If you look at HR measurement, we have gear at work that costs from about a quid, to 20 grand, all of which can extract a heart-rate from a person. The one that costs 20 grand is somewhat more accurate and lets you tune what your definition of heart-rate is a lot more than the 1 quid sensor, and requires a whole lot less post processing by a computer.

Cos they’re built to be super-accurate and reliable, and have to bung a load of technology in an inconvenient place on the bike (in the hub or on a crank ).

You could probably build something cheaper if you were willing to accept much more error, but I suspect the target market is people who want something that is more accurate than heart rate to train against, so it might not sell well.

Having said that, the polar one is built using a method which is less accurate and less reliable and isn’t so complex from an engineering point of view, so is cheaper. So is the iBike wind-sensor based one.

It also could be because hardware manufacturers are behind the times slightly, basing their designs on extremely low computing power and developing extremely high quality but expensive sensors, whereas in practice, equally good results could be had by using way more complex processing on data from multiple cheap sensors, and processing power is dirt cheap nowadays (although the iBike one doesn’t appear have found the right processing of their particular sensors judging from the reviews).

At our pool, there are cubicles if you don’t want to talk to people, and benches in the middle for people who want to be sociable.

I think there’s a divide between young and old people though, like with the whole wandering around naked thing, younger men are fussed about all that, older people, particularly those who are parents, really don’t care, and just treat it like any other social occasion! People who swim with clubs are the same, chit chat all the time. It’s only young, solitary swimmers who are worried about this kind of thing.

Last year was £120 including parts I think. Had a flashing fault light intermittently and needed some parts replacing though. Probably way more expensive if you live in a city though.

If the pump will fit on still, I’d shift the rim round one hole and not box the valve in if that works okay. I’d be paranoid about anything other than perfect lacing of the wheel, so as to avoid the flange snapping at the spoke hole that at some people have had on schlumpfs.

This might be obvious to people less stupid than me, but the countersinking is not for the spoke heads, it is for the spoke bend, ie. the head of the spoke should go into the hub on the side opposite to the countersinking. Not knowing that can lead people to thinking that their hub and rim don’t match. See on here:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/bicycles/wheelbuilding/

Also, I rode a couple of unicycles with terribly built wheels (one built by Dave Mariner, with the wrong length spokes (way too long), one Pashley with rubbish spokes and built a bit loose). They lasted for years before self-destructing. So I suspect using the wrong lacing will be fine. Having said that, I never really got on with a narrow rim on a unicycle, even for road. Massively preferred a wide rim.

Like any form of investment it’s just betting. You’re betting on it gaining loads in value. Nobody here is telling you about the thousands of pounds they’ve spent on bottles of whisky that would be worth less than they paid now, just like horse gamblers don’t tell you about the horses that came last.

So only do it with money that you’d happily put on the horses / on the roulette wheel or whatever.

http://www.whiskyhighland.co.uk/discover/whisky_highland_index/getting_it_wrong.html

@stoatsbrother “targets” “reimbursement”, to me these words suggest that one way or another GPs have a financial arrangement of sorts with drug companies. Whilst this arrangement is in place I’m afraid I cannot trust the motives of GPs. Their sole concern should be patient welfare. Not “targets”

No they don’t. The government wants as many people as possible to be vaccinated, in order to avoid children dying which is generally seen as a bad thing (morally and politically), it is the government who pays GPs to vaccinate, not the drug companies. The purpose of vaccination targets is to increase patient welfare plain and simple.

If your conspiracy theory was true, if drug companies wanted to encourage more use of their vaccines, then surely they’d be encouraging use of the more expensive single vaccines? Whilst drug companies are obviously evil in tons of ways for which there is really good evidence, they certainly aren’t stupid, so the chances are that in this case they aren’t being evil (not to mention that they don’t pay doctors to give vaccines, did I mention that already).

As a GP please understand this is about trust. Detach yourself from a financial arrangement with the drug companies and that is a step in the right direction. Maybe then I’ll develop some trust.

They don’t get paid by drug companies to administer vaccines, so do you trust them yet? Seriously though – if you think that you’ve found out lots of information, and considered vaccination carefully, yet you don’t even know who is paying these supposed ‘bribes’ to the doctor and aren’t able to understand what the purpose of vaccination targets is for, and still believe things that are obviously untrue, I wonder what even more crazy stuff people who haven’t considered vaccination carefully might believe.

The relationship between the NHS and drug companies is a complex one though and isn’t just the complete conspiracy theory thing of being in the pocket of drug companies – there is obviously some stuff where drug companies do well out of the NHS, but on other things they do quite badly, like the NHS price bargaining for drugs means that a lot of drugs are much cheaper here than in Europe (and massively cheaper than in the USA, but drugs are all ludicrously expensive over there).

I used to always have colds, all winter. This year i have been swimming in rivers every week since september, without missing a week, and i feel like i’ve had far less bad colds. Extreme cold exposure is supposed to strengthen your immune system, although the evidence for that is slightly inconclusive. I might just be imagining it and feeling I am less sick because i feel more positive, it might all be a placebo effect, but i certainly feel stronger and better, so I don’t care!

Right now possibly isn’t the time to start, but i can recommend it for next year.

I had a car from a dealer where ‘their garage’ had ‘fixed’ a serious engine problem which was causing an engine management light to show. And written on the paperwork that they’d done it (and hence proved that the dashboard light was working at the point I saw the car!). Claimed a full MOT, full service etc. too.

So I took it into local trusted garage when it became obvious that the brakes were broken, wheels making funny noises etc, so much for the ‘full service’, and the engine was doing something funny. He plugged in the fault reader, showed a potentially serious engine fault, but no dashboard light. After some investigation, turned out that ‘their garage’ had opened up the dashboard, put a bit of black tape over the light, and then put the dashboard back on. They were obviously bang to rights, but totally denied it, offered repairs etc, said I wasn’t due my money back, sent me bogus legal letters etc. A few months later, and a small amount of court paperwork, and they paid me in full for the cost of the car, insurance + tax for the time I had it but wasn’t able to run it, oh, plus fees for the court, plus fees for the high court enforcers who collected the money. After all the fees and things, Derby Car Centre ended up paying out the best part of 3 grand to me and the court thanks to their efforts at not paying me back for my £1800 car purchase. If they’d just given me a refund of the £1800 there and then when I first discovered the blacked out light, they’d have been £1200 better off. Silly billies.

So anyway, based on that, my advice is to be extremely wary of fixes by the dealer that sold it to you. Particularly if they are Derby Car Centre, but I suspect they’re not the only second hand car dealer with county court judgements against them for this kind of thing.

Have you got heavy panniers on? That would mean more back punctures, particularly if they were pinch flats from hitting potholes and having too soft tyres. It could also be the rim shape making pinch flats more likely.

Or it could be a dodgy tyre, I’d swap front and back tyres and see if they start happening on the front instead.

I found that using a pump with a pressure gauge was a revelation for my road riding, so good that I went out and bought one for my dad for his birthday. Mine cost twenty quid (I think it is a Blackburn one), was well worth the money, totally recommend track pumps.

Blimey, are the private sector landlords the only ones capable of converting a semi into 2 flats?

In the less salubrious areas of Hull, it’d surely never be worth doing that conversion though, and to suggest that councils do it would be stupid; the cost of conversion of a terrace into two one bed flats would probably cost a similar amount of money to the cost of buying a second terraced house. To put it in perspective, there are areas where a 2 bed terrace house can cost less than 20K. By the time they’d fitted even a cheap kitchen, bathroom etc and divided things off, you’d be costing them most of the cost of buying a completely new house.

So in order to save a tiny bit of housing benefit, they’d spend thousands of pounds converting essentially valueless houses, money which they could just as easily have spent on buying a few more similar sized houses (or just have not spent if the extra housing isn’t needed). Brilliant idea.

Oh gosh, I misread that as 15-20 punctures in 2012, which seemed like a lot. 15 punctures in 3 months is crazy. If you’re getting a puncture a week, you’ve got to have something more than just not very puncture protected tyres. Assuming you’re not just riding without looking for broken glass on back streets where pubs and clubs kick out to or riding right in the gutter or something.

Is it always the same wheel, or is it evenly front and back? That would rule out stupid things like a burr in the rim or one tyre with a dodgy bead or a hole in the sidewall or something.

Just to check, you are pumping them up with a track pump, to 100PSI aren’t you? If not, and you’re just using a hand pump, that could be the problem, it is hard to gauge the right pressure for road tyres (and hard to get them to pressure with a mountain bike mini pump).

If you are, then I would get another pair of tyres, any old tyre, make sure they’re kept pumped up well and see if you’re still getting a puncture a week. That would rule out a bad pair of tyres.

Conti GP 4000s, a track pump, stop riding in the gutter.

That’s what I do, been thousands of miles between punctures (sods law next ride out I’ll get one). Pumping up the tyre nice and hard (100 psi and I do it regularly), and riding it on the road, not messing around with off-road cyclepaths are the big things that sort it out I think.

If you’ve had 15-20 punctures in a year, with a gator skin or similar tyre, that is amazing – are you doing tens of thousands of miles, or does your rim have a sharp bit inside or something?

My wife always just gives them a bit extra money. Nothing says that you value a job highly than you thinking it is worth more money than the person who did it for you. Easier than beer / chocolates or whatever, which you don’t know if they want. She is probably right, she usually is!

If it’s the same as our honeywell, the boiler controller has two buttons, if you single press one of the buttons it turns the heating on (just constantly on) regardless of the wireless bit.

Not sure about the rest, but that is designed to get you heating control if the wireless stat is broken.

Do tell. I was looking at the pebble watch and its hardware isn’t too dissimilar to the garmin swim and its apparently waterproof. Fairly certain you could use the acelerometers in the pebble to duplicate the garmin swim.

Yeah, pretty trivial to acquire that data. Would only be one arm, same as garmin/swimovate, and not much else useful you can get from it.

If you paired it with a body worn smartphone, then you’d have a seriously large amount of information.

I’m looking at using accelerometer, gyro and magnetic field sensors in parallel, which gives you a whole lot more information than just an accelerometer. Can’t say too much more yet as to how much information, as I’m currently fighting graphs and algorithms to work out what we can get out, but it allows a lot richer analysis than current systems, and potentially allows much of the data to be used for real-time feedback. Currently runs as a smartphone app in a body mounted waterproof case (total cost even of this basic prototype is less than a 910xt!).

6’3″ with massive feet.

Ah, that explains the short stroke counts. Have you looked at swimsmooth.com and what they say about gliding?

I am currently at a point where I’m playing with a lot of things swimming wise, I can consistently do 1:30 for 100m, but it is quite an effort so I’m trying to keep that speed but mess with my stroke to reduce the effort for longer swims, trying a 2 beat kick and a slightly higher stroke rate, which is interesting, feels good when I get the kick timing just right, terrible the rest of the time, but fits quite well with my general ability to float flat (weirdly the one thing I don’t have a problem with in swimming is my legs sinking – I can happily swim along without kicking at normal or slow pace).

Also I’m messing around building some swimming technology at the moment to support a project I’m working on – currently at a stage where I’m getting accurate (both sided) stroke counts and lap times, data on left/right balance and various other really interesting metrics. The current state of swimming technology is nice enough, but really very basic, with the exception of the crazy video analysis and pressure tracking stuff done on high level professionals in research, using many thousands of pounds of equipment and/or tons of manual operator time. I think things could be made a lot better for the average swimmer, without expensive technology or pool modifications.

Breathe…
Hold your breath as long as you can (3 strokes) and exhale quickly, inhale as much air as you can as quick as you can.
Its all in the timing.
Practice in an empty pool, all pools are empty on Friday evenings.
Work on getting a nice steady rhythm and you’ll wish you could swim home.
Glide. Try and get as few strokes per length as possible, this is where breathing helps your buoyancy.
I typically get 15 strokes in per length of 25 meter pool, with tumble turns and big push I can get it down to 13.
Nice steady kick, keep your feet close to the surface.
Try and make as few bubbles as possible.
Reach, stretch as far foward as you can to start each stroke.

Out of interest, how fast do you go doing this (and are you mega tall)? I can do 15 strokes a length, but I’d be down to 8 minute 400 pace or something, whereas at 20 or so, I’d be under 7.

For example if you look at this site from page 12 in google search for seo training (which suggests they’re not that good at SEO!), they suggest things like “We’ll also give you ideas to develop your link building strategies.” and “How to look for the right type of inbound links to your website, and how to get them”, which sounds a bit like link farming, which if you’re not careful could be the sort of thing that google dumps sites for. I would steer clear of anyone suggesting things like that. It could be that they give perfectly good advice on the course, but really the only sensible way to do SEO is not to try and second guess how search engines work, but to make content relevant and understandable to the search engines.

(http://www.clearseo.co.uk/seo/seo-training-courses/ )

Search engine optimisation can be done two ways. Firstly by making your content good, relevant, well structured and searchable. Or secondly by doing dodgy magic that tries to game the algorithms that search engines use. If you do it the first way by making your content good quality, you have a good chance of getting a high rank for a long time. If you do it the second way, you may gain in the short term, but long term, you are likely to be dumped down out of the search engine index when they spot your trickery. So if you want to learn about SEO, then you need to work out if whoever is teaching you is trying to teach magic to game search engine rankings, or how to actually do your site properly.

Personally I wouldn’t bother though, it isn’t exactly black magic – this document from google gives you the information you need, from the horse’s mouth:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Joe

How much you stop start depends on the route – if i turn right and head for the Peak District, you can go probably hundreds of miles without hitting a traffic light if you pick the route right, wheras if i turn left to Derby, loads of lights.

You can always just use spds on the road bike – they do touring ones with a foot platform if you don’t find normal spd pedals comfortable (some people don’t).

I’d just buy any old road bike that has mudguard mounts, assuming you want to do the commute on road. I have a Trek 1200 (called a 1.2 now) and it does the job for a 16 mile each way hilly commute.

If you have spare money, a dynamo front hub wheel and a dynamo front light are by far the best things for commuting. Much better than battery lights.

Charge are jolly trendy, but you do pay money for that trendyness, and it kind of depends whether you want something that is racy but mainstream, or something that is a lot like an old ten speed racer.

Bear in mind with mirroring that if you have a constant mirror, it only saves you from some things (eg hardware failure], for example if you delete everything, it goes on the mirror too.

My parents have the Focus which parks itself…it’s pretty amazing to watch

The scary thing about that is how fast it turns the wheel. It can apparently get itself into spaces that are quite hard to get out of manually!

Well it’s not the same, it’s more like a car manufacturer insisting that you have your car serviced at an accredited garage during the warranty period. Imagine the up roar if they did, oh wait.

Not really, because it isn’t anything to do with the warranty, and the warranty period on a few phones is way less than the contract period (Apple are bad for this).

If you’re in the contract period you have to pay whatever you contracted to pay. The locking of phones is in theory to make it more compelling to you not to just stop paying and let them sue you. In reality, it is just a way of them trying to ensure that you stay with them by holding your phone to ransom. That’s why they offer you a ‘free upgrade’ slightly before your contract is finished, to lock you in again and in order to make you think that you have to keep with them.

And because the phone is subsidised by the phone co.
If you bought a cheap car on the basis it was part paid for by shell…

True years back in the olden days of extremely high phone charges. Nowadays, if you look at the difference in cost between sim only contracts and phone costs, for most high end phones, you end up paying roughly the same for the phone, there is very little subsidy, it is just an extended hire purchase of a phone. In some cases (Nexus 4 being the obvious one), it is actually cheaper to buy the unlocked phone and a sim card separately. So that justification is a lot more shaky nowadays.

Interestingly t-mobile USA just announced that they’re not locking phones, they’ll just sell you a phone, and sell you a sim package. You can hire-purchase the phones if you want to spread the cost, but they are getting rid of a lot of the opaqueness that is inherent in the ridiculous system of ‘upgrades’ and ‘free’ phones.

Hey,

ignoring all the stuff going off at a tangent, if you feel that there was a serious problem with the exam, and it’s something that is actually counting towards your mark, then yes, you obviously should at least seek further clarification of the reasoning behind the particular answers in case you didn’t fully understand them, and complain if you still think that there was a problem with the test. If you complain now, it at least gives the lecturer an opportunity to make any future assessments better.

Who you should moan to depends on your university. Probably talk first to your personal tutor as a default contact person, if not them (probably not), then it’ll be their job to tell you who is the right person.

that is why you can’t change the battery on several of the current smartphones – not smartphones but smart manufacturers and dumb consumers

They’re designed to last a couple of years, warranties and contracts are typically a couple of years, most people’s phones don’t outlast the battery. I’m typing this on my three year old htc desire, which could vaguely do with a new battery, but still goes for a day no problems. Most people will dump their shiny phone way before the battery dies.

And really, most of them it is just a matter of undoing a couple of screws to change the battery, a pain, but not that bad really.

The only pain about new batteries for old phones is that often the batteries for a three year old phone will be three years old, so you have to hope they’ve been stored sensibly before you get your replacement, not kept anywhere too hot or anything stupid, which in three years could screw up even an unused battery.

Tell me, what should a driver use a flash of the headlights for?
Now tell me those doing the flashing were right.

Now that’s a funny one. Because whilst obviously the highway code just says to let someone know that you are there, I did meet one IAM guy who suggested that when you saw bad driving on the road, you should beep or flash your lights, to let people know that you felt their actions were discourteous or unsafe, as without this kind of feedback, people won’t realise that they are having a negative effect on people, and won’t change their driving to avoid it. So the advanced motorists don’t actually agree on that one.

I don’t disagree that sometimes people flash something that is perfectly safe, but I do think that if it happens to you often, as described in that post above, it is possibly time to start thinking about whether it is you, not them who is doing something wrong, and I think that this is exactly the kind of reflection that should be expected of someone with advanced driver training, rather than just arrogantly assuming that all the people in your rear view flashing you are mere mortals in the presence of a driving god.

It does.

Yes, I know it should do. That was kind of my point.

I don’t know any advanced drivers that either think like that,

I do. Look at the quote below if you want an example of someone who thinks that they’re a super-hero because of their elite skills and fast car, and better than the ‘lowest common denominator’ non-elite driver?

I’ve done lots of extra training since passing my test. AIM, police type fast road training, observational training and a couple of track based handling sessions. So I think my standard of driving is way above average. Sure I still make the odd mistake but who doesn’t. The extra training, awareness of hazards combined with a high performance car with good handling and good brakes means that often I can drive above the posted limits completely safely whilst at the same time taking accounts if any harass that might be present. For someone who’s not had this training then these hazards might seem like unexpected events, but in reality 99% are totally predictable.

I fail to see why if conditions allow then a speed limit can’t be safely exceeded. We shouldn’t all have to drive to the lowest common denominator.

No, you’re missing the many posts made that suggest that advanced drivers are a bunch of speed hungry boy racers.

To be fair, the advanced drivers on here are hardly helping their cause by saying things like this:

Plus I’d never be able to have any fun on a deserted motorway or quiet country B road.

or by saying that speed limits shouldn’t apply to them because they are advanced drivers with jolly fast cars etc.

or by commenting on how they are very often flashed by people who consider their overtaking to be in some way dangerous, but that because they are such a jolly advanced driver, the people flashing them are clearly the ones in the wrong (I overtake people all the time, and I think I’ve been flashed maybe twice in the last couple of years, and if I am honest both times were when I did something stupid and at best cheeky and rude.)

If advanced driving should teach people anything, it should be some humility, and an ability to perceive that whilst you do have greater training, you are still limited and fallible, the same as everyone else and should take this into account in your planning and anticipation whilst driving, rather than that you are a super-driving-god because you’ve got a little red badge on your windscreen.

It’s a 3yo phone, the battery will be shagged to a greater or lesser degree. A new one isn’t a waste.

Possibly true, assuming the phone was used lots previously, but I would fix the software problem that is causing the battery drain, before I go putting a brand new battery in it and shagging that. No point spending money on hardware to fix a software problem.

Android OS should be showing something like 2% of the battery use, certainly not anything like 80% (does on both phones I have here). Something is screwy with your software, you’ve installed some dodgy app or a dodgy rom.

Joe

the estate agent is always going to try and get the most they can as theyll make more money out of it!

That’s not really true. The estate agent is aiming to get the highest sale price they can get that guarantees a sale.

Pushing the price up by 1000 gains them an extra tenner. Losing a sale loses them the best part of 2 grand. If they can encourage the seller to accept a few thousand less, they are better off than if you walk away.

If android OS is showing at 80% of battery consumption, then it is quite likely some dodgy app you’ve installed is doing notification checking or some such rubbish and wasting the battery away. Or it might be something in your custom rom. It’ll probably be bringing the phone back to life repeatedly to check something.

You can find out if this is happening with better battery stats, which if you get a login on xda-developers.com is free.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1179809

Don’t waste money on new batteries till you’ve checked this.

Joe

Also, maybe this is my naive city boy background coming through, but is it normal for farm-boy country types just to think, road closed with snow, no worries, we’ll get the JCB out for our 20 mile journey?

Picture of A515 at Parsley Hay from Sunday night on my facebook, A515 was 6 foot in snow. The person who took the picture had come through (to Belper) on a JCB digging their way through, and it took them two hours of digging to get through (I guess they really wanted to get back home!). From the picture it looked surprising they’d got through with a JCB even, snow up to the top of the drystone walls at the side of the road. So unless it’s been ploughed a whole lot since then, then you’re screwed.

I would go South then West then North, stick to very main roads, and only ones that aren’t marked as closed on the site below. A6 looks fine here in Belper and I saw a plough on the A517 this morning, so I’m guessing that has been cleared to Ashbourne.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/derby

Bike hire, it’s cheap and the city is mostly pretty flat and great for cycling. We used fat tyre bikes (loads of places round the city)

Old east berlin is where anything a bit more alternative is located, the most interesting art places etc.

Clarchen’s Ballhaus is an interesting place to go, crazy building, nice pizzas too http://www.ballhaus.de/

Get free listings magazines in bars for art / clubs etc, changes so often no one will be able to recommend anything of that kind reliably. Tripadvisor might be good for restaurants, so many visitors to the city it’ll get tons of reviews for anywhere, although to be honest i usually just wander around and look at places, it’s quite a good city for that.

Tons of historical stuff, depends how much depressing holocaust stuff you can take – the holocaust memorial is very moving in an extremely bleak way.

I don’t see much benefit in getting young children used to using computers or tablets. When the time comes that they need to use them, I think it will take them about 5 minutes to get up to speed!

I’d agree with this, even as a complete nerd, there’s no positive benefit to learning to use an interface. However there are lots of fun things to do with it, so I wouldn’t let that stop you letting them play with it. It is a rich and interesting thing to do, is fun to watch them playing with things. I built my daughter her own game for my phone (Poke that Goat) and she loves playing with and around it, making up stories about who each goat belongs to, that sort of thing. Like everything else, I think parental supervision and taking part in things with them is important, but that is true of most things with kids, not just technology.

Not a fan of Android though. Nor lending my phone unsupervised as he keeps launching stuff he shouldn’t.

Kid mode – lock them out of everything except particular apps. Various apps for Android, surely something for iOS?

And games are education. Hand/eye coordination, mental ability etc. Education isn’t just about learning the names of letters and adding up after all.

I’m a massive Android fan, but I think there are more and nicer apps for iOS in various areas that are good for kids – painting, music making, that sort of thing, although iOS is so blooming expensive both for the device and the apps.

Don’t forget to turn off in-app purchasing.

I’ve done lots of extra training since passing my test. AIM, police type fast road training, observational training and a couple of track based handling sessions. So I think my standard of driving is way above average. Sure I still make the odd mistake but who doesn’t. The extra training, awareness of hazards combined with a high performance car with good handling and good brakes means that often I can drive above the posted limits completely safely whilst at the same time taking accounts if any harass that might be present.

So you’re an amazingly good driver in a super duper car in your opinion.

Often I will get flashed when passing a slower driver even though an overtake is safe an legal.

But then in the opinion of loads of people who have actually seen you driving, you are clearly a bad enough driver that they feel the need to warn you by flashing their lights. Clearly their warnings have just reinforced your belief that you are a super driver, but seriously, if you’re scaring people all the time, then you’re being at best discourteous, and quite likely dangerous, even if only by the trail of surprised and shocked people hitting their brakes behind you as you zoom past them into a narrow gap.

Quick lunchtime swim before the snow goes away.