Mort

Holy s*** does this new update REALLY show up how bad the civilian AI is at driving. Woeful. Seems a cross between a reskin of the biker fetch missions and the Benny's missions. Nothing groundbreaking but should keep me busy until into the new year I think. Gone from 10m down to 2.5m last night; may spend more as the extra vehicles are released, but I've bought everything I want (3 things) so far. As a forewarning, this is NOT an update that can easily be solo'd. Very much more-so than the bikers update, you'll need at least two people to do this 'comfortably'. And I can imagine in a reasonably full public session you'll likely be breaking even or making a loss if anyone wants to mess with you. It's just too easy to mess up the cars during fetch and sell missions, let alone when actual players are trying to stop you as well as the NPCs. A very expensive update with no massive guarantee that you'll make that money back quickly/easily. But, on the flip side, I can imagine is quite fun with a small group of you in free-roam if you're not in it for the money. Plus I can see myself grinding this more than bikers simply because I prefer driving cars to bikes. Over 5m for Knight Rider though? That's cray-cray.

Because they take over 3 bloody years to update the Mac Pro grr!

Yeah, sorting the house out for Xmas, so hopefully when work ends I'll have more time on. That said I'm considering playing through The Last of Us again. And may look into Steep or Uncharted 4 as Xmas entertainment if no one's around. Then there's, like, 80% left of Fallout 4 which kinda fizzled out for me way back. Hopefully the Import/Export update will actually bring stuff that makes me want to keep playing, as a lot of it has seemed to turn into blatant moneymaking rather than covert moneymaking recently. I want to buy the Shotaro, but the price is a kick in the teeth when I have the H.Drag already. If they play Import/Export right then they can milk me like a cow with the vehicles. But I sense it'll be more about fetch/sell missions than actually bringing tuner cars into the game. Worst case is reskinned crate games but with (mostly existing) cars instead of crates. Oh well, only a year until Red Dead...

The Deadline mode is good when you have 4 decent players on. There's actually a lot of skill involved. But if you have lower level players you can game it a bit. I managed to win simply by driving around really slowly away from the other 3 and they just wiped each other out, leaving me 1-on-1 with 5 lives to his 2 at the end. I'd love to see a team version of it with 3 on 3, where you can go through your own colour trails. Expecting to drop 10m on the next update at least. Currently on 9.7m in the bank. Need a couple days racing and should hit 10.5 easily I think. Crate grinding has become too much of a chore and the Biker factories need a bit too much investment upfront to get the return in time. Heists with randoms is too hit and miss so there's not much left to grind but missions and races. The new Kill Count thing is quite fun too actually. Was hoping there's be more of us online for it as while it was on double cash I reckon a decent group of 4 of us could have made a mint. As it is now, you get a couple of good rounds and then people drop out. That said, I've been being kicked from a lot of races recently when I start to come first consistently. Think I upset a guy the other day as he tried to sideswipe me on a corner. I held back a little and span him out when he swerved into me. Went on to win the race and suddenly got kicked at the next lobby. Rejoined 5 times in a row (they had auto-invite on) and was kicked again each time (see what I'm reduced to in order to have fun!)

I'm on most nights. Just plugging the grind ready for the bank drain of Import/Export. I'm getting pretty good at avoiding bad play in races. Also surprisingly good at causing it too...

If your server machine can transcode them then they should play to the TV fine? I've not come across anything that my ageing (2009) Mac Mini can't transcode to any device I stream to. Maybe the Windows version is a bit more picky? I've converted 99% of my library to H.264 MP4s now anyway so almost all of my devices can direct play... which leads on to: I'm using an old Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (which I hate, and intend to replace soon) as I'm running the server on a Mac Mini that's connected to it (used to be a media pc for the living room TV but now is just a headless server for Plex as I upgraded the TV to an Android TV which can run the Plex app natively). If, like me, you intend to encode all the DVDs to H.264 MP4s with Handbrake (I use the AppleTV3 preset) then the iPad will direct play and the server is pretty much just being a fancy UI and pointing to the right files so you could get away with a cheap NAS that will run the Plex server but not transcode any video (official list here). A 4TB My Cloud Pro PR2100 will transcode 1080p (if you need to) for around £530 or you could go for a 1TB Synology DS114 (if you didn't plan to do any transcoding at all) for £215-ish. (obviously if you wanted to drop 6k on a rackmount NAS then you could probably transcode HD content quite happily, but it may be overkill ​I've not got any experience running the server on a NAS, so afraid I'm not really that useful for suggesting hardware but I'd 100% recommend Plex as a platform. It's revolutionised how we consume media in our house. The only NAS advice I'd give is to consider whether or not you need to upgrade storage in the future. My Duo has two disks, but I'm mirroring one using RAID for some redundancy, so in theory I can put a larger disk in one bay and it'll sort the data out itself. If you have only one disk then upgrading space could become a problem in the future. That said I have 2TB of space and I'm holding a huge amount of SD content on there. As I slowly move to 1080p then it may change, but the previous move from 1TB to 2TB was reasonably easy for me with the 2-bay setup.

Name one. Mine's had no problems with this for (at least) the last 6 years, and has been running 24/7? Only spikes when I've not been actively watching have been Library refreshes or behind the scenes stuff like metadata updates or thumbnail generation. I'm on a Mac and been using MDRP for years with no problems at all. There's hundreds for PC though so I can't advise for that - however I'd be most tempted to just run it through Handbrake direct as long as the optical drive isn't too much of a bottleneck?

Plex. (If you want to do pretty much exactly as you said in the original post. I have over 500 DVDs and probably about 30 seasons of TV shows on my NAS all accessible from anywhere I have an internet connection through the Plex app on my phone/iPad/laptop or any web browser. Been using it for about 8 years now and it just keeps getting better. Buy a NAS that will run the server and it'll all be in one box and last them years)

I'd try Thunderbird if you need a desktop client?

This sounds like you're saying BT infected your machine because you're complaining about your excessive use charges?

Still on PS4 but not PC. Getting quite into this Tron/Deadline stuff though. A break from the norm.

A standard DVD will give you a selection of .VOB files that each contain 1GB of the movie and an .IFO file that tells the player how to piece it all together. You'll need to convert ('rip') these to another format to play it from USB on your player. Which format will entirely depend on the make and model of your DVD player.

If you use page breaks instead of endless carriage returns to get to a new page then I'd be happy to class you as an expert.

Sounds like you could do with an unlimited data plan.

1 in every 1,000 you could say...

Could get 100 of the retro stickers (250x50mm approx size) for around £35+VAT from WTTB - plus they do £20 off your first order (subject to small print). Found the original files if you do go ahead with this – just give me a shout and I can send over any format you need.

It doesn't surprise me. The move to less physical ingress points in my phone means I'm closer to an IP67 (or even 68/69K) rated phone. I've had iPhones since the 3Gs and I've never run out of space, nor needed a battery replacement. But I've often come across times when having a totally waterproof phone would be useful, and times when I've had to pick out pocket lint from the headphone and charging ports with a cocktail stick or toothpick before they could be used. Horses for courses I guess. No one complains that you can't upgrade a phone's processor or RAM like you can with a PC, so I'm not sure why we're all so hung up about storage space becoming fixed? Just because flash is cheap. People want smaller, thinner, lighter phones - SD slots and other physical limitations (like headphone jacks) hinder that goal. At some point the desire for the former will overtake the desire for the latter and physical expandable storage will be a footnote in the history of mobile phones. Sure, cheaper or free cloud storage/infrastructure would help speed that up, but no one can say it's not the direction we're already headed (like it or not).

I've had the leather case on mine since I bought it, which makes it (quite a bit) chunkier. But I recently helped my Mother buy a 6s and holding the bare phone is like trying to keep hold of a wet kipper! It feels so much smaller and the metal finish is like it's greased up. Pretty sure if I ditched my case I'd break the phone in a week, just because my hands wouldn't work properly.

I mostly tried it as I wanted to get a WiFi SD card to transfer from camera to phone when I'm out and about. CF cards are a lot more expensive, yet I have a 16GB CF card that's now 8 years old and has been the main workhorse for my camera - Over 20k shots taken on it at the very least and it's as strong as the day I bought it. I've had much less success with SD cards, however, and will probably be buying a larger CF card for the 7d and only use the SD slot if I have a specific workflow for it. I'd always wondered why no bigger brands have brought a CF>SD adapter to market, all the ones I could find were no-name (or very German, for some reason?) products which doesn't fill you with the most confidence when you're after something you're not sure will work in the first place. If you have a CF card for the camera already, I'd just use that for the time being - you can just use a USB cable to transfer from the camera to the computer if you don't have a reader. If you get into photography more you might either get used to using CF/USB or feel it's worthwhile to upgrade to a camera with an SD slot if you plan on doing more.

I got one for my 50d, but it ended up bending one of the pins in the camera (and the CF card reader I have) leading to about 25 minutes with a couple knives and screwdrivers bending them straight again. After that it went straight in the bin so I never even got so see if it worked. My advice would be to make sure you get the right one (CF type I or II) for the camera and see if anyone else has used one in your model before as when I was looking there were a lot of reviews saying it didn't work in the 50d but had in other cameras (firmware/software issue I guess?) Also be careful on what you shoot as the adapter can strip quite a bit of speed from the card - if you're shooting sport or often filling your buffer you may find some issues. I bought a 7dii in the end. Slightly more expensive solution but now I can use SD if I need to

MY EYES!!! :'(

When I got my Nighthawk to replace the Virgin SuperHub it was a night/day change. So much better and much more reliable signal. Not been keen on Netgear stuff in the past but quite impressed with it even if I do think I should have bought the ASUS in hindsight.

Yesterday I downloaded 2GB of GTA5 updates which is not in my normal usage pattern. I also assume that OSX Sierra and iOS10 for 3 devices in the house amounts to a substantial chunk of bandwidth that is not the 'norm' for me. There's plenty of reasons your usage could have spiked. I don't see how you can prove your router was switched off if their logging shows network traffic, and being out of the house doesn't mean your internet suddenly stops working if you have connected devices (and ditto to how you prove they weren't connected). I see the tactic is complain until they give up and write off the debt. But I don't see that happening. Even the Ombudsman, faced with "He says he didn't do it, our evidence says he did", doesn't sound like it'd fall in your favour? But good luck with it, I'll keep an eye on the thread to see the outcome.

Considering your argument here is that BT are evil and conning you out of money; what happens when they say "you used 20GB of bandwidth on Tuesday" and you reply with "Well, my freeware app on my computer says I only used 6GB"? What part of you is not expecting a response of "Well, sir, our logging infrastructure has been purposefully designed by a national organisation to monitor this data, and account for all transfers and overheads, not just those to/from the one device you're monitoring. We believe it is far more accurate than a free piece of software you have downloaded. You owe us £100, please pay up". I'm just not sure where you expect this to go? "Oh, sorry sir, you must be more correct than our system - please don't bother paying the £100 we claim you owe us"?