To be honest, I'm not sure how great an idea going back to uni is. At the end of the course, you're competing for entry level jobs with people who are happy to flog themselves to get a foot in the door.

It really depends on the uni & course. Something like engineering or medicine is going to require maths or science qualifications.

On the other hand, almost anyone could go and make a decent fist of a business degree, as the syllabus is very varied.

The uni may use something like GMAT for mature students & internationals, and ask you to sit that in order to prove you've got a brain in your head. I wouldn't go sitting A-level maths myself, as I view A-levels as a big time sponge when I look back on them.

Van MPG is nowhere like car MPG. I'd be surprised if many campers can manage more than 25mpg.

Not saying it doesn't work out for you though. A lot of people seem to use them for a week or two a year.

Seriously, with any camper / caravan, think about how much you will use it, and how much it will cost you a year. When you account for road tax & insurance at a total of around £400 a year, plus fuel, maintenance & depreciation, it can be a surprisingly expensive way of taking a holiday.

10 ride old? Go down the gym, get on the Watt bike and send your peak power figures off to British Cycling would be my advice…

It's not a high end bike at all (can't remember the model name etc.). Came with Alivio level kit, and now has some old XT 8 speed shifters/levers etc.

Clearance isn't bad (runs 2.35s quite happily) but it doesn't have a rear disc mount, which would make me lean more towards swapping it eventually rather than tidying it up. On the other hand, I suspect it would make a decent racey bike with a nice set of wheels and forks…

As a rule, small cars seem not to be built to handle mileage. The mechanical bits are normally fine, although it is easier to thrash a small engine to bits trying to make a bit of progress. The interior bits are normally screwed though.

My advice as for anyone starting out in motoring is to consider the car as a package – the cost of the car is what you have to spend to buy it and insure it. It's very easy to get a few ballpark figures with confused.com for a range of 10 or 20 cars. Some of the stuff is bizarre – 106s tend to be cheaper to insure than mechanically identical Saxos. Same goes for ZX / Xsara against 306s. A larger car that's faster and will do more damage in an accident is often cheaper to insure than a small group 1 car.

The other thing to remember is that insurance groups are based on how expensive that car is to repair. But your TPFT insurance is based on the damage you're likely to do to other people's vehicles. The result is that insurance groups have almost no bearing on the premium (unless you're fully comp), and the likelihood of that car being purchased by a div has a huge bearing on the premium.

Granola & yoghurt.

Chain reaction cycles list stems and handlebars with their specs. The highest stems are normally around the 30 degree mark, and the highest riser bars are normally 2 inches. All in all, you can lift the bars around 3 or 4 inches by fiddling with the stem and bar combination.

Chilli. Possibly on top of a jacket spud.

24" wheel into fork / frame designed for 26" doesn't go. The braking surfaces are more or less level with the canti / vee mounts.

The on-one canti mounts (assuming they're the same as standard inbred ones) bolt into two holes on the seatstay, with the pivot pretty much equidistant between the two.

You could make up your own bodgetastic version I suppose, and move the canti mount down the seatstay, but it's a bit of an engineering job.

I'd be inclined to pick up the cheapest possible set of V wheels, possibly off a scrapped (tip?) 26" wheeled bike, or a half decent set off the classifieds.

Surely everyone's taken their bike out the the back of the car, put both wheels in then ridden off without connecting the V-brakes back up?

I thought MythTV was a nightmare… Think I probably tryed Mythbuntu as I quite like Ubuntu.

Only sell stuff that's worth a few quid. Anything that's worth less than a tenner is easily more hassle than it's worth territory. You have to dig the gear out, clean it, tidy up a desk to take photos on, take photos, tidy them up a little (level them up, resize them). And then you have to deal with stupid questions and take the kit down to the post office.

John Deere every time!

Apocryphal tales I've heard suggest that the debtor usually claims poverty, a repayment plan of £4.50 a week for the rest of all time is agreed, and you're lucky if you get a month's worth of payments.

I am not a lawyer, and all that.

Can you not phone up a friendly debt collection agency? As far as I'm aware, it's difficult to get small claims court rulings enforced.

To be honest its not that unrealistic, my employer, a large supermarket, take a note of the persons details whenever they are buying any mobile phone and they sell loads of them

Fairly sure that's a legal requirement, in order to make it very slightly more difficult for criminals / terrorists to use PAYG phones as a method of communicating relatively untraceably.

Given the kind of use that kind of machine is designed for, I suspect raiding a milkfloat for all its lead acid batteries would lead to massive ruts left all over the shop and traction problems.

Few things that are going to be problematic:
Lead acid batteries will weigh a lot more than the existing engine.
Motors tend to run at far higher RPMs than engines.
All torque is available from zero revs, so if you put the batteries in the right place you could do some fantastic wheelies.

They taste like death. Nothing could get me to drink those things on a regular basis. I suspect it's the vitamin content coming through, as the rank flavour is pretty much the same as the one you get from a multivitamin tablet.

I suspect it's slightly better for recovery than a Yazoo, but the flavour is so horrendous that I'd never choose to drink a For Goodness.

OK, you guys are getting cassettes mixed up with freewheels.

Oh yeah. I just assumed that anything 6 speed had a freewheel – didn't realise that Freehubs / Cassettes had been around that long! There are still some 7 speed cassettes around if you look on CRC etc. There are also some New Old Stock (NOS) 6 speed cassettes on Ebay.

EN521s weigh in at 540 grammes and still let you run decent sized tyres. The "XC" rims all seem to top out at 2.3" tyres, which is a bit of a gip on a hardtail, where you need high volume tyres to give some cushioning.

My advice comes from knowing & giving a toss about people with T2 diabetes. A lot are the equivalent of smokers who won't give up even after being diagnosed with cancer.

Scratches would have to be horrendous to fail an MOT.

Simple answer is that they can't. Not economically. Screens are generally £70 upwards if you're willing to ring around for a while.

I have some 1Z glass polish and it doesn't seem to make much of a dent on wiper type marking on a windscreen, even when applied by machine.

Some kind of foam covered by something heavy. That's what the car makers do. Normally a foam or felt underlay with rubber sheeting over the top.

Regina still make 6 speed freewheels, and SJS sell them.

I have a 2×6 speed Raleigh Banana, which the LBS bloke who apprenticed at a Carlton described as crap. Still, got me about as a student…

Tell her to sort it out. Seriously.

The standard response to Type 2 diabetes seems to be "boo hoo" with a large helping of "I'll continue doing what caused me to get T2 diabetes", which is eventually followed by Insulin and further degeneration. It's a nightmare of a situation.

Personally I would go down the route of "this act causes consequence A, which leads to consequence B". That method convinces me – as an example, I couldn't give a stuff about the govt. telling me not to drink with their patronising ads, but the recent thread where people spoke about glycogen production being affected and REM sleep being interfered with put me off drink hugely.

Never dealt with Ribble, but I've heard bad things about them for years. Which is why I've never dealt with them…

I swapped the seat clamp for a cheap brand-x one from CRC.

I've got an EN521 on a Deore hub with plain gauge spokes (found that one out the other day – thought I'd ordered DB) and it weighs 1200g if my memory serves.

Twas cheap, and it should be tough as old boots. Go for a better hub and some DB spokes and you'll probably have a not hugely higher weight for a similar price.

Edit: However, it really depends how heavy & clumsy you are and whether you're on a hardtail or FS bike. FS is obviously going to be easier on the wheels. Personally I'm suspicious of pinned rims after one spctacularly folded up on me when I was a kid…

Given what I've heard about the numbers of police on the streets in Nottingham at the moment, good luck.

Cut one in advance, then put a bit of solder on the end before it gets a chance to fray, or stick an end cap on. I find that if a cable's cut well, and an endcap's fitted, it'll stay nice enough to thread through gear outers again.

Seriously, don't give up on getting it back just because you don't have the frame number. I got my Inbred recovered by the police (the actually went and found it once they knew it was worth real money), and I didn't have a frame number. I did, however, have my knowledge of the bike, so I could tell them what forks it had, down to exact model and year, exactly what parts were on it, where there were little dings etc.

Alternately, be the winning bidder, turn up mob handed and take it off him. The guy blatantly knows he's shifting stolen gear, which is why he's got a fairly new account with 1 feedback.

I don't think there's anything that packs up at a rate of knots like catalysts do on petrol cars (a sick Lambda sensor on a petrol car can cause this error, and the car will burn out the catalyst very quickly as a result), but I'm not a diesel fan.

The vast majority of the bananas we have are the Cavendish variety, and yes, they are genetically identical.

However, there will still be massive variance in the quality of the fruit due to all the usual factors that affect plant growth. That can be down to either the quality of the raw materials (ie, land, hours of sunshine) or the quality of the grower.

Something like this?

Engine fault code. Get a garage to read them for a tenner or so.

My money is on Exhaust Gas Recirculation valve. The law is that the car must throw on the Check Engine light for any emissions related fault, so most of the time that lamp means there's an emissions fault…

More theoretical at the moment. Maybe when summer comes and we've got some cash.

Inner tube and zip ties. One of my friends had a section of an old tyre zip tied to his chainstay for even more extremity.

It'd be for my girlfriend, so that may be no bad thing. I kind of twigged that the frame would be a bit of a beast :lol:

Europe was fairly well industrialised before the CAP came in – we were making atom bombs, jet fighters and so on. Anyhow, CAP has hardly helped the proverbial African farmer, has it? It's probably one of the worst examples of a subsidy there is.

I said I was speculating. Of course I can't back it up. My personal experience is that Fairtrade coffee tastes rank, and I've suggested a couple of mechanisms by which that situation could arise. Again, Ethiopia is taken as an example as a lot of Fairtrade coffee seems to come from there.