dancorder.com

EF Core Shadow Properties

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

EF Core has a feature called “Shadow Properties”. These are values that exist in the database but aren’t declared on the entity class.

This can be useful for defining foreign key columns when you don’t want the foreign key values in your entity classes. I’d need to experiment on a larger codebase, but this could be a nice way of keeping database and business code separate without having to declare two sets of model classes and mapping between them.

For example a Parent class has a property of type Child.

In the OnModelCreating method of the DbContext we can declare a column on the Child entity to hold the ID of its parent, and then set up a foreign key to use the column.

modelBuilder.Entity<Child>()
            .Property<int>("ParentId");

modelBuilder.Entity<Child>()
            .HasOne<Parent>()
            .WithOne(d => d.Child)
            .HasForeignKey<Child>("ParentId")
            .IsRequired();

Printing background colours on web pages

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I was surprised to find that by default browsers will hide the background colours of elements if you print the page. If you need the background printed the following CSS should do the trick:

.print-background {
    color-adjust: exact; // Firefox
    -webkit-print-color-adjust: exact; // Edge, Chrome, Safari
}

(Reference)

Svelte and Complicated State

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently creating a website to help with the creation of cryptic crosswords. As the site is very dynamic I wanted to use a pre-existing framework to bind my state to the DOM of the page and decided to try out Svelte.

So far it’s been quite nice to work with, but one thing it’s taken me a while to get to grips with is how to update complicated state. In my case I have a large state object for the clues and the grid of the crossword. Updating the grid can effect the clues, and updating the clues will effect the display version of the clues below the grid. I also wanted a button beside each clue to write the answer into the grid. This means a lot of dependencies between the various parts of my overall crossword state object.

I decided to put all the public methods for updating the state on the top level crossword state object. This made it simple to update both the grid and clue state objects as needed. This did mean that I had to pass the full crossword state to each component though:

<Grid crosswordState={state}>
<ClueDisplay crosswordState={state}>
<ClueInputs crosswordState={state}>

Svelte notices change to state through assignments, so it will notice something like

boundVariable = "new value";

but not

boundArray.push("new value");

That meant that all the crossword state methods had to return the state object so they could be used like this within the components:

crosswordState = crosswordState.toggleCellColour(row, column);

However, this still didn’t address the problem of having the ClueInputs component notice when the Grid component updated the state. One way to solve that is to bind the state to the component.

<Grid bind:crosswordState={state}>
<ClueDisplay bind:crosswordState={state}>
<ClueInputs bind:crosswordState={state}>

However the Svelte docs caution against too much binding. I also wanted to split some of my components down into smaller components and I’d need to keep binding the crossword state all the way down with this approach.

In the end I found a blog post that suggested wrapping the state in a custom store. This effectively makes the state a global variable which feels a bit yucky but is definitely convenient. The fact that I’m using this to just expose the update methods makes it quite similar to registering some event handlers which to my mind makes it seem a more palatable :). Using the update store method means that every component using the state will notice whenever it changes.

import { writable } from 'svelte/store';
import { CrosswordState } from './CrosswordState';

function createCrosswordStateStore() {
    const { subscribe, set, update } = writable(new CrosswordState);

    return {
        subscribe,
        set,
        toggleCell: (rowIndex: number, columnIndex: number) =>
            update(g => g.toggleCell(rowIndex, columnIndex)),
        setAnswerText: (clueNumber: number, direction: "a"|"d", answerText: string) =>
            update(g => g.setAnswerText(clueNumber, direction, answerText)),
        ...
    };
}

export const CrosswordStateStore = createCrosswordStateStore();

This store can be used in the top level components like this to pass down parts of the state:

import { CrosswordStateStore } from "../modules/CrosswordStateStore";

<Grid state="{$CrosswordStateStore.grid}" />

In those components it’s easy to call the store methods:

import { CrosswordStateStore } from "../modules/CrosswordStateStore";

CrosswordStateStore.setAnswerText(
    state.answerPosition.number,
    state.answerPosition.direction,
    state.answer);

I’m very new to Svelte, so if anyone reads this and has a better way of sharing state amongst a number of components I’d be grateful for a tweet.

Svelte Warning Codes

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Having just spent close to an hour trying to find the right way to suppress this Svelte warning

(!) Plugin svelte: A11y: Avoid using autofocus

I wanted to record how to do it for future reference.

The easyish part is using  the harder part is working out what error-code should actually be.

Update: The headings here seem to match the error codes: https://svelte.dev/docs#accessibility-warnings

~~I couldn’t find a nice list documented anywhere, so failing that here’s the relevant source file:~~

~~https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/blob/master/src/compiler/compile/compiler_warnings.ts~~

Jekyll Feeds Plugin on Github pages

Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On another site I’m creating I didn’t want a feeds.xml file. The default Jekyll configuration for Github pages includes the minima theme and the jekyll-feed plugin by default.

Removing jekyll-feeds from the jekyll _config.yml doesn’t actually disable the plugin. It seems I’m not the only one to be confused by this. Fortunately the suggestions on that issue from creadone worked for me.

To repeat them here:

Remove the jekyll-feed plugin and minima theme from _config.yml
Comment out these lines from Gemfile
- gem "minima", "~> 2.5"
- gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.12"
For local development restart the jekyll server

Creating iOS Shortcuts

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After complaining that there wasn’t any decent documentation on Shortcuts I finally found the right combination of words to search for and found this page: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios. Don’t miss the “Table of Contents” link on this page. (I think I might have found this page before and dismissed it as not very helpful.)

A few other tips for creating shortcuts are:

Use the triangle “Play” button in the bottom right of the shortcut edit screen to run the shortcut while working on it. Running the shortcut this way will show you more information than running it normally.
The “View Content Graph” action can help to show you what’s going on.
When viewing the list of actions there are information icons on the right. Clicking these will show you some details about the action.
If you want user input for a shortcut executed through Siri you can use the “Dictate Text” action.

iPhone Music on Homepod

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One thing that’s frustrating about my Homepod Mini is that it interferes with using Siri to play music from my phone. Siri on the phone can easily play an artist, song, playlist, etc. Now if I do that within range of my Homepod it just tell me that it can’t connect to Apple Music. I don’t have an Apple Music subscription and I don’t want one, so this is quite annoying.

Of course I can use the music app on my phone to pick what I want to play, but this is a place where using Siri was actually quicker and easier.

So far I’ve come up with a workaround by creating individual shortcuts on my phone. Fortunately I tried making an artist shortcut first and it worked OK. If I’d tried the other shortcuts first I might have given up due to the lack of documentation (but that’s a topic for another post).

The first step uses “Dictate Text” to ask for an artist. That is fed into a “Find Music” action which uses the dictated text as a filter to find all music by that artist. The final step plays the found music.

This approach is limited by the “Find Music” filter options which don’t include the playlist.

For that you need a different shortcut that uses the “Get Playlist” step:

You also need to name your playlists carefully. The dictate text step doesn’t have any context and just converts your speech to matching words. So I can’t play my “Gym” playlist this way because the dictation step turns that into “Jim”. You can test this by using the play button at the bottom right of the shortcut editing screen. This will show you the dictation window when you run the shortcut.

Playing an individual song was tricky. Eventually I worked out the reason it didn’t work is that the “Find Music” filter is case sensitive, dictate text uses sentence case, and (most of) my song titles are all capitalised.

To fix this you need to insert a “Change Case” action to capitalise the text:

A similar trick works for most Album titles.

These shortcuts aren’t foolproof, but much better than nothing. I just wish Apple would sort out Siri on Homepod so that this workaround wasn’t necessary.

UPDATE

You can improve the album and song shortcuts by making multiple different capitalisations of the “Dictate Text” action, storing them in variables, and then checking all of those in the “Find Music” action.

Automations and a Homepod Mini as an Alarm Clock

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When I found out about Apple’s shortcuts and automations I was interested in using an automation as an alarm.

Unfortunately even though you can set an automation to run without asking for permission there are certain actions that Apple won’t allow your phone to do without user intervention. Making a noise appears to be one of those things. A common suggestion to work around this is to set your phone’s alarm and then have an automation that runs when you turn the alarm off. This means that you wake up to the alarm sound but as soon as you turn it off you get your sound of choice.

However, it looks like Apple are happy with a Homepod making a noise as part of an automation (I have a Homepod Mini, but I can’t see why a normal Homepod would be any different). So, if you have a Homepod you can set up an automation to play almost anything through the Homepod at a set time.

Here are some screenshots of my automation:

The first step is to make sure the WiFi is enabled so the phone can connect to the Homepod. There’s a pause to let the phone connect to the WiFi then we set the playback destination to the Homepod. Again there’s a pause here - without this pause the automation just failed and it took a while to find out why. The next step is to reset the volume in case it’s been changed during the day. Finally we actually play the sound - in this case BBC Radio 4.

With the delays I’ve set the automation to start a minute before my alarm time. Also note that “Ask Before Running” is disabled.

Jekyll Without Plugins

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been porting my blog over to this fairly vanilla Jekyll site hosted on Github and just found Jekyll Codex. It’s a site that has loads of useful functionality implemented without the need for Jekyll plugins. I’ll at least be using the Atom feed for inspiration.

Monads

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Monads have a bit of a mystique about them, and there are a lot of confusing articles written about them. Today I found this page (through ycombinator’s best news RSS feed) which seems to do a good job of demystifying monads. It uses Haskell for examples, but I’ve never used Haskell before and the article still made sense to me.

http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2958

Jekyll/Github Markdown

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This page consists of various examples of markdown

Links

Here’s a link to the Github Flavoured Markdown spec

An inline link not needing a separate definition.

An auto link to http://www.dancorder.com

[docs]: https://github.github.com/gfm/ "Github Flavoured Markdown"
Here's a [link to the Github Flavoured Markdown spec][docs]
An [inline link](http://www.dancorder.com "Home") not needing a separate definition.
An auto link to <http://www.dancorder.com>

Headings

A heading

H2

H3

H4

H5

H6

# A line starting with a #

# A heading
## H2
### H3
#### H4
##### H5
###### H6
\# A line starting with a #

Code

Some code
some more code

Another code
  block

Some inline code

    Some code
    some more code

```

Another code
  block

```

Some `inline` code

Text

A paragraph with a line break
in it

Some emphasis and strong text.

Some ~~strikethrough~~ text

A horizontal rule

A paragraph with a line break\
in it
Some *emphasis* and **strong** text.
Some ~~strikethrough~~ text
A horizontal rule
---

Lists

An
- nested
unordered
list

An
Ordered
1. nested
List

checkbox
list

- An
  - nested
- unordered
- list

1. An
1. Ordered
   1. nested
1. List

- [ ] checkbox
- [x] list

Quotes

A block quote

A new paragraph in the same block quote

> A block quote
>
> A new paragraph in the same block quote

Tables

	Col 1	Col 2
Row 1	Cell 1	Cell 2

|       | Col 1    | Col 2    |
| Row 1 | Cell 1   | Cell 2   |

Images

An inline image

Some referenced images

An inline image ![image alt text](/images/blog/car.png "image title")
Some referenced images ![image alt text][image] ![image alt text][image]
[image]: /images/blog/car.png "image title"

Backing up archives - Archiverify

Sun, 20 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I take quite a few digital photos which I need to back-up. Until recently I did this simply by copying my original photos folder onto one of two portable hard drives which I then stored offsite.

This is a simple system and was working pretty well except for one flaw that I hadn’t considered. What happens if my master copy of a file gets corrupted and I don’t notice? After a little while the corrupted copy will be in both my back-ups and I won’t be able to retrieve a good copy from anywhere. I thought that the chances of this were occurring were tiny, unfortunately I was wrong (or unlucky), and I now have a number of corrupted files in my master copy, some of which have also made it into my backups*.

So, how do I stop this happening again? Also how do I work out which files are corrupted but recoverable from backup? To address these issues I’ve written a small program called Archiverify that can compare the files in two directory trees against each other and against previously generated hashes (if you don’t know what hashes are, think of them as fingerprints). This is allowing me to find files that are different between my back-up and master copy so that I can check them and remove the corrupted version.

Once I have my back-ups back in order it will also allow me to run a single command against a back-up drive that will:

Check that all images in the backup and master folders match each other and their fingerprints. This means that all of my images are read from disc every time I do a back-up and corrupt files will be found quickly.
Offer to correct images that have been corrupted by copying over the good version from the other directory
Copy and fingerprint any new images.

Hopefully, having three copies at any one time will make the chances of them all getting corrupted/lost at the same time very small.

There are a couple of other features such as the ability to just run against a single directory tree. This can be used to generate hashes or to compare files against previously generated hashes, but doesn’t allow you to repair corrupted files.

Archiverify should be useful for any files that you want to back-up that don’t change. In my case that means:

Original photo files
Installers for various programs that I use
Game mods that I want to keep a copy of
Anything else so old that I’m probably never going to change it again

If Archiverify sounds useful to you, then you are in luck. You can download and use it for free from https://github.com/DanCorder/Archiverify/releases/. To run it you will need to have Java installed and then use the command “java -jar " to see the options that are currently available. The most common usage is "java -jar ".

Archiverify is released under the GPLv3 open source licence and you can view (and fork) the source on Github at https://github.com/DanCorder/Archiverify.

I have written and tested the app on Windows, but I have tried to ensure that it will also work on Mac and Linux. If anyone tries it on those systems please let me know how it goes.

* Those of you thinking “that would never happen to me, my backups are on CD/DVD/Blu-Ray”, you may be right. If you’re using the more expensive discs designed to last for many years, and you’re checking all of your back-up discs regularly then you’re probably fine, but I don’t envy you all the disc swapping, and the task of changing media when your current media finally becomes obsolete. If you’re not doing all of the above then I’d suggest that your back-up strategy is probably just flawed in a different way to how mine was. Backing up to Amazon S3 (directly or through another service) looks pretty safe as they claim to generate hashes and regularly check them against your data. However you do then have ongoing costs and potentially long upload times.

Cycle Commuter Clothing

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I do actually own a pair of padded lycra cycling shorts, and for long distance commuting I’d recommend some “proper” cycling clothing and getting changed at work/home. At the moment though, as I currently only cycle a mile or two at a time to and from railways stations I just wear my normal clothes. However, as I need to cycle every day, I do need to be able to cope with the British weather.

This basically means that I need to have a waterproof top, waterproof trousers, headgear, gloves, and some way of keeping my trousers away from the chain on my bike (I tend to wear waterproof walking shoes so those are already fine).

I currently have an Altura Pocket Rocket jacket in yellow as my top. This jacket packs down to a very small size and has done a good job of keeping me dry. But I’ve found that it hasn’t coped well with being taken on and off 4 times a day for a year. The inner membrane is coming away at the cuffs and under the arms. For occasional emergency use it’s probably still a good choice, but this year I’ve asked Santa for what looks to be the more hardy Night Vision jacket, which has the added benefit of being available in orange. As I plan to wear my jacket any time I cycle, the ability to pack it down to a small size is no longer such a consideration. I’ll report back if the Night Vision doesn’t stand up to daily use.

For my legs I’ve been using a proper pair of waterproof Lowe Alpine hiking trousers. These have worked fine but they are fairly bulky and I’ve actually used them surprisingly rarely. So for trousers I’m going in the opposite direction with a pair of smaller, flimsier, and cheaper Regatta over-trousers. So far I’ve used them a couple of times and they have worked nicely and they take up far less space in my bag most of the time - they pack down to about the size of a can of soft drink and come with a bag to keep them that size.

When I started commuting I would tuck my trousers into my socks. This works ok as long as:

The sock elastic holds up
It’s not raining hard. If it rains my sock gets wet and the water runs down into my shoe.

So I decided to get some trouser clips. I started with the traditional metal variety, but I found that they were either so tight that they were painful, or so loose that they slid down my trousers around my ankle - and in one case then fell off onto the road and got lost. There may well be some trick to the metal clips that I haven’t discovered, after all they have been in use for years, but I just couldn’t get on with them. Fortunately since then I’ve tried some fabric and velcro bands that work much better, and seem more reflective too. Looking at them I don’t think that they’ll last forever, but £7 every year or two isn’t going to break the bank.

On my head I always wear a thin headband under my helmet to keep my ears protected from the wind, and when it gets really cold I have a snood to keep my neck and face warm too. For gloves I wear a pair of normal gore windstopper gloves which do a good job of keeping my hands warm and will also provide some abrasion protection if I ever end up sliding along the road. These bits are all pretty small so I have no trouble keeping them in my bag (actually in one of the side pockets for easy access) all the time.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

More Stickers and Paint

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

When I first posted about adding some stickers to protect my frame from rubbing a couple of people helpfully posted comments about clear stickers.

During the process of changing my handlebars the places where the cables rubbed on the frame changed so I took another look at the clear stickers and decided to give them a go as I thought they would look better than the checkerboard pattern on my previous stickers.

The clear stickers are a bit more expensive than the others but you do seem to get a lot of them, or rather you get some fairly large bits that can be cut up into a lot of smaller bits. I went for a set meant to cover large parts of a full size mountain bike and I hardly made a dent in it.

After a while most of the clear stickers are still in very good condition. Below you can see the front fork. The lighter patch is the repainted area underneath the sticker. Note that normally the sticker is much less visible than this, here it was photographed in strong side sunlight.

The area where the front fork hooks onto the rear triangle when folding the bike seems to be an area of particularly strong rubbing. When I checked there the double layer of clear sticker I had put there had been completely rubbed through not just the stickers but the paint too.

So here I’ve decided to keep using the checkerboard stickers as they are much thicker and also seem to be tougher; so far it’s holding up well.

Whilst I was checking the frame over I noticed quite a few more chips in the paintwork, especially on the side and top of one of the rear triangle tubes which I’m quite surprised about as I have no idea how they would have got there:

I also found another area of cable wear:

I guess the moral of this is that I’m going to have to check the frame over every now and again for chips and cable wear and keep some stickers and paint on hand.

Ouch

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Having cycled at least part of the way to work on and off for the last 10 years I’ve been lucky not to have had any trouble with cars aside from a couple of idiots that thought it was fun to shout as they went past. However, yesterday I was actually hit by a car for the first time. Fortunately both myself and my bike somehow came out of things unscathed. This is a somewhat self-indulgent post, but I feel like I need to write this down even though the only lasting effect was a bruised buttock :).

On my route home there is a 3 exit roundabout at the top of a hill. I was turning right when I noticed a blue BMW coming towards the roundabout in the lane to turn left - so he was going to follow me off my exit. There was a white car in the other lane that had stopped and was waiting for me to trundle past (I’m pretty tired by the time I get to the top of the hill). As the BMW approached my thought process was something like:

“He’s going a bit fast, typical aggressive BMW driver I guess, he’ll brake hard at the roundabout”
“Actually he’s going to have trouble stopping at the line, I’ll leave him a bit of extra space just in case”
“He’s is going to stop right?”
“Oh dear (actually something a bit stronger than that), he’s going to hit me”
“I wonder how much this is going to hurt”

At this point I think I turned even further away from the car, but at the speed I was going I don’t think it made much difference (the earlier turn to give him space definitely helped though). Fortunately it was a glancing blow as he was turning left and I think he hit the bike first, before my bum bounced off the right hand side of his bonnet/wing. I don’t remember the time I was in the air, the next thing I remember is seeing my bike land further from the car than I did and standing in the road shouting at the driver of the car (I must have turned around in between but don’t remember it).

The bike somehow went out cleanly from underneath me even with the PowerGrips on my pedals, I guess the low frame of a Brompton helped here, and I managed to stay on my feet after bouncing off the car, otherwise things would have been much more unpleasant.

To his credit the driver did stop, helped me check over my bike and put the chain back on (he’ll need to clean his stearing wheel after driving home with bike chain grease on his hands!). Somehow the bike seems to have escaped totally unharmed save for the chain coming off, some bits of road on the ends of the rear axle and a small slight scuff to one side of my t-bag. Given that both ends of the rear axle look to have scraped up a bit of road the best I can come up with is that the bike initially went down on its left and skidded away briefly on its tyres and rear axle bolt before flipping over and landing on its right (which fits with my general impression of the bike bouncing as it went away from me).

The driver said that he simply hadn’t seen me and, as he was heading directly into a setting sun (and very few people try to deliberately hit cyclists), I believe him. He was genuinely shocked at what he’d done and hopefully will be a bit more careful in the future - the white car stopping in the other lane ought to have been a big clue even if he hadn’t seen me.

As far as I’m concerned I’ve learnt four things:

If a car looks like it hasn’t seen you, even in broad daylight with an orange bike, then there is a good chance that it really hasn’t.
I should consider wearing my day-glo yellow cycling jacket even when it’s not cold.
Bromptons are tougher than they look.
I should have got his name, address, and/or number plate (and ideally that of one of the witnesses). A camera phone would work well here. Even though I think my initial assessment of everything being fine was correct, I was slightly in shock and could easily have missed something. Without these details I’d have no way of trying to get any help paying for any damage I discovered later on.

More Handlebars

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I changed my handlebars with some success, but I wanted to see if I could do better. The main issue with the new handlebars was that they were a bit too low which made the riding position less than ideal.

So I looked around until I found some mountain bike handlebars with 65mm of rise (compared to 30mm on the other set) that were still 25.4mm wide at the clamping point. A handy hint if you’re looking for bars like this is that they are often called jump bars (I believe because they flex a bit on landing). Anyway the ones I went with are the “Full Bore” model made by a company called Funn and came from Chain Reaction Cycles.

Unlike the previous bars, the Funn ones widen out well before the clamping point, in fact they are virtually 25.4mm in diameter even at the curves. This makes them very difficult to get through the clamp. Even after spreading out the clamp a bit with a screwdriver wrapped in a cloth I still managed to scratch a fair bit of paint off the handlebars. Fortunately some Brompton black gloss paint tidied it up fairly well.

The Funn bars are also even wider than the XLC ones so I decided to cut them down a bit. I did it a little at a time an eventually took off about 5cm from each end. Note that this was the most I could take off and still fit my brake levers and grips on, and that my grips were already cut down a bit from when they were on the original Brompton bars. So if you have a larger hands you’ll probably want to take a bit less off.

I also cut down my brake and hub gear cables by about 5cm to get them to sit a bit better in their new positions. In truth they could do with being cut down a little more, but they’re OK as they are and I haven’t had the time or motivation to tidy them up any further.

With these adjustments made the Funn bars are a bit more comfortable than the XLC bars, and I think comfortable enough to live with - I’ve been using them for about 6 months now. I haven’t noticed my knees hitting my stomach since changing over either. The other improvement is in the clearance of the brake levers and cables over the front luggage which is now enough to not worry me.

The extra rise in the bars does make them a tiny bit more flexible, but not enough to be annoying (unlike the original un-braced Brompton bars)

Like the XLC bars I can have the bar ends set up in a comfortable position without interfering with the fold.

Overall I’m happy with this set up and will stick with it for the forseeable future, however I have to wonder if I’d have been better off just getting an S-type bike and the smaller luggage to begin with. The larger T-bag is nice to have and the extra capacity has been useful at times, but most of the time I’m sure I could have made do with the smaller S bag. Mind you, if I’d done that I wouldn’t have had half as much to write about!

Kudos to Apple

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I have a second hand 13” white Macbook. Like most Macbooks of that vintage it has developed cracks in the palm rest where the ridges in the lid push on it when it’s closed. I recently found out that Apple in the US are still fixing this problem for free, I guess because it’s seen as a design defect.

So I thought I’d call up Apple here in the UK and see what their policy is. It turns out that as long as your Macbook is less than 5 years old they will fix it for free - even a second hand one like mine!

I didn’t know when my laptop was bought and it turned out that the original owner hadn’t registered it when they bought it. However the AppleCare guy was able to determine that it must have been bought after November 2007 (I guess from the model number) so it was still within the 5 year window. After checking with his supervisor he told me that it would be fixed free of charge, gave me a case number, and told me that I’d need to make an appointment in an Apple store to have it done (actually he offered to make the appointment for me, but I needed some time to work out which store would be most convenient so I did it).

They do also recommend that you back up your computer, presumably to cover them in case they accidentally break something.

Making an appointment at an Apple store is handled on their website and is a pretty nice experience, you pick from a list of available dates and times and leave a message explaining the problem.

When I got to the store today it seemed that they hadn’t actually read the message much in advance as the person helping me told me they’d have to check that they had the parts in stock. Fortunately they did and I was asked to come back in about 90 minutes.

I had read that the palm rest, keyboard, and trackpad are all one unit so I was hoping for, but not expecting, a new keyboard and trackpad. As it turns out, I not only got a new keyboard and trackpad, they also replaced the bezel around the screen, I’m not sure why. Perhaps the new one is less likely to break the new palm rest, but it looks the same to me, only much cleaner - the original looked like this:

So credit where it’s due, I’m very impressed with the way Apple have stood behind their product here, and as a result I’m happily typing this on a brand new keyboard.

Tyre Update

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Schwalbe Marathon Pluses for a few months now (switching from the original Kojaks), so I thought it was time for an update.

Since moving house there isn’t anywhere near as much broken glass around on my commute, so it may not be a an entirely fair comparison, but nonetheless I’ve been puncture free since switching tyres.

The Marathon Pluses do seem to have very slightly more rolling resistance than the Kojaks. I’m not sure if that is due to the make-up of the tyre or just that they can’t be inflated to as high a pressure as the Kojaks.

However, given that I cycle to get to work and back, and to get some exercise, the slight increase in pedalling effort is more than made up for by the extra reliability.

Broken Mudguard

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I managed to break the rear mudguard on my Brompton recently. I don’t think I put the bike down any harder than I normally do (it was parked), so my best guess is that the recent extra cold weather had made the plastic more brittle than usual (I keep the bike in an unheated garage). I managed to tape it up for a few days, but then the remaining bits of plastic snapped and I was left with what you can see below.

This rapidly got annoying, as whenever the bike was folded the little remaining bit of mudguard got pushed round onto the wheel so I had to move it back every time I unfolded the bike.

Fortunately a replacement mudguard doesn’t break the bank at £11.50. I’ve also scraped the metal screws attaching the mudguard to the remaining wire a fair bit, so I ordered a replacement plate and screws for an extra £3.50 (both including free shipping from Simpson Cycles).

As you can see below, the mudguard comes with instructions for replacing it.

Actually replacing the mudguard is fairly simple if you’ve taken the wheel off before. First you need to remove the back wheel, which involves a few steps. Brompton have a handy video explaining it, although I prefer to deflate the tyre to get it past the brake blocks - they take me a while to get adjusted correctly again if I undo the cable as they suggest.

Then you just need to undo the allen bolts holding the mudguard to the wires and the nut holding the rear brake and mudguard onto the frame. The nut is a little tricky to get at so you need to be patient and undo it 1/6th of a turn at a time until you can turn it by hand. Once it’s off you just need to remove the washers and rear light making careful note of the order, pull out the bolt, take off one last washer, and then finally the mudguard:

Fitting the new mudguard is simply a matter of reversing the process and re-fitting (and in my case re-inflating) the wheel.

Bye Bye Baldy

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When I was originally ordering my Brompton and looking through the myriad options, the one I thought was simplest was the choice of tyres. The Schawalbe Kojaks were high pressure - so low rolling resistance, have a “Raceguard” strip, and are lighter than the alternatives. A no-brainer, or so I thought.

Now, nearly a year later, I’m not so sure. On my full size bike I have some Kevlar lined tires and they have lasted for years with only two punctures. I was hoping that the “Raceguard” part of the Kojaks would work similarly effectively. Unfortunately it simply doesn’t - I’ve had around 7 punctures in under a year, cycling perhaps 3 miles per day (and I wasn’t cycling for a couple of those months) which is too many for me. Below you can see some of the chunks gouged out of my rear tyre by bits of glass and sharp stones.

Having looked around a bit, it seemed that the Schwalbe Marathon Plus is the way to go for reliability, so I ordered a pair of those. I saw a number people online complaining that they were very difficult to fit. Fortunately during my research I also found a video that explained how to fit them fairly easily. The trick is to squeeze the sides of the tyre inwards so that you can push them into the well in the middle of the wheel, this then gives you enough slack to get the last bit of tyre over the rim without needing any tyre levers.

I’ll update this blog in a few months with details of any punctures or any other issues with the new tyres.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Pedal Update

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago I wrote about how my pedals had detached themselves a couple of times. I thought it was only fair to post an update to say that since then they have behaved perfectly. I also haven’t removed them deliberately in that time which may or may not be related.

However, having now started my new commute, I’ve come to the conclusion that I would have been better off just getting some rather simpler and cheaper non-detachable pedals and using a pedal spanner if I ever had to remove them.

Handlebars

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned before, I now have some fairly comfortable bar ends on my Brompton, but they were unfortunately set at a less than ideal angle, to keep them (barely) clear of the ground when the bike was folded.

Looking at the variables open to me it seemed like the simplest and cheapest to try was a new set of handlebars. Whilst it seems that you can spend upwards of £100 on handlebars(!) for this experiment I went with a rather more modest set at a grand cost of £11.81 including shipping from Amazon.

The most important thing to look for when buying new handlebars for a Brompton is to ensure that they are 25.4mm (1 inch) in diameter at the clamping point. Some mountain bike handlebars are rather wider. The set that I got are shaped so that the grips are about 3cm above the clamp. I hoped that this would help to stop the riding position from being too severe and also provide some clearance for my luggage (a T bag).

Fitting the new bars was fairly straightforward it was just a case of:

Removing everything from the old handlebars, noting the routing of the cables. (Also note that if you still have the original Brompton grips you almost certainly won’t be able to get them off without ruining them so you’ll need something to replace them with).
in my case undoing the handlebar brace on one side.
loosening the handlebar clamp.
sliding out the old bars and sliding in the new ones.
reversing the other steps above, remembering to route the cables correctly.

The new handlebars went in fairly easily as they only bulge out at the clamping point (the grip ends are at the normal 22.2mm diameter) which meant that the curves in the bar went through the clamp without much trouble.

With everything fitted I found that I could easily position the bar ends at the angle I wanted and keep them clear of the ground when the bike was folded.

However, there are a couple of other clearances you need to worry about when changing the handlebars:

The clearance between the brake levers and any luggage you may have
The clearance between the cables to the rear of the bike and the front cog

With these handlebars the brake levers are a little close to my T-bag for my liking, I wouldn’t be able to pack it too full. The brake and gear cables, whilst closer to the front cog, seem to be OK.

In use the first thing I noticed was that the riding position felt very strange compared to before. My arms felt quite widely spread, the steering felt a bit less lively, and my knees were getting rather close to my stomach when peddling.

The first two of these changes are down to the fact that the new handlebars are rather wider than the standard m-type handlebars and I got used them fairly quickly. The third change was down to the new handlebars obviously being much lower. I’ve never owned a proper racing bike but looking at picture it seems that they often have their handlebars down below the height of the saddle so it may just be my overly large stomach getting in the way! (Or it may be that having a longer distance between the saddle and handlebars on a full size bike counteracts this issue somewhat).

After a couple of rides I also noticed that the saddle feels rather less comfortable than before, I’m not sure whether this is down to the change in riding position or just the fact that I haven’t ridden a bike for a few months. I may try tipping the saddle forwards a little to see if that’s any more comfortable.

Overall I’d say that these handlebars are a qualified success. They allow me a good bar end position but are a bit uncomfortable at the moment - I’d not go on a long ride without a few trial runs first to see if I could get comfortable in the new position.

Given my findings I think I’ll try to find another set of handlebars with a bit more rise in them to see whether I can get a better compromise between bar ends and overall comfort.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Brompton Ergon GR2 grips and bar ends

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Sometime ago I mentioned that I was going to try some longer bar-ends on my Brompton. The main reason for the change was that I’d cut my first set of Ergon grips to match the original brake levers and then promptly changed the brake levers for different ones.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to try some slightly longer bar-ends as the first ones I tried were a little short. This time around I went for the latest Ergon GR2 grips (the older 2010 version are a little shorter and seem to be made of metal). I thought that if the new ones were too long to fold I’d still be able to use the new grips with the old bar-ends. That turned out to be wrong as the two grips use completely different systems for attaching the bar-ends to the grips as you can see below (note that the GR2 grip on the right is upside down in this picture).

Fortunately, the new bar-ends turned out to fold just fine.

The other change I made was to go for the smaller size grips. I found some information on the internet, supposedly from Ergon, that said that the only difference between the grip sizes was the circumference of the grip. Comparing the two grips above you can see that actually the pad area is also a little bit smaller on the smaller grips (although I guess the difference could be down to the different models, but that seems unlikely).

As before I went for the normal length grips knowing that I’d have to cut them down a little. As you can see below, with the new brake levers the grips are only slightly too long.

Unfortunately, due to the length of the bar-ends they need to be pretty much horizontal when unfolded so that they stay off the ground when the bike is folded, and even then one still gets a little scratched. I would prefer to be able to angle them slightly upwards for riding.

I do prefer these longer GR2 bar-ends to the shorter GC2 ones; the extra length makes a difference and helps you to get a decent grip. The rubbery patches on the bar-ends also make them feel a bit more comfortable and less slippy. Whilst overall they are not quite as good to use as the normal bar-ends on my full size bike, they are still pretty good. For anyone looking to get some bar-ends I’d definitely recommend these over the shorter GC2s.

Not so superior after all?

Sat, 07 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve now had my detachable pedals detach themselves twice. The first time was immediately after I’d been demonstrating how the pedals worked to some friends so I put it down to user error re-attaching them. However, the second time occurred after a few weeks of riding without detaching the pedals.

Both times the pedal came off as I stopped once whilst I was still moving and once just after I’d got off the bike. As I said before I never had trouble with the pedals on my Dahon, and coupled with when they came off I think it may be the twisting to get out of my Power Grips that does it.

Of course that shouldn’t be enough as you have to twist the collar as well as push it in, but close inspection reveals that the twisting spring only pushes the collar a few millimetres away from the crucial point, you can twist it a full 90 degrees away manually though. Any rubbing between the shoe and the collar during forward pedalling should actually help to secure the pedals, so I guess that I must have back-pedalled and then twisted my foot out to cause the pedal to detach.

At the very least I’m to have to be a bit more careful from now on. I am even considering sending the pedals back and getting some non “superior” ones that will be a bit more of a hassle to take off, but won’t come off by accident (due to the plastic locking ring). I’ll wait and see what my new commute is like and how often I’ll need to take the pedal off.

Brompton Stickers and Paint

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my rather long and rambling initial thoughts, the orange paint on my Brompton doesn’t seem to be very hard wearing. Looking over the bike recently I noticed that the front brake cable had already managed to rub through the paint on the fork and was getting close to doing the same on the main frame tube.

Coupled with the paint chips I reported on initially I decided it was time to get some touch up paint and see what it could do. So I bought some matt Brompton paint from SJS cycles. As the cable rubbing was only going to get worse with time I also bought some protective stickers at the same time (I found it surprisingly hard to find bicycle stickers that weren’t either branded or reflective).

Before painting I cleaned the chipped and worn areas with a little white spirits. Applying the paint was fairly easy, there is a small brush in the lid (like a nail varnish brush). The only thing to be careful is to wipe the excess paint off the brush before starting.

The paint dries fairly quickly, and, once dried, is a fairly good colour match (at least on my frame) but not identical. You can see the colour difference here, along with the fact that it’s doing a better (but not perfect) job of standing up to the pressure on the inside of the joint.

Once the paint was dry I applied protective stickers wherever there were signs of rubbing. As some areas only had light marks so I didn’t re-paint them but still stickered them. The main areas were where the cables touch the frame and forks and where the front wheel hooks over the rear triangle when folding.

With my new brake levers there were also signs of wear where the cables rub on the other side of the front fork when the handlebars are folded. Finally I stuck one sticker under the chain to protect the frame from all the grease that comes off there.

I’m fairly pleased with the results. The stickers are fairly thick and so should provide good protection - as long as they stay put. So far one has slipped out of position but I do at least have plenty of spares in the original pack.

Brompton Power Grips

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post on pedals I mentioned that I also bought some Power Grips to go with them. I use SPD shoes and pedals on my full size bike and I really like the way they secure my feet on the pedals. So I wanted something similar for my Brompton but without the need to wear special shoes. Before moving on to SPDs I had used toe clips which worked reasonably well so I started searching for toe clips suitable use on a Brompton. Whilst searching I ran across a few people that were recommending Power Grips as a superior alternative so I decided to give them a go.

The first thing you notice about Power Grips is the price, they’re not exactly cheap for what they are at around £22, plus another £8 for reflectors if you want to be legal in the UK after dark. However, as far as I’m aware they’re a fairly new idea and it seems reasonable to reward innovation.

Fitting them to my pedals was pretty straightforward just requiring a 3mm allan key and an 8mm spanner (you’ll need a philips head screw driver too if you’re not fitting reflectors). If you are fitting reflectors read both sets of instructions before starting as the reflectors replace a good proportion of the original fixings. You’ll just have to undo your handiwork if you fit the grips first and then look at the reflectors.

The standard fittings look solid and are entirely metal, however when fitting the reflectors it looks like metal bolts are held in place by the plastic of the reflector. So far I’ve not had any trouble, but this system at least looks a bit less strong than the normal fittings so I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

The main downside with Power Grips is that take a bit of setting up to match your shoes, and you then can’t use them properly with any other shoes (unless they happen to have the same external circumference) without readjusting them. You can of course still ride in other shoes, they just won’t be gripped as well. This isn’t a problem for me as I almost always wear the same shoes but could be an issue for some.

Some people have also not liked the fact that you have apply a twisting force to tighten the grips as it has hurt their knees. So far this hasn’t been a problem for me - perhaps because I have quite grippy soles on my shoes. This means that once I’ve twisted them in they tend to stay put on their own.

I’ve been using the Power Grips for a few weeks now and I am happy with them. They hold my feet better than toe clips without straps, and don’t require the constant faffing of toe clips with straps. They are also a bit easier to get your foot out of in an emergency. I had an episode early on when I was still getting used to having my feet strapped in to my Brompton. I did the usual thing of stopping before remembering to get my foot out of the strap but still managed to get my foot out in time to catch myself. I’m fairly sure that with proper toe clips I wouldn’t have been quick enough.

Given the choice I still prefer my SPD shoes though, so if I ever went on a really long ride I’d look into getting some removable SPD pedals and just replace my current pedals for that trip.

Brompton Pedals

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The Brompton folding pedal is very cleverly designed but the plastic section in the middle doesn’t seem to be strong enough to cope with hard pedaling and creaks a bit when put under stress. Usually flipping the pedal the other way up works (probably because it transfers the stresses to the metal sections of the pedal) but not always for some reason.

So, I decided I wanted something a bit sturdier and something that would also allow me to attach toe clips later on. Whilst you can find people online that have attached toeclips and similar things to their Brompton pedals they all seem to involve drilling extra holes, and I’d still have the pedal creaking to contend with.

My Dahon had removable MKS pedals, and as it turns out MKS seem to be the main player when it comes to detachable pedals. Some googling later I was suitably inspired by this post describing not just a nice set of MKS pedals but also how to fit Power Grips to those pedals (my Power Grips will have to wait for a separate post).

One thing I wasn’t keen on with the Dahon’s pedals was the little plastic clips that you were supposed to use to lock the pedals in place. They were fiddly to remove and I managed to lose one of them. Personally I never had a problem cycling without the locking ring, but it still niggled (you can find stories of people accidentally detaching their pedals whilst cycling). So I was particularly happy with the added bonus of the MKS Esprit EZY Superior pedals. Namely the “superior” attachment system that does away with the plastic locking ring in favour of requiring the locking collar to be rotated as well as pushed.

Removing the existing pedals isn’t exactly straightforward. The righthand one can be removed easily enough with a normal 15mm pedal spanner. However the folding pedal needs a 24mm box spanner to get it off.

Once removed the Brompton cranks show an interesting asymmetry. The righthand crank has the usual indentation for a pedal washer (not fitted with the Brompton pedal, but shown below with both MKS washers fitted).

However the lefthand crank is completely smooth.

The folding pedal instead has a very large washer.

It seems that the indentation in the righthand crank is little narrow for the MKS pedal so the pedal started to bite into the crank before the washer took the load. So, I ended up using both MKS supplied washers on the righthand pedal. On the lefthand pedal I used a single pedal washer I ordered from eBay.

The new pedals are much sturdier, although a bit less convenient to fold. Personally it’s a trade-off I’m more than happy with.

Brompton brake levers

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my initial thoughts the biggest disappointment with my Brompton is the performance of the brakes. The cable oilers I fitted helped to some degree but I decided to try some different brake levers too.

I bought a pair of Shimano R550 levers in black. At £15 for a pair they are only about £5 more expensive than a replacement pair of Brompton levers but they are much more solidly made (and no doubt a bit heavier for it too). There are other levers around, but the important thing to check is that they are suitable for calliper brakes rather than V brakes.

These levers are much narrower where they attach to the handlebar than the Brompton levers. This means that if you use Ergon grips they need to be cut much less than with the standard lever (although they do need to be cut all the way around).

At first I found the levers a bit hard to use, but I realised that this was because I’d positioned them similarly to the old levers and they were facing almost straight down making them hard to reach. I adjusted the handlebars back to about vertical (when unfolded) which allowed me to position the levers at close to 45 degrees and still fold the bike. In this position they are much more usable and importantly feel much more positive than the original levers.

Brompton Ergon GC2 grips and bar ends

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Since writing this post I have fitted some GR2 grips and bar-ends which overall I prefer to the GC2s.

The thing I probably missed most when moving over from my larger bike were bar ends. I find them really helpful for going up hills, and also more comfortable than holding the main handle bars in general.

Looking at how the Brompton folds it seems that bar-end choice is limited by the clearance between the folded handlebar and the front wheel. So I started researching what other people had managed to fit onto their Bromptons. The most popular choice seemed to be the Ergon GC2 grips with integrated stubby bar ends, so decided to try them out. They come in three different lengths; normal, short for use with grip shifters, and one short one long for use with a Rohlhoff shifter. The grip shift version would have been too short so I went for the normal length knowing that I’d have to cut them down a little.

Fitting them was fairly easy, firstly I removed the original grips. These are made of foam and a glued on to the handle bar so I had to cut them to get them off. The glue used to stick them in place wasn’t too hard to scrape off using an old plastic store card.

I then moved the gear shifters and brake levers as far inboard as I could (as I have an M type Brompton that wasn’t very far) and used a pen knife to cut the grips around the brake levers. (Note, if you plan to change your brake levers you should do so before cutting up your new grips. The replacement brake levers I got [that’s another post] require far less cutting of the grips so I now need to get a second pair!)

The grips and bar ends are both secured by a 4mm allan bolt in the underside of the bar end. I recommend tightening it so that you can just about move the grips and then sitting on the bike to adjust the grip and bar end positions. Even then I’d also recommend carrying an allan key with you for a week or two to tweak the positions as you ride.

I pushed my handlebars as far forward as the fold allows and the bar ends don’t interfere with the fold, although the lefthand one does scrape on the ground sometimes when the bike is folded.

The new grips are nice, and definitely better than the Brompton ones. Although, for me at least, they are not the revelation that they are for some. The bar ends are just about long enough to provide a second hand position when combined with the hand grip. As far as providing extra leverage goes, the bar ends are usable over short distances but I wouldn’t want to use them on a long hill. Also being combined with the grips, the bar ends take up minimal space on the handlebar, which is useful given the very limited space on the M-type handlebars.

So, overall I’m happy with them, and as I indicated above I’m planning to get a replacement pair. Although I’ve now pushed the handlebars back a bit so I’m going to try some longer bar ends next time.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Brompton Cable Oilers

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the (few) disappointments with my Brompton is the brake performance. After a bit of research one thing I saw recommended was fitting cable oilers to allow easy lubrication of the brake cables. However I couldn’t find any information on how to fit them or what the different sizes meant - although it seemed that one size was for brakes and one was for gears. So, I ordered a packet of each and resolved to work it out when they arrived. The other thing I ordered was a packet of cable endcaps.

As it turned out the measurement relates to the outer diameter of the cable, the 5mm ones fitted the brake cables and the 4mm ones fitted the gear cables.

To fit an oiler you need to disconnect the relevant cable and remove the inner cable from the outer (which means removing the existing cable end cap). Then you need to cut the cable outer somewhere in the middle. You can (and probably should) use proper cable cutters, but as I didn’t know about them I just used a hacksaw. If you do use a hacksaw make sure that there are no sharp edges left to rub against the cable. Once the outer is cut it’s fairly straightforward to fit the oiler.

First reinsert the cable.

Secondly thread the cable oiler onto the cable and push it on to the cable outer.

Finally insert the cable back into the other part of the outer and push that into the oiler.

Once re-assembled the cable can be re-attached and re-capped, and then it’s ready to oil. Just push the rubber ring to one side, insert the tube from a can of WD40 or similar and squirt until lubricant comes out of the ends of the cable.

As the Brompton front brake cable is already in two sections I used two oilers on it, and one on the rear cable. I also fitted one to the hub gear cable. However, the derailleur cable was rather frayed at the end (I think probably inevitably due to the way it’s attached to the lever) so I left it. It would have been impossible to reinsert the cable into the outer if I removed it - it was difficult enough to re-attach it to the gear lever. I still have spare oilers and if I ever need to fit a replacement derailleur cable I put an oiler on it first.

After oiling the cables I noticed a definite improvement in the brakes, and I hope that lubricating the cables this way will increase their lifespan and also push out any grit or dirt that might have got into the ends of the cables.

So overall they’re a little fiddly to fit, but cheap and I think, worth it.

Brompton Handlebar Brace

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Brompton manufacture an optional handle bar strengthener for the M type handlebars. As I was planning to install some bar-ends on the bike I thought the strengthener would be a very good idea to help counteract the extra bending force I’d be applying when I used the bar-ends. Aside from stiffening the handlebars the strengthener also has a couple of other things going for it:

It lengthens the lifespan of the handlebars - they are aluminium and will eventually fail. Brompton tell you to replace them at least every 5000 miles without the strengthener although they appear to be silent on how long they will last with the strengthener (reading literally you may never have to replace the handlebars).
It provides extra space to mount lights, cycle computers, etc (although it has quite a small diameter, so make sure the clamps for your equipment will fit).
It’s cheap - about £10

Anyway, fitting the strengthener was straightforward and required only one 3mm allan key and two 17mm spanners.

The instructions are clear and well written, but it’s worth emphasising a couple of points:

The strengthener is not symmetrical - it has a back and a front. So make sure you get it the right way around
The strengthener should not apply any force (pulling in or pushing out) on the handlebars. It should just be a snug fit.

Merell, what were you thinking?

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently bought a new pair of Merrell Chameleon Evo shoes, as all my previous pairs of Merrell shoes have been comfortable, and the Gore-Tex ones nicely waterproof.

These new ones seem to be similarly good, except that I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when they chose the laces. The laces on these shoes are thin and smooth and won’t stay done up for more than 10 minutes at a time. Were I actually hiking in these shoes I would very quickly get fed up or have to tie them in some kind of knot!

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Brompton Part 2

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been riding my Brompton the short distances on my current commute to get it broken in and get used to it. My initial impression in mostly positive, but there are a few niggles. Some good and not so good points follow:

Folding

Folding has always been a strength of the Brompton and it doesn’t disappoint. The folding action is reasonably fast once you get the hang of it, although the Dahon was probably marginally faster due its quick release levers instead of screws. Once folded the Brompton is about as small as they come, plus the chain is on the inside of the folded bike; other commuters will thank - or at least not curse - you.

Attention to Detail

Brompton have been refining the same basic design for many years now and that shows through in a number of nice touches like the hand grip under the saddle, the folding pedal, and the option to “park” the bike easily.

Colours

The Brompton frame is divided into two sections for the purposes of painting it (one if you go for the titanium option) with any combination of red and black being included in the normal price. To change the colour of either section to one of the many options costs a not unreasonable £25 extra. I went for orange on both sections and I’m very pleased with the result. The orange is a bright and vibrant one, exactly what I was after.

Saddle

Bicycle saddles are very subjective things, but personally I like the default Brompton one and have no intention of changing it.

Luggage

Another traditional strong point of Brompton is their luggage. I went for a “T bag” as it was the largest available and it seems to be a well made piece of luggage. The frame that supports it and attaches to the bike is fairly sturdy and clips onto and off the frame easily. I recently took the frame out and use the bag as a shoulder bag for the first time, and in that scenario it was less good (although the ability to that at all is appreciated). I imagine that the S or C bags would do better in this role due to their shapes.

Instructions

The Brompton comes with instructions on how to fold and maintain the bike. Even better, the instructions are written very clearly and precisely and accompanied by diagrams. There’s a sort of old-school re-assurance from the fact that the manual appears to have been written by someone that really understands the engineering behind the bike.

Gear range

I went for the 6 speed option which provides the biggest range of gears. I find it quite impressive that Brompton have managed to cover in 6 gears the same range that my full size bike uses 18 gears to cover.

Gear changes

The hub gear on the Brompton is definitely easier to change than that on my old Dahon. You need to back off the power much less on the Brompton to allow it to change gear which is useful when going up hill.

Lights

The lights are a mixed bag. The front light is pretty bright, but needs to be twisted out of position whenever the bike is folded. The rear light integrates nicely into the frame of the bike so it will always be there when you need it. However, it doesn’t flash and is fairly low down on the bike, so I immediately bought a cheap flashing light to attach just under the saddle to complement the built in one.

Adjustment

You don’t expect a huge amount of adjustment on a folding bike, but a few do feature handlebar height adjustment. The Brompton allows you to move the saddle backwards and forwards a bit, and you can tilt the handlebars a little bit (but not too far or you’ll interfere with the folding). I found that moving the seat back a bit made a noticeable improvement to the comfort of the riding position for me (I am about 5”8’).

Brake and Gear Levers

The brake and gear levers both feel a bit flimsy, which is disappointing on bike this well designed (and expensive!).

Brakes

The biggest disappointment with my Brompton is the performance of the brakes, when new it was almost impossible to lock the back wheel even when trying hard. Apparently this is a newer rear brake, much improved over the design of a few years ago. All I can say is that I’m glad I never had to use the old design. I have made some changes (stay tuned for future posts) as well as adjusting the brake position and the brakes are now reasonable. At some point I may look into replacing the levers which may help further.

Paint

Whilst the paint is a good colour, it has already chipped in a couple of places which doesn’t bode to well for it’s long term survival. I may have to buy some touch up paint and see what I can do.

Overall

So, overall I do like the bike a lot, especially with the modifications I’ve made. Although, if I hadn’t bought it on the cycle to work scheme I would be smarting a bit at the cost. It seems that you do pay a fairly large premium for all that clever design, and the fact that the bikes are built in London.

New Brompton

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We’re currently trying to sell our house so that we can move nearer to our families. Anyway, the upshot of the planned move is that we will be living about a mile from the railway station with a very steep hill in-between. A second consideration is that the train from Rochester only goes to St Pancras rather than Kentish Town so there’s a bit of a journey at the far end of my commute too. So, the obvious solution to this transport issue (and a way to get some exercise) is a folding bicycle.

I have previously owned two folding bicycles, one a very cheap piece of basic rubbish from eBay, bought to test the feasibility of a folding bike on my current commute, followed by a rather nicer Dahon Curve SL (review courtesy of The Folding Society). As luck would have it I sold the Dahon a few months before we decided we wanted to move so I was back in the market for a folding bike.

Whilst the Dahon had been a fairly nice bike there were some issues with it, the main annoyance was that it had been designed such that the handle bar quick release lever was positioned just where it could gouge the frame every time the bike was folded. Turning the quick release lever around did nothing to alleviate the problem. Dahon obviously knew about the issue as there was a thick but very soft plastic pad stuck to the frame just where it clashed. That lasted all of a few weeks before it had worn through.

That issue with the Dahon seemed symptomatic of a certain lack of design, so I was interested to see what many years of refining basically the same design could do in comparison. In other words I wanted to try a Brompton. When I found out that Bromptons were available in a range of colours, including orange, and how much I’d save by using the Cycle to Work Scheme the deal was pretty much sealed.

My main concern was to make sure I could get up Star Hill in Rochester. To that end I took my full size bike to a footpath in St Albans that I judged to be about the same gradient and cycled up that in a number of gears to find out which one was low enough to comfortably get up the hill. I then worked out that the relevant gear worked out at 30 gear inches. To get that low on a Brompton meant choosing one of the 6 speed models, after some research I went for the 12% lower geared option giving a range of 29 to 88 gear inches (for comparison my full size bike has a top gear of 89 gear inches).

The other big choice with a Brompton is the type of handlebar. In the end I went for the M type, mainly because I could then get the largest bag to go on the front (the S type handlebars restrict the choice of luggage that will fit).

Impressions, and details of some modifications I’ve made to follow.

More Manual Focus

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I got a response from Nikon service reasonably quickly, however the response itself was fairly useless. They couldn’t give me a price for doing any work without seeing the camera and said that if the focus screen wasn’t a Nikon one (as far as I know Nikon don’t make split prism screens for their DSLRs) they may replace it during the service.

So, next stop was to try and find a local camera repair shop and see what they could do. I phoned RCCR as they’re pretty close by and had a very helpful conversation with Ray. Whilst he couldn’t actually help me he was very happy to explain in detail what might be going wrong.

Conveniently I’ve also currently got a trial version of Lightroom 3 installed. I’d read that this allows you to do tethered shooting, and sure enough after changing the USB setting on my camera, tethered shooting worked without a hitch. This allowed me to check the focus of my photos at 1:1 on my laptop as I took them, which is a lot more useful than looking at them on the back of the camera.

Ray was worried that the mirror adjustment might noticably mess with the autofocus (contrary to what I’d read previously). It seems that he was right, thanks to the tethered shooting I saw a noticable change in sharpness as I moved the mirror adjustment this time.

According to Ray I should have seen a difference in focus performance after taking the existing shims out. The first time I took them out and put them in a few times and didn’t really notice anything changing. This time I thought that instead of using the autofocus and seeing how far misaligned the split prism was I would try focusing with the split prism and see if I could tell the difference in the pictures. This turned out to be a much better idea and showed that focusing with some thick paper shims I made was clearly worse than no shims.

Unfortunately because in both cases the focus was off in the same direction I have to conclude that either my camera just can’t do accurate manual focus, or that I’ve got a duff focus screen - if it’s thicker than the existing screen plus the shims then it’s probably going to be impossible to use.

So for now I’ve re-installed the original screen and gone back to my mostly reliable autofocus. Drat.

Installing Drupal on a Mac

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Drupal site contains full instructions for both prerequisites and installation but somethings were not immediately clear to me and some of the documentation is fairly long so I thought I’d distill them here.

Install Apache - On a Mac you don’t need to do this as it’s already there, you just need to enable it in System preferences under Sharing -> Web Sharing.

Install MySql - You get the option of 32 bit or 64 bit installs. It seems that at the moment it’s still safer to install the 32 bit version. I downloaded the dmg version and installed both packages (so MySql will start up automatically with the machine) and the preferences panel.

Install PHP - Again this is already installed on your Mac you just need to activate it.

Download Drupal and unzip it somewhere, (the Drupal instructions will link it to Apache later on).

Configure MySql (by default installed to /usr/local/mysql/bin). The following step by step instructions assume that MySql has only just been installed and has not been configured at all yet.

mysql -u root

Then the following sets up a root user password:

SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('secret_password');

Create a user for use by Drupal

CREATE USER 'drupal'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'another_password';

Create a database for use by Drupal

CREATE DATABASE drupalDb;

Allow the Drupal user to manipulate the Drupal database (note the ` characters that are not ')

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, LOCK TABLES, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON `drupalDb`.* TO 'drupal'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Quit MySql

\q

Follow the remaining installation instructions on the Drupal site.

The Mac specific instructions on the Drupal site are a bit mangled. This page explains how to set up virtual hosts more clearly:

http://drupal.org/node/238805

One important note here is that if you put your Drupal files somewhere non-standard then you could end up getting 403 errors. This page has some suggestions on how to fix things. Personally I just put the Drupal files in a subdirectory of /Library/WebServer/Documents.

Once that’s all done you ought to be able to go to the virtual site you set up and see the drupal installation start page. From there it ought to be plain sailing.

But in my case it wasn’t. A final couple of useful points:

You’ll probably get an error about the files directory. Just create the directory manually and give the _www group write access to it.
If you’re installing on Snow Leopard you’ll probably get an error after entering the database details. To get around this, click on advanced options and change the host name from localhost to 127.0.0.1.

Manual Focus

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been interested in getting a manual focus screen for my D300 for a while, but the price of the Katzeye screen has put me off. However, I recently found out that you can get focus screens from on eBay for a fraction of the price, so I thought I’d take the plunge.

I chose a 180 degree split, which just means that the split line is horizontal. That means that it’s easiest and most accurate to focus on vertical lines and impossible to focus on horizontal lines. The other common types are:

45 degree single split. This is the same as the 180 degree but with the split line at 45 degrees. One of these screens will let you focus on both horizontal and vertical lines but with less accuracy. For maximum accuracy you’d need to find a 45 degree line.
45 degree double split. As the name suggests this screen has two splits. Apparently the purpose of this is to help get the sensor plane aligned with what you need to focus on and is mainly useful for photography flat objects like coins and books.

Removing the focus screen on a D300 is slightly fiddly as you really need to remove two tiny screws (it’s probably just about possible to change the screen without removing the screws but I wouldn’t recommend it). Once the screws, and small plate they hold, have been removed you just need to unhook the wire holding the screen in and replace the screen. If you plan to do this you should follow some proper instructions.

Unfortunately, so far things have not gone to plan. Fitting the screen is in theory fairly simple. In practice the particular screen I have was about 1mm narrower than the original screen and so the wire clip holding it in slipped off one side and so didn’t hold it as securely as I’d like. To counter this I removed the clip completely, bent it in slightly with some pliers, and then put it back. Not too hard but it shouldn’t have been necessary and required some confidence.

Once securely fitted I tested the screen by setting the camera to autofocus and seeing if the screen agreed. It didn’t. I half expected this as there were two shims between the original focus screen and camera body and I’d read guides that said to leave them in and other guides that said to take them out. So I tried removing one, then both shims. Unfortunately that didn’t really help.

At this point I had to do some more research. One thing I learned is that with a 1.5mm allen key you can adjust the mirror resting position to a small degree by turning a small screw next to the bottom right hand corner of the mirror (as you look into the camera). This helped and got the focus quite close, but I couldn’t adjust it far enough. Also please do note that I later found a few warnings about how this adjustment might mess up your auto focus, however, I found just as many notes saying that people had done this without any problems. For the record I have not seen any problems with my auto focus but haven’t tested it thoroughly.

Finally after more research I’ve found a few people saying that modern DSLRs are simply not set up for manual focus at all accurately (although mostly they’re not far off). Given the general lack of complaints about these screens I think in my case I may have got unlucky and got a camera that is so far away from accurate manual focus that the small adjustments available to me aren’t enough.

So, I’ve admitted defeat and emailed Nikon Service to see what they can do adjust the focusing and how much it will cost. More details to follow as things progress…

Notes on the iPhone on IOS4 is broken

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Apple recently released IOS4 for the iPhone which updated a number of things (mostly for the better).

One of the less obvious changes was to synchronise notes from the Notes app automatically with your gmail account. The iphone will automatically create a “Notes” label in gmail and file your notes there.

Anyway this would have passed unnoticed for me except that the Notes app is now bugged and anything after the first few lines of a note will be lost when you close and re-open the app. This makes the Notes app unusable and is apparently down to a bug in the gmail synchronisation.

Fine so I just turn off this feature that I didn’t want anyway and everything will be OK right? Wrong. Turn off the note syncing (in the settings app under the mail settings) and any notes written since you updated your phone will vanish from the Notes app completely. Brilliant.

Fortunately they don’t get deleted from gmail so you can still get at them and paste them back into the Notes app where they ought to have stayed in the first place.

So be warned, if you use the Notes app at all then turn off the gmail synching ASAP and be prepared to retrieve your newest notes from gmail.

Customer Service

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It’s nice to get a good bit of customer service every now and again. A while back we bought an AeroBed, which is a nice, comfortable air bed with a built in mains powered pump. Recently it sprung a leak so I went to the AeroBed site and requested a puncture repair kit which were listed as free. A couple of days later I got an email asking for proof purchase which I didn’t have (having bought the bed some years ago), so I sent a reply saying that and that I would be happy to pay for a kit. They replied to say that they’d send out a kit anyway, still free.

In the end I actually received two kits so I have to wonder whether they’d sent out the first kit before even getting in touch to ask for proof of purchase.

Anyway, the fact that they are still around and providing free customer support for old customers is nice thing, and I think deserves to be reported, given how often people get on the internet just to complain.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Cycling

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I looked for a site that could plot out a cycle friendly route for me for my commute to work but failed to find one. I have now found CycleStreets.net and whilst I haven’t actually tried the route they suggest yet I am very impressed with the (free) route planner they have on the site. Well worth a look if you want to plan a route through unfamiliar territory.

PNG and CSS colour matching

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Whilst working on my new site layout I came across a couple of issues.

Firstly, at least on a mac, if you create a PNG with a certain colour and then use that same colour in a stylesheet the likelyhood is that the colour won’t look the same in a browser. If you want to see this for yourself, have a look at the various test pages at libpng.org.

One way to get around this problem is to use a single pixel image as a repeating background instead of setting a colour in the stylesheet.

This brings me to the second and far more bizarre issue. In Chrome (but not firefox) a single pixel background image displays as a different colour to a background image made up of two or more pixels of the same colour. I have tested this by creating a two pixel image viewing it, then cutting it down to one pixel and viewing it again so I’m pretty sure it’s not some subtle issue to do with the image itself.

My best guess is that Chrome is optimising single pixel background images somehow. However, it’s not just turning it into a CSS background colour as it displays as yet another different colour.

So for now I’ll have to make do with 2 pixel background images to be able to match my backgrounds to my other graphics.

Static Sites with Haml, Sass, and ScriptMatic

Sat, 08 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was listening to an episode of the “Herding Code” podcast recently, and they had a guest on who was singing the praises of Haml. Haml is a language for creating HTML documents that is supposedly neater and easier to use than HTML itself. Haml is also packaged with another project called Sass (although either can be used without the other) which is a language for creating CSS documents. Again Sass is supposed to be easier and quicker to write than CSS, but it also supports variables and arithmetic which can be very useful.

Since my website is currently in need of a refresh I thought I’d try using these languages and see how it went.

Haml and Sass are often used with dynamic pages generated by Rails. My site is a simple static affair, and whilst it is possible to run both Haml and Sass from the command line it’s quickly going to get tedious. So, I had a look for a tool to help. My requirements were:

Must support Haml and Sass
Must have a live preview - automatic regeneration of the site whilst developing
Must support partial files - so that common sections can be split out and re-used
Must be able to export the site to HTML and CSS when it’s done

I found a few recommendations, but these two seemed to be the closest match to what I wanted:

For no particular reason I’ve gone for StaticMatic.

So, assuming that you have ruby and gem set up, you can get things working, by running the following commands from a terminal window:

sudo gem install haml
sudo gem install staticmatic
staticmatic setup mySite
staticmatic preview mySite

At this point you should be able to go to http://localhost:3000 and see the default staticmatic page. Now that the site is up and running we can change it a bit. By default the main files are:

src/layout/application.haml - The default template, page content replaces “=yield”
src/pages/index.haml - Default index content
src/stylesheets/application.sass - Default stylesheet

As you change the Haml and Sass files in mySite/src the site should update dynamically. Once you’ve got things looking how you like run “staticmatic build mySite” to build the html and css files under mySite/site which you can then upload to your live site.

Printing Pictures

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So today I wrote my first plug-in for the GIMP (it’s really just a script but as it’s written in Python it goes in the GIMP plug-ins directory).

The reason for the script is that I’ve found a print lab in the UK that will accept files over the internet and just print them without messing around trying to “correct” them. They give you an icm profile for their printer so that you can convert your images. They’re called ProAmImaging. There are other places on the internet that seem to do the same but the sample prints I got from ProAm look pretty good so I’ll be using them for now.

Anyway, the flip side of them not touching the images is that I need to scale and crop the images to the exact number of pixels needed for the print size I want. This gets tedious very quickly so I decided to write a script to automate things. What the script does is take an image size in inches, and a desired DPI, and uses them to scale and crop the image to the correct size in one step. It’s nothing you couldn’t do with the existing tools, but it halves the number of actions you need to do, and does the maths to work out exactly how many pixels to crop automatically.

I’d like to improve it so that it activates the crop tool with the correct aspect ratio so that you can select the crop manually, however it’s not obvious to me whether that’s even possible so I’ll leave that for now.

A couple of things worth noting when writing Python scripts for the GIMP:

If python doesn’t like your script for some reason the GIMP won’t tell you why, your script simply won’t appear in the menus. There’s probably a way around this but it never got so annoying that I had to figure it out. If you start with a known good script (there are loads at registry.gimp.org) and test regularly it’s OK.
The GIMP/Python documentation seems to be rather sparse (http://www.gimp.org/docs/python/index.html) and the python object interface is quite small. However you can call all the libgimp methods from Python using pbd.methodName().
For debugging pdb.gimp_message(“Your message here”) is rather helpful.

Please note that this is the first time I’ve written a GIMP plug-in and almost the first time I’ve used Python so the take the above with the appropriate dosage of salt.

And finally the script itself - ScaleAndCrop.py, I hope someone else finds it useful.

High Pass Filter Effect

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This technique has been written about a number of times, not least by Strobist, but I thought I’d see how it works on this rhino rather than a person and what happens if you mess around with it a little.

I use the GIMP for post processing my photos, and by default it doesn’t have a high pass filter. So the first thing to do is to head to the GIMP plugin repository to get one. On Windows put the .scm file in “C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Name.gimp-2.6\scripts” On OSX put the .scm file in “~/Library/Application Support/Gimp/scripts”

If all went well you should now have a “High Pass Filter” entry under Filters > Generic.

Now we’re all set, so: Open up the photo you’re going to work on Select Filters > Generic > High Pass Filter I’m working on a picture that’s about 800 pixels wide so in the dialogue I chose:

Filter radius: 16
Contrast Adjust: 0
Mode: Greyscale
Keep original layer: Checked

Other values will also work (see below for what happens) but a radius of about 1/50th of the image width is a good place to start.

Change the layer mode on the new grey layer to Hard Light Tweak the opacity of the layer to taste

The image below has had a different setting applied to each quarter for comparison.

and the original again for comparison:

My favourite here is the radius 16 contrast 0 section. Adding extra contrast to the high pass layer adds contrast to the final image, bleaching out some of the colour. Increasing the radius seems to emphasise larger features turning the effect from a subtleish sharpening effect to something actually affecting the image more obviously.

Tiger's Spider Burning Bright

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently bought a game for my iPhone, which in itself is unusual as I don’t normally buy things from the iTunes store as I don’t like the idea of only being able to use them whilst Apple says I can. The game in question is Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (developed by Tiger Style) and in this case a combination of the free demo Spider: Hornet Smash and the fact that Randy Smith was involved was enough to get me to part with the small amount of £1.79.

If you don’t want to read any more, I’ll say here and now that it’s a very good game and if you play games on your iPhone you should buy this one.

As I said I came to the game through the demo; Hornet Smash. The demo uses the same levels as the main game but it takes a small mechanic from the main game and expands it slightly to actually make a fairly different game. Hornet Smash is more fast paced than the main game with greater dynamism as you leap non-stop around the levels tackling as many hornets as you can before inevitably succumbing to the steadily growing number. Playing well will slow the hornets’ growth but I don’t know if it’s possible to play well enough to reach equilibrium.

In contrast, the main game only contains a few (non-multiplying) hornets and mostly plays out at a more sedate pace. The main adventure mode game is based around building webs to catch and eat enough insects in the level to open the portal to the next level. You do this by anchoring a thread to the level and then leaping to a second point to secure the thread between those points. Completely surround an empty space with threads and a web will appear between them trapping any insect that flies over it for long enough. You can anchor threads to webs, allowing you make new webs that were previously impossible. Eating insects will replenish your silk supplies and running out of silk means imminent death (there is a grace period in which to quickly eat an insect). One nice touch is that at the end of a level you are shown the complete room including your cobwebs, giving a feeling of the house gradually becoming more disused and deserted as you travel through it.

After a little practice, if you charge through the game, then the Blitzkrieg acheivement of completing it in under 30 minutes is easily achievable. But, if you do that and then leave the game you’ll have missed most of what makes it enjoyable. Rushing through the levels would mean not noticing the many details in the rooms and not finding the numerous secret areas that help to tell the story of the house you are making your way through and the family that lived there. If you find and follow all the clues there is also a secret room to find. (There is also the sealed room which is easier to find but also hidden).

There are also three other game modes, one where you try to eat as many insects as possible in 3 minutes, one where you have to eat insects regularly to avoid dieing (with the frequency increasing as you eat more), and finally a mode very similar to the main game but with your threads shortened and reduced in number which makes forward planning far more important.

According the lifetime stats the game provides I’ve played it for over 16 hours and have now completed the game, found the secret room, and completed all of the optional achievements which I found rather fun.

So overall an excellent way to spend £1.79, highly recommended.

New Lens

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I recently bought a second hand Nikon 70-210mm f4-f5.6 AF lens from eBay for £65 as I’d read some good things about it, and it comes from the same era as my 35-70mm f2.8 which I like very much (but which was also rather more expensive).

I already have an 18-200 VR so this new 70-210 is going have to be better than that lens to avoid going straight back on eBay.

I set the camera up on a tripod pointing down the garden and took a few shots with each lens at 200mm and 210mm with varying apertures. These are 100% crops from near the centre of the frame (unsharpened). The last shots are shrunk versions of the full image to give an idea of the extra reach the 70-210 has.

These results are a bit disappointing, the 70-210 is clearly putting more pixels over the same area, but I’m not convinced it’s actually capturing much more detail (especially at f5.6).

I’ve also just taken the 70-210 down to the park to take some photos of my daughter, and I’ve learned how important shutter speed is with this lens at 210mm. I guess I’ve been spoiled by the VR on the 18-200 but it does seem that you need a shutter speed of 1/400s or faster when hand holding which means you need quite a sunny day to also get down to f8-f11.

That said, I did get some quite nice shots in the park and noticed that it might be front focusing slightly which I should be able to correct for in the camera.

In terms of build quality the 70-210 wins, feeling much more solid. But it loses out in terms of focus speed to the 18-200’s built in AFS. The AF-D version of the 70-210 is supposed to focus twice as fast which would certainly help (but they are also rarer and more expensive on eBay).

So for now I’m leaning towards the 18-200 as it’s only marginally less sharp, but focuses faster, has VR and can go all the way to 18mm. However, if I didn’t already have the 18-200 I’d certainly be happy with 70-210, especially at the bargain price it can be had for.

Media Hardware

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Hopefully the final post in this mini series about my Media PC trials (I’d much rather just be using it!). Most of the hardware in the PC is not particularly important. It’s an old Athlon XP on a micro ATX motherboard in an Antec Aria case if you must know :). The imporant parts are the Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-TD 500 with remote control and a wireless Emprex keyboard with built in trackball (you can get one from Amazon here).

The TV card contains two DVB-T tuners allowing us to record two different Freeview channels at once, plus a remote control which works with the provided software and also with at least MythTV and MediaPortal.

The keyboard includes a small trackball, which allows you to completely control a PC without needing an extra mouse. It runs on 4AA batteries and as a pleasant surprise comes with 4 Duracell batteries rather than the usual generic batteries that often come with electronics. The second pleasant surprise is that plugging in the USB dongle and fitting the batteries was all that was needed to get it working. I guess that the dongle must pretend to be a normal keyboard so the computer doesn’t need any special drivers to make it work. Whilst the trackball isn’t the best in the world it works fine, and given the low price this keyboard is great value for money.

[The links to Amazon on this page won’t cost you anything, but will make me some money if you buy through them]

Media on Windows

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

With the new operating system came the choice of what software to use; MythTV on Windows requires you to build it yourself and I didn’t fancy going down that road. I started with the software that came with the TV card. This is version 7 of their software and I dread to think what the previous versions must have been like. If you just want to watch TV it’s fine, but the UI for recording is pretty poor, and in my case didn’t even work. I found a couple of possible solutions on Google, but didn’t bother trying them out as I knew there was more user friendly software out there that I wanted to try first.

I tried out GBPVR briefly but the flaky website (Google’s cache helps here) and some rough edges put me off. I then went on to MediaPortal. I have used MediaPortal before, but not for TV as my previous TV card wouldn’t work with it. On the whole I’ve been reasonably impressed. The UI is nice and if you tell it you have a Hauppauge remote control it all just works together. There were a couple of things that could have been easier though:

Picking up the programme guide information over the air doesn’t seem to work for me which meant I had to follow the instructions here to set up an included tool to get listings from a RadioTimes XML feed. (Although I had to use the XmlTv plugin to read the listing file rather than the WebEPG one).
My first trial recording failed because apparently the TV card takes some time to wake up and so it wasn’t ready when MediaPortal looked for it. There is a setting specifically for this under:
- TV-Server Configuration
- General Settings
- Delay for TV card detection
I set this to 30 seconds and since then it’s been fine.

The final problem I’ve yet to satisfactorily solve is the “Black screen of death” which can happen when you plug a computer into a TV’s HDMI socket and then switch the source on the TV. As I understand it, when the source on the TV is switched the HDMI connection to the computer is broken and it gives up on the display. When you switch back to the computer source on the TV the computer doesn’t know and continues to ignore the display. You can get round this by getting the computer to re-detect the display but so far the ways I’ve found are not ideal:

Unplug the HDMI connection, wait a couple of seconds, then plug it back in.
Put the computer to sleep and then wake it up again.

I’ve found this program which turns the monitor connection on and off again and can be bound to a particular key combination, but unfortunately doesn’t yet work with XP. However, it seems likely that the author will be adding XP support shortly.

To end on a positive note one thing that has worked unexpectedly well is the scheduling plugin. Once enabled you can tell it to put the computer to sleep after a certain amount of inactivity and wake up for recordings. So far it had been hibernating and waking up perfectly which definitely beats having it on all the time. One caveat, if you want to watch a DVD using a different program you need to tell the acheduler not to go to sleep or your viewing will be rudely interrupted by a hibernation screen every few minutes.

Media on Linux

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a media PC sitting under the TV for quite a while now and it’s been very useful for recording TV and showing photos to the family. A few months ago I replaced the TV card with one supported under Linux (a Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-TD 500) and thought it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit about how Linux works, plus I’d heard good things about MythTV and wanted to try it out. A few months later the things I have learned are:

With a family and a full time job I don’t have the hours of free time needed to get things working, especially when I know I can do the same thing under Windows with far less trouble.
Mythbuntu sounds like a good idea, but when things don’t work (which in my experience was all too often) it’s another layer of unfamiliarity to work through. i.e. “Is this a problem in MythTV, Ubuntu, or Mythbuntu specifically?”. Also walkthroughs for Ubuntu may not work as various tools have been stripped out of Mythbuntu to make it lighter-weight. So if you are familiar with Linux already then Mythbuntu may help, however, if I was doing this again I’d install the full Ubuntu first and then MythTV on top.
MythTV has a pretty slick frontend and when it works it is good. However, it’s quite fiddly to set up. If you want to get a TV card IR remote control working at the same time as a USB keyboard and mouse (which may or may not be plugged in at boot time) then be prepared for an unnecessarily convoluted fight with various configuration files. (I believe because the IR receiver in my TV card also looks like a USB device to the operating system.)
For some reason DVDs are jerky under Linux using either VLC or the built in DVD decoder in MythTV. The same (rather old) hardware plays DVDs fine using a free copy of PowerDVD on Windows.

So when DVDs stopped playing altogether it was the final straw. In that particular case it turned out that the DVD drive had actually died but by then the die was cast and Windows XP was back.

iTunes!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I keep my music on a NAS device and run iTunes on Windows XP machine. If the NAS device isn’t turned one when I sync my iPhone iTunes will decide that my music no longer exists and put an exclamation mark next to the songs it tried to sync. Turning the NAS device on doesn’t fix it, neither does telling iTunes to add the directory the songs are in (you end up with two pointers to the same file in iTunes!), instead you need to take the incredibly intuitive action of shutting down iTunes and then restarting it whilst holding down the Ctrl key.

Now all I need is some way of stopping iTunes instantly crashing every time I access the podcasts tab of my iPhone…

With thanks to Dave Nicoll: http://blog.davenicoll.com/2009/04/05/dear-itunes-that-track-with-an-exclamation-mark-is-not-missing/

Hello World

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On the off chance that someone is actually reading this, be warned that this blog is mainly going to be for things I find interesting and want some record of. If you find them interesting too then so much the better, if not then please feel free to move along, there are plenty of more interesting blogs out there. In fact this first post can contain the ones I regularly read (there, now it has a purpose).

Photography
http://strobist.blogspot.com/
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog
http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog
http://photography-thedarkart.blogspot.com/

Computers
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/