Bought some decals a few weeks ago. Couldn’t see the ones I wanted on the website, so mailed and received a reply within a few hours. The decals arrived a few days after ordering, and the quality is top notch. Excellent service all round.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/06/nigel-slater-book-recipes-appetite-tender

This is really nice, it may seem a bit fancy but it’s just cheese, onion and pastry. Sort of an open pie, if you will. Feel free to massively increase the amount of butter used.

My sister has recently become veggie so we made it for her the other week. Although as my wife pointed out, ‘she’s not a proper veggie, as she’s only given up meat and fish’.

Hmmm. Anyway, it’s nice.

Blindfolded skateboarding – genius simplicity.

A guy I used to work with was inspired by that photo, and decided to make his own Escher lizard floor tiles – all detailed (in great detail) here :

http://danceswithferrets.org/geekblog/?p=154

I went to the zoo the other day, but the only animal they had was a dog in a cage.

It was a sh1t zoo.

Speak to your solicitor about an indemnity – I was in the same situation, and that was all that was required.

I’m sure if you went back a decade and asked people if my current 140mm bike with a head angle approaching 65 deg was a good idea they’d say it was downright silly!

I remember the Bike Verbier guides were singing the praises of slack head angles on trail bikes over ten years ago, and I think it was around then that Steve Wade was playing around with the 223 as an ‘XC’ bike. That led on to the Strange Alpine 5 – a 140mm bike with a 62-64 degree head angle in around 2007. Chainstays on the shortish side though, so clearly an evolutionary dead end and in no way ahead of its time..

Another vote for securityforbikes.com, excellent products and service.

As above, a Nexus 5 would be a better bet than a 4. Nexus 4 is decent enough but getting a bit long in the tooth.

I had one, and it got stolen before it was even built. Based on that, I couldn’t recommend it. Very pretty frame, mind.

3m Pragmasis 13mm chain here, seems plenty strong enough. I think 19mm would be overkill and as mentioned above could do quite a bit of damage to a frame.

3m chain with 3 bikes locked up and plenty of slack in the chain to wrap it round frame tubes, through stays etc.

Shackle will take three bikes – it’s down to the length of the chain you use really.

As for bolting the bikes to the shackle – securityforbikes (again) sell heavy duty chains and padlocks (and do package deals).

I’m sounding like a securityforbikes fanboy here, but the stuff is really good and they are really nice people to deal with as well and went above and beyond to help me out when the keys to one of my padlocks got lost during building work.

Another thing, and speaking from bitter experience here.

Make sure that all / some of the hinge and hasp fixings are coach bolts, otherwise the shed will be really easy to break into.

Although my shed was advertised as having strong security features, the idiots who fitted it used 6mm coach bolts in 8mm holes which meant the nuts could be dragged straight through the holes – it *looked* secure, while being completely useless :o(

I replaced them all myself with 8mm bolts, and also fitted a hasp from securityforbikes.com

http://securityforbikes.com/HS1HeavyDutyHaspAndStaple.php

The floor alone won’t be strong enough, and use the paving underneath and you’ll end up with loads of mice moving in through the hole in the floor.

I use one of these :

http://securityforbikes.com/shed-shackle.php

Not that this will help, but we’re using VS2015 to target C# projects running under Mono 2.8 and we’ve never seen any issues with the debugger resolving variables following a Linq statement.

Does it behave differently for variables in local and class scope? If in local scope, are the variables implicitly typed? In closures?

TBH, if people are getting different behaviour, it sounds like a bug.

Another recommendation of own bike, but a Switchback is more than capable of bashing out many miles up and down.

The squirrel our cat brought in a couple of weeks ago was unwelcome, but not as unwelcome as the hundreds of fleas it was carrying :o(

Yep, i5 for that price range.

http://www.saveonlaptops.co.uk are worth a look. I’ve bought a laptop from them before, and they usually have some decent deals.

Love mine, it’s a really capable, balanced, and agile little bike.

Local trails are predominantly rocky and rooty, with some nice steep stuff as well as some flatter singletrack. Handles it all really well, possibly a touch harsh at the back but then it is a hardtail. I’m running the 142×12 dropouts, and I wonder if the 135 QR dropouts would add a little extra ‘give’ in the back end.

It’s also an accomplished technical climber, which was a pleasant surprise.

Running mine 2×10, with 140mm BOS forks and a Superstar Ryde Edge wheelset.

Crap camera phone picture :

Banshee axle has the same thread pitch as a maxle, so would work.

Take note that the little end bolt is perfect for dropping in puddles when fixing a flat in horizontal sleet in the middle of nowhere..

I’ve got an Airshot which is great, but I won’t mention that.

A mate has a Birzman Zacoo Maha pump, it’s not a flash style device (and has a silly name) but it’s very high volume, is designed for tubeless inflation and works really well. I would have got one but as I already had a good track pump I got an Airshot. Has anyone mentioned how good they are?

You can shorten them by adding a spacer to the top of the negative spring, had this done to my 44RC3’s.

Plenty of info around – have a search on mtbr.

We went for several walks on Kuringai chase when we were there, and met a fair few riders – it seemed pretty popular, and looked a good place to ride.

They recommended goggles because of the spiders..

I ran it 26″ with 160, it would be great with 150 (either 26 or 650b).

Drop me a mail if you’re interested – derby DOT al AT gmail DOT com

I’ll have a 2013 (mk 2) medium Spitfire for sale soon, with both 26 and 650b dropouts.

Stanton Switchback is 64 static, and climbs very well (with no need to add the word ‘considering’ either).

Ooh, in the loft I have :

Spectrum 48k
C64
Atari 800XL
Amiga 500
Atari ST + Megafile 60 hard disk (a whole 60Mb of storage!)
SNES (and development kit)
PC Engine
TurboGrafx (US version of PC engine)
Turbo Express (handheld version of PC engine)
Lots of newer stuff that couldn’t be considered vintage.

Used to have a mono ST monitor as well (they were great), but it got lost during various house moves.

I’ve been a game developer for over 20 years, and have acquired lots of stuff in that time. Not plugged any of it in for ages, it might all still work.

I’m happy with my Ryde Edge / Switch wheels from Superstar – £190 for the pair with discount.

Not bracelet related, but a friend has had a dramatic and (so far) lasting improvement to his arthritis by cutting out all nightshade fruits and vegetables from his diet.

I’ve used Transfil Black Snake in the past, seemed decent.

We hired a Thule one from here, they brought it out and fitted it, and collected it when we returned.

http://www.rentabox.co.uk/%5B/url%5D

It’s a pain, but definitely worth doing it legit as the potential consequences of building over without approval are really bad.

We had to bridge a public foul sewer on both sides of our extension, application cost was ~£400 (I think), survey costs before / after came to around £600, and Severn Trent insisted we repair a short section just inside the footprint of the extension. It was in a bad enough state to need repairing, but not bad enough that they would do it :o/ We replaced the entire run in the end, but that only added an extra £750 to the bill as the builder managed the contractors / timing very well to minimize costs.

The storm drain (3m deep) that ran parallel to the extension was another matter entirely, and caused a whole load of problems and expense.

We found that Severn Trent were very conservative when it comes to anything other than strip foundations, although the guy we dealt with was really helpful and worked directly with our builder + building control to come up with a satisfactory design.

Merlin are showing small Scout frames in stock.

Production Privee OKA – very nice.

By happy coincidence, I have one for sale :

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/fs-production-privee-oka-frame-1

Lognan -> Le Lavancher would fit the bill. Get the train to Argentiere, lift up to Lognan, lovely singletrack descent to Le Lavancher. Not technical (compared to some of the other trails), and just a lovely trail.

You’ll need proper directions, I think it’s in the bike book posted above.

Not massively up on the whole streaming media thing, but I’ve been impressed with our Amazon Fire TV Stick. People I work with who do know about this stuff rate them as well.

Not just about the head angle though is it – my Stanton Switchback is very very slack, and yet is a really good climber (and I don’t need to add ‘considering’ to the end of that).

Have fun, looks like there are plenty of steps.