@TrekEX8 absolutely no offence taken and yes, if I see you there, I’ll have a bacon buttie. I’ll be the one grumbling about the climbs 😀

To be honest this thread didn’t quite lead where I thought it would. Most people are commenting on the opening climb, which I thought was a really pleasant and easy way to warm up, gain height and chat to your mates with some big views. There are a lot worse trail centre climbs out there.

My grumble was with the second/half of the red/black stuff where it felt like there was far too much up for the amount of down. Julia’s Trail was particularly guilty of this and as for whoever it was who said they could do it all in the big ring, you are Nino Schurter and I claim my prize.

I was there a couple of days ago and there are a couple of drop-offs that would probably end up in an over-the-bars moment if drop-offs were not your forte.

taxi25, I’m with you – mountain bikers complaining about hills! Tell me it’s not real?!

You’ve done good rides and bad rides I assume. What made the bad rides bad and the good rides good? Were some a bit muddier than others? A bit longer/shorter? Were some a bit too flat? Were some a bit tame on the descents? Or perhaps a bit risky…?

…Were some less enjoyable than others on the climbs? That. That’s what I’m talking about.

Mountain bikers having an opinion on STW. Whatever next? 😉

you’ll always get bored with something because you’re doing it all the time

Not always. My mate – who rides at ‘Degla quite regularly – loves it but finds Cannock a bit dull. I ride Cannock frequently and never get bored of it (even the climbs!). It is true that one always compares their “local” patch with other places and sometimes things don’t live up to expectation.

That said I AM looking forward to going back there and riding those tabletops properly 🙂

Interesting how most of you are thinking of the opening, wide, flat(ish), long but easy climb. I started this OP not with that climb in mind. I have no problem with that climb. It’s a nice warm up. It’s the countless other climbs that interrupt the fun and flow far too often in the last half of the red/black trail that I got annoyed with.

Some people are never happy are they.

Damn right 😆

I had high expectations and they weren’t quite met. I just wondered if others felt the same and apparently they do. I’ll be back there, no doubt, but this time I’ll be prepared for the climbing.

chat to a friend

Other than on the opening fireroad section I really don’t think there’s room to ride two abreast nattering about what you had for tea on the other climbs

So changing the law will change people’s behaviour?

Irresponsible mountain bikers will ride irresponsibly whether they are “allowed” on a particular piece of trail or not, but the debate will slowly educate at least some of them which is a good thing even if nothing comes of the campaign.

One of the ideas behind open access is to give access to more land to ride on with the advantage of spreading the load. If the reality is that too many mountain bikers descend – quite literally – on busy footpaths on sunny weekends, then exceptions will have to be introduced. It already happens on Snowdon as we know.

The opening climb didn’t bother me; I thought it was a good warm up with interesting views. It was all the other climbs that kept appearing during the last half that annoyed and disrupted the fun

Mackem I didn’t find that at all. The second half was up and down all the time, but mostly up towards the end.

It’s the way it teases you with a tiny bit of downhill in amongst the big climbs, then straight into another uphill slog. “Julia’s Trail” was a particular low point (pun intended). The opening (easy) climb with big views was so promising 😆

Is this the right order of “off-roadness”?

road bike
gnarmac
CX
MTB

Is a sportive road bike with nobblies a gnarcore bike? When does it become a CX bike?

I assume a hybrid is still a jack-of-no-trades, master of even fewer 🙂

Some good debate here.

A key challenge is understanding the difference between “open access” and “riding on footpaths”. One potentially leads to the other but they are far from the same thing. Open access is as much about stepping (riding!) off the path well trodden as it is about riding on footpaths.

Much like Snowdon’s access arrangements, there will be some popular footpaths and even bridleways where a more structured approach will be needed during busy times. Common sense rather than simply new rules. Some interesting reads on the Peak District MTB pages…

You’re just a nuisance

Some thoughts on open access in England

Back to the OP – and judging by the problems I’m having this week with Apps and even Settings not responding on my iPhone – I’d say yes. The problems seem focused – ironically based on my support of iTunes – around the new Music app.

– Music app only playing offline music, even though I’m very much online
– Music app telling me to sign up to Apple Music even though my free trial is still active (iTunes working OK!)
– If I try to go into Settings –> Music it just hangs

Pants

I’m going to wimp out and use the “in my experience” prefix, but in my experience Mp3 players like the Creative Nomad were big, heavy and even less portable than a “portable” CD player. My mate who had one was geeky enough to enjoy spending his time searching for (usually pirated) music on Napster/Limewire and happy enough dragging, dropping, renaming etc etc. I’m quite sure he and countless others didn’t find it difficult but I find it hard to see how that is easier than what Apple and iTunes brought to the party.

iTunes isn’t brill software but I always found it easier to manage my music on my iPod using that than I ever did using Creative’s software and my little Zen Stone. Horses for courses.

Anyway, this is an Apple-knocking thread, not an Apple love-in 😆

Even the IPod was basically a designer getting all creative with the MP3 players around at the time and a small hard drive being made available

I remember the first Mp3 players. They were big, heavy and with little infrastructure to actually get music on them. Apple “solved” that problem and made Mp3 players a genuine alternative to portable CD/tape players. Whilst this may not be seen as revolutionary, I don’t think you can deny the impact it had. Launching products with a supporting infrastructure is what Apple do well…mostly.

I love the super light and thin new Macbook and don’t miss ports and DVD drive, but I guess I’m target market for it. Tablets didn’t give me what I wanted and the “hybrid” Surface Pros and the like seemed a bit of a convoluted solution to the problem. A light, slim and high resolution laptop is just the ticket 🙂

iTunes isn’t great but I’ve never found it to be the horror that (many) others have. I quite like the new iTunes with Apple Music, despite one or two minor annoyances.

It’s just the stuff that WAS good and now isn’t that makes me question the “It just works” mantra

My friends and family will say I had my MLC a few years ago when I bought an Elise. I’d always wanted one (an Elise, not a MLC) but it lasted only 2 months before it got in a fight with a drystone wall…and lost.

Replaced it with a Boxster which lasted 18 months before (sadly) selling it. That was THE best car I’ve ever owned by a mile and I still miss it 2 years after getting rid of it.

The most interesting stat in this would be the net promoter score

“How likely is it that you would recommend Apple to a friend or colleague?”

I’m less likely to recommend Apple than I was even a year ago and I know I’m not alone. Is that a trend that is growing or are the detractors an inconsequential stat amongst the growing army of new Apple users?

In my relative short time using an iMac (4/5 years?) my experience of using Apple OS and software is worse not better. My iMac has in the last 12 months or so suffered from intermittent connectivity issues over wi-fi which, if the forums are anything to go by, is a common problem and coincidentally has been at its worst today. I also think Apple continue to struggle with cloud computing for reasons I neither have the time nor energy to go into.

Moreover they seem to be masters of introducing “improved” software to solve a set of real problems (credit due there), but introduce a whole new set of problems you didn’t have before. For example iCloud Photo Library was my dream solution of being able to have a single photo library that is shared and editable across multiple devices and not reliant on an internet connection, at least on my main iMac. The downside to this is that there is no way of forcing certain photos/albums to be “available offline” on my iPhone. It seems Apple only design software for an infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist and may never do i.e. fast internet access everywhere.

The latest Mission: Impossible is ACE! Good old fashioned full-on action from start to finish. Cheesy but I had a goofy grin on my face from start to finish and usually I get bored easily with modern “blockbuster” cinema. As good if not better than the original Cruise outing and Rebecca Ferguson is lovely.

If you want a thriller you could do a lot worse than The Gift.

What sort of noise was it making?

Even if I had paid attention I’m not sure how to spell bird noises. Probably lots of tch brr chp chp or something like that 🙂

Take your bikes and have a play on the big jumps and drops in Macc Forest 😉

The Cheshire Matterhorn?

Shutlingsloe (The Cheshire Matterhorn) viewed from Bowstones, Lyme Park, Disley, Cheshire by vg92[/url], on Flickr

Why do I have to have FB to find out about them?

It’s quick and easy and a platform that a LOT of people use already. It’s certainly a good place to ask questions of those directly involved.

Mail menu, Preferences, General tab. First place to look for any settings

As bikebuoy, I’ve had problems particularly syncing my Gmail account through Mail on my iPhone, iMac and Macbook. iMac and iPhone are problem-free (touch wood) but Macbook can take an age to sync mail.

Apple make beautiful hardware but their ability to reliably do the simplest and most basic requirements of modern e-life is getting worse and worse.

I take it that you are on the OpenMTB group, who are the others?

I’m in Peak District MTB and we have a representative on the group. I don’t (yet) have the detail to share that some of you are asking. This is a good thing so keep eyes and ears peeled as more information becomes available to share.

The group is an amalgamation of other more local groups that already exist like Peak District MTB and Ride Sheffield. Get yourself signed up to your local group and you’re immediately helping “the cause”. The idea is to have a national voice made up of regional groups as well as the bigger organisations like BC and CTC.

YoPhoto

Used them for my Dad’s 70th birthday book. The software was a bit buggy and crashed too much for my liking, but this was a few years ago. The reason I used them was based on a friend’s experience. He had used loads of suppliers and found that YoPhoto had the most flexible tools to create the book and the end result was great too.

If you use Apple iPhoto or Photos, the book creation tools are worth a look. Plenty of good templates and a good user interface.

Download the photos from your phone onto your computer. Flickr or Google Photos both have automatic uploads from iOS so that’s not a bad shout either, but not sure if there is a quick way to delete the old photos and personally I like to keep my photos local as well as in the cloud.

In iOS 8.something they introduced “iCloud Photo Library” which is cloud storage for your photos. With this came the option to “optimise iPhone storage” whereby the phone only keeps thumbnails of your photos and downloads them from iCloud when you want to view them. In theory popular and recent photos are cached locally on your phone.

If you’re on iOS 7 you won’t have the option of iCloud Photo Library and, perhaps more importantly, you will soon use up that free 5Gb and need to pay for more iCloud storage for photos if you enable it.

My Photo Stream and Photo Sharing are something different, with the former only keeping your last 1000 photos in iCloud.

Apple and photo management is a confusing mess, but their website is as good a place as any to make (some) sense of it.

Out with (road) club Sunday morning. Not sure I’ll fit in an MTB ride as well

Go Ape?

Great programme. I thought Jay from The Inbetweeners was a fictional character, but apparently he’s alive and well in Accrington 😆

I hope that between school and our parenting, our boys get that level of sexual education.

Maybe I just need an (old) Kindle with buttons and a head torch 😀

^this. This is exactly what I liked about the old Kindle I had.

Smart arse. If I’d wanted cheeky mockery I would have asked the question on the STW forum…oh 😳

Any practical real world experience or advice or is my question destined to be on page 2 of the forum by the end of the day?

Videos with much MUCH smaller circulation have caused a ruckus by promoting mountain biking on trails in the Peak District that aren’t supposed to be ridden on, so this doesn’t surprise me. Combined with the fear of someone copying him and plummeting into the sea, you can well understand this litigious and fearful society we live in taking issue with the film.

Can’t deny it was impressive though…whilst it lasted 🙂

Yeah, fair comments. The inescapable commitment is no doubt the biggest black mark on leasing.

Of course, on top of this there are running costs

Therein lies the rub. I’ve bought 3 year old cars and put high mileages on them, but expensive things started going wrong and the car – when I finally decided to get rid – was next to worthless. The monthly cost to run the car AND save for a replacement is not a million miles off the cost of a monthly lease.

I’m sure the facts and figures could be debated endlessly so this is not a question of “should I get a lease?” it’s a question of “I’ve decided to lease a car, tell me what I need to know”.

Ta

Thanks all