Any question answered...

Big ol' dongs.

You don't need to buy the range.
Bog standard works well and if it doesn't, no one will notice the difference.
There's marketing for you......

Hate myself for knowing this.
Hate the ad.
Hate the whole premise of ‘you’re shit so keep being a shit but no one else matters except YOU’ so buy a Mercedes and it’ll be ok proposition.

Well to be fair it's not the car's fault you're shit now is it.

It's always a cars' fault

It's always a cars' fault

So did a car put that apostrophe in the wrong place? :)

Does anyone here ride a steel Vigorelli track frame? If so, what would your review of it be?

Ta.

Is there a site that lets me check for free which carrier an iPhone is locked to if I enter the IMEI?

Graphite powder to lube gear cable outers, anyone tried it before?

AFAIK locking is done in the phone hardware, so there's no central database.

(well, Apple might be able to track it, but good luck getting data out of them)

Pretty sure this isn't right. There are definitely ways to report a phone as stolen and have the IMEI blocked from working.
As to which sites work and are free, not sure there

There are definitely ways to report a phone as stolen and have the IMEI blocked from working

Being locked out of all carriers is a slightly different mechanism from being locked in to only one.

True. But if a carrier lock was a hardware only thing then you'd have easy hacks to get it done rather than having to contact your current carrier.

Up until recently I've used easy hacks to unlock all my phones.

AIUI the official way to unlock an iPhone is for the carrier and/or Apple to send some sort of code to the phone that flicks a switch in the hardware to unlock it.

So Apple might have a log of which phones they've done that for, but the fundamental unlockedness is down to the phone hardware. Phones that were unlocked from the factory or were unlocked by other means won't be on the list.

send some sort of code to the phone that flicks a switch in the hardware

wat

I could say the same thing with longer words if you like. e.g. "the carrier transmits a unique cryptographically signed message to the phone that it uses to change the configuration of the cellular baseband modem to remove the SIM lock".

(I'm a bit unclear on the exact technical details of how exactly the message gets to the phone and whether it's the carrier or Apple that does the cryptographic signing, and so on, but you get the idea)

Has anyone converted a VHS to digital format?

Wanted to do this as a present, but initial costs of paying someone are more than I thought.*

Wondering if I can buy a 2nd hand DVD / VHS combo recorder and rip that way?

Cheers.

*the main problem is a large number of short films when there is a price per VHS.

My dad looked into this and he ended up just filming the each video with a digital camera on a tripod. Results were ok.

Thanks, but I'm not sure that's going to be viable for me.

Combo players on ebay look pretty cheap, but I just want to double check that I'm not going to end up with something that only plays.

Any number of usb video-capture devices are available, where you'd plug the audio and video out of your existing vhs player and then record it on a computer. Never used one though, so I can't recommend one.

Yeah he's retired so has a lot of time on his hands!

I've done it in years gone by with some kind of PCI (I can imagine you get USB ones now) card that had inputs for composite video (three phono cables red, white and yellow). Used a scart to composite cable from the video player and some kind of recording software on the PC. Think it came with the card but also seem to remember using VLC.

Cheers.

I'll have a look at cables. A couple of reviews seemed to imply a 2nd hand combo recorder would be easier.

Also put a couple of snipes on all-in-one units, as I figured that could be easier.