Posts by James Wilson 110 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2007
Exactly the same here. I've bought some excellent pieces of kit and some pieces of crap. All were very cheap so not much lost on the dodgy ones (and often you can get your money back if you can demonstrate the deficiencies), though I do feel a bit guilty about adding the the e-waste pile so I'm more circumspect these days. Caveat emptor and all that.
Yes, school budgets are pretty much always under pressure. The government's favourite trick is to announce to the world "teachers will get a 4% raise this year, well done us!", then to the schools "we'll give you 3% extra for the staff wages, you have to magic the remaining 1% as obviously thus far you've been wasting money on hookers and blow".
Excuse me for being blunt, but this wasn't basic driving skills, it was about making the OP smoother (better). I agree most people drive very poorly but you can't lump it on the driving school system, it's always going to have to be a balance between getting people safe (enough) they can be on the road unsupervised against the costs of tuition. Now if you were suggesting some form of repeated testing, so say checking people every 10 years after they initially passed their test, with lessons enforced for those who have slipped in to bad habits, that I could get behind.
"if there is a hose pipe ban this year, I WILL be running my bath 24/7 as I'm not on a meter. As a point of principle."
While I'm right with you on Macquarie and the amount of debt they've saddled TW with as soon as you say something like this it makes you sound like an antisocial arse.
Sometimes it makes no sense. You'd think after the third or fourth (heck, it should be the first, but let's cut some slack) code review that's essentially "this works fine but fix the indentation" that they'd check the indentation before submitting future ones, but no.
So we should run all the airports at far below capacity to cope with the occasional instance like this where there's an incident that affects one but not the others (surely the most likely cause of problems for airports is weather and that's likely to hit most or all at the same time)? Resilience comes at a price, sometimes it's one worth paying and sometimes not. I suspect most people in cattle class wouldn't want that extra cost and those for whom it is worthwhile will be doing so by finding alternatives for themselves.
Dom Joly did a skit where he kept asking Alexa to do stuff. I was listening to it on a speaker while in a holiday home that had an Echo, so of course it kept trying to do whatever he was saying, which fortunately wasn't "order seventeen dozen eggs" or "google donkey porn" but was nevertheless very annoying. Also the skit wasn't very funny, I don't know why I didn't just stop the damn thing.
Definitely do the filter every use, but don't forget to still check the vent periodically. I hadn't and the amount of crud in it was remarkable, once removed the dryer started doing loads much quicker (and will be much safer).
Of course the best way to reduce your drying and the associated costs is not to have teenage daughters who will chuck something in the wash after wearing it for 30s, but apparently even environmental concerns aren't considered justification for beating them round the head with a washing basket.
We did a holiday to France recently in our EV. There was hardly any stress, there's so many chargers around it's easy to find one, and the Electroverse card & app were great. Also it's sooo much cheaper than the UK - worst I paid was I think €0.59/KWh and for a small detour I was able to get €0.25/kwh for a lot of it!
You can get base models for considerably less than that now, including the long-range one. There aren't many options, I think mostly just the 'Trophy' (oh, and different paint colours ;-) ), and that's only a few grand so nowhere near a Tesla Model 3. Though the 0-60 of 3.8s means they have an X-Power which is a bit more.
Other than parts and dealers there aren't many negatives, but it is a cheap car (correction, cheap *for an EV*) so there are some niggles. By far the most common is the lane-keeping-assist which is fine on large well-marked roads but poor on small ones. It's still good for the cash which is why it was the second-best selling EV in the UK last year.
My MG4 handles rather nicely. I mostly drive like an old fart but have played with it a couple of times to check what's available should I need it and I've been pleasantly surprised, you can feel the weight a bit but not as much as I was expecting. The only things that let it down are the "driver aids" like the lane-keeping assist (which I can only assume was sponsored by car repair companies) but from what I can tell that's the case on a lot of modern cars regardless of country of origin.
Yeah, it's all of them, not just the Niro & Kona. MG4 forums are full of people going nuts as their car has not just bleeped but has tried to steer them in to a ditch. I assume (hope) NCAP have looked at this and the cars are safer overall when you compare the reduced number of motorway pile-ups, with high chances of fatalities or serious injuries, against an increased number of lower-speed crunches where the LKA got confused by a country road. Essentially though you're right, the systems need to be improved so they work properly on most roads.
I only got Reading to Cardiff. I had to get the travel people to update the internal system from 'never allow first class' to 'only allow first class if it's cheaper than a standard ticket'. Ah, the joys of rail ticket pricing in the UK.
Sadly I was never able to convince them to allow me to book first class when it was 50p more than standard even if I paid the extra myself. Fair enough I suppose, there would be an admin cost to all that, but annoying.
Ah, the CPC 464. I have fond memories of that. Probably more playing "Harrier Attack" than of writing some incredibly elementary BASIC to make a little character man run across the screen.
I have less fond memories of waiting 17 minutes for a game to load from tape, from (very hazy) memory it was called "Sultan's Maze", only for it to be, well, crap.
I recently got fed up with that, where I signed up to a 18-month deal for £38/month and then 7 months in they raised it to £44 "because inflation". Initially I did the usual, phoned up and they offered me £36 so I signed up, but then I got pi**ed off so cancelled it and went with Toob. A few days after we'd had Toob installed VM texted me to offer a new deal of £14/month! Though I could have cancelled the new service (within 14 days of signing up) Toob hadn't done anything wrong and VM had wound me up royally so even though it would have saved me money I told them to stick it.
OK, I'll put my hand up. Say I'm interested in getting a new drill. I do a few searches while I'm researching, the advertisers pick up on this and I then see ads for drills (or bits, or eye protectors, or whatever). It might bring something to my attention I haven't seen and I like. I'd rather that than random ads, say for incontinence pads[1].They're only ads, it's not as if I'm forced to buy anything.
p.s. I'm none of young, female, or employed in the coloured crayons department.
[1] For now at least. Maybe in the future.
In school I had a friend who really should have become a QA tester, he could unfailingly find the unique combination to trigger the obscure bug in my code[1]. One time I thought I had him beaten, my program steadfastly refused to crash. Until he asked "what's that" and pointed at the screen, a centimetre-long spark went between it and his finger and the machine died.
[1] Or maybe, just maybe, I wasn't as good as I thought and my schoolboy code was littered with bugs and he just happened to find some of them. Nah, that can't be right, Shirley?
