Electric Motorcycle Company Energica has filed for bankruptcy

According to reports in Italy earlier in the week, Energica Motors was reportedly in danger of going bust as the electric motorcycle company has already laid off employees and has narrowly avoided eviction.

Emergency meetings to try and find a solution were held on Monday and Tuesday, however, a press release has been made by the company announcing its plans to file a bankruptcy judicial liquidation pursuant.

An electric motorcycle supplier as well as a supplier of MotoE bikes for several seasons, Energica has held a strong position within the racing and motorcycle sales sectors. But that hasn’t been able to stop the company from reaching its sad end.

Given its previous success, sections of the Italian media allocated blame towards Energica’s American parent company, Ideanomics. READ MORE...

This is really sad news. I've had the pleasure of riding a couple of their bikes: the Ego - an amazing electric superbike & the Experia - an adventure tourer. Fantastic bikes, top notch build quality, truly premium products: electric exotica! Another example of why electric just isn't working out...

www.visordown.com

Support the people behind the pint: Long Live the Local!

Almost a million people make a pint possible - from scientists, farmers and draymen, to delivery drivers and the many thousands who work in our nation’s pubs. They have faced a tough few years, and they have worked hard to continue to serve our local communities. But Britain is still one of the most taxed places to have a pint.

Nearly 1 million people make a pint in a pub possible. The pub is the beating heart of communities across the whole of Britain. But outside its walls, there are nearly a million people behind your pint who take it from hop to glass, including delivery drivers, farmers, logistics workers, brewers, technicians, cleaners and of course the bar staff who hand you your pint.

Pubs and brewing supports nearly one million jobs across the UK, including farmers growing hops, brewers developing new recipes, scientists working on quality control and logistics teams managing deliveries.

Beyond the UK, millions across the globe enjoy a British beer with friends. The UK is one of the biggest beer exporters in Europe, with British brewers exporting the equivalent of 874 million pints in 2022.

The brewing and pub sector is a core part of the UK economy, supporting £14.3 billion in wages. We want to show the people who make up the large economic figures… to show the passion and skills of those in the sector who make a pint possible, not only to celebrate them and the work which they do to deliver the pint which Brits enjoy with their friends and family, but also to show politicians that support for the sector is support for their voters.

Sign up, join the campaign and enter the draw to win a free case of beer every month - good luck & CHEERS!

www.longlivethelocal.pub

The new version of my bike: Honda CB1000 Hornet. What a bargain!

Honda's Hornet family is complete, and the boss of the hive is here packing a sting in its tail. The new CB1000 Hornet loads a four-cylinder engine built to shred tarmac with naked class-leading punch. Throttle By Wire delivers precise control while the chassis arms with adjustable Showa 41mm SFF-BP USD forks and Pro-Link rear shock. Pure, bare-knuckle street fighting aggression is led by sharp twin LED projectors; a full-colour 5-inch TFT screen and Honda RoadSync connectivity brings the smarts. Ready for full attack?

All out attack: Nothing just for show. This is the motorcycle in its rawest form, tautly defined. Stripped for action the CB1000 Hornet’s uncompromising, streetfighter style is led by the piercing stare of super-compact twin LED projector headlights, tightly wrapped in a discreet nose fairing. The subtly blacked out frame brings a strong element of lithe design, underpinning the lines as does the trellis-style rear subframe. Adding menace, the engine, wheels and swingarm are also finished in black. And the Hornet-signature, broad-shouldered fuel tank tapering radically to the rear outlines pure performance.

Packing a punch: Thoroughbred racing DNA courses through the CB1000 Hornet. Its 999cc, DOHC four-cylinder engine pumps out an adrenaline-charged 112kW power @ 11,000rpm and 104Nm torque @ 9,000rpm. Tuned for smooth yet punchy low- to mid-range delivery and precise throttle control, with 11.7 compression ratio and newly developed die-cast pistons optimised it’s a huge buzz to ride, streetfighter-style and free in the city. And the gearbox ratios – tuned for instant acceleration – ensure the CB1000 Hornet simply destroys any set of corners.

All-round agility: It’s got the incredible engine. The hardcore streetfighter looks. But the CB1000 Hornet is also built to handle. From urban jungle to winding back road. The one-piece steel twin-spar frame uses mass-forward geometry to weight the front wheel and ups torsional rigidity by 70%, for agile corner entry and razor-fast side-to-side performance. It also mounts a Showa rear shock operating through Pro-Link for perfect suspension control, matched by the steering precision of adjustable 41mm Showa SFF-BP USD front forks. You’ve also got the sharp stopping power of Nissin four-piston radial-mount front brake calipers gripping 310mm floating discs. And the wide handlebars and riding position that join you, as one, with the bike.

Never miss a beat: The CB1000 Hornet has you. Throttle By Wire (TBW) puts all the engine’s stunning performance fully in your right hand and at your control. And the 5-inch, full-colour TFT screen serves up intuitive mode management via simple 4-way switch on the handlebar. You can select the default riding modes – Rain, Standard and Sport – or use 2 User modes to go fully custom with 3 levels of Engine Power/Engine Brake and 4 levels of Honda Selectable Torque Control (HSTC) plus Wheelie Control. The display also features Honda RoadSync connectivity, for on-screen turn-by-turn navigation and whatever else you need from your smartphone.

Honda CB1000 Hornet - from £8,999
Honda CB1000 Hornet SP - from £9,999

www.honda.co.uk

Brembo has bought Öhlins!

Brembo today signed an agreement with Tenneco, a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, Inc., for the acquisition of a 100% stake in Öhlins Racing, the leading manufacturer of premium, high performance suspension technology for motorcycles and cars in the Original Equipment, Motorsport, and Aftermarket segments.

“Öhlins is a strong fit for Brembo. It is a world-renowned brand, with a solid business and an unrivaled reputation, both on the racetrack and the road,” said Matteo Tiraboschi, Brembo Executive Chairman. “We welcome Öhlins to our Group as a great opportunity to expand our offerings for the automotive market. With this addition, we take another step forward in our strategy to provide integrated intelligent solutions to our customers, leveraging synergies across key technologies in the vehicle’s corner.”

www.brembo.com

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

UK government has kicked off a consultation on whether the country should have a common standard for charging electrical devices, and if this needs to be the same as the USB-C connector the EU adopted.

In a call for evidence this month, the Office for Product Safety and Standards within the Department for Business and Trade said it wants to hear from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations.

The EU has already outlined USB-C as its standard for charging personal devices across all of its 27 member states, as has India – the world's second-largest smartphone market. The standard is also being mooted for possible adoption by the US as well. Even Apple has reluctantly accepted USB-C.

In The Register's estimation, the chances are pretty small that device makers will be prepared to build special versions of their products to cater specifically to the UK consumer, should the government elect to go its own way.

The call for evidence points out that recent developments in wired charging technologies and evolving international standards provide an opportunity to reduce electronic waste and benefit consumers by specifying a standardized charger for smartphones and similar gadgets.

"We consider that it would potentially help businesses and deliver consumer and environmental benefits if we were to introduce standardized requirements for chargers for certain portable electrical/electronic devices across the whole UK," the Office for Product Safety and Standards stated. "We are seeking views from manufacturers, importers, distributors, and trade associations as to whether it would be helpful to do so and, if so, whether this should be based on USB-C – as adopted by the EU."

About time too! In Donline, I hold dozens of different laptop mains adapters, not just by brand - but also by model! OK, we can't go back in time & correct the craziness of history - but going forward there is no reason not to use USB-C as a common standard for phones, tablets, laptops & most forms of electronic gadgets. Think of the reduction in e-waste & saving money - as we'll all already have a suitable adapter.

www.theregister.com

All Saints Denmead - Film Night Fundraiser #2 - Amazing Grace

We are pleased to announce our second All Saints Film Night Fundraiser. 
Saturday 2nd November 7.15pm. 
All monies raised go towards church funds. 

The film is: "Amazing Grace" (Loan Gruffudd, Romola Garai, Benedict Cumberbatch, Albert Finney, Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell & others). 

Amazing Grace is the incredible true story of William Wilberforce, who tirelessly led the campaign to abolish slavery in Britain. At a time when the slave trade was not only perceived as acceptable but as a necessity for the economy, Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists dared speak out against a massive injustice, fighting long and hard for the freedom of others. 

Watch the trailer HERE

Being held this time in the Church, doors will open at 6.45pm for 7.15pm film start. 
Open to all ages 12 & above. 
Pay on the door, cash please: £5 per adult / £1 per child and this includes a hot drink on arrival. 
There will be a half time intermission (loo break!).
You are welcome to bring your own snacks and drinks. 

Hope to see you on the night. Don't forget your popcorn!

www.allsaintsdenmead.org.uk

Personalised dog food that gets the Calli stamp of approval!

 

Back in 2013, a small group of people came together to bring one vet’s idea to life. They set out to solve a problem at the heart of pet food: despite the overwhelming choice of one-size-fits-all food in the shops, there was never anything that could tick all the boxes. Long lists of mysterious ingredients on the label only made things more complicated – there had to be a better way to feed dogs right.

And so tails.com began, assembling a crack team of experts including vets, nutritionists and engineers (and their dogs) to develop a super-smart way to create a unique recipe for every single dog – yes, even yours. From your dog’s weird preference for whiffy fish smells, to that itchy skin condition, your dog’s tails.com recipe is based on information only you could know.

Nothing tops our wet food for quality. 

For nutrition. For taste. No wonder dogs can’t get enough of our recipes. 

20 nutritious and delicious wet food recipes

Choose from jellies, gravies, pâtés and terrines

Free from artificial colours, flavours and preservatives

Optimum Care: The ultimate nutrition with natural ingredients

Discover our range of high quality, protein-rich recipes, packed with powerful natural ingredients, and made to support your dog’s health like nothing else. 

Your dog's unique kibble recipe - tailored dog food, the tails.com way

Nutritionally-balanced with goodness in every bite

No added sugar, colours, flavours or preservatives

Complete nutrition for your dog

Your dog’s nutritional needs depend on many things – from breed and age to lifestyle and health. Take a few minutes to tell us about your dog. We’ll create a complete kibble recipe that’s 100% supportive, nutritious and satisfying. And just for them.

What's in our kibble? Our vets and nutritionists choose each ingredient for the specific nutrients it provides. So your dog gets the right balance of protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals they need in every bite.

How it works:

1. Tell us all about your dog and their health

2. We’ll create their unique kibble recipe

3. Add delicious wet food and treats

4. We deliver your dog's food to you monthly - pause or cancel anytime

Click here to get a free bag of kibble - plus 50% off wet food and treats

www.tails.com

International E-Waste Day – 14th October 2024

Join The Great Cable Challenge for International E-Waste Day! We’ve all got one of ‘those’ drawers, filled with broken chargers and unused cables. 

According to our latest research, in the UK we bin or stash away 627 million cables – enough to go to the moon AND BACK!

But did you know those cables are full of precious copper which, if recycled, could meet the UK’s growing demand of copper needed in our green future?! And with copper becoming more scarce, demand soaring, and the detrimental environmental and social impacts of mining for raw materials – how can we all help? The solution is surprisingly simple; harness what we already have.

Enter The Great Cable Challenge! – a UK-wide challenge to recycle 1 million cables to mark International E-Waste Day. If 1 million of us all recycled one cable, we could save at least 5,000kg of copper from going to waste.

So bag up your old cables – or any old electricals in your ‘drawer of doom’! – ready to recycle this October. 

www.recycleyourelectricals.org.uk

Updating to Windows 11 24H2? Make sure you have plenty of spare drive space!

Microsoft’s big annual Windows 11 update has ended up being a massive headache for numerous users, with new problems constantly cropping up and getting in the way of otherwise useful changes and features.

Not only have we seen blue screen crashes related to gaming and Intel drivers and disappearing mouse cursors, but the major Windows 11 24H2 update apparently also creates an enormous cache folder during installation that can’t be deleted. How enormous are we talking? An impressive 8.63GB in size, a sizable chunk of all but the largest of drives.

To be clear, the existence of the cache isn’t an issue. Windows always creates a cache when installing Windows updates, which is meant to be a temporary holding place for installation files. What isn’t normal is that the cache can’t be removed after the update is applied.

According to Windows Latest, attempts to delete the cache via the Control Panel are unsuccessful. Although you can select the cache for deletion and initiate the deletion process, the cache remains. Various other methods to remove the Windows update cache failed, too. It only cleared after a clean Windows installation altogether.

www.pcworld.com

Reading for today: We are the Church - the Body of Christ

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” 

It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of our- selves together. 

Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.

By C.S. Lewis

From The Weight of Glory

AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs

Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.

www.arstechnica.com

A bug in Word deletes documents instead of saving them

If you use Word to write your documents, beware of a very odd bug that can ruin your day by deleting a file instead of saving it. Microsoft has issued a warning, acknowledging that Word documents with certain file names might be lost upon saving locally.

If you save files on your local machine, you better pay attention to their file extensions. Microsoft says that if a file has its extension capitalized (.DOCX instead of .docx) or with the symbol # in it, an attempt to save when closing the file will result in Windows just deleting the file. Neowin managed to recreate this bug, as it seems to be affecting all users with Office apps version 2409.

Fortunately, the damage is not permanent, and you can restore the deleted file from the Recycle Bin.

www.neowin.net

What will you choose to do at Motorcycle Live? 16-24 November 2024 - NEC Birmingham

 

Whether you've already got tickets to Motorcycle Live or you're on the fence about clicking that 'book now' button, be sure to keep reading! This email contains some SERIOUSLY good updates about the UK's biggest motorcycle show... 

We've been SO busy announcing new features, we thought we'd do a handy round-up - and sprinkle in even more 'newness'... 

Perform at MCL 24. We're working with the gang at Yamaha Music to bring live performers to the show on a brand-new dedicated music stage. Are you a budding musician? Or in a band? Apply to perform at the show here! Psst - you get free entry and it's a paid gig... click here for full details.

Have a go! Whether you've been riding for years and want to test ride a model you've had your eye on or if you've never been on two wheels before, there's something for everyone at MCL24.

NEW Features. If you missed our updates announcing our BRAND-NEW features for 2024, then check out the website to find out more details about the adrenaline-filled Festival Zone and the entertaining Expert Lab.

More to Come. Let's just say, if you like music and you always think that one day at the show wasn't enough, then you may want to open the next email you receive from us. We've been working hard behind the scenes to bring you a night like never before... 

Bringing together the best of bikes, music and food, come and celebrate everything we love about motorcycling, AMPLIFIED. 

Tickets are on sale now - and they’re currently frozen at last year’s prices!

www.motorcyclelive.co.uk

Want to upgrade to Windows 11? Just buy a new PC, says Microsoft

Despite Microsoft's efforts, people prefer to dodge Windows 11's system requirements over buying new PCs. Microsoft's attempts to get people to ditch perfectly good hardware are wasteful.

When Windows 11 was released, it set an ultimatum for people wanting to upgrade; have a CPU that supports TPM 2.0, or don't upgrade at all. Since then, the company has seen Windows 10 users holding onto their systems and people finding ways to dodge Windows 11's system requirements and run it on unsupported hardware. And with Windows 10's end-of-support date in a year's time, the Redmond giant would really prefer you chuck out all that perfectly good hardware and just purchase a new PC already.

As spotted by Neowin, a new entry on the Microsoft Support article about unsupported devices has appeared. In the FAQ section, under the question "What options do I have for staying supported on Windows?," Microsoft's first port of call is pretty frank:

Recommended: New PC with Windows 11 - Windows 11 is the most current version of Windows. If you have an older PC, we recommend you move to Windows 11 by buying a new PC. Hardware and software have improved a lot, and today's computers are faster, more powerful, and more secure.

Last year it was estimated that 400 million PCs can't be upgraded to Windows 11 and instead face being rendered eligible for landfill -  which is is somewhat at odds with Microsoft's stance on the environment.

www.xda-developers.com

Ecovacs says it will fix bugs that can be abused to spy on robot owners

Earlier this month, security researchers warned that a series of security flaws in vacuum and lawn mower robots made by Ecovacs could allow hackers to spy on their owners through the devices’ microphones and cameras. 

At the time, Ecovacs told TechCrunch it concluded that the flaws found by the researchers “are extremely rare in typical user environments and require specialized hacking tools and physical access to the device.”

“Therefore, users can rest assured that they do not need to worry excessively about this,” read the emailed statement, declining to commit to fixing the vulnerabilities. 

Two weeks later, Ecovacs changed its mind, telling the researchers and TechCrunch that, actually, the company will fix the bugs.

“We have conducted an in-depth verification and self-examination. We have identified several areas where there is room for improvement,” Martin Ma, the director of Ecovacs’ security committee, told TechCrunch in an email. “In response, we have initiated targeted improvements and addressing the issues highlighted.”

www.techcrunch.com

What’s the problem with kids and smartphones?

 

When children first started getting smartphones a decade ago, there was no research about their impact. Now there is, and it’s overwhelming. Exposing children to things their brains aren’t yet developed enough to deal with can cause a whole host of problems, from triggering anxiety and eating disorders, to opening the door to cyberbullying or sexual predators, according to the latest research. 

When we give our children access to the whole world in their pocket, we give the whole world access to our children. READ MORE...

www.smartphonefreechildhood.co.uk