Mountain bike all set to go, cables, bearings, bled the brake, chain, bled the brake again. Pedals should show up tomorrow.
Been lazy to switch pedals over so I’ve been riding the crosscheck in the mean time. Rode parts of maxwell to get up top… then managed to somehow double flat on the reservoir high trail. Pinch flat on the rear, then while I’m standing there inspecting, the front pops!? wha wha wha whaaaaa…
While my pedals are back at crankbros for the 3rd time (been cracking them routinely?), I thought I’d take the time to give the Limo some TLC. I bought new cables and plan to address a sticky rear brake, then also discovered my new-ish primo bb bearings were shot to hell. Disappointing… back to the $5 steelies from the local fan shop.
Bearings serviced and repacked (get me by for a while), cables done, now the brake hmmm… I don’t really feel like doing it, but bleed the brake I must.
Welp, my web hosting company went under. I lost a year and some change worth of posts, some page work, and a few other things (all my links disappeared, tag cloud, etc.). Sucks, but not much I could do. I consider myself lucky to have a raw SQL dump from the beginning of 2008, and a back up of the design from a few months ago.
After months of procrastination and no time… finally got around to the fun journey of upgrading an older WordPress SQL dump, importing, and re-building things. I think I can even restore the missing content manually since I was able to grab a cached page from google! (smart thinking eh!?) Only a handful of posts to re-create.
My new hosting is awesome and the new built-in WordPress install is nifty! Although I’m not sure I like the new 2.7* WordPress, seems to becoming more and more cluttered.
Been slacking at the blog a bit lately, but here we go on some catch up. A month ago, the 18th of November to be exact, I met up with Steve, Jay P, Dave Newman of the Breakfast Club to do the new Ginny Trail up at Bobcat Ridge. A handful of Jay’s co-horts glommed on in the parking lot and off we went.
According to Steve we did the trail “backwards” or up the service road and down the trail. Personally, I like this type of ride where the climb is brutal but the trail down is sweet. And sweet it was – to date I think this is my favorite local trail!! It’s a Towers-like fitness test of a climb, and the downhill is flowing, ups, downs, curves, exposure and rocks… but always moving. With 8-9 riders or so all near the same riding level, the comradery was fun.
I did however get my first flat (in the field) of the season. Not bad eh… made it all the way to November. But I was asking for it… my Nevegals are shredded with small tears in the side walls and a few missing side knobs. I have some new Big Betty’s I’ll be putting on the hoops to try out next. If anything they’ll be good for training, as in like heavy. Note: I have had several flats this season, 3 overnight while hanging on the garage wall, and two while sitting in the back of my truck (weird).
Click on either of the pics here to go to the flickr photo set.
You can get a full write up of this ride on Steve’s blog HERE.
And here’s a cool pic of Steve with the new Yeti in a fire burn out area… you can the see the trail leading off in the distance…
I have recently settled on a Linux set-up that works very well for my music needs. I thought I’d post up what I have been running in hopes it helps folks still exploring all the various solutions for managing music available on Linux.
I’m using Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbons”
By default this came set-up with Rhythmbox as the default audio player and music manager. There are other popular choices like Amarok (default with Kubuntu), Totem and Banshee. openSUSE defaults with Banshee. I’m not sure what Fedora is using. Rhythmbox and Banshee are more or less iTunes clones. Both work mostly well, but I’ve had problems with both, mostly with my iPod, and beyond that I find them very bland. Amarok is cool, innovative, and has a huge following with skins, customizations, plug-ins etc… but in my own personal taste, find the interface messy, bloated, and why they can’t just auto-mount devices is f*****g annoying. They have an explanation on their FAQ website that seems good when you read it, but OK whatever, all the other apps just do it. So just do it. Anyway, I digress…
Ok ok… I’ll cut to the chase, on Ubuntu 7.10, here’s what I find works well:
Preparation:
I used the synaptic package manager to install a few pieces of additional software that were needed beyond the default install. The main ones for this posting are: Listen (my choice of audio player), gstreamer-plugins-bad (for m4a, other odd-ball media support), wincodecs (for .wmv/.wma support), lame for good mp3 encoder support and libraries, libgpod (enables iPod device support in most apps), grip (for audio ripping), and gtkpod (as an iPod manager).
Music player and library management:
I have found that all players including Listen, Amarok, Banshee, and Rhythmbox all have quirks or bugs with my iPod which is a black 30Gig Video model. Listen is written in python, and the python-gpod support is a bit behind the more widely used libgpod, and it flat out just doesn’t work. Banshee and Rhythmbox both actually work fairly well, both for the iPod and tagging. However I found that if I do too much at once Banshee will hang and do weird things, and Rhythmbox has one bad bug where removing files from your iPod deletes the entry from the iPod database but fails to actually delete the file and free up space… screwing your pod. From what I could find, this is specific to the 30G video model and a few others, but not all iPods, and all this should be fixed in the next distro releases.
So, the truth is there currently is no one perfect application on Linux to do all your music management… you have to try them all and use what works, and you may be like me and choose what you like. What I like are small, non-bloated, simple apps that work and are good at what they do…
Music Player:
I like and use Listen as my music player, I think it’s rad…. its an app developed from some French guy: www.listen-project.org
I think Listen is the f*****g bomb, and I have no idea why it hasn’t caught more wind. Frankly I dig the interface, the flow of playlist and album cover management on the left, sources like podcasts, your local library, devices like your iPod or CD, as well as Lyrics, Wikipedia sources in the middle, and then on the right you have your iTunes like browsing. It has a fantastic dynamic playlist mode that incorporates LastFM data, your preferences and playing history into a freaking awesome running DJ. You just seed it with a few tracks and let it go. Everything is at your touch on the main screen, no tabs or bloat, and its all drag-and-drop-able.
I’ll stop gushing about this player, and just say try it. Besides the fact that my iPod model in particular doesn’t work with Listen yet, it is a simple, effective, and brilliant music explorer.
Audio ripper and decoder:
I use GRIP, I think its awesome at the only thing it does, rip and encode CD’s. I have it configured with the default gstreamer ripper, and the switched it to the lame encoder with bit rate set to 192kb for mp3′s. (I just use mp3′s, they are universal between devices and players, and yes I’m kind of an audiophile so I like a high bit rate). Simple, effective, and it works.
iPod manager:
I use gtkpod. To date, out of all the players… none of them work entirely with my iPod, or have some quirk. Gtkpod however, is not a player, but rather a small app and all it does is you point it at your media collection, and it drags and drops stuff without issues to any iPod. Simple, effective, and it works for everything I’ve tried.
So there you have it…. hope that puts someone on the right track.
-e
“Configuring” Linux
I’ve been using Linux in various forms for the past 6 years, both at home and for my job at work. For the most part its great.
I admit it can (used to) take some work to get everything “configured” like graphics, audio, etc. At least it seems that’s the first thing people complain or whine about. It is the only excuse I’ve heard from Windows users about not switching, or saying they tried Linux but it was a “pain.”
Its too bad really because in reality, yes it can take a bit of some grunt “configuring” to get things all peachy, but once its set, its set, it works. I argue that the “configuring” of Linux is worth the frustration of maybe 3 reboots, a couple annoying dialogs, and a freeze or two in Windoz, and I know you all have to reboot, install crap, reboot more often than that, perhaps daily.
Once you have Linux “configured”
All this over time = lower blood pressure and a natural uplift in life.
At the time of this posting, the latest versions of Linux such as Ubuntu’s 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbons” release, openSUSE 10.3, and Fedora 8 are all so polished that little to no “configuring” is required.
I especially like and personally have been using Ubuntu. Dare I say everything worked out-of-the-box and comes with most anything one needs, audio suite, office suite, graphics apps etc… My computer is not an average case either, but rather a dual dual-core Xeon workstation with goodies.
The only “configuring” I had to do was an accelerated graphics driver. Beyond that I “shopped” for additional software I wanted to play with through the software manager and added applications like DVD players/editors, alternate audio players, rippers, iPod support, graphics and Blender 3D. All of these are a simple search-by-keyword and simple click, click, auto-install through the package manager.
And this leads me to the next topic…
“Lack of Software” in Linux
Another “myth” is the lack of software available on Linux. I’m sorry but that is a joke at this point…
Many mainstream application vendors create Linux versions of their software, to name a few: Macromedia Flash plug-ins, Acrobat plug-ins, many games now have Linux clients, Windows Media codecs are available, Google Earth and Desktop etc…
If you absolutely must use a Windoz something or other, you can purchase CrossOver Office as an emulator on Linux that allows you to run most main Windoz apps like MS Office, iTunes and Exploder for example.
Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbons now by default comes with something called WINE, which also allows you to add Windoz based apps under Linux, or heck, you can run the whole Windoz OS under it if you want.
One thing I can think of that still causes me trouble on Linux is printing, the infrastructure, set up, sizing, and being able to change settings like “draft” quality on a printer still doesn’t work well.
Suspend and hibernation support is also weak… and part of my new role at work is to fix it 
-e
I recently took the camera with me on my morning bike commute….
Click on the pic to go to the flickr photo set:
Coming into the home stretch for this biking season with no 24hrs of Moab planned, we had been talking about doing a big epic, scenic mtb ride up west of Boulder. Ryan took the initiative to organize this years bigun… a 54 mile ride starting in Nederland, riding to the Sourdough trail, to Camp Dick/Peaceful Valley, to a gnarly jeep road climb up and out the St. Vrain trail, then back to Boulder down Canyon road. You can see a map of the journey here.
We started off with 8 from Ned at around 8:30am. We lost two along the way. Kevin bailed a bit early before we really started to get into the woods. He was a bit in over his head for this round… but we’ll be seeing more of Kevin. Then part way into the Sourdough trail, K8 had a sudden fall due to her cleat actually giving away. Her left cleat had pulled loose and a necessary metal piece had popped out and was lost. Without being able fix it and clip in, she decided to turn back and not risk injury – total bummer! This was stupid unfortunate 
However, she ended up shopping in Boulder with Kate B. of course 
while the rest of us pressed on.
We took it in stages with several stops to regroup and check the map. In a couple spots we had to back track a half mile or so after taking some wrong turns. Arriving in Camp Dick we thought we could re-fill our water packs but found the spigots had been turned off for the winter season. Took a bit of time to pawn some water off campers, and even stopped at a shack store in Raymond for some Gatorade before the last BIG climb.
In the end, rolling back into Boulder we crashed at Proto’s pizza and prompty ordered 5 beers and 5 large pizzas, polished it all. No mechanicals, no bad falls, and we made it.
You can check out my photos at flickr:
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Dave’s photos at Picasa:
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And Ryan’s photos at Backpackit:
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