I’m doing the 200 and it’s my first time, having registered for the last few years but never having been able to turn up due to either injury, travel with work or in the case of last year, a shocking lack of fitness.

Training’s gone well this year and I feel about as strong as I could be in April, but who knows how well that’s going to stand me after 120km or so when there’s still so long to go.

Layers-wise, I was thinking similar to Will. SS base, LS top, Insulated gilet and a waterproof shell which I’ll probably wear for the cold start. Leaving a bit of room in a small handlebar bag to stash those layers. Gloves – probably some short-fingered mitts with a pair of Rapha neoprene gloves over the top.

I’d been told to wear some Velotoze with the ford-crossing in mind. Nobody wants a long day with wet socks. However, I see from Instagram this morning that there’s had to be a diversion and the ford’s not included this year.

In case anyone else is thinking of switching to Pure Planet – we moved to them from Bulb recently – here’s a referral code:

https://referme.to/bGveECe

As mentioned above, that gets both of us a £25 Amazon voucher.

Cheers @Ro5ey. I’ve heard tale after tale about the KK and Moosivert. I’ve been trying to get plenty of training in for the apres too 🍻

I’m off to St Anton on Saturday for a week boarding. It’ll be my first ever snowboarding trip. I invited myself along with some friends who go every year and I’ve spent the last couple of months getting weekly coaching sessions at Castleford. I absolutely cannot wait.

This is relevant to my interests.

A few shots from a trip to the Schobrunn Zoo in Vienna this week. All taken on a Olympus E-M10 mkII. The big cat photos were taken handheld, manual focus, with a 135mm (so ~270mm equiv on the Oly) 60 year old Soviet Jupiter 11 lens.

Jellyfish by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

Lioness by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

Lioness by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

Tiger by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

Tiger by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

Fish by Pete Lambert[/url], on Flickr

@rs89 – I’m 6’4″ and quite broad/athletic and I wear an L. It’s nice and stretchy. There’s room to wear it over a heavier jersey in Winter but I wouldn’t want to size down.

For reference, it fits like a Castelli Gabba in L.

I wear a L in Castelli and Rapha too if that helps you place the sizing.

It’s a good piece of kit, especially for riding on the road. Only downsides I’ve found:

– Sometimes it can be too warm (but this might be down to my layering
– The armholes are a bit small (but stretchy)
– Don’t wear it for activities off the bike (running, etc). It has a high collar with the reflective material on which is fine when your head’s fairly static, but if you’re running and moving your head constantly, it chafes the jaw.

I’ve got the Pixelite one. It’s a much better fit than the ProViz stuff and a different fabric altogether.

The Pixelite gilet is kind of like a softshell and really pretty warm. I found it useful on night rides last winter.

If you want reflective and warm, I’d recommend it.

Hello. Fellow flat-footed clown here. Size 50 with fallen arches.

I tried allsorts. Even ended up having some carbon ones made in my LBS but they just weren’t strong enough to support my massive, shitty arches.

I’ve ended up with these cheapies from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009T4L2LO/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They’re great. Proper bulky but only 3/4 length. I have them in all my shoes now, cycling or otherwise.

I asked Evans the same question the other day. They said the full 2018 range will be out by November.

Evans apparently do the BC discount but don’t advertise it. You have to ask. A friend told me that, I’ve never tried it myself.

One way to get a discount is with Vitality health insurance. I can get up to 50% cashback from evans on a bike purchase, which is nice, if it need some critical illness insurance.

Did you know that once-popular photo sharing website, Flickr, is awash with swingers? I didn’t, until I let the Flickr app scan my phone contacts for any of my friends who also have Flickr accounts.

Turns out one of the mums from the post-natal group is a very mucky pup.

Accidentally hit “Add Friend” and did that thing where you try to grab data as it flies through the air. I immediately rescinded the request but to this day I don’t know if her or her husband know I’ve seen them in the buff, being penetrated (and apparently impregnated, if the photo descriptions are to be believed) by all kinds of people and objects.

She does give me looks, but in retrospect, I think she did before.

I told my wife, obviously. And some of the other members of the post-natal group.

If you’re interested, here a few of the photos from my trip:

California 2016 on Flickr

I did a similar thing in reverse last September on a solo road-trip in a massive pickup truck.

SF is great. You can make as much or as little of it as you want. I’ve been a few times with work now and there’s always more stuff to see and do.

Whether you take the clockwise route that you mentioned or anti-clockwise, drive in/out of Yosemite on the Tioga pass. Spend as much time as you can in Yosemite. It’s just stunning. I spent two pretty rushed days there and I wish I’d had longer.

Between Tahoe and Yosemite, try to make time to visit Bodie, a ghost town in a state of preserved decay. Only a hundred years ago it was the 5th biggest town in the US. Then it just emptied. Gold-rush stuff. Fascinating and beautiful. I got there when it opened in the morning and there were only a handful of people looking round.

Santa Cruz was a bit shit. It’s just a seaside town and if you’re going midweek in September it’ll be a dead seaside town. Carmel is very pretty, in a chocolate-box kind of way. I dipped into Big Sur and that was pretty beautiful too.

If you’re bothered about the Highway 1 (coast road) drive, I’d suggest doing the route anti-clockwise so that you’re driving south on that road as it means you’re on the ocean-side of the road and you get better views. Driving north you’ll only really see other cars. The view to the east of the highway doesn’t really get pretty between SF and Santa Cruz. It’s only once you get towards Big Sur that it gets good.

When I did it I booked my first night’s accommodation in Pacifica (a surf town just 15 minutes out of SF), then just booked AirBnBs each morning as I went, deciding where I’d end up that day and aiming for it.

Outside of SF, the driving is easy. It’s not like driving here. Wide lanes and steady speeds mean it’s comfortable. You can go a long way/time without really noticing.

If I went again, I’d like more time in Yosemite and Big Sur and a trip into Sequoia.

I visited last month and really enjoyed it. Bayeux (the town) is beautiful too. In fact, that whole region is pretty stunning.

Get to the Normandy beaches, St Malo, Dinard and Dinan.

I’d probably avoid Mont Saint Michel though. It’s like Euro Disney without rides, but with an extra helping of surly, Parisien-style waiters and shopkeepers.

Rocks Off in Bradford was my favourite, specifically as it was a little bit out of town, up the big hill, and on the top floor of a three story building, so it really felt like it was on the fringes. Felt like an effort to go there and be cool. They’d have rare stuff (live tapes, bootlegs, obscure band t-shirts) near the till.

And it had a guitar shop and a drum centre on the floors below it.

I don’t know how much of that stuff is still there. I’ve long since moved away from Bradford and not much pulls me back.

As I understand it (and I’m no expert), double amplification wouldn’t an issue here, since what comes out of your Mac’s headphone socket is a line level signal. Powered speakers (that you plug into your Mac’s 3.5mm headphone out) contain an amp to drive the speakers.

If you were using high-end headphones you might find that they need more amplification than the line-out signal from the mac, and you’d consider a headphone amp to drive those.

I’m having similar/related quandary at the moment. I have a decent set of powered speakers (Harmon Kardon Soundsticks) that I had plugged into my Mac’s line-out. Pretty good sound, but I just bought a turntable which I keep on my desk. With the turntable I needed a pre-amp to bring the signal up to line-level, and then from there I plugged in my Soundsticks (as the amp/speaker part of the setup).

Now I have no speakers plugged into my mac, nor do I have a headphone option for my turntable, so I’m now looking at getting a proper integrated amp/receiver, so I can plug in both the mac and the turntable and output to some proper speakers. And then I’ll have some Soundsticks to sell :-).

Another thing worth considering is that before you get an audio signal out of the mac, it goes through a pretty mediocre DAC. Getting an external DAC (or an amp with an integrated DAC) and plugging that into the mac via USB would give you better sound, even if you just go from the DAC to your existing headphones or a set of powered speakers.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert. I’ve just been doing a bit of reading about this recently.

FWIW, I’ve updated the pen so you don’t need jQuery.

I have enjoyed this morning’s diversion. :-)

Yes. Definitely assault the IT guys.

Jesus. Variable font sizes too? It’s becoming a beast!

Hmm. I suppose if you can’t use client-side scripting, there might be a way to do it server side but you’d need more information up front.

– Height and width of container in pixels
– Font-size
– String length in characters
– Width of a character (so you’d need to be using a monospaced font)

You could then calculate how much text per line before it wraps (width/font-size), and therefore how many times it wraps and then you’d know the number of lines. Then you could do the calculation in my example and have it print an inline style="line-height: whatever" attribute on the container.

OK. Here we go. With a little bit of jQuery (although it could easily be rewritten in pure JS), we can do it automagically, knowing only the font-size (16px in this case).

https://codepen.io/peterjlambert/pen/dWmxrm

Calc() is part of CSS3, yeah, but it’s got very solid support. http://caniuse.com/#search=calc

In this scenario though, I just used it to demonstrate the calculation. You could just have easily used line-height: 60px.

But all that depends on knowing the length of the text so it’s a moot point. Interesting experiment though.

There might be something else here that we can do with a bit of JS though. I’ll have an experiment.

But of course, that’s pretty inflexible. Change a word in the text and it’s screwed. :-)

I think I understand what you want to do. Do you want the line-height to automatically expand to the point that the text fills the entire height of its container?

There’s not really a reliable way of doing it, but theoretically, if you knew the number of lines of text (i.e. how much text and how it wrapped), and you knew the height of the container, you could do it like this:

https://codepen.io/peterjlambert/pen/dWmxrm

Here, I’ve set the height of the container to 900px and the width to 300px. With the font-size at 16px, the text wraps onto 15 lines. Setting the line-height to 900/15 makes the text fill the container vertically.

I’ve had a few Jetech ones in the past (available on Amazon for generally not much money). The silicone Sport bands are _ok_ but the metal studs rust a little and the silicone isn’t as flexible or comfortable as the official ones.

The leather loop straps are nice and very comfortable but longevity isn’t great. The ‘leather’ comes off the edge of the strap and it just falls apart after a while.

I also have the Milanese loop in black. I don’t know how this one compares to the official Apple Milanese loop. It looks great but I save it for smart occasions because honestly it’s just not very comfortable. Also, the weight of the watch is greater than the pull of the magnetic clasp, so the strap gets loose around the wrist pretty easily.

In conclusion, and I haven’t really thought about this in such definite terms before, I can’t recommend them. I have a couple of Apple Sport bands and an Apple nylon strap and they’re both great and look fantastic. I wear them all the time. The nylon bands look really smart.

I tend to use CDKeys (http://www.cdkeys.com/xbox-live/memberships). Often comes up the cheapest. They do make it feel very sneaky and underhand though. They email you a picture of the membership card with the silver foil scratched off.

I’ve used them for a few years without hassle though.

You shouldn’t have a problem parking on Toft Green, especially in the evening. £2 on a meter. If not, there’ll likely be spaces on Micklegate (behind Fibbers) – same price.

Found these when I was looking yesterday – Lake MX145 for £99 from Halfords.

They even had them to fit my enormo-feet but only if I could click and collect from Charlton, which is 170 miles away.

Lake MX145 at Halfords

Avoid the Juintech R1s.

I had some on my CX bike and they failed pretty quickly (front and back) when the piston seals blew. Fortunately this had the effect of locking the brake on rather than having no brakes at all. They warranty replaced them pretty quickly but I never put them back on. I’ve had enough problems with brakes in the past that I know not to trust ones that have already failed on me.

A friend bought some a short while later for his disk road bike. Exactly the same thing happened to him, although this time we were 60 miles into a 150mile road ride. He turned for home but had to remove his front brake to be able to ride at all. His back brake failed about 30 miles later, making the last part of his already miserable ride a bit more grim.

I’ve gone back to Avid BB7s, which aren’t great but do the job (although I’m tempted to try the Spyres). He’s gone full Shimano hydraulic DI2, because he’s flash.

MTB Batteries Lumenator on the bars, Exposure Joystick on the lid. Works a treat for me. Lowest settings on both most of the time, going to middle setting when it gets fast and technical.

Thanks @timmys. I’ll have a look at moving the clamp arm backwards then. That should solve the problem, I think. If not, I’ll look into the 598.

Yeah, I had to move the rear fixing forward just to get the clamp to reach the frame, which is what necessitated the front fixing being moved so far forward too. It seems the clamp arm length is the real issue.

To be honest, it was pretty secure once it had all settled into place halfway up the A64 (when the front fixing slid forward of its own accord and I lost the front plastic plug off the rack base) and it did me to Dalby and back without major incident – it just doesn’t feel right to have so much money perched on my roof on a rack that is being extended beyond its designed limits.

I’ve had the same problem and found that Levis 505 (a fitted but quite comfortable fit on me) and 506 (slightly looser on the thighs than the 505s) fit best.

Give them a try.

I’m 6’4″, 14st, 32″ waist with long legs and pretty big quads. I offer these details as a guide to the fit of the jeans, not as a pickup line.

I use a Catlike Kompact’o on road and off. Removable visor. Super venty.

I asked a doctor about it when I had a back injury. Apparently it’s much less effective and a lower dosage than just taking some ibuprofen and paracetamol.

Just take some ibuprofen and paracetamol.

Innocent Caribbean Jerk Curry veg-pot, a few slices of roast turkey breast, a big tomato and a beetroot.

@crell, I really like my Morvelo hoody. Super comfy and despite being worn and washed loads it still looks new. Either I’ve been lucky or you’ve been unlucky.

But it was expensive, I’ll give you that.

I’ve been wearing Morvelo bib shorts on and off road this year and they’re honestly the best bib shorts I’ve ever owned (which either says they’re very good or I’ve only ever bought crap bibs before).

I’ve got a Morvelo jersey too which I’m wearing on the road. It’s very nice and a great fit but quite lightweight. I’ll probably be switching back to my Torm jersey by the end of the summer as it gets a little chillier.