nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Continental TravelContact

March 18, 2008

Continental TravelContact 26 x 1.75″ Tire

Today after work I picked up two Continental TravelContact tires for my bike. While the tires that it came with are pretty decent, I wanted a smoother rolling tire for when riding on paths and other paved areas. While I’d previous purchased some rather all right Forte FastCity ST/K mostly smooth tires, I found that they are just too narrow for anything other than pavement.

After a bunch of reading online and a bit of conversation here, I ended up going by REI and purchasing a membership, two tires, and two tubes. I wasn’t sure if the tubes already in my bike tires would fit, so I got these. I’ve got a spare 1.5″ – 2.0″ Forte tube, so that’ll continue to be my spare (these are 1.75″).

As you can see above (or in this top view), the Continental TravelContact has a really smooth center, with knobs on the edges. I took the bike out for a quick ride this evening after fitting the tires, and they definitely roll both more smoothly and easily than the knobby tires which were on there. I had no problem riding / hopping over some of the remaining piles of snow either, and they feel a good bit more solid / sure footed than the narrow FastCity ST/K ones I’d tried before. So, all in all, these seem like pretty nice tires. Hopefully I’ll have some time to ride this weekend and get a good bit more use out of them.

Oh, I also swung by Lowes on the way home and picked up this cheap lock ($12) for securing my bike when running up to the grocery store. It’s the sort of area where one could leave their car doors unlocked and most likely not have a problem, so I think this should be good enough for keeping someone from just riding away. I wouldn’t trust it for all-day use in a secluded area, but for a bike rack near the front door of a large grocery store, it should be fine.

UPDATE: I just remembered that I forgot to roll out the front tire and measure it’s circumference. Ergh. I’ll have to do this tomorrow. If I’m going to instrument something (in this case, the bike) I like it to be reasonably accurate.

acquired thingscyclingmoved from livejournal

Bike Tires

March 17, 2008

So, not long after getting my bike I picked up a pair of Forte FastCity ST/K tires. These are relatively narrow, somewhat smooth tires designed to make a mountain bike work better on roads. This they do very well, but they are awful on other surfaces.

The knobby tires which came with my bike seem to do well on trails, but whenever I’m riding on pavement they are a bit rough/rumbly, and just a bit harder than the smooth tires to pedal / go fast with.

I’ve been finding that what I really want, to match how I use the bike, is something which is smooth rolling on pavement, but will still be okay when I have to deal with spots of mud, puddles, and riding around on grass / dirt paths, two-tracks up north, stuff like that. Not true mountain bike uses, but more go-anywhere tires.

Looking around online I came across these, Continental Traffic tires, which seem to have a nicely smooth but still grooved center, and bigger knobs around the edge. From these reviews they look like they’d be pretty all right.

Do any of you have an opinion on these, or possibly recommendations for similar tires?

Thanks very much!

cyclingmoved from livejournal

GPS + Bike Stuff

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

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.

cyclingmoved from livejournal

Zenith DTT900

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

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

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).

computersmoved from livejournalmovies

Bike Rack

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

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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