Funny how, people don’t get quite so angry about divorced people, when it comes to the housing crisis? maybe we should force them to live with other single adults to help solve the problem?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281616/people-living-alone-uk-by-gender/#:~:text=As%20of%202022%2C%20approximately%208.34,to%20be%20living%20by%20themselves.

That’s also known as a sanding belt cleaner, the griptape cleaner is the same stuff too, but sandingbelt cleaner comes in bigger and better value blocks :) Also handy for saving yourself a fortune in sandpaper.

That tactical vote site seems to be using the data from the 2019 election, so it’s not really helpful, my constituency had a massive tory majority with LibDem a long way back and Labour even further behind, so it suggests a LibDem tactical vote. All the more recent polls I can find now show all 3 parties are now pretty close at about 30% of the votes each, which would mean you should just vote for which ever opposition party you fancy…

Similar to @oceanskipper except I tore the mount clean off the fork, that was an expensive mistake…..

Maybe buy an office chair and replace the castors with something like these? – https://www.vital-parts.co.uk/castor-tower-glides—cst023-10202-p.asp

I’m not an expert at all, but I’m trying to work out what to do with our victorian house, this is a really good resource… https://www.thepebbletrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/230814_SRG-ed2_Digital-V2_compressed.pdf .  Also look at the Historic England site, there’s a really good talk on retrofitting old properties https://historicengland.org.uk/services-skills/training-skills/training/webinars/recordings/webinar-on-retrofit-fundamentals/  as well as a load more stuff to read. Generally speaking I think you want vapour permeable membranes and breathable insulation, but it has to be done properly or it’s not worth doing at all, and that seems to be the difficult part. I keep meaning to start a thread on here for advice.

Dishwasher tablet companies funding keep out of reach of children warning campaigns (that also conveniently happen to be adverts), why do kids eat dishwasher tablets? because they look like sweets, and why do they look like sweets? Because dishwasher tablet companies realise the ones that look like sweets sell more than those that don’t….. what an utterly hypocritical, morally bankrupt line of reasoning. arseholes, there’s no fire in hell, hot enough.

I found out yesterday, there’s a tool for that…. https://www.tradeinn.com/bikeinn/en/unior-hub-genie-extractor-tool/137604325/p?utm_source=google_products&utm_medium=merchant&id_producte=10917306&country=uk&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwztOwBhD7ARIsAPDKnkAOO_nHKXxo1Ns-eAw2UTI3wLc2bRDV7x7RgzoOVXOPFM6cA78G2_UaAvjmEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Sorry for the slight hijack, but there seem to be some experts on here, and I have a question they might be able to help with.

We live in a Victorian half timbered house that needs insulation sorting as it only has loft insulation currently. Construction is, I believe solid red brick lime mortared (35cm thick) no cavity, ground floor. Half timbered upper floor, exterior upper is hung with tiles, then inside the frame is bitumen paper then lathe and plaster for the internal finish. It gets fairly cold as there is no insulation and the wind passes through the exterior hung tiles.

I don’t believe exterior insulation is going to be possible due to decorative overhanging eaves and I understand the tiles need air circulating front and back to allow them to dry when they get wet from rain. I think the solution is to remove the lathe and plaster internally and fit breathable (wood fibre or similar) to the inside wooden frame then lime plaster back over the top? However I’ve been reading about how important it is to get right and read all the  horror stories about damp when you get it wrong. Or perhaps I’ve got it all wrong and modern celotex and watertight membranes will be fine?

Previous idiot owners have already breached the DPC with a concrete path all the way round the house and an injected chemical DPC to solve the problem, but we’d like to be here for a while and we’d like to do it right

So before I make some horrible mistake, I think I need to pay someone to come and take a look and tell me what the way forward is, but I don’t know who to ask, I’ve had a look for some kind of specialist surveyor but can’t find any nearby, but maybe I’m looking for the wrong thing? I’m near Cambridge

@joshvegas I mostly agree with you about youtubers but I think Rex is (mostly) better than that. I was a bit annoyed to build one of his mitre boxes only to discover a load of the measurements in the plan should have been adjusted for the depth of the saw, and you don’t discover that till it’s practically done and try to make the first cut with it though. :(

The american obsession with table saws and thousands of dollars of machinery drives me nuts. The tools you will use, make a big difference to the design, materials and techniques you use to build something. So most of the plans you find are not ideal for hand tool construction.

Rex Krueger is the obvious place to start – https://www.rexkrueger.com/

Paul Sellers is a good teacher, though I find him unbearably opinionated after a while – https://commonwoodworking.com/

“Make gravel great again” might suit, amazing views, mix of terrain, hardly any road maybe a little less than the distance you are after but check the elevation. I’ve done it a few times, always an epic, if you want it to be even longer, go the other way round Loch Venachar and round Glen Finglas…

https://www.strava.com/routes/3078313911169291986

We tried them on a (now ex) diabetic cat, that idea really isn’t going to work, till they can make them much smaller and stickier, they are the same size as the humans ones FFS. Mind you the cats ears were starting too look like nettle leaves from blood prick tests, so we were running out of options

I did a woodworking course with this Ciarán Ó Braonáin – https://www.cheshirewoodworking.co.uk/ , sounds like he’s doing what you are talking about, maybe speak to him? His custom stuff is really expensive (like over 10 grand a piece) but I don’t think he’s making a massive profit, it’s just a reflection of how long it takes. He can charge what he does because of the market he’s in. Super luxury gunboxes, that rich people can show others from the back of their car (all right Range Rovers :) )

@MoreCashThanDash I’ve often wondered if anyone here actually seen a proper head on collision in these circumstances, you get terrible overtakes like this all the time and I’ve seen quite a few close calls where there has been traffic coming the other way, but the fact I’ve never seen an actual collision and people keep doing it does make me wonder how risky it actually is? Maybe their risk assessment is actually better than it looks. And although it looks stupidly dangerous, the chances of an actual accident are really incredibly low. Obviously not wanting to get into the whole risk reward bit of gaining 2 seconds in exchange for a 1 in a million chance you might die bit, as we know people are terrible at those kind of calls….

@BigJohn I love my PRS SE A50 and so does everyone who’s had a play….

@TheArtistFormaerlyKnownAsSTR My point is that we shouldn’t make allowances for people who need to travel for work, because if it’s for work, they get paid for it and travel is a part, there’s no problem in increasing the cost of travel for these people, because they will pass that cost on to their customers, by increasing the cost of travel, you ensure that I end up employing more local tradespeople where possible because the local tradespeople suddenly become cheaper, if there is no local alternative then I just end up paying more, and the true cost of all this transport is reflected in the end bill. At the moment the cost of that travel is either being paid by everyone in taxes,kicked down the road in terms of future generations having to clear up the mess or is already being paid at least partially by customers for having a tradesmen sitting in traffic. The cost to end users of reducing traffic an pollution won’t just come in direct costs in running a car, it comes in paying for other people who’s services they engage having to use cars. With any luck some of those costs may be mitigated by their being less traffic and so people who need to use them can get to their place of work quicker and therefore cheaper.

@alpin “Make allowances for those that need to carry materials.” no we don’t, because everyone has an excuse why they are special, “need to carry tools”, “I’m an important politician”, “security”, “Tarquin has a medical condition”, “I’ve a cold and didn’t want to spread it around” and that’s before you get to the chancers who register themselves as a tradesman and put a toolbox in their car just so they can make the same claim. My granddad was a carpenter and he never had a car he still managed to get to work for 40 years, a combination of liftshare, company vans and public transport. It needs to be made easier for tradesmen to use public transport too. Some of it involves a wider change, how often do you employ a company for some work on your house and it turns up they travelled 30 40 50 even more miles to come? That needs to stop, especially common trades.

Shame, I’ve been using it for a few years now, they never publicised it much even when it was first created, but I’ve not seen any mention of it on the amazon site for a long time now, if they’d ever put any effort into it it would have been much more successful I’m sure. It didn’t surprise me that amazon never pushed it much as there’s no money in it for them, and that’s all they care about, but I was surprised charities didn’t publicise it a bit.

Sergey Brin, understands and gets to the core of a problem about 20 times faster than anyone I’ve ever met, it’s surreal.

It’s not the close pass, that ruins your ride, it’s your response to it, that does that :), forget about it move on.

@zilog6128 – nope it stores a local copy on each device you use it on but syncs to a cloud service

I use passwordsafe for exactly this reason, it’s not as convenient as it doesn’t autofill passwords for you, but your actual password file is not held by passwordsafe at all. You connect it to a cloud storage service of your choice (i.e dropbox) on your account and it stores the encrypted file there. Not inherently more secure but the incentive is lower for hackers as they’ll only get one account at a time that they have to crack individually.

Shimano use JIS screws everywhere as well, which is why none of my screwdrivers ever fit well in the derailleur adjusters and always slip out.

Ha, I won’t be getting rid of it, it’s cheap to run, and I really like the flexibility you get with furniture when you don’t have to worry about where the radiators are, the only slight issue is that upstairs is a couple of degrees cooler than downstairs when it’s cold and windy. I was just thinking that with air getting sucked out of the house, I could save some more money by stopping that, sounds like the proper solution isn’t likely to be worth the bother though, maybe just cover the vents on those cold windy days when it is an issue. We have a CO sensor and the boiler is serviced every year, and there’s very little to actually go wrong with it anyway as it’s amazingly simple.

The boiler is 6 or 7 years old, The flue is just steel pipe about 15-20cm in diameter the inlet is separate and is 30cm diameter flexible foil ducting that vents to the hall, there are no other gas appliances, there’s no nearer outside wall, the house is designed around the warm air heating with a central column which contains the boiler and the other rooms are built around it, so the vent is always going to have to drag the air half way across the house, the location of the exterior vent is actually the nearest point to the boiler inlet. It sounds like I’d need to I’d need to think about a fixed inlet to an outside wall through the floor space, but if it needs to be the same size as the inlet at the boiler it would have to be huge (30cm dia) not sure where that would even fit.

The boiler inlet is inside the house, never had any damp issues when the vent is blocked. I did suggest a cowl on the outside to stop wind blowing through to the engineer and he said that wasn’t allowed and he’d have to remove that too. He didn’t have any suggestions about what I could do to help, not very helpful.

hmmm, my experience (and I believe the evidence supports me, which is why the highway code was changed) is that the closer I ride to the kerb the more close passes I get, the more drivers think they can squeeze pass me and the more danger I am put in. Whether or not that makes drivers happy or not I frankly couldn’t give a sh*t.

Elite cannibal xc? costs about 7 quid, got them on every bike, never lost a bottle…

Stop the idea that you can pay to do something that is bad for the rest of the world, allowing rich entitled people to behave like arseholes as long as they throw some cash at it, just allows them to feel more entitled and smug and behave even more like arseholes. If flying around the place in private jets is bad, just ban them, if a car doing 11mpg is bad, ban them too, don’t just tax or fine them, get rid of them. You just make behaving like an arsehole aspirational otherwise.

old School tradesmen had this figured out, the problem isn’t really so much, how soft what you are standing on is, it’s because all the pressure from your weight goes through the same small points of your feet which effects bloodflow. They used to make up duckboards to stand on, but make them of the roughest most uneven wood you can, not square and not level and make sure they flex a bit, it means every time you stand on the board yo get pressure on different parts of your feet and you’ll keep moving them around subconsciously. I’m sure someone somewhere will have made something expensive and prettier you can buy that does the same thing.

I really rate the led panels over battens, they give a really good and less directional light, add task lighting on top if you really need it but often I find they add more shadow than they take away.

Will be a bit of a piss take, if the new cabinet get a long weekend with the rest of us, they’ve already had the last few months off…

The couple, who’d managed to grab the nicest pitch in the Forestry commission campsite above Aberfoyle overlooking a beautiful little loch, on what must be the busiest weekend of the year but then placed a 70″ LCD tv between them and said loch blocking the entire view. Watching cash in the attic or some such crap, they were still there 2 hours later when I passed by on my way back. That was when I knew there was truly no hope for humanity….

especially as there’s clearly a black wire, attached to the socket box earth…….

Speak to your mates, no matter how big their problems, the great thing about listening to someone else’s problems is it takes your mind off your own…

Well I’ve only heard of Nanowar of steel and Norwegian Reggaeton is a great crossover track . So i’d see them, never heard of the rest though.

All though taxing bad stuff, may be the only solution for some stuff. It really doesn’t help with changing peoples attitudes. Apart from making these things aspirational, the rich have got away with thinking they can do whatever they like in this world and avoid consequences, just by buying their way through. This is something that needs to stop, you shouldn’t be allowed to do things to the detriment of large numbers of other people by chucking cash around it needs to be illegal and morally unacceptable. People need to be held accountable, and no amount of money is going to compensate for making the world a worse place. So they shouldn’t be allowed to do it anymore.

@GreyBeard I’ts not not strictly correct, but as a generalisation……

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election

It’s not far off

For the Boomers in denial – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A I’m not a boomer but close enough that I benefited from some of the policies that did benefit them, house prices etc.

The truth is everyone has to make changes, and there are a lot of people and corporations who have a lot invested in the status quo that are going to resist those changes, eventually those changes will be forced upon us. Those changes are harder the longer you leave them and it’s entirely possible to make those changes too late to have the effect that is needed to save us.