I flattened an on one reetard rim on my back wheel, it was too flat to get the spokes tight again, rode about on it for absolutely ages (at least a couple of years) and it didn’t die. Eventually replaced it with a new wheel just for peace of mind.

Kick Danny Dyer, Dave Courtney and every other bell end who comes on the telly going “Int being a hard nut brilliant!” down a disused pit.

Replace all bouncers with bobbies from the armed response unit + a few of the sniffer dog / land shark bunch. Pay them £60k a year and move them between cities so they’re unlikely to be bribed.

In fact, any corruption in public office and you’re out on your arse. Stripped of your pension, the works. And while we’re at it, pay politicians more but stop buying them free houses. Buy a load of property in London and put the MPs up in govt houses.

Then bang up the few hundred people in each city who are responsible for the vast majority of crime. Pareto innit. Keep them in until they’re 40 and they’ve grown out of it. If they re-offend, back in for life.

Stop messing about with student visas. Higher education is one export we’re absolutely world class at, and if they stick around then we’ve not only had years of £20k fees, but also a highly educated person who can make some money.

After that’s done, we could get a few eminent economists to come on the telly and explain that the economy isn’t a zero sum game, and that forcing old folks to retire will actual reduce the total productivity of the economy rather than making a job for an unemployed 18 year old.

A bloke from the RNIB said two things to be about laser eye surgery. The first was “Don’t” and the second was “Nobody has ever paid £500 for laser eye surgery.” Because as soon as they start saying “Well, the basic is £500, but X is extra, Y is extra”. It’d be like buying glasses that you knew you’d have to wear for the rest of your life and saying “Nah, skip the anti reflect and the light lenses”.

So there’s probably bugger all in it between the best and the cheap places once you’ve had the options…

They do, there was one advertised on the radio the other week.

It’s a myth. We still manufacture loads of things (google it – UK factory output is well ahead of where it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s, well, ever, more or less). It’s just that we use far less people to make the stuff.

Have a shufti at this:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100016398/the-insanity-of-subsidising-manufacturing/%5B/url%5D

Anyway. There are lots of very good reasons to use UK suppliers. Largely that you can ring up a UK supplier, get your account manager on the phone and get things fixed that day. The clobber you want arrives quickly, and by and large exactly to the spec you have ordered.

Compare that with far east sourcing, where you’re going through an agent / sourcing office, there’s an 8 hour time difference and a language barrier, the supplier is buying in from another factory half the time, the shipping alone takes 4 weeks etc. etc.

In my view, if you cost things out properly – ie, not just on raw margin, but include the costs of managing the supplier, QA fails and holding extra inventory to cover for shipping and lead times, there’s probably very little in it for a large proportion of goods.

Nice chocolates (ie, better than Thorntons). PR girls tend to be pretty slim IME so they probably won’t want a massive family tin of Celebrations…

A cheap Dell. Built umpteen PCs over the years it’s just not worth the aggro. Go to DMX Dimension, find a good offer, and the built PC will cost less than the parts would.

Latest version works over 3g.

Mainstream? Doesn’t Android make up 50% or so of UK smartphone sales?

When he was in the office, I thought “By God, he does an amazing job of playing an egregious bell end”. The more time goes by, the less convinced I am that he was acting…

He’s your brother in law but he’s living in a room in a shared house? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Don’t. When he eventually goes down the bankruptcy / IVA route, you’ll be liable. IMO offering joint loans / guarantors is just a way for lenders to keep people on their books at nice high rates and barely servicing their debts.

Edit, just read the reply you banged out whilst I was typing. If he doesn’t own his own place, there’s no real reason to avoid just owning up to not being able to pay. Has he really not got 3k of liquidisable assets though?

The S2 beats the 4s in my book. Usability wise if you’re used to an iPhone then it will seem odd, pretty much like if you’re used to Windows a Mac will seem odd.

The S2 and HTC One X are probably the best two phones available. The One X is newer and has a bigger screen, faster etc. but ropey battery life. I’d go for an Orange Panther plan, simply because swappables are great. Best deal I could find as a new customer on Orange was an S2 on Panther 26 (£26). As a renewing customer, I managed to get them to knock a tenner off one of the dearer Panthers for myself.

Apps do vary between the two – iPhone tends to be the platform that makes the developer more money, apps tend to be paid for and plentiful. Android also has loads of Apps, lots of them can be had in free versions with ads, but I’d say the app market tends to lag slightly behind as a rule.

The theory is sound. Any engine has an rpm and load range where it will work at its most fuel efficient in pure petrol in, energy out terms. Driving normally you might do well to be in that range 5% of the time. Use the engine to run a generator, and it can be in it 100% of the time.

Edit: sounds like the engine is a 1.4 and there is some kind of direct drive mechanism. To run an engine to generate electricity at max efficiency, you’d probably be looking at a tiny 10 to 15hp job to cruise at 60 and put some juice in the battery pack.

30 odd grand odd is way too much though. Unless you’re doing insane mileage or intend to keep the car for a very long time, a bluemotion or similar is going to be cheaper.

Aldi had them a couple of weeks ago. If you live near a city centre store or one in a pretty middle class area, they’re likely to.have some left.

I got one a while ago far better than the same price from machine mart. The aldi one was proper oil lubricated, my old machine mart one was oil free and couldn’t hack a decent amount of use.

Edit: what’s the Wilko sprayer hack?

For textile goods I’d look at Pakistan as well as China.

I would go with an agent unless you’re willing to set up a local purchasing office. You really need some kind of middleman keeping an eye on things. Otherwise you get totally random happenings like clothes with the only suitable cleaning method specced as “Wipe clean with a damp cloth only”…

The whole job of getting a Far East supplied item is tortuous – you’ve got to find a decent agent and supplier, so that you reduce the chance of your product being despecced and your packaging art being altered from “almost certainly going to happen” to “might happen”. You also suddenly have massive lead times, so more cash tied up in stock even if you are making a better margin, and more chance of going out of stock.

For some stuff it’s an absolute no-brainer – relatively simple and low spec items, you can order 20000 Far East units rather than 10000 European items and still be saving a fortune. For other items, you may spend as much on supply chain management, print management and QA as you save on the manufacture.

You may also move from a situation where you’re a relatively large customer for your supplier, and therefore pretty important and treated with kid gloves, to being a small part of the supplier’s business and not getting replies to emails once things start getting difficult.

Soaking in a hot bath has the opposite effect of compression clothing as I understand it. A hot bath causes vasodilation.

Bondhus Allen keys are good.

Sealey will do you for 3/8ths sockets and ratchets. I’ve done every stupid thing you can do to my sealey sockets working on cars and never bust one yet. The halfords pro stuff is decent too, can vouch for their square drive Allen bits.

To be honest any halfway respectable car tools will be major overkill for a bike. When was the last time you used a blowtorch and a 4lb lump hammer to get a fixing to turn on your bike?

Six foot might do it. We had one that would jump about five to six foot, then use sheer terrier determination to scrabble another foot or so vertically to clear the gate. Don’t be surprised if he jumps over, nips the neighbours for daring to walk past then jumps back.

Have you read the book? The biggest thing you come out with from the book is that spying is a horrible grubby business where the ends justify the means. I expect they’re trying to re-inforce that point.

Alright for chilling by the pool, diving if it interests you. Otherwise, it’s a dump.

Decathlon do town bikes that are spot on for not much cash. Come with extras if you want, dynamos, baskets etc.

You want to be able to drive around without holding onto the steering wheel, but you don’t want a sofa?

The 3 series tops everything else in it’s class for handling. The Audi A4 isn’t particularly sparkling in that regard. It’s much like driving a Golf or Passat.

But, to me it sounds like you want an armchair on wheels. So get a Merc or a Jag…

Decathlon tend to have turbo trainers out on the shop floor for you to try out. Have you got one local?

Just go to somewhere that does MOT tests and get them to put it on their brake rollers. Takes them five minutes, will probably cost you a tenner and you’ll know exactly what’s sticking.

If you’re paying for other peoples labour, stick a recon calliper on.

500 mb would be the absolute minimum from my point of view. I used to get through that from just browsing the web and using Google maps.

Being as there is talk of very low data limits and bolt ons, are we talking about o2? Their tariffs seem very poor for smartphones to me. I’d look at one of the Panther tariffs on Orange with free music / times online app / sky sports and a decent data cap. Otherwise you’re buying an expensive phone and using very little of what it can do.

I’m guessing that this is asking the lines of:
Do you buy widgets?
Do you like our widgets?
When do you next intend to buy a widget?

What you want to do is code your responses to numbers. The simplest easy to do this is by using find and replace or filleting the columns and then changing all the Yes values to 1s say by selecting them all and using CTRL Enter after changing one value.

I’d make total Nos or Nevers zeros… Then use vlookup to pull all the tables together (you’ll need a common ID for each respondent). Then you can score each one by multiplying the values together. All your absolute No bods will score zero.

Using If would be better, but if you’re struggling with formulae…

Or why not just clear your history and not have to worry about whether you’ve signed in or out of Google…

Or Glitter Gary, you’re 100% you won’t ever have anything you wouldn’t want to slip out. Search for a new job at home, sign into google at work, and you could be getting lots of targetted ads for new jobs.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to envisage every possible piece of information you might at some point not want to disclose, and very difficult to envisage how it might be used in future.

Just done it now. Think there’s probably still an hour or so as it’s 11pm in LA.

Anyway. As to why you might care? I dunno, say you had some of the symptoms of a horrible illness, and as most people do, you google them. Google could then start targetting your computer with, say ads for say, HIV medicines etc.

A.N Other might use your PC, see that Google thinks you’ve got the AIDS and all of a sudden half your mates think you’ve got AIDS…

Might sound a bit far fetched, but bear in mind that Target in the US have worked out that when women start buying body butter and vitamins out of the blue, they’re probably pregnant. So they start sending out flyers for nappies etc. Which is all well and good if you’re happy with everyone knowing that you’re pregnant…

Absolutely right that there’s been a big payout. To me the big deal with phone hacking has been that people end up thinking that one of their close friends or family it’s leaking stories to the press. Can you imagine how corrosive that must be for all your personal relationships?

It’s surprising nobodies topped themselves over this.

Bought a few at auction, because the prices are low. I can see why the motor trade use them – offload unsuitable part ex stock quickly and easily with near zero buyer comeback.

No idea why a private seller would. You are already free from worries about buyer complaints.

Thermostat sticking open. Engine never really gets up to operating temperature and uses a lot more fuel.

Next option would be temperature sensors.

Stop doing whatever’s causing the pain – ie using SPDs. Go and see your doctor and see if he can refer you to someone. If not, go and see a sports physio.

I’m a big fan of NHS physios, they’ve no vested interest in seeing you come back, unlike the private bunch.

Avoid chiropractors entirely, they’re about as much use as homeopathists.

If you really want to be clipped in in future, maybe try Time pedals or similar with more float.

Best I’ve ever used for actual phone signal. No idea about data coverage though.

Glasses guide is rarely optimistic for anything vaguely old. Extreme examples are things like RS Turbos which Glasses will value at a few hundred quid but are actually worth 3k+ for a decent car.

Write off is usually 72% of glass’s value, give out take. Which is also their starting offer.

Ring someone like help hire to fight your corner or start collecting ads for minters from the alfa forums / autotrader.

Used to work at an assessors writing off tens of cars every week…

At 40 quid you will be getting a pretty no frills service.

Stick to getting the basics right.

I’d suggest proofing it extremely carefully and then getting a mate to proof it again, because I doubt the printer will checking it for errors!