I like it when couriers leave parcels. Means I don’t have to wait around at home for stuff.

Zelensky needs to call Putin telling him to keep what’s he’s got and see if they can call it quits. If you want to escalate it more get over there and fight .

I’m sure Putin would be 100% happy with what he’s acquired, and definitely won’t regroup and come back for more later.

My Samsung was borked by the last update – it made the bluetooth audio all stuttery.

That’s what I thought – but there are 4 pages of lenses, no frames.

How topical, one of these just arrived with me about an hour ago:

https://www.mobilesolarchargers.co.uk/shop/details/msc-expedition-10w?basket_items_id=5099509

Can’t recommend it yet as haven’t used it, but it’s the best weight:output ratio I could find (possibly not an issue for your daughter’s use case, but likely of interest for many on here).

I use memory maps (MMFA is the app). I paid a one-off fee to get all of the OS maps on there. I can’t remember exactly how much it was, but it was a good enough deal that I ditched my OS subscription.

It also allows you to download the entire UK in 1:50k in one go – rather than piecemeal like with the OS app.

Great idea. Lighter vehicle, less energy to shift it around.

Will def cause issues though – the first time one of those is involved in an accident (presumably uninsured, because bike), there would be a hastily-concocted law to reclasify them.

You can’t have too much shed. Ever.

So apart from a bit of 90’s nostalgia, have they actually made a bike in the last decade that anybody wanted enough to buy?

My 2016-ish Process 111 was excellent, and quite ahead of the game – LLS short travel 29er before that was really a thing.

You would expect Halfords to give at least a basic level of training to their fitters wouldn’t you

Nope. Used to work there and staff received zero training.

It so happened that most of us who worked there (in the bikehut bit) were bike-mad so there was actually a lot of knowledge – but that was because the manager tried to hire people who already knew what they were doing. With a less conscientious manager, I can quite believe a branch could be staffed entirely by folk with no clue.

Saw a lad many years ago absolutely mash himself when a pair of carbon bars let go in a DH race. It’s a nope from me. It’s a great material, but for that application they’re just too susceptible to invisible damage and sudden failure.

Any recommendations for a good compact camera with small zoom that I could use with gloves and one handed while paragliding? I see some spectacular views but would like to get some photos! Phone is in use as a flight instrument so not that.

I’d suggest a 360 cam, unless the focus of your flying is photography. Switch it on, forget about it, and focus on your flying. You can use timelapse if you want to save on space and battery life, and plug in a battery pack if you’re going xc and need it to run all day. It won’t get particularly good quality shots, but it’ll get shots – no matter whether you’re looking in the wrong direction, eating a sandwich, busy on the rear risers keeping your wing open… you get the idea.
Some gratuitous shots from Sunday, using an insta360 X2:

I’d happily live in one of those. I bet it’s comfier and more efficient than my 1920’s-build cavity wall house.

If they were legal to be registered/used as dwellings I can see a place in the market for them.

Yep, I’ll admit I learnt something this morning. Thought the “Iron Curtain” and the “Berlin Wall” were one and the same

Me three. Not something I was ever taught. I have previously read about the Berlin airlift too, which makes much more sense now that I think of it as an island within E. Berlin…

Come on lads, please. Not having a pop here but…

I didn’t post it as a hard hitting piece of journalism. I don’t think some more tongue in cheek, lighter threads do STW any harm to be honest. 😉

These are worrying times we live in, let’s be allowed to bring up and have a laugh at the ludicrous without having to disect it all, please?

As above – my disdain was aimed squarely at whoever thought this was worthy of being published as news.

A nuclear missile without the nuclear bit or the bit that makes it fly. So… man has metal tube in garage? Scary stuff.

I’ve broken a few bones, had viral arthritis (which stung more than a bit), but the most pain I’ve had was from something totally unknown.

Sat at work one day, I felt this sudden onset of pain in my abdomen. I just sort of froze on the spot. My colleague looked a bit puzzled and asked if I was ok – apparently I’d turned an unhealthy shade of grey.

Anyway, I ended up in hospital shortly after. Nobody was available to see me, and I didn’t get any pain relief. I had maybe 3-4 hours of hitherto-unfelt (by me, at least) pain. It got to a point that I almost didn’t feel it any more – I was hallucinating, and felt detached from it.

Around about the time a doctor arrived, the pain began to subside. A couple of hours later I was fine, and the pain never reocurred. Most bizarre!

Possibly daft question as I’ve never used one – what makes an air fryer a fryer, rather than just a small oven? Does it skoosh oil around?

to the lay man it’s taking a, seemingly, high-tech piece of kit and using the most low-tech approach to make it straight (which problem looks like having to fix it to some people). Doesn’t look great – sometimes focusing on the precise end result is better than how you got there.

Aluminium has a high coefficent of thermal expansion. A weld will pull the frame around as it cools and contracts. I’d much rather they straighten that out before heat treatment than just ignoring it and shipping horribly aligned frames. I assume Intense did the latter with my Socom back in the day (my 224 Evo of the same era had no such problems).

Give over. If you’re that clueless about cars you probably have loads of them driving past you all the time and you think they’re petrol. Over a third of UK cars are diesel…

…and they mostly sound like ass.

SOME diesels sound good, but they aren’t 4 pot 4-strokes…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjkneSAPKsw&ab_channel=AllisonTyler

I’d be far more likely to use fake frames with genuine lenses than the other way around… I’ve tried various aftermarket lenses and came back to genuine, they’re just better.Sorry OP, no idea about your original question.

id have a new house

id not have one on a new estate layout.

Pretty much this. My (1920’s build) house is objectively a bit crap. I’d trade it in a heartbeat for a nice dry well-insulated new house.

I’d not trade my shed and my space/privacy/location though, and I’m not going to get a new build with any of those things – well, not on my budget anyway.

In hinsight, they were miles ahead of their time weren’t they? Must be 20 years ago I first started buying bike parts – CRC always had what I needed, at the best price, and were doing free next day delivery even way back then.
Haven’t used them for years now mind – the stock situation is crap, prices are crap (unless you want size XXXXXXXXXS), postage costs as much as anywhere else

Just taken a screenshot of the wind patterns around the U.K. on Windy.com, and they’re extraordinary, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like the ripples across the north of Scotland before.

Looks like wave, which actually happens quite a lot. Usually downwind of mountains – see it often here (SE of the cairngorms) in a strong NW. In strong conditions the bars can travel a loooooong way though. In this case I wonder if the trigger might be rotor at shear layers rather than mountains.

It’s certainly been a rough night here; not as wet as I’ve seen it but absolutely howling. My carport roof is still attached for now, it’s quite sheltered in the usual strong N or SW winds but very exposed in an E.

Most people who fondly remember the original Patriots will by now be fat and old.

As such, reusing the name for an e-bike makes perfect sense.

*hides*

My only brand new mtb was my first ‘proper’ one. A 2005 Kona coiler, bought in 2006 for something like 1/2 RRP.

Turns out there was a very good reason for this ‘bargain’. It was rubbish.

I always built bikes from parts secondhand thereafter.

Assumed this was a pisstake when I saw the thread title. Appears not!

Still run them happily on road/commuter bike, tubes are fine for me on the road.  Can change a tubed tyre in a couple of minutes with zero mess and I very, very rarely punture on the road.

Not like DH days of yore when pinch flats were a thing every other run – tubeless was a huge improvement for MTB.

Tbh I don’t think anyone is going to change the OP’s mind. For what it’s worth, I still test because I will act differently if I have covid vs a common cold. I still feel the effects of my first bout of covid over three years ago, if I test positive for it again I’ll

1. Dial back my exercise level

2. Do my absolute best to not pass it on

While I would do both of the above to an extent for a common cold, my experience is that covid is orders of magnitude more dangerous, so deserves special treatment.

A lot of the ‘inaccuracy’ with rainfal forecasts at certain times will be because of what’s causing the rain. If the rain is due to an unstable airmass and thermic action, it can be very localised – so basically impossible to precict *exactly* where will get wet. Not like rain associated with a front which is much easier to predict.

Getting into a skew-t chart is probably overkill, but it might be a useful addition to your forecasting. I use an android app called (appropriately) ‘skew-t’, but I think Windy can do soundings for certain locations too.

It’s online dating – nothing’s exclusive until clearly discussed and agreed. Most people on there will have multiple options on the go at any given time.

In short, don’t worry about it. Go on both separate dates and see what happens.

I don’t fish, but I’ve seen it done and fished as a kid so can state that ‘letting it suffocate slowly on said boat’ isn’t a thing in sport/line fishing. I’ve only ever seen fish whacked over the head to put them out the moment they’re lifted on board.

Tbh this seems a deliberately inflammatory post though, so you probably know that already…

Different models are good for different things, under different conditions.

Locally, I find GFS to be the best for the things I’m interested in (wind and precipitation). Under certain conditions ICON works better. Ultimately, if you review all of the models and they’re in agreement, that’s a good sign. If conditions are tricky and they all say different things, you have to look at the inputs and make a judgement.

App wise, I like Ventusky. Windy is also popular, though I prefer the grid-style numbering on Ventusky.

How old school? 4th should be direct drive on anything pre-puma/tdci.

Short of stripping it by the road or getting recovered,  I’d probably leave it in 4th. Pull away in 4 low, then shift to 4 high (rev matching required) to avoid any damage.

Not sure about the later ones as from earlier posts they are now galvanised, but I’ve never seen a vehicle rust faster than my mate’s old Vito.

I watched it go from ‘tidy, with a few rust spots on the arches’ to ‘holes in the sills and needing half the floorpan replaced’ over the course of a single winter. Incredible, and not in a good way.

There is talk of human remains being found. This is against what plenty of internet “commentators” stated was possible. Apparently the amount of energy released when it went from 1 bat to 400 bar in a millisecond would of destroyed anything inside.

They may both be correct. ‘Remains’ in this case may refer to a thin veneer of human mince…

What did you do with the money that you weren’t stretched with? Have you overpaid so you are reducing the impact of the rate rises with a lower capital element, or do you have a pot that you can use to buffer, say 3-6mo of salary as ML would suggest? Or did it all get spent?

I wasn’t really posting about my specific circumstances, I was just trying to give an alternate viewpoint to the ‘it should have been really obvious this would happen’ side. Personally, I saved a chunk rather than paying off extra on the mortgage. I work in a relatively volatile industry and I sleep better knowing I can live off my savings for a while.

For many people my age, the market in our (financial) lifetime has taught us that rates only ever go down. As an example, when I bought my first house I was very aware that interest rates might rise, so I fixed at 5 years at something like 4% (at the time a good deal). I got burned, because all the rates did was fall for that 5 year period! Since then I have only fixed for 2 years at a time and, until now, rates have only ever gone down. I’ve just remortgaged (again 2 year fixed) at 4.39%, so my payments have gone up to £933/month from £750/month. I can cope with that, but I can completely sympathise with those who can’t. Having only ever seen rates fall, I can’t blame them for thinking things would stay that way.

That’s quite a naive outlook. It’s fairly common knowledge how historically low interest rates have been since 2008.
People making money arranging mortgages are not going to try and talk you out of it.

I bought in 2007ish at 4.99%. That’s not ancient history.

Hmmmm. For many people badly affected by this rate increase, 2007 is ancient history.

I bought my first house in 2014, in 2007 I was too busy riding bikes and going to the union to care about interest rates.

Yes, when buying we were all told to expect interest rate rises – and I didn’t particularly stretch myself so I’m ok for now. For many people my age though, all we have ever known is low interest rates –  so this is a much bigger shock than it will be for the, err, more advanced of age among us.

Ah yes, the ‘happiness hangover’.

It’s a thing. Currently suffering myself after an epic weekend of racing in the lakes.

Judging by the ‘driving on a beach’ promo pic it’ll need a new bulkhead and chassis soon…