mats

Aw, that sucks. Although I guess $49pa isn't a bad deal - we've had it good for a while as far as logmein is concerned.

Whatever you do, just don't buy RM Easymail. RM 'goes down every now and again, awful and infuriating web interface'mail would be a better name.

I suspect the pollution levels would be greatly reduced by simply putting average speed cameras along that stretch of the M1. This would have the knock-on benefit of reducing the average speed along that stretch which (given that slower traffic needs less inter-vehicle space) would mean more vehicles could use it at once. Hey presto, congestion reduced. This wouldn't pan out though, because people tend to say 'that road's much clearer than it used to be so I'll use it instead of another one". It's also interesting to compare the land use vs people carried of a motorway vs a rail line. Cars - especially low occupancy ones - are a terrifically inefficient way to move people, in terms of land and energy / fuel use (hence pollution).

I was asked a similar question this week by one of the TAs. 14 year old son, already been caught on sites his mum doesn't approve of. He's getting a new laptop for christmas too. I explained that anything they install on the machine will be defeated by a determined 14yo and you really want a filter where the connection enters the house. Turns out they're on sky which offers some McAfee cr4pware to install on up to 3 PCs. So, only good for households with no tablets, phones, apple things. If it were me, I'd just use openDNS, but the level of tech knowledge to change the dns servers on your sky router (even if the router has that facility) is beyond your average parent. I'm not set up for out of hours consultancy and I'm not doing it for free so we're a bit stuck. Don't think 'change to an isp with better filtering arrangement' would fly either.

Blimey, those AMD's are cheap against i5s!

I'd not bother buying a graphics card in the first instance - ivy bridge and later i5's (basically anything you'd buy new now) have a perfectly adequate one if you're not into heavy gaming - just check wikipedia to see the one you want has HDXXXX graphics, a few don't. Spend the saving on a SSD - massive speed increase, modest spending. Make it your boot disc and have a magnetic one if you need lots of storage. I think you could build a useful pc for 500 - don't you have any screens you could reuse?

Digital Ocean might be worth a look. $5 per month, install wordpress yourself.

Amen to that. I'd be a bit more creative though. Buy a couple of big old bangers, lop the roofs off and fill with plants. Bit of creative parking and you've installed a low cost guerrilla traffic calming scheme. The road I live on would be much nicer for it. I'd sell the engines to pay for the plants & horse muck and insure them on a [as few miles as possible] pa policy.

I KNEW being able to wield a soldering iron would come in useful one day! Good tip - ta.

ICTDirect_Dave - thanks, do you sell individual machines to joe public? As suggested, I'm considering buying a machine, shoving the magnetic drive in a usb caddy as a backup device and sticking a ssd in the laptop. It's not a great option when a teacher asks for laptop recommendations though - I want to say ssd but can't when it's £1000 or DIY. And I'm not D'ing it for them. Now, how to avoid the Microsoft tax?

So, I'm seeing what pcworld have by way of reasonable laptops - no atoms, no dubious bottom of the pile stuff. i3's with 4Gb ram start under £350. I have converted a couple of machines to SSDs and the increase in performance is incredible so I want one in a laptop. Why, then, is the first i-series with a SSD an i7 asus with a 256Gb ssd at just under £1000? I suspect it's because people compare the 128Gb ssd machine with the cheaper 500Gb disc machine and buy the spinning media. A cheap laptop would be vastly improved by an ssd - is the lack of awareness of this hampering the machines available to the great British public?

Erp - beaten to it. If nano isn't there, try this method using vi. Linux machines (eg the Pi) always have an editor called vi installed. It's pretty user-unfriendly at first but it's always there. At a command prompt, type 'sudo vi /etc/environment' You should get an editor with /etc/enviromnent in it. Pressing 'i' should get you insert mode. Go to the bottom of the file, make a new line (enter) and type the stuff you need to insert. To save, press escape then ':' . You should get a : as a prompt. Typing 'wq' makes it write and quit. Typing q! makes it quit without saving. Type 'cat /etc/environment' at the command prompt to see what you've done. Good luck.

All for it. If our council tax bills are reduced by fining the lazy / ignorant / selfish, what's not to like?

Cycle to work looks good until you factor in the fact that if you're after a new bike and time it right, you can usually buy last years model at a discount that's as good as the cycle to work scheme would offer. Without the paperwork, requirement to stay in the same job or the uncertainty about when the bike is actually yours. C2W was dreamed up by a committee of tax accountants with no idea how it would work in the real world. Taking vat off new bikes would have been much simpler.

This thread is a testament to bare metal hypervisors. Not long ago you'd have been laughed at for suggesting piles of updates to your host!

I *always* go out on 31st Oct. No idea if they knock or not. They probably get the message after over a decade.

Interesting point about dban and bad sectors - there's more info on that here. I'll try secure erase from parted magic next time round (adjusts tin foil hat). Edit - thought parted magic was foss - it's commercial. Unclear if gparted (which it's based on) does hdd secure erasing. Either way, if a dban doesn't report bad sectors, I suspect it's good enough. If it does, who wants a drive with bad sectors? It's failing.

Ouch. If it helps, dban will wipe as many drives as you can connect to a machine - all at the same time. Boot it from usb (yumi to make the bootable usb), select autonuke when it boots, pull the usb when the image has been read and walk away for an hour or two. Leave the usb stick in and you'll be making a new one...

DBAN is your friend.

Looking at the amount of Tosh there I'd say not..

Isn't that like shaving legs (men), chamois creme and drilling holes in everything / buying lots of £carbon£ - the sign of an obsessive? Btw - good to see your CEOGB badge, good org imo.

Occasionally. The middle school next door to mine supplies bmx-boys every so often. One stood up and started pedalling furiously when I passed him last week. Clicked the three-speed into top and left him for dust. Bmxs with their one gear suck on the road.

Yeah, they didn't shout about that bit..

Fire or hudl? Well, one's going to be tied to an online retailer and be full of annoying carp, and the other one will be tied to a retailer and full of annoying carp. I'd look elsewhere personally.

If it's any consolation, we had no connection on the 24th for most of the afternoon. RM / talktalk providers - it's not just KCom.