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Showing posts from February, 2008

Cheap driving... petrol vs diesel vs vegeoil

I'm pretty sure I've spent many an hour thinking about cheap cars, and the cheapest way of running a car... mainly in the " bangernomics " region, where you buy the cheapest car possible... but now that you can run your own diesel car on vegetable oil and not have to pay tax on the fuel, which would be the cheaper option? Assuming you're running the car as a second car (because old cars aren't as safe as new cars, and you don't want to potentially explode an expensive car), and assuming you'd do an average of 5000 miles a year... Option 1 would be the cheapest small petrol car possible eg a Renault 5 1.1, which on average would get you 35mpg with a mix of sensible town/city/motorway driving. Cost of car: free - £150 Tax /year: £115 MOT /year: £50 basic Servicing: £50 basic Fuel (5000miles, 35mpg, 642litres): £674 (@ £1.05/l) Insurance: £240 Total cost year 1: £1129 (assuming free, alternatively £1279), year 2: £1129 Option 2 would be the cheap small

The VW Scirocco has gone...

The VW Scirocco Scala has gone to a better home . Click to embiggen . Lots more pictures here . Sold for the same price I bought it for, so that worked out quite nicely.

Why I dislike the Nokia N95...

There are some things that are fundamentally flawed on the Nokia N95 :- 1. It's sold as a "Carl Zeiss" 5mp digital camera - yet it can't even take good photos with flash without making all the people look blue . I initially thought that this was because it uses an LED flash, instead of a 'real' flash like on the Sony K800i , but the Nokia N73 uses the same LED flash as the N95, and is capable of taking better flash photos with much more colourful skin tones (although admittedly there is still some blue ). 2. Nokia Maps - it's utter rubbish. Navigation should be FREE, there is no way that I would pay to use this software, I would much rather pay for TomTom. On a 5 minute journey, I had to enter / reset the journey from and to points 5 times! The Nokia software update removes the "tracking" feature making Nokia Maps practically un-usable and useless when driving. Nokia make a huge deal about GPS, navigation etc, yet charge you to use it. 3. The