MisterDave

Neighbour bought one of those crinkly hoses for their garden earlier this year, is back to borrowing my flat hose already, no idea what went wrong with the crinkly one but it didn't last more than a few weeks of light use in a small garden & greenhouse.

Hate to disagree but it is! I dumped Orange (EE) and moved onto Three about a year ago after Orange decided that Sunday mornings before 7 was a good time to send me their weekly advertising texts and after a 12 month battle to get them to stop sending that crap. Three (PAYG) doesn't send me any texts apart from "your credit is low", "you've run out of credit" and "thanks for topping up". Just like all the other phone providers were a decade ago.

That's how you can tell a real Lord of the Rings fan from someone who just watched the film! Pretty sure I saw 2 different boats called Tom Bombadil on my recent journey up to Yorkshire from the bottom of the GU, boat index lists 4 boats with that exact name as well as 2 similar so it's a popular name.

Offers from total strangers who may not know what they're doing, or may just be making rhetorical feel-good noises. I doubt a court would be interested!

No, it's not a lot of money but I'd rather give money to charity or support a struggling canalside pub than waste it buying things that are free elsewhere

£1.60 a month is £18.20 a year for something that you could have got better quality for free from dozens of places. The only way that's a good deal is if the act of changing mail provider will require you to hire someone to reconfigure a load of systems or if you've had your @btinternet.com address printed on loads of letterheads. Free is a lot of a good deal, very hard to beat free, especially when it's not the type of free that bombards you with adverts. I pay about £8 a year for my family surname as a domain name, and use zoho free to create separate @(my-surname).net email accounts for both of my parents, myself, my daughter and my consultancy business.

You would not necessarily even be able to identify an RFID reader if the installer chose to hide or disguise it. the device could be hidden completely out of site inside the woodwork of a lock gate, inside water level monitoring apparatus or even inside water and elsan points. There are already readers on the market which are compact, waterproof, and ruggedized. Adoption of active RFID tags would allow the readers to be situated a distance away from the water's edge eliminating the need to place readers at obvious locations like choke points, as well as allowing readers to be mounted high up out of harm's way on buildings or utility poles. It would still be possible for a corrupt individual to take the chip off their boat and take it for a bicycle ride up the towpath to fool the system, however if the RFID readers were hidden the miscreant would never know if he had taken it far enough or moved it slowly enough between readers to give the appearance of a boat moving. I'm not saying I want tracking, I don't like the idea at all, I'm just saying that it could be made to work in the context of detecting who had moved where.

This could be a rumour or an old wives tail, but I have heard from multiple sources (including one person who used to work in management at a paint manufacturer) that genuine NATO paint is very porous and gives no water protection on its own. When I wanted to paint one of my motorbikes olive green I went for satin "military vehicle restoration paint", results came out looking good http://imgur.com/a/04XK6

POP and IMAP are the methods used by email clients such as outlook or thunderbird to get the mail from the mail server. POP takes the mail off the server and stores it on your computer (it's gone from the server, you have the only copy) whereas IMAP leaves the mail on the server and shows you a copy of it on your computer (it only gets removed from the server if you hit delete). If you still have lots of mail on the server the chances are you've been using IMAP so far. You could sign up to a new mail provider like zoho.com and enter the address of your old provider's POP server into their online interface, this would allow the new provider to retrieve all the messages from the old provider so your mail is still stored with the provider rather than on your own machine where it would be at risk of being lost if the machine died. The POP server address and details you will need to retrieve your old mail are as follows: address=mail.btinternet.com, port=995 SSL=on, STARTTLS=off

Many free mail providers have the ability to import mail from other providers. I use zoho.com, they will allow you to use pop3 to move mail from your old provider directly into a zoho account.

Surely it would diesel and the accuracy would drop to nothing. I used to have an air rifle which was modified for more power (legal, I had FAC at the time, before anyone lectures me). Occasionally it would diesel and the pellet would leave the barrel with no accuracy at all. I could hit something 15-20 degrees angle away from where I was aiming, somewhat dangerous! If you want to make good defensive use of a paintball gun you might consider buying bear-repellent balls for it, those little beauties burst into a cloud of pepper spray on impact. I think you mean the 1968 act, the only Firearms Act 1971 I could find was for the Republic of Ireland. Firearms Act 1968. S57(1). In this Act, the expression “firearm” means a lethal barrelled weapon of any description from which any shot, bullet or other missile can be discharged. If you were firing paint or pepper rounds from a paintball gun you're not using a lethal barrelled weapon, you're using a toy. Your actions are more akin to using poster paint or tabasco sauce in a supersoaker!

If you're only mooring for the day, the pair of bollards at the top side of Failsworth basin outside the flats would be more pleasant than the ones outside Tesco, just wouldn't want to overnight there due to being about 10 yards away from a nightclub beergarden which is rowdy until after 2am. As for Tesco offering some security, A group of about 20 or so youths appeared to give a beating to Tesco's security man at one point while we were moored there. The local police seemed to decide our presence was enough to justify a camera van in the carpark opposite (although that could be down to me telling the Oldham council youth street team that I would put a permanent end to the little shits if they started shooting at us again). The camera van did nothing to deter a youth who repeatedly tried to lift our ropes off the bollards, they really don't seem to be scared of anything until you start trying to hit them with a mooring pin.

There literally isn't anywhere safe at all before Failsworth, mostly concrete near the sides and where you can get to moor it's so obviously unsafe I'm pretty sure you wouldn't try, also some of the shorter pounds leak enough to leave you sat high and dry on mud after 30 mins. There's a pair of bollards outside Failsworth Tesco and another pair at the far side of Failsworth basin (just before the bridge) but that's very close to a nightclub and only a stones throw from Lock 65. If you get that far you might as well go 2 locks further and moor just above 64.

It's nice everywhere above Lock 64, only really nasty up to a mile or two above Failsworth. At Lock 68 we had thieves on the roof, at Tesco in Failsworth we had idiots shooting at us, at Lock 64 we had nice local man welcoming us, complaining that they don't get enough boats through despite locally sponsored attempts to beautify the area, and complaining that CRT had restricted their clean-up efforts. Quick trip down the weed hatch in Lock 65 as the boat wanted to go sideways instead of forwards. http://i.imgur.com/KuPIy73.jpg yes all that really did come off our prop!

Getting heavy with the local "needle" community can be a slippery slope. There's always one or two who will go out of their way to defend their reputation as the tough guy, you're likely to attract more trouble as they exercise their "need" to reinforce their reputation as the local hard man. Losing face could be as damaging to them in their screwed-up little world as losing your boat would be to you! Don't use a baseball bat or any form of dedicated weapon at all if you've any sense, if you find yourself going down this path use a heavy mooring pin, big maglite or windlass because you can claim to have instant-armed in the face of a perceived threat rather than having carried out a premeditated assault with the deadly weapon of your choice! Certainly don't use anything with a blade (eg a spade) or you might find yourself doing mandatory jail time as a result of "zero tolerance". After my experiences on the Rochdale I'm taken with the idea of using a high pressure pump and fire hose to repel the local troublemakers, I'm still undecided if that should be pumping canal water or toilet tank!

We passed thru there a few months ago and used it, also used the public one in Kidsgrove.

Stack the bit behind it with firebricks, it'll store heat and stay warm for ages. I'm in the middle of fitting a slightly bigger range to my boat, luckily it doesn't quite reach the gunwales but it does take up half my kitchen. http://www.stoves-etc.co.uk/Brands/LaNordica/LaNordicaMamyWoodBurningCooker

Someone jogging casually on a towpath is not a sporting activity, there is no sport with "casual jogging" in it, there is no element of competition, and no skill or prowess are required. People here are trying to change the definition of words to suit their agendas. Casual jogging can be beneficial to health and could make the participant better at various sports, but that does not make it a sport or sporting activity per se (unless we're going to start describing eating healthy food as a sporting activity as well!). The same can be said of casual or commuter cycling. I believe the CRT staffer misspoke, used the wrong word, maybe has a malformed concept of what sport is. The misunderstanding arising from this is inevitable, especially in an environment where so many people have already been endangered and injured by cyclists, an environment where so many experienced users are counting down to the first fatality and hoping they're not "it". The only person I've seen using a towing path safely for a "sporting activity" was one guy sprinting back and forth on a 100m stretch of empty path somewhere above Marple, stopping at each turnaround to do press-ups, sit-ups, and vigorous shadow boxing whilst his trainer made sure he didn't get in any other path user's way by moving him every time any one got near. There are many sports which are not necessarily competitive, however the element of competition in these has been replaced by expanded elements of skill and prowess. Testing skill and prowess on a towing path is likely to be as problematic as competing to be fastest. The towpath is not the place for competitive cycling, running, or competitive anything much more aggressive than competitive dominoes. It's way too dangerous a place to be testing physical abilities to the limit, there are better and safer places for that.

According to my dictionary, sporting means used in or associated with sport. Sport means an athletic activity involving skill or prowess and often of a competitive nature. I know of no cycling activities of a competitive nature which could be safely carried out on the towing path without detriment to other users. The simple act of using a bicycle on the towing path requires little skill and no prowess. Perhaps there's some new "slowest cycling" sport I'm not aware of, or perhaps the scandal is not "manufactured" at all but is an entirely natural reaction to some inflammatory wording.

I know someone who had the TV fly off the table and hit the window because local smackheads grabbed his generator and ran. Climbing out of Manchester a couple of months ago the local toerags grabbed a bicycle off our boat and ran, luckily for us it was padlocked to the handrails with a 10 foot wire rope. Next time I head that way I'll be taking the electric fence transformer and making everything on the roof live!.

Police don't always do the logical thing. They're human, fallible, and some of them don't seem to know very much about the law at all. I know of an incident where two girls leaving a pub car park on horseback were stopped and breathalysed. On revealing that they'd bought one pint each and shared it with the horses the officer on the scene radioed the station to find out if he needed to breathalyse the horses as well!

Nobody else pointed this out, might be useful. All the locks on the Aire and the Calder below Fall Ing lock are electric, so minimal physical effort required. You only have 3 manual locks on the Calder & Hebble before you're at Broad Cut.