Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Unfortunately, US Rt 44 is the only way to get from Adams Fairacre to the Stop & Shop, so we ride this section once a week. I’m towing the trailer with two bags of groceries:
Rt 44 – 695 at Quest Diagnostics – pedestrian
A palimpsest of patches shows that they really don’t have staying power:
Rt 44 – 695 at Quest Diagnostics – deterioration
Gravel and a manhole cover keep cyclists off the shoulder:
Rt 44 – 695 at Quest Diagnostics – patching
We take the lane well before we encounter this section, because veering into traffic doesn’t work well:
Rt 44 – 695 at Quest Diagnostics – traffic
The longitudinal crack marks the edge of the original paving. This is a common hazard on Dutchess County roads, as many were widened by simply paving the original shoulders into the travel lane, without actually rebuilding the substructure.
Walkway South View – Sony HDR-AS30V still image – detail
The thing has absolutely no affordance for hand-holding, so perching it on the Walkway handrail 200 feet over the Hudson required tamping down my usual risk aversion.
Both images have been slightly contrast-tweaked and lightly compressed from the original data, but not by enough to matter here. Generally, I apply ruthless compression to keep the image size under control, so these look a lot better than the usual pix around here.
Entering Rt 376 from Diddell Road after leaving the Dutchess Rail Trail:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 1
All of Rt 376 has thick gravel along the shoulder from the deteriorating asphalt.
The wheel-trapping longitudinal cracks on the shoulder show where the previous surface extended beyond the bottom paving layer. Basically, you must ride to the right of the edge of the “new” cap over the travel lane and left of the parallel cracks:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 2
Sometimes, you must use the road surface. Fortunately, it’s not too bad at this spot:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 3
But it quickly returns to normal:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 4
In some places, the travel lane is developing longitudinal cracks, so moving off the shoulder will require taking the lane:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 5
Chooosing your line requires the ability to ride precisely between gravel, cracks, and traffic:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 6
I can ride along this plateau every time, but it seems unreasonable to expect that level of ability from every bicyclist:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 7
In this spot, the potholes expose three layers of paving. The only “safe” line seems to be on the very edge of the “new” cap, just to the right of the potholes:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 8
The “new” cap didn’t adhere to the previous asphalt very well, perhaps because the thickness dropped below the spec. I’m crossing the travel lane to reach the left turn storage lane at the New Hackensack signal, having avoided a drain grate that occupies the ever-narrowing shoulder:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – 9
A map showing the route:
Rt 376 – Diddell to New Hackensack – map
[Edit: A comment from someone who shall remain anonymous:
This person has found an amusing way to get attention to potholes: he just adds a penis drawing to the pothole with spray paint.
The parameter order matters: the -ss must come before the -i input file name and the -t must come after it. Otherwise, avconv will copy the entire file before extracting the clip, which can be tedious.
The Fly6 camera produced a video file containing ten minutes of variations on this theme:
Fly6 – 0842001.AVI – Video compression failure
The top of the image looked pretty good, but then the decompression stalls and smears a single, slowly degenerating, line down the rest of the frame. The other files from that trip looked just fine.
As it turned out, extracting a few seconds with avconv or binary-copying the first few megabytes with dd produced playable copies: the original file tripped vlc’s decompression, but the source data was in the file and the copies worked.
Soooo, I could recover the video. Not that it was particularly important, but knowing how might matter some day.
Video is weird.
The Cycliq tech support folks recommend regularly formatting the MicroSD card using the Official SD Association Program (Windows-only, of course), not erasing any video files, and generally letting the camera handle the card. This whole affair seems remarkably fragile.
So I stuck a snippet of ordinary “transparent” (it’s actually translucent) adhesive tape across the top of the Cycliq Fly6 camera lens:
Cycliq Fly6 Camera – blur tape
That smoothly blurs the top third of the frame:
Fly6 – Tape-blurred frame
The motivation for using translucent tape: it should maintain roughly the same brightness and color balance across the whole image. Opaque tape would burn out the remaining image as the camera desperately tries to maintain an average gray level.
Fast-forwarding VLC with the video stopped forces it to display the inter-frame compression blocks spanning several seconds of video:
Fly6 – Forced compression artifacts
The upper third of the frame has big, simple blocks that pegged the files at a uniform 475 MB per ten minute file, somewhat lower than the un-blurred 500 to 700 MB. So the compression definitely isn’t working nearly as hard.
I hoped that simplifying the uninteresting part of the image would leave more bits for license plates and other interesting details, which might be the case. New York has two main licence plate color schemes (the obsolete high-contrast blue-on-white and the current low-contrast blue-on-orange “Empire Gold”) and both the Fly6 and the Sony AS30V cameras do much better with white plates in full sun.
Some samples at full size:
Fly6 – License Plates
Those were chosen based on:
Similar range / angle: just over the center line
Same-size crop box: 350 x 197
Sun vs. shade
I think those are somewhat sharper than the plates from un-blurred frames, but it’s not like the camera suddenly woke up smarter and started paying attention to the important stuff.
Just south of Lake Walton on the Dutchess Rail Trail, I encountered a barred owl with wings spread around something yummy in its talons (clicky for more dots):
MAH00389-0548 – Barred Owl on DCRT – 1
The owl acquired weapons lock on me, just in case I might try to steal its fresh-killed meal:
MAH00389-0548 – Barred Owl on DCRT – 2
My neck doesn’t turn nearly that far, so I lost the staring contest:
MAH00389-0548 – Barred Owl on DCRT – 3
Owls being good folks to have around, we wish ’em well: may they raise many owlets!
The pictures were extracted from the Sony HDR-AS30V helmet camera with this incantation:
The -q 1 parameter should produce an image with the same dots as the original, but that really doesn’t mean much in the face of the camera’s relentless video compression.
Here’s a dot-for-dot crop (at 100% JPEG quality = uncompressed) showing the tradeoff between wide field-of-view, detail, and compression:
MAH00389-0548 – Barred Owl on DCRT – 2 – detail
Makes me appreciate my eyesight: I spotted that owl when it covered just a few image pixels. Of course, at first I thought somebody dropped a hoodie on the trail, then maybe it was a chunk of debris, so I eased off the asphalt onto the gravel Just In Case.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 