Why no pictures of the left hand side ?

There’s a picture of the LHS on the Endorfin site, but the gear change mechanism seems to be in the way of the crank. Very strange.

Cheap & Cheerful degreaser – http://www.screwfix.com/prods/47781/Cleaning/Swarfega-Surface-Cleaners/Swarfega-Heavy-Duty-Degreaser

Lack of appropriate investment on the railways has been an issue for as long as I can remember. We were still building steam engines with 50 year life-spans in the 1960s when we should have been electrifying, they all got thrown away in 1968. We developed high-speed trains in the 1970s ahead of most other countries and then dropped it and sold it to the Italians who now sell it back to us. Probably the last significant strategic investment was the channel tunnel.

Having said that the biggest problem the railways face today is lack of capacity, so the high fares don’t seem to be putting off rail users. And anyone who remembers BR wouldn’t want to go back there (although that may solve the capacity problem – who wants to travel on a dirty train with no guaranteed arrival time?).

I’ve found Event Tyres[/url] to be as cheap as most of the places that just provide the tyres, and they come and fit them for you.

Endowments are long-term investments and consequently are still suffering from the decline in stock markets since the peak in 2000. The companies still take their percentage though, so they’ll still make money regardless.

Ed Balls, just for the comedy headlines.

Try Ebay or somewhere like here. If you pay Maplin’s prices you may as well buy disk brake cleaner.

better than the Muc Off disc cleaner IMHO (which left an oily film on my rotors)

Probably oil that was already there getting spread around by the solvent – you still need to wipe off the dissolved crap otherwise it’ll still be there when the solvent dissolves. I suspect it’s this that’s led to the myth about brake cleaner containing oil!

You’d never get a grape into one. Wouldn’t recommend it for anything wet or sticky either. Great for anything dry like dust, flies and spiders though.

If you're travelling much I always used to advise our people not to use purpose-made laptop bags as in many countries it's like carrying a badge around saying "mug me". I always use an ordinary rucksac and if you're really worried about scratching the laptop (and they're usually tough little things) then get one of those neoprene sleeves for it.

I could afford £1 a week extra tax for a year. I'm sure lots of other people could too. That would surely make a big difference?

£52 from each of the 30M or so working people is about £1.5bn. I think we need about £150bn this year…

I asked Mrs R how old our Siemens washing machine is this morning as I was surprised it's still as quiet as it was when it was new. She said 10 years. It's never gone wrong, and if it ever breaks beyond repair I wouldn't hesitate to get another. She was washing a door-mat in it at the time, which didn't seem to faze it at all.

Got mine this morning. Not surprisingly the purple one and the red one seem to be the same apart from the colour! A quick check indicates that they're about the same brightness as the Tesco 1W torch but it's very battery-dependent; the Panasonic batteries that came with the purple one don't give anything like as much light as a fresh set of Duracells. The rear light comes with a slightly flimsy clothing clip; Mrs R has told me that this one has to be used when I'm out running on dark evenings :|

May try to get some beam shots tonight if the rain holds off, then decide if it's worth modding one to take a better battery.

Edit: The batteries that came with the purple one are Pemasanig, not Panasonic, so not surprised they seem to have the internal resistance of a goat. Apologies to Panasonic for not spotting the blatant rip-off!

Its far harsher than anything Thatcher did.

There must be a Thatcher version of Godwin's law. TJ's law?

"Thursday 25 March 2010 21.40 GMT. Alistair Darling admitted tonight that Labour's planned cuts in public spending will be "deeper and tougher" than Margaret Thatcher's in the 1980s, as the country's leading experts on tax and spending warned that Britain faces "two parliaments of pain" to repair the black hole in the state's finances."

Hardly suggests the apocalypse we are being sold does it?

Debt/deficit – both begin with d so why not interchange them.

If you include employers contributions, which isn't a tax that you pay

It's a tax someone pays on my employment so should be included in the calculation of overall tax rate, otherwise we could make the employer pay all the tax; that way we'd all be on 0% tax but curiously with the same take-home pay. Although I agree it does make the effective rate lower (44.4% according to my calculation) but its still pretty high. 50% effective tax rate comes in at 135K again according to my dodgy accountancy.

we still don't spend enough to have the services we want

Probably true, but (a) life is a compromise and (b) so far there's been little evidence of a direct link between expenditure and quality of services in this country – other countries e.g. Germany and the Netherlands seem to run their governments in more business-like ways.

Maybe the answer is to emulate some of the countries being idolised on here and start charging for healthcare, that way there's more money for other things.

[just nipping out to put on my flame-proof gear].

Even someone earning 100k a year isn't paying anywhere near 50% in Tax and NI

PAYE plus NI on 100K including employers contribution comes to about 45%. Not a million miles from 50%, and I did say "close to".

I'd give 50% of what I earn in tax to live in a Britain more like Denmark

Not sure I'd want to live in Denmark, but taking your point isn't this part of the problem? A lot of us have been or will be paying close to 50% taking into account tax and NI, but we've ended up where we are, not in some Scandinavian-style big government utopia. The last government is the best advertisment I've seen for not letting the government spend your money, regardless of your political persuasion.

Its an ideological con.

No, it's what you'd expect from a Tory/Libdem government (has no-one read the Libdem constitution?). Now the previous government pi$$ing money against the wall to buy votes whilst pandering to its new middle class voters and at the same time pretending to be the Labour party – that was an idealogical con, this lot are just amateurs in comparison.

Good God! But that could take seconds, possibly even minutes!
Do they think you have nothing better to do.

Strangely I do have better things to do than sorting out something that wasn't wrong in the first place. Like posting on STW, for example! :wink:

Upgraded mine last night but it took 4 hours and 2 attempts to download it. Main difference so far seems to be that it's stuck a "Game Center" app on the home screen and consequently created another screen with one app on it so the whole lot needs sorting out – if they're going put things I don't want on the home screen they could at least spell them correctly. Will be interested to see if the Bluetooth fixes now mean that it'll speak nicely to the car again, like it did before the 4.0 upgrade. One step forwards, 2 steps back…

My FSA Afterburner MegaExo plays quite happily with ordinary BBs – currently using a Superstar one that was spare, have also used one from a Shimano LX. There was a thread on here recently about Hope compatibility with FSA being an issue though – best to ask Hope about that. Worth looking into this as the FSA one that came with my BB lasted about 2 rotations before seizing (I exaggerate for effect but you get the idea).

You just need one of these.

Have seen this on the Polycell website, http://www.polycell.co.uk/products/polycell_hairline_crack_polyfilla.jsp

Used a lot of that on our walls where the plaster had crazed – the previous owners had covered it with heavy wallpaper which is another approach! It seems to have lasted several years so I reckon it's ok, but don't expect to just paint it on – it's like thick glue; you need to use a knife.

Where one of our ceilings had crazed I used some special flexible paint that Polycell make – much easier to apply than the hairline crack stuff.

Edit – this sort of stuff – http://www.polycell.co.uk/products/polycell_3_in_1_basecoat.jsp

I get the odd bit of hanging with my 3GS on iOS4

I find that if you force-quit a few apps it usually cures this. I suspect the multi-tasking still needs a bit of tweaking by Apple.

If they are pants, then I apologize

As one who's had to ride home holding a 1W Tesco torch in my hand after my Lumis packed up I'll be happy even if they are only 1W – they'll do what I want and act as a backup!

If the thing you're plugging in needs USB power then you definitely won't get far with just a cable. I suspect the USB PC card thing above is your best bet (note PC card, not PCI card which is something completely different and plugs inside a desktop machine). Try it before you buy it if poss – there are several versions of PCMCIA/PC card/Cardbus slots that all look similar.

Edit – I think this may do what you need if you can get to Maplin – http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=47096&C=Froogle&U=47096&T=Module

Just ordered a purple and a red. For that price you can't go wrong even if I just end up using them as torches.

Looks tempting as a backup. Anyone tried the supposedly brighter purple one?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Bike-Bicycle-Front-LED-Lamp-Light-Torch-Flashlight-7W-/250650919699?pt=UK_SportsLeisure_Cycling_Bike_Lights#payId

we never did heat more about the 250,000 dog bites a year

ok, let's hear about it now with some back-of-a-fag-packet calculations. I've seen various figures quoted around the 200,000-250-000 mark. If we take as a ball-park figure that the UK population is about 50M then that would mean the average person can expect to get bitten by a dog every 200 years or so. There's a question over what constitutes "bitten" – what for some is "just a friendly nip, he's only playing, if he meant it he'd have your leg off" is for others a scary experience of being bitten by a potentially dangerous animal. But if I ignore those and just go by my personal experience, I can think of 4 occasions where I have been bitten hard enough to leave a mark or damage clothing – the sort of things that might be regarded as an assault if a person did them. So either I've been incredibly unlucky or that figure of 250,000 is not unreasonable.

Edit: or I'm 800 years old. I feel it sometimes. :?

It's all very serious isn't it?

Only when discussing dogs, politics or tyres. :-)

Can't we all just get along?

New to this forum?

Ask yourself the same question about what triggered the dog attacks. Some are unprovoked, many aren't.

They're all provoked in some way; animals rarely act on a whim. However, it's unreasonable to expect everyone to know what provokes a particular dog to attack. On one memorable occasion I was accused by a dog owner of provoking his dog to bite me on the leg because I didn't stop running in its presence, and it always liked to attack runners (silly me for not realising that). Given that, it's perfectly reasonable for me to regard all dogs as dangerous animals.

At the end of the day it comes down to control; if you don't know what provokes your dog, don't take it out in public unless its on a lead. And I suspect very few dog owners know what would actually provoke their dog.

Windows7 64 bit may not be backwards compatible

If you've got any older specialist hardware there may not be any 64 bit drivers for it. I recently fell foul of this with a video capture card. Otherwise it should be ok.

Do people on here never sleep?

http://news.stv.tv/uk/118368-farmers-issue-warning-after-fatal-cow-attacks/

18 cow deaths in the last 8 years

Interesting link – so 18 people have been killed by by cows in 8 years, and the main cause according to the article is provocation by dogs. In this particular case I'd say the problems are firstly the owners, then the dogs, and only finally the cows which are protecting their offspring.

c.f. 5 children killed in the last 5 years by dogs[/url] according to a pro-dog web site that seems to have some very sensible views on dog control.

Did you know, on average, cows kill more people than dogs do

Any source for this? Anyway, this wasn't a death. About 250,000 dog bites occur in the UK each year. I expect cow bites are less of a problem.

Whats the problem?

In this case it wasn't the owner's offspring that was mauled.

My next door neighbours when I was little probably thought the same as you, until they had to take their teenage daughter to hospital to have her face sown back on after their beloved dog attacked her.

Dog and child in the same garden, not a good combo.

Last night, as Toni lay in hospital, dad James Dixon said: "These dogs shouldn't be with families or around kids. They are killing machines."

Avatar. Being blue and 3D doesn't make up for being a long, crap story.

I wouldn't believe a single word from that evil self-serving c***.

Which one, Brown or Blair?