What’s the budget ? I’d almost certainly go for a panasonic plasma; best picture quality you can buy imho

something like this…
panasonic plasma linky

I’ve lost two stone in around 9 months by doing the ‘eat less do more’ – going from a slightly pudgy 15.5 stone to a more respectable 13.5. I used a variation on the breakfast like a king… blah blah as a way of limiting my calorie / food intake aiming to halve the amount of calories for each meal ( ~1000 for breakfast; 500 for lunch; 250 for tea ) the only other material difference to my diet was to make a conscious effort to swap from white to wholemeal bread.

I mainly came up with it as it suits my lifestyle when I travel for work (full english in hotels on a morning; sandwich and drink for lunch; exercise and snack in the evening)

I’m sure it’s not for everyone; but it works for me :)

tinas – where ’bouts are you ? I live in Skelton; usually my 15 mile ‘hillyish’ route is skelton – lingdale – stanghow – moors road – moorsholm – loftus and back

I’m equally unfit / slow if you fancy a ride tho ;)

I’ve found that doesn’t always work (depends on shoe/pedal) – I work on the ‘high as you can but without making your hips rock’ method… and for the mtb – just whatever feels comfy; it’s always going to be a tradeoff between efficiency and bike control…

Hmm – from what I can find out; they will be publically available; however I don’t believe the first set of updates has been published yet – when it is it should be available via the evidence.nhs.uk search engine …

What do you mean by NICE Evidence Updates ? I may be able to help you out; but I’m not sure what it is you after after exactly ..

Ah; you need to ride it to appreciate it – I fell in love with it when I saw the prototype hanging up at Bike ’99 behind the Downhill Arcade machine …

the ugliest bike ever made….period = whyte plus 4

You mean one of these ?

I kinda like mine ….

Garmin Forerunner 305 is less than £100 on amazon at the moment – get the optional bar mount and you are good to go…

yes .. don’t :)

the heat from the stove will crack the plaster and it will come away from the brickwork. If you must have a smooth finish behind the burner use some heatproof board (e.g. supalux) and be prepared for a slightly rough finish (it’ll look fine though :))

“I’ve got a rare form of reverse diabetes and need to eat raw jelly cubes every day”

edit: this is more effective if you have a packet secreted about your person

know any linux types ? get them to use dd_rescue to create a copy of the card as it currently is before it gets any worse – you can then use recovery tools on the backup image

testdisk and photorec from cgsecurity.org should get back anything that’s plausible.

If you are anywhere near Manchester or Middlesbrough I may be able to help out

@retro83 – have you checked for key loggers recently ;)

I’d put money on retro83 saying something predictable like:

how do you know which file in dir A maps to each file in dir B ? Sounds like it should be fairly trivial in Powershell

edit: ;)

electric carving knife ?

*runs away for verging too close to common sense*

“My dealer said the first fixie was free”

I guess it depends on how ‘actively’ you want to use it – I’d take my phone in case of emergency anyway so I just start tracking; stick the phone in a ziplock and put it in the camelbak. Comes out when I get back so I can log the route / time.

I use my Nexus S for tracking (never tried to use it to follow a route) – No problems with battery life; I’ve had it on for 6 hours+ – you just need to make sure that you aren’t running any non-essential apps / services.

@Squidlord – I’d try the bitter first; it’ll be a bit more forgiving if you don’t get the fermentation temperature right

No.

I wouldn’t worry about it though; it’s open moorland.

You’ll have to pay back the remaining value (without the tax exemption); not sure how that will affect the final value payment – when it happened to me HR just rolled the whole lot up into one last lump sum. This was pre-the amended tax guidelines about final value tho and I only had a couple of months remaining.

I stream video / music from my server to a media player – it’s fine over the wired network; not reliable over wi-fi; however I haven’t bothered switching to an ‘N’ based router as I’ve installed network cable instead…

Is one of either the Mac or the ubuntu box a 24 hour ‘on’ machine ? If so you could simply share the wireless connection via that PC; so it would act as the bridge onto the wired network. I do this to connect my media center to the wireless network using my squeezebox as a bridging device.

I’d second that – connect your router to your hub and don’t bother connecting the machines via wi-fi. Also has the benefit of allowing access to the file server via wi-fi if you need it

Multiple projects – yes; multiple solutions – no.

Each solution will contain several projects; however each ‘deliverable’ module (e.g. a Windows Service or WCF service) will be a single solution referencing only it’s required project files.

What’s using all the ram?

Multiple copies of Visual Studio; SQL Server (yes I know it’s configurable – it still needs plenty of RAM if you are using it with a large/frequently accessed db); Sharepoint and FAST Esp

I have various VM’s with some of the above components on each depending on what I’m working on – I have occasional need to run two vm’s concurrently for integration testing / debugging.

I’ve got 8Gb of memory in this machine here; frequently I wish it was 16.

Visual Studio 2010; SQL Server + others.

I can only assume the single monitor purchase is because they’ll be keeping old monitors from the outgoing machines – so an additional monitor each.

Only hole I’d pick in the spec would be (as previously noted) Core i7 and not Core 2 Quads; however unless you have massive compile times I’d take the extra memory over a faster cpu every day of the week.

Might also benefit from a couple of HDD’s in a RAID configuration; or SSD disks (if you can afford it)

It’s not that bad up here – I moved to the (relatively) rural bit after 8 years in Manchester; and whilst there’s good and bad aspects to both areas; I wouldn’t dream of going back to urban life…

anyhoo – If you are working short term at Wilton site (and presumably mid week; therefore not interested in night life) I’d find a hotel over Guisborough way; that way you get riding from your door and Wilton is only 5 minutes away over the other side of Eston Nab.

I’m sure there are a few of us who could show you round the riding that’s to be had in the area. Send me an e-mail if you need any other info or if there’s anything you want me to find out …

I use Good Run Guide[/url] – It’s £10 a year; but pleasingly bereft of intrusive advertising and also allows you to log your runs / rides.

I tried bi-wire/amping some ls3/5as with two Quad 306s but it didn’t make any odds, but I also heard it make a difference on some LS7t a while ago.

Bi-wiring can make a slight difference to the measured frequency response of a speaker; though it’s questionable if it’s audible – it would most likely have the effect of removing some mids (effectively creating / exaggerating the notch at the crossover point). Bi amping should make some sort of a positive difference unless you run 500W PA amps on minimum – THD tends to increase as you demand more from your output stage. If I was creating a new setup from a wish list I would definately go for active crossovers; bi or even tri-amping and no crossovers within the speakers.

Alternatively you could just take a calibrated measurement of frequency response using a behringer microphone and simply use your media server to apply an EQ correcting algorithm to your music; it’s much cheaper :D

I’m talking about extremely subtle effects that can be detectable by a suitable human brain

Surely if these effects existed at this range you’d expect to be able to measure them somehow ?

I’ll probably regret posting this but re the Sky frequency, I thought the LNB down shifted the frequency to about 1 Ghz so that copper co-ax cable could cope?

No; you are quite right and I stand corrected.

1Ghz is still a hell of a frequency compared to 20kHz though

Surely as an electronicist you can appreciate that the subtelties of an analogue signal across a range of frequencies being delivered to a human cortex have absolutely no bearing on a digital signal…?

Sky hasn’t always been digital….but even so; signal degredation in digital is arguable much more important – whilst there are error correcting mechanisms; they only work up to a point – It was more pointing out that if the underlying structure could have such a marked influence on a high power; low frequency analog signal then a signal of the frequency of sky simply would not transmit through copper cable at all.

@molgrips – It is still a crossover – think of it this way; A cross over has one input and two outputs; a low and a high. In a bi-wirable speaker this is done with two individual filters – one low pass and one high pass – The input is shared by virtue of the brass link. When you bi-wire; the circuit configuration remains virtually unchanged; however the impedance provided by the cable(s) now sits ‘between’ the inputs of the two networks

This page has some diagrams which show it better than I’m explaining ;)

Then (off the top of my head now) the crystal boundaries in the metal would cause the electrons to diffract which would be frequency dependent. So the higher frequencies could scatter more therefore resulting in a longer signal path. Same could go for impurity atoms in the crystal structure.

And if that were the case for audio frequencies where these effects are smallest I would be unable to reply; for the modern world would simply not exist – take Sky as an example – the 12 – 18 GHz frequencies it uses seem to cope perfectly well with the 30p / metre copper coaxial cable that is nailed to the side of my house; and yet I’m supposed to believe that we need to worry about the crystalline structure of speaker cables ?

I wonder, how many of the contributors to this thread are musicians themselves

I’d be more interested to know how many actually have any formal education in electronics…..

I didn’t install a crossover. I think the speakers are simply filtering using one half of the original crossover.

The (relatively) low impedance of the cable acts as part of the cross over network inside the loudspeaker – when bi-wiring; you effectively add an extra component of impedence to the cross overs; the effect of this is that the low pass filter frequency for the woofer drops slightly and the high pass filter for the tweeter / mid range rises slightly. In practical terms the actual change in response is barely measurable; let alone audible.

However; when you bi-amp; you are creating two electrically isolated circuits; one for each part of the speaker – you can (if you wish) vary the signal level to each side for your own preference and you also gain significant headroom as you are now splitting the workload between two amps (which are presumably the same spec as the single one was) – it is the additional headroom and finer control which provide the benefit in a bi-amped situation. An active crossover can improve things still further; as you are then only amplifying what you actually need to hear and can remove the cross over networks from the speakers entirely.

However Ohm’s law applies to DC circuits

Not entirely true. It just gets very complicated….

We can assume that two cables, even from the same manufacturer would be subtly different

There is no doubting that two – even visually identical – cables will exhibit minor differences in transfer function. However; the differences are at frequencies way above human hearing; (as in in the MHz’s rather than the kHz…)

And make sure you apply these to make sure the listening room is as tuned as possible:

Oh
My
God.

Three thousand dollars ? I am in the wrong business !

But the argument is, that all cable sounds the same…

It is; however NAIM claim that the speaker cable characteristics are an integral part of the amp and specify minimum lengths etc..

It’s not so much the sound being different that would worry me; but (as an example) my cat 5 cables have a higher capacitance than most. In the unlikely event that your expensive naim became unstable and oscillated (It does not have a zobel netowrk to prevent this) it could easily melt istelf and you will be left with an expensive block of metal with no warranty to boot.

I’d suggest using an amp that doesn’t specifically warn you not to do this; that is all !

Leatherheads near me – we could have a cable-rolling party!

Sadly; I’m at the other end of the country; however I’m entirely happy to supply a set of pre-rolled cat 5 speaker cables to be used in the test if it’s actually going to happen.

I’d suggest NOT using a naim amp; for no other reason than it claims to be specifically designed to run with a certain length and type of speaker cable.