Right, it’s that time of year and I’m a cheapskate with few morals so here’s a brief MyWhoosh review.

It’s basically Zwift. I’ve not done a race in it yet, but everything else so far has been basically Zwift. So I’ll not bore you with the stuff that’s basically the same.

Installation and updates: It was about 3.5GB initially, then 2 days later another 2.5GB update!  Had to bring the laptop back into he house to update it.  Otherwise fine.

Menus and logging in: If you know what you’re doing it’s much quicker than zwift to get from booting up the pc to riding. But some of the menus are a bit unintuitive.

Routes: Clearly aimed at Runners but there’s a lot of 3-6km loops and few 20-30km ones, and it lacks the open world feeling of Zwift. You’re basically doing laps.

The graphics. They’ve gone for more textures but the engine itself seems less refined and more resource hungry.  My laptop with a GTX1650 won’t run them smoothly on max.  It seems to prioritize your avatar over the NPC’s though so it’s not to jarring when your pedaling along but the rabbit waving a UCI flag is a bit Shakey.  It’s probably better than Zwift on a gaming PC with an RTX4060 , but otherwise if you’re running Zwift on a shoestring with an old office Dell and a 970 then stick with Zwift.  I’ve not tried the app versions so they may be better/worse.

Sound: the music is awful.  Just mute it in settings and put Spotify on. The in game sound effects if there were any were more subtle than zwift.

Connections to equipment, my cadence from the smart trainer was miles off, not sure if that’s a trainer issue I’ve mot noticed before, or a software issue but it kept dropping out.  Power seemed steady though.

Workouts – yep, they work. Basically the same as zwift with training plans that you can add to a calendar.  It actually seems a bit easier to find them than Zwift too.  The training plans and individual workouts are in easy to find categories so you could just click “sweet spot”, pick a session, pick a world to ride in, and you’re off.  There’s a “live coach” which seems to be a peloton style session, but the forums and my experience agree that there’s never any online.

Integration with other apps – rubbish.  It’ll connect to Strava (but you have to set this up via the website not the app) and traininpeaks (not tested).  But unlike Zwift there’s no map or pictures. It’s a minor thing but I actually missed the zwift pictures and map in the middle of the sea.  But there’s no way to automatically sync to Garmin and transfering the .fit file manually seems to be missing something as I turned myself inside out last night on a ramp test and my Epix is still saying I’m ready for more training today.  I’ve not tried it yet but the suggested workaround is to just log workouts on your Garmin at the same time.

In app payments, yep you can skip doing a million laps of Alpe Du Zwift for your Tron bike and just buy the in game tokens.  I never upgraded my zwift bike (i actually downgraded to the retro looking steel one) so don’t really care.

Is it sportwashing oil money? Probably, but I can’t see that’s any worse than accepting BP / Nectar / Shell points and spending it on a trip to legoland / in the n+1 watches thread / on a bacon sarnie when you fill up. 

In conclusion, Zwift is better, I’m not going to argue otherwise, it just is.  The graphics are better, the worlds are better, there are more users, it links to other software better.  Is it £16/month better? That depends. To me indoor training is a means to an end.  I have a “good value” £100 Pinnacle trainer, not a £1200 Tacx, all I want from the software is to be not bored and MyWhoosh does that.  If Zwift dropped it’s price and raised it’s money via pay-to-win upgrades or in game advertising on all those billboards I’d probably come back.

And really Zwift is cheaper for a month than I’ll probably pay for a round of drinks in the pub after tonight’s club ride.  It think it’s more subscription fatigue than anything.  Zwift just stuck it’s head above the parapet by making itself more expensive than Amazon, Spotify, Netflix or Disney.

Interesting, nobody hasn’t mention Austrian economics based on sound money principles.

“Austrian Economics” is just Thatcherism (or rather, Thatcher was just adopting the Austrian model 200 years later).

If you are funding your own infrastructure builds through “printing money” why won’t people just charge more for stuff? What stops inflation going through the roof?

Nothing, other than your competitor who also wants the job will undercut your inflated prices.

MMT as a model just describes how things work, it’s not a political philosophy.  MMT doesn’t say you can print unlimited money in the real world, it just describes what happens if you either do or don’t.  In simple terms the government and central bank have to balance inflation somehow, either they print free money for themselves, which pushes up inflation and interest rates.  Or they try and restrict their own spending, which tends to push down inflation and interest rates.

So in that sense MMT describes:

The Cameron  and Osborne austerity era (low spending, low interest rates).  If you’re a cynical lefty then their mates benefited most form tax cuts, and their mates companies benefited most from cheap loans to invest.  The rest of us benefited very little from tax cuts/freezes, and low interest rates just drove house price inflation so no one saw a benefit.

The Covid into Truss era (high spending, followed by low tax resulting in high interest rates)

You can’t have a free lunch.

You can also consider how it relates to other economic models and / or  philosophies.  Keynes’ philosophy describes how you could use MMT to prop up an economy through a recession, because a recession (or a bubble) isn’t the market finding an optimal solution therefore an intervention has a positive impact not a negative one.  The same way governments should tax more in a bubble.  Or Marxxism which focuses on the economic capital of the worker.  MMT and Marx agree that money is a made up construct and the real value is elsewhere, so don’t think of things in fixed monetary terms, a house isn’t £200,000, it’s 5x man-years of labour, the supply of money is supply of labour is what dictates what the value of  5 years labour actually is represented by financially.

It’s why the whole “government debit card” analogy does still work, they don’t have to balance the books, but if for example in a bubble they opted not to raise taxes and pay down the debt (even if you don’t believe in paying it down from a political philosophy standpoint) then your alternative is to watch inflation and interest rates rise which also hurts people.  It’s just a question of who you choose to hurt and what the subsequent impact is.

The last “dialogue” I had with a driver I told them to grow up, act their age and set a better example to their kids in the back seat.

They must have been 70 and their ‘kids;’ about 40.

There was no comeback and it was glorious.

Oh well if you’re going to fart at someone you deserve all you get.

Depends?

Did you not want to talk to them anymore? 

Did they come across empty headed and make a living wiping down animal troughs?

Was their mother a hamster and did their father smell of elderberries?

If so, farting in their general direction is the accepted course of action.

Wonder if he knows he cant vote.

Tell him you object to foreigners interfering in politics and watch the cogs turn.

As above, I suspect you’d find that at average drop bar road speeds you’d be riding unassisted anyway, just with a nice boost on the climbs.  I’d agree it might even be less irritating to do it on a more utilitarian e-bike that doesn’t feel so hamstrung at ~15mph.

I used to do 13-15miles each way daily and it was hard work for a fortnight or so but soon I was looking for longer diversions to mix it up a bit.  I’d give it a go on whatever the most commuter-y bike you currently have is. You can either chill out and put an e-bike level of effort into it and it’ll probably only make 10minutes difference over that distance, or ride at a normal speed and just see how fit you get.

I do see that Lewis have another brake set out, and by some crazy coincidence it has ended up looking exactly like Trickstuff’s other model, the Piccola

Covered on the original thread months ago.  They also offer it with the 4-pot trail caliper.

Hang on………..

Shimano XTR

Formula Cura

It’s almost like there’s actually very few novel ways of arranging a lever and a piston that don’t look like each other.

We have:

Some variety of Acer / Sycamore, needs pollarding very few years to keep it in check but otherwise just does it’s thing (it grows back a dense crop of ~2m branches in a season so you barely notice it’s gone).

Apple trees, most varieties intended for domestic gardens are grafted to a smaller root to keep them small.

Medlar, looks cool in a “a kid must have drawn  this perfectly upright trunk with a complete spherical head of big round leaves” kind of way.  The fruit is pointless whatever the cookbook says, it’s birch syrup, basically tasteless.

Sumach, grows quickly, nice leaves, if you get one that flowers they’re these funky looking upright cones in spring, a long season with green leaves which turn a spectacular shade of red later on.  The only downside is it spreads.  Not (AFAIK) in a destroying your houses foundations kind of of way, or a piercing your feet kind of bamboo way, but you will have tens of them popping up in the lawn which stick out because they grow much faster than the grass in summer.

We had but it was a PITA:

Leylandi, just no

Plum, it was fine, then it was a PITA to keep alive, then it died. I think they need a nice spot out in  the open where you can rake up all the windfall to keep disease at bay.

Laurel, I didn’t mind it. Tolerated being pruned as hard as you liked even down to the stump, great for privacy. OH decided she didn’t like it, so I had to put my back out trying to remove the stump.

(Worth remembering in this debate – inflation isn’t CPI necessarily. And everyone will experience inflation in different ways.)

Also worth noting that slapping 5p back on fuel duty would directly counter the falling fuel prices.

And oil prices have gone up again.

The UK government can over-rule the BoE any time it wants to.  Pretending they can’t do anything is a lie.

By the same argument Charlie sets interest rates. In theory yes, in practice they’ve been given a degree of independence. Even in an MMT world and without a quasi-independent central bank, you’d still have to balance government spending with interest rates to control inflation. In that sense both Truss and the most frivolous socialist* are two sides of the same coin, an imbalance in government spending catalyzed** high interest rates.  Interest rates would not be independent regardless of the mechanism.

*assuming spending goes up but tax doesn’t

**it’s always a stretch to imply direct causation when it was a multifaceted worldwide problem, but we could probably have not made it an apocalyptical financial cliff edge.

NZ faster and tactically better. Game over. 7-0. F1 analogy is good.

Well this aged like a fine cheap New Zealand wine. plonk 

I might be back in a few days to eat my words, but I’d remind people of the last time Ainsley won the Americas Cup ……

Writing off today as a couple of small but heavily punished NZ mistakes misses the point, match racing is a bit like nougats and crosses, winning is very difficult but there’s lots of ways to make sure your opponent doesn’t win.  NZ need to force GB into a tacking battle, GB need to force NZ into a drag race.

And remember this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Fod7rvSHQ

In the last election the democrats had a significant advantage in postal and early votes, so I hope that is indicative of an energised opposition to another Trump term (got to find hope where I can).

Do they count and declare the mail ins and early votes separately?  It’s been a fairly constant news story that DT is at odds with the GOP on the ground with his conspiracy theories about mail in ballot fraud working against party activists trying to get people to vote early.

Two things. Thing One, if Brady is voting for her, then I’ve clearly misread his politics all this time, and he’s actually bonkers, and Thing Two. Of all the words you could use to describe Badenoch; ‘Genuine’ is an interesting choice, that is to say; her views clearly aren’t just a pitch at leadership based on echoing the worst of the party membership’s inner dialogue, they’re actually the things she believes..?

No, I think he’s always been very conservative.  Being chair of the 1922 committee I think gave him an air of superiority and impartiality because he didn’t have to publicly take sides in any contest.  And being the author of “the Brady amendment” which was supposed to be the compromise on Brexit and NI made him seem like the sensible one against May.  Whenever he’s been interviewed though he’s somewhat on the right of the party.

And example of “keeping your mouth shut and just appearing conservative, rather than open it and remove all doubt”.

Interesting how the team that gets to decide the design rules of the boat have an advantage!

To be fair, unless there’s a well hidden loophole they’re exploiting, then it’s the same rules for everyone.

It was more of an issue in previous campaigns where they would deliberately write rules to disadvantage teams they didn’t want to face (budget caps to keep high spenders away, high entry fees that kept small teams away,  different numbers of prototypes allowed for challenger / defender, etc). And RYS/Ineos were the challenger of record, so were involved in the negotiations on the rules, location, etc.  I didn’t keep up with the politics this time round but for AC36 ETNZ designed the mechanicals of the foils, while Prada as challenger did the foils themselves?

It’s not the pre J-class era when the defender could build a lightweight speed machine while the challenger had to sail to the race in an more sturdy offshore yacht. Or the IACC/12M eras when the winner was whoever won the preceding court case over who’s boat bent fewer rules.

This is one thing I’ve been saying for years.

It does surprise me how apparently blasé the bike industry is about this sort of thing.  Can you imagine if T6’s had a plastic brake pedal that saved a few grammes but cracked regularly, or Octavia’s had a known fault where the plastic piston in the master cylinder would just seize leaving you with no brakes suddenly.  Or Berlingo calipers leaked just enough fluid to contaminate the pads.

Those weren’t maintenance or durability* issues.  They were just really poorly designed brakes.

*in a crash surviving sense

Magura are 5 years too, and European made.

I don’t really want to rely on a warranty or 1970’s nostalgia for DIN and TUV standards when it comes to brakes, I want the lever to remain attached to the bars when I grab it in a panic.

Though I note the Magicshine Evo 1700 is not a STVZO type light.

Hmmm

STVZO is very prescriptive, it’s not just the beam pattern, you can’t have, even on a switch, a high beam or flashing mode either.  Both of which the magicshine has.

Same with rear lights, the STVZO standard says the light must have a constant red light and a built in reflector, nothing else.

Club run is tomorrow night so I’ll put up some comparison shots against  my Lumenator which is IIRC 1800 lumens so on paper would be a good comparison.  But suffice to say I’m pretty impressed with it.  The dipped beam is very well shaped, and quite a bit wider than some stvzo lights I’ve tried. It’s very good.  The “main” beam I’m reserving judgment on, it seems like it almost mirrors the dipped beam upwards, so you’ve still got a noticeably flat beam, we’ll see how that works out on some fast descents with corners. The remote switch / app / button is a bit confusing at first, it sounds complicated but in the real world ‘square’ takes you straight to full power main beam, and circle takes you to the previous setting, so for probably 99% of people that will be dipped on mid or high power I guess.  If you double click circle it switches from dipped to main, and a single click cycles through low/mid/high in whichever beam you’re in.

Like most lights it’s fault is offering too many modes. Just give me the ones I’ll actually use on the light, and maybe hide the rest in the app.  99% of the time I probably just want full main beams and a full dipped beam.  The only time I’d want anything else is would be an overnight audax type ride and then I’d have to choose between either a low/medium beam or running on external power.  And on that note, it can run on external power (as long as it’s dry) form any USB-C cable and a power bank.

Will check  out the magicshine light above and a few other brands that have light to GoPro type options.

Dunno if I missed it on the magicshine literature, but the 1700 EVO has a go-pro adapter, but the light itself slides on and off a mount.  You press that textured bit under the clamp to release it and the lamp body slides back off it.

put a bit of electrical tape (?) across the top (say)  30% of the front light (mine is an older Exposure MaxxD normally used for mtbing in the forest at night, not roads). Though my light does get pretty warm!

Nope, doesn’t work like that I’m afraid, if you look at car headlights , it’s often actually the opposite, the reflector has a focal popint somewhere out in front of the light so it’s the bottom half of the light that pointing upwards and vice versa.  But unless you get your cover somewhere past the focal point then it will just blur out of focus rather than get projected with the beam.

Most STVZO lights have the LED mounted facing down to the ground, then a shaped reflector that projects it forward.

tip the light to establish the cut off at a suitable level. Hopefully the light tips enough on the Alpkit ‘Garmin and Light Outfront Mount’

It’s never that straightforward in practice.

If you point the torch down far enough to get he actual cut-off horizontal, that would need to be almost 45deg down. Which means you get a very brightly lit front wheel, and relative darkness beyond it. The beam is also getting narrower (as it’s the top of a circle) into the distance, so you lose any illumination to the sides as well.

Run at approx 1,000 lumen maximum

The irony is that because the reflectors in STVZO lights put the light where you actually want it (except when cornering) they’re actually much brighter in the real world.  In terms of light output 100lux (measures intensity at the brightest point) in an average beam pattern is ~300 lumens (which is just the overall output), but is comfortably as bright as a 1000lumen light on the road.

The Magicshine 1700 Evo turned up yesterday (not had time to get beam shots yet) but f*** me, it’s like a bloody letter box shaped laser beam.

This diagram kinda gives an idea what’s going on.

The top image is an STVZO type light, the brightest bit of the beam is near the top, which (the side on diagram doesn’t really convey this) is the bit spread out over the most area of road, so when you observe it on the bike the road actually  all looks the same brightness from your front wheel to infinity (or as far as the light will reach anyway).

The middle is what happens if you try to dip a normal light.  Anything above the center of the beam is relatively dark to you, but to oncoming vehicles it’s still incredibly bright and glaring.

The bottom is an undipped normal light.

In the real world that ends up something like this:

Normal light, the road is visibly darker pas the hot-spot:

Whereas this is an STVZO beam, slight color fringing from the lens aside, the illuminated area is pretty much equally bright all the way up to the cut off, then nothing above it:

SRAM brakes can be a bit shit (or used to be) with sticking pistons and you get a warranty that’s honoured.

The best I got out of them was a bleed and a denial that there was anything wrong.

So un-ironically for this thread I bought the metal pistons from China to fix them myself.

Of all the points raised most can be overlooked or justified one way or another except this.  Shimano brakes can be a bit shit with leaks and wandering bite point but you get a 2 year warranty (3 with XTR) that is pretty much always honoured.  SRAM brakes can be a bit shit (or used to be) with sticking pistons and you get a warranty that’s honoured.  Hope have had issues with the pistons on the Tech 4 master cylinder and warranty honoured, and all parts available as spares.

And magura levers crack because they’re made from plastic.

So in summary established MTB brands all make crap* brakes, but it’s a gamble whether the newcomers are as bad as everything else.

*Hope can maybe have a point back in their favor for seemingly fixing the problem quickly rather than ignoring it and telling everyone there isn’t an issue.

Because, at a fundamental level, a sizable chunk of the American public pays very little attention to politics but really objects to having to pay tax.

There’s a demographic in current US voters referred to as “boat people”, and  it’s not an immigration slur this time.

It’s those stereotypical midwestern, middle income, middle aged men.  They’ve bought a big house in the suburbs, drive a big truck, and thanks to Don’s tax cuts bought a boat.

Trump needs to get his far right base to vote for him as well, but that’s not the 50%.  The 50% is people who just want to pay less tax. And in a country where you don’t get healthcare in return for your tax, you can sort of see why.  You’ve finished with school, you’re not at war, your only interactions with the police are getting speeding tickets.  Where’s the intrinsic benefit benefit in paying tax? A boat on the other hand is cool, you can drink Coors light on a boat.

There did seem to be some Harris momentum but lately it seems that there’s lots of mud n shit being thrown at trump but it doesn’t stick. It seems a little desperate.

Those voting for him are already holding their noses, they can’t smell whatever s*** is thrown his way.

IME, the advertised time is a bit optimistic, they can’t close it early so it can only ever be on time or late.

So if it says closed form 7pm, they’ll start putting cones out at say 6:30, which involves a few miles of pitting them diagonally across lanes 3 and 2 first to filter the traffic into one lane past the junction, then if they’re on schedule they close off lane 1 letting the last car through at 7:00.

Current Olympic (double Olympic!) and former World and European MTB Champion though. That’s kind of a big deal. Do you just walk away from that to concentrate on road? Or pick and choose a bit? Maybe that’s where the rift is? Is he being pushed to choose one or the other? I don’t know by the way, it’s kind of a rhetorical question.

That’s a bit like saying “He’s won the Rugby Superleague cup, so why doesn’t he just go play football for Manchester United”.  Almost completely different sports and one is much bigger and more lucrative than the other.  Most decent MTB talent ends up racing on the road because you can make more money as a mediocre continental tour team domestique than winning MTB races.  Hence when someone does do both (Pidcock, Peter Sagan, Lachlan Morton) they tend to be absolutely dominant off-road in the few races they do turn up to because they’re in a different league.

I often wonder if we’ll be the last generation like this. My dad was a wood hoarder,

Or there’s a perception bias, there’s scrap wood behind the shed form when it was built  To me that’s just sat there because at some point I need to make a few modifications to the roof/guttering.  To my 2yo nephew it’s been there a lifetime.

My parents (since downsizing anyway) seem to have become remarkably minimalist.  I suspect we all grow up with this idea that our parents know everything, and have access to a treasure-trove of spare parts and scrap wood for any occasion, Whereas the reality is they had a couple of odd screws spare to fix your bunk bed and a jam jar of assorted washers and brackets.

Many years later, I now work from home and spend lunchtimes at a gym – I either do weights/swim/or classes. But talk to people who have nothing to do with my work but have interesting stories to tell. Weekends with cycling group and evening with mates I grew up with.

+1

It’s all great saying “get out and ride more for your mental health” but I find doing it with someone far more beneficial (even if it’s just done in almost silence with fellow introverts).  All the extra little dopamine hits from keeping up / beating someone.  It’s also good for the endless variety, Over the winter the roadie club tends to retreat to doing the same few routes on night rides so we all learn where the potholes are.  Doing that solo would be downright stressful but in a group there’s always something more interesting to focus on (holding  a wheel an don’t crashing) than the route itself.

Will you die – yes

Will it be because of tyre choices – who knows.

I ran winter tyres on the front of my berlingo and it still understeered* like crap even on cold / wet / frosty roads.

* and lets be honest, unless you’re regularly driving like a tit, how often do you skid?  In the 20 years I’ve had my license I can count on my thumbs how many times I’ve accidentally skidded.  Deliberately throwing the back end of the midget out on a wet roundabout is a different matter, but tyre choice for that is limited to Firestone, Uniroyal or trailer ditchfinders……..

Why does having ‘stuff’ cause people such a problem?

Having stuff I need and use is great.

Having stuff I’ve just kept means:

a) it’s depreciating, keeping it has a cost.

b) it’s taking up space, that space isn’t free.  I bought  a house with a double garage so I’d have space for fun stuff like a classic car and a motorbike, if it’s just full of shit then it’s just a very expensive storage unit.

c) it’s inconvenient.  Having crates of bike spares, 5 tents, 6 stoves, 3 sleeping mats, 4 sleeping bags, etc. It is great if you think of it as always having the correct kit and spares to hand.  In reality 90% of the time I take the same (most expensive / lightest ) quilt, the same (most expensive / lightest)  gas stove, the same (most expensive / lightest) pad and the same (most expensive / lightest) tent.  But I have to spend an hour up there finding/packing the correct ones.  I should just sell the rest.

It’s come to a head this year as I’ve realized I have an entire 8ft wide 2ft deep racking unit devoted to spares for bikes, 90% of which I won’t ever use but probably thought at the time I’d maybe revisit as a niche, like 26″, fat bikes, 9/10speed, a whole crate of old finishing kit, handlebars that I didn’t like and OEM fixed seat posts.  I could fit a motorbike in that space, and a motorbike will be far more fun!  I try and list a few things every time I go into the garage to tidy it up.  Same with the loft. Why did I put the old TV up there, incase the new one breaks?  That’s daft logic, I could sell it on marketplace as a 5yo tely, and if the new one does break, buy a much newer 5yo tely.

Also there’s items that might be worth selling but are they worth the time it will take to sell them? A similar amount of time is required sometimes to just give things away.

Facebook marketplace.  You can probably list something in 30-60 seconds.  Ebay (especially now that it’s free) is slightly longer but still pretty quick.

I just ask myself a series of questions:

Does it impact me, is it my fight?  The news is full of Trump, culture war bullshit, the Tory leadership race, Israel.  And while deep down I may be right-on-progressive-left-and-woke, If I think about it too much I’ll either have a breakdown or end up chained to a motorway gantry, neither of which benefit me.  Switch off and read a fiction book.

If yes, can I do anything about it?  There’s no point stewing over things I can’t have a meaningful impact on.  The bulldozers are coming in a couple of months to flatten the local woods / fields and build a housing estate.  This upsets, me.  But I can’t dop anything about it so I just choose to ignore that it’s happening.

Once that’s done, the pile of “problems” stressing me out is smaller.

I’m now beginning to think that all these attempts to improve myself are actually the opposite of what I need to be doing. I still want to be fit and healthy (and that seems to be much harder in my 50’s) but surely the answer should be about being more relaxed rather than regimented and actually finding the time to just enjoy life. In my head I’d like to be a laid-back surfer dude but in reality I’m a stressed out, angry old man!

Which of those self-help things would actually make you happy?

If going for a run at 6am makes you happy, then do it and it’ll become a routine.  But don’t do it because someone on the internet told you it’s the secret to happiness.  Personally my 6am happy place is a posh coffee and a vegan sausage sandwich whilst I watch the runners go past in the freezing cold, then I ride my bike to work which does make me happy.

Same with healthy eating.  Some skinny oik telling you that diet coke is basically poison is Tik-Tok gold. But they’ve become an influencer because they’re skinny and obnoxious, not because they gave up fizzy drinks.  Yes there are negative health effects of sweeteners, but they’re dwarfed by things that we actually know kill you like stress, or sugar.  So drink the diet drink and chill out about it.

Find something to be joyful about as often as possible.

This +1

I go for a lunchtime walk and the highlight of my day is laughing out loud as someone else’s  spaniel / Labrador launches itself into the muddy lake after the ducks as the owner franticly tries to get it out / clean and the fisherment look angry / miserable. Dogs + Schadenfreude is great.

Tried Isalabikes, they can’t / won’t supply decals or the files.

Indievelo only have the conc decals, which have the same issue as the ebay ones.

Time to fire up inkscape and the cricut and get tinkering with fonts I think.

Have you contacted Islabikes direct?

They’re no-more.

http://road.cc/content/news/islabikes-cease-production-after-18-years-304725

Children’s bike manufacturer Islabikes to cease production after 18 years | road.cc

We ended up with a powersheds log cabin.

Not cheap but; 44mm thick wood walls and double glazing mean it stays pretty cosy even without insulating the roof. If I did it again I’d probably hide some ~20mm Celotex type insulation under the EPDM roof, and I would have used either some sort of breathable base or had a DPM between the treated base and the floorboards.

Intrinsically I’d say not a problem as long as you can fix some stuff occasionally.  Our 1.4 petrol Fiesta is now upto 170k and 21 years old. Yes stuff is wearing out, yes theres rust on the inner door skins, but aside form normal service items and things you’d expect to replace anyway it’s hardly cost anything. This year was quite expensive as it needed a cambelt and an new suspension strut (but that was probably die to being enthusiastically kerbed by my OH.

The only trouble is they won’t last forever, so be reasonably prepared that anything you spend on it may disappear. Same with any car but obviously far more likely the older it gets.

One good tip to diffuse the situation is to not look at the dog, instead focus on something else or ignore it.

If you watch dogs body language they never approach each other face on, they only do that when fighting (play or otherwise).  So if you become fixated by the loud dog, then it just gets angrier.  Look for the owner, look at the trees, walk off at right angles to the dog (that’s basically dog for “hello, I’m not a threat please sniff my but”).

Probably won’t work for an already stressed dog, but might stop it escalating in the first place.

Maybe like F1 they should be made to use 2 different sails during the race

Back in the AC75 cat days they did use an asymmetric / code zero for the downwind leg. But with them going faster than the wind it didn’t work as effectively as it does on a displacement boat so they dropped it pretty quickly.  Basically the jib is now just there to do it’s job of pushing air over the main quicker.

What length nipples have you got, buy some longer ones?

I don’t think the threads always go to the end of the nipple? I’m sure DT ones are all the same it’s just the square bit on the end is longer so machines can grip it easier or it pokes through really thick / deep carbon rims.

There’s no such thing as self cleaning.

No but (and I’ve found with my recipe experiments) you can trade off between a hard/dry wax which flakes off (taking any contaminants with it), which is “self cleaning”. Or a softer blend which is till pretty hard which seems to leave a is super hydrophobic smear* over the drivetrain to which nothing wet seems to stick.  The stumbling block i have at the moment is really dry dusty conditions.  The hard wax doesn’t last long enough (~100miles before the drivetrain starts to whirrr), and the softened wax picks up dry dust. So my next set of experiments are going to be making a a very hard “grease” via saponification of stearic acid and lime in the molten wax which if I’m right should make the softer wax blend harder, but more malleable without flaking off.  The other option is a to use tallow rather than stearic acid,  which actually has the advantage of working better when wet!

*it’s a mucky grey from the WS2 additive but i guess if it was just the wax, oil and PTFE it would be clear/white.

I like.

But I would go further and say anyone below the average wage gets a £100 voucher to spend at any bike shop annually. This can contribute to a new bike, servicing & parts, helmet or clothing.

Risks reinforcing the whole “I pay more tax than you” anti-cyclist ranting?

That’s another issue with it – it’s not just a barrier for the low-paid, it’s a barrier in any employment where one senior figure can kill the whole thing dead cos they hate cyclists. Not dissimilar to how one stick-in-the-mud in a council department can effectively kill off any road safety schemes, cycle lanes etc.

The main overhaul needs to remove all the numerous providers from their position and have it administered by central government as a default. ANYONE can apply, no limit, no restrictions on shop or supplier, primary purpose should be riding to work but what you do with it in your own time is your business. Effectively create an interest-free loan scheme for bikes – it can be tied into repayments via tax / salary sacrifice if you work but other repayment options if you are on minimum wage. Could put in a graduated limit if required for people with low credit scores so someone on minimum wage can’t go out and buy a £10,000 MTB but that’s no different to most areas of life.

And then cross-subsidise for the low-paid, self-employed and even the WFH-ers – recognising that people who WFH may still need to go to meetings, still need to travel around their local area, shops etc.

That’s why I think just getting rid of VAT on bikes would be a good idea.

Heck you could get rid of VAT on any sports kit if you wanted a more broad justification as it would* all pay back in NHS savings over the longer term.

No VAT on:

Gym memberships (gym must not have a sauna, steam room etc to qualify as a gym rather than “health club”).

Badminton rackets

Football boots (clothing as usually is the odd one out, it’s clearly an essential, but you can’t adequately define between a £125 football shirt and a £5 gym top).

Bikes

etc.

*well spending in general on sport does, the question would be whether people would actually do more sport as a result, or just buy kit that was 20% better / pocket the difference.

I’ll be running the Axis on low except when I’m on the unlit parts of the cycle track. Will also have it aimed down rather than straight out.

It’s not quite so straightforward. The trouble is that most beams the periphery (say the bit between 23 and 45deg from center on a normal 90deg wide beam) is still ~50% as bright as the spot. Whereas from a light with a cut off it’s more like 5%. Try it with your car headlights, stand in front of the dipped beam (a safe distance so you don’t get blinded) with the cut off somewhere around your waist. We can all see that’s still plenty of upward spill to “be seen”, but if you duck down and look at the lamp from below the cut off it’s f****** bright.  And for context a standard H4 bulb is ~1000lumens (main or dipped, most cars only run one filament at a time)  So a 2000lumen bar light is the equivalent of driving around with your main beams on.

The advantage of that is you can actually aim 1000 lumens up the road, and on a flat road that could illuminate a very long way without being in anyone’s eyes. And it does it very evenly as the ‘hotspot’  is right at the cut off so if you look at the trigonometry the majority of the photons are ending up where they’re spread out most on the road. The end result being that the road surface looks evenly bright at your front wheel and 50m down the road.

Whereas a 500 lumen light (i.e. most lights low settings these days), unless you’re pointing it down 45deg, is still spilling a lot more light up into the air. And even setup to be the best light, you still end up with the road getting dimmer past the hotspot.

The downside comes when cornering sharply.  The cut off leans with you so you trying to look around the corner are effectively looking “up” into the area with almost no illumination. Some motorbikes fix this with gimbals, motors, mirrors and other wizardry, But most motorcyclists know that cornering in the dark is either terrifying or requires the main beams !

I like the idea of removing VAT from bikes but I remember when they did it with helmets. Suddenly got cheaper, then in a few months, it felt like they’d gone back up to the original price and a bit more.

It’s a risk, but didn’t that happen just before the Brexit referendum which crashed the £ by 20%?

Ahh, sorry I misread it and though you meant it was a problem at 24 (JB) so dropped it to 19 (D2), I missed the bit in the middle where you inflated it to 24 (D2) psi.

My JoeBlow seems to agree with the SKS airchecker (and the ali express TPMS) , but my Aldi specialbuy pump I bough as a backup is a good 15-20% out (but seems to be consistent at least so “100psi” in the road bike is close to the 85 I actually want.

Light spokes can actually be an advantage,

If you imagine what happens to a wheel when you land heavily,

With a stiff rim, the rim gets pushed up and the strain is all on the top spokes being stretched.

With a flexible rim the rim distorts and stretches all the top half spokes (i.e. the ones at 90 and 270deg are stretched as the rim tries to go a bit oval as well as just displacing upwards).

Light spokes are an advantage in that scenario because they stretch more for the same tension, which means the rim has to deflect a lot more before they go slack, and therefore the rims stays more evenly supported through the impact.

I think you’ll be fine but I wouldn’t have worried about rounding to the next 2mm for spokes that only come in 2mm increments

Yea, it makes naff all difference, 2 different calculators could have that much variance in the measurements. The DT calculator even implies you should use spokes that don’t reach the top of the nipple with anything other than 12mm nipples.

They can’t be too long ion modern double wall rims, the threads will bottom out long before the spoke reaches the inner bed and the tubeless tape.

Too short, sometimes spoke nipples crack if the spoke doesn’t reach into the ‘slot’ part. But it’s not a common problem.

For 2/1.8/2 or bigger spokes I’d always round up (i.e. 270.5 would be 272mm), for smaller spokes like 2/1.5/2 I’d consider rounding to the nearest as they stretch a lot more, so adding ~1.5mm might mean they’re ~3mm too long by the time they’re tensioned.

 I’ve only built one wheel before, and probably a decade ago, so don’t know what I’m doing. Hence why I’ve bought super-light spokes for the driveside of a rear mountain bike disc brake wheel, which I only just now discovered is probably breaking three rules of wheelbuilding simulataneously.

I’d just use the lightest spokes on the NDS rear where they’re under least tension when built if possible, they’re the lowest tension therefore benefit most from being the most stretchy.  Having them on the drive side is a recipe for a PITA wheel as the wheel will flex more towards the NDS side in use, so the NDS side will go slack.

If they’re different lengths I’d just go out an get 16x 2.0/1.8/2.0 spokes for the drive side. Even at bike shop prices that’s £16 well spent in the long run.

TBH having built a few wheels now and found a few things out the hard way, I’d always go one step up on the drive side (i.e. plain gauge if the NDS was 2/1.8/2, or or even chunky aero spokes) as a bit of an insurance policy.

Most of these providers are linked into various HR outsourcing stuff – my last place had outsourced all the employee benefits to some “agency” that charged the employer a set fee per employee on the basis that they’d then handle all the admin and then the “perks” offered would be something like “save 2% at Center Parcs if you go on a Tuesday in November” and “save 1% at Boots when you spend £200 or more in one transaction”. Worthless shite.

The cycle to work scheme that they administered was worse than useless.

Ours is similar, the Halfords scheme is apparently bundled in with a load of other useless stuff so we can’t even discuss changing it, it’s basically a corporate equivalent of Topcashback.