Thanks - I’ll have a look tomorrow when I’ve got a bit more time.  I did use new, genuine Rohloff cables so I hope I haven’t done something daft that has chewed things up! I’ll let you know how I get on.

Fairly recently I bought a s/h Paul Hewitt with a Rohloff, internal mech, with cables routed along the top tube. The shifter was quite stiff at the time, and is now unusable. The hub cables move all right when I unclip them, but if I then pull on the cables to the shifter I can hardly move them at all. Do I need to buy a whole new shifter? When I bought the bike I fitted new (genuine Rohloff) cables to the shifter and things worked fine, but now I can’t use the bike at all.

I have used a Thorn Raven for a good ten years without any problems - it’s so old that it has the triangular shifter. These days however I find it too heavy to hang it up by the back wheel as required by some Scotrail trains. The Hewitt is much lighter and easier, so obviously I want to sort the problem.

Hope someone can help - thanks!

Quote from: Moronic on June 16, 2026, 12:41:55 AM

PH, when you think about it, it's not unreasonable to think that "artificial intelligence" would be able to read what's been said online on a topic and infer reliability and accuracy from the experience and tone of the posters. Just as human intelligence would.

Did you look at the examples I gave?  How many errors did you spot in the Nomad review?  That was written by a cycling journalist with thirty years experience.

Degree does matter, though. The cycling journalist didn't say of the Nomad that Thorn's Audax contender was way too heavy to be competitive and used unfashionably small wheels whose benefits didn't outweigh their advantages for randonneur events. And his career wouldn't have survived such an error.

We attribute intelligence to dogs and monkeys. It doesn't justify naming a machine AI that it can perform better on many language tasks than dogs and monkeys.

My original point was simply that people do seem to be taking AI's pronouncements more seriously than is helpful, for them and for anyone else. If your point is that we would do well to lower our expectations of a machine that's described as intelligent, because intelligent people make public statements that are indefensibly inaccurate, ignorant or illogical, then it's a good point.

I gave up worrying about health effects when I reached thirty. I designed and printed a card to all the doctors who'd said I wouldn't make thirty. Fifty years later I've forgotten when the hypnic jerks started, but I go straight back to sleep -- see below about my method of ensuring that I go back to sleep almost immediately. I don't know if hypnic jerks are linked to coffee or tea, but I drink a four-cup pot of tea with half a lemon or lime plus honey every day, and the same of mokka, a 3:1 mixture of cocoa and one heaped spoon of whatever instant coffee my wife buys at the supermarket.

For all I know the hypnic jerks may just be a result of angling your body horizontally when you go to sleep, rather than vertically. Or, perhaps more likely, they may be caused by hormones secreted in your brain to keep you sane by reminding you dreams are not real: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins are so much the usual suspects of happiness that they are shorthanded as DOSE. Serotonin in particular has a wide variety of functions in the body as well as the brain, and both a shortage or an excess of serotonin in the body can produce undesirable effects.

One could speculate that vomiting, about which serotonin is known to send  messages to the nerve-ends, is a convulsive effect, rather similar to hypnic jerks, but don't take that as gospel as I haven't kept up with the literature.

I was prescribed amitriptyline for migraines, which are caused by damage to a mandibular nerve suffered during heart surgery when the surgeons had force my mouth open in a hurry. It's a medicine without a well-defined therapeutic map but for me it has always worked for whatever it was prescribed. The point of telling you all this is that, as a side effect of trying to do something about migraines, amitriptyline seems to keep the hypnic jerks at bay.

Or it may just be that my entirely unplanned diet of what I like to eat (chicken, oily fish and shellfish, cheese, avocado, fruit, yoghurt, red meat generally only once a week, mineral supplements to replace sunlight, rough brown rye bread, pasta, salami for a controlled intake of fat) works well to keep the DOSE well-balanced.

Medicine is a lottery...

But I know this stuff because I was taught it. I don't actually worry about the now rare (since I started taking amitriptyline) hypnic jerks, as I think it is far more likely a transient ischemic attack will get me, and I've never heard of a case where someone actually died of a hypnic jerk, which by definition is very brief. Not that I worry about TIA's either, which could start something not quite so "transient". Que sera sera.

If you have trouble going to sleep again after a hypnic jerk, it helps to have something else pre-chosen to focus your mind at the same time as you blank it off to the disturbance. You could mentally calculate the ratios in the Rohloff hub gearbox, for instance, or how many actually meaningful half steps you could get by inserting only one further chainring to the crankset. I try to improve the stress calculations in the chasses of cars I designed and (over-)built, without pencil and paper a near-impossible task never completed because I fall asleep almost immediately I flash up that particular spreadsheet in my mind's eye.

One final point: Your body's state isn't only an output of DOSE and lesser helper chemicals in your body and brain, your mood is also an input to the other regulators. If you make a point of being happy and carefree, the hypnic jerks might just feel so unwelcome, they jerk themselves up, leave you behind, and invade someone else's life.

Can 3 or 4 coffees a day be to blame?

I suffer(ed) from bouts of tachycardia. Heart rate suddenly increases, but seems weak, and fluttery. After a certain time, my heart seems to give one or two strong beats, then it goes back to normal. It happened more often when I wasn't getting enough exercise.

The cardiologist I saw when I was about 40 prescribed beta-bloquants and warned that it was dangerous not to take them. I put up with the beta-bloquants for about a week, but didn't like the side effects.

So I tried doing without tea and coffee and not taking the beta-bloquants. After the initial withdrawal symptoms, this has worked very well for me since. Thinking back, I first noticed having tachycardia at about the age of 10. Coincidentally (or not ?) this was about the same age I started drinking tea. From 10 to about 40 I used to drink either tea or coffee at virtually every meal, often in between meals as well.