In my experience I see no correlation between drive and how many children you have. Some people are career-driven, some people have kids.

As for the OP, it does seem like a huge amount of money. I appreciate, however, it will be an average. There will be parents sending kids to expensive private schools, taking them skiing in Davos every year and buying them new cars; the cost of all that will be dramatically swinging the average. We have 3 kids and I can tell you with no uncertainty that we don’t spend £30k a year on them. If that *is* the average we will end up spending on them, we have some very nasty surprises in future years.

As for warming up – I tend to let my car idle for a couple of minutes before driving off from a cold start, regardless of weather. Allowing the oil to circulate before loading the engine may do some good. Won’t do any harm anyway.

I’m sure that one of my cars said in the manual that you should *not* do this and should drive off straight away. Can’t remember which car…

This thread is making me want to trade in my car for another Ford.

it fills the air with fumes

Surely it still does that when you

start, scrape and stay with car(s) as they start on cold morning – and then sit in the thing if it is a cold one and I cannot see.

???

Two separate issues here:

1. Have we got sympathy for people whose cars get nicked when they leave them with the engine running? (for the record, I do).

2. How best to de-ice and de-mist a car on a cold morning?

However good it is, I still have to scrape side windows.

Indeed, but overall it’s considerably quicker and easier in my experience. It also helps with de-misting the inside of the front window = less sitting around in a cold car waiting to be able to see.

My solution is for Ford to let their patent lapse on heated front windows*. I’ve only ever owned one Ford and this is most definitely something I miss. It was awesome at quickly clearing the window on a cold and frosty morning.

*I don’t know if they have a patent or not, but it has always baffled me why no other brands (that I’m aware of) offer this.

Great story. The twins learn not to climb on unsecured bookcases again, and the parents learn to secure unsecured furniture. Everyone’s a winner.

Meanwhile, thousands of parents on STW blush at the many more dangerous situations they’ve left their kids in, deliberately or not.

Not all footpaths are suitable for bikes

Arguably Nan Bield Pass is unsuitable for cycling, yet it remains a “must ride” classic for countless mountain bikers. It’s a current right of way for cyclists and is far from being on its own when it comes to being a hike-a-bike. My wife is perfectly capable of riding a bike yet Jacob’s Ladder – another classic – is wholly unsuitable for her skills. The suitability argument is extremely subjective.

Talk to your local horse riders and they will argue that many of their local bridleways are not suitable for horse riding.

That said, when it comes to suitability with regard to sharing the trail with other users, I have more empathy. Is that the kind of suitability you’re referring to @ninfan?

@tthew I *think* you can request a lower credit limit, so you could simply align your credit limit with your usual monthly budget. That way you can’t accidentally spend more than you can afford to pay off, but still get the benefits of the credit card.

Offers such as cash-back, whilst not as generous as they once were, is surely a huge reason to keep the credit card. Put all the spend you can on it, pay it off in full every month and get money/offers for nothing. Why would you not want to do that?

When is a credit card better than a debit card?[/url]

Oh, and it’s not so good for books with loads of pictures and/or educational/text books that you might flick between chapter/pages when using.

This^

Kindles are great for words and that’s it. I’m reading a novel right now that occasionally has tables in it that I simply can’t read. I can zoom in and make the font bigger but not the table. I assume they render things like tables differently from text so they’re not as crisp as print. Not a huge issue, but is definitely a mark against Kindles compared to real books.

I’d agree on the backlight – makes reading in bed with a sleeping partner next to you a lot easier.

+1. Do not skimp and buy the non-Paperwhite version.

I think it’s handy to have a sleeve (as opposed to a book-style case, which I think is unnecessary), if only to protect it when stuffed in her bag or when left lying around.

You can get books from other sources other than Amazon. For example you can email PDFs to a Kindle email and they will magically appear on your Kindle. That’s handy for insurance policies when going on holiday for example. STW might still have their Travel Features book available for Kindle too, which can/could be downloaded from this site.

Really interesting thread.

I used to live in Buxton and had BWs and other rights of way within yards of my front door. I’d happily spend evenings poring over an OS map deciding which trails to link up next and had some lovely local doorstep rides. When I moved I spent similar evenings staring at the map for new routes to piece together and looked forward to those new explorations. Sadly the bridleways were mostly wet and muddy fields or so short – with so much road work to get to and from – that they weren’t worth it. My current doorstep trails are ones I would never have found just looking on a map; they required local knowledge and a curious (or cheeky) nature.

I realise how spoilt I was where I previously lived and can see why people would rather drive to somewhere better.

Great question and I’m struggling to think of an answer. Trail centres, by their very nature of being designed to be ridden, have easy climbs compared to many local “natural” climbs near me that I always struggle to clean.

The one that I got little joy out of and little reward was at Llandegla, but *not* the initial fireroad climb which I thought was quite a pleasant way to warm up. Nope, I’m talking about the second half of the (red?) trail which seems to be an endless meander of mostly up and little down. All the fun has been had and it just feels like a tedious slog back to the start. It’s a shame I feel this way, because compared to other trail centres it is at least moderately interesting climbing. Must go back and see if I feel different now….

Well how far away are you from that tv?

Anywhere from 2 – 4m at a guess

it depends on many factors, so not everyone will notice or care.

I get it, hence my open door to you and STR :-) I’m genuinely interested to know whether “other factors” mean that the difference is genuinely not that great on our TV, or whether it is just that I don’t care that much (or whether my eyes are just poor!)

Another thumbs up for Ticket to Ride.

A man doesn’t walk on the lot unless he wants to buy a car.

One of the joys in life is pottering around showrooms looking at cars that you can ill afford. It’s a poor analogy for the OP.

OP, you were in the wrong here and acidtest puts it well:

If you’re young then that’s something to learn from, if you’re not young then you should’ve known better and it’s something to learn from.

I really don’t understand how some folks can’t tell the difference between SD & HD

My theory goes like this:

Many moons ago – before HD was a thing – people started buying flat screen LCD TVs and plugged their Sky boxes into them. Some people (me) stuck with a big (in those days) CRT, watching very limited analogue terrestrial TV. The quality on my TV was much better than those friends of mine who had moved to these “new and improved” TVs.

As people started getting bigger and bigger TVs, the crap picture quality became more and more of a problem, so someone brought HD into the picture (pun, as always, intended). In the meantime the quality of my TV picture had got no worse. These new, big HD TVs were a big leap in quality for some people, but they forget that they had actually gone down in quality before going back up. For those – me – who did not make that backwards evolutionary step, the improvement in quality of a HD TV was not that remarkable.

I’ve had a 42″ plasma TV for 6ish years now. I can watch BBC1 in SD quite happily, but will switch to HD when prompted. I can tell the difference, but It’s not a “wow” difference. I would be very interested if someone who thinks SD and HD are like chalk and cheese came to my house to see if the difference was as marked on my TV with my source signal.

Thanks Simon. I not used Apple Remote for a long time, but it looks like it will achieve some of what I want to achieve without me spending any more money. Result :-)

For what I’ve read it sounds like I just need to replace my ageing HDD with something a bit newer, which can be done quite cheaply….

….and buy a longer lead whilst I’m at it :lol:

Thanks for the helpful advice

Surely it only does incremental backups hourly?

indeed

I have cloud backup solutions, but they’re to complement and not replace my local Time Machine backup.

Backing up to a big physical disk is what my dad would do.

Sensible man ;-)

Could you connect a small NAS to your router and back-up via your network?

I’ve had poor results trying to set up NAS with Time Machine in the past and I don’t have the patience to try again.

Thanks all. £200 is waaaayyyy too much money, so looks like an old-fashioned spinning disk is for me. I still need a new one, but had hoped to be the right side of £100. Amazon seem to have quite a few at and below that budget.

Anything I should be wary of?

Quite right too Michael. The best part of the run up to Christmas is hitting the 21st December and realising the days are going to be getting longer. I don’t care if it’s the first day of winter; bring on the snow! I just want some daylight in my life.

I’ve now seen the first two episodes so feel qualified to join in the fun on this thread (albeit not having bothered to read all that up there^).

Conclusion? First episode was full of the kind of cars the kids and I drool over almost daily and was hence enjoyed immensely, despite expecting something a little more different.

Episode 2? Crap. Drivel. Potentially good segments like the Aston Martin Vulcan were massively overshadowed by that awful piece with the VIP rescue. I watched in disbelief wondering (a) what it had to do with a car show (b) why the producers thought it deserved all that airtime when it stopped being entertaining after the first couple of minutes.

Should I bother with episode 3?

@simons_nicolai-uk I have an Apple TV and a Airport Express so familiar with Airplay, but in that context they are basically dumb devices in that you use a source such as iPhone, iPad, Mac etc. Granted the Apple TV now has Apple Music built in and also works with home sharing via iTunes, but from what I’m reading above, there are neater and more flexible solutions. I didn’t think you could Airplay the same source to multiple receivers at the same time, or use one device to Airplay different output to different devices, but I’d very happily be educated on that.

It begs the question why you need a family subscription to Spotify if Chromecast and Sonos let you stream different music to different devices in your household…?

Just been looking on the Chromecast site

Multi-room lets you group Chromecast Audio devices together so that you can listen to the same song on multiple speakers.

That’s ace, and might be the clincher in moving back to Spotify from Apple Music, which doesn’t support casting.

But as many previous posters have already said; is also a feature of chromecast audio

Just as I thought I was getting it, now you’ve thrown me. I thought with Chromecast you could only cast one source to one Chromecast, not one source to multiple Chromecast simultaneously, which is the bit Sonos does.

If multiple Chromecasts *can* accept the same source simultaneously, I might be spending some money….

I dip into this thread with great interest, wondering if I have a problem I need Sonos to solve. I leave the thread once more none the wiser :lol:

Having heard Laura Marling’s ace new single, I was going to recommend her new album Semper Femina

This item will be released on 10 March 2017.

…but then maybe not :-(

In answer to OP, yes.

When I see 4K demos in Currys on those HUGE 72″ screens (or whatever they are), I am impressed. I then get home and watch SD channels on my 42″ plasma and don’t think “I wish this was better”. To be honest I’m not as blown away by the difference between SD and HD broadcasts as others, so I’m probably not the target eyesight market for 4K.

In a desire to add nothing other than anecdote to this thread, I find that my relatively inexpensive 2013ish Dell work laptop on Windows 10 boots from cold minutes quicker than my 2011(?) iMac running Sierra. My 2015 MacBook boots considerably quicker than the iMac from cold. The summary is don’t let anyone tell you Macs don’t slow down as they get older. I see more spinning beach balls on my iMac than a Californian beach at sprint break.

Today I learnt that I shouldn’t be doing something I’ve always been doing :oops:

I thought the point of the thread was identifying things you can do but would rather pay someone else to do.

I started the thread. Not sure I had a point :lol:

In the context of “what would I rather be doing instead?” it is about what you’d rather pay someone to do than do yourself. I suspect some would rather not be sat at the side of the road waiting for the AA when they can get on their way quicker by doing it themselves.

I used to love being in the shed tinkering with my bike. Now my time is much more precious to me, I’d rather be riding my bike of an evening than spannering with it.

Maybe its the area i live

This is probably a large part of it. Where I live I can have some extremely pleasant road rides and rarely have issues with cars. I can get a good ride in and hardly see any traffic despite being in one of the most central parts of England.

Interesting comments about calling the breakdown services to replace a tyre. I’m more than happy to swap tyres on a car and – in theory – it means I’m back on the road quicker than waiting to be “rescued”. Unfortunately the last two times I’ve had flats (1) the locking wheel nut adaptor was missing and (2) the wheel was seized on. Both times I therefore needed to call the services. It took some fairly serious and brutal hammering in both instances to get the wheel off.

Having just been out at lunch to pick the car up from having some winter tyres fitted, another reason for getting the LBS doing these jobs occurred to me. Change.

Days vanish in a blur of work and being a Dad, so just taking 30 minutes to nip to the LBS with some work for them and a quick chat is a very welcome change to the Monday to Friday routine.

This, all for freeing up time, but two trips to the lbs (assuming they didn’t do it whilst you waited) could have got you a ride in.

Not really. I can take the kids into town and the LBS, but taking the 3 of them for a quick off-road ride isn’t an option.

Singletrack liked the Vaude Moab[/url]. Not full on winter boot, but might do the job