don't they say drinking 10 cans in an hour is the same as taking a dose of speed tablets?

Where would one purchase a dose of speed tablets?

Sorry… just such an odd way to phrase things :) I think this is one of those baseless comparisons. What is a "dose" of speed? Where do you get speed 'tablets' (it comes in a powder normally)? And more importantly, in what way is it the same?

I can definitely tell you that Red Bull and speed do not feel the same to ingest.
One will make you mildly rush and maybe make you feel a bit dehydrated and headachey the next day if you overdo it, the other will hollow you out and drop you a shivering wreck on the floor wishing that the world would reach up and swallow you the next day. It's not the same ;)

it's clearly untenable.

good.

If they ditched all the opinion pieces that would be a start.

Disagree. I really like these pieces, they add a bit of character to the mag and these sort of "lifestyle" pieces are what keep me coming back to ST even when I've stopped bothering to buy any others.

That and the fact that most of the articles actually tell stories, and while a lot of people above seem to be making negative comments on the grammar I've very, very rarely had anything stand out enough to actually jar my enjoyment of an article in ST (unlike another lifestyle bike mag I occasionally read – anyone try and read the recent Orange Blood review elsewhere?).

Overall I think ST is a fantastic mag that does the sort of articles I want to read in a magazine instead of on a monitor. That's why despite my lack of "p" I'm a subscriber and intend to continue to be so.

To me the Catholic view of gay people has no more moral weight than the BNP's view of black people. Why should they have special permission to discriminate?

This.

But also, people trying to view human behavioral patterns in animals: surely the very fact that we are able to view animals engaging in a variety of sexual roles goes more towards eroding the idea of sexuality being a binary concept. That animals don't behave just like people is hardly surprising.
I would argue that the fact that animals seem so happy to engage in sexual activity with any available gender is more telling regarding the 'naturalness' of the concepts of both heterosexuality and homosexuality. IMO both are largely cultural constructs.

Sorry, badly worded by me. Crystal Antlers are a band, their album is called Tantacles and iotsd pretty good.

ISIS albums that I like are Celestial and Oceanic, not sure about Wavering Radiant, its a bit hit n miss
Awesome, thanks. I'll give one of those two a go then. Might explain why I struggled a bit with Wavering Radiant :)

What about some ISIS?

Crystal Antlers, their album is pretty good
I just had a look for this and can't find this album, are you sure that's right? I'd like some recommendations for ISIS albums as I've struggled to get into their stuff before. I think I have Wavering Radiant at the moment.

If you haven't heard it already: Mastodon – Crack the Skye

It's a brilliant, brilliant album. Really big sound, heavy as anything and just generally fantastic. In fact I think I might put it on now.

I'm not a fan of the iPod either, I've never got on with the buttons on it. However, if I were buying a new MP3 player now (especially one with good storage) it would be hard not to get an iPod.

However, if buying an iPod I would definitely buy an iPod classic that was compatible with Rockbox[/url]. That would then free you from the contentious Apple software and allow you to transfer data by plugging your iPod in as an external drive and simply copying files across.

FWIW, my current actual choice of mp3 player is an old iRiver H340 which has already had the battery upgraded and is about to have the hdd upgraded to 120g. I still haven't found anything I'd choose to upgrade to, although it would be nice to have something less brick like.

That Zorro thing… bottom bracket on the swingarm? Oh. Ok. Definitely keeping with the times there.

Or for half the money and all the capability…

…the mighty Spesh Pitch

This is a great choice if you're on a budget. But, as ever, it really depends on how much you have to spend. While the Pitch frame is excellent, the build kit is mostly just OK – more of a fantastic starting point for slow upgrades than a totally sorted final bike.

Interesting spelling and grammar to start a thread about books with there ;)

Regardless, I'm in the middle of Stand on Zanzibar at the moment. I found the first part of the book quite dull, but now I'm getting deeper in the interest is starting to show. I haven't really seen the brilliance that got it destined for the SF Masterworks series, and earned it so many high praises, yet though.

I think I need to give Blood Meridian another try soon. I started on it a while ago but ran out of steam around half way through, For some reason it didn't grab me at that time, although most of McCarthy's other stuff I've read has been brilliant.

Firefox on my Gentoo PC and Laptop (Ubuntu, pfffft) ;)

I've tried a few other browsers now and again, but keep coming back to FF. The problem with lightweight browsers I find is that we run so much stuff through the web these days they tend to be limited in some way, and FF has so many brilliant extensions available it makes up for the little bit of bloat.

Magento is one of the better ones around, we spent some time investigating the options and this is what we've settled on for our current project.

Don't listen to the doubters, take your HT down any track you fancy and you'll be fine. Last time we were up there a friend took an Orange P7 demo bike down Egypt in the pissing rain and had a right laugh.
I'd probably think twice about taking a racey XC bike down there, but any normal slack-ish trail bike will be fine, just maybe not that quick! Your Chameleon should love it.

I need to make an effort to get back up there over the Christmas break, it's an awesome place, and I've still not had the chance to experience chip shop.

Just to update anyone else who's interested, I found a bike shop near me with a Tesla 5 in stock and got over there to give it a go. It looks good. Holding the end caps up to one another the lens looked a spot on fit – I didn't actually put it into my light and close it as (unsurprisingly) they didn't seem too keen on me pulling apart a £300+ light too much, but it was good enough for me to order a Tesla end cap with lens.
As I had to order the end cap as well I'm hoping the threads will line up and I can neaten up the look of my light a little, will let you know when it turns up in a day or two.

Thanks, that's what I was considering doing if I couldn't find a replacement. Still hoping someone will be able to confirm whether or not Tesla lens' will fit, but if not I'll be off to the shops soon to look for acrylic and drill bits.

Hard to be sure about the dimensions as the lens is now in little pieces in the rubbish, but from measuring the light itself I think it's 39mm diameter.

No idea on thickness, but at a guess: thin.

There's a few, a lot of which have sprung from modified code for the Linksys WRT series of routers. The one I use is dd-wrt, which is really very good – although I've not played with the VPN features that much. You can normally pick up a WRT54G or similar for under £50 (quite probably less now) on ebay. Flashing with dd-wrt is really very easy and the set-up is all done via a nicely designed web interface. You pretty much get an enterprise feature set for a home cost.

You will probably need an ethernet ADSL modem to handle your adsl connection though as most of the boxes that run dd-wrt are pure ethernet and wireless routers, not ADSL modems. You probably have this already though.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/

Definitely get a burr grinder, it's well worth the investment. I have a couple of these (one at home and one in the office) and for everything other than espresso they are fantastic – if you want to make good espresso budget a significant amount more! I got mine a fair bit cheaper than that listing, so it's worth watching ebay for the price to drop.

I'll also second the recommendation for Hasbean[/url]. It's barely more expensive than from the supermarket if you don't get carried away, and you know it's freshly roasted unlike the supermarket stuff which has probably been sitting on a shelf for weeks. Really quick service as well, often delivered the next day even on orders placed well into the afternoon.

These two things will make a HUGE difference to your coffee :D

And to add to the "Basic Bothy Questions" – if you don't know exactly where a bothy you're heading to is, how do you know it's a bothy?

I had always imagined them to be much less house like and very obviously bothy, but I keep seeing pictures of places that I would just look at as houses and assume the people in them were the permanent occupants.
Has anyone tried to enter a private home thinking it was a bothy? Or is there some sort of marking to say it's a bothy? And what's the protocol if someone's already there?

Just thought I'd give this another chance in case anyone who has an answer missed it the first time!

Actually it's the opposite. The gravitational force is inversely proportional to the distance from the centre of mass. (F=GmM/R^2 where F = force, G = gravitational constant, m = your mass, M = mass of earth, R = distance between masses) so increasing R reduces F if all others are constant.

Yeah, well, you can prove anything with facts.

I do a 14 miles each way, normally I drive in Monday morning, leave the van at work and drive home again Friday evening.
I've been trying to get out early to take in a few more interesting trails before work a few times a week though, which ups it by about 5 or 6 miles on those days. And group rides about once a week add a fair bit to the ride home.

is anyone interested in a group buy of helmet mounts and 1m extension leads? $25 postage is poor…

Just came across this guy on ebay, postage is a fair bit cheaper.

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/dapedaler/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=

I'm 6ft so not sure if a small would be a bit wee for me.

It definitely would be. I'm 5'10" and ride a medium quite comfortably, there's no way I wouldn want anything smaller. I would say that even if you're not planning to do any miles on it at all and just use it as a play bike a small would be too small.
Depending on your dimensions you may be wanting to look at a large even, not sure on that though.

I think that would be turboferret Xipe? I came across his site but the battery packs he's selling need soldering skills that I don't have. I can probably find someone to do that for me if I get really stuck, but I was hoping to find an 'out of the box' solution.

I have just now discovered spare battery packs on the Geoman site: http://www.geomangear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=4_41&products_id=141
Unfortunately it looks like they want $25 on top of that for delivery, which makes it quite expensive when compared to the light as a whole.

Ah ha! BatterySpace looks like the place to get a spare battery for my DX then. Can anyone who understands these things better than I guide me as to which battery I would need to buy? Or point me to somewhere else I can get spare battery packs for these.

Dogmatix: that should be fine. Mine is long enough for the cable to reach from the light on the bars to the battery back on the back of the top tube. It actually lives further forwards towards the head tube, but only because it risks fouling the rear suspension at the back.

I'm curious if anyone knows where a spare battery pack can be had for this without any soldering skills being required. I've been hunting around a bit but not found any information as yet, and 3 hours is cutting it a little fine in some circumstances.

What about a windstopper gilet layered over a long or short sleeve jersey? I find this does me brilliantly at the moment. The mesh back on the gilet means that I rarely feel the need to take it off when the weather heats up either, just a bit of tweaking of zips up and down as needed. As a bonus they're cheap: mine was about £25 I think.

I'm so glad to read this! I'm currently waiting for my Letter of Collection from the Cycle Scheme so I can go and collect my Boardman HT Pro. As I'd been waiting a few weeks the excitement had started to wain, and I'd even started looking at other bikes I could get (whisper it, even road bikes). This has just re-invigorated my enthusiasm for the bike though!

Thanks :D

I'm guessing the lack of motivation means you're not training for anything in particular? If that's the case then you could either:

1. Enter yourself for something in the not too distant future. This way you have something to aim for and a reason to push you out the door when it's nasty out.
2. Stop worrying about 'training' and just ride for fun. If this means not doing stuff that you don't enjoy, don't do it! It's pretty easy. Unless you have a specific reason to be training, why bother if it's not fun?

On full compression the seatstay brace was hitting the seat tubing only slighlty, only noticable if bottoming out. colour is polished silver with blue rocker

They replaced the frame because of that? Wow. Mines done the same thing a few times and now has a slight dent in the seatstay brace due to it but I never considered it might be a warranty job.
Did you mean that yours suffered some structural damage as a result of the bottoming?

I too have the Endura Laser and have grown to love it very quickly, it's the ideal bit of kit for pretty much every day at the moment. I would have bought the Ultralite from CRC at that price though if they had it in my size.

What about the Boardman Pro HT? I've not really found anything bad said about one of these yet. I'm hoping they're as good as they sound as I was planning to go and get one at the end of the week!

That Killer Loop looks a little different than the one I've done Foxy. In fact it is, not substantially though. This is the variant I've ridden: http://www.gpsies.com/map.do?fileId=iwxfvddrjfgmddef

Very good it is too. Particularly the stuff in and around Lustleigh / Nutcracker. I found some of the stuff over Birch Tor a little underwhelming after the earlier stuff, but fun all the same.

I got the same experience as you lot when placing the order – completed fine through paypal but got a blank page after hitting the confirm button and my cart failed to clear. I've also contacted them with the paypal receipt, so hopefully it'll all be ok and sorted fairly quick sharpish!

Thanks Gus, an overnight in a bothy would certainly tick more boxes on the "doing Scotland" check sheet.

On the subject of a 2 day ride: I'm really keen to hear any other suggestions for this. I'm not amazingly fit, but a fairly capable rider. However, I am pretty inexperienced in the whole wild camping thing so ideally I'd like that whole empty world feel but not in the most remote area. You know, just in case.

I've just ordered Phil McKane's book on Scotland's "Wild Trails" as a point of reference, but personal recommendation always helps :D

Loads of great input, thanks!

cullen-bay On thursday, you could come out with us in the evening.

That sounds awesome. If I end up in the area on a Thursday and have sufficient lighting I'll drop you a line to sort something out. Would be great to have people to ride with :)

druidhHere's an idea…forget the idea of "doing" Scotland in a week. Your plan has as much driving as riding time. Choose an area (or 2) and just do what's there. There are trail centres dotted liberally around and more "natural" riding than you could ever hope to do.

Thanks, that's just what I was worried about. The amount of driving is made worse by the fact that I live about half an hour from the most southerly point in the UK! This plan was made by reading a couple of books and picking out the bits that appealed, but I do think that it all seems a little spread out. Certainly people saying that Golspie is a fairly short run makes me wonder if it's really worth venturing that far North on such a tight schedule.

Goan I would take the Fort William part and move it to the end of the week, and take it in as part of your two day ride, for which I suggest a loop of Ben Nevis, the Mamores and Grey Corries.

That sounds good. I really have no idea where to go for such a ride, so this is definitely one to look into.