Jan 31, 2014
Jan 30, 2014
We were out in the prius earlier this week and found ourselves chasing Orange/Red down Oregon St.
—orc Thu Jan 30 08:26:50 2014
Jan 26, 2014
So I had to take the mlcm down one of them, despite it having 22mm tubulars. The ride on gravel isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think; it’s pretty close to the ride of Nomads and Confreries, with the notable exception of not having nearly the pneumatic volume of the larger tires (which means that they bottom out a lot faster than the larger volume tires do.)
—orc Sun Jan 26 18:01:48 2014
Jan 25, 2014
After an interval of a few months, it’s xtracycle time in the OK corral.
—orc Sat Jan 25 16:50:28 2014
Jan 24, 2014
A pint1 of mite2
- not actually a pint
- not actually a mite
—orc Fri Jan 24 23:25:00 2014
Jan 23, 2014
Yes, it’s a pink Macbook Pro with a Hello Kitty sticker.
—orc Thu Jan 23 18:31:47 2014
Jan 19, 2014
Alas, bikecad doesn’t have a setting for putting in the ob-front rack, so you’ll just have to use your imagination for that.
—orc Sun Jan 19 15:36:29 2014
Jan 18, 2014
The midlifecrisismobile at Kobos this afternoon. It was very bright out, so I tried to use the flash to fill in the shadowed areas, and then I tweaked it a bit in iPhoto to see about bringing out the colors. Part of the way in the colors started to go very very wrong, so I stopped right there and called it art.
—orc Sat Jan 18 22:25:58 2014
Oregon Pacific’s GMD-1 shoves a passenger train towards OMSI.
—orc Sat Jan 18 18:13:08 2014
Jan 17, 2014
Setting up a replacement for my now-demised 15" macbook.
—orc Fri Jan 17 23:45:26 2014
Jan 16, 2014
The Archetypes I’d put on the midlifecrisismobile wore out pretty fast (after 3k miles the DS brake track on the rear wheel was becoming alarmingly concave, and I’d dented the front rim when I hit a large rock 80k into a 400k last spring (I finished the 400k, of course, I just didn’t use the front brake all that often after the collision)) and the Swobo Del Norte rims I had as emergency spares were not exactly what I’d call light, so when I wore through the rear tire on the emergency spares I decided I’d look around for a new set of lightish rims and tires.
I’d been interested in trying tubular tires for a while, so after successfully doing rube goldberg-style tubeless on the born-again Trek I was pretty much just looking for an excuse to make the jump.
A pair of tubular rims for $20 (Wolber Profil 20 – 460gm/rim) was a pretty good excuse, as was the pair of Kenda Volare tires I found on ebay for $29. You can tell it’s going to be a budget wheelbuild when the tubular glue (two tubes @ $4) are 15% of the cost of the wheels, and that the cost of the entire wheelset was less than the cost to replace the worn Archetype would have been. Yes, the tubular tires are ⅞“ instead of the 1⅛” that my beloved 28mm Resist Nomads are, but the praise for the ride of tubular tires was so embarrassingly effuse that I just had to try that size out.
They aren’t bad. They ride noticeably different than the wider tires I prefer (they’re so narrow that when I lean the bicycle over it feels like it’s going to turn turtle on me, and don’t have much resistance to wander – a problem when the front end isn’t loaded – and they weep air a lot faster than I’d like) but the ride is still very good and they seem to be slightly faster than the Nomads (already a very fast tire in my experience) are.
But I still haven’t ridden them on a brevet. No, instead I’ve been taking them shopping, which is not exactly the intended use for an fast(ish) randonneuse. But this weekend I’ll load up the mlcm with a bottle of Stans (my toolroll is overkill for tubular repair; a bottle of stans, syringe, patchkit, needle+thread, and minitool is somewhat smaller than the toolkit I carry for tubeless or tubed clinchers) and try to run it up to Ripplebrook (under the logic that I’ll never be more than about 10 miles away from a telephone so if I tear a tube in half I’ll be able to walk to help in finite time) one or two times.
Who knows, if the tires are faster I might be able to break 8 hours and then think about riding Hylo Sailor! in a week or so. (And maybe pigs will fly. In any case, it will be a fun experiment.)
—orc Thu Jan 16 22:33:21 2014
Jan 10, 2014
Dust Mite helps me build some racks.
—orc Fri Jan 10 22:10:57 2014
Jan 05, 2014
It turns out that the problem with the best’s macbook is not its interaction with the SSD, but it’s interaction with all internal media. After attempting to restore on friday it failed to reboot but just locked up on a spinny cursor instead. And after several slow iterations of fetching the internet recovery image and failing to get it to do anything except throw an error and force a (slow) reboot I looked around more on the net and found discussions of faulty hardware cables, with the diagnostic being to install the offending drive in a sata ↔ usb sled and try to boot off it.
So I tried that. And it worked (booted and everything) and let me recover off the time machine backup and update to macos 10.9 without any fuss.
Too bad the cable is a $50 part :-(
—orc Sun Jan 5 18:41:24 2014
Jan 03, 2014
After the hard disk failed on Julie’s macbook pro, I replaced it with a (much faster) solid state drive. Unfortunately there appears to be a problem with 2012 macbook pros in that if they have a solid state drive and they aren’t connected to mains power and they attempt to go to sleep they end up flaking out and only writing some of the hibernation file. And then when you try to wake up the machine it sits there blankly and just glows at you while the fractional hibernation file is read into memory and then used to make the machine quietly kill itself.
The last time this happened it ended up eating part of the kernel, which resulted in a machine that would only boot into the recovery partition and – sigh – only give me the (usable) options of restoring from backup or loading a new version of the OS from across the net.
I decided to restore from backup, which is taking about 3 hours. And Dust Mite is, as is traditional, supervising.
—orc Fri Jan 3 23:19:55 2014
—30—
![[rss feed]](/~orc/feedbutton.png "Atom + RSS feeds available here"){kind=small}