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GPS + Bike Stuff

Published March 16, 2008

Google Earth Plot of my Bike Ride
(Click for full res image…)

That right there is a plot of the bike ride I went on yesterday. Yes, it won’t make much sense for those of you who don’t know the northern Sterling Heights / Utica / Clinton Township area, but it’s a ~12 mile round trip.

If you’re wondering how this is made, I simply had my old Garmin eTrex Legend GPS mounted on the handlebar of my bike, logging the route as I rode. Then today I connected it to my Mac via a serial cable and USB adapter, fired up the Mac OS X version of GPSBabel+, set the input to the USB serial port, type Garmin GPS, selected to transfer only Tracks, and set the output to ‘Google Earth (Keyhole) Markup Language’, or KML file. Then I just opened the file in Google Earth, edited it a bit, deleted the points and left only the track, and saved it off as a new KMZ. Here is a screenshot of GPSBabel+ set up the way I use it for transferring data from my GPS to a KML file.

Note that when using the GPSBabel+, if I select Waypoints, Tracks, and Routes I only get Waypoints. If I select just Tracks, I get the data used for this plot. If I select just Routes, GPSbabel (or the crappy USB adapter, or something) hangs, with a process I can’t kill, even with -9. (This is why I suspect it’s the crappy USB adapter or its driver.). Also note that GPSBabel+ is a OS X GUI for the gpsbabel command line utility.

If you’d like to poke with the data for the map, and open it in Google Earth (or whatever) yourself, grab 15-Mar-08_dodge_park.kmz.

This link opens the file in Google Maps for you, with street names and such.

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Today’s Bike Ride

Published March 15, 2008

My Bike, Kinda Dirty
(Click for bigger…)

Today (Brian) and I met up at Dodge Park in Sterling Heights to go for a bit of a ride. We ended up riding through the park for a little ways, then down Utica to Schoenherr, up 16 Mile, through some subdivisions, and down Dodge Park (the road) back to Dodge Park proper. Brian was pretty cold by this time, as his shoes are pretty airy, and due to a fall (while he was getting used to his new clipless pedals) which got his glove wet. That, and he had to meet some people for Japanese food at 5pm.

By this time we’d gone around six or seven miles, but I was wanting to ride some more, so I headed back into the park and along the river, eventually going under M-53 and up to Riverland Drive. After this I stopped and had a Clif bar (I hadn’t eaten much today), then headed back. All in all I did just over 12 miles. I could go a bit more, but I don’t want to completely kill my legs in one day.

At a few points while riding I had to go through 3″ of standing water, and almost everywhere ridden was either wet, muddy, or snowy. Despite almost all of it being pavement, only the residential roads were dry, which, as you can see meant that I had to wash my bike off when getting home. I hosed it down and gently brushed it with a soft car washing brush., and it’s pretty clean now, but I could use some degreasing cleaner to sort out some parts of the frame.

I grabbed a GPS track of the whole ride, so hopefully I’ll have a nice plot tonight, layed over Google Earth or something. Now, time to shower, go to Target and get a more proper shirt for biking in, swing by work, get some Indian food, then… I’m not sure what else.

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Zenith DTT900

Published March 11, 2008

Inside of the Zenith DTT900

Remember back when I got my DTV Deputy certificate? Well, today the DTV2009 coupon arrived, so I went out to Circuit City, waited an infuriating 15 minutes to pay, then acquired a Zenith DTT900 DTV converter box (photo gallery retired). I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I did tear it apart.

So, want to see the inside of a DTV converter? Click here (photo gallery retired).

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New Belt

Published March 9, 2008

My Old Belt

That’s my old belt. A rather worn US military issue belt and belt buckle. Today I finally grew tired enough of it to put together a new one from these parts, literally a new belt and buckle.

Also, this Adobe Lightroom to Gallery plugin works well. I’m going to add the setting of summary field from metadata when I get some time to poke with it, but it shouldn’t be hard to do.

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The Lives Of Others

Published March 8, 2008

Tonight Danielle and I watched The Lives of Others. There are two notable things about this.

One, it’s an excellent film. Probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while.

Two, this movie was rented via Netflix a week ago, but I ripped it using HandBrake because Danielle wanted to return it. Dropping it into ~/Movies and playing it on my Xbox 360 via Connect360 worked out very well. Ripped at an average bitrate of 1500kbps with 2-pass encoding, turbo first pass, and no deinterlacing (samples of the movie in the transcoder GUI showed this to be unneeded) they played just fine and looked to be of the same quality as movies played using my upscaling OPPO DV970HD (photo gallery retired).

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Bike Rack

Published March 6, 2008

Danielle’s Townie and my bike on my car.

Today the gigantic box containing the Thule 917 T2 bike rack which I had ordered from backcountry.com arrived today. Upon opening the box I found that the contents were a bit disshoveled and the instruction manual was missing. Also, a few of the parts were scratched a bit, and there was a rather scuffed up, but spare, pipe end cap in the box. After looking the rack over, based on the wear on the nuts, I figured that someone had purchased it, assembled it up to the point where it had to be put on the car, then put it back as it was, and returned it. This meant that it really didn’t have any wear except. The parts kit hadn’t even been opened.

The scratches (example) aren’t too bad, and being a car part I figured it would eventually get a few scratches on it anyway, so I decided to go ahead with assembling it.

I finished putting things together, fit both Danielle’s bike and mine on there, then used a plumb bob (really, a washer and some sort of high tension fishing line I found in a park) to measure the distance between the end of each wheel and the center post. I then moved the bike racks side to side, and now both bikes fit, nicely centered on the vehicle, with plenty of clearance between them.

All in all, I’m quite happy with it. The rack doesn’t take a standard hitch pin, instead coming with a bolt and lock washer which should hold the rack very securely in the hitch. One particularly great part is the fit of Danielle’s bike. Because of the fender on it I was afraid that the mechanism for holding the front wheel down would require removal of the fender. Well, as can be seen here, I was able to securely fit the clamp in front of the fender where it still securely holds the wheel. Yay!

If you’d like to see more photos of the bike rack on my car, please take a look at then end of this page (photo gallery retired) and all of this page.

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Sequentix P3 Assembly

Published March 5, 2008

Hrm. It looks like I’m going to be doing contract assembly of two Sequentix P3s for $300/each. One is the very original old case kit, the other is the newer design. One of the guys may want me to build up a modular for him as well…

This should satisfy my wanting-to-assemble-something itch, while at the same time getting me a bit bigger savings account.

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PR #5732

Published March 4, 2008

See that Change the default console to zstty0? [no] line? That’s the result of OpenBSD Problem Report #5732 which I had submitted a few weeks back. Two days ago Ken Westerback, one of the OpenBSD devs emailed me a patch which was about to be committed in order to resolve the problem, and a request that I test it on macppc. Well, I did, and it works great.

In short, it looks through your dmesg for the console and sets up whatever serial port is used for that as your console.

This makes me happy. OpenBSD really is a great OS.

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OpenBSD Bug Fix?

Published March 3, 2008

Yesterday morning I received a patch which should fix OpenBSD PR #5732. It’s a patch for all platforms, which has (supposedly) been applied to the 4.3 family which should be released on 01-May. I’ve been asked to test it, so it looks like I’ll be doing a reinstall on my firewall this evening, this time from the latest snapshot. Hopefully it’ll all go well. Good thing I’ve got my pre-made config files files to base everything off of. I just hope I did them right. ;)

Oh, that also means I’ll be spending quite a while sitting in front of a cold rack in the basement at a serial console. Ah well.

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