spode@thinkbikes

The zip tie is only a temporary measure. I may actually take one of the pins from my DH4's on my XC bike instead. If I manage to fix my bike tomorrow am (it now needs bleeding), Jack said he'd bring me a split pin.

Cripes. Had a close call today. I was riding home and pulled a manual. Went to break and my lever just pulled straight to the handle bars, I flew off the back. Muchos pain (still gonna go riding in Nodnol tomorrow mind you). 2 of the pads in my M4 Disc had come out! The pin that holds them in had come lose and fallen out. How unlucky was that!! However, I managed to trace my steps and found my pads a few hundred metres up the high street. No sign of the pin, but a zip tie should work fine :D (Y) :) :-

Unfortunately not the case... Think about it - you are essentially giving away that song for free. You need permission to do that!

It does sound very much like Nightwish. I couldn't pin-point a track for you I'm afraid. In theory, they SHOULD put credits and get permission from the record label before putting it on a video....

If I was really pushed to make a decision... I'd have to say.. me. Loving oneself is the start of a life-long relationship, no? But seriously. I quite like Ryan Leech's Manifesto, it's a nice video. Although I do think his "no correction hops" technique means that some moves look rushed and they might look a little better if he just took his time. I don't really watch a lot of riders, I've never been one for hero worship, I just like to get out there and ride. But your suggestions are interesting, I might have to look up some videos of some of these guys.

That's still a shit load of people using IE. Makes web design a PITA. You design something in correct HTML/CSS and it renders fine in Firefox/Opera/Konquerer. Then you jump over to IE and IE thinks "oh, this code be a mistake, he must have REALLY wanted to do this and tries to 'correct' the coding. Give me a break. :blink: Didn't we already have another thread on Firefox anyway? This might have gone better tagged on to that.

I'm completely confused what a pinch gap is. I grew up with COMPLETELY different names for everything. Anyone got a link to a video? Or a decent explanation? Are we basically talking about a gap hop from static?

Woohoo! First pictures of me on my "new" blue zero :D I didn't realise how late I dropped the back wheel on that drop :P

Nice! What frame is the 26? (some good riding on the 26 by the way..) I wish I had some of that stuff near me, I'd have a field day!

Is this with the USB cable I assume? When you plug it in, does the computer make a noise suggesting that it realises you've plugged something in?

Just reminded me of another good thing. You don't have to worry about keeping your wheels constantly in true :P My front wheel has had a wobble in it for months and I've not bothered adjusting it. My rear disc was screwing me around yesterday. So before a ride today, I just did the whole ride round in circles until the disc brake is steaming, rinse and repeat malarchy. Working superbly now :D

I just use my hands :P

I think I was running koolstops.. I tried green frogs or something as well. So no, I haven't tried the new generation. But I've ridden other peoples bieks with maguras and still not been too hot on them. Some of them have been pretty sweet mind you. Why should I change, it works for me though <_<

Well, it's true that discs do seem to put more strain on frames. But that's just a testament to how good the brakes are. I've had my orange zero beefed up to take discs better as I got fed up with breaking them. Touch wood, it's been good so far. They can be a little temperamental, but a quick frantic lap while holding the disc brakes to burn any crap off usually does the trick. I generally find them very reliable and they work in the wet. I haven't had maguras in a few years, but I found them to be horribly problematic and hugely unreliable. The worst accidents I had were from Maguras slipping through. Mind you back then, tar on rims was a new idea... If I were to go rim brakes again, I'd probably get a decent set of V's. Oh, and I can't STAND the noise of tar on rims. All that squeeking just annoys the hell out of me. I like my bike as quiet as possible. I have met far too many people will a completely unnatural hatred of discs.... I mean come on! As far as hitting them, you'd be surprised how much of a knock they can take. Any major bend will bend back quite easily, and the minor bends are gonna happen anyway. I've never had a disc that didn't warp to an extent. In saying that, I prefer to side hop to the right, although I am partial to the occasional hop to the left. All in all, personally, I'd never ride anything BUT discs. As soon as I went to discs, I never went back.

Because they are a lot of money and most people won't use them. And it is very rarely a new for new swap out. Generally, purchasing some seperate insurance works out cheaper. Or just having it covered under your house insurance.

The 3 year warrantees are generally not worth it. However, if you can get someone like PC World to talk down the price if you buy the warranty, then take it. Then you have 14 days to get a refund on the warrantee. So get the refund and you still get the discount on the laptop (discovered that in an undercover shopping thingy....). There are some pretty good laptops on ebuyer.com for under £500. I would go with either an HP or the Thinkpads. The Pentium M's used in current laptops are not like previous Pentium 4Ms. They have a shorter pipeline which makes them more effecient per clock cycle (they are more like super Pentium 3's, than Pentium 4's.) A 1.6GHz Pentium M, or hell a Celeron M would be plenty, especially on your budget.

Heh. The difference between Socket 754 and Socket 939, is that 939 supports Dual Channel memory (hence the need for extra pins). It also supports the X2 and FX processors. Socket 754 only supports Athlon 64 and Sempron. So the real choice is made by what processor you go for, not the effeciency of the platform. Socket 754 used to be only AGP, as nobody was making PCI-E boards for them. But now Nforce4 boards are being made for Socket 754, for PCI-E support and in some cases SLI. The Socket 754 Semprons (not the Socket A Variety) are superbly cheap and overclock like hell. The Sempron we have in our test labs clocks up from 2ghz to 2.75 on air and almost all the Nforce 4 boards we've tested can do that. You'll also notice next to no difference between Semprons and Athlon 64s, bar the lack of 64-bit support (except in the 64-bit Semprons of course...). Considering you don't play games, you don't really NEED PCI-Express as you will of course need a new graphics card, but it is nice future protection. MSI do a cheap Socket 754 board which has an AGP and PCI-E slot. You could therefore use your current graphics card and you have the option to stick a PCI-E card in later. You could could even go for onboard graphics, but I'm not sure there are many Socket 754 boards than use the ATI Express Chipset yet. As far as memory, sure you could go with what stubert is recommending, but you won't notice the difference. Get cheap memory, but not unbranded. The Corsair Value range or the Kingston value range are real winners. They won't hinder you're overclock as you can ran your memory asynchrounsly on the Athlon 64. Besides, Athlon 64 doesn't seem to get effected by memory bandwidth too much for some reason.. If you ARE serious about video encoding, you would actually be better off with an Intel chip. But they are a lot more money and I hate the platforms.. I hope this helps. Spode, Custom PC Magazine (Y)

Sounds like it could work. However, I've hit my singulator before and not only bent the hanger, but bent the arm. By strenghtening the hanger, you are just more likely the bend the mech. Just because your frame snapped at the downtube, doesn't mean that this didn't contribute to it. If that particualar area of your frame is fairly strong, it may well just shift the force along and usually affects the weakest point. Not to put anyone off what you've done, just playing devils advocate (Y)

I find it a little slower to actually LOAD. But once it's up and running it's great. My laptop struggles with it a little, but it's only an 866MHz P3...

I'm using a surly singlulator. I find the springs useless on them, so I've got zipties holding it tight. If I ever hit it, it usually bends the hanger, but because it's running so close to the chain, it will usually still run, but rattle a lot. Then when I get home, I just bend the hanger back with a wrench. Besides, if you are landing side hops on the front wheel, you can usually tell if your gonna land on the mech and bail before hand (Y)

Somehow, I'd prefer to call you Monty.... Perhaps I should call you Burns after Monty Burns... BURNS! YES! BURNS!!! And yes, I liked your bike. Uber impressed with your break set up, I'll have to consider an upgrade at some point. There's something weird about the phrase "blue orange zero"....

Apart from the moody looking image of me standing there on my bike, where are the ones of me!!!! Jack does have a funny set up. Although I recently screwed the thread on the push-rod on my front disc, so I've had to get used to having my levers set up quite far out. His last bike I literally couldn't pull the levers because of the wierd position it put my wrists! I think the nicest bike I tried there that day was some guys Red Monty with a 25" back wheel. I'm useless with names, so apologies for not remembering it.

Not bad. ;) But I'm sure you don't need an ego massage, but rather constructive critiscm. I thought your side hops were the weakest area there. You could call it an interesting technique, I would call it a weak one ;) True, it did get you up the obstacles, but I don't think you are going to progress much further than you have using that current method. Some nice blunts with front taps, (where you tap the front first before moving to the back - I'm useless at what you guys name these things...). That one on the green electrical box was nice, pity you had to jump off. Always the problem with slanted tops. Spode

Hi Guys, There was a huge meet this weekend in Folkstone. Had a pretty good day. Got ruined towards the end when my hands got reeeeeealy sore and couldn't ride anymore. Then my bottom bracket became loose. Went home to tighten it only to find it had stripped out the first inch of the thread! OUCH. It screws it fairly tight and then try and rtighten it anymore and it just loosens again. Had a look around and I've seen a few guys fixing this with some epoxy, so I think I'm going to give that a go. If I snap my bottom bracket I'll just get a new frame. My orange zero has been welded more times than I care to remember, it's about time it got changed anyway! I did think about a threadless bottom bracket, but I read that don't seem t otake the strain of trials, so I'm not goign to risk it. Anyway, it was a good ride. Good to see Jack, Craig, Clem, Darren there. Nice to have someone that challenges rather than just watches ;) ;) A few other good riders there too, I'm just ****ing awful at remember peoples names at faces (I actually had conversations with one or two people only to find I've met them several times before, DOH). I post all this here, because AFAIK I can still only post in this area. Word up dawgs! Spode