I was at the Dutch Bike festival last weekend, and I think I found the Sensible Bicycle. Curbside were showing the Batavus Personal Bike. It’s lovely. At $1400 for the 3-speed, though, I’m not just about to trade in the old Stumpjumper.
I’m not wild about the squidgy roller brakes, and the dynamo really should’ve been built into the hub, but these are very minor things. Wonder if the company would let me expense this instead of getting a transit pass?
I’ve been using my GPS to track roads around the wind farm. I’m most disappointed with the coverage that Garmin’s MetroGuide Canada gives. Sure, Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh might not be Canada’s most vibrant metropolis, but it seems that much of the MetroGuide routing is screwy around the Huron shores. A couple of frinstances:
I know I didn’t really need to use the GPS for this (except I now know how to navigate the backroads of Wingham), but some of the map choices it was giving me were downright useless.
Helps if you load the right map …
In New Hamburg, they do things differently. They still have the winter ‘Snowman Suicide Pact‘ cups at Tim’s …
While I said quite early on that I had Ubuntu Feisty running in 64-bit, it wasn’t until today I got things really how I liked it. My earlier Perl problem was due to a broken gcc setup; all is happy now, and all the modules I’ve ever used are built and running as expected.
The one thing I’ll probably never get going is Citrix Metaframe presentation client. There’s no AMD64 package for it. I’m hardly heartbroken, as I still have two machines on which it runs just fine.
Canada has recently released most of its geodata for free – Go Canada! I was particularly interested in CanVec, the large vector topographical set. I downloaded the set for Toronto and environs, and slapped it into QGIS. With nearly all the layers on, my neighbourhood looks like the above.
I didn’t find any labels, or much in the way of documentation for this huge data set. It would be a shame if good metadata weren’t available, for it adds real utility to the map data.
I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.
And then I discovered proj. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:
4843744 443025 Goderich
that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.
To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:
invproj -E -r -f "%.6f" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83
and it would spit out:
4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich
Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43° 44′ 40.37″ N, 81° 42′ 27.40″ W in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.
With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.
I got the feeling that quite a few people at the Daniel Johnston gig last night weren’t there for the music, but were just there to see what he’d do.
I quite like his music (I was more there to hear McCa) and I’m glad he’s making a living from it, but he’s clearly not doing too well on stage. Random playing, forgetting the words or tune, massive tremor while he was singing, complaining of being tired — he’s not well. I felt particularly sorry for him when his keyboard mic kept slipping lower and lower, and he had to hunch down to sing into it; no stage crew came out to help him.
I had to leave early. Too many of the crowd were there to laugh at him, I felt.
I’m going to see Mayor McCa support Daniel Johnston tonight.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the Scottish National Party forming a minority government in the Scottish parliament.
Mayor McCa, Lee’s Palace – Toronto – 18/6/2004
(there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)
Mayor McCa and the Implants, The Horseshoe – Toronto – 29/7/2003
(there are better quality MP3s at the main link.)
On a windowsill towards the rear of TTC streetcar #4106, there is a paint chip in exactly the profile of Afrika Bambaataa circa ‘Planet Rock’. You may begin to worship …
My Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day 02007 gallery for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.I made an f/90 pinhole lens for the D70 today. Results are not bad. True pinhole freaks will decry the fact that I could just sight through the SLR viewfinder, so all of the images are uncropped.
I also took a roll on my Zero 2000 120 rollfilm pinhole camera. I have to take the film into Toronto Image Works to see the results.
Man, but do pinhole lenses resolve the grot on your DSLR sensor!
I got the Super Galaxy back from Cogs yesterday. They’ve done a great job of fitting slightly raised bars and thumbshifters, and repacking all the ancient bearings. It rides like a dream; I was only planning to ride from Gerrard back to Broadview TTC, but I zoomed all the way along Gerrard to Main St station. And this was me having hardly been on a bike since last year.
I think the rear derailleur may be on its way out, ‘cos it still makes clonky noises in lowest gear. But it’s looking great, and running great, and best of all, Cogs did the work for a very reasonable price. I am happy.
Sign at Riverdale Library: Slippery trip hazard.
There is a timid calico cat that lives in the wing of the Bandshell at ExPlace. There is no picture; I said it was timid …
 
It’s actually the UK speed camera warning sign, but it looks quite a lot like an RB67 …
The RB-67 arrived. It’s colossal and heavy. It’ll need a CLA as the shutter release is sticky, but seems to be in okay condition for the price.
The conference was good (learnt a lot about wind integration and forecasting), but I was most taken with the little Richardson’s Ground Squirrels that lived in burrows around the hotel.
A Scooma folding bike seen on the Danforth.
