Recent Posts

1926

Living Room / Re: Is Excel the most dangerous software in the world?

« Last post by IainB on November 15, 2015, 08:05 AM »

I completely agree with your last paragraph.
**** rant alert ****
Sounds like you never had the "pleasure" of turning a solution created by such an "inventive" person into a system that actually scales. ...
____________________________________

-Shades (November 14, 2015, 09:17 AM)

Sorry for misleading you, but I did actually have that "pleasure" many times, and the use of "inventive" was a deliberate euphemism for "[expletive deleted]" - so I can resonate with your rant.
The most polite thing I could say about them in polite company was that they were "inventive", but I would also use that term as it was often quite a politically sensitive matter too, in that management had invariably at some point been responsible for mistakenly allowing these people to wreak their peculiar form of havoc on the company's information systems, so there was a lot of egg-on-face type of concern (no-one wants to get fired for making a genuine mistake in ignorance of the potential risks of that sort of mistake).

In one case, I recall that I was called in as a consultant in the role of project director to help at a company where they did indeed have around their necks the proverbial millstone - a legacy of these kinds of "inventive" solutions - mostly Access databases, and some Excel spreadsheets, and none of them documented, of course. A project had been belatedly set up to address the tremendous mess that had resulted and that now needed to be cleared up. It took quite a while, for which I was paid handsomely, so I couldn't really complain.        $$$

I'd happily sweep the streets if I was paid enough.

1927

Activation/License/Language Help / Re: About signing up to download freeware license keys - READ IN PLEASE

« Last post by IainB on November 15, 2015, 07:34 AM »

Whoa. Please take your ego off the shift key.
________________________

-Tuxman (November 14, 2015, 06:20 PM)

Have some sympathy. I think you may find that @shechaiyah's PC has got the SHIFTCAPSLOCKLOUD Keyboard Hijack Virus. I got that once and it got me into real strife - I was given a warning by the Lothario.com dating site I was using at the time that, if I didn't keep my voice down, then I would be banned.
Unfortunately, by the time I had managed to get a virus removal tool to excise the virus, all my potential dates unfriended me and I had to start over with a completely new Lothario profile. It was very embarrassing, I can tell you.   

1928

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Questions about sorting and formatting

« Last post by IainB on November 15, 2015, 07:18 AM »

Formatting will be stripped from all items in the quick paste menu -- it's only the most recent clip that keeps its formatting because windows manages that if you use Ctrl+V to paste it.  You can use hotkey as Tomos said to paste last clip as plaintext.

I want the opposite -- i.e., to keep the formatting of previous clips.
For instance, if I copy a number of tables as separate clips, I want to be able to paste them later (once I've finished making the clips) individually from the Quick Paste menu. How do I do this?
Thanks
________________________

-rkr3 (November 15, 2015, 05:56 AM)

Hmm...tricky.

1929

Find And Run Robot / Re: Using FARR to open website in different locations?

« Last post by IainB on November 14, 2015, 09:09 AM »

Not sure whether this is precisely what is required, but I thought I should mention that one can generally do this sort of thing with the Awesome Bar in Firefox, after setting it to look in Bookmarks and History.
The Awesome Bar will search for URLs with any relevant terms, Bookmarks and Keywords you throw at it.
For example:

1930

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on November 13, 2015, 09:21 PM »

I have always been interested in calculators. I was intrigued when I found this article on an emulator for the Sinclair Scientific calculator: Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35, and I finally understood why its calculation of Pi was incorrect - the constraints of its el cheapo design meant that it only had three decimal places of accuracy at best!

I found it as a link in this great GitHub list of Emulators written in JavaScript 

1931

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by IainB on November 12, 2015, 08:59 PM »

This gave me a bit of a surprise (CCleaner cleanup of Win10 + MS Edge 14Gb cache 2015-11-13):
(with thanks to @mouser for creating SC, which made the compound screen clipping easy)

1932

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff"

« Last post by IainB on November 12, 2015, 06:39 AM »

As a keen cyclist with children, I had always been in favour of the New Zealand law making it compulsory to wear a bicycle helmet. However, the outcome of that law is apparently not what one might have intuitively expected - according to a 2012 report from the NZ Medical Journal. I'd not seen it before. Very interesting statistical analysis.
Evaluation of New Zealand’s bicycle helmet law - New Zealand Medical Journal

-IainB (January 25, 2015, 10:35 AM)

Study: The Latest Evidence That Bike Helmet Laws Don't Help Rider Safety - CityLab

Public health might be better off if cities focused on building better bike lanes instead.
    Eric Jaffe @e_jaffe Nov 10, 2015 Comments

It goes against all common sense, even as it’s become increasingly clear to anyone swayed by the science: bike helmet laws don’t seem to improve rider safety.

The latest evidence comes via a new study, published in BMJ Open, conducted by a group of Canada-based public health scholars. Kay Teschke of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, and collaborators gathered Canadian data on bicycle use, cycle-related hospitalization, and a number of other variables including helmet legislation in 11 jurisdictions between 2006 and 2011. Some areas had helmet laws over this period, while others did not.

Teschke and company found two factors to be statistically linked with bike hospitalizations. One was gender. For all types of injuries, women experienced “substantially lower” hospitalization rates than men did. This finding—in line with previous reports—could be the result of women being less likely to ride on major city streets that don’t have separated bike lanes. Another possible explanation offered in the past is that women tend to ride slower than men do.

The second main variable related to bike hospitalizations was local cycling mode share. For traffic-related injuries in particular, areas with higher shares of bike riders among all travelers had lower hospitalization rates than other regions, a finding that held for all bodily injuries as well as those to the head or brain. In other words, when more people ride bikes, fewer riders get injured—a clear sign that cyclists experience safety in numbers.
___________________
Related Story
Why It's Safer to Walk and Bike Where More People Walk and Bike
Drivers pay more attention.
___________________

What the researchers failed to find was any connection between helmet laws and bike-related hospitalization rates. That held true whether they looked at all cycling injuries or just traffic-specific injuries. Surprisingly, it also held true when they narrowed in on body parts protected by a helmet: the brain, head, scalp, skull, face, even neck. Since helmet laws don’t necessarily mean compliance, they looked at helmet usage, too, and once again found nothing.

The point is not that helmets do nothing or that you shouldn’t wear them. If you fall off your bike and hit your head, it’s obviously much better to have a helmet on. At a personal level, if that’s what it takes to get you riding, by all means, helmet up. But at the local government level, it’s time to recognize that other safety measures have far greater public health benefits—in particular, well-designed infrastructure that separates riders from general traffic.

Here’s Teschke, writing to CityLab via email, on how there’s sufficient evidence out there by now “to shift our focus” from bike laws to bike lanes:

    It has dual advantages, both reducing injuries and encouraging cycling, an important public health goal of its own given the physical activity and environmental benefits. Comparisons between North America and the Netherlands or Denmark have long suggested that their route design focus is better at welcoming cycling and achieving lower injury rates. Many were concerned that Dutch and Danish infrastructure wouldn't have the same impact here, but there is more and more research in North America showing that it does.

1933

Living Room / Re: Patch your Flash! Version 19.0.0.226 (October 16, 2015)

« Last post by IainB on November 12, 2015, 05:14 AM »

^^ That's rather interesting. Thanks for mentioning it @f0dder.

1934

Living Room / Re: Is Excel the most dangerous software in the world?

« Last post by IainB on November 12, 2015, 05:03 AM »

Is Excel the most dangerous software in the world?
Well, whilst calling it the most dangerous software might be stretching it a bit, it could certainly be argued from a historical perspective that they had the potential to be "dangerous" and sometimes had actually proven to be so in fact.
My experience has been that Excel and Access have generally been the de facto financial black holes for a great deal of labour costs, where often non-IT personnel had spent many hours inventively developing one-off or prototype spreadsheet models and access database applications as business solutions to do often quite clever and useful things that simply could not have been done (at the time) in a timely or cost-effective manner using IT otherwise. Often these one-off solutions were tweaked to the stage where they could become so useful that they were commercially indispensable, and might even form a large part of the core legacy solutions for an enterprise.

A great strength of Excel and Access lies in their "tweakability" by the user - the extent of user control. That is also their Achilles Heel - there is a profound scope for human error in developing the logic and formulae in the models/applications, and that is why, from the perspective of stochastic and accounting accuracy, the models need to be independently audited and verified, but certainty in that regard (that all errors have been identified and fixed) is something that was and remains notoriously extremely difficult to achieve - despite the growth of things like spreadsheet auditing tools.

However, having worked on complex models such as ITEM (the UK Independent Treasury Econometric Model) and climate models of the North Sea, I would recommend skepticism towards any plea of incompetence - the "Oh dear, there was an error in the [insert name of scam] financial model" argument. These people aren't necessarily the fools they might have us believe.
For example, in "JPMorgan’s model had not captured this at all...".
Yeah, right.

1935

Living Room / Re: Interesting "stuff" - Spandex as the fabric of Space and Time

« Last post by IainB on November 10, 2015, 08:46 PM »

A Relativity teaching tool: Gravity Visualized - YouTube

1936

General Software Discussion / Re: flamory

« Last post by IainB on November 09, 2015, 12:56 AM »

Ah, what a pity. I was keenly waiting to see what readers gave as feedback to flamory. "The proof is in the pudding", as they say, so I was preparing to trial it, but from the above it certainly doesn't look too hopeful, and I think at this stage I will not bother to trial it. Mandatory requirements for me include privacy/confidentiality, so what @JavaJones refers to is, for me, a showstopper.

These are some of the better potential alternatives, as I see things so far:

• Scrapbook ($Free): (as used in the original academic research tool and Firefox extension from xuldev.org, or forks/versions of same) excellent; uses a purpose-built public domain engine to provide a faithful local (client) copy of the web page in a non-proprietary format (so is shareable) and also copies any related files embedded in the webpage (if you specify which file types you want, for all webpages, or dynamically for any given webpage), and can copy nested pages to several levels deep (level captures can also be set dynamically); allows annotation, highlighting and partial copying; allows sorting/filtering of the library. Limitations include: only works for Firefox; a slow folder management pane and a painfully slow indexing interface when you have a large library (as I do) - though it meets most of my requirements otherwise. This is the standard tool I use at present.
  
  
• Zotero ($Free): (as a dual-purpose tabbed-page Firefox extension and stand-alone client application) excellent; uses the same public domain engine as Scrapbook to provide a faithful local (client) copy of the web page in a non-proprietary format (so is shareable) and can also copy related files embedded in the webpage. An academic information/research-gathering tool From zotero.org (via George Mason University). I am currently trialing this (have been for a few months) and have so far found it to be very good for capturing web pages (full/partial content) and/or screenshots. I think this might be a tool that I could end up using as standard for (at least) webpage copy, edit and screenshot.
  
  
• Wezinc ($Free): a PIM for students and information workers, geared towards providing a client-based repository - enables the user to create mindmaps, text notes, passwords, capture from webpages, screenshots, files, and search for anything from a single source; links very effectively with the Clipboard.  I am currently trialing this (have been for a few months) and have so far found it to be very good, and, from an ergonomic perspective, it has a beautifully-designed GUI. I think this might be a tool that I could end up using as standard for (at least) webpage copy, edit and screenshot, if not as my primary PIM.
  
  
• WizNote ($Free): They now seem to have an English translation for large parts of this website (so less need for Google Translate or the S3.Google Translator extension). WizNote is a superb Cloud/client PIM which I have done a mini-review for in the DC Forum (now out-of-date as WizNote is under very active commercial development and improvement). WizNote is a PIM and with the new OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) features, seems to be becoming a "killer app" challenger to MS Office's OneNote and OneDrive approach.  I think this might be a tool that I could end up using as standard for (at least) webpage copy, edit and screenshot, if not as my primary PIM.
  
  
• Surfulater v3.0 (US$79.00): - as referred to by @dr_andus, above. Having trialed this, it seems to be a very good client-based PIM application with major strengths relating to web content capture, but for me it's proprietary database format was a very negative point, and it was/is simply just too expensive for what it appears to offer. Furthermore, I wouldn't buy it anyway, as, for some time now, it appears to have arrived at end-of-life, as the developer has for some obscure reason decided to put its development on hold and is apparently focused on superseding it with what seems to be a new replacement - a Cloud-based service called Clibu (refer Clibu V1 released, improved UI and easier to use) - which (though I could be wrong, of course), seems to me to be taking several steps backwards for techno-ideological reasons, or maybe it's to create a different business revenue model. From experience, this is what tends to happen when developers of seriously useful PIMs seem to focus on functionality at the loss of focus on user requirements - e.g., InfoSelect v10.
  

There are some other, now moribund, software apps for web page content/snapshot capture - tools that could be referred to here - including one (I forget its name) that @40hz said he used and was very good, and this (following), which I stumbled upon a couple of months back (I don't think these two are one and the same, though I could be wrong, of course):

• Internet Research Scout ($Free): (NLA at http://bytescout.com, but the download is for Special Edition (last/final version v2.22) from http://download.cnet...2064_4-10386528.html. This seems like a very good app that I am trialing at present, just out of interest.

1937

Developer's Corner / Re: Blog Essay: Reconsider - Startups Don't Need to Disrupt the Universe

« Last post by IainB on November 08, 2015, 03:13 AM »

^^ Har-de-har-har. Very droll.

1938

Living Room / Re: Knight to queen's bishop 3 - Snowden charged with espionage.

« Last post by IainB on November 08, 2015, 03:06 AM »

I wasn't sure whether this came under the category of "silly humour" or "Snowdengate", but either way it made me smile:
Microsoft Invests In 3 Undersea Cable Projects To Improve Its Data Center Connectivity | TechCrunch

I guess this sort of thing is increasingly likely to happen, as US Cloud-hosting corporations attempt to at least give things a semblance of "wanting to be seen to be not in league with the NSA" and so start planting their data centres offshore of the North Americas.
It will be interesting anyway. There could be far more capacity in those cables than MS would be likely to need...
Maybe MS is about to offer telco services too?   
Some people (not me, you understand) might query whether the NSA will be connecting to these cables as they are being laid, or afterwards; however, I couldn't possibly comment.
_____________________________

-IainB (May 12, 2015, 02:55 AM)

Rather dryly, The Inquirer posts:

AWS announces UK region offering local cloud storage in wake of Safe Harbour ruling- The Inquirer
But what effect is May to December?
By Chris Merriman
Fri Nov 06 2015, 15:19

AWS announces UK region offering local cloud storage in wake of Safe Harbor ruling

AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) has announced a new UK region for its cloud services. It is expected that the UK operation will be complete by the end of 2016, and that the facility will bolster the current AWS regional offerings in Dublin and Frankfurt.

The news has a double impact for customers in the UK. On an operational level, it will create a lower latency, higher speed offering for customers that will significantly affect organisations such as Channel 4 which uses AWS as the backbone of its All 4 service.

The second aspect comes from the continuing controversy surrounding the Safe Harbour ruling. UK companies will now be able to store data in the UK, thus avoiding any unpleasant laws governing access to files that may exist in other countries.

Of course, the news comes in the same week that the so-called Snoopers' Charter was revealed, which includes a number of clauses that will make UK-based storage less appealing.

Government CTO Liam Maxwell was glowing in his praise of Amazon's decision and referred to the need for onshore data storage.

"It’s great to see that AWS will provide commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK. Not only will this mean a significant investment in the UK economy, but more healthy competition and innovation in the UK data centre market.

"This is good news for the UK government given the significant amount of data we hold that needs to be kept onshore,” he said.

The announcement of a UK region comes just a day after Amazon revealed a string of new data centres in South Korea. Jeff Barr, one of the main cloud evangelists at AWS, said in a blog post: “We have always believed that you need to be able to exercise complete control over where your data is stored and where it is processed.”

Which is all very noble, but Amazon probably hadn't bet on Theresa May.

We reported last month on an Australian university that had made the decision to switch from Google Apps to Microsoft Office 365 specifically to ensure that its data would be stored in Europe rather than the US. It's an illustration of what's at stake when planning a cloud infrastructure.

Presumably AWS don't realise that people read the news on the Internet...

1939

General Software Discussion / Re: SpiderOak Unlimited Space

« Last post by IainB on November 05, 2015, 07:05 AM »

...You can't trust a commercial operation you have a contract with if they make nonsensical and unilateral changes like that and without any explanation...
____________________

-IainB (October 29, 2015, 03:35 AM)

Regarding Microsoft's apparent turnabout regarding OneDrive max storage limits, at least they gave a useful explanation (even if one might not like or agree with it), so, hats off to them for that.

1940

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CLIPBOARD HELP+SPELL LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v2.32.0 BETA - Nov 1, 2015

« Last post by IainB on November 04, 2015, 04:07 PM »

Feedback on CHS v2.32.0 Beta:
1. Editing a filtered (Ctrl+F) text clip had been a real problem. This now works just fine (I typed up the text of this DCF comment in such a clip). Thankyou!   

2. During the editing, I moved back and forth between some clips in the filtered view, copying from them and pasting into the clip being edited. This would be realistic because it is what I would typically want to do in adding to or building a new text note in CHS, and it was not really workable before. It seemed to work OK, but then CHS seemed to stop and then displayed one of the copied clips (like it was slowly moving through the clips), then back to the one I was editing, and then Windows Explorer crashed, but CHS was apparently OK, but VERY slow to display again on screen at first.
When Explorer had restarted, I continued and repeated the exercise, but was unable to repeat the crash, so I don't know whether the crash was related to CHS.

1941

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: CLIPBOARD HELP+SPELL LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - v2.32.0 BETA - Nov 1, 2015

« Last post by IainB on November 02, 2015, 02:29 AM »

@mouser: Just installed ClipboardHelpAndSpellSetup (v2.32.0 beta 2015-11-01).
Thanks for the changes/fixes.

1942

General Software Discussion / Re: SpiderOak Unlimited Space

« Last post by IainB on October 29, 2015, 03:35 AM »

I don't think their blog post was stupid. I think they were right about unlimited plans not being a viable business model without restrictions. In fact, their stances on zero-knowledge and unlimited plans were part of what made them stand out from the competition.
I find it amusing that they would offer unlimited plans anyway, and wonder what restrictions they will have to impose (I guess limited availability and price point for a start).

-Jibz (October 29, 2015, 02:45 AM)

This may be a very bright red warning lamp. They will be unlikely to be doing this out of generosity. It's a risky market and highly competitive, with low margins, necessitating high volumes of business to survive. Doing an about-face on their earlier firm guidelines for a viable business model might well indicate that their business model has proven infeasible and is haemorrhaging (making a loss) and that they are anticipating going under if there is no change. Desperate times sometimes require desperate remedies, so reversing their earlier commitment and presenting an enticing loss-leader offer may be a panic attempt to bump up the business volume and change things for the better, or at least reduce the haemorrhage.

For example, there was evidence of instability in similar survival mode reactions in Wuala and Tresorit, and I stopped relying on backup in either of them as soon as I saw the tell-tale warning signs. Wuala has gone under and Tresorit is probably currently struggling to survive. I was also wondering whether Mega was stable, after studying the significant changes of shareholder ownership there.

Given that experience, if I were a SpiderOak customer, then right now I'd be rapidly making sure that I was no longer dependent on SpiderOak for anything - and then cancel my contract - and I certainly wouldn't be spending more on them after they have just done an about-face on their earlier statements. You can't trust a commercial operation you have a contract with if they make nonsensical and unilateral changes like that and without any explanation.
If one did spend more on them regardless, then one could well be at risk of throwing good money after bad.

1943

Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.14.0 Beta - Oct 26, 2015

« Last post by IainB on October 28, 2015, 04:44 PM »

^^ Thanks for this. Now using this Beta v4.14.0 (2015-10-26). Nothing to report so far.

1944

Living Room / Re: good Videos [short films] here :)

« Last post by IainB on October 26, 2015, 11:29 PM »

Many thanks to @Renegade for apparently posting the link to the Twilight Zone episode "Wordplay" by mistake to the discussion Re: Is the term "Negro" offensive or not?.

...One of the reasons that I love the Humpty Dumpty quote so much is that we **SHARE** language in ways that other things are not shared.
You don't get to change the meaning of a word by yourself.
It's nicely embodied in "Wordplay":

...
___________________________

-Renegade (October 26, 2015, 01:59 AM)

The trouble is, I couldn't recall whether I had seen that episode, so I had to watch it, but then it auto-played the next in sequence and I had to watch that...and then...etc.

Curse you @Renegade!

1945

Living Room / Re: bicycling suddenly a British speciality?!

« Last post by IainB on October 24, 2015, 04:21 AM »

Thankyou @mouser. I actually have a birthday every year but rarely mention it, and I only mentioned it now as a coincidental connection to the bit about the Taupo tyres (on my "birthday bike").
This year, my 14 y/o daughter made a chocolate b/day cake for me/us with LOADS of fresh whipped cream. It was very yummy and I've just eaten too much of it and now I feel sick.

1946

Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately

« Last post by IainB on October 24, 2015, 03:40 AM »

Ok... So I go outside for a smoke, and I trip across this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk...ancelled-in-malaysia

-Renegade (October 24, 2015, 02:29 AM)

That's priceless. I sometimes wonder whether the BBC doesn't try to do its level best to grind its face into its own poo. It's probably a form of ritual liberal-marxist religio-political self-abasement as penance/atonement and as proxy for an imagined history of racial abuse by white male (mainly British) colonists.

1947

Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately

« Last post by IainB on October 24, 2015, 03:26 AM »

OH MY FREAKING CRIPES ALMIGHTY~!
This is just 1,000,000 degrees of awesomeness~!

It's got:

• 9/11
• Conspiracies
• Back to the Future (the movie)
• Funky wildness
• "Concentrating collective consciousness onto a single space-time focal point" (Just how friggin' awesome is that???)
• And so much MOAR~!

And it's in the friggin' WASHINGTON POST!!!
At under 13 minutes (11 minutes after the credits), this is going to be one of the best/wonkiest films you've seen in forever!
I've got $5 in DC credits for anyone* that watches it and isn't one of:

• Entertained
• Freaked out a bit
• Saying to themselves, "WTF did I just watch???"

(* Must have >50 posts and have posted in this thread before. Max 4 people.)
And that's why the wonky, freaky stuff always has a place~!
_______________________________

-Renegade (October 24, 2015, 02:12 AM)

I think that's inappropriate and political and should be moved to The Basement. Anyone who disagrees with me is a denier and is ad homineming me and I don't understand what logical fallacies are.
Sorry for any typos, but I are just now only learning to rite proper.

1948

Living Room / Re: Movies you've seen lately - "41"

« Last post by IainB on October 24, 2015, 02:59 AM »

...Also what happens to all these twins he has flying around?  Do they create a softball team of clones?  Like Joe Shmoe playing all 9 positions and managing versus the high school girl's softball team? 
_________________

-MilesAhead (October 23, 2015, 08:09 AM)

Well, I think they're not "clones" per se, it's simply that they cease to exist in their own timeline as they go through the hole in the floor and enter a parallel universe's timeline where they probably already have a near-duplicate, but if the duplicate has already gone back in time (or is about to), then that's 2 of them out of their native timelines, and so on. The plot does not try to resolve what happens to all those duplicates crossing into other timelines, but I like the central theme picked by the movie, which is that one of the duplicates has to cross over to many timelines and go back deep into the past in order to effect a positive incremental change in the "present".
I think that's a great SF story, and it reminds me of a quite different SF film, "Jacket" (which I thought was superb and have watched several times). "The Time Traveller's Wife" is another, similar, I guess.

1949

Finished Programs / Re: Frameless.exe

« Last post by IainB on October 23, 2015, 11:53 PM »

There is one little program that I have on my laptop and I use it to display animated gifs with a transparent background. The program is called Impression: eyes, made by utilhaven (shareware, but the freeware version does work ok. and YES, it´s 100% FRAMELESS!!).
Unfortunately, utilhaven has closed down... so I don't know what's happening with the program.

-Chessnia (January 11, 2015, 12:06 PM)

You can find the website in Wayback (click on this link)  and download the proggies from here:

• Download Impression Eyes v1.12 (shareware) | Wayback
• Download First Impression v1.02 (freeware) | Softpedia

1950

Living Room / Re: bicycling suddenly a British speciality?!

« Last post by IainB on October 23, 2015, 09:26 PM »

Thanks for the birthday greets. The recycled traditional happy birthday song was nice, and the "bespoke" greeting was punny.
@tomos: Bad luck about having the trekking bike nicked. I really hate that, but then, these bikes are just too expensive and tempting to be left lying around - as I found out to my cost. My Trek SL1000 and my daughter's new (junior) bike were both stolen at the same time from within the basement of the apartment building where they were secured with cable-locks. Someone had evidently seen them there and planned on taking them, and simply cut the cables with a bolt-cutter. I advertised describing the bikes, and said that I'd like to get the bikes back and would be happy to pay for them if anyone found them, and provided a mobile number to contact. The Trek was returned by someone who called me up and said they knew who had stolen them, but they couldn't find the other bike, so I ended up replacing that with a secondhand bike of the same model. The finder didn't want any money but said they wouldn't refuse $20 to recharge their phone card, so I paid that.

By the way, here's a photo (below) of the Taupo tyres on a blue Trek SL1000 bike (not my birthday bike). The clearly discernible whitish strip on the outer circumference of the tyre is made of reinforced/thicker rubber and is the bit where the rubber meets the road - that is the area where most punctures tend to occur. The tyre walls are also reinforced with extra nylon fabric. This makes them a bit stiffer, and as they also have a stiffer beading the Taupo tyres are not really foldable like the standard flimsy Bontrager brand road tyres.
This photo is better than if I had shown my bike's Taupo tyres, as my ones have a dark grey reinforced strip, which would not be so readily discernible in a photo.

(Click to enlarge.)