mats

Doesn't work like that. "I've spend £hundreds of tax in my 60 years of cigarette addiction. I have more right to NHS treatment than your sick child who's paid £0. Send her home." "I spent £hundreds on VED for my gas guzzler / HGV / coach. Your hippymobile which has £0 VED should get out of my way. Death to all cyclists." "I don't think Trident is a good use of my taxes. I'm witholding X% to take account of that".

Don't forget to practice unclipping. Do it loads so you can do it really quickly when you need to - it needs to be instinctive. You will forget at some point and probably fall off at very low speed in front of lots of people. Persist, clipless pedals are a fantastic invention on and off road. I liken it to having about another leg's worth of power. Cheap shoes are fine ime.

The "fleeced motorist" is a myth. Lots of the external costs of motoring are bourne by the people outside the car. On hypotecated taxation - great. How are you going to pay for social services? The welfare system? Defence? Pensions? Have a read of ipayroadtax.com

After Libor, nothing surprises me. I see the BBC spin it as a motorist issue (call the RAC foundation! Get a picture of a petrol pump!), but in a society built and powered (mainly) by fossil fuel it affects us all.

That's a proper bit of weird French - before Citroen's boring phase. Nice.

Same here.

Had a play with Calibre last week - it's really nice. I suspect that using a dropbox directory for its data directory will make it work as a reader from different PCs too.

Has yours arrived yet? I'm still waiting and despite having received an email from B&N saying my order is scheduled to ship (on 1st May) there's no order against my account. No "it's shipped" email yet either. I have also put an order in with currys who expect to deliver by the 14th so if B&N sort themselves out I may end up with a spare.

School vacuum cleaner (Henry) for cleaning in-situ, Giottos Rocket for blowing out internals eg pc cases. Using lung power isn't all that good for you and the Rocket (designed for cleaning cameras) never runs out of air, unlike cans.

RM books has an online viewer and ipad & android reader apps. No kindle or nook which makes it a bit spendy if you want to use cheap offline readers.

Have you created /etc/apt/apt.conf to contain the line Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy url:port"; (change as appropriate)?

Ha - I had a Hotmail address *until* it was owned by MS!

The Nook Simple Touch is going for £29 inc delivery at the moment. Cursory research looks like they're fairly hackable and may even function as one of those electronic book things. I've ordered one out of curiosity (and 'cos I'm still sore about missing out on the HP tablet fire sale nearly 2 years ago now..).

Couldn't say (in a public forum). DM / email.

I removed the sparklebox toolbar from a teacher laptop just last week. It was there because Twinkl have started charging £30pa apparently.

export http_proxy="http://proxy.rmplc.co.uk:8080" works here. Modify as appropriate. Also, in /etc/apt/apt.conf Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.rmplc.co.uk:8080";

RM Smartcache is blocking all safesearch and bing images and yahoo image results now. Call logged. Expectations low.

Check your spelling of "mailling".

I spent a couple of days in Paris in 2011. Beautiful place with tons to see, we used the Velib hire bikes and travelled all over the place for (nearly) free. You see loads more than on the metro etc and there are docking stations everywhere (many more than in London) so you can ride around & ditch the bike whenever you want to stop & see something. There are a lot of car-free routes along the canals and some separated lanes on the larger roads. There were one or two moments when we were ejected onto Place de la Concorde or other large junctions but the drivers were very good. We even did some of the Champs Elysees and Arc de Triomph (A d T not recommended!). Side note - my wife & I ride everywhere in the UK so we might be more hardy than some but it's definitely worth a try - maps are available from bike shops / tourist info.

For riding 2 miles to work? No, normal clothes. I will admit to lycra for big rides though. Locks - nothing special for the work / hack bike. D lock + cable lock + careful selection of time & place for locking up + on home insurance mtb / posher road bike.

Doesn't stop them selling it unfortunately!

Just in case other people get caught out - we have a RM Dumbcache version 2b.11 [sNU-C]. My W7 pc upgraded itself to IE10 without me noticing. This breaks some of the Dumbcache screens (filtering / user management, filter list management for example - nothing important!), leaving you with both Firefox and IE not working properly with the Dumbcache. The workaround is to uninstall IE10 - you end up with IE9 which appears to work. No points for RM for making a browser dependent web interface - after all, that wasn't uncommon back in 2006 - the date of the copyright notice. No points either for not seeming to have maintained or improved it since then. I can't wait for the day I see the back of that device. Points to @sparkeh for making me double check it's not a browser issue. The great irony, of course, is that the dumbcache is based on pretty much the same tech as smoothwall - which I bet isn't even slightly browser dependent. Thanks for listening, rant over. Mat

We've got an internet connection from RM here. Moving to a system which depended on it being up all the time would be utterly bonkers.

Motorola L7089. It had an IR port & modem which worked with whatever Palm I had at the time. To recreate the experience, I used the web browser on my current phone on the train yesterday.

Giffgaff's ok but their reliability isn't up to the same levels at the other operators. Twice in the last couple of years they've had days of no calls for anybody. Once was when their basement room that contained the billing system flooded; can't remember what the other time was. If you can live with that, they're fine.