The only criteria is that you’re not in the UK

Does that make much difference, practically? Presumably applying for a visa/change of visa requires an address, so if you’re resident in the UK but still have family back in your home country, what’s your 3rd option for something like that?

ITV hub is on fire TV stick now, not tried it though. They added all4 recently too, but I think it’s slightly limited – looks like none of the American stuff on e4 like big bang theory, not sure if that’s likely to change. It’s gained a Eurosport player app since I bought it too. Quite handy really seeing as our Xbox seems to be getting ropey.

I get maliciously patient. The sensible thing to do is to slow down a bit so that you’re less likely to have to stop quickly, the fact that it probably really annoys the impatient moron behind you is just an added bonus.

It gets particularly fun around sets of traffic lights/ multiple lanes etc where you can try to drive really smoothly and steadily, such that you get through it all as fast as everyone else around you, without at any point giving the car behind a chance to get past. It’s not big, it’s not clever, but it keeps me amused.

I started with a weeride, which she seemed to enjoy, but using it twice a day, four days a week, with a short but quite hilly commute (3 Sheffield miles) felt like it was doing bad things to my knees. That was with a smaller than average 1 year old and reasonable fitness, so that’s something to bear in mind.

Now got a decathlon own brand that mounts to the seat tube and it’s fine, she seems happy with that one too (although the balance isn’t as good for BMX tracks…)

It’s not great if she falls asleep on longer weekend rides, she ends up slumped forward which doesn’t look comfy. I sort of wish I’d gone for a reclining seat, but it was extra money when I’d already bought a seat and a trailer recently. And for completeness, I don’t use the trailer for commuting because the slightly convoluted route to avoid bigger roads makes the extra width/length and reduced manoeuvrability a bit annoying, might not apply to you.

Yes, sorry.

Which might make it with seeing if you can get the ratios you need with a double – SRAM do their ‘wifli’ stuff which is basically a big cassette (up to 32, I think) and a long cage rear mech to accommodate the extra range. Might be cheaper than new cranks and a shifter.

Can’t really comment on the wheels (my planet-x al30s are faster than my shimano r501s, but one set are on a carbon race bike and one set are on a Ribble hack), but i have to correct some of the less conventional physics. Gravity is not an acceleration, it is an attractive force between objects with mass which is (on earth, generally) 9.8N/Kg. That just happens to make objects in free fall against no resistance accelerate at 9.8m/s^2, which is often called called acceleration due to gravity. (Not to be confused with heavier riders descending quickly towards a pub meal, which is acceleration due to gravy.)

Going uphill, you are not accelerating constantly, you’re just having to work against gravity and wind resistance, friction etc, so higher force to maintain the same constant speed.

now i dont know about you but i cant ride two at a time nor can i make 100% / 2 equal more than 50% either.

It’s 50% of the use of that bike, not 50% of your uses of any bike. You could have 10 bikes, each used only once every 2 weeks for a ride to work and back, and 100% of the use of each bike would be for a qualifying journey.

I commute over a hill in Sheffield with a toddler in a baby seat. I try not to feel a bit smug when overtaking going uphill but I can’t claim much success, especially when it’s a ‘proper’ bike. I really need to get her better trained to smile and wave at people as we pass, just to rub it in…

He now lives in Lancashire.

This is the real problem. The Froome/Wiggins spat is made up to hide the truth – Wiggins can’t get a visa for the better side of the Pennines, so Sky can’t include him in the team.

Too many rules already and the added interference can only benefits the bureaucrats which I don’t like

Understandable, and probably quite a common view, but in the last few months alone I can think of EU legislation on safer lorries, and legislation forcing publication of all pharmaceutical trials, not just the positive stiff, which has massive implications. And that’s without particularly looking or paying much attention. Compare that with the headline grabbing crap that UK governments of all flavours churn out near elections (or all the time, depending on how you look at it).

It might not get much attention, it might not be stuff that the general public are demanding, but just being EU legislation doesn’t automatically make it a bad thing.

Just click on the ‘festival’ link, and see how far you can get with a straight face.

There is a version (I’ve got one) with a smaller receiver (link to salus’ website[/url]), which could probably be wedged inside the boiler cover. It has a switch that can put it in manual mode (i.e. always on), and a reset button. If you’re bothered enough you could take the boiler cover off and have a look, but if you haven’t already done so I’m guessing you’d rather not?

It’s intended to go in place of one of those standard circular mechanical timers, but by the sound of it you’ve got one of those too, which is a bit odd. They could probably be wired up in series to have both in use (bit pointless with a timer on the thermostat), or they could have just not fitted it. We moved into a house in january that had a similar thing fitted but the receiver was dead, and google suggested the receivers aren’t the most reliable thing ever. Maybe the receiver broke and they just took it out and put the mechanical timer back in? In which case, what you have isn’t a thermostat, it’s a clock with a thermometer. Given the time of year, do you have any relatives you don’t particularly like?

Doesn’t directly answer the question, but this was a fairly interesting read about the neutral service at the giro: http://road.cc/content/feature/83410-inside-giro-ditalia-vittoria-servizio-corse-pelotons-guardian-angels

Sounds like the neutral bikes are only ever used very occasionally and very briefly, until they can get a spare team bike, but as others have said if a rider has mechanical when the team car can’t get to them (eg in a breakaway on narrow mountain roads), then the quick change to a neutral bike hopefully avoids the race being decided by mechanicals not riders.

Also interesting that as well as pedals, they record which teams are on which groupset to make sure rear wheels are compatible, so they can get the right wheel without needing to check with the rider first – saves a few seconds I suppose.

You can crop the start and end of a ride, best bet is probably to do upload a duplicate of the ride then crop each one accordingly. Crop is under ‘actions’ button on the activity summary page. Not sure how you go about uploading a route twice though. If you can’t do it through the strava website you should be able to get the gpx file off the gps and upload it manually. Annoyingly I don’t think you can export gpx files from strava, even for your own rides.

This explains the whole story quite well, with pictures and everything. And today, knowing all this, the cretins at the independent still tried to bring back the glory days of 1998.

Nottingham beer festival on the 13th, so I’m afraid the 14th has actually been cancelled this year.

Any idea what chainset it is? Some (generally cheaper) chainsets have riveted rings – might look like allen key holes, but not removable. It’s a new chainset needed if you want to change the rings in that case.

(E.g. this one’s riveted but looks a bit bolted: http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=41449 )

Err, I thought it was the other way around (right lever – rear mech). And it definitely matters – 10 speed or 2+trim. No difference in the braking if that’s what you mean.
Cable routing sometimes crosses over infront of the head tube to help with routing (less tight curves) if that’s confusing anything.

50km on the road bike in the peaks. Coming back across Houndkirk moor with a ridiculous headwind was a bit more character building than I’d have liked. Oh, and I got back to find it raining in my living room.

Still, my weather karma must be properly balanced for the Dyfi now. It’s got to stop raining soon, right?

they must tell you, they cannot do it secretly

Yes, but how many contracts/work computer use policies that everyone signs when starting a job will say something along the lines of ‘your e-mail will be monitored’.

Also, data protection is for personal data – they’d probably say work e-mail isn’t personal data, and if you’ve made it personal it’s your fault/breach of the policy.

But as others have said, I’d be very surprised if your boss replying on your behalf isn’t a bit dodgy.

“brake cable is ‘strands’, gear coiled”
Other way around, I thought? Brake is coiled to give some modulation (like a really rubbish spring that compresses a tiny bit), gear is several (non-coiled) strands to index gears accurately (but could split if compressed with as much force as brake outer).

Why don’t they print ‘brake’ and ‘gear’ instead of sp41/slr?

Not yet, they’re thinking of adding it at some point. Netflix do high defintion streaming I think, so it’s a question of how much that bothers lovefilm. Better choice of films with lovefilm though. (And to be a bit pedantic – you’re looking for high-defintion/HD streaming, blu ray is specifically the discs. The postal version of lovefilm includes blu ray and DVD for the same cost if that helps.)

I should be able to make it tomorrow, any time after 6 is fine by me.

I’m in. Even after the last one.

Didn’t really want to get involved in this, but I can argue semantics for hours: For the NHS, there is no pot of money/pension fund, so you could say it is paid directly out of taxation.

However, it is also true that pension contributions paid by employees and employers are greater than what is paid out, and those contributions also go directly to the tax man, hence the statement that it isn’t funded by taxation.

You could argue, correctly, that the employer contributions are the same thing as taxation paying pensions, but in that case it’s not really an argument about pensions, it’s an argument about public sector pay being too high (employer pension contributions being just another part of the remuneration package, for both private and public workers). Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but that seems like a more honest way of framing the discussion (or argument, seeing as this is STW)

Snowy ride in the peaks. Train to Edale then rode home. Northern Rail as an uplift service? Why not?

Good ride, cheers guys. Nice to actually meet some real people off here, that’s a first for me. Will have to try to make the next one too, if only because I somehow managed to hide from the cake. I think I was trying to do something futile like defrosting my feet.

Not many areas have fibre to the home, it’s generally copper coax cable to a box in the street, then fibre, but the point is all virgin media broadband is on a dedicated line, not using a BT or ex-BT phone line. So no need for extra line rental. That said, we added a phone for not much, then got basic cable TV included for nothing. Customer service is horrendous as soon as anything other than a common problem happens though – we’ve just moved and it took us 2 weeks to persuade them of that because the previous tenants were a bit slow cancelling the contract. They seemed to think we hadn’t actually moved, but were just transferring our services to someone else’s house for a joke.

Edit: yeah, what he ^ said. But we did at least get shiny new kit when we moved :-)

Right, I’ve recently moved to Sheffield and I’m getting bored riding on my own, so I’m in.

I agree with everyone else about the time though, 8.30 is way too late, how about 7?

Err, I thought that the main bit of motion control/black box damping is the cartridge in the top of the fork leg, so that would need to be removed to change damping. I thought the bit that can be removed from the bottom of the leg is just a plunger that forces the oil through the damper cartridge in the top. Am I missing something?

Never biked there, but went recently and there is a long distance path around the coast which looked fun in places, saw a couple of people on mountain bikes on it. It’s the cami de cavalls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam%C3%AD_de_Cavalls), also part of one of the long distance european routes, GR somethingorother. We we were at the ciutadella end, the path went at least as far as the western tip of the island, and the furthest east we got was cala galdana (which is where there were some bikers). Saw a few bits of the trail in between, looked nice if no massive hills, and was right next to the coast. Well marked for the offroad bits, but maybe needed a bit of guess work through the towns, not that ‘follow the coast’ is that tricky. No idea about bike hire though, sorry.

Easy way of giving some context to mean and standard deviation: for a set of samples, ~70% of values will be within mean +/- 1 S.D., 95% will be in mean +/- 2xS.D.

The thing that always gets me about this sort of thing is the way the bbc (for example) try to talk as if it’s fantastic news. There’s a statement from someone at bbc sport along the lines of ‘ it’s great that we’ve signed this brilliant new agreement to provide excellent coverage’ which is clearly a load of arse, whereas if they’d said ‘yeah, it’s not great, but it was really expensive, so it was this or nothing – at least this way we get some of the more well known races, it’ll have to do’ then people would probably be a bit more understanding. It’s like banks closing branches or reducing opening times and saying it’s ‘to provide a better service to all our customers’ – no it isn’t, it’s because it obviously didn’t make commercial sense to run your businesses like that, which is fine but don’t be so bloomin’ patronising about it.

Not bothered about coke versions, but we should clear up this centrifugal/centripetal force thing: http://xkcd.net/123/%5B/url%5D

The kindle .prc file works on the android kindle app for me (android 2.2, kindle 3.0.1). Downloaded it on the phone browser, moved the file from the browser download directory to the kindle folder, and it appeared in the app. No conversion or PC needed. Blades2000 – you weren’t converting the epub file rather than the kindle file were you?

Swoosh – I’ve wondered about this, I’ve got an old sirius, which had the same geometry as the new one/scion, but uses their own tubeset (which they said is roughly equal to reynolds 631). They then changed to 853, but it sounds like it actually got heavier through some last minute changes for CEN testing. I have seen 5.7lbs quoted for the new one and 4.8 for the old (source – a bloke on the internet). So they’ve now taken the dropouts off and made it only a little heavier than the old one. Is 853 that much better, even in a heavier frame?

Either way, mine is lovely to ride, so I imagine the scion will be good – I keep thinking about getting a full suss, then I go for a ride and remember my current bike is awesome. Ruins my plans for new shiny things.

Do they just process most recent orders first, rather than processing in the order that orders were placed? Order late in the week when they’re up to date and it’s fine, order friday evening and you have to wait few days for the weekend backlog to be done first?

Quick thought – wonder how many people will watch that video and think about making a donation to a mountain rescue team or air ambulance? Could be quite effective fundraising.

Where abouts is that first bit and the detour through the woods? Looks fun, I obviously don’t know the area as we’ll as I’d like.

– don’t swear at or abuse the soldiers on exercise

Regardless of location or activity, I’d have said ‘don’t abuse groups of heavily armed people, who are trained in violence, while in the woods where no one will ever know what happened’ is fairly good advice :-)