next few years….there are just too many of then on the roads for the government to do anything significant about them.

Having owned ours for four years, I’d hoped to treat myself to something a bit more upmarket, but looking at the alternatives makes you realise what a good design the S-Max is.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with Windows 8, apart from it was set up appallingly badly out of the box for desktop PC’s. If you spend a couple of hours tweaking it, it was OK.

I’m not defending Windows 8….I think MS were incredibly misguided in the way they delivered Windows 8 to desktop users, but IMHO, it’s not like Windows 98 or Vista, where there were fundamental problems with the OS.

All our computers have been upgraded, then clean installed with Windows 10. No issues on any of them. Minecraft still working fine :-).

Some random thoughts….EHU cable, levelling chocks if the pitch isn’t flat, gas bottle, kettle which won’t trip the electrics, some chairs to sit outside the van in the event it’s not hammering down, Cadac BBQ if you like fryup breakfasts, small toolkit, mobile phone charger(s) to leave in the van, Some decent pillows / bedding, tea towels.

It’s fine. The difference between going from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3 is much smaller….but obviously the pain lasts for longer ;-)

This is the one I was looking at….

I’m suffering with one at the moment. I’ve had it for about 5 years. Mine was brought on by a pair of walking boots which were to tight. I’ve had the steroid injection, which did nothing. I’m getting it treated at The Barn Clinic in Sheffield in about 3 weeks time. I could have had it done on the NHS, but it looked like I’d be out of action for a few weeks, so I thought I’d try Cryosurgery.

With mine, I can walk / cycle for about an hour with no problem, it then gets very painful, very quickly. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to get it treated. I have made sure I buy the widest shoes I can get away with, other than that, I’m not sure if there is much you can do.

They’ve cancelled the bridge flyover for health and safety apparently.

A wise move…if that thing came down in the centre of Runcorn it could do tens of pounds worth of damage.

His price is inclusive, so it’s never, ever going to be £350.

She came across as a goon.

I’ve now tried some of the CC features, and TBH I think they are pretty good. The ability to edit pictures taken on a mobile device then sync the picture including edits with LR using the Mobile App is pretty nice.

The big one for me is the ability to upload decent quality images to the cloud and share them via a link with pretty much zero effort. This is a feature I’ve been after for ages. The albums it creates are nicely presented with a black background and can optionally allow people who view the collection to download the images.

I’ve had a Smax for 4 years now, I think they are pretty good at what they do. I test drove a XC90 before we bought it, and I thought they were really nice, but it did feel like a big car to drive (I had to take it to fill up at a petrol station and it felt massive trying to negotiate the pumps).

The XC90 was much cleverer inside than X5 / Tourreg / Q7, and to my mind, doesn’t suffer from the obnoxious image of other 4×4’s.

The seats were really nice, and the car had an air of quality which a lot of modern cars don’t seem to have.

I can’t think there is going to be a better 7 seat match for CFH than an XC90?

Upgraded 3 of the family machines so far this weekend…it been a nice free way to rid all of them from the junk they came installed with. All of them are running much better than delivered from new (although I swapped the HDD for SSD’s on two of the machines).

Looks like Microsoft have taken on board that the preinstalled software has pretty much trashed the average consumer experience for Windows and appear to be proving a nice work around with the new activation system.

So far pretty impressed with Win10, can’t say I’ve been impressed with Bing, but easy enough to avoid it. Other than that, all seems good. Appears to work really nicely for driving a big TV for internet and Spotify…much better than Win 8 in this respect.

The 4K TV’s look great in the shops, when you are stood 2 feet away. In a typical UK living room, they are largely pointless. Check out the viewing distance calculators on the net before you buy.

The settings you choose will have a far more affect on picture quality than any differences between mainstream brands. We have a Samsung 65″ 1080 and with the right settings, it looks great. Some of the default settings totally destroy the image quality….turning everything ‘off’ (like motionflow, enhancers etc) and putting it in Cinema mode is usually a good place to start.

Unless you are mounting it on your forehead, paying a premium for a 40″ 4K seems like a pointless idea at the moment.

God I Love Katie Puckrick…how could you not like her? Her show is proper amazeballs. She’s funny and plays some great music.

I still fancy her from The Word.

The weird thing about Robert Peston is that he now sounds like he’s sorted his speech out, but Mark Mardell has started copying his pre-trained vocal style :-(

Liz Kershaw….now that’s a voice made for the deaf. Thankfully she also has zero taste in music, (unless you want to hear two hours of mid 90’s indie landfill exploring the musical rainbow between The Farm and Northern Uproar) so it’s easy to just make sure the radio is off on a Saturday afternoon.

I have the subscription version, I haven’t really used the CC features as I haven’t got decent broadband (yet), but in general I like Lightroom. It does take a bit of effort to get the best from it, especially improving workflow speed.

I did a quick test to check if the Lightroom for iPad app worked OK, and it appeared to be fine. I get decent broadband next week, so I will start using the CC features….I’ll report back after I’ve given it a go.

For backups, I backup the raw files locally and export processed medium resolution jpg’s to a cloud based service in case I need to get a quick copy of the processed image. Lightroom has some plugin’s for uploading directly to cloud based services. I only use the FB one, and I find it a bit flaky, but that’s probably more to do with FB changing things than Adobe.

It doesn’t really bother me that I need to keep paying for LR to keep my edits, as I like it and I’m happy to support it’s development. I can understand why some people are unhappy with the subscription model, but if there’s on thing worse than paying a subscription for something, it’s investing time in a product which gets canned (like Aperture) and getting left high and dry.

Personally. i’m not comfortable about converting .raw files into .dng, as that does appear to tie you more into Adobe, but dunno it that’s still the case?

Superficial I know, but the use of italics on the dials of Mercedes-Benz would prevent me from owning one. Category A font crime.

Brabantia.

Had a kitchen bin for ages, the lid broke. I’d lost the receipt. Phoned them up to buy a new lid. They have a 10year warranty, but with no receipt i was expecting to pay.

The customer service representative asked for a few details as the design had changed over the years.

He said ‘That design is over 10 years old, what’s your address?’ I told him, he said ‘Replacement will be with you tomorrow, no charge!’.

I’d avoid Cater Allen like the plague, very slow electronic transfers and I got charged credit card fees by some retailers even though it’s only a debit card. Transactions made using the debit card show up with a date at the end of the month with the date of the transaction in the description, which is a PITA. I also read about them editing transaction details after they they had been recorded.

Accountants seem to love them though, presumably because they get a kickback (?). I use Barclays now and they have been fine.

+1 for Landal….it’s like Centerparks without being rubbish

The overuse of the word ‘narrative’ by R4 presenters….it’s driving me up the wall.

I don’t think its going to be possible as the valance comes too far forward underneath the car. I’ll take a pic to show you. Mine is the ‘official’ Ford one (they are made by a 3rd party, can’t remember who), fitted by Ford when I picked the car up. There is a proper cutting template for the dealer to use, so it is a supported solution (a few people told me you couldn’t fit a towbar to a Tit X at all, which is not true).

I have the previous version, i mainly just use the bbq plate. I think they are great…really easy to clean and use it all the time. The little ones are good for the beach / picnics too.