My nephews both had a Stompee and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Excellent quality and very durable. Great value too.

Looks great for the price, although 35cm seat height surely rules out a lot of 2 year olds – my one only hit 35cm inside leg with shoes at about 2 and 9 months.

I spent ages looking at everything that admits a weight and ended up getting an Islabike anyway, which is great, at 3 and 2 months, it’s the perfect first bike, easy to pick up off the ground, brakes are easy to use, nice low gear so she can go up hills.

There is nothing that I could find which is light and cheap. Frog bikes or Islabikes are both light, but both equivalently expensive.

For £120, there is a ridgeback thing, which is 50% heavier than those.

Also, the Specialized 12″ wheel thing for £130, which is about 25% heavier, or the Specialized 16″ wheel thing for £170 which is 50% heavier.

For less money than those, there are other ones which mostly have steel frames and probably weigh more than your own bike.

Second hand Islabike? Or sell a pair of forks to pay for a new one?

My son found the Rothan too heavy and long at 2 years old. Refused to ride (but coveted it all the same). Finally got on it last weekend and was just off like a shot. He turns three in 6 weeks. So in our case the Rothan was a 3+ bike really. Others may experience more success younger. I guess our lad isn’t the heftiest of boys.

Yeah, that’s why we got the Strider, because it is lighter. Was pickable up by Rose about 3 months before she was 2, and easy enough to ride by 2, and she wasn’t that big a kid. Feels noticeably lighter compared to any other ones I’ve picked up.

We were booked to go in a hot air balloon once. The way it works, is that you phone them up the day of the flight, and they tell you if the weather forecast is acceptable for them to fly. If not, you go to the back of the queue and are given a date a month or so afterwards.

After arranging to get home from work early 5 times over 5 or 6 months, only to be told each time that they’d not fly, my wife got pregnant and by using that as leverage (they don’t fly with pregnant women), we finally managed to convince them very grudgingly to give us a refund, which they don’t normally do (minus a £30 ‘administration charge’ for basically doing nothing, the buggers).

None of the balloon companies will publicise how many times they cancel per year, but the internet is full of similar tales of people waiting months and never getting to go, so probably quite a lot. Their terms and conditions are very much full of notes that you’re not guaranteed a flight, that they might never get you on a flight etc.

So I would recommend that you only do the hot air balloon thing if you are both retired or both have jobs where you can just pop off at very short notice. Certainly not something you can just do as a surprise, unless you fancy calling off your surprise 5 times before it goes, or can just whisk your girlfriend home from work at very short notice.

Here is how to sight:

http://www.feelforthewater.com/2011/06/how-to-sight-correctly-in-open-water.html

Essentially, lift head to crocodile eyes, drop head and turn to breathe at the side as normal. So you do it just before a breath. Head has to go higher than crocodile eyes if there is chop or people in the way.

There is a knack to it. When you get good at it, you can sight pretty much without slowing down in flat water.

It is easier to sight on high up things directly above wherever you’re headed to get a general direction, but as you’re getting closer to whatever you’re actually headed for, you do really need to sight on that.

Don’t follow people in front without sighting too, as they may be zigzagging idiots.

If you’re rubbish and not in a hurry, you can just breaststroke a stroke or two to sight, although breaststroke is harder in a suit.

Oh, and one random useless sighting tip from last night’s swim, if you’re swimming at night, and you put a light to mark where you left your clothes so you can see where to stop, don’t put it in flashing mode, as it will only be visible if you sight just as the flash goes, I was seeing my light only on about every 5th sight!

Rose has a strider. It is *very* light. They are as far as I know the only company that actually has a big community of riders and events, rather than just selling bikes, which is nice – they do regular racing and general fun sessions at various BMX tracks around the country. Very fun events too; the first race I’ve ever been to where the start has been delayed for one competitor to have a nappy change.

It is super duper light, which makes a massive difference when I am carrying it home up the hill from the park, and makes it easier to ride as a bonus. I think it is the lightest, and has the lowest standover of the 12″ wheel ones, which made a difference when Rose was 18 months, but may be less important at 2. Friends have a cheap heavy one (Raleigh I think), which was much much harder for either their kid or ours to ride, Rose actually couldn’t even pick it up, even though she could happily ride her strider for miles (Not sure how far the furthest she’s done is, but she did a few miles of downhill under a ski-lift in Italy, and has done 2+ milers here). The solid (very lightweight) tyres work surprisingly well off road. It has nice footrests for the kid to put their feet up on, with grip tape on, which make it easy to scoot with feet right up for a long time.

I wouldn’t bother with the brake, bit of a waste of time, stupid funny design of brake, and you don’t really need it, even on big bmx tracks and things; once they’re 3, you can get them a proper bike anyway, and in my experience braking is quite easy to learn at that point.

Friends have a Rothan. It is okay, bit heavier than the strider, not such a low saddle height, does have a proper brake if you’re intending them to ride it for a long time. It has pneumatic tyres, but the solid tyres on the strider are fine, and it makes it heavier. Other than the brake, I don’t think it is any better.

Both makes have really thought through making it toddler friendly, the Islabikes has taken a much more conventional tiny bike with no pedals approach, but got things like tiny grips and brake, whereas the strider, they’ve really thought about things like the footrests and the grips and the funny brake and the wheels in terms of making a toddler specific bike, but some of that makes the Strider better (the footrests), although the brake on the strider seems pretty stupid to me – Rose had the strength in her hands and skill to operate the small brake on her new pedal bike whereas she never really got the skill to operate the silly foot brake on the strider.

Any idea how old you can take them from for actual climbing (indoor or outdoor)?

We cook quite a lot of GF food, cos mother in law is coeliac. Mostly normal recipes that are GF, not special GF ones.

Dove’s Farm gluten free flour appears to be what we use for cake. Oh and they do GF baking powder, which I guess means that baking powder isn’t GF. Can get it any old health food shop and most supermarkets. We don’t use specialist GF cook books, but do mark in books whether a recipe worked GF or not, as some don’t (I think light sponges don’t work). Cakes that have lots of other things in like ground almonds or something and not much flour can be pretty much indistinguishable, other ones vary.

Curry is great, most Indian food is gluten free except where obviously not (breads, pancakes, that sort of thing).

Risotto (make sure you have gluten free stock powder if using).

Soy sauce has gluten in, except for a few specific ones (Japanese Tamari is the easiest one to get), check the label when you buy it, and don’t go out to restaurants for Chinese. I think Thai is also bad.

Oh, and from experience of living in a house with a coeliac and 2 vegans, don’t try and cook vegan gluten free cake except for a dark chocolate fridge cake.

Yeah they do if they see you. I find it rather strange that there are pages of people complaining about how drivers are crap and don’t look, but on a baby trailer thread suddenly everyone’s a great driver that is really careful and courteous. Lolz, quite frankly!

That was kind of my point about how when you go out with a trailer, it appears that people actually do look, but don’t bother to do anything about you when you’re biking normally. Unless it’s the fact that the trailer is massive in comparison to a bike that makes people spot it.

Well you could check out the professional advice about shaking small babies around. As a responsible parent who puts your children first you have done that haven’t you?

And it’d say that shaken baby syndrome is primarily caused by people shaking the baby in anger. And that:

shaken baby syndrome does not result from gentle bouncing, playful swinging or tossing the child in the air, or jogging with the child.

So if it’s okay to jog while holding a kid, chuck em in the air, or go for a rocky country walk with them in, or put them in a car being driven down a bumpy road, then it’s probably safe enough for quite young kids to go in a bike trailer too (especially one like mine where the manufacturer recommends it as being safe for babies from 12 weeks), and it’s hard to know whether playful swinging and jogging with a kid are going to be more or less bumpy than a bike seat, so the expert advice is essentially useless.

You can find a million things on the internet saying everything from that it is perfectly fine, to that if you put a kid at below pre-school age on a bike, or in a bike trailer, you are a sadistic child abuser and are risking their health, but that isn’t really expert advice.

sheffield, maybe we need fast trains to london, but we already have them, and they’re not full all the time.

but we definitely need quick trains to Manchester, Leeds and Beyond.
…
want to go to Edinburgh? – first you’ll need to drive to Gatwick, for a flight to Frankfurt, for another flight to Edinburgh.

Want to go to Edinburgh from Sheffield, it’s 3 hours 30 minutes on the train, which doesn’t seem that bad for 250 miles? It’d be nice if it was faster, but it isn’t the end of the world is it?

Funnily and slightly OT- Non-cyclists that I’ve talked to are gobsmacked that cyclists tow their small toddlers etc in those trailer/bike things.

I must admit I bloody wouldn’t on a road.

If you’ve ever been out with a trailer, you’d be amazed at how careful drivers are around you, and how much room they give you. Got to be way safer than a seat around traffic.

It gives the lie to the idea that when you’re normally on the bike people mean to drive safely around you, but just fail to pay attention. In general people just don’t in practice consider the safety of cyclists to be as high a priority as their ability to squeeze through a super narrow gap and save a couple of seconds, whereas when there is an obvious kid in the equation, they’re suddenly right over the centre line to the other side of the road to overtake.

and actual cyclist who use their bikes as transport.

I am definitely in the latter category and even though I can drive and ride a motorbike I much prefer to do as many journeys on my bike. So of course there was an urgency to get my babies on my bike.

This is part of it. I had Rose in the trailer from 6 months. I did buy a trailer which had a baby sling bit (croozer with added baby sling). It worked great. I have never relied on a car to get her around locally, which is nice. She loves it, and loves coming out on the bike for adventures. It’s also fun for me, I got out for a lovely 2 hour road ride on Saturday (albeit only 22 miles), and not only did I have a nice ride, I also got to spend some fun time with Rose chitter chattering away as we went, then she got to ride round the big park on her bike and have a picnic. It’s great to combine your riding with time with your kid, rather than just keeping riding as a dad thing that you head off and do. Really I find it hard to understand why if you love riding bikes, you wouldn’t want to share that with your kids, it isn’t like riding bikes with your kids takes away from other riding time, it takes away from jigsaw puzzle and painting and reading ballerina books time, and much as I love Angelina, I’d much rather be outside.

As a bonus, she’s always been really excited about getting out on her own bike for her own adventures and is excited about bikes in general, and sees them as a mode of transport, she’s 3 and a bit now, and she just rode up to the childminders on her new pedal bike, about which she is super excited, and we did 4 miles on the Monsal Trail last week. Her getting into pedal bike riding is good for my running too, and much as I love running, I don’t really have the time to fit in dedicated runs, but I have tons of time looking after Rose.

Oh, and yes, she’s been on forest roads from an early age (6 or 7 months), and the trailer has been on some quite bumpy stuff in Shining Cliff Woods, and full speed down the wide but quite steep and a bit bumpy incline on the High Peak Trail at 9 months or so, all fine.

Also, if you look at the various seats and trailers and things, they recommend different ages in different countries, I guess depending on legal and cultural stuff, but the Croozer baby sling is rated for use from 12 weeks up to about 10 months (was just over 12 months for our small baby), so is obviously okay for 6 months. If you search for German or Dutch sites selling bike seats, you can see their age recommendations. If Dutch people aren’t happy with recommending a particular seat, I wouldn’t do it.

It will be good preparation for taking the child rock-climbing as soon as he/she can walk.

Toddlers love a good scramble actually. Not to mention a nice swim in a lake (you can’t do that for long until about 2, unless you have a really warm lake though).

Frame fit pumps are always with the bike, and are easy enough to get a tyre up to 100psi with.

Mini pumps either weigh the same, but aren’t so easy or tidy to carry , or are teeny weeny and can’t get decent pressure.

It kind of depends – with a mini pump you can get home at a slower pace. With a frame fit, you can just go on with a ride.

Co2 might be good, I hate the idea of being limited in how many punctures you can repair though (except for obviously how many tubes and patches you have), and you might not want to lend it to a mate if you are low on them.

I have one of these:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DIGITECK-NEW-WIRELESS-DRIVEWAY-PATROL-GARAGE-SHED-DOOR-SHOP-BURGLAR-ALARM-ALERT-/161081730385?pt=UK_Burglar_Alarms&hash=item2581382551

which means when I’m in, if someone goes into the shed, all hell breaks out in our house, so at least no one is going to nick my bikes while I’m in the house asleep.

If it does what you want now, then great. But be aware that Microsoft can just drop support for things that don’t sell (Zune, PlaysForSure, and will happily change things so that they’re incompatible with old devices (Windows Phone 7 vs 8).

They’ll in theory support the hardware until 2017, but the software support for Windows RT, they are very vague about, which suggests they have an open mind on dumping it, or at least aren’t so confident that they’re willing to commit to it:

“Microsoft will make software updates, including security updates, available for Windows RT. Additional information regarding the Windows RT lifecycle policy will be communicated as available.”

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifecycle-windows-rt-faq

Also, I cooked a decent dal with a mixture of interesting lentils and spinach, with an aubergine curry and rice for our family dinner on Monday. Took me just over an hour (ignoring washing up). Which I was able to do, because a)I worked from home, b)I’m pretty flexible, so I could just do some more work after Rose was in bed, and c)I made enough for 2 nights, so no cooking on Tuesday, so worked out at 30 minutes cooking per day which isn’t so bad.

But ignoring the fact that cooking this stuff requires skill, equipment, and a load of cook books (or at least the ability to work from internet recipes), for most people with kids and less flexible jobs, if you pick up your kids at 5pm, you need a dinner by 5:30 to 6ish, there is no way you’d have the time to put together an elaborate curry, rice and dal that is tasty and nice when if you’re using anything other than basic red lentils (other lentils take way longer to cook, 45 minutes or so for the mixture I was using). Not to mention that if you add up all the spices we have, the cost of getting together what is in our store cupboard in the first place is not that cheap, even bought in big bags from the Indian shop.

Well here’s a fact: French food, ordinary food-in-the-shops food, is **** GREAT compared to the same stuff here. I’d challenge anyone to a blind taste test of, say, two supermarket tomatoes, one here, one in France. I’m confident the French tomato would win that taste test 95% of the time, and the other 5% would be people who like tomatoes that taste mainly of water.

French fruit and veg at a good market is quite good and well priced, French fruit and veg at a good greengrocers also quite good, French fruit and veg at supermarkets, not that different to ours, and so so expensive it isn’t funny. They also have a lot of absolute rubbish that they just sell because it is French and their smaller supermarkets appear to get very infrequent deliveries of veg.

It certainly used to be the case that UK supermarkets were rubbish for fruit and veg in comparison, but nowadays, there isn’t much difference; French supermarkets have got worse, and UK ones have got much better. Maybe there are a few of the super-supermarkets around, but certainly the intermarché/carrefour or whatever big supermarkets in every town are not that different to your average UK one.

Oh, and oddly enough, our Morrisons got refurbished and has suddenly gone from being the pie and crisps supermarket to having a massive array of high quality fruit and veg, which are really fresh and surprisingly good quality. They also have nice things like a wide selection of fresh herbs and fresh garlic when it is in season. The only time I’ve seen anything like it was in a super expensive and very upmarket supermarket near Lake Tahoe in the USA, but this is Morrisons, so everything is relatively cheap.

Speaking as someone who hates cycling on the road, and as a dad of a nine month old, do you find that drivers recognise that you’re towing a baby / child and give you more space?

I’ve been swithering about buying a trailer for daycare runs and trips around town but the thought of putting my son onto roads shared with bellends terrifies me (I do have a road bike, used infrequently and ran a bike courier company so my road skillz are reasonable but still terrifying!).

That Croozer doesn’t look like it has a flag – are they available?

The only problem that I’ve had on the road is that sometimes people are too courteous. I’m always having to wave people past so that they overtake rather than just hang around behind me. It has to be way way safer than with a bike seat for that reason alone.

Seriously, I ride on the Derby -> Matlock section of the A6 quite a lot, it being the only road down our valley, and I have never before seen drivers being quite so polite or careful around a bike.

Croozer comes with a flag, I had ours on when I went to Carsington Water on a pretty much gale force wind (it was rocking the trailer and pushing the steering of the bike to the side), and the flag blew off into the lake, I haven’t got round to replacing it and I don’t see traffic doing anything different.

Oh, and once they get older, and you get your kid and a friend in it, it’s priceless to hear them gossiping away and playing games in it, always cracks me up the rubbish they get talking about.

Hugin is the ultimate photo stitching program, and free, from :

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

It is very very powerful, does it all pretty magically and not all that hard to use. There are tutorials on the web if you get stuck or don’t know what all the options mean.

The Croozer is brilliant. Ours has done well over a thousand miles and runs just fine still. Very comfy I’m told, and she’s always falling asleep in it, so I guess it is. We’ve done 40 mile rides with it with no problems (except that my legs were pretty tired!). Very good baby sling available for it, so you can use it from six months or earlier. I personally know 2 other people with the same model, and we all recommend it. Runs very smoothly, although obviously you notice it up hills.

Oh, and the beast of a boot – we’ve had full camping gear for the two of us in it.

If you’re not sure if you’re having a second kid, be aware that a single trailer is more convenient because it’s narrower, I’ve got a double and every so often it is a pain when you’re off road, although the massive boot and extra seat for carrying friends is very useful.

The chariot ones are very very much more expensive, and have suspension, but I think not such a big boot judging from the one I saw down the park. The suspension is probably nice if you’re going round Coed y Brenin on it, but I’ve never missed it, and Rose doesn’t seem too shaken about even on quite rocky tracks (and on our road which is massive stone cobbles). Oh, and the chariot can fit skis, whereas the Croozer is only good for running biking and walking.

The Croozer and Chariot and Burley ones have nice comfy looking seats, whereas the really cheap ones have essentially a bench. Friend with a bench seat double trailer says that it leads to argument as they push each other sideways, that might just be his kids, but I’ve not had an argument in our trailer except when they poke each other with sticks.

Joe

If you don’t ride in a club, you probably don’t know what fit is.

I can average 20mph for 10 miles but probably not for 20 unless it was pancake flat. I did a time trial last night, just with people from the local triathlon club, none of whom are really serious road riders, and the winner was 3 minutes ahead of me. I am really not fit at all compared to a bad regular club rider.

For example if you look at our local 25 mile time trial results, not one rider averaged less than 20 mph.
http://cyclingtimetrials.org.uk/Default.aspx?&ge1246__geka=0qr-ktkYrcYzPU7-JC7bf9f_oc4Fb4M6rU-vQKEkKGwEgDRSjnvxeBsfAK4CXFM_3_SSI5IivjlnbAKCN9wmeFRgmipPUb0ija5hVlYo0NK4Ucl1MILKD5Jl0_r27Rdw&ge1246__gevi=2rCK9AX4wdTakLD9iNdBpozLXG4X8lNFX15D1RANbUw&gv484__gvac=2&gv484__gvff0=58710&gv484__gvfl0=0&language=en-GB&tabid=109

1.6kg in our fridge from today and yesterday, will probably get more tonight.

I’ve found a massive bank of brambles that isn’t right next to a dog walker path, which appears to not be being picked by many people, unlike all the dog path ones which go at 6am every morning.

Bridge Inn was really very good when we were there last year. Not so cheap as some of the others, but quite cheap for the quality of the food.

I’ve stayed at the bunkhouse there and it was nice enough too, although that was a few years back.

Islabikes do pink now, and it is quite a nice colour too.

They have a size chart so you can check size, but if she’s growing out of a 12″, surely she’d fit on a 16″?

People seem to go 14″ to 20″ and skip 16, so it doesn’t necessarily mean an extra bike.

Could you take the pedals and stabilisers off the 12″ bike and make it into a balance bike when you get the new bike and then not bother with stabilisers, know a few kids, mine included who went straight from balance bike to pedal bike and skipped the stabilisers, I wasn’t sure I believed the whole balance bike to pedal bike thing would work before I saw it happen, but it was <30 minutes from getting the pedal bike to going 100m without being held.

Only people I know of who can hold above 20mph for a decent period of time (>2hrs) are typically 1st Cats and Elite.

I certainly wouldn’t say that’s typical. As I said earlier, I’m a 3rd cat and did the Ride London 100 in 4:36, 22mph average speed.

I think there’s a confusion on here about time trialling versus bunch riding. Anyone can sit in a big group and average 20mph+, but how many of us can realistically do 20mph or more for (say) 5 hours?

Although looking at results, if you did more than 5 hours in a 100 mile time trial, you’d be well into the bottom 25% of the results, so there must be a fair few people out there with that fitness.

100k ride the in motion average and the overall average were 0.2mph different. We had to stop for a few junctions and traffic lights but otherwise rode the entire time until we got back. Same as every week.

Depends where you go – if I head for the Peak District, I can ride like that, pretty much without stopping. If I head towards Nottingham for work, I can lose 3-5 minutes from an hour by stopping.

On a club ride I’d not expect stopping except maybe for a small number of traffic lights, but then they tailor their routes for that purpose.

Only people I know of who can hold above 20mph for a decent period of time (>2hrs) are typically 1st Cats and Elite.

Although obviously anyone who can sit in a bunch can do it while drafting.

I average 17mph on a good day for 16.2 quite hilly miles to work. Proper average, like I start at one end, stop at the other, and I’ve taken 57 minutes total. Counting actual averages rather than ‘riding averages’/’cheating averages’ can make a real difference to people’s speeds too.

On the other hand, if I go up or down the valley rather than the hilly way, I’d be annoyed if I averaged much under 20.

I don’t use Strava right now, but I understand round here all the road routes are ridiculously fast, because we are a big place for road riding (on the A6 to Matlock), so a lot of good club riders set times (not to mention people using Strava on the big Tuesday night chaingang with probably 20 or more riders in the front group).

Drafting speeds can be pretty fun – I did a 5 mile time trial and averaged 22.75mph yesterday, but then wheel-sucked on the way back behind a guy who is faster than me, we didn’t go below 25 mph for much of it, I was just sat on the drops pottering along behind him while he did all the work, the lazy wheelsucker that I am.

The problem is the room boundaries – they become additional delayed sources of lower magnitude. I can’t see how you can remove their effect?

I don’t think I can remove them, I was just hoping that if I didn’t put the system near a wall (in a large room) they would be lowered enough in power to mean that the main interference effects dominated – after all it doesn’t have to be completely silent in the non-affected places, just significantly lower power.

The other big issue is harmonic distortion – how will you get clean tones at the required frequency and SPL?

Not sure. I can obviously output decent tones from the computer, but presumably the amplifier and speaker is where it all goes wrong?

I’ve got a Trek 1200 aluminium road bike and a pretty basic hardtail.

It is night and day better to tow on the road bike as long as it is something that the road tyres are okay for (anything up to canal path or old railway trail for the road tyres fitted on my bike). Funny really, because you’d think that the massive weight of the trailer would make so much difference that you’d not notice the difference between bikes.

On the road, with the road bike you notice the trailer a bit on the flat, but mostly only on hills, whereas the mountain bike feels like it is a constant drag.

Combination of mountain bike vs road tyres and the better position I think. The road bike just feels better to pedal against the extra drag. If I wanted to tow much with the mountain bike, I think I’d stick bar ends on it and maybe put slicker tyres on to try and make it more similar.

Oh, I didn’t notice you said a full sus; friend towed on his full carbon full on road bike, and on that the frame was flexing in a bad way, enough that the wheel came loose at one point, no way I’d tow on a suspension rear end.

If you look at vortex cannons, once they go electronic control, they bung on a subwoofer and a big amp to do it, like this one:

It looks like good fun, but feels like it might lack the nuance and variation of something that plays with the phase to move things around.

The ultrasonic sound stuff is a different mechanism to the ultrasonic haptics thing I linked – it uses an array of transducers to create directional ultrasound, I think in a similar way to what the subwoofer arrays chiefgrooveguru was talking about do.

Those ultrasonic sound / hypersonics / audio spotlight things are really very uncanny, went to a show once where some artist guy had one mounted on a tripod with a sight, and was using it to talk to particular people in the crowd, it was quite quiet, but really disturbing, like hearing a voice in your head.

The only way you can make a sub directional is by making a huge steered array. That won’t be possible to fit inside any room smaller than an arena. Something like lots of these:

http://www.meyersound.com/products/1100-LFC/

Plus a controller. Your concept is interesting but hasn’t a hope of working.

Actually now I’ve thought about it, it doesn’t need to be directional, it just needs to come from one place for each speaker. Directionality is actually a bad thing for this design, the ideal would be speakers that radiated roughly equally at a wide range of angles in front of them.

It certainly works with ultrasound transducers, which aren’t really directional either.
(eg. this thing works http://big.cs.bris.ac.uk/projects/ultrahaptics) and certainly if you flip the phase on one of a pair of stereo speakers you can make some weird effects happen.

Obviously with very loud audible sound you’re going to get big horrible noises and need ear protection as well, but that is part of the fun of the idea.

There’s probably some other reason it won’t work (wall reflections, variations in the speed of sound making calibration a nightmare etc.), but I don’t think lack of directionality is it.

Oh, and I think I need probably 40-80 hz, although not sure if 80hz will still be something that you can feel as opposed to hear.

I know it isn’t directional in terms of listening; but physically it still is – essentially I want to mess with phasing effects by using varying delays on the 4 signals.

Essentially, if you know exactly where the person is, where the speakers are, and the characteristics of the speaker array, if you mess with the phase of the different speaker array, you can make it so that the sound level at particular points is the full power of all the speakers, whilst having much low zero power at other points. At least that is the theory, and it seems to look fine when I graph it all up. It’d in theory mean being able to target people and make them feel things at different places on their body. I think it might be more complex in real life, and the effect will inevitably be pretty blunt, but I still think it’d be cool to build and test.

It occurs to me that it also depends on where in Nottingham you’re staying – if you’re right up the top of Nottingham, Arnold or somewhere then Sherwood Pines is not all that far. If you’re further South or West, then there is very little difference if any compared to going to the Peak District. Certainly when I lived in Beeston, it took blooming ages to get to Sherwood Pines.

Pines is surprisingly far from Nottingham on crappy roads. It always seemed soul destroying and flat when I bothered going there.

According to google maps:

Matlock is about the same time to get to as Pines and has hills and decent riding.

Hathersage is about the same time to get to as Cannock and only 20 minutes more than Pines, and Hathersage has amazing massive Dark Peak rides that are classic rides for a reason. If you’re up on holiday, I’d head there.

I’m watching this with interest as I am a parent gov of my sons special school and I’m on the students committed and we want to start a project on getting all the pupils (where possible) to ride bikes. Hats off to you and Mick for doing this.

it depends on how old your kids are, obviously no good for this particular kid but for slightly smaller kids, strider balance bikes do a big one which comes in a 16″ wheel size, aimed at kids up to 10.

How can it be a psychological or physical issue?

The Human race hasn’t just gone through a genetic transformation. Thirty years ago when I was at school there was one fat kid who probably did have a glandular problem, on today’s proportions there would be 300 obese ones.

The program is saying its not their lack of activity. Its the ever increasing quantities of sugar rich food they are encouraged to eat more frequently and in bigger portions.

Kind of.

There’s a big study (mentioned on this show) which essentially suggests that the correlation is not that ‘people aren’t active enough therefore they get fat’, but much more ‘people get fat, which means they stop being active’. So the root cause is diet, but once you get fat it is hard to get thin (which is where the compensation effects and stuff come in).

If its a disused rail track converted to a cycleway and doggers walking route, then just like being on a road, you should expect other road users to pass,

If it’s a shared use disused railway path, it isn’t at all like being on the road. It’s like being on a shared use path. Which means that people can walk anywhere, people can ride any side of the path, and it is up to you if you’re overtaking to do it safely and warn people if they need warning rather than just zoom past 6 inches away from them.

And please can someone tell that to the idiot groups of riders on the Monsal Trail yesterday who were moaning because they seriously seemed to expect that all the walkers and their dogs should be walking single file on the left hand side and all the cyclists with kids should be riding on the left hand side etc.