People saying about holding onto wifi is only partially true. We have 2 or 3 extenders and it is not a problem most of the time. Sometimes you can pulse wifi off and on and get the one you want. For 95% of the time it works just as you would hope it would.

We have a cheap ant+ dongle and have no issues with HRM straps (garmin + wahoo) and Tacx turbo. The dongle is about 1ft away from front wheel.

We had the ones that did not even have the proper bindings(!) but were great when the kids were young. You could strap your pair on one side of rucksack and their pair on the other side. Hands were free to help them.
Would not wear them now though!!!

We have a dunster house severn cabin, with insulation on floor and ceiling. Floor is maybe 25mm and is laid below the floor, with a small gap between floor. Roof is insulated above the internal roof and below the shingles. The walls are also 45mm wide.

At the moment it is REALLY cold down there even with that insulation with a 2kW (supposedly) heater.

Expanding foam has been used between floor and wall and clear silicon between wall and roof.

I use my son’s zwift account and just download the fit file from the website and export. Normally I adjust the weight up to mine. Small faff, but dont use it enough to warrant spending

I have 2 DHB bibs that I bought the same time, from Wiggle for the same price (both reduced) for about 40 I think. One pair is much better than the other. But I cannot fathom out from the labelling any model name.
My son swears that Rapha has the best pad (nothing touches it for 5+hrs). If you are not doing longer rides then that will be irrelevant – go for the cheaper ones.

@singletrackmind – I think your brother is confused? Or I am. You could never put personal property into pensions. There was talk about it ~15yrs ago, but they aborted that.
You also imply that he is going to borrow to get the B2L – I assume he realises that you cannot offset mortgage interest any more (or soon- whatever the rules are). Actually you can, but it has to be from within a company.

I realise that you are trying to replace into some existing light fittings, but for other people – I have just fitted one of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0895G4YF2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 in a log cabin and really impressed with the amount of light output. Also nice and simple to install.

Best value? Readly (read/scan so many magazines on there – allows 3 or 4 devices so you could share the cost too).

I have (some) ethernet in the attic, so just ran a cable from the roof down behind the drain pipe under the patio and down the garden. Terminated in a socket and then a switch and a £30 wifi repeater (in AP mode). Works a treat.

I had a pair of varifocals (my first) and a large monitor. Never got on with them (ended up titling my head to get the right vari-portion of the lens). Recently got 2 pairs of glasses (which I originally tried to dodge doing). So one pair is fixed focal length for my monitor – SOOO much better. Just a small pain to look at anything else in the room (still have varifocals for everything else).

I have this Lenovo 24″ 4k – https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B084XR8RPB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_image?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Seems pretty good for the money – it is cheap for a 4k.

Some lease companies will allow winter tyres – a friend successfully lobbied them to – he did 50+k miles a year though – his argument was that he would wear them out before winter arrived – they were happy to allow it.

i think i would be considering one of the more “serious” heart related devices.
seeing as whoop does HRV I would imagine (I am guessing) that it’s heartrate raw data is going to be pretty good.
Same applies to the apple watch (the latest one(s))?

Yes. I wrote a (company) cheque to the shop and it was used as a pool bike for errands.

got 2 of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01IR41A40/ set to AP mode with wire going into them with same SSID everywhere. Work a treat.
Note – those ceiling mounted ones can have an aerial that expects them to be mounted on a ceiling for best results

@alex Wiltshire. They laid the fibre locally in the last few weeks, so expecting it to be lit soon. The upload speed is one of the appealing things (currently ~5mb, would go to ~200mb).
5G is not going to sole stuff in rural. Urban can give massive speeds, but will be limited to a few hundred metres.

@alex – gigaclear – are you waiting for them to lay the fibre? They have recently laid fibre along the main road with their green cabinets, so waiting to hear from people how it goes.

clamps is a good call – I had to do it with only 1 timber.
wired ethernet – dead easy to run, worth the effort. I have a switch and a wifi extender down there as well.
radiator is definitely needed. REALLY cold in the winter without a reasonable amount of heating.
PIR on the lighting makes it nice and easy when you walk in too.
base – I used something like these – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reinforced-Driveway-ECO-Friendly-Included-Membrane/dp/B07LG7Y6CQ/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=reinforced+grid+ground+plastic&qid=1606246204&sr=8-6 I did not want to go for a concrete slab (no good reason really)

Every single one of our bikes had a bent hanger. I would (now) check them first always.

I have dunster severn (3 yrs old?).
We do have roof and floor insulation and have 40mm thick logs.
Did not get it pressure treated, but applied a very good protective stain after (do this “quickly”, I delayed it – although you are pushed at the moment with weather). https://www.wood-finishes-direct.com/product/sikkens-cetol-novatop
Foundations – we used the plastic grids filled with stone. Seems to have worked fine. Friend did not make sure his was level and had to rebuild his.
Walls – dead easy to put up. But the overall time taken is quite a while.
Have a garage consumer unit in there, fed from the house. With wired data going from loft and down the wall and under the patio.

Be warned – it is still v.cold in the winter! probably best to go for some kind of remote control heating.

PAC code – they got info from credit card company, said the 2 phone contracts that were being paid – they attempted to compromise both – plus.net and vodafone. vodafone has 2FA – so they failed (I received the spurious login attempt), plus.net did/do not have 2FA – so they successfully got PAC code.

Considering most “hacks” are quite basic, I was surprised how many steps this involved.

Be really careful.
My “attack” started with them trying my mobile network (that failed – 2 factor auth), but they did manage to get my wife’s (so they got PAC code and transferred her number off – there was no way to get it back then!!).

They were quite brazen (and successful), the security on some organisations was quite shocking! (eg they phoned my bank and provided VERY loose details, and managed to get past security!!!)

Could have sworn my last one was level 5? I have done mine 3 times now – rightx2, leftx1.

They were offering surgery. Was almost tempted. Until doctor said that he had a builder who did not have the operation and was still able to move bags of sand/cement.

The only limiting factor I have found is when I was helping at a velodrome, holding a bike with a rider and they wanted me to lift them so they could move the back wheel. That motion was not pleasant/possible. Other than that it causes me no issues (other than backpack straps slipping off more easily!).

@shedbrewed road. just to be clear they use the roadman 2. Absolutely swear by them. For me they seem a bit OTT, but I was commuting a small distance, they have used them in all sorts of weather.

My kids use https://www.spatzwear.com/ and absolutely swear by them (yearly mileage over 15k miles).
Also if totally covered in muck you can just jetwash your feet with them on.

4gb is bad, but to quantify – my son’s i3 went from something like 5mins to boot to ~30secs to boot by upgrading to SSD.
I would suggest you do both RAM + SSD and it will transform it for ~100 pounds.

Bought my son a secondhand i3 basic laptop. Was horribly slow. Upgraded the drive to SSD (about 60 quid?) and it transformed it (wakes from sleep in about 10seconds, instead of 5mins). SSD makes a massive difference unless you need specific hardware requirements (as long as you have at least 8gb ram).

Friends use them a lot, no idea how responsive they are normally, but are a long standing business

I have run cat5 out to shed with netgear extender in AP mode – works fine.
Also using those round generic chinese plugs from amazon – work really well (one is set to switch on 30mins before sunset).

clicking – there were a bunch (of desktop?) drives that had the “click of death” which was a sign that the drive was about to die.

As has been said above – SSD makes a massive difference. Upgraded a basic laptop with a cheap SSD (~£60) and it changed it from taking 3-5mins to start to seconds. Note – some come with everything you need to copy your old drive – cable and software. Some laptops may have 2 drive bays.

We spent months seeing cars on the motorway and entering their details into comparison web sites.
Amazing what are expensive/cheap to insure (Kia was cheapest, Polo is more expensive than Golf, Seat is more than VW, etc)

Both kids are on Admiral multi-car (in their name). This was much much cheaper for a faster/more powerful golf.

All cars in my name so that bank breakdown policy covers all of them.

Android auto – amazing, great, would not buy a car without it.
However, my Samsung S7 would have many issues with it. Upgrading to a new OnePlus7 almost all the issues disappeared. I presume it was to do with the newness of the OS on the phone. So Android auto on an old phone (or old operating system) might have more issues/oddities

all our hangers were not straight

Are the D12ers just putting in massive miles? My two mechanical bikes share 10,000km between them on original cables and outers. Again, I don’t care what folks spend their money on, just surprised my experiences seem so out of step, makes me worry I’m not riding enough!

Yes I think so. The experiences I am listing is based off young racers (who love to crash), who do massive miles (~15,000km per year, per rider), some of which has been bought secondhand. If you limit di2 experience to just what I have experienced – I have had no issues.

Even things like crash protection (eg Sagan playing around with his mech – where it had probably gone into crash protection mode) is irrelevant to 98% of us. It is also easy to rectify (unplug/reboot). But I have seen it happen “just” going into the first corner of a crit where unnatural forces at put into the drivertrain.

Somebody else I know who does 2 x 30 miles x 4 days a week x 48 weeks a year swears by (campag) electronic shifting.

We have 3 Di2 bikes. Team members have had di2 as well. I prefer the idea of eTAP.

List of issues:

i)batteries die – happened to a few now – sure it would happen to eTAP – but the eTAP ones are so much easier to get your hands on.

ii) internal routing of cables can be easy, can be a pain. Had problems with mine (not di2’s fault – kids fault) and you have to remove the cranks to get at the junction box

iii) problems seen in races – crash protection – I believe that most of the issues we have experienced and seen is to do with the mech trying to protect itself. You need to “reboot” the mech for it to work again

iv) DI2 batteries just seem to be die. After a few years you start to have issues with some of them. You just need to accept that you need to buy a new £120 battery that has £10 worth of cells in them…

I only know one friend who uses eTAP – he is very happy with it – but it gets far less abuse than the di2 listed above. So not fair comparison.

I know one big national team had AXS last year and riders were seen having issues. So, in similar situations AXS has it’s own issues too.

Given the choice, I would buy AXS, certainly not saying it is any better though.

Stayed here a few times – https://www.booking.com/hotel/fr/park-and-suites-elegance-reims.html?aid=337862;label=review_am;sid=358cea762caf767a0ce9a63bd5dd5bf2;dist=0&keep_landing=1&rurl=1a5754d7bd14ab73&sb_price_type=total&tab=4&type=total&#tab-main

enough space to put bikes in the room and they accept dogs.

Food shops near by too

Have you checked http://www.wolfbane.net/cgi-bin/txpath.exe to see if you can get signal from the main transmitter?

Assuming the Altea is like the Leon – if so – it is quite hard to remove the door card – but maybe for what you want to do not too bad.

To remove the door card you have to remove the whole window mechanism – so you half-wind the window down, tape the window, undo the bolts, then remove the card. It is a REAL faff. But you end up getting hold of the window regulator/motor – so might work out better for you??? See seatcupra.net for a guide (for Leon).

The mobile/SIM portion will have a timeout associated with holding the internet connection up when it is idle. Maybe that side of things is not working correctly? It will be an operator side setting (ie if nothing is going on, drop the 4g data side), it should then bring this back up on demand (helps with battery life on mobiles – so possibly should be turned off on a data only SIM). Try simulating it? Turn off your your wired/wireless devices – see if it drops the connection, then turn one on and see if it brings the connection back up on demand.