Sadly Nitromors is not what it once was but even so a liquid / gel based stripper will be kinder than a heat gun, after which a progressive rub down with finer and finer wire wool (to at least 000 or even 0000) and finally a good application of wax will bring the wood up beautifully. I'd, be tempted to re-upholster in leather although that wouldn't be cheap.

Read somewhere recently that this would be the last series they make, so it looks as if we won't see all of the books covered which is rather a shame. This has been rather an enjoyable outing.

It seems, according to Dell's own tools, that my trusty Precision's ssd is on the way out and they are accordingly dispatching a replacement. Under normal circumstances I would usually take this as an opportunity to start afresh. I keep backups of all data so normally it's not the end of the world to lose a few hours, or days as the the case may be to rebuild the machine and get it back to the way I like it. Time is not on my side at present so I need to cheat, taking a full image of the existing disk in order to restore it to the replacement when it arrives next week. I've never tried this approach before and would be keen to know if others have and with what degree of success. Assuming that indeed it has been successful what would be their recommendation of a suitable product to carry this out. The ssd in question has a capacity of 500gb. I have a NAS available with enough room to accommodate a backup of this size, alternatively I could always access some cloud storage.

More decades than I care to remember of tinkering with machines and peripherals, combined with a reluctance to throw anything on the grounds that it might come in useful one day, have left me with two very large boxes filled with cables. When I started helping clients to start digitising what were once paper based offices (so full install of machines, network cabling etc) I discovered the joy of the velcro cable tie, which can be obtained in a myriad of colours. My cable boxes have cables wrapped with different coloured ties (blue = usb, black = power etc etc) and, just because I could, I wrote a small application to keep tracks of them which is linked to the client's office setup tables. When they destroy cables it's pretty easy to establish if I a) have one in a box, and b) what colour velcro tie it will be sporting. This also has one other small but not to be sneezed at advatage, they stay seperate and untangled!

I'm rather inclined to agree with you there. I too went through school doing all mathematical calculations (at which in truth I wasn't particularly good) in my head or with the use of either a slide rule or log tables. Computers of course were non existent except for the odd class where we would add holes to punch cards, have them submitted to the local university, wait for two months and then discover that two plus two did indeed equal five. Now decades down the road having found myself writing more and more code for what were once these new fangled computer things I find myself revisiting the maths of my schooldays and being curious once again to use slide rules and log tables and see just how much you could actually do with them. Slide rules I have been able to locate via the dreaded ebay and one or two other specialist sites, but log tables have proved to be more of a problem. It's almost as if they've disappeared of the face of the earth, that or I've been looking in entirely the wrong place.

Sincerely hope you have many happy years motoring in it. I love mine. You may find if you are often carrying the hounds in the back that it will pay to get the cargo bulkhead (the big full height wire grill that can go behind the rear seats). We find it a) keeps the mutts in the back. b) gives them their own space (very useful when driving the length and breadth of France) and finally if , god forbid you were to have a prang then at least they wouldn't be catapulted all the way to front.

Actually mine's a two litre , 150 bhp and goes like sh*t of the proverbial shovel. Good returns on motorways come from hitting that sweet spot of engine revs and speed, all too easy to do on European motorways , damn near impossible on British roads.

VW Caddy Max Kombi For that budget you can spec every conceivable extra going, you'll end up with a motor that seats five in comfort with enough room in the back to take two deerhounds in comfort as well (for those not versed in canine breeds think small donkey). Fantastic vehicle to drive, especially in the automatic variant. Mine can easily return not far off 63 miles to the gallon when driven on long runs on European motorways. Not quite as good a return on UK roads, but then again our roads are shit.

Already have three of those, different breed admittedly. They now cower in fear as kittens approach!

Latest addition to family have just discovered the joys of my desk. In addition to detecting their presence on the keyboard it would also help if it could detect which monitor they have decided to look at and automatically transfer my work window to a vacant monitor.

Colour Lasers can be remarkably cheap to run these days subject to the usual proviso that you don't use manufacturer branded toner refills. I have an Oki that has and continues to do Stirling work. The other half though is very much into photography and whilst a colour laser will produce modestly good printed images they can't compare to a good inkjet. Now having said that these days if there are images that she wants printed so that they can be framed and placed on a wall somewhere we take them to a 'professional' print house. I have been more than pleasantly surprised at just how reasonable the costs are. So we now have a colour laser for all the everyday printing needs (I still hanker after the paperless office that we were promised decades ago) which is capable of producing colour output at less than a penny a page, although mostly its plain black text at substantially less than a penny a page, and any specialist print jobs we have done elsewhere which, when taking into account the costs of maintaining inkjets, seems to work out cheaper in the long run.

Actually they are reasonably happy with the concept of selling on the last day of the month and the new owner taxing on the next day, and offer advice over the phone to that extent. True they do point out the technical need for a SORN but if you inform them of the sale, which you can do over the internet, during the last hour of play (as defined by their technical opening hours) on the last day of the month, and tax it within the first hour of play on the first day of the next month it is effectively taxed because their system has not yet got around to deciding that it's untaxed. Government inefficiencies can be put to ones advantage but they are admittedly very few and very far between. In the main government systems are just a complete pain.

I have created a WPF Custom Control (NOT a user control). I would now like to properly install this control into end users machines such that when they select a wpf project in visual studio it is automatically loaded. I have searched high and low through Code Project, Stack Overflow and of course google, but nowhere can I find anything that explains simply what (if any ) attributes I might need to add to this custom control and what I may need to set in the registry in order to achieve this result. Most articles and tutotials now seem to suggest going down the visx route and using the WPF Toolbox control template as the base for ones control, but that is based on User Control and by doing that I'd lose the additional benefits I've gained from creating a custom control from scratch (although I do like the idea of using a visx, but cannot see how to add an already complete custom control to one and achieve the result I'm after). So has anyone here faced this issue and can tell me what it is that I need to do with a finished wpf custom control in order to get it successfully installed into an end users machine. Ideally I would like to target visual studio 2010 upwards, but fot the time being I'd be happy just figuring out where to start.

Did the conversion process to win 10 by any chance prompt you to sign in with a different (or newly created Microsoft Account). The two machines I have 'allowed' to run the update so far have not been affected by this, both however were accessed via a Microsoft Id to start with and that same id is still in use on the upgrade. Admittedly, and especially in the light of what folks have said here and elsewhere my main development machine remains firmly anchored to it's old system os.

I have used this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inateck-Gigabit-Ethernet-Network-Adapter/dp/B00ESVH4MO[^]with my surface pro. Doesn't require an external power source and provides a fast Ethernet port as well. Generally speaking the surface pro has been an excellent machine for development, but it really comes into its own when you need to travel to a client. Having a portable development platform in such a small form factor is fantastic. Dom

Christian Thanks for your quick reply, I was starting to think the same, so now I guess I'm going to have to turn my attention to doing an NSLookup during the installation routine and seeing if I can get the information I need from there, unless you have a better idea that is. Dom

Is there a relatively 'foolproof' way to either determine the smtp server being used by a user of ones program, or alternatively a 'default' setting that one could assign as the smtp host that should work. This is for use in an application that will be utilising system.net.mail for automatic e mailing. I would prefer to avoid having to ask the end user to supply such information during the installation, simply because not all of thenm would know what it is. Most of the searches that I have done around this all seem to include a 'hardcoded' smtp host, which is the one thing I'm trying to avoid. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.