sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb

Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

Links:

Linux Weekly News,
XKCD,
Girl Genius,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,

Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.

Subscribe: rss, rss2.0, atom

←June→
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30    

←2006→
Months
Jan Feb Mar
Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep
Oct Nov Dec

Categories:

Archive by month:

Mon, 26 Jun 2006

That ol' Stromlo thing again - 17:22
As it happens Tony will be getting a fancy new rather light nice road bike later this week (probably one of these), thus to give me a bit of oomph on the bike in the hope I can still ride faster than him I decided I had better go and climb Mt Stromlo during the day again today.

Damn that was bad, 12:30 for the climb itself, 1h11m for the 36.4KM ride (work,stromlo,work) which is a rather lacklustre average speed of 30.6 KMh. The worst was during the climb, I had been unable to keep the pace above 20 KMh on the first half, a little past the boom gates I started picking the pace up properly and all of a sudden I was unable to breathe without pain. My diaphragm muscles were really hurting. I think the main reason for this is I have done no hard efforts since before the geoquest and thus had not had to breathe hard, especially not in the cold air we have in town currently. I think I need to go out and do a bunch more rides by myself at high pace with some hills to get me breathing hard.

[/mtb] link

Sun, 25 Jun 2006

Attempting to fix the Google images result for me - 16:20
Steven Hanley
Steven Hanley 		I noticed the other day while ego surfing myself on google images that the first hit for Steven Hanley has changed. It used to be a photo from the 2004 Gravity 12 Hour, from my Gravity 12 2004 race photos page, taken by Mikey of me riding an obstacle they had at the race. I was never quite sure while Google Images associated that photo with me, I did not have my name linked directly to the photos or in the file name. However it was an alright sort of photo so I let it be.

The photo now coming up as top hit is one from the Wild Horse Ridge ride last year, this photo that comes up top hit currently was taken by Andrew Cassie, from behind and is simply a photo of a bunch of flies on my backpack (I copied it from his site and renamed it). Thus the image to the left, with my name as the filename and both the alt, id and title tags set. Lets hope I can replace the flies on my backpack with this, an image taken at the 2005 Triple Triathlon.

[/various] link

Tue, 20 Jun 2006

More success with the tv tuner card - 16:06
Thanks to tpot for a bunch of help with suggestions on what to use t make this run. I was able to tune into a channel (SBS HD) and record it successfully (dump to a file the broadcast stream) and play it on my laptop.

I needed the dvb-utils and dvbstream packages, Tim said first off generate a channel scan in a format xine and other applications will understand (including tzap) which is done using the scan program from dvb-utils. 

/usr/bin/scan -o zap /usr/share/doc/dvb-utils/examples/scan/dvb-t/au-canberra > channels.conf

This channels.conf is understood by xine and the tzap command (tune to a channel), to tune into a given channel run tzap -r "Channel Name" where the channel name is listed in the channels.conf. I have not yet found Ten/Capital, however this is using rabbit ears in my office, I suspect when hooked up to the roof mounted antenna at home all will be better. This was enough to find a lot of other channels though so that is good.

Leaving tzap running in the background in another xterm I was then able to run "dvbstream 8192 -o > output.ts" and it sat there dumping the raw video/audio stream until I hit control c. As Tim pointed out the stream is about 1 MB per second and with dual audio streams can soak up more. Almost 2 minutes and I was using 150 MB of disk for the output.ts already. I strongly suspect transcoding to a more compressed on the fly will be necessary. The 8192 above is a dummy value that simply tells dvbstream to dump all of the stream it sees.

Anyway I copied the file to my laptop and played it with mplayer, the quality really is rather nice 720x576 I think, definitely better than normal tv, woohoo bring on the Tour de France.

[/comp/hardware] link

Mon, 19 Jun 2006

TV Tuner Card - 20:56
So I finally purchased a TV Tuner card today, a Leadtek WinFast DTV2000 H, I bought it thinking it was a DTV2000 which is supported in Linux with the bttv driver. Upon realising it was a different card I was worried it was not yet supported. However upon looking around the Linuxtv.org site I found a link to their Mercurial repository with the latest list of supported cards with the CX88 chipset from the cx88 devices page. The machine I am installing on is an old PIII 866 and for the last while I have been building kernel packages and the v4l-dvb tree. I have however successfully gotten the card recognised so that is good.

I am of course doing this as the Tour de France is looming and I look forward to being able to record all of the live stages televised onto a computer.

[/comp/hardware] link

Fri, 16 Jun 2006

Out of Range at the Geoquest half adventure race - 21:32
Last weekend Michelle, Lina, Ian and I headed up to the Macleay valley with 200 or more other people for the Geoquest adventure race, we competed in the half as team "Out of Range". It took us 31.5 hours to finish the race, and now we want to go back next year for the full. Anyway I wrote a Geoquest race report with photos.

[/mtb/events] link

So will Jon be getting magnets next? - 17:44
So after Jon Oxer went ahead and implanted an RFID chip in his arm I wonder if he will be continuing down the Johndo path and implanting magnets in his fingertips as a wired article (found on kottke and other places) mentions some people have done. Apparently it gives you a sort of sixth sense for magnetic fields.

[/various] link

Wed, 07 Jun 2006

The balance has returned to the force^Wblogs - 11:10
All is once again right in the bloggy world as Fafblog is back and happening, I have not even read the entry yet but darn it is good to see it again.

[/various] link

Tue, 06 Jun 2006

Did she get the telegram? - 16:07
Yes she did!

I have wondered for a while now, when the Queen Mother turned 100 did she receive a telegram from the Queen (Elizabeth II) her daughter? (All citizens of the Commonwealth who reach that age receive a telegram from the Queen AFAIR) Now the source is not authoritative however I see no reason for it to be false. The Queen Mother did receive a Telegram from Queen Elizabeth II on the morning of her 100th birthday. Neat.

I looked for a bit more information, the fact that telegrams are slowly having their use discontinued around the world is of little matter as the aforementioned message is delivered some other way now days. However a more authoritative source does confirm the Queen Mother received the message (the first member of the Royal family to do so). Apparently most people will need to register to receive the message (I say most, I suspect the Queen Mother did not have to register).

The bit I like the most about the message the Queen mother received is she had a guard open it with a sword, that is high style, they don't need no steenkin letter openers there, they have swords!

[/various] link

Mon, 05 Jun 2006

Small disks and low memory are not the default case. - 22:26
After yet another 10 GB disk died on one of the computers I installed Ubuntu on for a housemate I noticed I had a reliable seeming 2.5 GB disk sitting around so I put that in and started and install of dapper.

During the install it warned me less than 95% of disk space was available, it did however make it through the install and at the end of the install cleared off a lot of language packs and other items so there was around 320MB of free disk. I rebooted and went to install "easy ubuntu" so my housemate could watch movies or real player files or whatever and it said it would need around 300 MB of disk while doing the install.

I have now removed all the cups and print drivers, all the non Arabic font ttf packages, all the un needed X Display drivers and a bunch of other stuff to recover some more space. Obviously so few computers come with small disks the need to cater for them is dwindling, at least the measly 256 MB of RAM in this system gets by (though slowly), if only there were more RAM slots on the motherboard, I have around 30 128 MB sticks sitting in my office at work doing not much.

Of course I have a 486 dx2 66 with 16 MB RAM and a 420 MB drive sitting around somewhere, I wonder how that would fare? Though if we go that way a whole lot of people could rare up commenting on us youth of today having it so easy compared to the punch cards and ticker tape from the days of yore.

[/comp/linux] link

Sun, 04 Jun 2006

Taking it easy in a race - 13:21
I drove out and competed in the CORC XC race this morning at the Sutton Rd XC course. I really enjoy the course, and not many people ever get out to ride it much, I know I do not. The single tracks in some sections are deeply reminiscent of the tracks through the Labyrinth and Kowalski sections of Greenhills. They are also remarkably smooth tracks for the lack of riding they get.

I took the single speed out and raced on it, there were around 5 other single speed riders there (mostly in different categories though) (Mal Bennett, Andrew Cassie, David Austin and some I do not know). I decided to take it easy and rather than race in my normal category and try to go fast I went down to an easier category and simply rode comfortably mid pack, overtaking people when I felt like it and generally not working too hard. I should race XC more often to get my speed up, however I was no in the mood for a workout today so it was rather pleasant taking it easier in a slower grade.

Due to the number of single speeders there this race and I know a few more people who race (either there or absent this week) have them, we may try having a separate category for Single Speeders (and probably for cyclo cross riders) to compete in at the next few XC races and see if people are keen for a specific category. Anyway fun was had.

[/mtb] link

Fri, 02 Jun 2006

Oops a rather nice wine - 23:40
Just as a reminder, I really liked the Stoneleigh 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (from Marlborough in NZ). Of course upon getting sick of a bottle of wine rattling around in the fridge, I should not simply assume it was from the dinner party a few weeks ago (after which there were a few half full bottles of wine to polish off over time). This was a half full bottle belonging to one of my housemates, fortunately I was able to find a replacement while out shopping tonight.

[/leisure/food] link

Problems with long sleeve shells - 18:57
So around an hour ago I got back to work after a ride out to Woden to buy some hardware and stuff for setting up tow lines off the back of my bike (to tow team mates in the Geo Half next weekend) and a new pair of trail running shoes I needed (Asics Trabuco).

Because the weather yesterday and this morning was wet (constant soaking rain) I had a light weight waterproof shell jacket, a thermal and a cycle jersey to wear. Normally in this temperature I would wear arm warmers and a shell vest instead, however with rain possible I decided on long sleeves. I probably should have stuck with what I prefer, I was again reminded why I do not like wearing long sleeve shells, you heat up and sweat far more than is sensible, my jersey and thermal are now soaked (admittedly if I had ridden at a sedate pace this would not have happened, however I was in a rush so it did).

I fortunately have some dryer clothing to wear for the short ride home, to which I should head soon as I need to replace a spoke in the back wheel on the hardtail, set up the towing system, do grocery shopping and some other stuff (see I can be boring and mundane in a diary as well as anyone).

[/mtb/gear] link

home, email, rss, rss2.0, atom