HongKongPhooey

Nice tutorial. I'm going to try this on mine. 105k and she runs like a bag of nails when she's cold. New inlet pipe too, methinks :-)

The only way I found to get the watermarks out of mine (which were caused by previous abortive attempts to clean the seats) was to hire a Rug Doctor. I did mine a couple of weeks ago. They came up like new. I'll post some pics when I get a chance, the difference is remarkable

Trouble is, once I hear one of those ads, I have it going through my head for the rest of the day! to the agency that came up with the idea.

Thanks Moggy

This might have been posted before, but it is one of the better YouTube videos, IMHO.

Does anyone know what the likely life of the cat on a MK1 Octy VRS is? I might be about to get a second hand one, and my only concern is that it could be near to the end of its life. I appreciate it depends on use (or abuse!), but is there an accepted average lifetime for the cat? Thanks

Tut Tut .... you could have been warned! Rogues, the lot of 'em.

Following unfortunate misunderstandings in the Grands Prix at Valencia and Spa, the FIA has revised the Red Car Rule for Formula 1. These amendments will be applied with immediate effect: 1) Overtaking a Ferrari is not permitted under any circumstances. 2) In the pit lane, a Ferrari always has precedence over other cars. 3) Any driver finishing less than 25 seconds ahead of a Ferrari will be penalized 25 seconds.* 4) If neither Ferrari finishes in first place, the stewards reserve the right to declare the result null and void (or to adjust it as necessary). 5) Only Ferrari drivers are permitted to use anything other than ‘designated’ parts of a circuit. 6) If forced off the ‘designated’ part of the track by a Ferrari, the guilty driver should immediately crash his car and return to the pits 6) Any driver or team appealing against any FIA decision in favour of Ferrari may be subject to a fine and/or the deduction of points. *Subject to post-race adjustment by the stewards. I don't claim credit, this comes from Sniff Petrol

Stories of my demise have been greatly exaggerated

I had an Austin Allegro (my first 'car') fall on me off a bottle jack. Ouch :eek: Still, it persuaded my Dad to fork out for a trolley jack for me

Alamy used to be quite good, both for sales quantity and revenue, but things seem to be going 'down the pan' just recently. Mind you, it's a tough business to be in for any of the major players. I tried selling on Fotolia a while back. When I finally cashed in my chips, I'd sold 200+ images, and earned a grand total of approx £75 . Seemed a bit pointless really. Anyway, I'm certainly not about to get drawn into the 'Royalty Free v Licenced' debate, nor the 'Microstock v Traditional agency' argument. It just didn't work for me

I use a "Canon ST-E2 Speedlite Wireless Remote Flash Transmitter", which is an infra-red transmitter so requires line of sight (or near-line of sight, at least), but Canon also do flash guns that can do the same job. You set the flash on the camera body to 'Master', and any other guns to 'Slave', so you can use the setup for fairly complex lighting. I can't vouch for the effectiveness of this, as Canon flashes are so expensive I've only ever been allowed one at a time There is a review of the ST-E2 here and I would totally agree with the writers opinion. The unit offers full exposure control of the flash, so it's a versatile bit of kit. And it certainly beats the curly cord connector that I used to have ... I pulled the flash too far away once, and the bl00dy thing pinged off the hotshoe connector and took me straight in the eye :eek:

One useful (if a little expensive) gadget is a remote trigger for the flash. The Canon unit uses infra-red to trigger the flash, and fits to the camera in place of the normal flash gun. You can also get cables to do this, but they're a bit unwieldy IMHO. I get SWMBO (usually) to hold the flash either pointing directly at the subject, or aimed to bounce off a handy surface. It's particularly handy if you're in a church or other building, for example, where it is too dark to get a photo without flash. Using the flash 'on the camera' results in a very 'flat' looking image (because the majority of the light is coming from parallel to the cameras line of sight), but with the flash coming from slightly to one side you get shadows that put back the depth to your subject. Mind you, you have to be a bit co-ordinated ... I've often fired the shutter while SWMBO has absentmindedly wandered off to look at something else, resulting in some embarrassing blinding of other visitors

You could try Alamy.com. You need to meet their technical criteria for images, but once you get started you'll at least get paid a reasonable amount for your work (assuming it sells, of course), rather than the pennies paid by the microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStock.