its sacrilege running a video card like that on a 22″ monitor

It’s the resolution that counts, not the size (unless you’re planning on looking at it from the other side of the room). I suspect you’d have to go quite a lot more expensive to get beyond 1920×1080.

Looks like a pretty fast system, discs are likely to be the bottleneck. You’d get quite a performance boost by configuring those discs as RAID0 or RAID1.

this pushes the heel back in the boot and moves the toes back slightly

Indeed, which is why they shouldn’t be touching the front of the boot. I’m assuming that the fit is in a skiing position, if the shop tries to tell you they fit in a non-skiing position then go somewhere else.

Toes against the end doesn’t sound right. Mine have enough room to wiggle my toes without touching the end of the boot. If you’re anywhere near Lockwoods in Leamington Spa give them a try.

I always wear one skiing – not only does it protect you if you fall on something hard but it keeps your head warm and looks better than the stupid bobble hats people used to wear. Most people doing any sort of serious skiing seem to wear them these days, just as most serious cyclists wear them. Not sure why there’s a fashion for matt black helmets though; first time the sun comes out you’ll boil your head.

Last year I skiied with a group off piste one day with a local guide; coming off the mountain at the end of the day one guy without a helmet fell over as he dropped back onto the piste and was taken off the mountain with concussion. Next day the guiding company had made helmets compulsory…

Embrace the falls! You may think you’re going fast but you probably aren’t yet, and if you fall on-piste the worst thing that’s likely to happen is some embarrassment and the need to go back a bit to get your skis. It’s not like coming off your bike which IME usually involves blood and/or a trip to casualty and some repairs to your bike. Once you learn that coming off doesn’t usually hurt your confidence should increase dramatically. Oh, and wear a helmet (stands back and dons flame-proof underwear…).

We’ve had them in the roof twice – best to get the professionals in to deal with them, they don’t charge much and it avoids the messy business of killing them yourself. First time they put traps out for them but had some difficulty because he reckoned some misguided person was releasing the poor dear things while we were out. Second time they were in the roof above the porch – he thwacked the timber holding up the roof with a stick and they shot out. Didn’t charge us for that one.

You need to deal with it because apart from the noise they can apparently gnaw through your wiring and have been known to start fires that way. Round here the bigger problem is if you get a glis glis in the roof – they’re protected and can do all sorts of damage including a tendency to drown in your water tank. They’re also good to eat, I’m told.

Lots of cogs here – http://www.sjscycles.co.uk/cassettes-spares-dept368_pg1/%5B/url%5D but if it’s more than 1 a new cassette may be better value.

Pentium Ds are a lot slower clock for clock than anything core 2 or i3 based

You could slip a core 2 duo in there for about £100 but you would definitely be getting to the point where a new system might be cheaper.

Replacing a hard drive on a Mac shouldn’t be any harder than on a PC. Whether it’s worth it depends on the spec of the Mac.

Power supply looks a bit weedy, you may want to look at a 500W or greater if you want to drive a decent graphics card. I think the ICH7D controller on your motherboard supports some sort of RAID which given the current price of discs might be more cost-effective than an SSD if your video files are big.

no need to change the existing transformers

Be careful, some LEDs don’t like electronic transformers – I killed 2 LED spots in the bathroom that way, an expensive mistake. I think it’s the LED driver that goes, rather than the LED itself.

Mrs R puts out fat-balls which seem to be much liked by the sparrows and finches although I worry that it’s the bird equivalent of giving them a McDonalds.

sparrow hawks have less chance of catching them

There was a sparrow hawk snacking on a sparrow under our birdtable the other day, which I thought was fair enough as they need winter food too. :-)

when a member of the aristocracy BBC report quoting an Evening Standard headline starts talking about ‘the poor’ in such terms it sounds even worse

Fixed it for you.

Caught the end of that in the car and it seemed really good, thanks for reminding me I need to listen to the rest!

I reckon people are turning away from beer and chocolate

I think most of the chocolate companies are owned by Turks or Americans now, and InBev has most of the breweries. That just leaves the cyclocross to support the economy. :-)

Can’t imagine either of those giving you a problem with CPU power, but as anjs says you may want to look at the graphics – both of those have just about the minimum you could get away with for gaming. The AMD one has a slightly bigger power supply which may give you more scope for upgrading the graphics later, all other things being equal.

We use Danish oil on our wooden worktops. Now 6 years old and looking better than new as the wood colour improves with age. When they were new they soaked up several coats of oil but now we probably oil them once a year, if that, so pretty low maintenance imho. As others have said, if you scratch it or make marks on it it just gives the surface a nice “worn” look but if you’re really fussy most marks can be sanded out and re-oiled. We’ve used it to roll out pastry and similar things but tbh if you’re doing a lot of that you probably want a sheet of stainless steel or something similar.

That’s funny, but not as funny as the $500 audio ethernet cable. Just shows there’s one born every minute.

Us loaning them cash at 5% is better for them and by extension us, than them having to pay nearly 9% to commercial lenders.

And according to the BBC news we can borrow it at 1.5% to lend to them at 5%. Sounds like a good deal to me as long as we get it back.

I wouldn’t take a road bike, driving standards out there can be terrible, and the desert is not a place to cycle on your own – it can get scary quite quickly away from the town. I’ve rented a bike for an afternoon out there and tbh it was a waste of time. Sharm has some of the best snorkelling and diving in the world, best to stick to that imho.

Like coolhandluke I ran my Summer Season with 130mm coil U-turn Revs (great fork, don’t know why they stopped making it) and it’s a real hooligan’s bike – great downhill and gives you a feeling of invincibility but heavy enough to make going uphill a real pain. I’m the same weight as the OP so gave it quite a hammering. I’ve heard about chain suck problems but never had it myself, I suspect it may be build-dependent.

Now have a 456ti also with the 130mm revs and that’s much better for climbing, particularly with the forks wound down to 100mm, but not quite so good on the downhills – it feels a bit more delicate somehow although I suspect in reality it’s just as strong. Standard 456 I would guess is likely to be a compromise between the 2 so may be perfect for what you’re looking for. It’s also cheap enough that if you don’t get on with it it’s not too much of a loss to ebay it, or keep as a spare frame in case of disasters!

btw whereabouts is there to ride in Seattle? Everywhere I looked round there seemed to be state or national parks so bikes where banned!

I’ve found http://www.theoutdoorgearshop.co.uk/%5B/url%5D to be pretty good on prices.

Not really much worse than asbestos I suppose

Or coal.

This will be a stand alone affair on a new plaster wall so the edges need to be tidy!

The I’d go for the non-MDF approach. A properly cut stainless steel sheet has nice edges and looks fine glued to a flat wall. If your wall’s not flat you either end up bending the sheet to fit the wall, which doesn’t look good when it reflects the light, or you end up with gaps between the edge and the plaster which you can’t fill with grout as that looks naff. Sticking it to a piece of MDF won’t help if your wall’s not flat as the stainless steel may stay flat but you’ll still get the gaps.

We just got a piece of stainless steel cut to size and stuck it to the wall with spray contact adhesive. But I guess your success will depend on how flat your wall is – ours was newly plastered so not too bad, and in a recess so the edges don’t show.

I’ll second the Dualit or one or its various clones. Seems to be one of the cheaper burr grinder, and burr grinders are best rather than the ones that thrash the beans to pieces. Mines several years old and still going strong, used every day.

I’ve had this since upgrading to ios 4. Not sure whther its the site or the phone that’s at fault, I don’t seem to get it on anything other than stw.

As to basket size, again irrelevant

Only true if you’re thinking of staying on a piste all the time. If you’re there for any length of time you’ll probably want some decent powder baskets.

Like others have said, get some cheap, solid poles for a few €, don’t go for the expensive ones as they’ll only get broken/trashed/nicked. Save your alpkit carbon poles for what they’re designed for.

What should I by my wife for her birthday.

Yes/no you should/shouldnt

Why can’t people on here spell/use punctuation/use grammar properly any more?

My Halfords track pump is about 8 years old and still works ok but I’ve never liked it much tbh so I use the car foot pump most of the time. If you’re just trying to get volume in then a car pump might be your best bet.

CEOPS is a good starting place but you might also want to look at Get Safe On Line[/url] and Childnet[/url].

Snowboarding stopped being cool 20 years ago when it went mainstream. Now it seems to be the province of middle aged men and kids with their trousers round their ankles; I’m sure they’re having fun but they’re not cool.

If anything the cool people are out freeride skiing or maybe using a split-board somewhere well away from the resort where you won’t see them. :wink:

Pish

As usual I refer the hon gentleman to Prof Mackay’s figures.

The problem with diffuse power sources is that the resource cost of harnessing them can easily exceed their value so there may be a lot of it but it’s not necessarily much use, and maybe we want to use all that steel for something else. Wave power has its place, but it’s not the answer to keeping the lights on.

TJ – even so, the numbers don’t add up even if you could extract 100% of the energy from the waves, never mind the environmental effects that would have.

WE could have a huge pelarmis fleet in action in a few years

I expect you mean Pelamis. It’s true that we possibly could and maybe we should if the costs of the steel and the offshore cables work out and we can solve the storage problem, but the numbers don’t stack up as a replacement for nuclear. Also remember that these sorts of technologies have a long history of failing to live up to their expectations. Anyone for a Salter’s Duck?

TJ – “energy too cheap to meter” was a stupid statement made for publicity and to maintain research funding in the early days of nuclear power; it has no more validity than the predictions of nuclear-powered vacuum cleaners and does not support the argument that predictions about nuclear power stations have been proven wrong so many times.

TJ – I don’t have faith in anyone, that’s why I only look at facts and figures. But I accept that some people will not be swayed by that – it’s just like religious arguments. C’est la vie.

TJ – as I keep on saying, look at the figures. Nuclear is reliable, is relatively cheap, and has few incidents per kW/h generated. People do have a pretty good handle on decommissioning costs. Governments aren’t all stupid (possibly UK excepted), they’ve done the figures and know that the risks of not doing it and having the lights go out are greater than the risks of doing it but annoying a subset of voters who “feel” its wrong.

Effectively tho it comes down to a faith argument.

I’ve heard it said that the green movement has become a replacement for religion for some people but I didn’t think it had gone this far! Decisions on nuclear power have to be made on facts and probabilities, not faith, or what you “feel” is right. Many governments have gone through this process recently and decided that nuclear is a good thing after all based primarily on its past record, which despite the rhetoric has been pretty good.

I see lots of the usual myths and alarmist statements about nuclear being repeated on here. Take a look at David Mackay’s calculations if you want a reasonably even-handed summary. In particular look at his figures for deaths-per-Magawatt hour and consider how dangerous some of our existing and proposed energy sources are.

If you’re worried about dirty bombs, a biological one is far more scary than a nuclear one and easier to make. If you’re worried about water being poisoned by largely insoluble nuclear waste then best not to think about some of the soluble things that could be put in your water supply. If you’re worried about nuclear waste best not to think about the piles of chemical waste lying around. Saying we all need to consume less is simplistic and not something I’d really be happy saying to someone in India with little food no electricity supply

Some of the fission reactor technologies being researched such as liquid flouride thorium reactors can be made in small scales and don’t produce the same long-lived isotopes as existing PWRs. At the moment the big corporations that make reactors won’t want to make these as they have existing investments to leverage but I expect we’ll be buying these from India soon – either that or we’ll have to beef up the cables to France and buy their nuclear-generated electricity.

The debate was live, so I doubt if editing was the issue. Monbiot just comes across as someone who isn’t prepared to listen or let the other side have their say because in his mind he is so obviously right. Now that may not be how he is (although I personally suspect it’s pretty close to the truth) but that’s how he came across.

Edit: And in a debate where the prime accusation is that Greens don’t listen and aren’t prepared to change their minds that’s an unfortunate attitude to take.