Month: October 2018

  • Planned Obscolesence as Fragility

    Planned Obscolesence as Fragility

    Reading Time: 4 minutes I want to discuss Planned obsolescence as fragility. In the days of Nokia you could buy a phone and give it to a teenage boy and expect it to survive without breaking. I know because I was a teenage boy with a Nokia phone. So were plenty of my peers. It…

  • Thinking about Bike locks

    Thinking about Bike locks

    Reading Time: 4 minutes Recently I have been thinking about bike locks. I have been looking at the variety of options that there are and for a while I was worried about bike theft. It is for that reason that I never left my bikes unattended for more than half a minute to a minute…

  • Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch

    Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch

    Reading Time: 2 minutes After just three climbing activities the Apple watch screen broke, rendering its smart features unusable.  Indoor Climbing and the Apple Watch are a bad mix. They are a bad mix because the Apple watch has an unprotected glass screen. The screen is so exposed that last Thursday I shattered the screen…

  • CuriosityStream – a place to find interesting documentaries

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Yesterday I started exploring CuriosityStream, a video streaming website that makes finding and watching documentaries easy. You can have a trial run of seven days but after watching three documentaries since yesterday evening I am convinced that it is a place where I want to watch more content.  I like documentaries…

  • Riding Zwift(ly) Through New York

    Reading Time: 2 minutes When I heard that Zwift would allow us to ride our bikes through a virtual New York I joked that I would use my singlespeed and I hoped that I could ride through the streets. Unfortunately you get to ride through the New York countryside, otherwise known as Central Park. Imagine…

  • Coming to the limitations of a simple home trainer

    Reading Time: < 1 minute The challenge is being gradual enough to react to the lag in power reading. A few training sessions ago I tried pedalling hard, overshooting the watts required but found that it was hard to catch the momentum just right. I then tried the opposite. I tried pedalling faster, to get…

  • Google Plus is Shutting Down in August

    Reading Time: 2 minutes By shutting Google plus in August 2019 Google have shut down one of my favourite social networks. From the start I have said that it reminded me of Jaiku, an excellent, european alternative to Jaiku that never reached critical mass and so was sold to Google, which then shut it down…

  • Easy track creation with Komoot

    Easy track creation with Komoot

    Reading Time: 3 minutes Komoot is an app based on socialising through sports. The sports are cycling, mountain biking, bike touring, hiking and running. It integrates well with Garmin and allows you to track activities from your mobile phone or import GPX, Fit and other files from other brands. It also allows you to create…

  • Cycling stings

    Reading Time: < 1 minute Yesterday I was stung by a wasp while cycling and when I tried to remove the stinger I couldn’t. I was in pain and almost stopped cycling. I was in distress as a bus passed on a main road. I was on an agricultural path by some apple orchards. I…

  • Second thoughts on E-bikes

    Reading Time: 2 minutes Yesterday I rode an e-bike over 5km and played with the eco, touring, sport and turbo modes. I experimented with the gears and I experimented with a variety of gradients and surfaces. Through this trial I got to understand how e-bikes work.  Gaining momentum E-bikes are great for helping you get…