Any question answered...

Why can't I find some cheap Shimano brake shoe holders I can stick carbon specific pads in and swap if I change wheels?

Why would you want to? The whole point of cartridge pads is that it's easier to swap the pads than the shoes. If you want to make it even easier, splash out on some EEBrakes shoes, the genius unintended spin-off from their clunky calipers.

How long is a piece of string?
Or more precisely; would a 10 kg aluminium CX bike be considered heavy? And too shit for an occasional mucking about with some studded tires?

I am looking at my local 2nd hand listings and noticing a massive price gap between alu cx and carbon cx. The alu ones seem to come from people discarding their first cx bike and realising they can't ask much for it. The Merida ones tends to go for ~£500.

10 kg is about normal. Definitely not too heavy for occasional mucking about.

Do it.

Grooming/enabling.

would a 10 kg aluminium CX bike be considered heavy?

Seemed reasonable, biggest difference is the wheel that add up the overall weight.

I get why they do it but I don't how, for instance, if I search "Mourinho sent off", the first 4 pages will be populated with daily fail links. How have they got there? Why has no one else got links?

would a 10 kg aluminium CX bike be considered heavy?

Yeah, definitely. As Bikesnob has remarked several times in the last couple of weeks, for occasional messing about the entry level these days is £5k carbon CX bikes.

When I were a lad, world champions rode CX bikes in the vicinity of 26lb, and if you put Štybar and Nys on them now, there would still only be about 3 people in the world who would fancy their chances on any modern bike. CX is probably the cycling discipline which most favours the rider over the equipment.

How have they got there? Why has no one else got links?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Personalized_Search

Outed as a daily mail reader*!

*If you click on them, Google thinks "man, this guy loves the Daily Mail", so it gives you even more Daily Mail, until the only thing you ever see is Daily Mail.

Is there a thread for the obligatory girlfriend bike build?

At bothwell:

Thanks.

Where's the thread for places to eat in London?
I just want a decent cafe near King's Cross that isn't full of cunts, that'll do a decent soup and a sandwich type thing, and won't charge me massive amounts of cash. And that I can sit down with my family. Also: non chainy pret thing.
ta.

Good luck

Not quite what you're after but King of Falafel is hella good.

@roboto HA!

@umop3pisdn : it may end up being that.

Actually, that King of Falafel may win.
What's not to love about falafel, meat skewers, and salad.

Roti King also win my vote too.

Not exactly sandwich but does have what loosely describe as "soup".

If I take a pair of wheels to be serviced at my LBS, will they expect me to take the tyres off beforehand or does it not matter?

Why do you need to take it off?

It's a bike shop, not your mum.

What?!

I'm not an expert in servicing wheels so I don't know if having tyres on the rim makes the servicing more difficult or not.

Make sure you take off all the spokes, bike shops hate it when customers leave the spokes on.

Tyres on protects the rim but adds work.

Have you cleaned the wheels?

They're not that dirty TBH. I think they were cleaned 2 or three (dry) rides ago.

Take them in missing something important, with dog shit ingrained in the tread and a puddle of water inside the tyre, like everyone else.

I ran directly over a fox on Saturday.

Back of a group and nobody signalled. The corpse was surprisingly firm.

When I got home I realised I had a significant amount of BBQ sauce on my thigh, which I had presumed was blood.

I also managed to curdle the contents of my water bottle by pouring hot coffee into it.

Was a bit of a weird one, all told.

Any recommendations for where to stay / what to do, see & eat in Oslo?