Some fantastic shots!

Not many people realise how much more creative you can be with a proper SLR (or other prosumer camera). Obvioulsy an understanding of how to compose a shot has nothing to do with the kit, but the results your bro has produced shows he has a creative streak and has gotten to grips with the additional flexibility of a proper camera.

Makes me want to shell out £500 on a DSL. If only I had the cash to flash!

I bought one of these for my missus Giant Yukon Ladies
Has cable operated Hayes discs. A nicely finished bike, but nothing special. £300 is enough IMO.

Be prepared to listen to endless complaints about hills, uneven surfaces, mud and uncomfortable saddles.

Get her some well padded shorts and make sure you involve a couple of pub stops

Or ask him if he has the manuals or a receipt.

I have an earlier version of this tent. Sturdy and very cheap!

Vango Alpha 200

16x16x50cm 2.75kg. Sorta on the heavy and large side, but for £30 can you so much better?

Yes cynic-al, but you can spell and these bits aren’t numpty bits. Perhaps he’s a poorly educated but rich person from Hull. I am such a doubting Thomas!

Good for dogs!

Pads disappearing after one ride?? Are you 20 stone and doing a 4 hour steep descent in the Alps? If not, you must be using some seriously nasty brake pads! 😆

Isn’t Hull the capital of car radio thefts?

Shimano are a bit slow bringing STI shifter/hydraulic brakes to the road biking fraternity. I have been looking out for such a product for a couple of years now.

Hull by the looks of things

Nokia 5800! Shockingly good handset.

Had mine for 6 weeks now.

A gadget that works!

How good it is depends on what you want it for.

I like the viewranger application you can buy for it – OS mapping on your mobile. Check out viewranger’s website.

Tomtom isn’t supported yet.

It has top quality sound, great music player, awesome battery life, great screen, unexpectedly powerful built in stereo speakers and can download and replay programmes from BBC’s iPlayer. Web browsing is average though and it is a bit thick and chunky, but not like the old n-series phones

Good for phone calls too!

If you want to buy insurance online (the easiest way of comparing prices and getting a good deal), you may come unstuck if there are significant breaks in your cover.

If you are happy to make numerous phonecalls to independent brokers – people who know their onions and will go to the trouble, you can probably retain the benefit of your no claims for a year or so. Don’t bank on it though – good brokers are less common these days and most insurers are rigid in the way their criteria are applied.

The water companies are increasingly moving in favour of forcing people to create soakaways on their land to minimise the amount of water channeled in to storm water drains.

This surprizes me. I thought they liked to collect as much water as possible so they don’t run out in a drought.

Sorry to hear about your plight Antigee. Seems like you were a lot more proactive about the matter than I was. It seems like your efforts were a waste of time though. I understand why they had problems taking your word for it – they are bound by security check processes now, but if they had checked the debit details from the previous transaction, they would have seen your initials.

I think the whole business of automatic renewals should be outlawed unless the customer specifically requests such a service. The insurer should have to get a signed agreement from the customer, including a direct debit mandate!

I wouldn’t use a credit card for purchasing insurance as the debitor has the “cardholder not present” option. So you would be none the wiser until yo get the credit card bill when they automatically renew the policy.

I shall be watching all my insurance policies like a hawk from now on!

Depends on what you mean by near. Cakes and Ale caravan and camping site, Harrow Lane near Leiston. Southwold is approached via Walberswick, or you can go the long way round. Via Walberswick, you have to take the footpassenger ferry over the river though, so you would have to enjoy a stroll or two.

Southwold Harbour campsite is just outside Southwold, but on the seafront – could be a bit chilly if there’s an onshore breeze.

Check them out on Google Earth

Just to clarify, you did look at the small header tank for the central heating and not the main cold water storage tank!?

It’s good business as it ensures your coverage doesn’t lapse – you’d be the first to complain if you assumed it would run on and then made a claim and found you weren’t covered, surely?

Call me oldfashioned, but no, I wouldn’t complain if my policy had run out and wanted to claim because I had subsequently sustained some sort of loss. I prefer to have control over whether I renew a policy, not the insurance company. They shouldn’t try and take money from my account without my consent either!

I was not informed that this was an auto-renewal policy. All the policies I have ever had (25-30 yrs worth) have lapsed if you do not pay a renewal premium within two weeks of expiry (two weeks grace has always been the standard). No ongoing obligation! Simple!

Thank you for your comments though.

My airport keeps dipping in and out of connection so I’m hoping it will cure that at least.

Don’t bank on it!

Flaky firmware could be causing the router to drop out, wifi or hard wired.

Try a different wifi router first.

Cabling is sensible. Wifi has it’s limitations.

Expect HD A/V streaming technology to become popular and affordable in the not too distant future. For this you will be way better off with proper hardwired infrastructure.

Dig a drainage ditch along your boundary and if there is nowhere to dischage this run off water below your property, dig a big soakaway and backfill it with hardcore.

Build your own. Way cheaper!

Use treated timber for weatherboarding.

Insulate underneath as well as the walls and roof.

Shouldn’t take much more than a couple of days if you are handy and have the right tools.

Did you check the things I mentioned?

Windfarms: NO!

Costing taxpayers a fortune for little benefit!

Windmills are uneconomic and a blight on the landscape.

The total of UK man made emissions is between 2% and 3% of the global output produced by us humans. Therefore, the proposed UK reduction (if successful) equates to a 1% drop (at best).

85% of global CO2 emissions are produced from natural sources.

The UK’s expensive CO2 reduction scheme will therefore reduce global emissions by an insignificant 0.15%!

Allegedly, this will cost each UK household at least £600 a year. There has been a £525M subsidy to be paid for by energy companies (who will pass these costs on to you). A further £425M of tax payer’s money set aside for household insulation, double glazing etc. A further provision of £405M of public money to encourage the development of low carbon energy and advanced green manufacturing.

An 0.15% reduction. Will that make any difference whatsoever? Is it really worth it?? I personally don’t want a £600 increase in my energy bills in these economic times!

A commitment from every country in the world would make a worthwhile difference, but then these countries are much more commercially focused than our clueless Labour administration! The rest of the developed world, who have vastly less public borrowing debt, are more focused on rebuilding their economies. The French for example are busy are selling their cheap nuclear energy to us at a healthy profit. They even own most of our utility companies.

What a farce!

You can tell if it’s a combi as it will have a pressure vessel, pumps and motorized valves all built into the boiler casing. Plumbers like combi’s coz they are less work to fit and you don’t need header tanks, pumps, MSV’s and yards of additional connecting pipework.

Get your manual online if you can’t find the original.

Sounds like there is no/little circulation of water through the boiler.

If the water isn’t getting topped up, the boiler could overheat and trip a thermal overide. Go in the loft and check the header tank ball valve has not stuck and that the tank is full up to the ball. (assuming this is a vented system). If it’s a combi, make sure you have not lost water pressure – there will be no header tank. There’s usuually a water pressure meter inside combi boilers – consult your user manual.

Also check that the circulator pump is running. Put you hand on it to feel if it is turning.

The other thing to check is if the motorized valves are opening. I don’t expect this to be a problem because it is quite comon for the switch in the valves to “call” the boiler to start up.

Let us know if you find any of these affect the problem.

This is not the place for such advice.

Yes I know how solar panels are made (I made one as a technology project 30 years ago), but when covered in snow over an extende period, the water inside could freeze. As could the pipes that carry water too and from this panel. Of course, there is the matter of the whole thing heating up and cooling every day which must surely increase the potential for a leak failure. If you have ever had water pouring through a ceiling and seen the damage it can do, you would understand my concern.

My TV only has a Standby button! 😆

Some brakes just work, others don’t. I bellive this is a great deal to do with set up on the bike and if you have decent tight hubs.

Get the mountings properly faced so the caliper runs perpendicular to the disc.

If your hubs have a lot of lateral play, you will get the jangling sounds as you corner. It will be more noticeable the bigger the rotor you have fitted. Check your wheel bearings and make sure the pads aren’t too badly worn. I used to have closed brakes where you can wind the pads in and out so that they run close to the disc. This seemed to minimise the problem.

After 9 years of faffing, i’m not convinced there is anything you can do to completely eliminate problems. Just hope you get lucky and everthing works most of the time.

I have tried numerous Hope brakes and a set of Hayes Stroker’s. They all played up at various stages. I have just learned to live with the hassles.

I’ve never watched it, but I think you’re taking it a bit too seriously [:)]

ME? Serious? !!

Microgeneration is an interesting subject.

I have heard about heat reclamation whereby you bury pipes in the garden. This produces enough heat to keep a house at a comfortable temperature, but you need a big plot without an established garden.

Geothermal energy sounds like a great way of heating homes. If people could get a local consortium together, this sort of method could become viable, but costs are very high indeed. Maybe this is one area for the politicians, but then GAs and electricys companies aren’t going to get behind this. I believe a lot of opportunities for alternative energy sources are held back by oil companies. They own a lot of patents and have good lawyers.

At a smaller scale, Solar panels to heat hot water are also of interest. My mate installs these and he reckons you get piping hot water, even on cloudy days. Roofs need reinforcement and installation must be on a south facing side. A tricky install and I would worry about frost and the potential subsequent water damage.

In all cases, unless you are into a specialised new build, it’s not really viable.

I think I get the gist of this carbon neutral thing (carbon input v output).

Ok, What about the inhabitants? Do we have to have enough plant life on the premises to balance out the CO2 we produce when breathing? Seriously, people produce CO2 as well. The output increases exponentially when we exercise, so should cyclists have to grow more plants?

I am of course playing devil’s advocate, but wish to draw attention to the fact that we are subjected to a lot of hot air (groan) about this topic.

Most of us are striving to reduce carbon emissions (to save on paying out too much for gas, vehicle fuel and electricity). It would be a lot easier if we had better engineered homes. It will take many decades to significantly change this, if ever. We need to give people an incentive.

The two biggest sources of pollution are from heating our homes and driving cars. If you want to save fossil fuels, these are the two main areas to focus on.

Currently, any equipment providing alternative sources of energy are ridiculously inflated. The period it takes to recover the outlay if you have all this gear installed professionally is 10 years (according to my central heating engineer mate). Is there anything radical about a roof mounted heat exchanger, or a simple windmill turbine? Not really, but in the latter case there is a need for battery storage of this energy. Batteries are expensive and don’t last forever. I do wonder what the environmental impact these have when they are disposed of. I think that wind energy isn’t viable (especially on calm days). The impact on the landscape is pretty unacceptable too.

The only way to really get people to take this pollution thing seriously is to inflate the price of fuel to the point where it hurts having a fossil fuel wasting product. Only his would motivate us to radically change. We saw a little bit of this last summer when fuel prices went through the roof.

Americans have a much larger wastage of fossil fuels per head of population than anywhere else in the world. This is down to everything being too big; vehicle engines, houses, distances travelled etc etc etc. Houses aren’t insulated well and then there is the issue of airconditioning – many Americans have AC in their homes. AC uses 3 times as much energy to cool a room as a boiler takes to heat a room. Imagine what it would be like if we had to cool our UK homes throughout the summer months? We pay vastly more than the Americans do for energy. If they were on the same tariffs as us, they’d go bust!

IMHO the prime solution for regulating temperatures in buildings starts with insulation.

I have been conscious of the environmental damage of our unsustainable lifestlye is doing since it was drummed into us at school 40 years ago will continue to try to persuade the rest of the population, but the cynic in me says that it won’t change until we are hit hard in the pocket.

Whatever we do as individuals, there will always be a need to produce energy. I think nuclear energy is our best option. Nuclear power plants that are owned, engineered and staffed by British people. What a naive notion!

Barry Scott (of the Cillit Bang advert) should pair up with Murray.

What shall you wear? Are you a woman?

No more adverts in the middle of a race! YEY!!!

I’m not asking if it matters, I’m asking how many Megans you know… I’ll decide if it matters or not [:)]

Dave Gorman is the expert on the frequency of names appearing in the population.

let’s hope they’re not cyclists…

Conversely, let’s hope they are cyclists! Just not STW chatroom reading cyclists.

You can’t bullshit your way into a tech. job these days! Aside from not knowing the common day to day issues, you’ll probably be asked if you have certification.

Many firms employ security checking agencies who will check with all your previous employers, colleges for certifications etc etc.

Getting shorlisted for an interview means you are in with a good chance Molegrips.

Good luck!

No!

ccleaner.

Use Windows Defender – free download from ms. Select software explorer and startup programs and disable or uninstall all the bloatware.

I’m sure the place will be awash with the great unwashed. The O/T bill for the police will be huge.

Nissan X-Trail, 50ft away