Category Archives: tech

Kindle Fire…soon…

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This just barely qualifies as a bicycle post, it’s really a gadget post. Here’s the thing. I love gadgets. Really. While I’m not always up on the latest bicycle gadgets and I prefer less to more in my cockpit, I do enjoy taking a decent gadget with me when I travel. Of course when one goes by bicycle less is always better.

I’ve gotten by with just my HTC EVO 4G phone for the most part – it saw me across Iowa rather well. I did have several batteries with me and I had to recharge more than I would have preferred, but hey, I was connected when I needed to be connected.

To be honest I almost took my iPad with me, but the thought of having to carry it with me everywhere really turned me off. It’s just a little big to be comfortable. And though I could have had the Pork Belly folks carry it for me in my luggage between stops they HIGHLY recommended not bringing tech toys. I understand completely. As it is my iPad has a wee dent that compromises the screen in one small area (it’s still very usable, but when held at certain angles you can see where the screen is being pushed in).

So what to do? I could easily have taken my 2nd generation Kindle. The problem there is that I’d have had to carry a light with me to read by, requiring more battery power. Ultimately I did carry a light but oddly never really used it. I just read from my phone for the approximately ten minutes every evening it took me to fall asleep. I also used it as a flashlight when I needed to run to the head in the middle of the night.

But the new Kindle Fire, being smaller than the iPad, seemed like something I absolutely had to have to test on bicycle trips. Right? I mean why else would I want one?

In any case mine has shipped and will be here in a couple days. Once I get in a few rides I’ll post on whether it’s a decent bike-able tool. I’m hoping!

I can’t wait.

New toy…Garmin Oregon 450…

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I just took delivery of a new Garmin Oregon 450 GPS unit. I really, really didn’t need it but…well you know how gadgets are for gadget geeks!

Garmin Oregon 450

Garmin Oregon 450

My justification for it is based solely on the fact that it has a barometric altimeter and I wanted to compare the readings I get with it to the readings I get simply by using MapMyRide. Oddly enough, since getting the unit on Tuesday I haven’t yet compared that data…be right back….

Okay, on a ride I did Tuesday from Niu Valley to Makiki around the inside of Diamond Head: 10 miles of flat riding except for the bit around Diamond Head.

MapMyRide gives me these figures…

  • Start Elevation: 21 ft
  • Max Elevation: 194 ft
  • Elevation Gain: 236 ft

Garmin Oregon 450 said…

  • Min Elevation: 4ft
  • Max Elevation: 175 ft
  • Elevation Gain: 349 ft

Now one should note that “Starting Elevation” and “Minimum Elevation” aren’t the same thing so they aren’t really comparable.

As for the maximum elevation it seems that the Garmin may be close to right. I traced the route using Google Earth and discovered that what I believe is the high point shows 172 ft in Google Earth and the Garmin said 175 ft. Given that the unit is about 3 feet off the ground…hmmm…it could also be just luck.

The difference in the total gain, 236 vs 349, may be due to how often points are taken in MapMyRide. I’ve heard it said that if you make the points much closer together you’ll get a more accurate reading. Since the Garmin is more or less constantly checking it’s going to give you those increases of a couple of feet that might be missed by MMR.

In any case I’m having fun with it.

I also picked up a cadence monitor and a heart monitor as well. They do work with the Oregon 450 even though it’s not listed as a fitness computer. It turns out that one has to upload track data manually into the various Garmin fitness apps in order to preserve the cadence and heart data, but it’s there if you want it. Sweet.

Here’s an example of the charting available from Garmin using their online version, Garmin Connect.Garmin Fitness Charting

This was from a short flat 4 mile ride I did last night. As you can tell I coast a lot (cadence), but I am on a single speed so sometimes I just get ahead of myself. I may end up changing the number of teeth on my cog when I replace it in the future. But then I do like coasting so…

Finally to be sure the heart monitor worked I checked it against the one built into the elliptical machine I use at work every morning. They are dead even. I’m going to assume they are both correct or at least wrong by the same amount. I’ll never really know I suppose. Still I was able to determine, rightly or wrongly (assuming they are both equally wrong) that at age 53 and overweight my resting heart rate is 50 bpm. Wow! I knew it had improved with all the biking but 50! That’s lower than my age.

Aloha!

Smoking…

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Say what you will about smokers. I was one myself for years, quitting several years ago. I don’t regret smoking, I enjoyed it. I’m also glad I quit, but that’s me; your mileage may vary.

Why am I bringing it up? I have a friend who still smokes and doesn’t enjoy going out nearly as much as she did before Hawaii passed laws preventing one from smoking just about everywhere. As I enjoy her company it’s been a bit of trial figuring out where we can go for a bite to eat where she can get out easily to have a puff or two.

The other day I reading an article on virus hunters in the New Yorker (you’ll need a subscription for the full article) and discovered the Ploom. It’s a smoke free delivery system for nicotine which comes from real tobacco. By vaporizing the nicotine (and flavors) out of real tobacco without burning it you are, supposedly, able to avoid all that smoke but still get flavor and your kick.

Hopefully it works and we can once again go out in society. :-)

Am I buying one for myself? No, I quit smoking a few years ago and have quite enough bad habits as it is. Besides if I get hooked on nicotine again the day will come when I don’t have my Ploom with me and will need a fix. Then I’ll be back to cigarettes and…well I’d just rather not go there.

Aloha!

Turnkey Linux…

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While it’s true I do work in tech and am responsible for a several websites besides this one I’m not really as technically savvy as I like to pretend. That’s why when a cool tool comes along, one that makes life easier, I’m generally quite glad.

Recently I came across Turnkey Linux which is more or less a set of distributions, each targeted to a specific use. Based on Ubuntu you can get turnkey setups that are targeted for development, for blogging, for hosting files, you get the idea. Essentially it’s everything you need and a bit more. You can install onto your own hardware, a virtual machine, or…and this is the cool part…into a cloud.

That all sounded fine but that’s not really the cool part. Because I’d signed up I discovered I was asked to be part of the Turnkey HUB beta. This really takes things to the next step.

Basically it’s a way of moving one of these distributions around, backup and migration made simple.

I already use Amazon s3 for backing up the production sites I work on (two non-profit sites). It’s easy to use and quite cheap. I think it’s been costing me about $0.50 a month each for both sites I caretake. I’m using a ruby based cronjob to tar each site and db. It works well but does require a bit of tinkering. This HUB system does away with the tinkering…well that’s not quite true…you can tinker if you like but you can also just let it do it’s thing.

As a test tonight I tried setting up a the Turnkey LAMP distro in a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook. It was quite easy and I discovered that it runs a shell over the browser. Sweet. I can tinker on break from work…or at least I hope I can. I’ll find out tomorrow.

Next I set up a user account on that system and put up a test page. So far so good.

I backed up the system to s3 (the default) and it was smooth.

Now, this is the kicker, I set up another bare system on Amazon EC2 as a first step. Next I restored the system I backed up from my MacBook to the EC2 system and sure enough, there was my modified system running on EC2. Sweet.

Of course EC2 costs a bit of change, $0.08 an hour. That’s not much but it is more than I’d pay for my webhosting system so I don’t plan on running a site off of EC2. But I am going to use it as a movable development system. By having the same turnkey system on a variety of machines and using the s3 backup to maintain the changes I should be able to play around just about anywhere…even when I don’t have my own computer with me. Sweet.

Aloha!

Google Apps class…

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A quick non-biking note, I sort of use Google Apps. My email runs through Google though I am using my own domain name and I sometimes open documents there. I also help manage a couple of workgroups with websites, though they don’t use Google Apps. Why am I mentioning this?

Today I got a notice from O’Reilly,the publisher, about a five week class on using Google Apps that will be held online (oddly enough, during my lunchtime here in Hawaii). It seemed a like a good opportunity to learn a bit more…at least I can keep my brain active.

Google Apps Class Header Image

Course: Google Apps.
Instructors: Michael Milton
Length: 5-Weeks
Class Dates: Tuesdays, August 31 – September 28, 2010

I’ve got a two of his books in the Head First series and participated in an online seminar he gave on data analysis which was really quite good so I signed up for this class as well. The worst that can happen is I’ll do something else at lunch. :-)

Aloha!