I’ve got a 29er Stumpjumper too, so the Enduro was a bit of a silly purchase. To be honest, the Stumpy is probably quicker everywhere I’ve been. I just find the Enduro a really nice place to be, very solid feeling bike, always feels confidence inspiring even jumping on after 6 months with no riding.

The Stumpy feels a bit more clunky, I think it’s too big/long for me though, combined with a noticably lower feeling BB which I strike a few times per ride. Very speedy though.

I bought ton’s Enduro. I like it more than he did.

Loving the look of the new Enduro 29s, bit hefty for this list maybe.

So many sensible spec choices for 2017 though. A return to threaded bottom brackets, as no one liked pf30. Proper (warranty covered) support for 650+ wheels on the 29er model. Decent, well thought out bits on the Comp, GX gearing, Monarch Plus, Yari on the front. Bit slacker + longer travel, given my 29er climbing technique has always just been ride at things as fast as I can I can’t see this being an issue.

Keen to see some proper reviews.

In these parts it’s drivers of Tata’s finest Indian tractor, the Range Rover particularly on narrow country roads where they believe it gives them some sort of entitlement to force anyone else out the way

haha, I came here just to post the very same. I work in an office where Tata have a floor of the building, there’s freebie Range Rovers everywhere, all an absolute nightmare. Even today we were in town and had one honking it’s horn as the car in front was letting someone pass.

I can’t say any other demographic hugely stands out, everyone seems to drive into the bike advanced stop line at every set of lights.

That said, I drive a BMW and previously drove a Mini, so I’m probably quite high on the list. If any other country would accept that people can potentially be 200cm+ though who knows what I’d be in.

I bought a Dell outlet XPS 17″ laptop a few years back, kept it for a couple of years then ebayed it at a profit. Bought and sold around the £500 sort of mark.

Only sold as I was using my desktop for everything.

Apple stuff is fine, if you know exactly what you want to use it for. It just seems to fit an odd middleground, if I wanted something super fast, simple, safe Id get a Chromebook. If i wanted something productive, supports everything, powerful, Id get a PC.

The Surface tablets in particular are lovely bits of kit, they work like very high end graphics tablets yet can run everything you’d run on laptop. Apple just dont offer that yet. iPad Pro was so ridiculously priced for what is still effectively a mobile device.

cutting out cake

No deal.

No, my wife was lovely and is an avid reader of this forum.

Oh indeed, same 🙂

I do use it, more so as a reality check as you say, I like the barcode scanner for quickly adding sarnies and things while at work. Today for example certainly wouldn’t balance, tomorrow probably won’t, Saturday we’re going for some sort of family meal, so I’ll have a really vague stab at guessing it. It’s all a bit fluffy 🙂

I only really asked as I was curious how weeksy did such a good job of finding the balance between starving himself and having no energy and overloading on carbs every day. He seems to have found a good balance given the speed of the loss 🙂

Sorry, I don’t understand your comment about calorie apps. I use MFP and just add in a conservative version of my exercise calories from Strava.

Similar sort of numbers here 🙂 Set to lose 1 pound it gives me 2060 calories, so far today I’ve walked 15000ish steps and I go play squash at 9. This gives me about 3200 calories for the day. Which is enough to stuff my face more than I normally would every meal, tomorrow I won’t get chance to walk as much as I’m not exercising, which means I get to eat just over half.

Don’t get me wrong, if I had some vague consistency to my lifestyle I’d probably like it 🙂 I just feel I do better eating comfortably on rest days and not over eating on exercise days.

I’ve got a Macbook I use for work, sadly I can’t compare the boot time as it has to run Bootcamp, because there’s loads of software that doesn’t run on OSX. Everything is super friendly, until you have to do something complicated in a command window and it’s instantly just back to awkward shonky Linux. Even trivial stuff like going to the root of your hard drive is needlessly awkward and hidden away, without remembering tons of key combinations.

I only have to use it because Apple make a point of not letting people build iOS games on Windows. Literally the only reason I touch it is because Apple give me no other options.

I also have an XPS 13 (booted in 17 seconds, after sitting on the Dell logo for about 6-7) and a Surface Pro 2 (booted in 5-6 seconds, no POST screen, it’s speedy and 3 years old!).

I even tried using my Macbook for Zwift recently, as it’s a 15″ jobby. Sadly the wifi was inexplicably rubbish, compared to every other device in the house.

A 5yr old Mac is worth 50% of what you paid for it (probably more). A 5yr old PC/laptop is worth zero or it’s stopped working.

Tis true, you pay double for it in the first place mind. You are aware Macs are the same hardware in a different box right? Are you purely talking about the operating system? A few clicks and you can wipe it to a freshly installed state with Windows 10.

A 5 year old PC will likely have an i3/5/7 in it, chuck in a new graphics card, SSD and memory and it’s better than new.

Oof, very well done sticking to that with the hefty exercise! Sounds like you’ve found a good routine given your progress in races and weight loss.

I know when I first lost a chunk of weight I found it quite empowering, knowing it was something you can do again if you ever need to.

weight now down to 15st 3 from 16st 8 just 10 weeks ago

Crazy weight loss, really well done! Are you allowing yourself to eat vaguely normally and burning it though the exercise? Just curious as it’s normally how I end up going. The fitter I get, the further/harder I ride, the more calories I can burn. Stuff like My Fitness Pal just falls apart when you’ve got an extra 1500 or so from exercise.

I did the 50km Specialized challenge last night, on the Richmond map. I’ll do the other 2 maps over the next week or so. I obviously need a £6000 road bike to sit in my turbo trainer.

Edit: Oh and the Richmond map seemed super boring, very good for spinning while watching a film though!

4 bikes
2 electric guitars
1 acoustic guitar
4 bass guitars
1 ukulele

Shit, it sounds bad when I lay it out like that. Especially given I can’t really play the guitar or ride a bike.

Mine used to squeak with every pedal stroke on my Conti GP 4000 tyre, regardless of tension it seemed to slip. I swapped to a proper Tacx training tyre after 1 day and it’s been silent, no more unexpected slipping.

A couple of rooms away there’s generally a baby sleeping, it definitely seems to be pretty quiet. Tacx Vortex trainer.

Ahh, I’m using a Tacx Vortex, like quite a few others in here. I don’t worry too much about it’s accuracy, as long as it’s roughly the same every time so I can see an increase.

I tailed off to walking speed right at the end due to confusion about the finish, due to the distance not changing I thought it was the green marker at 17.1m. I’ll know for next time, I don’t think it cost me any positions to be fair 🙂

8/17 Cat D. Happy with that for my second race as a time strapped Dad with a baby in the house. Interesting to see that the winner has nearly the same w/kg as me, my tactics just need to improve.

It sounds like I’m in a very similar situation, time strapped dad on his second race 🙂

12/17 here, as the “Fatigue Rating” on the right shows, I lost 18% of my power in the second half. It looks like you zoomed past at the 20ish minute mark, never to be seen again.

http://labs.strava.com/flyby/viewer/#801655230?c=rtytwzrh&z=F&t=1OK5tx&a=vknIL7REyC_hOsgv

Ah, sounds like the distance thing was for everyone. Frustratingly it did start going down as I started a second lap.

Botched it up, zoomed off the start, hung with the front groups for 15 minutes or so. Totally ran out of steam and zoomed backwards. Still finding my pace a bit, my first race was smoother, although this one supposedly took my ftp up to 219 (from 194). It seems like such a ridiculous metric, when you die straight after the 20 minutes.

I tried the FTP test last night, tried to hold 200W but I was being a bit optimistic and blew up after 10 minutes. Back to the drawing board

Yeah, I did very similar. The second it hits the big 20 minute block I exploded. I tried to sneak down through the gears, it raised the braking on the turbo to compensate.

I then stuck it down to a slightly more sensible 164 or something (doing the short test), which was much more doable. Not sure why I bothered as it was pulled to 194 after the first race. I doubt I’d do the FTP test again, it really doesn’t motivate you at all.

In real world terms, my current fitness equates to not really having done any riding in the last year. Last time I went to Cannock Chase I pushed up the big hill 🙁

We had a sprog in the middle of summer, tragically I just stopped riding entirely. I’d barely done any during the pregnancy either. Picking up a bit now though, nab the odd weekend to pop to the woods and I’ve just joined the Zwift lot, which seems to be working out very well.

I’m planning on doing tonight’s 8pm KISS ride, sat low D cat again 🙂 Not aiming to improve on the last one, just looking to get a bit better at holding a steady power for the duration, rather than spiking and knackering myself every 10 minutes.

If I beat another 30kg sub 10 year old I’ll be delighted.

I’m quite pleased with being lowish D, there were people around to compete with at that level. The chap behind and in front both added me on Strava afterwards and had a natter 🙂 My previous FTP was 164, after the race it set it to 194, the incentive definitely pulled me up the hills a lot quicker!

Looking forward to gradually going upwards with any luck.

Every year when the clocks changed out of BST I’d give up road cycling, so much traffic around here, it just seemed far too risky to bother. This has really picked me up! My lack of cycling tied in with having a newborn in the house 6 months ago, which made finding spare time a bit more tricky too, this is perfect!

Yeah, I only noticed the 30kg as it was in the same cat. There’s a 41kg chap in A (6.4 stone). They might be legit, I’m not sure. He’d look pretty bizarre though with Bruce Lee torso and giant legs.

Seems to be a shame in a way though, it’s the one metric they have no control over, it’d be easy to give myself an extra free 20% w/kg without anyone even questioning.

Minor moan though, it was fantastic fun. Although having my turbo upstairs is dangerous! Jelly legs every time! 🙂

Joined the STW club just now (Alastair Graham). I’ve just started Zwifting this last week or so, after 6 months with zero biking in. After years of lazy winters I’m most chuffed that I might get to spring with at least a vague bit of fitness. First race last night (BRS), came 22/28 in the D category, it gave me a new ftp of 194 from this.

The amount of 30-50kg riders annoys me a little. Supposedly there was a 30kg rider in the same category as me, I’m 6’6″ and 100kg!

Using one as a day to day watch here as well, absolutely love it. Even purely as a smart watch it’s great, the battery lasts over a week, I’ve got the old non-HR version too. It also merrily pairs with all my ANT+ stuff, so I can use it with a food pod + heart rate for treadmill jogging.

The Garmin software has really come along as well, very easy to get it auto syncing with Strava/MyFitnessPal etc. On the note above about auto upload, I’ve never had an issue, it’s normally synced and uploaded quietly via my phone within minutes of finishing a workout.

I don’t regret my 500gb Xbox at all, as long as you accept that one day you might want to plug an external hard drive in. Especially if he has Xbox Gold and gets stacks of free games (which I heartily recommend! :)). I’ve got a little 1tb perma sat on top of mine.

The pads do take 2xAA batteries and personally I’d stick to rechargeables, I found the charge kits didn’t seem to hold nearly as much charge, it was much more convenient/cheap dropping new batteries in.

As mentioned above, if he subscribes to gold he’ll get a constant stream of free games. Although tragically this month’s don’t seem hugely appropriate for an 11 year old.

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/games-with-gold

V8 FTW.

Indeed, straight six did seem an odd target. Mine’s pretty boring and doesn’t make much sound at all (E90 325i). It cost loads to tax and insure, doesn’t go hugely fast and it’s currently sat on 23mpg.

With the new 2017 tax setup I want Mustang GT, after the initial lump sum payment you’re only paying £140 a year. A 3-4 years on and the new system is cheaper than the old one. The people getting shafted are those buying new, low emission, cars. Bonkers.

Sorry, miles off topic now. Boo! Down with dirty diesel cars!

Edit: I feel terrible posting this after the previous post, hehe. If it helps at all, I walked in to work today!

I’d be surprised if you found a way of doing all that without quite a bit of code.

I’d probably go through the stock Android SDK/Android Studio, it supports things like adding/rotating views, drag and drop etc. I’d imagine you could then dump the layouts out as XML to share. There would be a good chunk of Java required with this setup.

Alternately the Unity UI stuff is quite powerful these days, it would still require C# or js code for dragging/pinching etc.

Sadly I work as a programmer, so the code heavy route feels like the path of least resistance.

I cracked a toenail while I was at uni 15 years ago or so, the doctor quickly bounced me on to have it removed. For some reason as well as removing the toenail they decided to remove the roots entirely, to stop it ever growing back. So I’m missing the one toenail on my big toe now. I didn’t actually know this was what they were doing until after the operation.

Years on I’m still not quite sure of the logic, the other one is fine. Every time I bump that toe on something it makes me cross.

Pliers all the way.

local anesthetic in the 2 toes

Agreed there, I felt like there was more anesthetic than toe by the time they’d loaded it up.

printing reliability has improved loads recently, especially with most printers being cloud ready now. Not sure why you’d need to network them together, all the data is in the cloud and accessible from every other device.

My printer is hooked up to the wifi, it just doesn’t support cloud printing, it’s only a couple of years old. This seems quite ridiculous, I can print directly from my phone or virtually any other device in the house. Network wise, it really depends what you want to use it for, we’ve got a little server in the house, which everything (including phones), except the Chromebook can see. I’d imagine as a student, having a device which is compatible with virtually everything would be a bonus?

Also saying that “all the data is in the cloud” really depends on what the data is. I’m a software engineer, which renders the Chromebook instantly useless for work. It’s fine as long as “all the data” is a few photos and word docs.

Sorry – slight thread hijack – how do you find the XPS 13 Toasty. Very close to pulling the trigger on the new spec i7 with ultra high res screen etc.

Really good 🙂 Although mine’s the i5, non-touch, lower res one. The carbon interior is a bit of a pain for fingerprints but it’s really nicely made.

I appreciate it costs an order of magnitude more than my Chromebook, but it’s the reason I don’t pick up the Chromebook anymore. The 13″ Dell is smaller than my 11″ Chromebook in all dimensions, it’s battery lasts just as long in general usage, I can install whatever I like and it’s drastically quicker at everything.

Chromebooks are indeed ace, but you’re very limited to what software you can find web versions of, even trivial things like networking or printing becomes a bizarre pain in the arse.

I’ve had a few reconditioned Dell laptops from the outlet, it’s a lot of hunting around and waiting for new items to appear though:

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&brandId=7

I had an XPS a while back, kept it for a year, stuck it on ebay and bizarrely made a profit. There’s not much on there now, every now and then it’ll spike with loads of bits though. A lot of which are custom orders, which have never even been sent out. I’ve got an XPS 13 at the moment, bit out of budget though I’d imagine.

“Less serious injuries”
“Fewer serious injuries”

Well on the flip side, you’d have:

“More serious injuries” or, err “More serious injuries”. Context is everything and those two could have easily been written differently for clarification.

My brain just can’t get into the habit of using “fewer” correctly, it feels like such an awkwardly redundant word. People talk about the new generation letting standards slip, I’m 35.

I’ve had a few, I had a Mojo that got a scary cosmetic crack and Ibis kindly swapped at cost. I then had a carbon Zaskar, it weighed about 1500g, yet cracked on the seatpost within minutes anyway, I got a full refund.

Really can’t be bothered with it anymore, I’ve got a Stumpy and Enduro, the carbon variants of both are just the front triangle, so it would have been £1000 extra for 200g saving. I’m sure I’ll end up with another one day. I’ve demo’d a few and got on very well, it’s just a ridiculous cost if weight is the main motivator.

You could almost save the same weight by swapping to light innertubes or grips for a tenner.

I’d personally just get a cheaper laptop and a games console, as mentioned above. If it must be a laptop though I’ve had a few from the Dell outlet:

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh&brandid=7&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

All come with warranty. I’ve had an old XPS 17 inch and a new slim little XPS 13, both came as new. The XPS 17 I actually sold for a profit after keeping it for 2 years, the 13 I still use now. New stock comes in every few days, good things come to those who F5.

Curious, glad we both got something to play with out of the swap 🙂

23″ (XXL) 29ers almost look correctly proportioned

Revelations are available in 130mm 29er with a bit of hunting, found a pair on CRC a while back. Quite a lot shorter A-C than Pikes mind. What is the frame made for?

Aye,but when you google him you also bring up a few bikes for sale. Scumbag.

Yeah, there is that 🙁 Some decent bikes too!

I was just stoking the fire really.

Totally not stoking the fire here, but it’s a shame really. If you Google the phone number on his Gumtree advert, you see his attempts at setting up a little business. Does look like he was quite driven, guess it’s not going to plan.

It’s definitely the same bike though! Even down to the Hope bolt seatclamp I stuck on (which was an odd size), the Superstar grips, removed remote lockout cable (it was rubbish and barely moved), the zip tie on the front!

Were I not planning his demise I’d probably invite him around to do some gardening work, we’ve got a pond we need to shift.

Highlander V

Tragically I quite like about half the films mention in this thread.