JohnMcL7

No, it's the older and bigger Stache which runs 29+ rather than 27.5+: Trek have now discontinued it as the market has moved away from the bigger 29+ and the Roscoe has been a lot more popular but I love the big wheels and wide rims as well as the short back end and slack front, I've had the bike a few years now and never ridden anything else I found better. I would like to try a Full Stache out of interest but I went to a rigid after full suspension and liked the feel of it so the hardtail is a good compromise.

Good to hear you're getting on well with the Garmin as I have a Fenix 5s myself I bought at launch pretty much, worn it every day and still working great. I was using it with Zwift for HR as well as broadcasting to an Edge and when I'd compared it against the chest strap I found it a bit slower to respond and underread a bit but that was fine for me. However I started with Zwift last year to make up for not being able to go out group rides and I was getting suspicious about its heartrate figures and was concerned because I'd had thyroid issues just before the pandemic and never got a proper all clear because I couldn't get tested any more. So I bought a new chest strap and I was shocked at how different the results were, the watch showed an average of 83bpm and a max of 136bpm while the chest strap showed an average of 168bpm and a max of 184 bpm. I'm sure the chest strap was right because I was doing a race and going hard at it which made me wonder is the watch faulty but the resting/24 hour monitoring looks good and out on an MTB ride it also looked good with an average of 140 and max of 190 which felt about right. I'm curious how your watch is doing? Whenever I read anything online it's not helpful because people just rubbish optical HR monitors and that's the end of it.

I've been having a brief break from the bike as I've been feeling really flat after my second vaccination and surprised how much I feel like something is missing in my life. I'm looking forward to getting back on the MTB and taking advantage of the bone dry super fast trails. I had been deliberating whether to pay for Strava or not because I'm actually finding it a lot better not being able to see the leaderboards because I don't bother now trying to beat my times and enjoy the ride instead. Which has resulted in faster times and was surprised to get a PB (and 6th overall) on one of my favourite segments that I spent a while improving on but haven't been near that time in a while and I'd long given up trying to beat it. Very much a bike for good conditions but my absolute favourite to ride: I'm definitely feeling in the mood for an event for a change but with many cancelled I'm not sure what's even likely to run. I decided to for a late night loop of Loch Ness on my own instead since I'd done that last year when the roads are quiet and it worked out well but I was around a third of the way round and just about to leave mobile reception and start climbing when someone texted me to say the road was closed for the last third and it was a lengthy diversion. I was disappointed I had to abandon the ride but that was a big relief as I'd not be happy to find I had a two to three hour diversion at 1am:

Thanks for all the responses which I've been thinking over and leaning very much towards giving it a miss. I did see that it was an ex-business lease car but I wasn't concerned about it as long as it's had the required work done along the way, it doesn't seem that unusual for this age and type of car and there's no guarantees a private car has been looked after any better. I know there's the belief that everyone hammers hire cars but I don't know how true that is in reality since I'm more careful with them than my own car and know many others that are the same. There won't be any Skoda warranty available for the car and any third party warranties don't seem worth the paper they are written on so I'd have to take it as is, I clearly don't have the expertise to check it over. I know Arnold Clark are usually good at moving cars but to be fair to them I think I'd have to be a lot more serious about buying the car and at the moment I'm not sure about a Superb in general never mind this particular one. Is there anyone out there that doesn't tell porkies about mpg? I'm not expecting much from a 280bhp petrol car and don't do a big number of miles anyway.

Hey folks, I'm considering a new car and was wondering what people thought about this 66 plate Superb L&K 280: https://www.arnoldclark.com/used-cars/skoda/superb/2-0-tsi-280-laurin-klement-4x4-5dr-dsg/2016/ref/arnax-u-48703 I generally have a 'too good to be true' approach and this seems a bit cheap for L&K 280 with previous ones I've seen in this price range being on much higher mileage and Arnold Clark don't have a great reputation. The car is just under 400 miles from where I live so it's not easy to pop over and have a look but I'm going to be in Newcastle next week so I'm looking to see if it's worth making the trip over to Liverpool for. I'd also appreciate any thoughts about this type of car in general as I'm hoping to be able to keep it for a good few years and my concern is that the complexity of this model with four wheel drive, a high power two litre engine, dual clutch gearbox and many gadgets could end up being problematic over the longer term. I currently have an older Mazda6 estate which has been a great car but over the last year it's been more unrellable with small problems relating to age and so looking for something newer to replace it which is a petrol estate with the same or more boot capacity, similar or better performance, manual gearbox (I know this one isn't happening), blind area warning system and keyless security/start. This Superb seems to tick all the boxes and with it being a 66 plate it just avoids the £40K tax rate, it has a plenty of performance, loads of boot space and is well featured. It's difficult reading through the forum because it's hard not to fixate on problems and it can present an unbalanced view since people are more likely to seek out help for problems than to come here just to post their car is fine.

I went with the Kenwood unit for my car and although it felt it a bit dated I thought it was a good unit as it had decent functionality, great sound quality and easy to fit as it was a straight drop in. Zenec did also make some decent VW compatible units as well. You've said you don't want 'cheap Chinese crap' but with a budget capped at 300 dollars, that's all that's really in your range if you're wanting a wide range of features.

I was quite excited to see this particularly when the Suzuki Swift he hired was the exact one I drove earlier in the year, I was told it's the 'Iron Man' car due to its red and gold colouring plus the IM in the number plate.

They don't have a great reputation and they don't make it clear they're selling grey imports which have no official support in the UK, in some cases there are devices which aren't sold in Europe anyway so that's always a downside but for the S8+ and similar, it needs to be a substantial discount to be worth losing the warranty. John

It's hard to tell from the video but bottom bracket was my thought?

I was disappointed with the forum for that reason, I don't mind company representatives on forums as often they can offer useful information without being pushy. However after asking a question on that forum I got pretty much no useful replies and instead received replies (and PM's) trying to persuade me to go with their preferred bike which I'd made clear I was not interested in. Do you find that works better rather than just dialling down the power? I'm thinking it'll be quite hard work pedalling without any motor assist particularly given you're lugging the weight of the battery and motor as well. John

I easily prefer Windows 8.1 over 10 and always surprised at the hate for 8.1 but the love for ten, most of the best features in ten came from 8.1 while 8.1 doesn't have most of the garbage that Windows 10 does - Win10 reminds me of a malware infested machine there's so much needs cleaned out of it, Win8.1 was a fairly clean install, ran smoother (particularly on Core-m's and Atoms) and has a usable touch interface unlike the pointless mess the 'tablet' mode is. Almost all the complaints about ten in this thread are specific to ten and not in Windows 8 yet still the latter gets all the criticism, I guess that's what branding and market perception can do in the wrong hands. Before anyone asks why I'm running Windows 10, there's not much choice with MS aggressively forcing people onto Win10 by only supporting certain features on the new OS. I keep meaning to get around to writing some scripts to clean up a Windows 10 install but right now I feel I've wasted enough time with W10 installs to last me a while. John

I received an Echo Dot as a gift, so far I love the novelty of it and currently tempted to go a bit further with it and order smart bulbs and power for a room to try it out. It seems a complete waste of money but the idea of being able to voice activate some of that stuff seems very cool. If my Dad was at all open to technology I think it would be perfect for him, he's terrible using computers or tablets as his control isn't good nor is his vision and Alexa is quite smart in that it doesn't need a super specific command to work - you can ask it what's happening today, what's the news etc. and it will give you the news each time. I do have a lot of music in Amazon which makes the Echo useful although it's pretty rubbish at playing individual albums or tracks - when I asked it to play Westworld, it replied it couldn't find the Artist Westworld instead I had to ask it to play Westworld music from season one or something. I asked it to play Time from Inception which I do own but it found some other version I didn't own (Mine is the original inception version) and instead offered me the chance to buy it, it couldn't find Dredd either as it was looking for Dread. On the other hand it's great at playing general music, telling it to play some Star Wars meant it hopped through my star wars albums and asking it to play some classical music gave me some good piano music. I'm tempted by the £4 offer for Amazon unlimited which is tied to the Echo although annoyingly it's tied to a specific Echo and not just your Echos in general, I mostly listen to music on an mp3 player which is offline so I need to buy albums for it but like the idea of using amazon unlimited to find new music. There's a lot of handy little questions you can ask it, what the weather is, currency conversion, the meaning of life, set a timer, set an alarm, set a sleep timer, execute order 66 etc. although time will tell if it's any actual use or not. This is a useful summary of the Alexa skills: https://www.buzzfeed.com/echouk/tips-and-tricks-for-getting-the-most-out-of-your-amazon-e?b=1&utm_term=.xaV5GQjaw#.qlD8Pxoe6

It looks great and I'm sure you'll find it works well, when I was choosing a road bike I was planning a carbon one with a 105 or Ultegra groupset but then hired an aluminium road bike with Tiagra which I found great. It was still way lighter than my mountain bikes and rocketed along the road on its skinny tyres, I've since changed the bike but simply to get hydraulic disc brakes as I've gone for another aluminium frame. John

Agreed, hard drives can fail in many different ways and I've seen several hard drives that function intermittently for a while with odd little errors then just bite the bucket. The moment I see any of that happening I just get rid of the drive as it's not worth the hassle. With regards to UEFI and GPT, I believe you need UEFI to boot a GPT formatted drive but I didn't think it was needed if the GPT formatted drive was an additional one as my machine is set to legacy boot as it's using a 500GB SSD but works fine with the three GPT formatted hard drives I have,

I don't see it as cheating as you're still out pedalling the bike it's just you can go further, faster and higher for the same effort and in turn means you're more likely to go out riding again. I think you will improve your fitness and the ebike has the advantage you can adjust the power so if you're feeling fitter you can drop the power assist to work you a bit harder. John

Something to bear in mind with road bikes is that when they crash they're almost always going to hit a very hard surface and often at a high speed as well, they're also far more vulnerable to being hit by cars. Mountain bikes on the other hand can obviously still hit something hard but a lot of the time they're likely to have a softer landing and put less stress on the frame, there's also much less chance of being hit by a car. I'd also suspect that a higher percentage of road bikes are carbon than any other material when compared to mountain bikes where there's many other costs particularly with suspension so if a road bike is damaged there's a much higher chance it's carbon. Although carbon fibre has a reputation for being weaker but I've never seen anything to suggest that's accurate and I've seen plenty broken steel and aluminium frames as well as carbon. I think one issue with carbon is that there are some very cheap and nasty frames and parts out there, usually fakes of a major brand which look visibly fine but in reality are too weak and will break in normal use. No interest in carbon myself, not enough benefit to just the cost for my use particularly as there's a good chance the frame will get damaged and at least an aluminium one is cheaper to replace.

My Mum was hiring an e-bike through a local council sponsored scheme last year, something like £10 for 24 hours so perfect for us to go out a ride then she could go get some shopping or see a friend. This year though they didn't renew the scheme and spent many months without luck trying to find an alternative, eventually she got signed up to a scheme where she got an ebike free for a month as long as she logged all the miles she took on the bike that she would have done by car. That went really well so after a good spot of bargain hunting I managed to find the same bike in 2016 spec for £500 off which is similar to the one you've got there, slightly more hybrid orientated but crank power drive and a little bit of suspension at the front. I'd seen a second hand Wisper but I wasn't sure about her with the front hub drive particularly when she'd cycled and liked the crank drive which makes sense to me as you ride it like a normal bike but you get a little help along the way. I'm really pleased she got the bike as I enjoyed the one she had for hire, she always refused to come out cycling with me even though I told her I'd go at whatever speed she was comfortable with but with the ebike she still gets a good bit of exercise but we can go further and faster plus I don't need to worry about choosing routes with hills because the ebike handles them with ease. Me not so much but on the plus side I beat most of my PR's trying to keep up with the ebike on the hills. I hope you have a lot of fun with that bike John

Amusingly, it does look like my very first phone (the Philips Diga on BT Cellnet) is a very similar size and weight to my current Galaxy Note 4: http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=145&idPhone2=6434&idPhone3=1681 Of course there is a massive difference in performance and functionality with the Diga only really being usable for calls, its one line text display made text messaging something of a chore for both reading and writing. The Note 4 (and any current high end phone) is quite ridiculous in its capability as its performance and capabilities are well beyond many full blown computers I've had in the past. I also added the Samsung X830 to the comparison as that was the smallest phone I ever owned when I had to carry a work and personal phone, the work phone was purely for taking calls so went for the tiny Samsung to easily carry it around in addition to my normal phone. It wasn't much bigger than a USB memory stick and rather impressively I've never seen a phone which had better reception. John

That's why I stopped using it and bought a dedicated Tomtom unit,I just couldn't see it being good having the phone running continuously that hot for extended periods of time. John

No, Google dropped SD support on the Notes the same time as they did the S range and regained them at the same time - the S5 and Note 4 both had micro SD slots, the S6 and Note 5 both lost their micro SD slots as well as replaceable batteries then both the S7 and Note 7 regained the micro SD car slots but kept the fixed batteries. I can absolutely see why manufacturers want to drop their SD slots as it encourages use of streaming services and cloud storage(particularly the likes of Google who make their money in services not hardware) and also great because it gives people an incentive to upgrade if they want more storage which amongst friends seems to be one of the main reasons they change phone particularly if a new storage tier is out. They can also charge vastly more flash prices even allowing for the use of high performance flash. It does surprise me to see consumers defending a lack of sd slots and non-replaceable batteries though, I have an older Note 4 which comes with 32GB onboard and initially used my previous phone's 64GB card (just pop it out and slide the new one, no need to transfer the content). It then got a 128GB card for £35 (giving it more storage than any current phone) and now has a 200GB card for £60 the combined cost of both cards is less than the upgrade to a Note 4 64GB. Also I can use the storage in other devices if I need it for any reason (tablet, camera etc.) so it's not money tied to the phone as it would be for a 200GB phone. As I can keep upgrading the storage (and replace the battery) it means the phone keeps on going, it still has a fast processor, great screen and decent form factor so battery/storage would be the only reason to upgrade. John

With Halo 5 they have continually added a lot of free content after release and also it's not unusual for games to download all the DLC in a patch even if you've not bought it. That said, fibre is clearly a must now - I had 4mb ADSL originally and was having to queue up patches and downloads, take the console to a friend's house to leave overnight and pick it up the next day. On the plus side it means I can buy more games digitally which is a bonus with the Xbox/PC cross play that so far works very well.

She's always recommended on MSE for lease deals and while the website is terrible, it clearly makes it distinctive in that market.

Welcome to modern console gaming unfortunately, you'll do all that updating then decide you want to watch a film and need to update the console then update the blu-ray app. It's quite weird that I find the PC now more straight forward than the consoles to use. I also agree about the UI and just the One in general feels clunky compared to the 360 although I prefer it in general to the PS4. The games all need installed to the hard drive for speed, the optical drive isn't fast enough. John

It's not much surprise the F1 cars are slow off the line since they're rear wheel drive and their performance is severely handicapped to meet the very strict rules even then their grip is completely insane. The Red Bull X2010 was an interesting idea as it was to answer the question what sort of car you could produce if there were no regulations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010 John

I think a lot of it depends where you use it, I used them for tethering for a while and their data performance was good although haven't used them recently. I've been on Vodafone for a while as it's essentially O2 or Vodafone up here, EE have very limited coverage and nothing out in the countryside which is where I rely on the signal as I spend a lot of time out cycling. John