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Don't worry, there are loads of models of e bike and cargo bike that have the wrong brake adapters fitted from factory so only a fraction of the brake pad even vaguely sweeps the disc, and when I followed through and queried these manufacturers the response was of course 'we've never heard of that before, very sorry, we'll do better in the future'. And then every single one I've seen on the road since 2021 is the exact same. Jokes.

Yup, my first voyage into canon SLR was 90's plastic units, eos 300 and eos 500 and a eos 3 or 5 with the eye control (only had 5 points though, thing was a tank). And honestly from every analogue camera with a TTL sensor I've ever used, they always had the best metering, only when shooting underground, sewers and mines was exposure (not the cameras fault) an issue.

Thats amazing news that 110 film is in production again!

Was gifted a Pentax 110 kit (alloy box with pretty much every lens and accessory that was popular at the time) in basically new condition from a house guest from Singapore. Never been able to use it, but now maybe there is a chance.

Tomato energy. New company with a daft name however if you....
Have an EV or plug in hybrid
Have a battery bank
Have electric panel heaters or salt furnace

Get on their lifestyle tariff. They have 3 different variations. Giving normal day rate, half price day rate and an few hours in the night at 5p rate.
For us they do an electric heater one that gives you 3 hours in morning and 3 hours in early evening at 14p a unit instead of 25p (cap) which gives us a saving of about 2£k a year compared to last year.

Don't think there is a referral scheme yet but will put up a code if there is one (used to be £50 credit each way).

Lots of cargo end up in Bucharest Romania within 2 weeks usually.

The locking technique is impeccable, targeted hit by professionals, firmly remind the police this is not an opportunity crime , it's very well organised the whole supply chain of them to move bikes out of the country usually very quickly.

Asked octopus about Agile so many times, won't cover our area, basically no tariff does. And we are on electric resistance heaters as very not easy to install air source pump due to old building, conservation area, only place for pump is gonna be noisy for neighbour and nearest service engineer is a 3 hour drive= would like it, but basically not workable.

So stuck on almost the cap basically at all times. However because there is no incentive to use peak time power, just use the hell out of peak time power when needed. For everyone's loose.

Yeah I think we are entering a short era where those with a home power bank, or electric car can make some gains by being very flexible with their demands. Possibly even make money if you still have an export tariff from years back.

. know various folk on new new estates that can't get decent chargers fitted as local grid basically won't support it

Nice you got up there!

Seen it done before as a temporary measure to get through winter...... cement backer board for showers wrapped in breathable roof felt over/tucked in the stones, to get the walls to dry out and confirm if thats where the water was coming from (can take months to really get dry).

For permant have seen folk wrap them in Grade 5+ lead or lay underneath.

Tap the render as far as you can reach, any hollow spots just get whole thing done, cost of scaff will be higher than the render, even if its lime or harled (Scottish style). Good render does 20- 40 years service. There is that new 1 bag silicon (?) stuff thats meant for new properties but there are variants you can use on old, in UK no one really uses it outside of extremely exposed areas (West coast of Scotland on new custom houses its the number 1 product) but very easy to work with compared to traditional materials. Have done a few chimneys and one small (30m2) gable been impressed.

Yes this kinda thing. Those seem expensive for what they are, but then all of these one box solution PNP white plastic home devices are massively over priced for what you get, its just standard now unfortunately.

Being in court proceedings and having a legal geeza basically just wave their hand at your evidence as 'well thats not worth anything' when anyone could clearly identify the perp as the person in the footage without doubt, literally just because there is some kind of mad precedent for 'wide angle cctv being of dubious quality'. Essentially learned if you want to rob a bank, don't destroy the cameras or block their feed, just put wide angle adapters on them, and then plead 'wasn't me mate', and you'll probably be fine*

*This is legal advise, but I'm guy on the internet, so do with this information as you will.

Had this several times with vision 2 or 3 being put in old cheap cans sourced from who knows where. Used normal cans with some 3m tape work way better, or do it yourself with a bulk loader and some pentax reloadable cans, change the felt light seal every 10 years and your good. Got a fleet of maybe 15 of them, invaluable.

Recently bought some vision 3 from a local company, never had an issue, noticed the can ends were a bit rusty, guy said 'they are OK', nope. On a customer shoot had 4 of 7 rolls light leaked and fogged to hell, can ends of 3 of them were no good and 1 the felt was no good so left a nice slit light leak through a few layers of frames. FML.

A beautiful thing, only really for the new breed of Omnium packers (makes a sick long to ultra distance touring rig), but weight saving over the standard alloy one isnt' that much, pretty sure its solidly under the 1 kg mark anyways?
Unfortunately gone well off Omnium since they've been using the Nexus 5 as their standard hub, maybe its good for Denmark + Netherland environment, but for UK where your almost constantly on some sort of incline, gears are too far apart, clunky and high % of out of the box failures (similar to old Nexus 7 if any techs have recovered from the PTSD on those things), and also I'm gonna say not great for mid drive use, especially urban use where your constantly slapping gears. The nexus 5 was supposed to be a torque proof, mid drive acceptable, reliability monster, and instead, I mean I had two customers who had more than 5 replacement hubs EACH in 1 year, threatening to return entire bike under consumer law, and this went on for 3 years. Shimano just never really giving an explanation. You get a good one they are pretty solid, you get a bad one, they can explode on 1st day.

Marathon Supreme but they all gone now, got killed off a few years ago. Absolutely favourite 20", 26" and 700c cargo bike tyre for UK conditions. Unless you are running heavy the entire time, then maybe go marathon plus, pickup (funny shape in 20" size so handling can be affected) or similar heavy weight tyre

If you do a search for estarli and the other one thats the same bike (forgot name now, but also claims to be UK built bike when its not, maybe sort of assembled) by me and others in the last year you'll find loads on this forum.
Main issue is that those two companies fit kinda cheap brakes but actually the wrong brake adapters on almost every single one I've seen, and will give you the 'SOrry, we've never heard of that happening before', when I personally by late 2023 had reported at 16 of 18 bikes I assembled and checked for customers with this exact issue. Means brake pad is only partially touching the rotor. Simple mistake, but shit response from a company, especially when its obviously a large issue.

Hub drive is fine so long as you don't have hill starts with a load, massive reduction in available torque. However upside is the hub motor is doing the work so your drive chain isn't, so chain, chainring and cassette life is much greater. Not as nice to ride etc, but as you mention, there is a huge jump in price, Tern especially a large jump in price for (WAY ToO MUCH OF THE TIME) not an increase in quality, quality control or even having a frame thats not got weld holes blown through it in multiple places*

*Yeah this is a dig at Tern, well designed bikes mostly (GSD mk2 is an insane joke of a bike, read up on why its so hard to remove rear wheel unless you got a Rohloff model, when the Mk1 was so simple, I honestly don't know why they don't employ engineers), ride well and suit the majority of folks actual needs from a family cargo. HOWEVER, their quality control and mentality of dusting off frames with holes in, bent frames, brake mounts welded in the wrong place, seat tube deformities (weld issues), headset race misalignment, appalling cable routing on some does not match their price point, especially in the UK market. Maybe since Raleigh has gone and they've moved to someone else it will be different, but I'm not holding my breath. If you get a good one without those issues, great, great bikes and ideal for your family cargo use, but if you get a bad one, just make sure you paid on a credit card and don't have high blood pressure.

£20k of festool is maybe you have like 6 things.

Most multi-trades will rock about £20k of stuff most of the time, with more at home for more defined tasks.
1 hour response time is the same even if you live next to a police station, decade + of massively under-funding them means there are basically none left to have, and when a unit does turn up, they aren't really interested as they are overstretched and everyone is grumpy towards them.

PSA: If you ever need home CCTV as evidence for identifying someone, having only wide angle they will mostly through it out as evidence or the 'its not me mate' line will often work in their favour. A second angle with something quite tight focal length shot at face height across what the wide angle see's is infinity more useful, less distortion, more detail even if you only catch their face for a second.
Source: Bitter experience for me and others when attempting to take evidence to court and being inadmissible, followed by non guilty plee and 'it wasn't me mate' = scot free*

*I would love to try this after robbing a bank or something as it seems to work well for others

Possible as well they've used a cement based render instead of lime, so 'more waterproof' until it eventually gets a tiny crack somewhere then it channels it down against the stonework or brick work until it gets in, because with cement it then can't evaporate back to the outside world like its supposed to. See it on chimney's and patchs all over Scotland, fixes the problem for a few months or years and then turns REAL nasty.

Who know's, airport security is 20% security, 80% fear mongering and 100% being as hostile as possible to anyone just trying to get on with their life.

In UK and most of Europe you have zero chance of getting a hand check unless its marked as ISO800 or 1600, and even then.
If you fly through Dubai, Qatar or the other one they will do it if you ask. I once passed through Qatar security 4x in one day (long story) and the same guy was like fuck my life, this guy again, used up all their drug and explosives swabs and good will I suspect.

If you fly pretty much anywhere in SE Asia they will hand check anything if you ask nicely and don't get arsey.
S. Korea, absolute will not, Japan, absolutely will not. Taiwan, I managed it but only by getting to the third tier of 'manager' who as soon as he saw old cameras, was chatty as hell and just waved my massive bag of 100 odd rolls through without even really looking at them.

Batch from S.Korea all my 120 have a slight fog, stuff thats gone through different cameras, different rolls, its not terrible, akin to having a soft filter on, however when I was there I managed to get hold of who underwrites their insurance policy, 100% won't ever get anything from it but want to stick a fire up the arse of the 'managers' who just looked at me like 'FILM IS FINE< PUT IN SCANNER NOW'. 135 all seems fine, so possibly that literally the metal canister is enough to diffuse some x ray machines.

So lead baggy is now in my travel bag at all times, it doesn't stop everything but hopefully enough that with only a few scans won't affect negs.

Have never come up against a new CT scanner yet. They are supposed to 'deffo offer hand scanning of all film items' wherever a CT scanner is installed, however the average low paid, stressed out, abused by the public bod that has to man these things is going to take some persuasion to get to that outcome.

Weird growth pattern for fungus. Might be balsam separate if its more than one piece of glass in there. Most prism's are pretty easy to take apart and that RZ won't be that old so screws likely not sweat rusted in there. Get yourself some 10% ammonia and some hydrogen peroxide (10-30% absolute max). 25:25:50 (A + H + distilled water).
Eye, skin, face protection it up and let it soak for a few minutes the individual piece of glass thats affected. Should bubble away gently. That will have modern coatings on it so no risk of them going soft IME. Better to leave it to soak and very gently swab away at the fungus with the fanciest cotton buds you can find, rather than less time and scrape.

Once clear, just distilled water to clean and dilute the chemicals off it, dry, then alcohol wash it, then glass cleaner and get it looking sexy, then put back together.
Been through dozens of point and shoots (now that they are worth money and not bin fodder like they were before), various lens and various viewfinders and rangefinders that have fungal growth and got just about all of them sorted out. A few were slightly too far gone, but still produce usable photos, and at least won't get worse now.

I used to be quite blaze with leaving fungus as opening lenses and viewfinders used to worry me a bit, but have lost so many decent bits of gear to fungus, or bought stuff which has had much worse fungus than they say etc, that now I check, open and clean basically all my glass within 12-24 month period without fail, all of it.

UK is a super wet musty climate and kills cameras, currently in Vietnam but was in a few other humid countries over past 12 years and they have all massively taken their toll on my gear. In Vietnam absolutely everyone has drying cabinets, either just sealed and you whack in a big desiccant sack every few weeks with a humidity alarm on it, or actively dehumidified units from Chinese and Taiwanese suppliers, otherwise it will go mouldy inside or out within a very short space of time.

Yashica 24 TLR - Delta 100 - Zeche D + Inverkip PS + Zeche E

Make sure there is an empty spool in the take up area, turns the silver cog around and also by pushing it down causes the film counter to go from S >>>>> 1 once you've closed back again and started winding it. Sometimes you can trick it if you don't have any spare spools with a small piece of plastic and some low tack tape.

RZ's are pretty damn solid, all metal construction in the film transport and cocking mechanism side. Most likely its because of above OR on of the pins that indicates mechanically to the mechanism that.... lens is fitted, back is fitted, dark slide out, film is loaded, counter is off S position etc has got a bit bent or jammed with a tiny piece of film backing paper or dried up grease.

Technics SL1300. A solid behemoth of a semi automatic. Keeps excellent time, works great TBH, changed the tonearm wiring and have a few different cartridges depending on what I fancy which TBH makes it 95% of what I want. Reliable, and even if someone is doing jumping jacks in the same room, doesn't move or skip ever.

But.... going to Japan soon as remember seeing someone modify one with a nice looking arm (looses semi auto functions but ah well, can be un modified easily). Anyone recommend any 70's appropriate looking tone arms that may fit? May or may not improve performance, just purely a 'what interesting weird techy audiophile type stuff can I get from Japan while I'm there that no one else would ever bother with'.

Just because they aren't saying anything doesn't mean there isn't anything. 99% of people I've ever met will automatically state there is nothing wrong their their house or car or whatever just out of knee jerk reaction to 'shit this could cost me money, maybe its my issue' or just total ignorance and naivety to anything that goes on around them.

Few potentials with that wall. If it is only you, then yeah local plumbing issue above, directly or along a joist and its just running to that point.
That gutter has an issue and its soaking the wall out, by passing the render where the buildings meet, or just full on soaking it out over long time.
Cracks above your keystone, suggest you've got some mild stonework/brick movement in that area, possibly just age, or possibly weakened due to small long long term plumbing leak in the building weakening the mortar or whatever bonds it.

If you look at whole area of darkened render there is like 3 patchs, most likely weak spots where the different courses have met in that area, remember you had scaff issues in the past, likely when it was rendered it was the same issue and they did the top section, bottom section, then met up in the middle a few times and the courses overlapped behind the scaff so its never as good of a job or bond, unavoidable sometimes without moving entire scaff etc.

Also look at your own buildings gutter work, centre of the frame top, to the right of black downpipe there is a wet patch hanging off underside of that stone work. Old gutters tend to be either IN the stonework, or like a lead trough sitting in a recess, water escapes through the stone in weird weird ways and gets all over the place. Could be that and trickling right down through the wall.
OTher neighbours haven't noticed because they dont' want to notice.

Buy or rent a decent thermal camera for a weekend and have a look in neighbours rooms on that entire elevation, and around to the front elevatation. Put machine up on the outside as well, needs to be overcast no direct sunlight early morning or evening kind of a job to be able to make any external wet patchs out. Very handy devices, bought one last year and paid for itself on first job, rented it to mates a few times so now well into profit technically, £350 something like that? Shared building like that its now essential tech TBH.

My mum recently moved house, rural Scotland, gas boiler job mains normal etc. New people took a few weeks until they moved in (moving from abroad) , did normal house moving stuff, cleaned out, shut water off, shut gas off at outside valve, shut electric off, cleaned whole place, emptied outside bins etc.
Never heard anything until like 4am in the morning when they turned up, place is freezing, can't believe you didn't leave the heating on for us etc (its summer, don't really ever use it in summer in the UK?). Responded next day with instructions on how to fire up, i.e. turn electric on, turn water on, turn gas on, press 'on' the boiler, away you go.

Nope. WOuldn't work. THey got some emergency guy out to look at it who said boiler is fucked, some valve not working, no gas supply, needs new £700 please. Boiler is 18 month old and has no issue.

Yeah so turns out the gas network had been around and 'capped' the system at the outside valve with a disc inside the fitting. Took 2 emergency call out engineers who both charged a stack, then we sent our normal guy who fitted it (Warranty with him), discovered the SGN cap, but can't; remove technically as there is a reason SGN did it. SGN called, and they then removed it.
Buyer of house wants this £1300 odd bill settled by us as apparently its our fault that SGN (network) capped the system, due to, bah dam bum....... The buyer tried to setup their gas supply with whatever company using an offshore barbados account that was black or red flagged ( whatever the term is) for ongoing fraud investigation. So network had sent someone out to physically cap it ASAP.
Never heard of this happening, super confusing, super stressful as moving house never great, especially when your fam is old and needs a lot of help. Buyer not so much as even said 'opps sorry, I guess it WAS our issue after all', yet the £1300 odd grievance bill is still sitting with the solicitor to this day.
Don't trust anyone, ever. I hate saying that, but you just get one pile of shit after another with things like this and then never even have the decency to say 'yeah sorry about that, our bad'.

Doesn't end though. New house, all electric panel heaters (gonna go to ground or air source + solar on it as got the land and would work well on that building) only 4 out of 11 work, at all!
Turns out the former owner just lived in a few rooms due to the cold of the rest not working (had money just panels broken and couldn't get anyone in to fix or repair them, rural Scotland is a desert for tradies, electricians especially).
So guess we have legal ability to ask for money to rectify heating so that at least most of it works. But at same time, just CBA dealing with legal crap any longer. I guess thats the British way of things, make it so frustrating and drawn out that you just sack it off and live with the issue*

*then complain about it on the internet ;)

Most high tier cargo's are in this price space now. Even the big guys its very low volume per country.