Yearly Summary This year has been a roller-coaster year to be honest, full of ups and downs. January started with a new job on the outskirts of London - potentially meaning that I could get out on my bike a lot more cycling to work. However, I seem to have spent the majority of the time on my bike commuting to and from work and the social rides and just rides at the weekend have been missing.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that winter is slowly but surely coming - it’s getting darker both in the morning cycling to work and in the evening cycling home. However, it’s not yet cold enough that I can wear my Proviz jacket - not the Nightrider I reviewed back in 2014, but the REFLECT360+ that I purchased in 2015. The newer jacket still suffers from some of the same issues as the original one that I tried - I overheat very quickly within the Proviz jackets it seems.

I bought the Polar M400 sports watch not long after getting my Polar V650. I’d decided that the Polar ecosystem was quite good, and was something that I might want to focus on a bit more. The training features of the Polar Flow site seemed to be good. However, I wasn’t able to import data from other services, such as Garmin and even work arounds wouldn’t allow me to upload my own data to the service and make use of the training load graph.

This month, one of my domains was up for renewal. Currently I own four domains and they’ve all been with 123-Reg for many years. However, the service I’ve had from them and the communication in response to a query was pretty poor - I realised that I’d had to contact them the year before regarding a renewal as well! So all in all, I decided to take my business elsewhere.

This weekend finally saw me get the chance to ride my new bike. I’d made use of the Cycle to Work offer that my firm offer through Cyclescheme. The offer allows me to save money on the purchase of a new bike through tax savings - I’ve never really been hugely convinced that the deal saves me money (though I’m assured that it does), but it is a method of getting a new bike with interest free credit for 12 months.

The past few months have seen me try to increase my running at the expense of my cycling. Comparing my overall mileage for the year, I’m probably on the lowest distance to date since 2011. However, the running has improved and I’m hitting personal bests that I set whilst I was running during university. I have tried to maintain the cycling at least once a week though, cycling to work.

So I managed to use the Trigo Garmin bike mount I wrote about the other day on my way to work. I have to say that whilst it performed the job reasonably well, I had a few issues with it. Firstly, when the Trigo is attached so that it doesn’t fold into my wheels when the Brompton folds down, the display isn’t in the best location on the handlebars. I can’t adjust this without an Allen Key.

I was trying to install Windows 10 on the recently purchased Gigabyte BRIX-BXBT-2807 that I got the other day and I was struggling. It would boot the Windows 10 USB up without any issues and would then allow me to go off and install it. Windows copies the files to the disk and then reboots as any normal install. On boot, it would then however sit there at the boot screen and wouldn’t even boot into Windows to continue the install.

Last week I found out about a Garmin mount from Taiwan called the Trigo. This mounts to the stem of the Brompton where the handlebars meet. This overcomes one of my issues with my current setup for the Brompton in that my GPS starts rotating around the handlebars occasionally and it has also caused some surface marks to the handlebar. Putting the Garmin onto the handlebars also means that I have to rotate the Garmin mount so I can attach the Garmin anyhow as the top of the stem gets in the way.

Zim and Journalling I’ve been using Day One for probably close to five years. In that time, I’ve built up quite a database of journal entries. However, with the release of version 2 of Day One, they have moved to running their own sync service - which I can understand and I can see the benefits of, as it allows them to add in additional features to the software that using iCloud or Dropbox sync wouldn’t let them.