I’ve got a 705 and use one of the free openstreetmap based maps you can get for it. Seems to be ok although not as detailed as OS maps. Not really used it for any navigation purposes though.

I’ve no idea what they are called but the bit of the blue that comes out near the top of the freeride park and the bit that starts at the top car park are good fun. Nice smooth swoopy singletrack which you can take at a fair old clip. Worth the extra few miles to tag on to the end of whatever else you do.

I was hoping this was going to be a warning about dangerous insects in some alpine location.

Obviously I have nothing useful to say about the tyres.

When you say heavy do you have any idea of how heavy?

That said I mostly intend to use it as a commuting bike so it’ll be lumbered with a rack and panniers anyway.

Both my bikes have specialized BG saddles and they’re pretty comfy.

That said I had one of their more lightweight ones before that was too damn hard and was replaced by one with gel inserts.

Onzadog: as far as I can tell it has rackmounts.

I’ve got a cateye enduro computer from the early 90s that’s still going.

I, as a lurker, think the forum seems to operate pretty well compared to many others. Part of that is the moderation. It’s hard to build up online communities and the general evidence is that the ones that work well and last have a pretty strong ethos on what the community is about and what sort of place it should be. And enforce it[0]. This is especially true of things like forums which have a very low barrier to entry.

So, you might not like some of the rules but I think the forums wouldn’t be nearly as useful as they are without them.

0: A good example of this is Flickr: if you go and trawl through the help discussion on flickr then it’s full of examples where moderators have stepped in to close stuff down that they see an inappropriate. Flickr and especially Heather Champ – their community manager – get a lot of respect for their skills at building a community.