Most chainrings are not perfectly round. Some are worse then others.

For singlespeeders this can sometimes make achieving correct chain tension a trick. To do this you approximate the tension, then rotate the crank to find the “tight” spot, then set tension from that position.

However, this assumes you didn’t forget to center the chainring in the first place! I learned the hard way and didn’t think about it when I originally threw on the chainring (sort of a SS noob). The variance was too much, either it was too loose and bounced off, or too tight and would bind some with each revolution.

I dropped a chain again recently… finally got off my butt and took the time to better center the chain ring on the crank spider/mounts. Maybe its just Salsa rings, but the fit is quite loose and it took some trial and error to get it fairly center.

Good to go now though:

Just found an awesome video detailing a rebuild of a FOX RP23… this is great:

In this case “rebuild” meaning replacing the air-sleeve seals and new lube.

FYI – This site is undergoing some construction.  I have been working on a new theme/design for this website as well as building in some new content and features.

The design may intermittently seem incomplete and certain content may appear broken until I get everything ironed out.

Stay tuned…

A while back I wrote a post about managing music on Linux.

Since then I have bounced back and forth between using Rhythmbox and the Listen music player.  In preparing music and playlists for our upcoming wedding (no way in hell I was going to rent a crappy DJ) I have been putting these players through their paces.  I have been listening to song snippets, creating large playlists, smart playlists, transferring files etc.

With this work I have brought both Rhythmbox and Listen music players to their knees, causing crashes left and right.  Frankly they have both pissed me off to the point of no return.  Rhythmbox crashed and somehow lost/wiped all my playlists which I spent hours creating.

Rhythmbox (0.12.3), besides being very boring, works very well except for one thing: if you start double-clicking quickly from song to song, it will momentarily hang for 30 seconds at a time.  Sometimes it comes back and works for a bit, other times it comes back and will no longer play at all (I have to restart it).  This one bug, which I found to be filed in launchpad months ago (still has no fix) kills this app for me, unusable in my mind.

The Listen player is my favorite (v0.6+).  I’ve come to love its “dynamic” mode and the queue centric behavior, unique layout.  However, as much as I really really want to love this player, it crashes all the time.

What about Amarok?  Screw it, I’ve tried, just do not like its layout, never figured out how to get devices to work right.  If I can’t get something working quickly I dump it.

Bashee.. no.

So… I have been avoiding, but recently decided to download and try Songbird.  It is a cross-platform music app, built on Mozilla technology, open source blah blah.

Long story short, it does what I want.  Actually, I love the mash-up pane for instant artist info.  I got it running quickly, added a few add-ons so I have a now-playing queue playlist similar in function to the Listen player, yet can browse my music similar to iTunes and Rhythmbox.  Best of both worlds.  I tend to prefer simple “lightweight” apps, and Songbird is “heavyweight” in my mind because of the integrated web browsing that I don’t see myself using.  Yet, so far… its solid.  Me likey.  At least I can make some progress now…

I forgot to post up this one.  From a MBM ride earlier in July on the Ginny Trail with Ryan and Dave:

The last couple times we attempted this trail we started late forcing us to descend early due to lack of daylight.  We were again pushing it this time for daylight, yet crested the top just in time to catch the sunset.

BTW, other MBM postings are over at our still in progress project site: cotw.

Our garden has not only made a come-back from hail damage this season, but has started to produce! Here’s what we picked just this morning:

We have been enjoying mini-strawberries, banana peppers, zucchini, squash, cucumber, and various herbs.  Tomatoes and tomatillos are on their way. Don’t think the broccoli survived.  The watermelon plant is growing, but I don’t see any watermelon yet.

Woot!

I recently updated my system at work to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.  It provides a more native environment for our development tools. With Hardy, I had to back port and find hacks for things to meet requirements.

Anyway, now happily running 9.04 32-bit, installed VMWare Server 1.0.9 to run a Windows XP Pro client on my Ubuntu host.  I found that something in the newer X server is mucking up keyboard mappings to VMWare such that the arrow keys, page up/down, home, delete etc. and number keys do weird things like opening menus and programs.

After some time, I found that I could at least workaround the problem by hard coding broken keymaps like so:

In ~/.vmware/config (create it if it doesn’t exist), put the following:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0×138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0×135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0×148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0×150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0×152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0×153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0×147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0×149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0×151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0×46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0×100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

yay google.