With Picasa, web albums appear on my phone, but some of them have now disappeared. No idea why. Anyway, even when it is working, sharing the photos is a pain in the neck.

Will look into Ubuntu One, Dropbox and Sugarsync this afternoon…

Dual Mass Flywheel failures are pretty common on turbodiesels. Seems like somewhere between 80k and 150k, you can be pretty sure it’ll let go. Had exactly the same kind of bill on a HDi Peugeot, and it wiped out any fuel savings I’d made and more.

The only time I think it makes sense to buy a TDI now is if you’re doing 20k a year upwards, and you’re buying new / company car, so you’ve got someone else paying any mechanical bills.

Apple charge about £3 a time for use of the dock connector, and pursue any unlicensed use of it. Of course they’re not going to standardise…

I’m after something Golf sized, no estates! Just don’t like them, or their stupid window blind load covers.

Not having a big old man’s saloon! Had a 406 estate for work and hated the size of it.

Won’t have a Ford, had a couple and just not a fan. I’m after something German or VAG group to be honest.

Having slept on it, I’ve twigged there’s a third option – just get my current PC working better and carry on with the laptop / phone for casual browsing.

My current machine’s a Dell Vostro (2.4GHz CPU, think it’s an Intel e4600, 2 gigs of RAM). I suppose that would be a full motherboard / CPU / RAM swap. Any pointers in that regard (do people still sell motherboard, CPU and RAM bundles)? I used to build my own PCs, so I know how to swap stuff, but I’ve no idea what’s what nowadays.

The Defender is about as comfortable as trying to pogo stick down the road on a garden spade. My Dad had a 90, and he sold it a few weeks after he bought it because it was horrendous. And he’s a farmer…

The cheaper i5 “PC” laptops are generally higher hardware spec but with a bigger 14 or 15 inch monitor (ie, bigger form factor) and considerably less battery power. I’m looking at the MBA just because it’s the cheapest mac laptop on JL’s website!

I’m typing this on a Samsung NC20, which is a bit slow now, but to me a MacBook air is probably a high performance ally cased version of this – 12 inch monitor, 6 hour battery life etc.

For ultraportable duties, the Samsung does a fine job – it’s not something I do often at all, and it’s old enough and cheap enough that I’m not terrified of it getting nicked.

Ultimately I’m looking for a fastish laptop with docking station because I’ll also be able to use it in the front room. I won’t be lugging it around the country with me.

Sounds like you need to lower your expectations or raise your budget

Not really. I had to get a car sharpish and cheap for my Girlfriend a couple of years back. Eventually we settled on getting a Golf, and I started looking for one – a car about 10 years old, but needed to be in good nick.

I was looking in my lunch hours at work (!) and so every time I rang a seller it was “I’m only after a car that’s in good nick with no / very little rust”. I must have seen 5 or 6 cars that were described as being in good nick with very litle rust, including one white Golf that had no sills…

I eventually ended up ringing a trader that had a decent looking Golf advertised and saying something along the lines of “I’ve got the cash to take that car off your hands today, but it needs to be X Y and Z. If it’s not as you say it is, there’s no chance of me buying it”. The bloke was honest and the car was absolutely spot on. 80k, full VW history, drove perfect and absolutely immaculate for under a grand.

I can only assume that there are people who will turn up and go “Well, it looks like it’s been in a lake for three months, and it sounds like a washing machine full of nails, but the man does keep insisting what a good car it is, so we might as well buy it”. There must be, otherwise these people wouldn’t keep insisting that crap cars are immaculate…

Don’t get why you’d by a Desire outright for £160 + a tenner a month or so for SIM only.

Surely you can blag an S2 or HTC Incredible / Sensation now for £20 a month or so and have a phone that’s a generation or two newer?

Test drove a load of two seater sports cars a while back and borrowed a MK2.5 MX-5 with a LSD for a good while:

MX-5 – MK2.5 Nevada dash / interior looks nice enough, interior is small – my head rubbed on the head liner (!), drove OK. 1.8 engine has power but really doesn’t feel gutsy, not a lot of torque. Drove OK, never really got the MX-5 handling thing (not down to one duff car, test drove a few).

MR2 (MK3) – can’t remember what it drove like, grey plastic interior reminded me of a 1990 Nissan Micra. Didn’t feel at all special, which to me is most of the point of an open top car.

S2000 – nice enough inside, roomier than the others, engine mounted somewhere under the dash, so servicing will be pricey. This felt like it had the engine from a 1990 Nissan Micra. Until something like 7500 revs, when it felt like someome had swapped the engine for a 4 litre V8. Went like absolute stink, but the power delivery was stupid. It really was “nothing… nothing… nothing… nothing… OH JES-rev limiter”, and it felt like you’d spend half your life trying to drive around the V-TEC switchover point. I suspect they’d drive far better if they brought the transition to the hot cam down 1500 revs or so.

I’d probably go looking for a 350Z or a Z4 to be honest if I could afford the fuel – none of the Japenese small engined stuff felt at all torquey. Or if I were after something that really handled, I’d probably start with a Racing Puma…

Please note that my view on two seater open top cars will be coloured by the fact that a) I’ve been in car that rolled three times, and so I think these things really need to have a sense of occasion about them, as I’d never really want to push one hard on the road and b) I’d always go for an engine with 200 horses that pulls from 1000 revs than an engine with 250 but only pulls from five grand…

It’s difficult to get a good looking compromise with transitions.

Sunglasses lenses tend to be pretty enormous in comparision with glasses lenses, and the frames tend to be much thicker, with thicker arms. So you end up either having massive glasses which look OK when tinted, or normal sized glasses that look tiny when tinted.

Even “big” glasses are relatively small at the side of a pair of sunglasses.

Chuck in that there’s less need for high index in a thick pair of frames, little need for MAR etc. meaning you can pick up prescription sunnies online for very little. I’ve got a pair prescription Raybans here that cost less than retail for a normal plano pair…

For general knocking about, you want aviators or wayfarers if you’re a bloke. Cheap sports glasses on the bike, because you’ll look daft whatever you’re wearing.

Check the brake mount is welded onto the frame in the right place. It isn’t on my inbred.

There are a few ways around this:

1. Employ someone who used to work for your supplier.
2. Employ someone who used to buy for a competitor.
3. Track backwards from everyone else’s likely costs, prices and published figures. You can get suppliers to give general retail price audit info AFAIK.
4. Ring up all your suppliers and say “We’re ordering 20% more clobber than we did 5 years ago, you must be making a nice living out of us. Drop your prices and spread the wealth.”
5. If you can’t do 4, consolidate your supply base so that you are more important to fewer suppliers, then do 4…

I’m not a lawyer.

Theres a set stand off time after spraying and harvest, so there’s little chance of being poisoned by sprays (assuming we’re taking UK grown at least).

You can do uni and a full time job. There was a lass on my masters course who did 40 hours a week at McDonalds and consistently managed to get solid distinctions on everything she did…

Lamy are decent, even the basic Safari is a nice pen. Beyond that I suspect Parker is a bit like Raleigh bikes.

Nip down to John Lewis and speak to the nice man behind the counter would be my first port of call…

Air bags in European cars are very different to the ones fitted to US cars.

Essentially, Europeans are mainly fairly sensible and tend to wear their seatbelts. So the airbags have smaller charges and are designed to stop you moving forwards once the seatbelt has more or less stopped you.

Americans of course, know better, and don’t wear their seatbelts. So your US spec airbag is designed to stop 300lb Bubba from 55mph to 0. So they tend to go off rather more violently…

So don’t believe anything you read about airbags being bad for you from an American source.

Golf with height adjustable drivers seat. Oddly the old ones are better – pull a lever and you can raise the seat or drop it in a second. The new ones have a slightly odd handbrake lever on the right of the seat that you have to pump.

A 3 series or C class might get you electric memory seats and steering wheel which could be very handy if you swap cars regularly.

I once did a training day at the RNIB. The bloke did a presentation on the various diseases that can cause you go to blind. All he had to say on laser eye surgery was “Anyone fancy laser eye surgery?” [no hands were raised] “Good.”.

Mind you, I’ve never had contact lenses drop out or major issues with wearing glasses.

The benefits argument doesn’t make any sense. One that does is if petrol were 2 quid a litre, would we see more people on buses? Would people seek to follow their own interests and minimise their costs?

Another example I suspect a lot of people have experience of first hand is of getting paid overtime at a time and a half. Once you pay the extra tax, you’re not seeing much above your regular hourly rate after tax. So you tend to less overtime.

TJ, you’re talking total tosh here. Pretty much the entirety of economics is theoretical. If you say the laffer curve is only a theory then you might as well not comment on any of it.

And the point on benefits fraud is a straw man argument.

That’s why I said “which makes a lot of tax dodges impossible”.

If you’re really determined you can mess around with things like transfer pricing etc. but ultimately simplifying the system makes tax avoidance harder.

There’s a part of flat tax that’s very often overlooked – you also bin every single exemption, loophole and rebate. You pay the tax and that’s that, which makes a lot of tax dodges impossible. If you take into account that the very rich often pay well below the headline rates, having a lower but much harder to dodge rate makes some sense.

I’m not saying that 30% is where the rate should be set, or even that a flat rate is particularly desirable. But overall, if you simplify tax, you make it harder to dodge, you can put taxmen, lawyers and accountants to an economically productive use…

Saying “stop the rich buggers dodging tax in the system we have” is all well and good, but if it were that easy (and there was a payback to it) then someone would.have already done it by now.

Brush. You get overspray with any kind of spray gun and the neighbours won’t thank you. I seem to remember that with a proper HVLP DeVilbiss gun and car paint, you get less than 50% of the paint on the car… Ultimately it’s got to be a bit of a ruse to sell more volume of more dilute product.

You can also get products that work as both brushable and sprayable if you really want to try it out.

No, but not because of the riots.

We went to Rhodes last year. Everything was pretty pricey and the food was all very samey. And much of the the place was pretty ropey.

We’d been to Dubrovnik a while before and to be honest, we couldn’t understand it. Yugoslavia had years of dictatorship followed by a recent civil war, and Croatia was all in pretty decent nick, Dubrovnik itself was pristine despite being shot to bits quite recently. What’s Greece’s excuse for foot wide wobbly pavements, flakey paintwork and half built everything?

Even if the police thought it were race related, I very much doubt they would say so. If they did, there would be a whole world of aggro and window breaking released.

The UK is a racially segregated and racist country in my book. The very fact that we treat minorities as little groups with “community leaders” shows you that this goes right to the core of how we govern.

With ADSL, you’re going to have to get a, phone line. You should be able to get line rental and BB for less than 20 pounds.

Orange and O2 both do very competitive broadband deals for mobile customers – often Orange are giving away fifty quid in vouchers too.

Sky are also advertising a no telly broadband deal at the moment.

I used to have internet only from Virgin via cable for the fantastic price of a tenner a month but they don’t seem to be adverting internet without a phone line now…

Cheers for the info everyone!

I’m now completely undecided to be honest – need some prescription sunnies for general use, so there are a lot of “buy one” get XYZ or % off deals with the local opticians. And you get to try the things on before you buy.

Or I could pick up a set of BBB Optiviews for £40 and get the inserts glazed online for a few quid…

Having had a look on the web this afternoon, it looks like Dixon glasses are the cheapest direct glaze option, and weigh in at just under £100. A few on here have mentioned looking at them but nobody seems to have bought them and commented on what they’re like.

I’m half tempted to go and see whether I can have have contacts again – if I had daily disposables I could stick them in a couple of times a week when I’m out on the bike.

Cheap filter machine wins for me. Easy enough that you can be bothered brewing up fresh coffee each morning.

HST – the high speed train line to Birmingham. I think I meant to type HS2… Should go up to Sheffield, Leeds etc. or can it entirely.

The internet thing – there were proposals for internet surveillance, what websites everyone visits, emails, tweets / fb messages etc. to be stored and accessed relatively easily compared with say, a phone tap. And some back bench tory is agitating for content filtering en masse to block porn, which to me has a couple of side effects – a) you suddenly have a big list of people who like looking at tits, which will eventually find it’s way into the public domain, and b) you have a filtering system in place which can be extended as and when you fancy. And it’ll eventually be circumvented anyway by the kids who want to look at porn – I read in the paper that the Pirate Bay block has been worked round already. If you don’t want your kids looking at that sort of stuff, don’t give them a mobile phone better than a 3310, a laptop or an ipod touch, and put your PC in the front room…

Birkenstocks are de-rigeur for your middle aged middle class man, surely?

Boat shoes – you either need to be young or an old bloke with a brass button blazer…

Barker or Loake for work.

Rubber soles on formal shoes are for chemistry teachers…

Sounds like direct glaze could be the way to go then. I generally end up using orange / yellow / bronze lenses most of the time (in fact, I think the grey / black lenses for my glasses are still in the packet), so I might be able to get away with some fairly straightforward lenses.

Transitions / photochromics would be another option – do they do different grades of transition like you get different levels of tint? They often seem to never quite go totally clear to me, and most of the time I don’t particularly want any tint.

Just in case TJ’s watching – I’m not a member of any political party…

The whole internet surveillance / filtering thing is something they ripped holes in all the time they were in opposition, and guaranteed to wind up any “small state” / classic liberal type tories.

And the case for HST doesn’t really stack up that well. I suspect the real rationale for it is to get some £s moving to nudge the economy a bit. To me it would be better to fix and upgrade a load of roads because it could be done far quicker and there would be benefits spread across the whole UK.

Not really worth bothering IMO – they’re gorilla glass aren’t they?

My old phone was gorilla glass and the only time I managed to properly scratch it was when a steel shelf panel dropped on it at work…

Prescription is -2.75 in both eyes, with a smidge of cyl. Not a complicated one.

Hadn’t thought of that option teef – noticed a few multibuy offers about but was struggling to find somewhere with a) decent sports glasses and b) decent normal sunnys. Will have a look next time I’m near a Boots.

Stan – what are the inserts like?

+1 for Decathlon. The ones without a sewn in groundsheet do tend to have a gap between the flysheet and the ground which freaks some people out – never bothered me.