You go and look at pictures of Gaza and take a shake to yourself.

I think it was the last ‘Giant refusing to honour a warranty’ thread on here that ensured the two e-bikes we bought for the grandparents weren’t from Giant.

Dwarf Mass Flywheel?

Should do, yes.

Yesterday I started Ready Player One. Read three chapters in the bath. Today I’m throwing it in the charity shop bag. If you’re absolutely in love with gatekeeping ’80s pop culture you’ll probably love it. There were the bones of a story in there, possibly, but I don’t know who for. It’s too YA to be for actual adults, while actual YAs have literally no connection with a decade that started thirty-odd years before they were born.

Don’t flame me for this, but…

I hate tubeless tyres and rims for this very reason. The only success I’ve had whilst out and about is keeping riding on the flat tyre as that seemed to be literally the only way to break the bead. WTB, of course, whose tyres (and rims) I will never buy again.

We’ve got one, because I absolutely hate mowing the lawn. It’s a Gardena Sileno or something. It’s okay, but at the shit end of okay rather than the good end. The boundary wire is underground so the only time it breaks is when you forget and accidentally put an edging tool through it or something. Although the connectors at the base unit have also gone furry and broken off as well, which I solved by putting actual decent ones on instead. It doesn’t love some of the slopes in our garden, so often gives up and just mows the area down the slope really well then has a rest. Took us ages to get the boundary wire in the right place to ensure it’d mow right to the edges but not get stuck.

It could do with bring more intelligent and not constantly going for that one corner, and the setup was an annoying faff. And in the winter the battery life seems to be less than the time it’s supposed to be out mowing for. However. It was 600€ compared with supposed ‘better’ ones, and it means I’ve saved countless hours messing with extension leads and it’s saved me countless hours of wandering around the garden with ear defenders on doing something I hate. So there is that.

Another Panda. They’re great wee things. I’m with her on the ‘I don’t care how good they are, I don’t want anything Asian on my driveway’ thing as well. The tall Polos in funky colours would probably suit as well. Dune? Cross? Something like that.

@rickmeister – you’ve just sent me down a rabbit hole of Yugoslav design and now I want to repurpose a K67 booth to be a bike shed.

I came here specifically to say Tolmin and surrounding areas. We stayed several days at Camp Labcra last year, and spent an entire day out biking. More ‘big day out’ than trail centre, but none the worse for it. The Laško afterwards was well deserved.

The Slovenia vignette’s already been covered, but that you’ll need an Austrian one as well. First fuel station either side of the border is fine. You can buy it online these days, but I like having the stickers.

Slovenia is lovely. We need to go back.

Metallurgy or something. Sacrificial protection as well. Maybe. Reactance? It’s late and I’m tired. But yes, there’s a good reason for not using coppaslip on aluminium threads, or between dissimilar metals, or maybe both, and you’re supposed to use Molyslip instead. In reality it’s probably not going to matter too much, especially if we’re talking about GXP or Dub since they require bi-monthly changes anyway.

Yeah. Doesn’t work. The spider needs longer legs, and the centrelock lock needs to be longer as well. It’s cool, though. I’ve got a combined non-boost to boost and centrelock to six bolt adapter coming now.

@nixie – Perfect, thank you!

@andrewh – yeah, got centrelock to six bolt and non-boost to boost adapters already, but the way they work means that the pins holding the discs in place don’t actually hold them in place when combined together. A photo would help here, I know.

I’m not always somewhere with super fast 4 or 5G. I’m often – if not frequently – in places where 3G or even H can be patchy. In the olden days this wasn’t a problem as my phone was just for calling or texting, and I’d have an mp3 player for music. Recently we were in Czech for the May holidays, and we were in my wife’s car. She has a Macintosh telephone and Macintosh Music, and crossing a good chunk of Germany would have been mute if we didn’t have my phone because there’s not enough Internet pipes there to stream music.

Add to that there’s the fact that I hate subscription services. I was burned by photobucket and I’m still not prepared to let that happen again. Which it inevitably will, because capitalism and enshittification.

And have you seen the price difference of purely internal memory phones lately? Last I looked, you’d pay a semi-sensible price for the 512 GB version, then the 1TB version would be 2-300€ more expensive. The best 1TB SD card isn’t even half that much.

tl;dr – I don’t always have signal, and I resent any attempt to make me pay again for what I already have.

Clouds work for you – great. They don’t for me.

Rather than you all bitching about how those of us who prefer SD cards are idiots, maybe we could have some suggestions for decent phones with SD cards? Ta.

Watching with interest. I can’t get on with my S20FE, and also no fan of the ‘pay more for internal storage and pay again to store your stuff in clouds’ model.

I’ve tried multiple times now and still haven’t received a PIN.

Use the whole base. My agri workshop was 12m x 8m, and it was fantastic. It was almost big enough for what I needed it for. Where we are now my ‘workshop’ is actually our double length garage and it’s frustratingly narrow. You won’t miss more space – you’ll miss not having it.

I wouldn’t. People have short memories and the SNP fluffed the best opportunity for decolonisation in living memory by collecting ‘mandates’ and doing nothing with them. You know how the council elections in England and Wales earlier this year saw the tories trounced and the number of spoiled ballots at an all time high? Expect more of that. This is going to be an interesting but incredibly dirty election.

Books. Books don’t run out of batteries, or have to be turned off for take off.

Mags? Subscribe to Automobilsport and Hayburner. I’ll pick up Evo, Octane, and Viz when I’m over the water, or ask visitors to bring them. Used to love VolksWorld, Custom Car, and Classic Porsche, but they all got bought by Kelsey Media and absolutely nosedived in quality…

Wider range cassette, XT or Saint shifter to get the double or triple up/downshift on the one stroke, maybe a good used/NOS M781 or 786 mech. I’ve pretty much landed on this formula and have an alert set up for M781/6 on my local marketplace site as it works so well.

If you’re staying VAG a decent code reader/resetter is well worth it. Think mine was 60€, bought purely to reset an airbag light after I twatted a connector under the passenger’s seat.

And a real, mechanical handbrake? Sign me up. Her Macan has an electric one and it’s a hateful thing, occasionally pulling itself on when it thinks it should, rather than when I tell it to. If I could rip it out and put a lever in, I’d do it tomorrow.

Mid-’90s, I was in my early teens, and there were occasional mtb races in Tentsmuir Forest. I remember being overtaken repeatedly by some gorgeous 20-something rugby player kinda build girl, and realising that I wasn’t into skinny girls at all. At the end, she packed her bike up in a black CSK Rangie, and I fell in lust with that as well.

Skip forward a decade or two and I’m running around in a ratty classic Rangie – although sadly, not a CSK – and it was perfect as an MTB support vehicle. Packed cleverly, it could take three folk, three bikes, and all their gear. The split tailgate was perfect for bike maintenance, and as it was ratty enough to not worry about, the bonnet put a Weber barbie at the perfect height for cooking. I miss my Rangie so much.

I’m still not into skinny girls, btw.

A podcast I was listening to earlier in the week mentioned M.I.A. and that was that – I’ve had this stuck in my head ever since.

It’s not even her best tune. Excellent video, though.

Weird – Bullet Train was on my Netflix about six months ago and was taken off last month!

@rnp only around Marseille. But yes.

I’ve got two Fulli ones. One just for France, one for France, Italy, Spain,and Portugal. The first is 1,70€ per month used, the other is 2,80€ IIRC. They both work perfectly. I think they were free, but a tenner each to post. Very, very handy and I wouldn’t be without them now.

Third vote for Kewpie. And the second for Atora, from France. Everything else is vanilla shite in comparison.

Would recommend Podbean, except they’ve just started sticking adverts in the middle of podcasts now. So I’m watching this thread with interest now…

Yes, absolutely. I’m thinking about forever cars at the moment and my current thinking is a sympathetically restored and upgraded Classic Range Rover. If I lived in Aus and was offered that Land Cruiser, it’d be on my driveway already. And I’d be down the local Toyota dealers ordering Euro-spec column stalks.

The usual reason? I only found out recently where Sodastream are from, so yep, I’ve binned ours.

I rate the Michelin Wild Enduros as well – I’ve got a tonne of them as every now and again Decathlon had them at 17€ a pop. Even at twice that they’re great value. There’s no way I’m paying 60-70€ for bike tyres!

I’ve had three bikes stolen in my lifetime, but the one that hurt the most was my 2013 (or ’14?) Explosif. It was Kona’s own demo model that I tried at one of Cyclehighlands’s legendary demo days and I just instantly gelled with it. I pretty much begged the boy to sell me it but he was having none of it. I spoke to Rich and said pretty much the same. I want that – order me one in please. About a week later he phoned me saying Kona didn’t have any more stock, but did I want the demo one for (IIRC) a good bit less? Yes. Yes I did. I racked up somewhere around 10,000km on that bike – all the local trails, the willows, heartbreak ridge, Tarland, and it hung off the back of my car when we moved to NL and got ridden around everywhere here as well. I chained it up one evening in the secure parking at Alkmaar Station when I was away to Amsterdam for a meal out, and when I got back it was gone. I was heartbroken and I still am.

I built up a 2016 Explosif from scratch over the course of a year afterwards, and although it feels similar, it’s not the same. So yes, I’ll miss Kona.

Delicious in Dungeon. Japanimation adventure and cooking show.

His Dark Materials books are fantastic, if slightly for kids. The follow ups when Lyra’s older are proper adult. And excellent.

Earthsea again excellent. There’s also loads of good YA fantasy about these days. Septimus Heap is great, and the Eragon books bridge the gap between YA and proper adult fantasy beautifully.

Haha, that’s what I originally came on here to say as well. My RCD300 started doing that a few years ago, so I replaced it with an RNS310. They’re cheap and overlooked because everyone wants the 510 instead. As long as you know the unit code it should be fine – it was in my case – but if not then the likes of Carista should see it coded in fine.

Saving 5%? Doubt. Even so, that’s still all of 1 mpg, probably. Will that offset the extra wear on the starter motor and battery? Maybe. Will that offset PTSD triggers? No. It stays off when I’m driving.

I turn it off because it’s triggering AF. PTSD from having to get through urban traffic in a dying shitter, doing the three pedal dance knowing that if it dies it’s not going to restart. Stop start brings back all that trauma and I don’t need that. So it gets turned off. I’ll happily lose a quarter of an mpg.

I miss my S10e. Replaced it with an S20 as the battery was really starting to become gash. I’d be tempted by another comparable Samsung if they stopped with the weekly software downdates and brought back the headphone jack.