When out on my bike in the real world the GPS on the Forerunner obviously tracks my speed and distance and works flawlessly. When on the Tacx Flow Turbo Trainer however I’m not actually going anywhere so the GPS doesn’t record my speed and distance. The computer on the Turbo Trainer does record both my speed and distance and also my cadence and power output, so I was able to see these things. The problem, if you can call it a problem, was that the Tacx Flow doesn’t interface with my computer. So, when I upload my turbo training sessions to Garmin Connect or any other fitness training software I get the data from my Forerunner but have to manually enter the distance, average speed, max speed, and power output data and don’t get to see anything about my cadence.

This is where the Speed / Cadence Sensor comes to the rescue. The gadget consists of a wireless sensor that fits to your chainstay and two magnets – one for the crank arm to measure cadence and one for the wheel to measure speed and distance. Fitting was a simple affair, just pop the sensor on the chainstay and fix with two zip ties, screw the wheel magnet onto a spoke making sure it aligns with the sensor and attach the crank magnet to the crank arm with the provided sticky pad and a zip tie, again making sure it aligns with the sensor.

As I was using this on my Turbo Trainer I already had the cadence sensor from the turbo trainer attached to the bike but the Garmin one is fairly adjustable so it was easy enough to get everything aligned. To make it even easier, the Garmin sensor has a little LED that flashes each time it picks up a passing magnet. It flashes red for the cadence sensor and green for the speed sensor so making sure everything was working before tightening the zip ties was a doddle. The magnets are just magnets so it would probably have been possible to use the existing crank arm magnet from the Tacx Flow for both the Turbo Trainer Sensor and the Garmin sensor but in the end I used a separate magnet for each.

Of course, once it was all attached I just had to give it a go so I jumped on and did a relatively easy workout. As usual I could see my various readouts on the Tacx Flow computer but now could also see corresponding values on my Garmin Forerunner.

The Tacx Flow computer only shows 2 values at any one time (plus the overall time) and I usually have these set to show speed and cadence. Reassuringly the speed and cadence on the turbo trainer readout matched those on the Garmin. I therefore soon changed the display on the turbo trainer to show Power and Cadence, whilst my Garmin (which can show up to 4 parameters at any one time ) was set to display Distance, Speed, and Heart Rate.

Everything worked beautifully and the figures all matched up. Best of all, once I’d finished I was able to connect my Garmin Foreunner to my computer as usual and upload the workout to both Ascent and Garmin Connect. All of the usual data was there (normally just time and heart rate data) but now it also had speed, distance and cadence data.

Here’s the graph of my workout from Ascent showing:
Red – Heart Rate
Purple – Cadence
Green – Speed
Brown – Power (It isn’t recording this but Ascent makes a best guess – which wasn’t too far out! Although it doesn’t know what resistance / slope settings I’m using so it isn’t that accurate. )

Read outs from Garmin Speed / Cadence Sensor

Once I got going though I couldn’t hold back and ended up hammering out a hard fast ride. Hard enough for it to feel like a good Time Trial effort and fast enough to beat my personal best on the course by just over 1 minute. I think I might suffer at circuits and Swimfit tonight!

It gives me a good excuse to show you one of the cool features of Ascent, my GPS and exercise tracking application though. Ascent allows you to compare up to four different sessions. The video below shows a comparison between two sessions. The yellow dot and upper topo graph is me on the course today compared to the blue dot (and lower topo graph) which was my previous best on the course a few weeks ago.

The movie is a a little stuttery but that is down to the screen capture program I’m using. It is obviously much clearer at full size too, but I’ve had to reduce it for display on the web. Hopefully you can just about make out the blue and yellow dots and get the general idea. You can see where on the map you were, where you were faster or slower and from the topography and heart rate graph you can see where you were trying hard and where you weren’t. Pretty handy hey! Click this link for more info on Ascent, and other Mac software for GPS and fitness training.

Here’s the route on Garmin Connect.

I’ve  recently been working on a publication for a client and have been presenting them with a pdf file of the document as it progressed. Initially I’d been doing this by providing them with a CD containing the file, but they wanted a few amendments made to the original file today so I added it to my dropbox and provided them with a link. It’s a 50 page document and the file was about 40Mb in size so the initial upload took about 30 minutes on my (not very fast) broadband connection. I then noticed a small error in the file, corrected this which took a few seconds and then had to re-upload it to dropbox.

I was expecting the upload to take 30 minutes or so again as I assumed that the original pdf file would have to be overwritten with the amended one, but somehow, and I have no idea how they do this, the upload only took a few seconds.  There’s some clever voodoo going on there as the upload process must have examined the contents of the pdf file and uploaded just the changes! I can understand how it would only need to upload any files that had been changed, but quite how it only needs to upload the changes WITHIN a file is beyond me. That’s pretty clever if you ask me and adds yet another reason why I like Dropbox!

You can try it out by signing up for a free account here. You may just like it!

At the moment I tend to work from my desktop iMac and therefore only occasionally need to access e-mails and such like from other computers. When I do need to I’ve been able to log into my webmail account and access e-mails like that, but as most of my e-mails were POP accounts that didn’t sync with things on my desktop. I don’t have a smart phone or a laptop so there was never a need to sync things with those either.

However, if I get an iPad then I will use it in the lounge and maybe out and about, so I might end up checking e-mails and such like on it, in which case it would be nice if anything I did on it then synced with my desktop computer. I thought this might be a good time to consolidate my e-mail addresses too, so decided to use my Google Mail IMAP address as my main account.

The idea behind this is that all my e-mail can forward to the one Google Mail account. I can then access this via IMAP in Apple Mail on my desktop, and also access it via Mail for the iPad on my iPad. Any e-mails that I receive, move to folders, reply to etc will then all be synced between my desktop and my iPad as they will all be coming from the Google Mail server. It all seems to be working so far between my iMac and Google, but I’m not sure yet how it will work once I add an iPad to the equation.

iCal

Whilst I was at it I thought that maybe I could also use Google Calendar to sync my iCal calendars. This wasn’t quite so successful. I was able to add my calendars to Google Calendar without any problems and I was able to sync the accounts between Google Calendar and iCal. Changes that I made in iCal were reflected in Google Calendar and vice versa.

There was a problem though as Google Calendar won’t let you set reminders for events for more than 28 days before the event. I have no idea why such a limitation is imposed by Google, but there is and it meant that any events I had in my iCal calendars that had alarms set for more than 28 days before the event didn’t get synced properly. The events were there but the reminders / alarms weren’t. This was quite a problem for me as I had hundreds of events with reminders for 60 days and 30 days in advance. This one limitation means that Google Calendars will be of no use to me.

Google Calendar Reminder Settings

However, I’ve just remembered that my iPod can sync with my iCal calendars via iTunes and that works well, so I’m sure the iPad will too. This will mean there won’t be a need to use a third party intermediary such as Google anyway. Maybe I will be able to keep my digital life synced between my iMac and iPad afterall and I’ll be able to keep myself organised and check my mail on either device and any changes I make will be reflected on the other.

Apple iPad

I’ve yet to decide whether or not to get an iPad, but it looks as though I’ve a little more time to make up my mind (and save up some money). Apple have announced that they are delaying the international launch of the iPad until the end of May, in order to meet US demand for the tablet computer..

In a note on its website, Apple says it has delivered 500,000 iPads already this month, and that “demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad.”

From what I’ve heard this is the case. Even many naysayers who didn’t like the idea of the iPad and said it was just a big iPod Touch have changed their minds about the device once they’ve actually touched one and used it.

Apple will start taking international orders on May 10th and start shipping them internationally at the end of May, one month later than originally planned.

I still don’t know if my name will be down to receive one. I had hoped to check one out in the flesh in the middle of May when I’ll be close(ish) to an Apple Store, but it doesn’t look as though I’ll be able to now.

I wandered across to the beach to see a few kite-surfers out and winds around the 20 knot mark. I soon headed back, got my kit and went for a windsurf. It was never going to be an epic session as the waves were small, the sea a little choppy and the wind wasn’t howling. I went out on my Starboard S-Type 104 board with a 5.6m wave sail. I still haven’t had chance to try my new speed kit out and this combination of kit and conditions was never going to get me close to my ‘Life Begins at 40 knots‘ target, but it should have been a good mixture between easy sailing and speed. In fact perfect for the conditions.

GPS Track from windsurf session

I then spent the next hour blasting around and having a nice cruise on the sea. The maximum speed recorded on my GPS was 24.7 knots. Not bad for open-sea sailing. I’ve since downloaded the GPS track to my computer and have used various software to analyse it so as to see how each one works and how accurate they all are.

The actual GPS had a maximum speed on the screen of 24.7 knots.

In Ascent (my usual application for MTBing etc) the maximum speed was also 24.7 knots.

GPS-Results, which is the official application used by the GPS-Speedsailing community showed a few peaks where the satellite reception must have been lacking. These included five points above 100 knots which are obviously incorrect data points, one point at 37.85 knots (if only that were true!) and one at 25.22 knots. It has a feature that strips these points out for you. Once it had stripped out the spikes it too showed a maximum speed of 24.74 knots.

I uploaded this to the GPS-Speed sailing site. The speed given for your session here is an average of your 5 fastest 10 second averages. Mine comes out at 23.3 knots for this session with a maximum 2 second speed of 24.65 knots. You can see the session details here: http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com/?mnu=user&val=57475&uid=2072.

I then also uploaded it to Sports Track Live (Click here to see it). This also automatically strips out spikes for you, but didn’t do quite such a good job. It removed the points that had speed in excess of 100 knots, but kept the 37.85 and 25.54 knot readings, so showed my top speed to be 37.85 knots. If I look at the trace from the GPS on Sports Track Live it shows that these two points were in fact just data recording errors as they were off the line I would have been sailing on. So, although its nice to look at Sports Track Live doesn’t do such a good job of removing the spikes as the others.

It was however quite reassuring to see that the others all pretty much agreed this time with a top speed of 24.74 knots, a total distance of 14.78 nm (17 miles). It may not have been a proper speed session, but it is all good practice for when the real wind arrives.

Today I discovered that the attaching of image files on one of my sites had stopped working. Now, I know it was working a couple of weeks ago as a PHP upgrade had rendered it broken for a while and I’d fixed it and tested it thoroughly. All was working fine. Until today that was.

First stop therefore was the code I’d fixed a couple of weeks ago, all seemed OK there and after some investigation all seemed to be working fine. In fact, the images were being uploaded and added to the database as they should be, it seemed therefore as though the problem was further down the line when it came to displaying these images within a post.

I looked at some older posts and the images were being displayed as they should, the images for newer posts were being uploaded but were not being displayed… This puzzled me for a while as they use the same files and database, but then I noticed a problem with the database structure.

The post_id column in the image attachment table had been assigned a type ‘SMALLINT’. For those of you who don’t know, this means that the maximum value this column can have is 32767. The post_id column in the posts table was however correctly assigned as an INT, allowing it to contain much higher values

The site had recently exceeded 32,767 posts so when a new post was added with an image attached to it, the scripts were correctly trying to insert a post_id in the image attachment table with a value that exceeded 32767. The MySQL database didn’t like this and simply entered the maximum value it could which was 32767. This meant that the image was being added, but when someone viewed a post with an id of higher than 32767, and image associated with it had the wrong post_id so never got shown.

Simply changing the column type from SMALLINT to INT fixed the problem. Easy when you know how, but it had me puzzled for a little while.

It was satisfying to get to the bottom of it though, which means I can now have some lunch!

Many people hope that the increasing popularity of Apple’s mobile devices in the form of the iPhone, iPod Touch and the new iPad will pressure website and content providers to provide their content in a form that doesn’t require Flash. YouTube is already moving in this direction and is experimenting with HTML5 to deliver its videos and others will follow suit as more an more users demand it.

Adobe seem to be hitting back though in conjunction with HP and their up and coming tablet device – obviously inspired by the iPad! Let the tablet wars begin!

The first I downloaded was ‘Seasons’ from the Collective which was amazing, loads of good footage, some excellent filming and a good mix of riding. At about an hour long you just can’t go wrong for £1.89. The sound track was good too and it just made me want to get out and ride.

Here’s the Trailer for Seasons:

Next up was Kranked 7 which was pretty good, but not quite as good as seasons in my view. I also downloaded ‘Virtuous’, which was a little shorter but just as good. Some really good downhill footage, although I wasn’t so sure about the soundtrack on this one as it would require an ‘explicit’ tag so I couldn’t really let Morgan watch it.

If only iTunes had some windsurfing movies too as it is so easy to download them and at £1.89 each you don’t mind paying for them. I know you can get such things for free if you look in the right places, but I’d prefer not to do that – I must be the only person who has actually acquired all of his video, music and software legitimately – if the products are available at a sensible price then I’d much rather buy them and support the people making them. It isn’t as though I don’t already give Apple enough of my hard earned cash, so they may as well provide my media as well!

Head on over to iTunes now and get inspired to get out there on the trails. Even the Guardian has an article about Mountain Biking video clips. All I need now is to find a way of viewing them on the TV in the living room.

We kind of enjoy helping out too and everyone always seemed pleased when we do so. It has also shown us that there is a market for some simple, friendly, down to earth computer help and advice, so we’ve decided to start up ‘Computer Tutor Wales‘, offering just that service.

We’re not offering to fix computers and we aren’t necessarily offering to help when things go wrong, it is more a case of helping people get the most from their computers. Whenever we go to someone house to help them out we always try to educate them about where they went wrong, how they can prevent such things happening again and how to help themselves and this is the best part of lending a hand. The education side of things is really satisfying and passing on our knowledge always feels good.

We don’t know how this new venture will go yet, we may be able to help people over the phone, via remote access to their computer or more likely in person at their house where we can help them on their own machine. Rather than teaching them things we think they should know we’ll hopefully teach them how to do the things they want to do on their computer.

So, if you need some help or computer tuition in the Aberystwyth and Machynlleth area give us a call, let us pass on some of our knowledge and before you know it you’ll be astounding your friends and family with your own computer wizardry!

Computer Help and Tuition in Aberystwyth & Machynlleth