New Triumph Bonneville test ride

Hello,

Just thought I'd share my thoughts about my test ride yesterday on the new Triumph Bonnie. I've been daydreaming about one of these for weeks now, and had to check one out (many thanks to Three Cross Motorcycles in Wimborne).

First impressions were : "Wow, that's beautiful! I want it!" When I was out on the road, I wasn't disappointed, it lived up to my expectations: it was comfortable to ride, powerful enough to pull out at 60 and overtake a couple of cars (up to 80 in no time), got lots of attention from car drivers and handled beautifully.

The demonstrator I rode had quite a high seat, and I felt a little 'on top' of the bike. However, when back at the shop I sat on another one with a slightly lower seat, and that felt much better, much more like I was 'in' the bike than perched on top.

Overall, the build quality of the Bonnie was fantastic, lots of chrome and thick paint and, apart from the switchgear, not too much plastic. However, it's with the latter that I have 'issues'. The switchgear looks really plasticky and cheap, and with bike gloves on, felt fragile and imprecise. I'd left the indicators on a couple of times, even though I was sure I'd cancelled them.

When idling, the sound of the Bonnie was pure retro Bonnie, expecially with the extra loud pipes fitted, but when moving there's just a quiet whirring sound, and the occasional backfire when you drop the throttle. And no vibration at all!

I'm still really interested in one of these, but the Black SE model I want isn't available anymore. Apparently, Triumph is bringing out a new model later this year, with fuel injection rather than carbs (the fuel injection system fitted inside fake carb bodies!). I'll have to wait until the new model comes out and decide then whether or not I still want one.

In the meantime, at least I still have the trusty VT500!

QuickFind update and news

I haven't been able to post anything recently, and doubt that I'll be able to get much work done over the coming weeks (there's been a new addition to the family – baby Aran). However, I'm planning to keep revising/updating QuickFind, and hope to get a bit more done in a few days) if I can. Planned features include:

• Smaller footprint
• Ability to query more websites
• Organise websites better, with more drawers, etc.
• Ability to save queries/searches/results
• The ability to view results within the application itself, without launching your web browser
• Allow some degree of user customisation

If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks to all who have provided feedback and suggestions so far.

Cheers,

Kev

QuickTime content not displaying in Safari

Recently, after an OS update, I found that QuickTime content wasn't displaying properly in Safari. Instead of the media content, all I was getting was a pale, faded out broken QuickTime icon. Anyway, too busy to look into it properly I soldiered on using Shiira. However, I soon got fed up with the problem and started looking into it. As Safari and Quicktime worked OK on another account on my machine, I had a look at the home/library/preferences folder for quicktime and safari preferences. Once I'd deleteed the following and restarted Safari, all was well:

com.apple.Safari.plist
com.apple.quicktime.plugin.preferences.plist
QuickTime Preferences
com.apple.quicktimeplayer.plist