I'm surprised by how expensive they are ($1000). There was a push to get them in schools in Britain starting around 2002-3, and the three schools I've seen in the last couple of years have had them in every room.

They're accurate enough for my Chinese evening class. Share a screen with MS Paint, and get a decent conference microphone.

Here's an example (British, and £50/month, but £1 = $1 is pretty normal for technology...)

They're only installing into apartment buildings at the moment, and I think they ask the building owner to subsidise the installation, but I don't doubt it increases the rental value.

Some people fly with Ryanair, who play advertisements several times in the flight. That annoyed me more than anything else last time I flew with Ryanair. They also have more up-sells on their website, which can be tricky for some people (e.g. old pensioners) to avoid, who end up buying insurance they don't need.

Paying for TV means paying for a load of advertisements.

Same with magazines and newspapers.

1 real guitar

1 audio cable (nothing special)

1 smartphone with HDMI output

1 TV

Has anyone tried anything like this before? I'd guess many decent phones have the necessary processing power for this.

(Simpler version: use the phone's microphone and sing.)

Driving a car does, but there's room for debate on whether particular sports are more or less safe than sitting on the couch for long periods.

My sister has that, I think it might be this: http://rocksmith.ubi.com/rocks...

In any case, it's a real guitar that does something like Guitar Hero.

Don't they do this already? Again, my sister has a drumkit and microphone for Guitar Hero, and I'm sure I've played both with and against her, consecutively and concurrently.

OK, that would be new.

I'm single, so carrying enough food isn't difficult. I have some panniers for my bike. I'd guess many more people live within a few minutes walk or cycle to a decent shop in the UK than the USA. Mine is about 2 minutes out of my way when I'm on my way home. (And I'm not in the middle of a city, I'm in monotonous London suburbia.)

I was more impressed when I visited a friend in Sweden a couple of weeks ago for a party his parents put on. His mother had bought food for the week + for the party in one bicycle trip. She had a trailer for the bike. I don't know why they didn't own a car — both parents are software developers, so it's not through lack of money. Perhaps to stay healthy? Or for the environment?

I mixed up my units, it must have been about 40km, with 325m of ascent according to Google.

I don't know if that counts as mostly flat. I didn't know the man very well, it's possible he only cycled one way each day and took the train back (either alternating cycling to work or from work, or taking the bike on the train).

Google says 5 miles. The off-road path is really off-road, it's not paved -- avoiding the bumps and ruts slows me down quite a bit.

I used to have a colleague who cycled about 40 miles each way around three days a week. There was a fast train parallel with his route, which gave him good flexibility in case of unexpected rain, tiredness etc.

Cycling infrastructure didn't appear in countries like the Netherlands by itself, it took a lot of campaigning. There's a summary here: http://lcc.org.uk/pages/hollan...

I'd like to see something similar in the UK, perhaps based on childhood obesity rather than road danger. There's some progress in some areas, but nothing national.

Oh, other relevant things:

- Southern English climate, so a temperature range of about -2 to 30C and relative humidity 50-90%. 30-50% "wet days" (although it's not so frequent for the rain to coincide with my commute, and "wet day" is defined as over 0.1mm rain, which really isn't much). See the bottom of http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2...

- I rent my home, so it was easy to live such that cycling to work includes about 500m on quiet roads, then the rest on an off-road cycle path. For most other trips I pick a route avoiding any busy roads, which makes learning the route a bit harder, but the journey so much more enjoyable (and safer).

I cycle to work, which takes about 30 minutes. I don't go fast enough to need to change clothes when I arrive, but sometimes I go faster on the way home.

It's free exercise. I doubt I'd find the motivation to go to a gym, or run round a park, in my spare time. Cycling to work is easy: it's about 10-15 minutes faster than the bus, and at most 5 minutes slower than driving (which can take a *lot* longer if there's bad traffic). It's also a lot cheaper than either of those, even with a nice bicycle.

I do miss not having an obvious time to check email, read the news, read a magazine or book etc — I used to do that when sitting on the train.

These are the "guys from Bletchley Park" -- in the sense that it's the same government organisation.

"During the Second World War, GC&CS was based largely at Bletchley Park ... GC&CS was renamed the "Government Communications Headquarters" in June 1946"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

The reason this expensive cable exists is to market the "mid-range" ethernet cables, which are around $200-400.

My employer is migrating, with the justification that they will no longer need to maintain Exchange servers, support will be easier (just a web browser), the included storage can replace some local SANs, and computers will require less RAM.

I'm particularly sceptical of the last claim.