Some detailed route and timing info

For my own planning purposes. Times are on my (new) old 3-speed in sandals. Section 1 is through campus and up a large hill, section 2 is through traffic downtown, section 3 is through mostly neighborhood with one hill at the end.

1. Office to the top of campus (Lumpkin and Broad St.): 6m 36s, 1.06 mi, 9.6 mph
2. Top of campus to Pope and Meigs (edge of “downtown”): 4m 15s, 0.69 mi, 9.7 mph
3. Edge of downtown to home: 8m 35s, 1.75 mi, 12.2 mph

1967 Schwinn Delux Racer

Front, originally uploaded by brunoj.

I’ve posted about this bike before. I’ve just finished upgrading / restoring it and I just put a bunch of photos on flickr (check the notes for detailed information).

The major work was:

1. Cleaning, shining, rust removal and paint removal (especially on the crankset and chain ring).
2. New wheelset, parts bought from Harris Cyclery. The rims are both chromed steel ISO 590mm. The rear hub is a new Sturmey-Archer 3 speed (originally this bike was a three speed, but with an external cassette, then I converted it to a single speed, now its back to three speed, but with a slick internal gear hub).

3. Changed the saddle, now its an old Avocet touring saddle that’s in pretty good shape.
4. Re-cabled the replaced some worn parts (like the cable stop) in the front brake, also upgraded the pads to Kool-Stop “eagle 2″ brake pads which have really awesome stopping power even on an old single pivot caliper brake.
5. Re-packed the overhauled the bottom bracket and headset bearings.

There are still a few things on my todo list.

1. Cleanup and re-install the chromed fenders and the rack (or might replace the rack with something in better shape).
2. Figure out a better solution for the housing stop on the chain stay.
3. Re-mount the shifter below the saddle on the seat stay.
4. True both wheels a bit better. I’m not terribly good at this and I don’t have a proper trueing stand.
5. Replace the pedals (which are devilishly slippery and quite rusted).

But it rides pretty sweet right as is. Shifting is perfect, braking is good, and it only weighs in at 35 pounds!

Graphical diff — FileMerge

There is a great introduction to the Mac xcode utility “FileMerge” here:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/05/02/filemerge.html?page=1

Basically, its a graphical interface to diff, allowing you to compare two similar files for differences and merge or ignore them.

6 Person Rail Bike

Barn, originally uploaded by J.Muir from Santa Cruz.

I came across this awesome vehicle while browsing flickr today. It reminds me of the conference bike, but this concept is much cooler. It’s like a conference bike for hobos.

BRP Blog

This is a plug for the Bike Athens Blog, where my BRP time lapse video is posted today.

Movies to watch and books to read

.. before I forget them.

Movies

1. The Wild Blue Yonder; Werner Herzog, 2005
2. Encounters at the End of the World; Herzog, opens 6-11-08 (yesterday) in NYC

Books

1. Anathem; Neil Stephenson
2. Thirteen; Richard Morgan
3. Blue Mars; Kim Stanley Robinson

Bike Recycling Program Time-Lapse

Another experiment with time-lapse movie making.

This is from the Bike Athens BRP (Bike Recycling Program) today (6-11-08). There are about 160 stills taking over 30 minutes. The participants appear in the credits.

Link to YouTube

The latest Bike-cam 3000 experiment

I put a new video on YouTube and Flickr. I made it using 120 still images taken by my camera (mounted to my bike thanks to Bike-cam 3000 (patent pending)). The camera is a Canon powershot G7, but it is running the modified CHDK firmware which provides (among other cool things) an intervalometer feature so you can make time-lapse sequences easily.

More experiments are to come..

Bike-cam 3000 and my video editing woes

I built a handlebar mount for my digital camera the other day. The idea was to make some time-lapse movies of long rides and/or of community rides like the Critical Mass and the Courteous Mass (yes, two different rides on two different Fridays every month).

My first attempt at a camera mount sucked pretty bad. It was one of those Gorilla-pods wrapped around my seat post and seat stay so that the camera pointed backwards. What ended up happening though is that the bumping around on the road caused the camera to slowly point downwards toward my rear wheel and as a result I have hundreds of stills of my back wheel and some pavement. This is not very interesting.

My second attempt involved modifying a reflector bracket. I saw someone doing this in a HOWTO on Instructables. It turned out that somehow I had all the parts I needed at home, including the 1/4-20 bolt scavenged from an unused tripod, so it was easy to put together.

The new mount works great, except for the shaking. When I’m on the road every little bump in the pavement translates into a big bump on camera. So this is where my video editing woe comes in. I thought that it would be easy to run the video clip through some software to “stabilize” the image. IT turns out that this isn’t as easy as I’d like, or as free as I’d like.

First, in iMovie ‘08 which came with my mac there is no such image stabilization feature (nor is there a feature to speed up or slow down a clip, which is ridiculous). Also, Apple, in all their wisdom, decided to remove the capability to run 3rd party plugins. Why on earth would they do that?

So after downloading iMovie HD (came with iLife ‘06, outdated indeed) from the Apple website (for free, which is nice) and loading the “piStabilizer” plugin (which is not free, but you can use the demo version if you don’t mind a nice big “DEMO” watermark on your footage) I got my footage stabilized and sped up (because iMovie HD **DOES** have the slow-down/speed-up video effect that iMovie ‘08 lacks).

You can see it below (again, with a huge DEMO watermark which sucks).

Link to YouTube