nuxx.net – Page 31 – Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

No More Tables

Published March 19, 2013

For the last ten (or so) years that I’ve been posting to a weblog (first as c0nsumer on LiveJournal and now here on nuxx.net/blog) I’ve regularly posted images at the top of the post. Embarassingly, up until today I’ve been using a templatized HTML table with 1px of padding and a black background to make the 1px black border around each image:

I’ve know that this is the wrong way to go for a while now, but not knowing much about CSS I didn’t want to take the time to learn what was needed to change things for the better. I also had something that worked, cross-posted properly to LiveJournal, and wasn’t hard to maintain. One thing that it didn’t afford me was the ability to use WordPress’s visual editor; something which would allow me to easily create more image-laden posts and edit posts more quickly.

With the recent implementation of the new MMBA Trail Guide and some updates that needed to be done I’d been reworking a few different parts of the server, and it was time to change some things on this, my personal site. The main page had been MediaWiki (MW)-based for a while, but I now prefer WordPress (WP) for a main-website CMS, especially as I make blog posts far more frequently than the long-form technical writing that MediaWiki is best for. I started by upgrading MW and returning it to a more default theme, then moving WP to be the main page reached when one visits nuxx.net. Content on MW was the adjusted to house only Technical Pages, and links to the most useful pages were added to WP.

The result of this will be that the main page of nuxx.net is now WordPress based, and brings about all the ease-of-writing features that it is known for. MediaWiki remains present, but has been relegated to a repository for technical info that’d be difficult to write up cleanly in WP; something which I intend to continue using whenever I work on detailed technical topics.

Thanks to help from my friend Rob I was able to get my head around using Chrome’s Elements Panel to easily figure out what was needed to style the images with a nice 1px border without using a silly table. Hopefully I’ll stick to the use of CSS in the future, avoiding more silly hacks like using tables in 2013. All posts going back to the beginning of the year have been updated to remove the use of a table for a border, but previous posts will end up stuck with a 6px border: 1px for the original padding plus 5px added by a margin on the images. I don’t think this is terrible and is probably just part of the price of progress. I had to do it at some point.

Going forward I may also move some of the less-technical content (such as a journal written while on a solo cruise to Alaska in 2003 or mixes) to WordPress just as I did with the About page, but I’ve yet to decide on that. For now I’ll just enjoy the enhanced writing capabilites, growing CSS knowledge, and improved writing tools.

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Free Recliner and Filing Cabinet

Published March 17, 2013

Would anyone like either this two-drawer plastic filing cabinet or this light brown cloth Lay-Z-Boy recliner? Both are used but in good shape. I no longer have a need for them and would like them gone, but I’d prefer to see them go to a good home where they will get used.

The filing cabinet served me well for a number of years, but has been replaced with an upright metal model. The recliner doesn’t work out with the house setup, and while still comfy has found itself relegated to the basement, sitting idly, and facing the furnace with no one to sit in it. Help give this recliner a purpose again by giving it a place in your home.

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A Clean Closet

Published March 17, 2013

The closet in the office has always been a bit of a dead space. It’s housed a filing cabinet and been used for a bit of storage, but ever since moving in here eleven-some years ago it’s been rather neglected. It was originally a basic particle board shelving closet with the curved metal faces to hold hangers, but something more was needed. Previously I had fit a plastic filing cabinet and old wood CD rack in one side, and two cheap shelves and the printer on the other side. This worked, but something more was needed, so with Danielle here we decided to make better use of the space.

By picking up a HON 510 four-drawer filing cabinet the plastic filing cabinet could be replaced and more stuff filed away. ClosetMaid-brand wire shelving was installed as shoe racks in the lower half of the right side, and the upper half was fitted with a rail-based adjustable shelf system. This provides much more storage on the upper part of the closet, better filing of paperwork and things that I want to save such as old manuals and receipts, and a place to put shoes that isn’t right next to a door.

Total cost for this project, including the filing cabinet, was $343.78, with $178.47 of that being the new filing cabinet (after tax and shipping, purchased on a sale at Costco) and $165.31 being the wire shelving and some extras that Danielle wanted for the bedroom closet. This also provided the impetus for cleaning out the closet and disposing of a fair bit of old paperwork and media that I’d let accumulate over the years. I still have a bit of filing of old data and audio CDs to do and some cables to put away, but that should only be an evening’s work.

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Advance Auto Parts Marine Grease is PEAK Performance Synthetic Marine Grease

Published March 15, 2013

En route to work today I stopped off at Advance Auto Parts and picked up some house brand Marine Grease to use when reassembling my bike rack after fixing the hitch retention piece. I wanted to find the MSDS for this product so I could try to figure out what materials this product is compatible with, but after the Advance Auto Parts MSDS Page didn’t return anything when searching for the product (SKU #A2953013) I called the listed phone number and asked for help.

The person who answered the phone was very helpful and — despite not being able to find the product by SKU — found the MSDS and emailed it to me. You can get a copy of it here. Embedded in the email was the path I:\M9\OLD WORLD INDUSTRIES\ELRMA14OZ.PDF, which I find interesting as it shows both that the company has a simple directory structure full of MSDS, and that this product is actually made by Old World Industries, the parent company for PEAK and a number of other automotive companies. Per a recent press release:

Old World Industries, LLC is among the largest privately-held companies competing in the automotive aftermarket. The Northbrook, Illinois-based company enjoys a presence in various consumer product markets in more than 30 countries worldwide. Old World’s brands include a full line of PEAK® Performance Products including Antifreeze, Motor Oil, Washer Fluid, Electronics and Wiper Blades; SIERRA® Antifreeze; Fleet Charge® Fully Formulated Coolant; Final Charge® Heavy Duty Global Extended Life Antifreeze/Coolant; SmartBLADE™ Premium Wiper Blades; HERCULINER® Truck Bed Liner Kits; and BlueDEF® Diesel Exhaust Fluid. For more information, please visit http://www.peakauto.com.

Comparing this product’s MSDS to the one from Advance Auto Parts SKU #A2953013 shows them to be identical (including the contact person and his phone number), save for some slight formatting and naming changes. Based on this I think this $3.99 tube of Advance Auto Parts-brand Marine Grease is the same as PEAK® Performance Synthetic Marine Grease. Thus these should also be the specs for the Advance Auto Parts grease.

Isn’t research via MSDS great? Digging into these lets one peer behind the labels on lots of products…

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Elegant Cadence Sensor Magnet

Published March 15, 2013

My friend Jeremy lost his Garmin cadence sensor magnet so he replaced it with a simple neodymium magnet. After hearing about how well that worked for him I picked up some similarly sized ones from eBay and put one on the crankset for my new bike. I opted for a 8mm thick (10mm diameter) magnet where he’d gone with the 6mm thick version. I picked this based on how far out from the crank arm the normal Garmin sensor sits, although with the additional strength of the larger magnet this may not have been necessary.

The magnet sticks solidly to the end of the pedal spindle, nestled inside of the 10mm hole in the Race Face Crank Boot. It’s a bit difficult to pry off with my finger, but easy enough to remove I can’t help but wonder if I should have opted for a thinner version instead, so I just purchased some 3mm thick magnets on eBay and will give those a go as well. Whichever I end up using it’s a very elegant solution that I expect to work out quite well, as long as it doesn’t come out and become stuck in my drivetrain or something terrible. It also looks much nicer (and is much easier to fit) than the normal Garmin magnet, as it doesn’t use adhesive nor require a cable tie around the crank arm.

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Chilly Evening MOT Ride

Published March 14, 2013

This evening I headed home from work early enough to get a ride in, and found myself parked at Onyx and ready to go at about 5:15pm. Being in the 40s I was fairly comfortable in a jersey + wind jacket, knickers, and autumn-weight gloves at the beginning, but by the end of the ride it wasn’t enough. With the sun setting temperatures were dropping, making it cold enough that I was shivering in the car on the drive home and needing a long, hot shower before I could feel my toes.

The route ended up taking me to Armada and back, and on the way out I got to experience my first serious leg cramp after trying to push myself hard for ~10 miles straight. Just as I stepped on to my pedal to cross 32 Mile Road my right calf clenched, and I had to stop for a few minutes afterward to let it loosen up. It felt odd throughout the entire rest of the ride, but thankfully never got as bad as when it’d locked up.

Not long after turning back in Armada I crossed paths with Tom Payne, with us seeing each long enough to say hi and hit hands (or whatever that thing you do when passing people where it’s sort of like a high five, but not up high and not with a full hand). I kept pushing on back towards the car, keeping an eye on the setting sun, when not long after passing through Romeo I received a call from Danielle asking for help while she was in a spinning class. It seems that the cleat had come off of her shoe becoming stuck in the pedal, and she was looking for suggestions for how to get it back out. I was cold enough at this point that I had difficulty holding the phone, but a few minutes of rest did help warm my hands again.

Just as I was taking off from the phone call someone a guy named Chris rode up behind me, and he and I ended up finishing up my ride together. He does mostly road riding and thus was pushing along at 19-20 MPH for most of the route. I was able to keep up riding side by side for most of it, but as we got near the end I tucked in behind him and drafted for a bit. 30-ish miles of road-ish riding is a fair bit for me, and not being accustomed to that kind of sustained output I really needed the help.

This ended up being a very nice ride. While I was cold it was great to see someone I knew, get to ride with someone else, and just to get out and about. The photo above was taken at my turnaround point near the grain elevator in Armada. The Strava data for the ride can be seen here, showing what seems like a weirdly straight route. That’s how it goes this time of the year, though.

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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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Replacement 1UP USA Hitch Bar

Published March 13, 2013

One day after cleaning salt off my 1UP USA bike rack I found that the ball on it was no longer retracting easily, making it hard to get the rack in and out of my hitch. I emailed 1UP USA asking for a few pointers on disassembling the retention mechanism and fixing it, but instead of that they sent a whole new hitch bar.

This evening I disassembled my rack to replace this piece, but then when cleaning the individual parts I found and was able to fix the problem. There is a plastic cap located in the part of the hitch bar that goes furthest towards the front of the vehicle and appears intended to keep from reaching the ball-moving mechanism. If this gets pushed towards the rear of the vehicle it can settle in behind the ball, preventing it from retracting. This was the problem that I had.

With the rack apart I decided to spend time washing the salt off of it, so now it’s sitting in the basement drying. I’ll get some blue marine grease (same as the rack originally used), put it back together, then get back to using it. I really do like the design of this rack. It does a great job of holding bikes in place and it makes it really easy to adjust two bikes to fit nicely while still keeping them centered on the vehicle.

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Syringes are Useful

Published March 7, 2013

I’m really glad that we keep syringes and hypodermic needles around the house. The oyster mushrooms that are growing in the basement have stagnated and somewhat dried out, and I think that this is caused by the growth media drying out. Having a 60cc syringe and a 19 gauge needle sitting around I figured the easiest way to get water into the media without breaking open the plastic surrounding it was to inject it with water. A few syringe-fulls later and the media was quite a bit heavier, so hopefully the mushrooms will now grow properly.

These 60cc syringes have also been quite useful for putting Stan’s No Tubes Sealant in bicycle tires, as the Luer taper fitting fits very nicely over a Presta valve stem with the core removed.

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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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