Why are you moaning? Sitting down for a wee is normally a treat, but you get to do it every day now!

I find mine a pain too. I tend to give them a spray with degreaser first then fight them with a bit of cloth round my hands. Squeezing them, pulling them, shaking them, swearing and squeezing them again tends to take about 10 minutes to have the desired effect…

But yes, if I ponied up for a pair of link pliers the chain swap would be a lot less detrimental to my sanity.

I don’t understand what you mean, If a bolt has snapped inside and both nut and bolt just spin won’t both ends just fall out?

I just bought the JL wireless booster box, I couldn’t get it to output any sound over hdmi or connect to iPhone over Bluetooth, so it went back! It was very big too, bigger than I was expecting.

If it were me, i’d spend a grand on a road bike and build a hardtail for a grand.

You could get a 456 carbon for about £1200, less if you build it yourself and it’ll be more than adequate for everything you’ll do at Cannock and Sutton Park. My full suss hasn’t been near Cannock since I built a c456, in fact it’s not been out of the house!

I’d have thought you’ll benefit far more from the road bike if you want to commute everyday than you would from a higher specced mountain bike to use occasionally.

That’s it – obviously memory isn’t improving with age!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW_aoTL-RBc

Cheers

I have, my new build requires a shim for the dropper and i’m not letting myself order one until i’ve pulled the post apart and serviced it.

I must say I haven’t struggled without it, but I do miss it.

I’m pretty sure my bikes are covered in Europe on M&S house policy. I’ll doubt you’ll get car insurance to cover it, but i’d have thought you could get it covered on travel insurance? Would probably be cheaper in the long run as a claim on the house insurance will probably be similar excess but you’ll pay for it over the next few years of increased premiums, and you’ll have to have travel insurance anyway.

I thought it was down to £1K now? I’ve had to declare my HT @ £1500 :-(
Was a lot better when it was 4K limit!

As said above you can use a van then you’ll be quids in. It’s a base of £3550 taxable value (£3000 for van and £550 for fuel) just times it by your tax rate either 0.20 or 0.40. Compared to your average big company car it’s cheaper if you can live with the van drawbacks.

The only thing you have to watch is that it passes the commercial vehicle tax regulations, with regards to windows, no. of seats etc. You basically have to have no rear windows and you’re only allowed rear seats if its over a certain weight. Roughly you can have a 5 seat T5 but a 5 seat astra van’s a no go. It’s a bit of a grey area – you should talk to your accountant, but to be on the safe side it has to be panel van with no rear seats. I’ve just been through the same thing.

For example a top spec Landrover discovery would cost you £5100 a year @ 20% tax as a company car, but the commercial version with black plastic windows and no back seats would rush you £710 a year, less than the cheapest diesel estate. At the same rate the eco V70 2.0 diesel would cost you £1700 a year in tax. Vehicle sits on the books better for the company as well if bought outright.

Just looked at your comparison above – why have you got the milage relief and car allowance in with the company car scheme?

Shouldn’t it be a straight company car + fuel (if applicable) cost in tax versus the bottom costs of your own car of £505 LESS the car allowance making the cost of having your own car more like £300 a month less milage – which could be up to £375 a month depending on how many miles you do?

Ask the company nicely if they can give you a bigger car?
If you do enough business miles, you’ll be better off with the larger S-Max if you buy it privately, I reckon it used to cost me about £350 a month all in to run a 10k car inc. fuel, depreciation, servicing and minor repairs etc doing 20K a year.

Buy it at 18 months for half new price, sell 3 years later. Considering you’re probably paying £150 a month on a cheap to run golf in tax, you’ll be worse off to the tune of £200 a month straight away, but if you can squeeze the maximum 10K a year milage allowance through work miles, that nets you £330 a month in tax free income.

Bearing in mind i’m including fuel in the first figures, that’s £130 a month in the kitty for repairing it if something big goes wrong, or all being good it’s £130 a month in the kitty to replace it with, which in 3 years would be £4680, a nice chunk toward the next deposit. Bear in mind if you take a car allowance instead of fuel payments, it’s not tax free so it’s not as efficient a way of doing it.

Having said that, i’ve just switched to a company car! But I could buy what I wanted, so if you need a certain car you can’t have on the company the choice is kind of made for you. I also keep my PAYE below the 40% threshold – I wouldn’t be doing it if I was paying 40% tax on it as it would double in cost.

New or used? I’ve got a 2007 stumpy 120mm rear travel frame in large under my feet….
[/blatant plug]

For new – i’m replacing it with a transition bandit at 130mm, so that’s where i’d point you. Combined with a set of 130/160 x-fusion slants i’m hoping it’s going to be as fun as the stumpy with a bit more travel on the front.

I’d vote netflix – Lovefilm I found a bit rubbish on selection and the search/general UI for streaming is terrible. Also had big problems with speed, I couldn’t get anything full screen in 1080p to run properly on a 20meg connection. Netflix has been loads better, and you can find stuff a lot easier. Never tried now tv.

Still can’t get into breaking bad though, it’s a bit rubbish! ;-)

You mean a ‘page’ i.e. business page, band page etc?
You can do this if you download the pages app, it’s not as quick as posting straight out of the camera but works ok.

I use the KMC ones from on-one for £15. A lot less than the Shimano ones and i’ve found it a lot more reliable!

Although I think the reason for constantly breaking the shimano ones was joining them without the poncy proper 10spd pins – but i’m really not sure why they bothered reinventing the wheel there when a powerlink works fine with everything else.

Sorry, you’ve said no WD but i’ve had a WD live duo for nearly 12 months which is set up for raid mirroring, and it’s been great. I wouldn’t say it’s been faultless ( a couple of reboots) the only real issue i’ve got with it is that if I use a wifi encryption & password at some point between the mac-router-cloud it slows right down so I have to stick to MAC filtering, but this could be anything not specifically the WD drive.

Also does time machine so it’s all a bit fit and forget, av receiver/ipad etc all talk to it to grab films and music nicely.

Although i’d have probably gone synology had I wanted to spend the extra, but i’ve always used WD drives and not had a problem with one in 15 years so thought i’d keep to it as it was the cheapest 4TB system by quite a way.

Macbook? Is it a powered usb drive – if it draws power via USB you may not have it plugged in to a connection with enough power to run it.

My external drive lights up on both MBA ports but only runs properly on one of them.

Check your bank t&c’s, they’ll offer you a crappy rate, or a good rate and a charge of a couple of quid.
Debit card is normally just a crappy rate – they’ll probably stick 5cents onto the exchange rate you get. No worse than a few quid either way.

Most software sites will allow you to choose a currency at checkout anyway, so you can pay in straight sterling and give the company the exchange rate profit – if you were spending a few quid i’d check both rates but for £40 just do whichever’s easier.

Your bank may well stop the transaction for a fraud check anyway.

Double post…

I use the on one stainless chainring, £15 I think? 32,33,34t on their site by look of it.
I’d pony for a seperate ring, as they’re cheaper than a middleburn/xt/whatever you have now middlering and you can keep the 3×10 setup as a spare without wearing out the middle ring of it.

Hubjub shorter bolts are about a fiver.

Castleton route with Hope & Edale is still just about White Peak but on the crossover. If you want south there’s a decent beginner route around Grangemill which is good, don’t have a GPX file though.

White Peak book is good, but lacking in the OS map’s of the Dark Peak book. The first classic route in the book is Ashover by Chatsworth, if you look on amazon you can do the look inside to get the route and map.

Is it actually a DVD nav? You don’t say. Mine is an SD – take the SD card out and it has a similar flip.
Sounds like your GPS is working though – i’d be wheeling it into Ford.

Decent enough, i’d probably hold out for a bargain on some Reba’s for a superlight – if you’re looking aat merlins £200 half price deal I only paid £250 for my Reba’s from them. 150g less.

Assuming you’re looking at new, that is, 2nd hand a whole lot comes up for that kind of money that would be better.

I’d be looking at a a NAS, i’ve got a 4GB WD livebook duo attached to my network, but would still leave you the problem of the ageing laptop and unable to play via itunes with the laptop off. One workaround for this would be streaming your videos via DLNA to an iPad/iPhone if you have one, and bouncing that to the apple TV via mirroring.

A mac mini as a server would be a much neater idea, expensive but if you bear in mind that last generation apple TV’s are going for £2-250 on ebay, if you haven’t jailbroken it just sell it and buy a new one for £85 off Amazon. Keep an eye on the apple refurb store for the mini, and you might find yourself with a new mini for a few hundred quid in actual cash.

And if you really have that itch, the new retina macbook pro’s are awesome, i’m very tempted to upgrade my air to one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny924BJ5DfE

=SUM(IF(FREQUENCY(B1:B5,B1:B5)>0,1))

That’s the formula I think you want, modified to suit your data. It will count a range of values and tell you how many unique values there are.

Assuming:
____A_____B__
1 Team A 123
2 Team A 123
3 Team A 245
4 Team A 456
5 Team A 456

The above formula would return you a result of 3.
Is that what you’re after?

You just have a function for each team then, and define the range of cells for each.

Control Panel: From start tiles, type control panel and as you type it’ll come up. Same for all other apps. Pin ones you want to click on to the start screen.
FS 2004, don’t know… google?
AV – windows defender does me fine and it’s already on there.
Music – Windows Media Player already installed…

I run a 128GB MacBook air as my main machine, with a 60GB partition assigned to VMware and Win8. Nowhere near the max storage, even with effectively only a 68GB hard drive.

2TB Cloud server at home which acts as the main storage, iTunes library points to that and it works really well. I was sceptical at first coming from a big desktop but it’s so much better for me this way. It’s perfectly good enough for eveything I do, mobile and if I do want a screen it just plugs into a 24″ monitor with a thunderbolt & usb cable. I had planned to get this air and then get the new iMac when it came out as a home machine but I really don’t see the point now. Caveat is of course you need the other kit to do it seamlessly, decent NAS and router. If you have a good upload connection then you can even access it remotely.

If i’m going away for a week or so which I often do I just chuck a few films/series/tunes etc on the main drive to provide entertainment, the only time I normally need more space out and about is when I take my camera on holiday, then I have a couple of USB drives to take care of that, which I would do anyway as I wouldn’t keep those files just on one drive incase of loss/damage etc. When I use the camera for work stuff I can’t fill the SSD in a day before it all comes off onto storage, but I could see why a pro/heavy photographer would eat that amount of space in a very short time.

Yes you can also have iTunes look at different locations, not on one library but you can create multiple libraries, i.e. 1 local and 1 on a storage device and hold option when you start iTunes, then you can select which library to load.

Staples if you’ve got a stapler, I’ve had to do this before in the office and as long as they’re not double cuffs then no one will notice.

Surely if they were single cuffs you’d just use the buttons? ;-)

OP, I think you should be creative with whatever’s in the room and post a photo. What about prising the buttons off the room phone and attaching them with the complimentary dental floss?

I use this on mine:

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=75810

Would you not be better off investing in a good surround sound system for TV/Xbox and just buying an airport express to use airplay with it as another input?

I don’t really think one of the wireless speakers is going to do you if you want proper sound from the TV.

Not that companies should supply sub standard goods, but everyone expects to take advantage of distance selling, and increased rights to return etc – this is fair enough but all these returned goods have to be sold again often with damaged packaging, maybe scuffs etc, which the retailer can’t do anything about.

People on here happy returning things for all kinds of reasons, there was a guy I saw the other day who had ordered a set of forks, then ordered another set the same cos the price was lower a couple of days later and returned the originals. Technically – you can buy bike parts boxed retail online, fit them, scratch them a bit finding they don’t fit, then return them without the original box and packaging and get a full refund, then what does the retailer do with what’s left?

So maybe an occasional item with a bit of a minor flaw or missing its box is the price to pay for the ability to buy a couple of bits and return whatever doesn’t fit/look good etc – swings and roundabouts and all that? If I bought bike parts online that were only cosmetically flawed (within reason) it wouldn’t bother me, they’re just going to get bashed up anyway.

Don’t really do curry, but Shimla Pinks was always good, not been since they moved it up broad street a few years ago, but can’t see it being too much different. Rajdoot in Jewellery Quarter also good, but always leaves me feeling a bit hungry..

Head into any of the southern suburbs, Moseley, Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath etc and you can’t go far wrong. If you like the Lasan recommendation but don’t fancy coming into town or the cost of a meal there, there’s a cheaper/more chilled out version in Hall Green, Lasan Eatery.

Wan Chai has turned a bit crap over the past few years…. not like it used to be! You’ll have to actually put a bit of effort in to getting your ‘collar’ felt these days, the ratio of men to women has inverted! To make the most of it you need to know which night all the maids have off…. ;-)

Bar wise The Wanch on Jaffe Rd is good if you like live music with ‘enthusiasm’ – take ear plugs. Round the corner from Amazonia. Lan Kwai Fong is another popular spot for nightlife that’s not Wan Chai. Knutsford Terrace on Kowloon side decent for western food.

Other stuff that hasn’t been mentioned is the light show 8pm each night, watch from Kowloon side looking at the island. Longest escalator in the world in Central, if you’re into looking smart look at some of the tailors on Nathan Rd. Sam’s is the celeb one. Decent made to measure suits can be picked up for £3-400, and shirts about £30-40 each, just avoid the really cheap tailors.

You may know this if you’ve been before but take advantage of the town check in when you come back, you can check in & dump bags in central airport express and then carry on with what you were doing, means you havent got to spend 3 hours sat in the airport.

CFH – what’s the underground car showroom called? Never heard of it, but back out in a few weeks and it sounds interesting!

Hard to give advice on selling, but one big tip I could give on getting through the door on repeat customers is have a rolodex (or new fangled iphone app version) of customers. Each time you see them, find out about them and write notes. The guy who spent a couple of minutes on the phone asking how the kids who just started school last time he saw them are doing etc will get the call over the guy who just calls to sell. Also jot down sales info, i.e. they did really well with beer A last Christmas so you have an excuse to call next Christmas.

Depends what you want – I don’t think you can beat PS3 for a device to do it all for the money, unless you want to use it to record live TV.

Bluray, lovefilm, netflix etc, plays movies and audio of the network for less than £200.

For the best part of £400 the box you linked to is good but lots of money, if you need all that then it’s good but if you just want to stream movies etc you could get a whole smart tv for that price. Other options would be apple tv for netflix, or a small htpc.

The uni does have a cycling club – gets involved in MTB too.
Drop me an email if you like, I’m town and try to get out a couple of times a week (night riding at the moment)

Holes in each corner and screwed to the wall. That’s how the 2 I put up in my office are.
The other one I didn’t touch Is currently hanging on a wing, prayer and the pinboard pins into plasterboard that hold the paper calendar to the wall. I said it wouldn’t hold for 5 minutes, but that was 3 months ago and it gets used everyday!

What did you order? If you specifically ordered black, then that’s what you should get.

The issue with the first postage balls up is a bit irrelevant here as you’ve received the item you ordered and it’s incorrect – if you don’t like it return it under DSR if it was ordered at distance.

Sounds like they’ve tried to cut their losses with it by sending something they can’t sell easily, as if they’ve used recorded delivery they won’t be insured for the first parcel (unless it’s a very high margin item as the cost would need to be less than £46). At the end of the day, they chose to send the goods uninsured and they’ve gone missing, it’s not something you should have to carry the can for. Whether you want to accept it as a show of goodwill is up to you if you don’t want to fall out with them, but you don’t have to.

They should just chalk it up – I do a similar thing with online retail and risk it on certain values as the cost of losing 1/50 parcels recorded is far less than the cost would be to send them all insured. Anything that doesn’t get there, I give it a week or so and give RM a poke and then send another no quibble, but I send the replacement special delivery so I know it will get there next day this time.