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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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Crooked Maps?

Published March 3, 2013

In working on the forthcoming MMBA trail guide data I’ve had to find the lat/lon boundaries for rectangular maps so they can be presented as overlays on a Google Map. In doing this I’ve found that almost all of the Michigan DNR-drawn maps seem slightly crooked compared to what I see in OpenStreetMap. It almost looks as if the designer of the map rotated it slightly so that the north/south roads align with the page border.

When making the Stony Creek and Addison Oaks maps I’d noticed that roads which I’d previously thought of as oriented perfectly north-south or east-west were slightly crooked. Now I’m wondering if there’s something I’m not understanding with regards to map projections in Michigan.

Reading this article from the DNR about map projections I see that Michigan has its own projection system called Michigan State Plane Coordinate System. (More info here at Wikipedia.) So, I’m starting to wonder if there’s something that I’m missing and possibly doing wrong with regards to map making in Michigan. I just don’t know enough to know yet.

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Home Grown Oyster Mushrooms

Published February 21, 2013

Danielle’s brother and sister-in-law sent us a kit from Cascadia Mushrooms that promised to grow oyster mushrooms. We’d inadvertently ignored it for a couple weeks, during which time it started growing, so we quickly set to starting it properly. The first harvest of mushrooms was good, but a little bit woody, so we’ll pay much more attention to the second crop which has just started growing.

As seen above, clusters of mushrooms have just barely begun growing, with the largest one comprised of a few primordium now visible. (The scale shown is a millimeter ruler.) I expect that within a week these will be much larger and almost ready to harvest. This time I’ll try to collect them before they turn woody, and if timing works out I’ll try to serve them up with scrambled eggs and toast, just as I ate when Dominic and I were in Brussels.

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Heel Rub Protection for SRAM X0 Crankset

Published February 17, 2013

I recently came across a great deal on a 2011 SRAM X0 2×10 crankset; something which should be a drop-in replacement for the X7 crankset that’s slated to come on the bike that I’ve got on order. Being carbon fiber and looking very nice I want to keep them in great shape, so I decided to apply some protective tape to cut down on heel rub† and some plastic caps to keep then ends from chipping when hitting rocks.

Race Face’s Crank Boots took care of the end of the crank arms, but for heel rub I turned to my favorite rub protection material, UHMW polyethylene tape. After a few minutes with some masking tape, a marker, and some drawing software I’d made this template which was easily transfered to the tape. As I used some thin (.0045″) tape it was a bit of a hassle to get in place, but hopefully my cleaning routine (glass cleaner followed up with isopropyl alcohol) got the cranks clean enough that the tape won’t begin peeling before I want to remove it.

The applied tape looks a bit milky, but I think that once in place on a bike it’ll be fine. The photo above is worst-case for appearance, as the angled lighting shows all of the slight surface imperfections in the tape. Just as when used for cable rub protection I feel that this super-slippery, strong tape will do a better job of preserving the cranks than the crystal clear polyurethane films that are normally used.

With the peel-off backing still in place the tape only weighed 1g, and with the Crank Boots coming in at 15g for the pair this bit of extra protection won’t add much to the overall weight of the bike. This photo shows the boots and pedals installed, and I’m pretty happy with how it all looks.

Since this crankset is a pretty common style and SRAM doesn’t appear to have changed the molds for their carbon fiber cranksets much recently I hope that quite a few others find this PDF template useful: SRAM XO Crank Arm Protector Template, Designed for 175mm 2011 2×10 X0 GXP Crankset, part number 00.6115.422.070.

† Heel rub is when one’s shoe rubs against a bike’s crank arm, wearing off the finish.

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FJF Door Sales Flyposted My House

Published February 16, 2013

During some routine repairs FJF Door Sales of Clinton Township, MI stuck an advertisement on the inside of my residence; something which I feel to be an inappropriate act.

A month back the garage door opener spring broke, and a quick call to the management company for our condo resulted in FJF Door Sales got it fixed the next morning. All of this was good and I was happy with the promptness and service provided. Since the garage had become the domain of Danielle’s new car I’m rarely in there with the door closed, so it wasn’t until yesterday evening I noticed the advertising decal that had been stuck to the inside of the garage door at eye level.

I find it ridiculous that this company feels that it is okay to stick their advertisement on the inside of one’s house after they have performed a repair.

Living in a condo makes this manner of advertising even more asinine, as garage doors (and other exterior elements) in this complex are handled by the condo association and not individual co-owners. Therefore, advertising directly to a co-owner is pointless.

Removing this advertisement has proven to be rather difficult. FJF chose to use a very cheap type of paper decal which tore when peeled and left behind a good deal of adhesive. This won’t be easy to remove since flat paint tends to absorb whatever has been applied to it and most adhesive removers are oil-based and won’t evaporate completely. The best recommendations I’ve found all involve cleaning the area and then repainting, but this’ll be a fair bit of work and have to wait until spring. All because one company chose to stick their ad to the inside of my house.

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More GPS Goofyness

Published February 15, 2013

This evening I was playing around with drawing custom courses that can be loaded into a Garmin Edge 500 and used to provide turn prompting while out riding. This isn’t quite turn by turn directions, but upon reaching a certain point it’ll provide notification that one should turn, look for a hazard, etc. To test this I set up a neighborhood route, out Philadelphia Court and out to some main roads, winding around through some other neighborhoods, and back.

Not long after departing on a test ride it correctly informed me that I should turn right out of the driveway, but then gave an an off-course notification and the prompting no longer worked. After I got back home and reviewed the data the image above is what I found. Lots of garbage data scattered around the neighborhood.

This is just one of the many little quirks that I run into when using a GPS for data recording. Despite indicating that it’s receiving a solid signal it’ll still occasionally go funny and produce garbage for a little while. I’ll have to give this a different test another day. Maybe I’ll head out for a ride on Sunday and test the prompting on one of Bob’s routes…

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