the gpx. If me sharing the route is an issue please let me know or delete my post or something, (but noticed johnnystorm’s post still existed, unscorned)

My encyclopedic memory tells me that there’s also Surrey classic rides in issues 79 (2 routes) and 137.

With the recent changes to the magazine, will there be an increase in quality of the pdf version?

The photography is one of the reasons that makes the mag so great but seems a shame for it to be so pixelated in the pdf. A little bump in pdf image quality would be greatly appreciated 🙏

Some short pointers from me…

1. > Moral of the story: keep moving.
^ this 100%.  Avoid rest. Try to carry on as normal. Keep walking, build it up, starting slow, short distances, if you can only go around the living room table it’s better than doing nothing.Next day add some more laps. Eventually you should move onto gentle cycling or other things you love.

Motion is lotion. Some movement will hurt, the pain mostly reflects how inflamed/irritated the structures are, not how damaged your back is. But you want the pain to be trending in the downwards direction.

2. Read the back book (Prof Martin Roland et al): it contains the latest advice about back pain, someone added it online so you can read it for free:   https://www.musicianshealth.co.uk/thebackbook.pdf  The book is short/succinct for a reason.

4.  I’m another avoider of surgery. I went to Bupa as I had cover via work: MRI showed I had two herniated discs (N.B. Scans don’t always show the cause of the pain, some herniated discs impact no nerves and might not be the source) The  physio they gave made it worse for me I was still in loads of pain 6 months later, also the next MRI I had showed a big progression in the severity of my two herniated discs. In that time I had been on gabapentin, naproxen, amitryptaline and had had 3 epidurals. This was breaking point for me I was considering surgery but I changed physio after 6 months of the bupa nonsense. My new physio (started Jan 2020) that had me doing gentle, low amplitude exercises, little and often, I was able to get off all pain killers, had no more time off work, and was back on the bike by summer.

Don’t go crazy with it, little and often, try to carry on your life as normal and avoid rest, it’ll be a bit painful for a while, but it means you get to do the things you love sooner. You’ve got this.

‘ello

As an alternative to Talky… I’m using the openfistemap (garmin routable maps using OpenStreetMap)

DC Rainmaker has some great instructions here if you want custom map areas:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/08/how-to-install-free-maps-on-your-garmin-edge.html

I’m using one of the downloads here:
https://www.openfietsmap.nl/downloads/europe

>> Are the changes just for the alloy model or ti too?

I believe it is both.

Moloko – Sing it Back?

This video details how to do it on the 1030 edge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J2_WgRuo_g

On my 530 edge, once the komoot app is installed (via garmin IQ) and have synced the device to a phone or wifi – it can download the tours (aka routes!) you have saved to your komoot profile.

On my 530, I go to Menu -> Connect IQ -> Komoot: The first page has my planned tours in most recent order, and also a link to my profile so I can find tours in collections, highlights etc. Once you have found your tour, clicking “available offline” downloads it to your garmin, and it will be available in the Garmin Courses list, or available in komoot again without re-downloading it, ready for when you want to start the ride.

Hope that helps, you could export the GPX and import it into garmin connect, but that seems a little old school when komoot can do it for you.

code.org is great, has scratch-like blocks that you can drag into position to create algorotihms to solve the minecraft or frozen themed puzzles.

I listened to a podcast about cs-unplugged which sounds great. Basically it allows you to tech Computer Science away from a computer:
https://csunplugged.org/en/ (I think this was the podcast https://changelog.com/podcast/302)

I’d buy a new bike for off-road use and clean this one up and use it for a pub bike/country lane cruiser/popping to the shops/etc.

My friend had this bike when I was young, the reflective paint brought back memories. Thanks for sharing 🙂

This is quite a good review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHOT3YBwW9U

I ended up going for the 530 as I didnt need/want touch screen and they were on sale.

If you want to go for Wildcat bags enter code stw21 at the checkout and get 20% off. Runs until the end of this month.

Thank you kindly. I bought a wildcat seatpost bag a few years ago and now I have got a handlebar one to match. Great quality kit.

Footflaps, I completely see where you are coming from, I think seeing adverts is just one of the many ways in which your data is used, and it’s probably the only one which actually manifests itself as visible to you as a user. And maybe that Conservatives advert was intended for you because any of you live in a neighbourhood that needs a CON win, or you have been profiled as a potential swing voter, or because you have voted con in the past, or because you have mostly conservative friends, or many other bits of data aligned to mean you got shown this advert. Ok the advert thankfully didn’t work on you, but others may be convinced (and indeed “we are where we are” with regards Conservatives and Brexit). So one might say that this user data has been used to influence user autonomy, and coerce decisions that don’t need coercing from some funded AI.

The other ways your data are used are not so visible. You don’t know when your data was accidentally leaked, sold to some other company, used to profile you using ai, when you become the subject of sentiment analysis, or when your location revealed to the police when you happened to be in a certain area where a crime happened, etc…

I think it’s great that: Apple’s privacy labels give you the tools to see what data is taken by these companies, apps like signal exist as a perfectly viable alternative, and that we’re even having this conversation on a mountain bike forum and not some techie/secops forum.

What are WA doing with my data, specifically, which I should be concerned about?

Well that’s kinda the problem isn’t it, and probably one for you to scour their privacy policy for, I imagine it will only tell you the things that they plan to do, and if you weren’t happy with the general vagueness of “Surveillance capitilism”, I doubt you’ll be satisfied with their “services” that they plan to offer from third parties with your data.

This article probably has the most information I can find in respect to whatsapp, and they also are unsatisfied with Whatsapps/Facebooks description of their intended data use: https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/23/facebook_whatsapp_business_api_hosting/

It probably hasn’t escaped you that Facebook does not have a great reputation when it comes to not leaking and abusing user data. That article summarises it nicely with the conclusion:

The Social Network™ said its hosting services will emerge in coming months, which gives us all plenty of time to ponder whether you want to get into business with a corporation that has failed to suppress misinformation, allowed live-streaming of a racist terror attack, leaked personal data, and took years to figure out that holocaust denial has no place in public conversations.

What are they doing with the data?

Surveillance Capitalism.

It might be worth saying that there’s a difference between what your phone has permission to read (aka permissions on the app stores), and what information is collected by the app and sent to the app provider (and possibly to be shared/sold to third parties). Only Apple have really put a spotlight on the latter with their recent introduction of “Privacy Labels”. On Android we have no such information, only the privacy policy of the app provider.

The image you see where Signal only collects your phone number is referring to what data is collected and sent/stored on the signal server. It has also has permission to read your contacts, and other things like your pictures (if you allow it).

So Signal has shown that it is possible to make a fully functioning messaging app (with attachments, video chat, group video chat, etc) without collecting your entire phone book, or any other such personal information, the only thing it stores in plaintext on the server is your phone number, which is actually pretty impressive technologically.

And for what it’s worth: “people will not follow you to Signal.” isn’t my experience.

Is Signal free of charge to use? If it is, there must be some way the developers can make money out of it, or will in the future.

Yes it is free to use (unlike Whatsapp, where you became the product when facebook bought it).

Signal Technology Foundation is a nonprofit 501c3 tax-exempt organization based in the United States. We don’t run ads, but we still need to pay for servers and staff. That’s where a donation from you can make a real difference. If you find Signal Messenger useful, we welcome your support.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Donor-FAQs

I’ve been using it for about 3-4 years, donate every now and again. Would recommend.

Re Wetherby red kite. Great route, muddy in places, advice on here about muddiest bits which might be worth an avoid this time of year: https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/wetherby-red-kite-trail-slop-or-not/#post-11475068

The HTC Desire 20 Pro has a 5,000mAh battery.

Everything else seems decent for the money, reviews are good for a non flagship type phone.

Another keepass user here. Not into giving my passwords to store on someone else’s server, and paying them to do so.

I went to Leeds Bike Park on Wednesday and there was about 10 of us on the trails, had a great time.

One of the things I really noticed were how good the blue and red flow trails near the car park are. When it’s not rammed you really get a chance to ride them properly. Thought they were a bit dull before.

So yeah if you want to go and have some holiday left, avoid the weekend.

It was pretty muddy, but very enjoyable, I’ll definitely be doing it again, maybe when it’s a bit less muddy. (Not gnarr but a lovely ride if anyone is wondering)

If the sections next to fields had some surfacing it’d be pretty good in all weather.

Cheers for the above advice.

This took a while to clean.

Thanks everyone for the replies.

I think a patch on the inside makes the most sense in my head. I’ve ordered some patches and some vulcanizing cement, will post here if it works.

That’s good to hear…

Any recommendations for tyre patches? I’ve seen the mushroom type, but concerned if I used one of them or anchovy in it might not seat so well from the outside (also heard the anchovies are not long term solutions). Struggling to find patches that aren’t inner tube patches.

Jaymoid, its illegal to release any live trapped pest. Unfortunately the only legal way to despatch is shooting or with a blunt instrument in a sack. Drowning any wildlife is an offence that carries a prison sentence under the FEPA legislation.

Ah that makes sense, I knew it was for grey squirrels and a few other invasive non native species but couldn’t find anything relating to rats, got any references/links? Annoyingly this stuff is not the easiest to find.

oh, clarification on my earlier post, we fitted https://ratwall.co.uk, not the ratblocker product.

We had this, they seemed to be getting in via the drains through a redundant branch and up the cavity, only visible once we had a drain CCTV, fitted some https://ratblockers.com/, and haven’t had any rats since we had those fitted. Touch wood.

I can highly recommend https://www.kestrelpestmanagement.co.uk/ if they come to your area.

Before we discovered the above I’ve tried poisoning, CCTV camera in the loft to work out where they are going, live catch traps, and kill traps. You might want something to control the population until you work it out. My thoughts were they can eat through your electrical wires and burn your house down so they have to die.

My thoughts/findings:
* poisoning has no guarantees about where they die, I only found one poisoned rat up there but could have quite easily missed it, but we have not had the dead rat smell. It’s not a quick or pleasant death for them, I think they die from internal bleeding/haemorrhaging. Pest control people like poison because they don’t have to check the traps every day (it’s not feasible). Poison is also good because you can see when the rat has visited the poison because there is less of it, or they make a mess eating it, so it’s good to discover if they are still there/where they go.

* Kill traps, are quick and effective, I’d look at Fenn Mk4 or the more expensive Black Cat traps. The snap style Victor traps are not effective on large brown/norway rats, they just shake them off, I’ve witnessed this on the camera. Oh have you ruled out squirrels? Fenn’s are cheap but will mash your fingers, avoid if you’re a clumsy bastard.

* live traps, also caught a few with live traps. But you then have to dispose of them, or set them free miles and miles away and hope you just haven’t caused another problem where you release it. Drowning is not advised, and is illegal for squirrels (but you cant let a grey squirrel go, by law you gotta squish it!) I don’t know about the legality of the CO2 method in the UK but seems the most humane way to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZXWr0aDbQ.

* CCTV, a cheap £30 night vision camera from amazon will allow you to check traps daily without going into your loft, and also alert you when your new fury friends are in town.

Oh they carry diseases like Leptospirosis (Weil’s disease), so avoid their blood and piss.

Hope that helps, I wish I didn’t have to know all this stuff, but maybe it helps you.

There’s a Guy Kes ride video. Spoiler Alert he says it’s really good.

Dakine Medium dropout shorts have a small waist, I’m gonna have to return them. For reference I wear endura medium shorts, and 30×30 gap jeans.

Another vote for Dishonored. I think I paid £2.39 on Steam. What an awesome game. I played it through twice, I could probably do it again. I’m usually more of a first person shooter fan, but this was superb.

Have you checked out react native? https://reactnative.dev/ it creates android and ios apps from one app, uses Javascript, and it’s components are described in a way which will feel familiar if you’ve used html. I’ve not used it but it is very popular. You won’t get the latest android SDK features, or the most Android looking and feeling app, for that you’ll have to go native Java/Kotlin, but it might be a route for you to get an app built using familiar concepts and languages.

I think if you can learn JS and Python, you can learn Java/Kotlin, but there are some things you might not have come across before, and it’ll take a bit of time. I think Kotlin is a great language, and enjoyable to code in.

Happy coding!

Loving the subtle/stealth branding, I would quite like the option to buy a frame without branding. I think on-one should go this route as their branding spoils the look of their frames imho, it’s the logo on the down tube, the text on the top tube is ok!

On the back of the e-bike recommendations, I’ve recently been looking at ebike conversion kits. One that is particularly interesting is a mid-drive motor that replaces your crankset, and the battery can be mounted on your bottle cage bosses. I’m thinking you could keep your swift but stick e-bike motor on it, until you don’t need it any more when you put it on ebay or classifieds (unless you are converted!).

Here’s an example where a guy has put one on a Surly Karate Monkey, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLngOq7jWnM… that’s using the older Bafang BBS02 motor, there’s a newer, more powerful and reliable (apparently) motor; BBSHD. They’re pretty popular, so if piqued your interest there’s plenty of install videos and useful info on tinterweb and in the youtubes.
I’d love to build one, they look great.

Best of luck with your recovery.

I’ve not done any of those things, but I did use a old android phone for a timelapse project, one photo every 60 seconds, for about 15 months, and learnt a few things:

1) modern phone screens will burn the image into the pixels, after a month or two
2) phones and their software are not very reliable, uptime is poor, remote connectivity software (ssh servers) required rebooting regularly, apps freeze and crash when you dont want them to.
3) The phone battery got trashed in the process, we had ours powered the whole time.
4) notifications, system messages, sms, etc, can steal focus from your app, so remember to disable them.

I guess you could use a bluetooth trigger to take the pic if in range. Alternatively find/write a simple app to take a pic when triggered over wifi. Not really sure what there is you could solder unless you took the phone apart, which I really haven’t a clue about!

Yup, they look nothing like the asbestos tiles that I had (however certainly no expert), as Blazing Saddles said it’s the vinyl type. If you do a google search for vinyl asbestos tiles, there’s plenty of examples.

I had a similar scenario recently. Depending on the age of your house, some old tiles have asbestos in, as does some of the mastic that is used to stick tiles to the cement/screed. As such, grinding stuff with asbestos in is not advised. It’s very cheap to do a test if you are concerned.

Thanks aracer, I’ve had a stab at putting together a little java app that replicates your c logic to get the URL for the tiles, luckily your algorithm still stands 7 years later! I wondered how many websites (or paying clients) might complain if they changed it now. I’m very impressed you worked this out, I’m ashamed to say my job is as a software developer, and that I doubt I would have discovered this (I think years of boring business computing has blatted any bit twiddling and analytical skills that ever existed).

I guess what I’d like to do next is use some lossless atlas datastore for the tiles and meta data, so they can easily be converted into some other atlas format like orux in say Mobac for example. Any recommendations? Thanks!

@aracer, yeah I was hoping there might be some magic that could be done to convert the streetmap URLs into one that Oruxmaps understands (I think it only works with the X, Y, and Zoom params or a single encoded Q value like the bing OS url). I managed to find an old post regarding your algorithm for calculating the obfuscated url param (good sk1llz btw!) to allow you to grab image tiles. I may experiment when I have some spare time on my hands (any additional hints you should wish to email over would be greatly appreciated!)

So if I’m using an offline map source I can’t use overlays?

Yeah this seems to be the case, the drop down box in orux only lists the online sources. Not a major issue, I’d say it’s handier for planning routes rather than whilst out on the trail.

@nemesis – I recall you can only combine online map sources (I’m not sure what the limitation is here).

Here’s my bing OS map source: You’ll have to go to https://www.bingmapsportal.com and register to obtain your API key and then place in the onlinemapsources file as below. Obviously you need to respect their usage policy, I’ve only ever used it as much as I’m actually needed (and not for example tried to download the whole of the UK!)

<onlinemapsource uid=”1″>
<name>Bing Ordnance Survey (TOPO)</name>
<url><![CDATA[http://ak.t1.tiles.virtualearth.ne{$s}/tiles/r{$q}.jpg?g=5166&productSet=mmOS&key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE]]></url>
<minzoom>1</minzoom>
<maxzoom>18</maxzoom>
<projection>MERCATORESFERICA</projection>
<servers>t</servers>
<cacheable>1</cacheable>
<downloadable>1</downloadable>
</onlinemapsource>

———————————-
Should you also use MOBAC, you can create a new xml file in your [your_mobac_directory]/mapsources folder, and select the map in the list of maps:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<customMapSource>
<name>Bing Ordnance Survey</name>
<minZoom>1</minZoom>
<maxZoom>15</maxZoom>
<tileType>jpg</tileType>
<url><![CDATA[http://ak.t1.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/r{$q}.jpg?g=5166&productSet=mmOS&key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE]]></url>
</customMapSource>

Now, the cool thing about this is that MOBAC supports PNG atlesses, so should you want to create a custom OS map to print or browse. It can also create atlases for use in Orux maps… Handy!

jaymoid, thanks…

but that honestly scares the crap out of me. might be easier just to buy an old skool paper map!

or maybe i need a strong coffee and a quiet room.

Haha, yeah although they’re not mutually exclusive, always good to have a backup map in whatever form!

Regarding your question about what phones people use, and how to mount – I usually keep mine in my pocket when I’m out exploring by myself. I’ve often thought about getting a low powered phone for just orux use but I’m not sure the battery would be as good as a garmin. Garmins seem so slow and crap – and the supported map formats are all proprietary and horrible.

Another user here – I have the full UK OS maps in 1:50k and 1:25k ripped from Streetmap.co.uk

Do you have your streetmap as a mapsource in oruxmaps? I didn’t know it had OS maps, it might be my dodgy eyes but to me it looks a little crisper than the OS ones that bing are serving.

Looks like you can use
http://www.openweathermap.org/api

You can get an API key from here https://openweathermap.org/appid

Caveat, I’ve not tried this in orux, but their maps are WMS so should work.