LosOjos

I did for Power Up - already had for Flix but TBH I assumed he already had Power Up on Steam!

Which is after me. Sorry @Bradlys think it's going to be too late for you, I'll happily take those entries off your hands though...

MP3 itself doesn't have to be awful, it's just that people tend to go "OMG if I set it to 64KBp/s I can fit 100 times more music!" and compress the hell out of it. You also have to consider whether you're ever likely to play them back through anything bigger than a pair of in-ears; even the best in-ears aren't going to produce the range that a nice pair of floor standers can. Production has certainly gone down hill though, seems to be a race to make music as loud as possible, compressing it (in a musical, not file size sense) awfully in the process: The Echo Nest Blog

They're the headphone equivalent of a 1000w subwoofer in the boot of a Ford Fiesta...

You could try a Raspberry Pi, they're cheap and cheerful but my family found it a little too slow to respond in XBMC, though a friend of mine uses his as his main "HTPC" and loves it, so perhaps I just needed to spend more time tweaking mine Maybe an Acer "Net-top" or an Intel NUC? They're considerably more expensive than an R-Pi, but they're "proper" PCs so if you're looking to get her a PC at some point anyway, these could potentially be good all-rounders. Personally, I'd go for one of the Intel NUCs, though you're looking around the £300 mark once you add in a HDD/SSD/SSHD

+2 Voted

Six of one, half dozen of the other... a device with a high quality DAC will sound better than one with a cheap one (most portable devices have to make some compromise here due to size limitations), but you won't hear the difference unless you have a decent pair of headphones that have wide range and are well balanced. Basically, there's no point in using £500 headphones on a cheapo MP# player, but equally there's no point buying a £10k sound system then plugging in a pair of headphones you got free with an MP# player...

Very sad indeed, the man must have had an incredible imagination to come up with the designs he did

Nail. On. Head. As I said to @SYSMAN_MK on twitter the other day, I have a £30 pair of Soundmagic E10s (in-ear headphones) and they absolutely wipe the floor with the Beats in-ears that cost literally four times as much.

Also, just spotted Power Up on Humble Store for 99p, so now you can support an indie dev and a worthy charity foe less than the price of a can of Red Bull

Nice one @Dos_Box He has also just successfully funded another game on Kickstarter (for £5 I'm getting a Steam copy, a DRM-free copy and my name in the credits! ), Flix the Flea - it's a take on a short-lived genre of Commodore/Amiga games, "physics platformer" maybe? Those who have played them will instantly get it: Steam Greenlight :: Flix The Flea

Yeah, everyone has a limit. Even if it's astronomically high, there's a limit. If you do have an astronomical budget @garethedmondson, how about building something inside a Red Harbinger Cross Desk?

My 47" TV is only 1080p and looks great for gaming and movies, so shut it!

+1 for Windows Live Movie Maker - it's simple enough to "just use", free and will do everything you need. Not as flexible as some other packages but if you're on a deadline and just want to get it done, it's a very good place to start

27" ASUS Monitor with good reviews, £194 on eBuyer today: Asus VE278H 27" LED LCD HDMI Monitor with Speakers | Ebuyer.com It's not an IPS screen but by all accounts sounds like a damn good screen for the money (just in case you're at the point I like to call "realist-ifying" your rig lol i.e. you have your dream spec, now you're chipping away to bring it within your budget)

Haha I don't mean to, perhaps I've just gotten excited over too many disappointing "breakthroughs" in technology over the years Touch screens also have a network of tiny wires running though them (well, the digitizer does technically not the screen itself, though this is the thing most likely to be damaged) so even if they did put this new polymer in to them, the touch screen would still be broken I'm afraid. I can imagine there might be some uses for this in industry, though I'm struggling to think of any right now... also think the car bumper example given in the article above is unrealistic; reading about how this works, I can't see any way it could "remember" the original shape to truly rebuild. What they've "invented" is automatic polyfiller!

More here: Regenerating plastic grows back after damage | News Bureau | University of Illinois Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem all that spectacular or useful to me... essentially, they'd need to build a network of "veins" through the plastic (sorry @abillybob but that means no screens!) that have to have a source of liquid polymer being pumped through them constantly, then when damage occurs the polymer seeps in to the crack/hole, hardens and the material is "fixed". However, this means that if that spot was damaged again, there'd be no "veins" to deliver the polymer. You'd need some sort of pump to deliver the polymer, which adds cost and complexity. Presumably you'd need to top up the polymer if it ran low... Surely it's easier, faster and cheaper to fill the hole yourself?

I'm afraid I've not tried it on a machine without a discrete GPU... I'd imagine any of the newer CPUs with APU/iGPU would be fine too. As @creese said, the software is free so just give it a go!

Dynamic Groups alone are worth installing Discover for IMO - ought to be built right in to SIMS really! Not much to add that @creese hasn't already said. I went on a "refresher" course a few weeks ago as I hadn't seen Discover since it's initial, slightly disappointing release - the latest version is miles better than the first version I saw! I plan to put it to better use next year. SIMS Discover for secondary schools and academies | capita-sims.co.uk

I reckon we could have put Elvis Presley himself on stage* and still wouldn't have won it; it has very little to do with talent! Hell, it has very little to do with the public vote either! Apparently, Poland got more public votes than anyone in the UK but as the "expert" panel scored them lowest, they got nil-points from us. Juries also get 50% stake in Semi-Final result | News | Eurovision Song Contest - Copenhagen 2014 *I know even if he was alive we couldn't have done but that's not the point

Fair enough, I hadn't looked at it like that. I don't think the intention was to make it a "freak show" but it was certainly to draw attention. I can see why it might be difficult though I suppose; I know for male to female 'transgenders' (is that the right word?) in particular visible stubble can be very embarrassing; having someone compare you to Conchita in that circumstance could be fairly crushing I imagine!

If she's happy with her current setup with the tablet, then could you get her a HDMI lead for the tablet? Most tablets have one available that will mirror the screen so she can keep using it as normal. Other than that, it really depends on how much you want to spend... You could get Sky multi-room for £10 extra per month which will give her all the same Sky channels as you have on the main box plus the ability to record. You could build her a media centre based on XBMC, which I believe you can get a Sky Go app for now. If she/you have a Netflix/Lovefilm subscription, you could go for a Roku box or similar. Then there's the new Chromecast, which theoretically allows you to air anything on your PC/Android Tablet on the TV wirelessly... (I say theoretically as support is not there for all sites yet, best Googling streaming sites you want to use to see if they work first) There are lots of options, really depends what you want and how much you want to spend! The only way you're going to get recordable Sky channels though is with Sky Multi-Room; AFAIK, there's no decoder other than an official Sky box that can decrypt their channels (I'd happily be proven wrong though!)

They shouldn't necessarily, you just live in hope that a person who has been subject to prejudice would be a little more open-minded about others... it's like one group of people complaining about racism aimed at them whilst simultaneously directing racism at a third group of people; you'd hope that empathy would prevail but unfortunately we humans are a complicated bunch! That said, you can't take the complaints of a few as the opinion of many...

Dictionary definition of transgender: denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender I think she fits that bill perfectly! She says she grew the beard as a statement that you don't have to conform to social norms, you can be who you want to be and people should accept that. (struggling to find a direct quote right now, will post source when I do) There are nay-sayers in all walks of life but overall, I don't see how this can be anything but positive for the LGBT community... Not really but as has already been said, Eurovision is political, it's not about talent. Meow!

Eurovision is primarily politics and I have to say, I think it was good that Austria won. The performance wasn't the best by a long shot, but in a political game showing support for LGBT is positive. It's not going to change the world but it is a sign that things are progressing at least, especially after somecountires talked about pulling out of the competition all together in protest at having a transgender contestant. Poland's entry was disgraceful, the polar opposite of progress!