Ligfiets in Nederland

Mijn fiets is gefuckt. To cut a long story short, the chain is as brittle as a Java applet running on low memory.

Last Wednesday, I was setting off from the terrace outside Radio Nederland Wereldomroep—where I’m currently a intern—when suddenly my leg shot forwards and my chain had come off my chainset. Actually, a little more had happened because when I looked behind at my derailleur, what seems like three hundred metres of chain was strewn across the footway. I’d snapped my chain, and not cleanly; it really snapped hard off. Since quite a few people cycle in the Netherlands (so I’ve heard), sourcing a chain tool at work wasn’t exactly difficult and I knew what to do. An annoyance but no reason to cry and ur…not cycle to the nearest bike shop. I went out to the cycle parking (lovely weather for bike maintanence) and got to work removing and refitting links. After about forty minutes of swearing copiously and getting seriously oily hands, the job was done and I was able to cycle home without problem.

This morning, I was cycling (again) quite happily on the three metre-wide unidirectional cycleway adjacent to the N417 just outside the village of Hollandsche Rading and again: crunk fipp clatter clatter clatter clatter. I stopped, looking behind and again: three hundred metres of chain. Since I was reasonably close to a railway station, I decided to park my bike and hop on a train to work.

Jonathan Bennett offered me the advice “clean and lube”. On closer inspection, yeah: it does need a clean. While I cleaned the shit off my Hurricane on Bank Holiday Monday, I neglected to clean the chain and other ‘transmission’ parts and naïvely thought “chain could do with a lube” before globbing the usual quarter-of-a-bottle onto the chain. In hindsight, this was a bad descicion.

The forest which surrounds the wonderful B&B where I’m staying is bone-dry (though we did get roughly an hour of rain yesterday evening) but still: really bloody dry and, as a precaution, a ‘code red‘ has been instigated banning smoking, barbecues and basically anything which could start a forest fire from “woodland and near woodland”. The route I’ve been commuting to Wereldomroep along for the past three weeks takes a dirt-surfaced fietspad (lit. “cycle path) for the first four-or-so kilometres. Not exactly the best surface for chains; this is perhaps why my chain snapped …three times, though I can’t find any real citations on t’Internet linking lack of cleaning to chain snappage.

Graffiti 2 vs Dell

In this post, I’ll be wasting your time by pointlessly comparing the Palm technology Graffiti to other methods of text input.

Graffiti may be retro but it’s one of the slowest ‘innovations’ I’ve recently gone back to. Don’t believe me?; remember Graffiti as a quick method of Palm input?; remember Palms? I wrote the following passage first in gvim on my netbook, then using the software keyboard on my ancient PalmOne Zire 31—yes; they do have software keyboards—and finally on my Zire 31 using Graffiti 2 as the input.

This expanded edition of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism includes the text of his 1868 speech to the British House of Commons defending the use of capital punishment in cases of aggravated murder. The speech is significant both because its topic remains timely and because its arguments illustrate the applicability of the principle of utility to questions of large-scale social policy.

The above passage, taken from the blurb on the back of my copy of Utilitarianism, took ninety seconds to write in gvim and that writing-out is the quote above. I rewrote-out the passage, using the book’s back cover as the source each time and waiting five minutes between typing each version to reduce memory bias. Taking a stylus to the Palm’s software keyboard took four minutes and 35 seconds (275 seconds). To write the paragraph using Graffiti 2, it took seven minutes and thirteen seconds (433 seconds): 1.6ish times longer than the Zire’s software keyboard and almost five times longer than using gvim on my Dell Inspiron mini. I’m not sure what scientific relevance or use this information has but remember: you’ve read it; you can’t unread it.

Palm Zire 31 and its software keyboard—accessible by tapping ABC in the bottom-right of the main Graffiti area

I’ve also been meaning to compare typing on one’s netbook and typing on one’s HTC Desire and its software keyboard (termed ‘Touch Input’ by the Android OS). The same-as-before passage of text took 108 seconds to type on the Desire; this figure versus the ninety seconds it took in gvim on my netbook. Not a huge difference and a lot faster than I was predicting.

So, as predicted, my netbook is the fastest mobile/portable device I have when it comes to typing; possibly slightly slower than my MacBook Pro was (rest in peace) owing to its slightly-more-springy keyboard. My Mac mini uses a Apple wireless keyboard as its keyboard input and, while the keys are a little smaller than those on my netbook and the spring is a little subtler on my Mac’s keyboard, I think I prefer my netbook’s keyboard—though maybe that’s because I’ve been using my netbook as my sole computer for the last fortnight and over the last few months, I’ve seen my Mac mini use dramatically fall as I begin to get more and more comfortable with using my netbook at college and for ‘around the house’ typing and editing.

Just a little bene: Graffiti 2 tries to be more ‘logical’ in terms of imitating handwriting than Graffiti (or Graffiti 1 as I’ll call it here) was. Graffiti 2 introduced multiple strokes per character—for example, a lowercase ‘t’ character requires a stroke down (which types a lowercase ‘l’) and a stroke across from left to right (which changes the ‘l’ to a ‘t’; without the stroke down to begin with, a space would be typed)—and I’m not the only one who considers this change, from ‘one stroke, one character’, less easy-to-use and difficult to adapt to. The interesting thing is is that I never had any contact with Graffiti 1 until February 2011 (when I installed a Graffiti 1 input method on my HTC Desire; simply because of retro impulsion), and the only device I’ve owned to have any version of Graffiti on it—this dear-old Palm Zire—had always been Graffiti 2-based. What probably happened was that I’d forgotten most (if not all) of the gestures from Graffiti 2 and, in relearning Graffiti 1 in those crucial five minutes, it now means until I forget everything again, I’m stuck with feeling awkward and frustrated every time a ‘t’ won’t write the way I ‘expect’ it to. JSYK, a ‘t’ character is written/drawn in Graffiti 1 by stylus-ing a glyph that looks similar to mirrored capital gamma (Γ)—but right-and-down and not left-and-down; left-and-down would produce an ‘f’.

Stopwatch used was an iPod nano (3rd generation). Blurb used as passage-to-be-transcribed was back cover of Utilitarianism and the 1868 Speech on Capital Punishment (2nd edition; ed. George Sher) (ISBN 0-87220-605-X). Control variables: same subject (Kevin Steinhardt), same passage of text; variable variables: input devices and methods (Dell Inspiron mini 10 keyboard with Windows key, Palm Zire 31 using Graffiti 2 first then using software keyboard, HTC Desire using Android 2.2 default software keyboard).

OpenWhateverMap

I only discovered this today—OpenWhateverMap. OpenWhateverMap is basically an OpenStreetMap map, but each tile on-screen loads from a different tile server: one gets Mapnik, Osmarender, ÖPNV-Karte, OpenCycleMap, the Midnight Commander-looking one that I can’t remember the name of, etc., which makes OpenWhateverMap a little less useful (than just viewing one style) but it’s still neat to see what different how different renderers have developed to display information from the same OpenStreetMap database.

OpenWhateverMap: focusing on Hilversum, NL and my current place of work. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0

OpenWhateverMap also, if you look closely, includes tiles from Andy Allan’s OpenCycleMap’s new Transport layer (too many possessives?).

Lit ways, March–April 2011

I haven’t done an OpenStreetMap-related post for a while—so, as a token, I’m going to revisit the progress of the lit=yes tagging in the Cambridge region …something I covered in this post a few months ago.

Lit ways of southwestern Cambridge, March--April 2011. Rendering and data Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 to OpenStreetMap.org and its contributors.

So what’s changed?; … not much, actually. The extent of Cambridge city’s lit ways is still very much limited to the southwest corner of town: Trumpington and Addenbrooke’s. The guided busway is partially lit, and the A1301 into Great Shelford forms the long ribbon of street lighting down to the bottom-right of the image above.

Street lighting isn’t too high up on the OpenStreetMap agenda: I’m assuming someone is to develop a fully-fledged OSM-based ‘sat nav’ and so I’m concentrating more on things like speed limits, number of lanes and road width—and also on tagging things which the CycleStreets engine picks up on: surfaces of cycleways and other highways in particular, which hopefully should be taken into consideration in a future version of the CycleStreets site.

Getting rid of my Mac mini

There are a number of things tying me to the Mac platform in 2011. It wouldn’t be time-efficient to list them all; of course it wouldn’t, but that would also require me to actually consider what is tying me to my Mac and why don’t I just sell it and get a powerful and sweet brand-new Linux box instead?

iTunes
This is kind of an obvious one, but it’s for two reasons. Firstly, the DRM on content in my iTunes library is frustrating and disgusting; while audio content can be de-DRM’d relatively easily, stripping the DRM from iTunes Store-purchased video content would probably take fucking ages (real-time plus time/effort at either end of each video) and it would most probably require me to break the Terms of Service. The second reason is that I haven’t found a decent Ubuntu ‘jukebox’; this is probably because, since I’m tied to iTunes for other reasons (cf. above and elsewhere on this blog at a later date), I haven’t been looking for an iTunes-ish/-esque equivalent for Ubuntu—it might also be because my current Ubuntu machine is a netbook with a solid-state drive and I’m scared I’m going to run out of write cycles a lot earlier than I actually will; “I don’t hit :w very often because one day it might not work” is what I’m saying.

iPhoto
(Another bloody iLife-suite application.) I’ve been moving away from iPhoto over the past few months; it’s served more as a ‘dump’ library than anything to do with organisation or touching-up photographs. There’s a bug in my installation which crashes the application if I assign more than a few (what iPhoto calls) ‘keywords’ (which are tags, basically; what Flickr calls tags) to more than a few photographs. I’ve tried Shotwell, which has tags (which I actually quite like) but it just doesn’t feel …rugged enough: maybe this is because I haven’t tried it out following a 3000-photograph import from my Mac mini—I’ve worked out how to use scp so I might tar up my iPhoto library and send it over to my netbook …but those write cycles.

Audio Hijack Pro
Audio Hijack Pro is an excellent piece of software from developers Rogue Amoeba. Put simply, the software can record the outgoing audio from any application—so Skype calls can be recorded, audio from YouTube can be recorded, …if I need to record something from iPlayer for my ND Radio course, it’s a piece of cake. It’s only available for OS X, however, and I don’t think I’m able to leave it behind.

Quicksilver
This is an easy one to fix, but I just haven’t got around to finding a replacement for the “original application launcher” Quicksilver—and, by the way, it was the original. I’ve been getting used to a neat little utility called gmrun on my netbook and, in all honesty, while I used to use Quicksilver’s ‘advanced’ features quite a lot, I now only use functions like X and Y infrequently and Quicksilver is now just my application launcher—sounds harsh, but that’s the reality. gmrun‘s a little different from Quicksilver: it’s a ‘run’ utility rather than a “graphical shell” [quote source] like Quicksilver. You may be wondering “well why don’t you just use Alt-F2 in GNOME?”; put simply, the Run Application dialog Alt-F2 brings up is too convoluted and I just don’t like it. gmrun on the other hand is simply and it works perfectly for my needs.

CloudApp (aka cl.ly)
CloudApp is a screenshot sharing application—a bit like the late GrabUp—and it’s been useful right from day one. While I know that applications like CloudApp have to exist for the Ubuntu platform, I haven’t found the time (again … I’ve been busy, goddamnit) to research these things enough. While I’ve got work experience next week and for a fortnight afterwards, my hotel in the Netherlands’ll hopefully have Wi-Fi; I’ll hopefully be able to investigate Mac application replacements, as well as pruning my netbook and Dropbox and also finishing off my Main Document: my document of notes from the past eight-or-so months of National Diploma Radio.

WhatSize
WhatSize, which used to be freeware but has since been heavily worked-upon and made shareware, is a utility I occasionally use to prune my Mac’s hard drive. One specifies a directory, and WhatSize‘ll list directories and their files by descending size, allowing one to see which files are taking up the most space. It’s easier to explain with a screenshot:

My Dropbox directory (~/Dropbox) in WhatSize

Looking at the above image, which shows a small portion of my Dropbox directory, I can see a few files that need to be organised and look: I’ve got two cyclingengland.tar tarballs: one in the root, and another in tarballs/. It’s such a neat little utility.

Hardware
Put simply, I don’t have a desktop machine other than my Mac mini. I’m just after a decent ‘beige box’ with a decent sound card, maybe a graphics card with more than one VGA port and a DVD+RW drive; I can get a PCI wireless card easily from somewhere like Maplin and a FireWire card might also be advantageous.