I've no objection to the chap on the basis of his cleverness or not.

What I object to is him being on the TV, looking like one of the Riddlers.

You can always ring the Samaritans if you're that gutted 😆

Shit happens – standing back and trusting your gut generally works for me.

You might want to try fitting a bigger radiator in there if it's consistently colder.

If one room's colder than the rest of the house, it'll always feel a bit manky – warm air can carry more water vapour than cold, so when air from the rest of the house comes in, the water will condense out. Until that's driven out by airing / warming the room through, it'll feel horrible at any temperature.

It sounds like you have a different idea of what a hobby is to me.

To me, a hobby is a means to an end, and the end is fun. It sounds like you treat your hobbies like an end in themselves – fiddling for hours with a media centre? Making RC models? Fixing an old Triumph? That's just work. The fun comes in the watching, flying and driving.

People in general have fairly little time to themselves these days. Put a value on your free time, and go with the stuff that Just Works. Buy one bike with solid kit on it, get a car / media centre that works straight out of the box. You get more time having fun, and less working.

It's nice to have the odd thing where you can think "I fettled that, and it's as sorted as it can be", but if everything's like that, it becomes a never ending task.

Gas central heating in theory is far cheaper than any electric heater. However, you're going to have to mess about turning radiator stats on and off, and have the main thermostat thing in his room. Otherwise everyone else will roast overnight.

So an oil filled rad / other electric heater might turn out much more convenient, without a massive hit in price.

Is there something up with the room – ie, not double skinned walls when the rest of the house is? On occasion you get a room that's not well insulated or a bit damp, and it'll feel horrible and cold all the time.

Why wash a car?

Because they stay in much better condition that way. My mum will very rarely wash her cars, and to be honest, once you've got to the point where moss is taking to the car, you're in trouble.

Moss and lichen break down stones to make soil. They don't seem to have much trouble with paint & rubber seals 😆

Just find it tiresome when someone who appears to have bugger all knowledge of design and what's required to be able to do it, makes sarky comments.

Someone moaning about being paid to watch a client (ie, the person who is paying them) pick photos? It's asking to have the mickey taken. As a freelancer, it's a bloody good way of picking up 2 hours of billable time without expending any effort. My point was that there are far worse things that you could be doing to make a living, even if you do have several years study and experience under your belt. Or in other words, be glad for what you've got.

It's very interesting that you went so ape over something not even directed at you.

There's no virtue in being precious over your qualifications by the way. I'm pretty well qualified compared to the average, but if shovel work's all that's going, you won't see my pride getting in the way of me picking up a shovel.

Spelling error on my part – Lech's a Polish beer 😆

It takes two thicknesses of cut up Lech can to get something designed for 26mm bars to clamp on a 25.4mm bar, in my experience. You can cut the can with scissors – it's longer around its circumference than it is from top to bottom.

No help on the jobs front but Nottingham Uni careers service will advise anyone, even if you didn't study there.

The likes of Reed and Kelly services do seem to have bits of temp work going if you could get by on that kind of wage.

10ml will last a while. 50ml will last your entire life, or until you lose it.

You don't put much on – by definition there's not much space between the bolt and the thread, so a little goes a long way.

Ubuntu is easy to install and uses Debian's packaging system which is by far the best way of installing software on linux. Makes RPM (as used by most others) look like a bad joke.

Basically, there's not much to choose between desktop Linux distributions – you can install any user interface you want for the most part. And for the most part, the bog basic ones that look like Windows XP or MacOS work the best.

The real big differences are in how well setup they are as standard, and what packaging system you get.

48 and still pissing over boys half my age ,

Said the Deacon to the Cardinal.

Apparently blue (242) is medium strength, and 222 is low strength. Blue is perfectly undoable later on.

And if you live near any airbase or aerospace firms, have a look round your local car boots. The stuff for aeroplanes all has expiry dates on, and ends up getting binned / walking out the back door of the hangar. Still works fine, but costs you a lot less 😆

Blue. Red (stud grade) is for things you never want to undo again.

Ok; discover you have a talent for something, spend a few years at college/Uni developing that talent, work for shite money for far too **** long, then have to deal with philistines who don't respect or appreciate your abilities and the effort that you've put in so that you can do something they can't, and you might get a sense of perspective.

😆

Or to put things another way: Get a job in your chosen vocation, then be paid good money to occasionally do things you think you're above, or for customers who you think are beneath you, then go online and bitch about it.

Hardly the end of the world, is it?

Perhaps but I still maintain that you're unlikely to be able to develop a feel for things if you're only working on a bike occassionally and you can still break things without a torque wrench

Think about it – convert into lbs/ft – 6NM is about 4.5 lb ft. Or in metric it's approx 600 grammes / metre.

So the torque is equivalent to 4.5lbs of weight on the end of a 1 foot lever.

If your allen key's 4 inches long, you need to triple that figure (there being 12 inches in a foot).

So you're talking about force of 13.5 lbs on the end of a 4 inch allen key. That's technically known as pretty tight.

Once you can actually visualise what the torque figures mean, it all becomes a bit clearer.

Nothing, so long as it's between consenting adults and behind closed doors.

What I meant was that umpteen people will turn up arguing whether he'll die instantly or not after shimming the stem.

My view is that he won't, so long as he is a sane and competent person who can do it properly, but I'm not interesting in arguing about it.

A proper set of Allen Keys is made so that the thinner ones are short – and hence can have less torque easily applied.

Exactly. The same with spanners too. When you're at breaking things levels of tight, you're already thinking "Something's not right here".

I don't know how you can bear it. Billing someone for 2 hours of your time whilst you watch them pick a photo?

Do a few weeks working with a shovel and you might gain a sense of perspective.

Well, if it's free, it's alright.

There are plenty of serious wash mitt & two bucket men who'll insist a car isn't washed before they get it though, as they don't trust the garage not to put swirls on the paint.

It's a wax & scotchguard type thing. Alright, but it doesn't work miracles, and it certainly doesn't last the life of the car like they claim. The very longest lasting car waxes do well to last 6 months.

The eye roll is more about the debate about shimming that always comes up. 1 thickness might work as you have to prise the old quill stems open.

You'll need to shim it. 2 thickness of Leck can will make up the gap quite nicely.

The wiseness or otherwise of shimming is up to you by the way 🙄

£3 into the parking machine 😆

The Diesel VS Petrol longevity thing has been overstated for years now.

Back in the pre-1993 days when stuff had carburettors, and petrol cars suffered from bore wash, they would wear more. Since EFI, it's much of a muchness.

I've a 2 litre TD that's better on fuel (across the board) than the 1.6 petrol of the same era.

My point was about weight as a proportion to the car. A diesel might be 50-100kg heavier than a little 1000cc petrol, and when you're talking about something that's a tonne or less, that's a lot!

Definitely less of a problem in a bigger hatch or saloon.

The real world varies from official fuel efficiency figures. For a start, they're done on a rolling road according to a set programme. I'd be amazed if there wasn't a little bit of optimisation done.

I don't know where this myth comes from

You don't understand pumping losses. You need very few horsepower to maintain 70mph on the motorway, so petrol cars have a near closed throttle butterfly at that sort of speed.

Because a diesel engine + ancillaries is generally much heavier, they lose out in stop start conditions.

Not true

I think you'll find it is. Parkers have a diesel VS petrol calculator. Taking book figures, the average small car will take 30000 miles or so to break even, and that's ignoring the cost of capital for the extra money you spend on the diesel in the first place. Bias things to town driving and it swings even further into petrol's favour.

If you look at properly small cars, a lot of manufacturers don't even bother offering a diesel option. The diesel Fiat 500s have a payback of > 60000 miles.

Small petrol engines work far better than small diesel engines in small cars.

The extra weight and purchase price of the diesel are bigger proportions of the total in both cases, which means you don't see any benefit.

Probably fine then. It's obviously a big faff to make a non-standard part, and even Dell have given up with it in the last few years.

This is not the greatest help for heroes wristband in the world… THIS IS JUST A TRIBUTE!

Actually, 50's too old to be breathing. I'm sick of living in a gerontocracy.

Slot the lot of them so we can have some houses, and don't have to pay a lod of tax to fund their pensions / feeding and backside wiping.

What brand / age is it by the way? Before you go swapping bits, in the days of yore Dell and a few others used PSUs and Motherboards with exactly the same connector as the ATX standard, but with all the pins jumbled round.

I suggest a quick google may be in order to check it's not non-standard.

The paint doesn't need to be a good insulator.

All that's needed is for igniter to burner to be an easier path than igniter to stove-top. I suggest getting a fibreglass pencil, rubbing the worst of the rust off with that, then using whatever heatproof paint matches the stovetop.

Luminous, I'm not suggesting that your lamps have overheating LEDs.

I'm just explaining why whether the casing of a lamp feels warm or warms up quickly isn't always a good indicator of whether the LEDs will be cooking.

How? It just looks like a better belt drive – I thought the issue was that the stays had to be stiffer to stand being split?

A bit naive, but I have never got to grips with a PC PSU. Do they output a single voltage, and if so what is it supposed to be? 12V?

There are a variety of 12V and 5V supplies, I believe. Google for the pinout of the powersupply connector – you'll need to test it under load.

I think the big deal with rally VS other disciplines is that you can't see what's coming up, and you're reliant on pace notes which are being read to you 5 or 6 corners in advance. That's a serious skill to learn – to be able to work out the optimum speed for this corner, on the basis of how much braking room and how tight the next corner is, and the corner after that etc.

Anyone who's driven something like the Nurburgring on Gran Turismo will know that you can perhaps get away with a bit too much speed through one bend, maybe two, but eventually, you're going to come off.

In contrast, Ken Block and most racers are operating from memory and what's going on right now (ie, other competitors in the way).

As for the Fiesta, I suspect the Ford Duratec or whatever it's currently called is under the bonnet – people have 2 litre non-turbo versions of these getting on for 300bhp. I suspect the floor from another car may have found it's way in too 😆

I would go for the power supply. You could get a multimeter and see if it's actually kicking out the right voltages on startup – the added current draw of starting every motor in the PC can drag it down, which results in reluctant starting.