Category: computers

Garmin Edge 500 Time Issues during Lumberjack 100

Published June 17, 2013

After getting back home from completing Lumberjack 100 I was excited to review the logged data from my Garmin Edge 500 bike computer. A few times during the ride the unit lost GPS signal, but as I’ve had this happen on other rides without issue I didn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately, it looks like this time the data really went odd. After poking with the data and attempting to correct it in Ascent I downloaded Fit File Repair Tool to see what it could tell me.

As shown in the screenshot above (click to embiggen), roughly 15.52 miles in, at 44.2119°N 86.1295°W, just beyond the Steinberg Road crossing in Road Monkey during my first lap (map here), the recorded time suddenly jumped from June 15, 2013 to October 19, 2019. This explains the strange duration I’d been seeing in analysis software, with everything from Ascent and Strava both reporting an elapsed time of around 55619:03:11, the length of a ride which I don’t quite think the Edge 500’s battery would endure, but which matches the 6-some year offset. Weirdly, Garmin Connect doesn’t show the issue (link), almost as if they filter out this problem.

When this issue occurred my Garmin was running firmware v3.00, something which I was hesitant to change soon before the race. Since the changelog to v3.20 only lists two minor changes which aren’t useful for me (power meter serial number display and a change to support manufacturing) I didn’t see a good reason to rush to upgrade. It’d also worked otherwise well for long rides, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. I upgraded the unit to v3.20 today and I’ll see if similar problems arise, but I can’t imagine I’ll be doing that length of ride any time soon, so it’ll be hard to get an equivalent test.

If any of you wish to review this damaged FIT file from Lumberjack 100 it can be found here: svigneau_2013_lumberjack100.fit.

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Google Nexus 4 Supports GLONASS (and GPS)

Published May 5, 2013

A few days back Jeff pointed out to me that the Google Nexus 4 supports both GPS and GLONASS for satellite-based geolocation. I hadn’t noticed this before, but sure enough as seen above in GPS Status & Toolbox there they are. The GLONASS satellites are the boxes shown in grey, where the GPS satellites are the green circles.

This helps explain why the device is so good at getting fast location fixes and also why it works so well for my amateur mapping work. I’ve wanted a GLONASS-supporting device for a while and now I have one. Yay!

(This screenshot was taken while logging the location of Stony Creek’s Trolly Trails so I can commit the route to OpenStreetMap.)

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Adobe Creative Suite Weirdness on OS X after Manual Backup

Published April 18, 2013

I’d been having a problem on my main OS X machine where, every time Adobe Acrobat would try to do a security update I’d receive a cryptic error message stating that I’d modified the installation and therefore the update wouldn’t work. During use of Creative Suite products (mostly Illustrator) I’d occasional see odd quirks, like slow(-er than expected) application launching or updates that seemed to run more than once.

After some digging I eventually found that the root of the problem was a backup of my Applications folder that I’d created when I reinstalled the OS post-SSD failure.

In recovering from this failure I figured that a clean OS install would be nice, so I moved /Applications off to a corner of my disk (/Volumes/Cruft/Storage/Applications.old if I recall correctly) and let it sit, just in case I forgot to copy or reinstall something and was later wanting for it. It appears that these .app bundles (the special folders suffixed .app, such as Adobe Illustrator.app) were still being seen as valid programs, and sometimes run instead of the intended ones in the root of the drive. This resulted in updates working strangely, slow launching as they weren’t read from the SSD, and the other quirkyness that I’d seen.

Having been a number of months since I created the …/Applications.old backup and not needing anything in there I deleted it, and all was better. Adobe Acrobat updated once more, and since then everything has worked as expected.

So, if you’re having problems with Adobe application updates failing weirdly on OS X, look around for other copies of the application bundles. Maybe this is your problem as well…

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Tiny Tiny RSS on nuxx.net

Published March 14, 2013

With Google announcing that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1, 2013 I finally got around to trying out Tiny Tiny RSS, a web-based, host-it-yourself, multi-user, database-backed RSS reader. I’ve always tried to keep an eye on alternatives to Google’s services, and for the last year or so I’ve considered giving this a go. The announced sunset finally made me give it a go.

This was pretty easy to set up, with the biggest hassle coming from trying to make the optional Sphinx search engine do its thing. The poller took a little bit of effort to get right as well, but running it in the background via daemon(8) seems to have done the needful. Getting my Google Reader feeds into was pretty easy as well. By visiting https://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export I received an XML file that I could import into Tiny Tiny RSS via the Preferences → Feeds → OPML menu. I received a rather odd error during the import, but after exiting from Preferences all of my feeds were listed. (One can get all of their Google Reader info via Takeout as detailed here on Google’s Data Liberation page.)

Beyond a growing number of desktop apps that support Tiny Tiny RSS as a back end (as opposed to Google Reader) there is also an official Tiny Tiny RSS Android app which, so far, seems nicer than Google’s mobile Reader offering. The app costs $1.99 after the initial 7-day trial, but I think this is a small price to pay to support the author for such a nicely working setup. The source for the app is available here if one really doesn’t want to pay, but for this I think supporting the author is a great idea.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how fast development on Tiny Tiny RSS will progress now that it is getting widespread attention as a Google Reader replacement. While it seems to work well the UI is a bit ugly, and when used from work via a proxy it seems a bit slow at times. I could see a whole bunch of UI changes and performance improvements coming if it gets attention from folks who specialize in this.

If any of you who read this and know me would like an account on nuxx.net so you may use it yourself as a replacement for Google Reader, drop me a note and I’ll set you up.

(And yes, this is a test post to see if it shows up in the reader, just to confirm that everything is working…)

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The New MMBA Trail Guide

Published March 6, 2013

I’ve been working on much of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the Michigan Mountain Biking Association (MMBA) website for a few years now. This started with a group of us moving from a broken phpBB2-based site to a Joomla site and a phpBB3 forum. After a couple of years the Joomla site was replaced with the more manageable and updatable WordPress.

Back when on Joomla there was a decent page that presented a Trail Guide that Rob Ritzenhein had built for Joomla which was a searchable list of mountain biking trails within the state along with a ZIP code-based proximity search. With the move to WordPress I had to drop this searchable trail guide and replaced it with a basic, text-based list that had been generated off of the old trail data. After two mis-starts and incomplete attempts to find a replacement during 2012, I was a bit concerned that I wasn’t going to have much luck finding someone who was able to write such a guide.

Out of the blue in late January 2013 I received email from a guy named Jeff Lau who said (in much more polite words) that our existing guide sucks and that he’d like to have a go at making something better. He was very right, and after he showed a very promising proof of concept I was really impressed, so he and I met up and things got rolling. Fast forward a couple weeks and he had software nearly ready to go. I was able to help out with some graphics stuff (made my first sprite sheet) and get the old trail data adapted to the new format and loaded into the site, and get a bunch of interested volunteers to proof and submit updates to the data. Following a few rounds of testing and small tweaks it was ready to release.

Last night Jeff and I were able to launch the site publicly, and thus far it’s been very well received. The guide is no longer an impenetrable wall of text, but instead a dynamic, flowing, zoomable Google-based map paired with a list of trails and their details which simply feels nice to use. Updates are easy, done by putting data in an OpenOffice.org Base database and running an SQL query which generates the CSVs, then uploading them to the trail guide’s data directory. Everything seen by the user is client-side JavaScript with the actual data stored in simple CSV files, so it all runs in the user’s browser and requires nothing special on the server.

I’m really impressed with the work that Jeff did in writing the Trail Guide software. He said he wanted to do something, did it, and turned it around very quickly, just in time for spring. The weather is just starting to warm here in Michigan, and getting this kind of guide ready before people look for it is key. I believe that this guide is one of the most important publicly accessible Michigan mountain bike trail advocacy tools that has been put forward in a while.

I strongly believe that one of the best ways to ensure trails remain good for and open to biking is to keep people using them. Once they reach a critical mass they become self-maintaining (users remove much of the deadfall themselves), and the chance of them becoming closed to bikes diminishes because they are well-used and known cycling areas. Giving people a guide to help them find trails increases usage by increasing accessibility.

This cost of this guide came in at a cost of about 120 hours of Jeff’s time, and 40-50 of mine. (While he kept detailed records I did not, but I did have a few 6 hour evenings of researching trails details for accuracy and entering them in the database one at a time.)

The official announcement of the new trail guide can be found here on the MMBA website, and the trail guide itself can be found here: http://mmba.org/trail-guide

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osm2ai.pl w/ JOSM XML Support

Published February 5, 2013

When working up some map stuff and trying to follow my own OSM workflow I ran into a quirk where the osm2ai.pl script wouldn’t deal with OSM XML coming out of JOSM.

Thank to help from a few folks on IRC I now have this updated version of osm2ai.pl available and it will successfully parse files from JOSM.

The root cause of this problem is the script parsing XML by hand, but as I didn’t have the time (or knowledge) to fix the problem by using an XML parser, this hack which deals with differing quote types and extra spacing, was put into place. It works, and I was able to get the map that I promised to someone complete.

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Fixing nuxx.net’s Backups

Published November 29, 2012

nuxx.net has a backup system which uses rsync to back up the server (and everything it hosts) to my desktop iMac, deduplicating the files by way of rsync’s --link-dest argument to create hard links (detailed info here). Maintaining a 30 day backup history it only uses the space of one full backup plus 29 days of change, which isn’t much given the utility allowed. It’s been running fine for a few years, but about a month or so ago I began getting errors where the target disk for the backups was full, which seemed a bit odd to me. As a stopgap I was able to clean up some other things and keep backups working, but the space was a lot more than normal.

Today I managed to get this resolved, but it took a bit of digging. Below the fold you can see what I found.

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How To Disable IPv6 w/ Sendmail on FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE

Published November 25, 2012

Due to some issues with Comcast flagging some email I’ve been sending via IPv6 as Spam I wanted to keep mail from being sent this way. Comcast publishes this document explaining how to keep IPv6 mail from being blocked, but I’ve got some rDNS issues to sort out before I can work through all of those. So, in the mean time I simply wanted to stop

It took a bit to figure out how to disable IPv6 in the base Sendmail, but now that I’ve got it done I figured I’d share. This is in 9.0-RELEASE, but I’m sure it applies to many other recent FreeBSD Versions:

Edit /etc/make.conf to ensure that IPv6 is turned off for Sendmail compiles. Add this line to the file:

SENDMAIL_CFLAGS= -UNETINET6

Rebuild Sendmail as described here in the FreeBSD Handbook:

# cd /usr/src/lib/libsmutil
# make cleandir && make obj && make
# cd /usr/src/lib/libsm
# make cleandir && make obj && make
# cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/sendmail
# make cleandir && make obj && make && make install

Then, go into your Sendmail config directory (/etc/mail), and if you haven’t so before, run make all to build your machine-specific Sendmail config files.

Edit hostname.mc and locate the line that reads DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Name=IPv6, Family=inet6, Modifiers=O') and comment it out by adding a dnl in front of it:

dnl DAEMON_OPTIONS(`Name=IPv6, Family=inet6, Modifiers=O')

Compile the Sendmail config and restart Sendmail:

make install
make restart

And, now you’re done! Look at /var/log/maillog to ensure that mail is no longer being delivered via IPv6.

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Asus Eee Box 1501 Upgrades

Published October 5, 2012

I’ve been wanting to make the Asus Eee Box 1501 PC that I’ve got connected to the television perform a bit better, so having a spare SSD hanging around I decided to do some upgrading. Using the personal version of XXCLONE I was able to easily copy the old 250GB drive to the SSD, and the RAM was easy to upgrade once I purchased the right stuff. I’d initially made the mistake of thinking I had a 1501P model when mine was actually the plain 1501. This meant I’d accidentally acquired DDR3 RAM, only noticing my mistake when it didn’t fit into the slot. After another trip back to Micro Center (and a bunch of waiting^†)

As a result of these upgrades the machine feels much faster, and I hope that the problems I was having with Netflix will be gone. The issues seemed disk related, as things would slow down tremendously whenever there was a bit of disk activity occurring. Running diagnostic tools showed a correlation between slowness and disk busyness too. Since this could also have been caused by paging (I didn’t look at it in enough detail to say if it was or not) I also increased the RAM.

Total price for this upgrade was $63.57 ($59.99 for the RAM, plus sales tax), and was only this much because DDR2 is becoming rare and thus more expensive. The upgrade was done in anticipation of seriously reshuffling the video (broadcast TV, internet streaming, etc) setup around the house. That’ll all hopefully happen within the next week or so.

(The photo above shows the inside of the Asus Eee Box 1501. The disassembly was very easy, but I was strongly disappointed by the wireless antenna. While it looks detachable and has a knurled base, turning it broke the plastic off and revealed it to be nothing more than a snap-on antenna with coax that runs directly to the network card. While not completely broken the antenna is now a bit loose and floppy. Thankfully the RF connection is still intact.)

^† Exchanging the RAM involved waiting in a line to initiate the return, attempting to find the replacement RAM (which listed 5 pieces in stock, but couldn’t be found), locating a suitable alternate replacement, negotiating a price match to the product which couldn’t be found, waiting for the return to be processed, then waiting for the replacement RAM to be brought to the front of the store. This took a total of ~55 minutes.

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External Intel 320 SSD

Published August 17, 2012

A couple weeks back, the Intel 320 SSD in my iMac failed, leaving the machine unbootable and the drive appearing as an 8MB volume. This drive was replaced with a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and the Intel drive was returned for warranty replacement.

Having no immediate need for another SSD but not wanting to have this one laying around I decided to put it in a Macally PHR-S250UAB external enclosure and use it as another piece of fast storage on my Mac. While the installation went well I’m not quite happy with the performance. Despite being connected via FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b-2002) couple of benchmark tools report only around 80 MB/sec read and 65 MB/sec write while the spinning piece of rust inside the computer reports something like 105 MB/sec read and 107 MB/sec write. It’ll be much lower latency than a spinning disk, but I’m not sure it’ll provide improvement over the internal disk, especially for things I was hoping to do with it like running VMs.

Maybe I’ll give it a try on my work laptop for VMs there, or maybe I’ll see if it’d work out well in Danielle’s Macbook Pro.

The photo above shows the external enclosure with an Intel-provided case sticker applied to the top in place of Macally’s branding. Except for the residual curved blue logo pieces at the end that didn’t fall outside of the cutoff area, I think this worked pretty well. Here is a photo of it all being assembled.

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