Digsy

Finally I can see the pics at home. It'll extend the life of the oil and extend the time it takes to heat up simply because of the extra mass. In theory it might help with oil surge because the pickup has been extended too BUT as mentioned above the increased mass of oil might tend to slop around more. You would have to do proper surge testing using a good pressure sensor with a fast response time, but it wont necessarily mean you can do away with the oil cooler - just drive it harder for longer before the oil gets to maximum temperature.

That was a bit uncalled for.

It won't be "impressive" but you can pick up a micro indoor helicopter for between £40 and £80. There are some even cheaper than that, but then you are verging on "toy" territory. However, if you go for one of the better micro helicopters then it will enable you to learn how to fly one before you go splashing out on an expensive kit because you will spend a lot of time crashing. I have no experience of planes but if you want to go down the helicopter route I would get a four channel RTF (Ready To Fly - comes with its own cheap controller) that can be switched to three channel mode for starters. Three channel helicopters can fly forwards, backwards and make flat turns left and right. They go up and down by changing the throttle. Very unlike a "real" helicopter, but if you get in a muddle you don't have to think too hard to steer it towards safety, even if it is heading towards you so left and right are reversed. Four channel helicopters can also fly sideways - i.e. one of the control sticks mimics a proper cyclic pitch lever from the real thing. With this extra control you can also do banked turns and hover more precisely over one spot (essential for landing). Most low-cost helis have contra rotating rotors which negates the need for a tail rotor, and makes then very stable. You can hover them "hands off" if they are trimmed properly. I have been told that the next step up from a four channel would be to go single main rotor + tail rotor. These are one more rung up the realism scale but tend to drift off more quickly and require more adjustment during flight. The next steps up after that are to add a fifth channel of control for collective pitch, which gives you independant control over height and throttle. You can get indoor and outdoor versions of all of the above but when you are learning, the real advantage of the smaller models is that altough you only get ten minutes or so of flight, the batteries are tiny and only take half an hour to recharge, compared to up to three hours for an outdoor model. The problem for you will be that pretty much all the above options will look like toys compared to the large outdoor models - mine cartainly does - but you have to start somewhere. I've had mine for a couple of weeks and I can just about land it on my ironing board

Probably blocked at work for me then.

Is it just me or are the pics in the first post not showing? I'd like to see if you can re upload them.

Yeah you're fitting it with one tooth too many on the tight side between the intake pulley and the crank.

I've got an NA (an auto too). I don't drive it now but I love the car and I still like this forum. But to be honest, starting a load of "NA this, NA that, NA the other" threads is funny in the same way as going to an open mike night at Jongleurs and singing "I Know A Song That Will Get On Your Nerves" for an hour.

Might be a repost. Hopefully not. Clicky

I see what you are saying, but I think there's still room for a true one-box "convergence" device for AV stuff. The PS3 does do a lot of this and I know several people use them as media hubs, but I wouldn't get one because I have no interest in gaming and it doesn't offer a pay-TV solution. I can envisage a near-future where you go and buy a product which has a Blu-ray slot, network connectivity, media card slots, satellite and/or cable inputs and then you jst go to the next shelf and buy your CIM/CAM to plug in for your chosen pay TV supplier if you have one. In fact, as you say, you can get this now in a TV if you forego the integrated Blu-ray player and subscription channels, or in an HTPC if you just forego the subscription channels. I could watch DVDs on my already connected "normal" PC if I wanted to go to the bother of ripping them first, but I'd still like a physical optical drive in my AV setup, especially as they are so cheap now.

Yeah, there is a way, but its not simple. Basically a card reader and some l33t code that can do the decoding on a PC. There is a 29 page thread on AVForums about it. Its a bit of a grey area because while it isn't illegal (becaue you are still paying for a Sky subscription) it does breach their terms, which state that their smartcards can only be used in Sky equipment. It also requires regular maintenance of the EPG because channels don't update automatically in the background like they do on the native Sky hardware. Its a real shame because we are really at the stage now where one PC-based box should be able to replace all the clutter and cables that a normal AV setup requires. Sky really ought to get with the times and offer a CIM / CAM decoder card solution for suitably equipped Freesat TVs and HTPCs. If Freesat ever expands their channel range to cover my tastes a bit more, I think I will definetaly go down this route.

Arrrgh! That's another box! I want less boxes!! I thought a few people on here had built HTPCs. I might post this over on AV Forums but I suspct I'll get swamped with half-arsed haxxxorz workarounds for the Sky problem. I appreciate that an HTPC is simple to do if all you want to do is watch media you have already recorded, or watch straight from DVD, but if you want a fully integrated system it seems to get a lot more difficult if you have a subscription based satellite or cable service. Shame that Sky don't do a PCI card version of their decoder.

I've had a home cinema setup for several years now. It was quite swanky back in the day but now its a bit lacking, so I started toying with the idea of building an HTPC rather than updating all my various boxes and cables and amp to support HD sources. However, I immediately hit two major snags: 1) No Blu-ray support in Windows Media Centre. 2) Absolutely no way to get Sky using an HTPC DVB-S card. 3) EPG downloaded from the internet rather than satellite. I appreciate that there is almost certainly a solution to (1) in using a different media centre solution, but (2) is the real show stopper. I already subscribe to Sky+ so would be looking for the PVR / satellite solution to all go in one box. However, no Sky means I would have to drop back to FreeSat. Ironically, with all those channels at my disposal I usually only watch the documentary ones - none od which are available on FreeSat. The suggested workaround for this on the Windows Media player website is to route the output from the Sky Digibox through the HTPC using a TV tuner, and then use IR blasters to make sure the Sky box is set to the right channel for recording. Sorry, but that soltuion was in vogue in the early 90s and I'm not taking a backwards step. So I go to thinking I could leave Sky in a seperate box and then just combine everything else, but what's the point? I would simply be replacing my DVD player with an HTPC box so I wouldn't really be adding any functionality at all apart from being able to play media from my NAS drive. As I already have a "normal" PC linked into my home cinema that would be pointless, too. So it would appear that in order to combine everything into a one-box solution, I would have to forego Sky and kiss goodbye to the only channels that I actually like watching. Plus at a rough cost estimate I reckon it would set me back about £600 for the privelege. (3) seems odd too. My understanding is that although the EPG is present in the satellite data, HTPCs ignore that and use an internet based solution. I'm sure that's fine, but it seems a bit shonky. I have also read a few accounts on line of people having trouble keeping the downloaded EPG channels list in sync with the channels being recieved by the DVB-S card. As this is home entertainment rather than computer geekery I just want it to work when I want to watch TV, and not require endless fiddling around with. You can see what I was planning in the attachment. I'd love to do this, but I really can't see the point. Am I missing something?

Are the little discs that you put in Tassimo / Nespresso machines et al actually just compressed, ground coffee though, or do they put other stuff in them to enhance the flavour and appearance? I've owned a couple of espresso machines and have always struggled to get a decent tasting cup out of them even when using beans that I grind myself. When the "disc" machines first hit the market a lot of the advertising focussed on how lovely and thick the crema layer was so I automatically assumed that they would put something in there to enhance it, which put me off buying one. On another note, we have just got a bean to cup vending machine here. Just like a normal upright vending machine, but bean to cup. £1 per cup, but its worth it Of course the milk will still be powdered, but it tastes better than the normal gut-rot vending machine stuff.

That's usually how the noisemaker in the pad works to tell you have have at least one pad with 1mm or less material remaining,

What about "where are the turbos?" and "how many spark plugs do I need?" from way back in the day...

Wheels (and any properly designed face-clamped rotating joint, including crankshaft pulleys, cam sprockets and flywheels) never ever transmit torque via shear through the studs. The studs are there to provide a purely axial clamping force to hold the wheel to the hub. The amount of torque that can be transmitted is then a function of the dimensions of the mating faces, the clamping load, and the coefficient of friction between the two faces. This also why you should never put copper grease on the mating faces, as I have seen some tyre centres do. So, provided the effective mean diameter of the mating faces (largest inner diameter + smallest outer diameter divided by two) is roughly the same as standard through both the hub-spacer and the spacer-wheel joints, then you should be OK. However, as you mention, if something goes wrong with the clamping for whatever reason, allowing the faces to slip, the studs are going to be subjected to some pretty large alternating bending loads. If it happens at speed I wouls think you could fatigue through a stud fairly fast. If the spacers spigot into the hub and the wheel then you will be better protected agianst this kind of failure.

That's a helluva lot more simple than my method

Ok, here's the solution complete with working out. It didn't occur to me that there might be something special about circles inscribed in triangles until I drew it out on CAD, so I did a quick Google and found the relevant equations. I did pure and applied maths through to A level and was never taught that part. The rest is my own. As you can see, the solution gives two possible answers so you have to use a bit of common sense to decide which is correct - in this case it is obvious. The other answer is how far the other end of the ladder is up the wall.

Close, but no.

Yes, you are correct (I just constructed it on CAD to check). However, your method for working it out isn't a method at all. You have just looked at the figures and tried to fit the most sensible estimate of the result into the answer based on the assumption that the answer will be a whole number, which says more about yoru knowledge of how exam questions are written than your knowledge of maths. As you said, its a maths question, not a real world question - but your answer uses a real world solution rather than a mathematical one. If you really want to impress, then give us the answer to this one. Its exactly the same question but with user-unfriendly numbers.

Just spent an hour or so on this to no avail. I thought you might be able to determine the angle between the ladder and the wall from the chord length across the "kite" shape and the segment angle in the center of the circle. The angle between the ladder and the wall plus the segment angle must equal 90 degrees because the other two internal angles in the kite are both 90degrees and all four together must total 360degrees. Knowing the angle between the ladder and the wall would give you the length C from the law of sines because the ratio of the sine of the angle of the ladder to the wall to the length C is equal to the ratio of the sine of the angle between the wall and the floor to the length of the ladder, both of whch are known. I'm stuck at calculating the chord length or the segment angle because there are too many unknowns. I bet its something really obvious...

Its threads like this one that I think of when someone asks about MPG and gets told "if you are worried about fuel economy then you can't afford a Supra".

I'm with PlusNet. I'm on a legacy package that doesn't have any specific restructions applied to it, so I should be OK. I'll drop them a line on their forum to make sure, though.

On the offchance someone on here has one and managed to get it working: I live in a patchy reception area so I decided to buy one of these things. I set it up last night and hey presto - it simply doesn't work. The box iteslf comes with virtually no instructions apart from a small leaflet tellling you how to plug it in and recognise if it is working or not. After doing some digging on the Vodafone help forum I came across a pretty lengthy troubleshooting and setup guide (which is a lot more in depth than the simple "Plug and play" description). In short I have checked that my internet connection is OK, assigned it a fixed IP, created the necessary port forwarding rules in my router. I even put the Suresignal's IP address in the DMZ to bypass the firewall entirely and it still won't work. The "status" light to say it is connected to Vodafone's remote server never lights up. Another think I found on the Vodafone forum is that there are literally hundreds of posts from frustrated users who have the same issue - it won't set itself up and refuses to work even after you configure it manually. Because this is not "vanilla" Vodafone stuff that you can't fix by "taking the SIM card out and wiping it", their helpline is virtually useless. If anyone reading this has one that works, any pointers would be gratefully received.

I think I got nine in 2001 as well. Need to check the logbook. Currently SORNed on my driveway next to the diesel Astra of joy after 150,000 miles of sterling daily drive service