Used to fly on Fokker 50s regularly. Expect a lot of noise and pray for light winds. Also pray that the person in the adjacent seat isn’t too fat.

On the plus side I’m told they can land on a hankerchief in an emergency.

where’s the incentive to stop politicians from screwing up a country other than being kicked out by their electorate

I think you’ve answered your own question there – if they screw up too badly they risk falling off the political gravy train.

B and Q were recently flogging off GU10 3.7W LEDs for £2 each – the “proper” ones, not the ones with lots of little LEDs. You may be lucky and still find a few in your local branch – I bought every one they had in ours. I reckon they’re about the same as a 25W halogen even though they claim more, typically 35W.

Looking on the chinese import sites the going rate seems to be about £3 for GU10s or MR16s so I’m hoping retail prices come down soon. Once MR16s are down to around £3 I’ll replace the 9 halogen bulbs in our kitchen, currently 50W each which is an obscene amount of electricity for lighting a room. Current retail price for direct replacement GU10 or MR16 seems to be about £11.

None of these work with a dimmer as far as I know – I’ve got rid of ours. If you frequently use the lights dimmed then maybe going for energy saving bulbs just isn’t worth it as you’re already using a lot less than the rated power?

If you do decide to try it on a dry slope and you’ve got any biking armour/pads/protection then use it because you WILL fall over and hurt yourself a lot. Don’t worry about looking stupid – everyone looks stupid on a dry slope.

But personally I’d see if you can get some sort of taster session first just to see if she’s got any inclination. One thing I would guarantee is that if you/she like the dry slope or a snowdome you’ll love the real thing – it’s 100 times better. Oh, and skiing’s where it’s at these days but boarding’s a good second best.

Tring is where you should live. It’s quite nice

…and you’d have the Chilterns on your doorstep, Aston Hill, easy access to Up North/Wales etc etc so worth having a look round there or nearer the Chiltern line – Wendover, Aylesbury etc or further East towards St Albans. Downside apart from the 30-45min commute is that the trains take you to the wrong side of London so you need to use the Tube or have a bike at the station to get you to Victoria, or you can walk – walking across London in the early morning when it’s getting ready for work is great on a nice day. Biggest up-side is that it’s a lot cheaper than central London which is where you really need to be to enjoy the place. If I were you I’d forget the outer suburbs, some of them are most depressing and soul-destroying places I’ve been to but if you ask anyone who lives there they’ll always say how great it is – “it’s got a lovely villagey feel not like the rest of London”, yet normal people can’t tell where one suburb ends and the next begins.

Not unexpected given his health issues but I was still shocked to hear the news this morning. I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of him again in the IT/consumer electronics industry. He will be missed.

RIP.

I’m quite surprised that in this day and age that tube trains even need drivers.

I seem to recall reading that several of the LU lines are now automated, e.g. the Victoria (since 1968?), Central, at least parts of the Jubilee and I think the Northern. The role of the “driver” is to open and close the doors.

In other parts of the world they seem to manage without any drivers, e.g. parts of the Paris metro. I’ve been on several of these and curiously I haven’t died yet.

I can’t help thinking that they should be booted out of the Euro

Not sure if that’s the solution or whether it’s really Germany that should be booted out of the Euro. Which one really has the economy that’s out of step with the rest of the Eurozone?

One of the classics:

I love some of the comments on this on Youtube, people saying how inspiring it is while anyone who recognises a Scottish accent is pi$$ing themselves.

I’ve got a pair of coil revs that have similar wear on the U-turn stanchion, as others have said it’s probably caused by water and lack of servicing. I looked at replacing the uppers but it’s not economically viable, so I changed the seal, instituted a regime of regular servicing and planned to ride them to death; 18 months on there’s no additional wear and they refuse to die, although having written that I expect they’ll now collapse tomorrow. So if I were you I’d service them, put them back together and ride them.

Our local outdoor pursuits shop recommended these for Mrs R – http://www.hunter-boot.com/2/9/Shop-Online/Balmoral-Sovereign/BROWN/W23619_BRN.aspx rather than those cheap foreign makes. I would have got them for her if it weren’t for the fact that they didn’t come in the right colour.

I use makemkv which can rip a DVD in a few minutes as it doesn’t have to do any transcoding. Can’t remember how long exactly but I think on my machine it’s typically about 15 minutes, probably limited by the read speed of my DVD drive. Handbrake has to transcode so takes forever; it’s only of use to me if I want to watch it on a mobile device. Also as you’ve noticed the interface leaves something to be desired.

The electrons aren’t “orbiting” as such – that’s just what they tell you to stop you asking awkward questions. Schroedinger’s equation is your friend here, combined with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and your favoured interpretation of the meaning of a wave function.

Hope that make things clear, no doubt a research physicist will be along shortly to help out.

I use a MF pillow – takes a few nights to settle in and get used to but after that I find it very comfy, no problems with getting too hot etc. I guess it’s a very personal thing, YMMV. Mrs R has a neck problem and tried every pillow under the sun until I got her one that’s filled with water as an experiment which she now swears by. I just worry about it bursting.

lol! Next mission is to try to get it to stream mkv files from a uPnP server. Oh, and to find out how to turn off autocorrect, currently driving me round the bend, hObO <= supposed to be uPnP. :twisted:

I’ve gone to 1.5 to be on the safe side, apparently 1.7 is ok but 1.9 can be a bit flaky. Most of the time it only seems to use one of the CPUs and that’s throttled back to a few MHz so can’t see it frying itself.

I’ve put the overclocking kernel on mine and with that and the reduced logging it’s now noticeably faster – can’t think why HP didn’t make it faster by default. Getting the Kindle app working was a bit of a faff though. Now very pleased with it for a cheapo touchpad!

Right, so I’ve got the Touchpad, turned down the logging, downloaded the WebOS SDK to my PC, found out how to put it into developer mode so all ready to play and now Mrs R has discovered Angry Birds so I can’t get near the thing. :? Knew I should have bought her an iPad.

Just had an email from PCWorld saying my order’s on the way and giving me a DHL tracking number, about 2 hours after it arrived by another courier. :roll:

I guess they haven’t quite got to grips with IT yet.

Blimey! Courier just turned up at the door with mine, wasn’t expecting that after PCWorld’s lack of communication. Had quick play and it seems to be pretty easy to use but will leave it charging for now ready for a serious play later.

PCWorld have now taken my CC payment; no other emails from them but if it doesn’t come now I’m going to get mighty cross with them!

Anyone had theirs delivered from Currys/PC World yet?

My order’s still on their system and they’ve authorised but not taken the payment from my credit card but I haven’t heard anything since the email saying “There’s a problem delivering your order… we’ll be in touch”.

I reckon it’s not coming; good job it was only a toy to play with.

Just got the “Unfortunately we may have a problem…” email. :(

I have a order confirmation so …………??

I got the order confirmation from the web site but still haven’t had the confirmation email. Just have to wait and see I guess.

I seem to have just managed to order a 32GB version from PCworld.

It’s all in here – http://www.windwave.co.uk/documents/techinfo/FSA_headsetbook.pdf

I use one of these –

http://www.amazon.co.uk/EasyCAP-Video-Audio-Capture-Card/dp/B0011N9QNC/ref=pd_bxgy_computers_text_b

End quality is pretty rubbish, you don’t realise how bad videos were until you look at them on a PC.

Oh, and don’t forget to put a copy of the ccleaner installer on to a USB stick or something before you restore!

If you know where the sensitive data is then deleting it and then running ccleaner with one of the secure deletion options should be sufficient. Then run ccleaner’s free-space deletion, again with the secure option. If you don’t know where it is then as you say you’ll have to get something on a USB key. Maybe another option is to restore from your restore partition then nuke the free space with ccleaner?

I think to be fair to the people involved at least part of the first half day was a legitimate demonstration, the rest was looting which needs to be classified as riots for the benefit of the uninsured.

Rio – you do know that the Poll Tax is not the current system????

:roll:

Council tax is effectively banded and capped rates and I can’t think of any basis that makes it a fair system; it’s a fudge that was introduced when poll tax was removed and if it wasn’t there you wouldn’t invent it.

Are you suggesting it is not true that rich people live in bigger and more expensive houses than poor people…can you evidence that?

I’m suggesting that there’s insufficient correlation between the size of your house and your ability to pay for that to be a fair way of assessing taxes.

One of the problems now with poll tax is that it’s become part of the left wing mantra that poll tax is inherently bad. A correctly implemented poll tax with mechanisms to allow for those who aren’t able to pay would be a lot fairer than what we have now. Maybe local income tax is the answer but it’s hard enough collecting national income tax so I suspect collecting local income tax would be a nightmare.

When poll tax came in I was a naive lefty and I thought what a good idea it was because it brought a lot of extra people into the local tax system who could easily afford to pay; I was surprised that this idea came from a Conservative government. In my naivity I hadn’t spotted the big problem, which is that some people just don’t want to pay their share regardless and that’s the basic reason for its unpopularity.

Those who think poll tax was unfair conveniently disregard the unfairness and anomolies inherent in the rates system it replaced, where the assumption was that your ability to pay was based on the value of your house. So the large family on the breadline who needed a big house got stung for high rates whereas a wealthy single person in a flat paid very little. Little old ladies left in a large house after their family had moved on got stung for high rates even if they only had a pension to live on. And if you inherited a country estate you were completely stuffed even if you had no money at all. The current system has an equal number of anomolies, and I haven’t seen any suggestions for any alternatives that I would consider fair regardless of your definition of fairness.

Germany benefit from exporting manufactured goods because they have a reputation for quality and export stuff to Oil rich countrys who have money and demand

Germany also benefits from having a currency that is lower than you would expect from a strong exporter because the Euro is dragged down by the Piigs. If they still had the Deutchmark I would expect it to be pretty high at the moment which would to some extent rebalance things; they’d import more and export less giving the rest of us a chance. I guess the price they have to pay for this is the continued bail-out of the Piigs.

Standard MegaExo is compatible with Shimano. Just as well as you’ll need to replace it with a generic BB after one wet ride.

Last one I was due they paid it into my account as soon as I’d pressed the submit button on their on-line tax site.

Unfortunately they’ve since decided it was a mistake and have asked for it back plus interest. :( They seem to be being particularly ruthless at the moment so as GrahamS says they’re probably looking for reasons not to pay it.

so these microchip cat flaps, which one is the best one?

We’ve got the Petporte[/url] one, works on the mains but I think the recent ones can work on batteries too. The only other one I’m aware of is the Sureflap[/url] one which I believe works on batteries.

The chips apparently can move, if they do and it ends up outside the range of the detector coil (down its leg for example) then you may have to get them re-chipped.

We had a similar problem – next door’s cats coming in and eating our cats’ food with the risk of spraying. Also had some major cat fights when our bigger cat caught the neighbour’s smaller cat in the house. We’ve now got one of the catflaps that recognises the cats’ microchips which works fine and solves all the problems, strongly recommended.

As uplink says, did you tell them? I once found myself trying to check out of a hotel in India with a flight to catch only to find all my cards refused – like you I had to make the expensive phone call, fortunately on a company phone so it didn’t cost me anything but was still somewhat annoyed. Since then I’ve always made sure I told them and after a lot of pestering they now let you lodge your travelling in advance on their web site.

I replaced my broken Lucky Strike with a Lynskey Ti456 when they were selling off the last ones cheaply and to be honest it doesn’t ride as well as the LS even though I was using 130mm forks – way beyond what the LS was designed for. New Van N 456 might be better though and I’d definitely be tempted by it at the current price. I also looked at the Cove Hummer and waited a long time for the Cotic Soda that never seemed to materialise

My LS lasted 6 years despite the long forks; it eventually cracked round the seat tube, so I wouldn’t be put off Chinese Ti by this – as others have said, Lynskey seem to have their problems too. Still can’t bring myself to throw out the LS frame though, and my LBS seem to think they know someone who could repair it if I get round to it.

Centrica plc interim results are announced tomorrow and Bloomberg is forecasting an increase in the dividend, which would give you your answer. On the other hand the shares are down today, but then so is everyone else.

Edit: £15.7M customers and a £2.5M fine = 0.16p each. They can add mine to the bill.