Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The rail trail recently sprouted white mile markers:
Rail Trail – Marathon 13 mile marker
This one stood out:
Rail Trail – Marathon 13.10938 mile marker
Not being a marathoner, I had the vague notion a marathonshould be an even number of kilometers, because it’s not an even number of miles, but nooooo it’s just an arbitrary distance everybody agreed would be about right for a good long run.
During the rest of the ride, I worked out that 1 micro mile = 5+ milli foot = 60+ milli inch, so the rightmost significant figure in that marker represents increments of, oh, a smidge under ¾ inch. Middle of the hash line marks the spot, perhaps?
I’ve seen similar markers along other courses, with varying numbers of ahem significant figures, and will not say how long it took me to recognize what it represented.
I sent a note to their email contact and got the usual autoresponder message, but may have a side channel through the Dutchess County Planning Department to their Bicycle Coordinator. We shall see.
Rolling into Vassar Farms, we encountered a Canadian Canada Goose (*) family:
Geese at Vassar Farm Pond 2017-05-21
The gander pulled straight up and hissed as we rolled by at what we thought was a respectful distance:
Geese at Vassar Farm Pond 2017-05-21 – detail
Their little fuzzballs retreated in good order under the fence toward the pond; they don’t need much survival training.
Word has it a goose family (perhaps this one) built their nest near a path around the ponds and defend their turf with sufficient resolve to deter even singletrack bikers.
I occasionally see snakes along the way, but none that hiss:
Black Snake on Rail Trail – 2017-04-28
We approach rail-trail curves with a bit more caution than some folks; I’m at about the spot where that rider began losing control and didn’t quite wipe us out.
Update: They’re “Canada Geese“, with (AFAICT) a legal distinction between Canadian tourists and resident Yanks during the hunting season. Thanks to David for the reminder!
When we get to the end of Overocker Road, we occupy the entire left-and-straight lane, because we’re turning left onto Burnett Blvd and there’s no room for another vehicle beside us:
Burnett at Rt 55 – Right pass – 2017-05-23 – 1
I’m towing a trailer of groceries.
On Burnett Blvd, we take the left side of the right lane (marked for left-and-right turns), because we’re turning left onto Rt 55, don’t want to get right-hooked by right-on-red traffic, and will be on the right side of the right lane of Rt 55 when we’re through the turn.
Without turn signals, it’s not clear whether the car following us from Overocker will turn left or right, but the driver is snuggling up next to Mary:
Burnett at Rt 55 – Right pass – 2017-05-23 – 2
The driver’s window is sliding downward. Fortunately, we started moving before any comments were made. Perhaps he was going tell us we’re riding cool bikes?
Ah-ha! The driver is turning left and intending to pass me on the right while we’re in the intersection:
I’m moving rightward across the turning lane to end up on the right side of the Rt 55 lane, while not riding across the steel manhole cover at the car’s front wheel:
Burnett at Rt 55 – Right pass – 2017-05-23 – 4
Mary doesn’t accelerate nearly as hard as I do; those pictures are one second apart.
I’m un-leaning from the turn into Rt 55, with the trailer still on my left and the driver accelerating toward me:
Most of the time, our rides aren’t this interesting, but I have plenty of examples showing how NYS DOT’s road designs ignore cyclists. The Burnett intersection signals still give us four seconds to clear the intersection.
For unknown reasons, a recent VLC update caused it to ignore uppercase file extensions: MP4 and AVI files no longer appear in its directory listings, while mp4 and avi files do. The least-awful solution involved renaming the files after copying them:
Yup, that scans the whole drive every time, which takes care of stray files, manual tweaks, and suchlike. The THM files are useless thumbnails; I should just delete them.
While I had the hood up, I listed the remaining space on the NAS drive and cleaned up a few misfeatures. I manually delete old video files / directories as needed, usually immediately after the script crashes for lack of room.
The Sony HDR-AS30V can act as a USB memory device, but it dependably segfaults the ExFAT driver; I now transfer its MicroSD card to an adapter and jam it into the media slot on the monitor, where it works fine.
Protip: always turn the AS30V on to verify the MicroSD card has seated correctly in its socket. Unfortunately, the socket can also hold Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick Micro cards (32 GB maximum capacity = roadkill), but the dual-use / dual-direction socket isn’t a snug fit around MicroSD cards. You (well, I) can insert a card so it looks fine, while sitting slightly canted and not making proper contact. The camera will kvetch about that and it’s easier to fix with the camera in hand.
I’ve disabled USB device automounting, as I vastly prefer to handle them manually, so the script asks for permission in order to mount the drives. The transfer requires about an hour, so I’ve extended the time the sudo password remains active.
The script lets both cards transfer data simultaneously; the Fly6 generally finishes first because it produces less data. That produces a jumbled progress display and the script waits for both drives to finish before continuing.
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So: jouncing over the larg(er) potholes / pavement discontinuities / debris on the roads around here wobbulates the front fender enough to pull the stays out of those tidy 18 mm = 6 diameter deep sockets on the fender clip.
Waving a heat gun around a 3D printed part seems fraught with peril, even with PETG’s glass transition temperature around 80 °C = 175 °F, as ordinary polyolefin tubing shrinks at 140-ish °C. Aiming the hot air stream more-or-less away from the clip (and the tire!) carried the day. PLA would surely have gotten bendy.
The proper solution surely involves screw clamps and suchlike. I really dislike fiddly hardware: I hope this hack survives.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 