It was established early on yesterday’s Etape “recce” that no-one on the ride was actually doing the event.

Free entry, and less dangerous too! :D

Iain – Can get the train to Dunfermline, assuming you are still in Ed.

Waiting for someone to reveal this is an April fools.

Recce of a sportive course? This might be even worse that the current trend for sportive race bikes!

Cracking route, love the Path of Condie and Dunning Glen climbs.

Sounds like you have a non-shimano plastic cup on one end.

Surely, you haven’t forgotten how frustrating it can be when you see the blue screen of death when your PC crashes? Programmers are fallible, too…

Programmers may be fallible, but their code gets to be installed in thousands of units, and as a result any obvious failures will be come apparent pretty early on. Current software for autonomous cars is pretty well tested before it even gets to a car.

I love the idea of an autonomous car, but I imagine the early transition period could be a little daunting.

Humans are the most useless unreliable parts of the control system. The more control we take away from them, the safer the roads will be.

All for it, will just need to find something to do to keep me entertained.

Noticably stiffer for sure. 15mm rules at the very unscientific ‘wheel between the legs and wrench on the bars’ test.

Move over. I had a bad day today and yielded for the first four elites, no point making your bad day theirs.

Follow the instructions that came with it, can’t get better than those.

I would get xt as I don’t trust hollowpin chains

Only the 10speed chain is hollowpin, and after years of running other hollowpin chains, I don’t see what is not to trust.

The nickel coating on the XTR chain makes a big difference to the durability of the chain. It is very resistant to surface rust (if you leave it wet overnight etc). I recently shortened an XTR chain I’d used for a few months, and took the chance to look at the wear between the inner and outer plates; the nickel coating was still intact.

Plus, Rose Bikes do them for £17 posted. http://www.rosebikes.co.uk/article/shimano-chain-9-speed-dura-ace-cn-7701/aid:38115

Someone who really understands the meaning of the word pimp. Lovely.

So next up will be buying the carbon frame

Is the Shimano MTB 10speed chain not a different width to a road chain?

Do KMC make a specific link for this?

Deaths per TWh for different power sources. The results shouldn’t surprise anyone with a brain.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

How do they compare with the likes of VM Bluemotion cars? Seems to me the manufacture of the batteries produce more CO2 than they ever save; refining heavy metals is not a cheap process.

Blatant publicity stunt. Just donate some money and keep your mouth shut.

Microsoft were very unpopular for doing something similar: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/microsoft_apologises_about_bing_japan_quake_tweet/

Why not Thorium then?

Answered by:

The Uranium-based infrastructure we have today was largely paid for by the weapons programme.

Exactly. Nuclear power was a nice side-product discovered while making weapons-grade materials. The legislation, especially in the US and Europe, is very much geared towards Uranium infrastructure, with other options being ignored as a result.

Bill Gates is a big investor in travelling-wave research, and had been hoping that Japan would give permission for some small-scale experimental reactors.

By default the current reactors are all unsafe-by-default. If left to their own devices without active-cooling they go super-critical.

A better way would be safe-by-defualt, where being left alone cause the reaction to slow to a stop without external input of power or otherwise.

LFTR does this, well worth watching some of the videos (mostly the same talks, various different lengths with associated brevity) on YT. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=liquid+thorium&aq=f

Unfortunately current regulation is not setup for either these or travelling wave reactors, so even starting development again has been a no-no since the late 70s.

I have a set of Stans/AC wheels, been great, even almost four years after I bought them.

Review here from a few years ago: http://douglasfshearer.com/blog/wheel-review-stans-ztr-olympic-rim-american-classic-hubs

Probably worth getting some DT hubs, the bearings in the AC are tiny, and the hubs aren’t as well sealed as DT or Pro2s. I have another front wheel which is an Stans Alpine on a Pro2, simply because the weight is similar, but the hub is far better sealed.

Next rear wheel will probably be a DT.

Not full. If you still want an entry email hels at helen@innerleithenmtbracing.com.

Will find out about on-the-day-entries.

Sticks will get caught in wheels no matter how many spokes you have.

The issue is that as you lower the spoke count, bigger things can get in there.

I’d ditch them if they were mine, but then I think then I wouldn’t buy them in the first place because:

– Super expensive.
– Heavy.
– Non-standard spokes are a pain to source in a hurry if you break one (thinking abroad).

A design exercise that made it to production.

Much better off with a Hope/Stans setup.

CX bike is a £100 cheaper than 2010, but now uses SRAM Apex rather than Rival. Muchos downgrade methinks.

Coffeeking posted a very similar thread a while back, just this time he went for the bait title.

http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/idiot-driver

CK – Between this and the dogs-on-trails thread a year or so back, we Scot’s sure are lucky to have such a nice chap as you around.

You have nowhere to be in such a rush that it is necessary to enter any hatched area, so chill out, wait a little more distance, and overtake when it’s really safe.

Did somebody say ‘Bonio’?

[/url]

Wait till 2012 bikes appear, everyone and their dog will have a CX bike out with disk brakes on. Might even see nice hydro brakes (Shimano had a press event last week but an embargo until July).

I have a Drobo. 4-bay FW-800 model.

Had it for about 18 months now. The ability to plug in larger disks without moving the data somewhere else first and re-RAIDing is brilliant.

I did have some issues with volume corruption, but this turned out to be due to me unplugging or switching it off without ejecting the drives first. Once I made sure I ejected it every time, things have gone brilliantly.

It is a little noisy due to air movement, though nothing that will disturb music at even low volumes.

I tend to use it as a backup device, though if I was using it as a primary/scratch drive I would have the data somewhere else. Same goes for any device. Data is priceless in a lot of cases.

Given the handlebar/saddle heights, does the weight include the front grocery basket?

Paste the following into your browser address bar:

javascript:alert(Math.floor(150*Math.random()))

More clearance would seem to be good for the puffer.

Only thing I can think of is a closed brake like a Hope C2 or Giant MPH (the older kind). Wind the pads out as much as you want. They also had the thickest pad material of any brake out there.

Looks like a Hex head void in the driveside axle. Cant think why.

Like the Middleburn HT2 style cranks, it is easier to make the axle as a separate part and have both ends bolt onto it.

Did STW not go to the Core Bike Show, or are they waiting till we’ve read all the news elsewhere?

It’s not BB30 you have, as that has a 30mm ID/axle. It will be BB92 most likely.

Standard bearings from a bearing supplier will work.

26:51 here. Race HT with SIDs was interesting, loved every second of it though. Only had one crash, on the uphill rocks at the end of Plora Craig, went straight over the bars on the second rise.

Brilliant atmosphere, as NW said everyone was smiling, had loads of chat with a whole gamut of folks.

Anyone get the top 5? Saw CCA killing it on stage 1, but had Shirley as the man for the win.

There is no time limit, you just have to finish the last stage by 1530, regardless of when you start.

Managed round fine on a race hardtail, only the luge section stage 2 is a bit iffy due to brake pump on 160/140 rotors.

Cracking fun, really like the format.

After new year we had really bad fog, snow meant you had to stick to main roads, so I was literally fearing for my life several times, despite a number of rear lights on the bike.

I will be buying one of these when they come out, partially for the brightness, but mostly for the convenience of running it off the same battery pack I use for my other lights.

£90 for the head unit on it’s own btw.

[/url]
Tilly in the Snow[/url] by douglasfshearer[/url], on Flickr

Only DH is timed.

You can start a stage any time after 0830, and you must finish the final stage by 1530.

Full explanation and schedule: http://www.innerleithenmtbracing.com/2010/11/enduro-race-series-round-1-30th-january.html

Hardtail with SIDs and 2.1 tyres. I may make the concession of dropping the saddle a little.

Singletrack below post 6 was created for the national XC champs in 2009. The singletrack above post 6 was the old red before it was re-routed to avoid the downhills.

Chicken balmoral, Marks and Spencer do a particularily lovely version.

Hels – Pre season diet going well?

Flickr uses some seriously long cache times in it’s header so that every cache on the internet helps save re-serving the image with the associated bandwidth usage:

$ curl -i http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5289/5263736409_7fa5fb164b_b.jpg
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:46:27 GMT
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Connection: keep-alive
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Expires: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 23:30:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:22:41 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 163644
Age: 76690
X-Cache: HIT from photocache617.flickr.bf1.yahoo.com
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from photocache617.flickr.bf1.yahoo.com:81
Via: 1.1 photocache617.flickr.bf1.yahoo.com:81 (squid/2.7.STABLE7)

The only likely way this photograph will be removed from caches is that it drops to being barely requested and gets squeezed out by other more popular content.

This is not unusual, Flickr have a need to reduce load on their servers, and you ISP has a desire to cache as much as possible to make your connection seem super fast.

It doesn’t. It’s a way for the UCI to make money by waving rulers at bikes in a lab instead of on the start line.