With the rise of Internet shopping, there’s a sudden explosion in the amount of small packets being delivered as ‘letters,’ costing considerably more to deliver as they take up ten times the space of a regular letter in the van (and, it seems, require more manual handling), yet earning no more revenue.

Amazon etc. just have a yearly deal with the PO – they give them £x millions to delivery all their parcels regardless. Someone from Amazon doesn’t sit in the PO office queue with 10,000 CDs to put stamps on.

And if you’ve noticed Amazon now send multiple smaller parcels rather than putting all your, say, CDs in one big box after a bit of feedback from posties – you can stick 5 individual CDs though a letterbox but can’t do the same for one big box. Plus 4 out of 5 might get through rather than losing the whole lot.

As people have said, it’s more complicated than postie X can carry 25kg of post, therefore thats x hundred letters blah blah.

There’ll be physical cables presumably from the hub to all the speakers to power them so unless the decorators have pulled all the cabling out (worrying if they have) then I can’t see there would be much on an issue.

I’m assuming they’ve had to move the control system for some reason and just pulled out the multitude of wires. if so, then just pay the Linn guy soem money to put them back in again.

Red spoked wheels are only cool in the minds of kids who haven’t even taken the stabilisers off yet.

Open Sport are a touch wider than Open Pro and a lot cheaper if that’s an issue.Or go for some beast of a rim Rigida Sputniks!

105 is a lot heavier than Apex, circa 400g or something. There was a shootout between 105, Centaur and Apex in Cycling Plus a while ago. I was suprised how much heavier the Shimano stuff was. Apex won though I’m sure that was more for the crazy get-out-of-jail low gear rather than much else.

Not sure what benefit Rival has over Apex. Carbon levers I think, but not sure if the shifters are actually any lighter.

If you’re not on a compact already go for that first.

Our neighbour’s house is costing him £25m to redevelop

Holy cow, that’s some extension!!!!

Don’t forget IE and FF have a different ‘box model’. Subtle difference but makes my life hell sometimes.

Basically in IE if you say a DIV is 100px wide, then add a border it makes the content on the div narrower. Same with padding etc.

Firefox decides your content should stay 100px wide and add the border/padding etc. on top so the blasted thing gets wider, which often blows out your layout. Or makes borders disappear as they are outside the visible area perhaps….

Been screwed by several lower feedbackers who didnt pay or respond to cases being opened, then had to second chance offer for whole lot less money.

Shouldn’t matter – if the buyer doesn’t respond to your case in 2 weeks you automatically get your fees back.

Just relist instead of getting 2nd chance offers.

Smart ones seem to have a decent clip. If you’ve got a decent tab to clip it to, then a strip of electricians tape underneath pretty much makes sure it’ll stay.

If you just want a flashy light, there are some cateye ones on an elastic bungy thingy you loop round something and tuck under themselves so just dangle.

Sure there’s a way in eBay settings to stop zero (or any specific) feedback buyers from being allowed to bid. It’s a bit fo a dig if I remember. But you can definitely stop specific users bidding on any of your items so maybe do it to these two.

Might be genuine but it’s strange to get two zeros in a bidding war.

Just do what everyone else seems to do, just don’t bother paying if you win. The seller can’t leave negative feedback.

The Spark’s a budget carbon full suss, £2300 for a complete build is not an expensive carbon bike by any means.

Well considering that ‘cheap’ Spark only has an carbon mainframe and an alloy build out the back for suspension duties it’s pushing the boundaries of exactly what a ‘carbon’ bike is anyway.

was there an advert for said brand on the opposit page or anywhere else in the Mag? i’ll bet there was!

Funnily enough a couple of pages after there was an exclusive low down two-page spread about the ‘new’ Scott Spark frame which for all intents and purposes is a double spread advert on how good Scott are….

So it was the Scott that won then?

Yes, the full suss Scott at twice the price was declared better than the cheap XC hardtails. But I’m spoiling it all for you now. Get yourselves into WHSmiths….

And the winner is the Orange Five!

Don’t get me started on that old WhatMTB test – “what is the best allround bike?” – must have all braze ons, mudguards, racks, easy to fix in Outer Mongolia, etc. etc. so they had various 26″ touring type bikes (Thorns etc.) and a random Orange 5 – funnily enough the Five own because it was most fun on the trails even though it failed almost every measure of what constituted an ‘all-round’ bike.

This months test IIRC was an On One Whippet, Exotic Carbons frame with some stuff stripped from a Trek, a Cube (all around the grand mark, proper XC hardtails, barends etc. with 100mm travel forks) and a Scott Spark at £2.5k. Think the test was entitled something like “is cheap carbon frame any good”. So no, as the expensive carbon bike won…

G-form!

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/protection/knee-pads/product/review-g-form-knee-pads-11-45012

http://g-form.com/product/

Can’t remember but know what you mean. It had yellow ‘padding’ on them didn’t it.

Surely not doing all the F1 races means we can fund even more BBC cronies to have a jolly to Glastonbury next time?

Surely we could fit Strickly Come Dancing onto one of the stages. Can’t see Brucie camping in a field mind…

F1 is expensing to broadcast. To get their moneys worth the Beeb just over egged the coverage – qualifying, race day “only 376 minutes until the race starts…”. On a Sky Sports channel you’d probably get away with that kinda stuff, when you only have two channels to appeal to everyone it does block out an awful lot of time on BBC for possibly a niche market.

Shimano complete shoe/pad assemblies will work fine with campag calipers.

Be careful with that statement. My campag shoes won’t fit my Shimano brakes – the Campy brake shoe bolt is too wide to fit into the Shimano ‘slot’ in the caliper.

Sidi do a ‘mega’ fit which is very wide if you have a bit of money spare. Lake do a wide version too but not sure in what models.

So slightly off thread, how is a downhill skier faster on the snow/ice than when he/she jumps a hill instead? Drag must be the same (assuming same aero tuck), no power input (i.e. wheels pushing them forwards etc.). Must have missed that lesson at school whilst behind the bike sheds with me pals.

[alert, spoiler from yesterday] Respect to Voeckler on that downhill yesterday, landing in that car park – it looked like a pretty large hop down onto the concrete!). Kiss of death mind, saying he was a great descender!!!

Check out GreenBee too – John Lewis insurance – I think they were both unwritten by the same company (AXA I think) so had similar ‘it’s a bike, we’ll cover it’ kinda policies though check small print for max values etc.

fellatio. Now that takes talent. Even Fiona Bruce couldn’t do that.

Damn. Another dream shattered…..

window.close() should work in the child regardless, just tried it on one of my pages. Are you trying to call anything before that that is possibly blowing out the javascript (like trying to hit the parent) before the call?

Probably find some stuff is just next seasons model. Think the pros has electronic shifting before the masses etc. etc. – basically road testing stuff for the dentists to buy next year to replace last years oh so out of date SRAM Red….

Renshaw was hinting that the two Marks and their mate come as a bundle.

I’d almost assume that was a mandatory requirement to the deal…

In fact I read an article with Millar saying pretty much the same thing about Wiggins when he was on Garmin.

Agreed with Headfirst.

Sky won’t run themselves into the ground getting a breakaway back to get him to a bunch sprint.

Can’t see Brad taking his turn on the train roaring into a French village somewhere…..

Cyclocross tyres normally on those width of rim (sure I remember someone running fairly chunky 29er tyres on a fairly standard road rim) so I can see why they wouldn’t work.

After all a Mavic XC717 26″ rim has an internal rim width of 17 mm (hence the last two digits of the product name!) and people run 2″ mtb tyres off them..

Afraid to admit I was old enough to see them in their prime.

Quality gig, Bob never aid a word between songs, just feedback until the next aural assault started. Never quite sure how Grant Hart managed to drum and sing at same time to some of them.

Maybe that’s why I’m deaf in older age…..

After all I’m sure a lot of sports/famous people have appeared to be using products they would probably in real life never touch.

I’m sure Christiano Ronaldo drives a Suzuki Swift. FACT.

Dunno, not sure if I would back off for drug cheat to get back on his bike.

Regarding Wiggins if you see the reaction that Cav did post-win maybe the communication isn’t as brilliant as we think it is.

I suspect in times to come the ‘unwritten rule’ will become more and more forgotten. Probably down to money.

Sponsor – “so why didn’t you win that stage after all the money we give you?”
Rider – “well, a rider from your competitors got a mechanical so we all slowed down and let him get back into the pack and subsequently win the race”.

Sad but true. Don’t see McLaren or Ferrari backing off if the Red Bull has an issue with it’s gearbox.

I’d put a fair amount of money on no other neighbours have thought it was ‘terrible’ or have indeed noticed anything. They’ll have been assuming their thoughts are indeed the representation of the populous (bit like STW people then… :P)

The worrying part of the letter is the hint to move out.

It might not be, there might be a o-ring around it and once the SFN type thingy opens enough it’ll grip the rough carbon. If you look down the steerer is there a cut going down the length of it that might imply it’s just held with tension on the sleeve?

Can’t believe a fork maker would effectively make a fork uncuttable by doing that.

I think the idea is to stop people getting their stuff shown in both the ‘auction’ tab and the ‘buy-it-now’ tab. You see the £9.99 auction and you use the buy-it-now option. If you’re daft enough to pay extra to do that for your auction anyway I don’t really see the issue but it’s eBays ball so they make the rules.

I think Buy it now is stupid anyway! you don’t have it at regular auctions so why have it online!

At regular auctions you bid, say, a tenner you pay a tenner and online you might pay 99p so it’s not exactly a like for like anyway…

Insert? Sounds like that might be the equivalent of the star fangled nut in the carbon tube.

It should come out, see if there’s an allen key fitting in there where the thread for the top cap goes through. It should unscrew and slacken off though from experience they can be a bit of a clart to get out.

Technically you could cut thru it, but you’ll be needing to buy a new one to replace it if it is what I think it is.

Advertise in what?

Good point I suppose if they bring NOTW down. Though expect the prices of advertising Fords to go up on Sky if Murdoch gets the hump!

Interesting to see who blinks first.

The people pulling their adverts are on a ‘moral’ bandwagon at the moment, but how long before Ford start realising Volkswagen are still advertising (and presumably getting sales due to the adverts…).

His missus was gorgeous, I remember that!

My Kona Jake the Snake has a 26.8mm post.