No Top Gear this week, but here’s this week’s Fifth Gear.

Sorry, but when my account was lost, so were my e-mail accounts and mailing lists. If you tired to e-mail me within the past couple days, I have no idea what happened to your e-mails, but I didn’t get them. You’ll have to send them again. Sorry.

As for this site’s mailing list, if you wish to be on it, you’ll have to sign up again by sending an e-mail to gearlist-subscribe@viper007bond.com.

Just a head’s up - Top Gear doesn’t air today, so obviously there will be no Top Gear release today.

As you may have read during the downtime, my host somehow managed to accidentally delete my entire account. They remade it as you can see, but all data was lost. Luckily, the database was not and I had backups of the main site.

I did not however have backups of the forum folder, so the template is back to default, but with the custom colors I chose. Also, all avatars were lost, so please reupload them!

You can comment here if you wish: http://gear.viper007bond.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1703

Just like this week’s Top Gear, Vuk couldn’t record this one due to antenna difficulties, so this rip is from another group off the web. Vuk should be providing rips again for the site in time for next week’s Fifth Gear (no Top Gear next week). You can grab this week’s Fifth Gear right here.

I’ve been getting some suggestions to switch to 350MB/700MB rips instead of the current 175MB/350MB rips.

From what I’ve seen, the standard rips for TV shows are 350MB for an “hour” of TV (that’s really 42 minutes of TV). Top Gear however is 60 minutes long, so by that standard, TG rips should be 500 MB. If you’re burning to CD, that’s 200 MB of space you’d be wasting, so you might as well go to 700 MB. Plus, we care much more about the quality of this show than we do with normal TV shows.

On the other hand, 700 MB is rather large. With both Fifth Gear and Top Gear, you’d be downloading about a gigabyte a week. Personally, I don’t mind, but perhaps some of you do.

So, I’ll leave it all up to you guys. Go vote here: http://gear.viper007bond.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1674

Long story short, Vuk couldn’t record this episode, so I had a friend re-encode a large 700 MB rip of the episode to this site’s normal size (700 MB is excessive in my opinion) and you can download it right here.

Here ‘ya go. No idea what’s in it though as HL2 is taking up all my time. :D

Here ‘ya go. Sorry for the delay. Get it here.

Vuk had to be somewhere else when it aired. He’ll grab it when it reairs today (Monday).