delusional

I'm not sold on the idea of PA systems for home audio. The problem with a PA in the home is that they're designed to fill very large spaces with sound and in the relatively enclosed space of a home they tend to just not sound that good. If all you're interested in is volume, sure go for a PA, but if you're looking at spending >£300 on an amp you're probably more interested in quality. Out of those two amps I'd go for the Nad. The company has an excellent reputation for making high quality, all round equipment and I rather like them.

If you want seperates though you're probably going to have to spend more than £70. Generally bottom of the range amps and speakers will start at around £60 and £50 respectfully (and that's if you shop in Richer Sounds). Be warned, the road of buying and learning about hi-fi/home cinema stuff is a slippery and expensive route! You'll soon be pimping yourself out, bit by bit, to get that £500 for the reciever you just have to have.

Oi! I'll have none of that! Maybe I shouldn't redo my hair like that then :)

Well, as grade 4 is longer than a grade 3, why not get it done to grade 4 first then if you don't like it you can just go down to a 3! Easy. Looking good. I used to have my hair something like that (years ago, before it was cool :op ), am tempted to dye it black and get it cut again now. If only for all the emo goth girls :) Ah, found pictures. This is (obviously) where my icon originated: And another slightly smarter one here.

Brilliant film. Surely Russell Crowes finest moment, it's a close run thing with Gladiator, but he's just so good in Romper Stomper. That film makes American History X look just a bit crap. It's actually Japanese, like many excellent films. Also [pedant alert] it's actually called Battle Royale, but you're nearly right. Excellent film though, the characterisation and way you see the relationships between the characters fall apart is brilliant. You can't beat a good war film. There are few Vietnam movies that aren't brilliant. Good examples are Platoon and Hamburger Hill. I love Enemy at the gates, the opening scenes are just fantastic. I don't think I can pick a favourite film. But some of my favourites are probably: The Butterfly Effect - dark, intelligent and mind blowing; Romper Stomper - see above; Oldboy - seriously f**ked up Korean cinema; The Princess Bride - just faultless really

The sequel to Ring was released in '99. Although the Hollywood remake of Ring 2 is being released soon. I need to rewatch Ring, I was distracted when watching it before and just didn't find it that scary, or infact good. I'm still not sure if that's because I didn't like it or because I was too distracted to follow it properly.

Candyman. That is one f**ked up film. It just never lets up, right up to and including the last minute it's harsh and brutally nasty. It's truly worthy of the horror genre. I thought Gothika was pretty creepy to (although not even slightly in the same league as Candyman), although it's a shame they felt the urge to throw in all the "jump out of your seat" type shock moments into it. The whole premise of someone apparantly sane being thrown into a mental hospital like that was really uncomfortable watching.

That's my last weekend in London, so if I'm not too bust packing/cleaning I'll try and make an effort to pop down for a ride. That's Easter Sunday as well, isn't it?

Did you have any luck with Coral Cache in the end? Also, it might be worth thinking about the way videos are downloaded, with the current system from what I can tell php is parsing the file from disk and handing it out alongside a webpage. I'm guessing this is to stop direct linking? However this not only restricts your use of Coral Cache, but might also be obstructing external proxy caching, which is something that could have a big impact on your bandwidth. Off the top of my head, you may be able to work around this by forwarding any requests from external referrers to files with video extensions to a php page where the link is available (in terms of useability, nil difference to the current site, except the title bar would change slightly). This may cause some slightly unexpected behaviour from proxy servers though (i.e. people downloading from a caching proxy will probably get the actual file served up to them rather than being forwarded to the html page). Am I right about the direct linking prevention? It creates some rather interesting complications with bandwidth limiting by doing that :)

IIRC it's recently been legalised for medical usage, but is still a "controlled substance" of sorts. There's been talk of imposing some sort regulation on chewing gum in some UK counties, I think they were proposing fines for dropping chewing gum on the ground, which was to cover the extra costs that are going to be incurred by the government including chewing gum in litter definitions (meaning county councils have an obligation to clean it off the streets - quite a mammoth task by all accounts). [edit for typo]

Oh, please do! I'd love to see those.

No, that's not true. Turkish law is pretty westernised these days, not least because they're looking to join the EU some time soon and need to conform to the expected standards to allow that. For instance, just last year they officially abolished the death penalty for this purpose (although in reality the death penalty had been out of use in Turkey since, i think, the 80s). I think there are still some countries with radical Islamic governments that hold to the law word for word as it is written in the Qur'an, which would include chopping off a hand for theft. But not Turkey.

They don't hunt at all, they just bounce.

Hmm, I'm not sure on that. I've been thinking about riding street style stuff on a crosser/trials bike for a while, but I've mostly dismissed the idea on the basis that it's both stupid and dangerous. On one side the bike is pretty cool, and it's certainly nice to see a little innovation - although I'm not sure on the idea of putting a 250 YZ engine in it, I'd probably have gone with a geared up trials engine, or maybe a 125. On the other hand, where the hell are you going to ride it? Trying to ride BMX style street on one of those is just far to dangerous, the chances of hitting a pedestrian are both much higher and much more dangerous than on a push bike. The "danger for other people" thing would completely bar you from any skate parks as well. It looks a bit too low to be used as a regular method of transport as well. I think for bikes like that too take off it needs a whole new style of beefed up skate parks to spring up all over the place. Unfortunately for such a network of parks to be built the bikes need to become really popular. Bit of a Catch 22 there. So yeah, nice idea, cool little toy. Not really any practical use that I can see...

That word doesn't derive from "Nigeria" you know. It derives from "negro" and has altogether darker connotations than the term "paki". Thanks to the historical connotations that word will nearly always be offensive, no matter what the nationality of the subject of the comment may be. The only reason you're able to say it's not offensive is due to the 'reclamation' of the term by black Americans over the last 30 years and it's subsequent abundance in media (films, music, etc). As for immigration, in short (and as you probably expect): I have absolutely no time for the Daily Mail "Oh my god! They're all criminals, living off our taxes and stealing our jobs and cars" attitude. People are people, who cares where they were born? Why should someone be treated differently in the eyes of the state because they were born in a different country?

I used to have a pair of buffaloes that I wore all the time that probably fit that bill. Although mine had 2" soles on them, so you'd have to be comfortable being a bit taller than you are (it took me ages to get used to not being 6' after they fell to bits). Actually I'm pretty sure they make flat soled shoes as well. There are definitely quite a lot of companies that make casual shoes (swear are another company in a similar vein to buffalo, quite a specific style again though). An easier and cheaper option could be a pair of boots, like Dr Martins or similar. Or high street fashion stores often have several different kinds of casual shoes.

Bittorrent's just like that sometimes. I've often found downloads slow down to a crawl and then for some reason restarting them get's them building up speed in no time (although only sometimes, mostly it just stays slow). I guess it's something to do with the subscriber lists or data allocation at the tracker, without reading the source I couldn't give you a better answer (and I can't be bothered to do that at the moment).

And another one I've just remembered. I'm going to Elektrofest at what was the Camden Palace (now called Koko for some reason) on 26th March to see Visage - as well as Girls under glass, Cursor Miner, Mechanical Cabaret, Noblesse Oblige, Lowe, Ovni and Trauma Pet. Mainly only going to see Visage though :)

Just swapping ports shouldn't work, because Kazaa (or whatever you're trying to connect to) won't be expecting connections on the port you're connecting out on. If your uni are blocking ports correctly then nothing will get out on those blocked ports no matter what you do, because their firewall will be scanning all outgoing data and simply dropping any that comes along on those ports. Unfortunately you do need to connect via an outside machine of some kind (whether that's an external proxy, another computer or whatever) and as such the speed you connect at will be limited by the slowest speed in the chain (if you're on a fast uni network this is more likely to be the external machine than yours). If you want to download at a reasonable speed you're quite likely going to have to pay (as in those two links danny put up). If you've got the Socks2HTTP free demo there is an FAQ for setting it up with Kazaa here.

You can't unblock the ports if they're blocked up the pipe to you, but you can tunnel ports out via other ports, however to do that to connect to something like kazaa you'll need a machine somewhere outside the blocked network you can use to route your traffic through. Basically the outside machine is there to route your traffic back onto the port that kazaa/whatever your trying to connect to uses. With two linux machines you'll need to do this with ssh port forwarding (I can give you more specific commands if you need it), with windows I'm not so sure. If the outside machine is a Linux machine I think putty can do port forwarding (actually, it can). Unfortunately a lot of the time, by the time your setting up all this sort of stuff you almost may as well be running your p2p on the outside machine and streaming it back home via some other (unblocked) method. There may be other ways of doing it using an external anonymous proxy or an external windows machine or something, but I'm not so sure on that. Someone else might be able to help you a bit better.

It depends on what p2p network we're talking about here, but on most tracking users is fairly trivial. With bittorrent for instance, an interested party doesn't actually have to seed anything, they just have to connect to the tracker and they can see the IP of anyone who connects to them in any way. This is actually quite widely used AFAIK. With other networks you often don't even need to connect to download to see what people are offering for download... Of course, they can always just bully the people who run the trackers and/or the torrent download sites into handing over their logs and then "catch" everyone who used that site; such as happened with lokitorrent (although to be fair I don't think there was much 'bullying' going on there, more mutual backscratching). In theory just having the logs to prove you downloaded a torrent isn't tantamount to to proving you downloaded the file itself, but then in theory there is absolutely nothing illegal about hosting torrent files that can be used to download copyrighted material - that hasn't stopped the MPAA yet though. Basically, if you're using a public p2p network of any kind (with possibly the only exception being freenet) to download copyrighted material you can assume that it's fairly likely someone like the MPAA will have your IP. Although at the moment it's pretty unlikely that anything will happen about it unless you're a very heavy user.

Brilliant, thanks very much guys. That's all what I was hoping to hear :) Just got put off by seeing all these product descriptions listing cranksets as "9 speed specific".

I know this isn't strictly a trials question, but it is general push bike tech. If it really hurts you to answer a non-trials specific question you can always pretend for a minute I'm running a 21 speed trials bike :) Title should be fairly descriptive, but I've just bought a Deore crankset for my mtb that is apparantly 9 speed specific and I'm still running a 7 speed rear cassette. I definitely need a new chain, however what I'm not sure on is what chain would be best to get. Is a 9 speed chain going to run smoother on a 7 speed cassette, or is an 7/8 speed chain going to run smoother on a 9 speed crankset? Obviously the ideal solution would be to upgrade to a 9 speed cassette, but I'd rather avoid that if possible as it'd mean extra expense on new shifters (I've only just bought a new set of 7 speed shifters) and it's not like I really feel the need for more than 21 gears at the moment.

If we're just talking domain name registration I reccomend easily. I have no idea what their hosting is like, but I use them for my DNS and they're pretty good. Always happy to set up extra sub-domains (at no extra charge like some companies I've heard of) and will happily set up DNS wild cards with no hassle at all. Helpfully they're also pretty reasonably priced :)

Worryingly I bet a whole pile of people go out and buy some Viz Urbans based on this 'review' now. Actually, I do need a new set of forks... :)