For people interested in traditional / instinctive archery – check out “GreyArcher1” on You Tube. He rambles a bit, but his videos are a good place to start.

The folks on Archery Interchange are pretty friendly to beginners.

To start with the usual advice is not to buy anything. Go along for a beginners session to your local club, borrow some club equipment and try a few different styles. If you haven’t shot before you’ll most likely have to build up your draw weight gradually, so buying kit initially may be a waste of money.

Many clubs are focussed on Olympic style target archery, but you often find some weirdos (like me) who shoot traditional. If you’re nice to them they might let you have a go.

Have fun!
James.

Knee pain covers a lot of ground. I’m starting treatment for pain on the outside of my left knee which has a preliminary diagnosis of ITBS or Chondromalacia patellae. So far I’m at the stage of hefty painkillers and waiting for physiotherapy. I suspect it’s quite important to get some expert advice to avoid making things worse.

In the past I’ve used Gnucash, but moved to YNAB a few years ago. Works well for simple personal finances.

J

Good, cheap(ish) way to get into fat biking. Frame geometry feels well sorted to me and is adaptable to all sorts of conditions. Tyres feel great and so far have only been stumped by sheet ice. The only negative is the Avid brakes which are utter poop (upgraded mine to Hope Minis). I also changed the drivetrain to 2×10 as I ride in proper mountains quite often and am a wimp.

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Heckler in snow[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Heckler rebuilt[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

Medium Heckler with RS Lyrik coil forks. Runs a Fox RC coil shock now. Mostly SRAM X9/X0 2×10 drive train, Hope Hoops, M4 brakes and finishing kit. A smattering of Thomson to finish it off. Not the lightest bike, but it’s very reliable and great fun to ride.

I had a lot of fun building my own macro lenses. Results were pretty average, but the components are dirt cheap on eBay:

Attempt #1

Attempt #2

Very cool plane. From Leuchars last year:

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Vulcan[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

Lightroom, small RAID array and backups to external HDDs.

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Massive double rainbow[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Rainbow cows[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

A few years back I had a Woodpecker as a regular visitor. The local Blue Tits weren’t impressed:

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Woodpecker on bird feeder[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

That’s fantastic. I guess that truck is the car equivalent of Josh Bender’s Karpiel!

I’ve no experience with this scope, but have heard good things about the Skywatcher Dobsonians. The 200P is a fairly large piece of equipment (200mm primary mirror, overall length about 1m). The other thing to consider is that if it’s going to be moved around almost all reflector (mirror) telescopes will need collimation (mirror alignment) occasionally. A refractor telescope is a bit easier to just pick up and use.

spchantier – there are a few people on the Stargazers Lounge forum who do stuff like that. I’ve only ever used off the shelf optics (Orion Optics).

J

Take a look at the Skywatcher Startravel scopes (maybe the 102 or 120). They’re a pretty good compromise on size, price and performance.

J

Unless it was moving pretty quickly it probably wasn’t the ISS – that crosses the sky in about a minute or so.

Last night facing southwards you’d probably see a few of the brighter stars. Sirius was pretty low, but would have been well visible. Further west you’d see Betelgeuse and Bellatrix in Orion and further west still is Jupiter – still the brightest thing in the sky at the moment.

J

I was fatting it at Kirkhill on Monday. Probably the best snow conditions I’ve seen this year. Perfect depth and crunchiness. It didn’t even matter when I lost the trail a few times – just trundled between the trees. Great fun!

J

Yeah – nature’s alright I suppose 😉

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Bumblebee[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Yellowhammer[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Hover Fly[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Bee on flower[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Mouse stealing food[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Greenfinch on branch[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

honourablegeorge – they supply lots of pins and there are many holes to screw them into; you don’t need to use them all! I probably have about 2/3rds of the pins installed – works for me…

So far I’m very happy with mine. Can’t comment on longevity yet, but they seem well built. I took a little bit of time to work out the best pin pattern and having done that they match my old Easton Cully & Bergtec Penthouse flats for grip.

J

I’m tremendously messy in the kitchen, so yes – I do wear one.

I had 4 proper WOW moments on a road-trip from a few years ago:

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Grand Canyon[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Arizona Meteor Crater[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Yosemite Silhouette[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Giant Grizzly Sequoia[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

J

Took the fatbike out for it’s first trial-by-snow. Headed out to the hills around Pitfichie on Saturday and found about 0.5m of snow away from the forest roads. The first 3 hours were great fun ploughing through the mix of powder, ice and drift. We could ride for about 20m or so before hitting something deep and getting ejected off the bikes into a tangled giggling heap.

Hours 3-4 were less fun as we started to get cold and extremely tired. Towards the end of the ride it was a head down slog to get back to the car. A giant bowl of pasta and a few glasses of red capped the day off nicely!

J

Golspie is probably my favourite with Laggan a close second.

theblackmount: no, not really – I ride all over the Grampians and NE Scotland during winter. I do take extra gear in my rucksack in case things go bad and I end up walking, but no need for them whilst riding.

I think a lot of it is down to your own personal central heating system (related to metabolism??). I don’t really feel the cold at all (apart from my hands), but I really struggle in hot weather.

I wear shorts for cycling all year round (baggies – none of this lycra nonsense!). I find trousers really uncomfortable on the bike. Never had a problem with getting cold so don’t see the point in wearing something less comfortable.

Earlier this week I started to photograph this (picture below is a test shot from a few years ago):

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M42[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

The sky was dark and clear and it was just visible with the naked eye. The thing that blows me away is that it’s over 1,300 light years away but can be seen without optics. I guess being a cloud of luminous gas 240 trillion kilometres across helps.

J

OK – sent you an email.

James.

Give me a shout on LinkedIn (http://lnkd.in/dCMZPJ) – I’ll take a look at your profile and see if I know of anything relevant.

James.

A feeling of stability was one of the first things I noticed. Once the bike is rolling it seems to sit ‘in’ the trail and responds predictably to shifting your weight around. As this is the only fat bike I’ve ridden I can’t comment on whether it’s the front geometry that’s doing that or something else, but it works for me!

I’ve only put around 40km on mine so far, but have had a whole pile of fun on it. I bought it as something a bit out of the ordinary and to act as a simple(r) bike for winter riding. It’s my first fat-bike, so the first thing I noticed was the vastly different weight distribution to a normal bike. The Fatty has most of its weight in the wheels which seems like it gives a low centre of gravity and makes for a very stable ride.

As mentioned above the monster truck wheels need a bit of work to get them up to speed, but once there it flows the trails very well and seems to be able to hold a line in the corners very nicely. With all that rotating weight it does seem to need quite a lot of input to get it to turn in, but just throw your weight into the corner and it’s all good. In boggy trail conditions the huge tyres did a great job of floating over the gunk and holding the speed.

It took me a while to get used to riding full-rigid off rode again after 7 years of riding full-suspension but you soon learn to loosen up and let the bike do its thing. I’m rather enjoying the simplicity of the 1×10 gearing. It’s a bit of a grind on the hills, but my theory is that it will help be build fitness over the dark months.

Overall I’m very happy and glad I bought it.

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Fatty![/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Fatty![/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

This yellow beastie does the job for me:

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Heckler rebuilt[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Heckler in snow[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

I have my name down for one. Just wanted something different from my main bike. Should double as a good winter / night ride bike too.

J

I’ll second what the Rt. Hon. George says – don’t buy a Joplin unless you enjoy stripping it down and rebuilding it regularly.

J

Can’t really advise on most of your questions as we visited in the height of summer. We rode Slickrock and it would have been just fine on a hardtail. Never managed to get out on the Porcupine Rim trail so that may be a different matter.

We stayed in a cheap hotel in the town. Poison Spider Bikes on the main street sorted us out with bikes, maps and trail advice – give them a shout, they’re very helpful.

J

For my thesis I had a master LaTeX document with all the usual preamble. From this all the chapters were written in separate files and merged into the master document using \input commands. When I wanted to send out a partial preview I just commented out each of the \inputs that I didn’t want to send and recompiled.

James.

theroadwarrior: the winter tyres are Continental Nordic Spike 240s. I run front and rear guards (Chromoplastic 50mm) and they work fine even with the higher profile tyres.

I use a Joplin 4 and can’t really recommend it. It seems to require regular rebuilds and its favourite trick at the moment is to lose all its air. Not sure how much longer I will persist before going back to a normal seat post.

J

Winter commuting:

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Winter Roadrat[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr

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Winter Roadrat[/url] by jwrfooo[/url], on Flickr