SRM, for its clever and entirely unanticipated inclusion of a solar panel on its power meter crankset. They say it significantly extends battery life of the power measuring unit.
I really have no use for a power meter, much less one that costs $3000, but I just love this. As my friend said the other day “this green stuff- it’s happening!”
Wish I had a picture. It looks really cool.Updated with picture. Nice.
Garmin recently announced the newest version of its bike computers (I love Interbike season!). I like my Edge 305 a lot. It’s a nice device that is 
sophisticated, but reasonably easy to figure out. It also plays well with my Mac, MotionBased and TrainingPeaks.
But . . . the new versions have. color. screens. Sure looks pretty.
And real maps- that beats the arrow at the top of the bread-crumb trail that’s all I’ve managed to get out of my 305. Guess I’ve never figured out how to export courses to the device- or I’ve never seen the point of downloading a course when I might deviate
from the route I rode last time.
The real nifty trick is power data, though. Pretty amazing to get HR, power data, GPS and street maps all in one device. Gadget-geek that I am I’m pretty excited to check this out, though at risk of sounding like a ridiculous fanboy I will say that the battery life on my Edge is slightly better than piss-poor. I’m worried I’ll have to set one of those bottle-dynamo things against my tire to get any kind of battery life out of a version with more features.
My Garmin bike computer works well. The battery life is not so good, though, so I bought an external battery pack to get me through some long rides coming up. The name isn’t quite right, though.
The correct one is “Lil’ Stync’er”.
I like bike lights a lot. I really like those ones that replace bar-end plugs on drop bars. I find the ones that fit on your rear V-brake mounts and light up when you brake clever and amusing, though not enough to put on my bike.
Recently, though, I started wondering what I could do to add more light. Ideally there would be some feature on my bike or body just thin enough that the light radiates through, and spreads out. I came up short, but fortunately someone else perservered and came up with Indicatears. A handlebar mount apparently lets the wearer turn on the left/right blinking indicators.
These seemed perfect, but then I started to worry. What happens if I grow my hair long and it covers the lights? What if it’s cold out and I want to wear a beanie under my helmet that covers my ears? That’s why I decided that as good as the Indicatears seem, I’m going to wait for the next generation. With luck they’ll come up with some kind of attachment so that the lights can stick out a few inches from my head, ideally with several LEDs sticking straight out from either ear. Then I’ll buy them for sure.
I ride a 15 year old bike, so I don’t know a whole lot about carbon fiber frames and parts and stuff. It all looks cool, but I am starting to have my doubts about whether it really makes sense to make *everything* out of carbon fiber, as the bike industry seems to believe these days. Carbon fiber seatposts, in particular, have a tendency to slip- or so I have heard.
Case in point is Alessandro Ballan’s bike from Paris-Roubaix. Call me a luddite, but I’ll stick to my guns with the opinion that if you need to drill holes in your frame and put screws into the seat tube to keep the post from slipping, you aren’t working with the best equipment for the job.
This post is my response to Web Worker Daily’s “open call” for contributors.
Opportunity
When I left my “office” job and went into business for myself I was thrilled at the chance to work with systems I thought were interesting, useful, different, etc.
The Promise. . .
A MacBook Pro was an easy choice: the combination of MS Office and iLife gives me the ability to run best-in-class software for my personal (music, photos, videos, etc) and professional (Word, Excel) lives from a single machine. Perfect!
Mobile email is essential as well. I opted for a Treo 650. I can’t remember exactly why at this point, except maybe that I could readily find a near-new Cingular version on eBay. I am not in love with the phone, but a smartphone is such a bundle of compromises that I probably wouldn’t love anything. I do love ChatterEmail as a replacement for the built-in VersaMail client, and developer Marc Blank is terrific about responding to questions and problems. MissingSync is a powerful, but troubled replacement for the Palm Desktop connector (more on that below).
So far so good. An email provider was next. Because I am away from my desk a lot, POP mail wasn’t going to work for me. I tried it briefly, but if I forgot to close my desktop mail client messages would disappear from the server and skip right past my Treo- no good.
The MS Outlook web client may have improved since I last used it, but I found it so clunky I longed for some alternative. Then I found Zimbra. Pretty to look at, slick to use. I was hooked and bought a hosted account through OnDeckTech. I liked them immediately, and still do, because they are what I strive for in my own business- small-in-the-best-kind-of-way, dependable, responsive to even the smallest customer (me). Special kudos to them for not dropping me once they found out what a demanding customer they had actually gotten (I think they know me by voice now).
And the Reality
It is fair to say that I like neat stuff, but it needs to work perfectly. I know that MS Outlook Web Access doesn’t. Sadly, neither does Zimbra.
It isn’t worth anyone’s time to read the details, but the summary is that Mac/iSync, Zimbra and Treo are unable to coexist happily on my computer. I primarily use iCal for my calendar, and it seems to get out of sync with the Zimbra web client about once a week. I go back and forth between thinking that iCal has some problem and that iSync has trouble with three-way syncing between iCal, Zimbra and the Treo.
AddressBook, Zimbra and MissingSync seem unable to get along as well (though Missing Sync does a better job than the Palm Desktop). Periodically, for no apparent reason, the three of them have trouble deciding whether email addresses should go in the “work” “home” or “email” fields and decide to put them in two out of three, or all, three for all of my contacts.
And then there are the times I tell the Zimbra connector to manually sync to the server and it blows it off. Just like my 8 year old when I tell him to clean his room, it makes a superficial 2 second effort that does absolutely nothing. Here I have found the only remedy is to click the “reset sync data” button, nervously click “ok” when it asks if I want to delete all data from the Zimbra server and replace from the desktop (backup iCal and AddressBook first!), then hold my breath for as much of the next five minutes as possible while the data gets replaced and re-synced.
But why don’t I just sync the Treo wirelessly with the Zimbra server, you might reasonably ask? The reason is a dark secret of Palm’s known as the AIRSam StatMachine” error, and that is a subject for a lengthy post of its own so I won’t get into it here. It is enough to say I got it bad and can’t find a cure.
Mostly Happy Ending- except on certain days
Once I put everything together, the report card is pretty good with one major black mark:
*MacBookPro – A- (nope, the heat doesn’t bother me, but the battery sure doesn’t last long)
*Treo 650 – C+ (an A would require 3G, a QWERTY keyboard, full iTunes compatibility, longer battery life and a big screen, and it would fit in my coin pocket. It would get a B if it didn’t crash as much and the screws in the back hadn’t all worked themselves loose)
*Zimbra – B+. (I like the web client and might use it full-time whenever offline support becomes available. It’s the iSync connector that drags down the score.)
*Time spent troubleshooting problems on my own – D
It isn’t a bad GPA, up until the last part. The lost time is the killer. Almost makes me want to go back to work someplace with an IT department. Almost.
This is probably not surprising to most people who have used an altimeter to hear that the data is not very accurate, but I have been somewhat amazed by how bad the data can get.
San Francisco is really hilly (wow- more amazing revelations!), which create “micro-climates”, which causes big variations in barometric pressure. I used to think it was funny to leave my house (altimeter calibrated properly), then go downtown and up to work on the 9th floor of an office building, only to have my altimeter watch tell me I was 50 feet below sea level.
My Garmin Edge 305 has a barometric altimeter that seemed to basically agree with the altimeter on my watch until I lost the watch. Now I just have the Garmin to go by, but I have noticed big differences in the data recorded on the device and data processed by MotionBased.com. A regular bike ride I do has something just under 6,000 feet of climbing. The Garmin’s screen will report 5,800 or so, but when I upload the file to MB it records it as 6,500.
Even worse is MB’s altitude correction feature. Apparently some altimeters are even worse than the Garmin, because MB’s help files say the Edge is more accurate than the correction feature. Still, I tested it out with some interesting results:
*The same ride described above consistently gets reported as 11,000+ feet of climbing.
*I do a regular workout around a basically flat track early in the mornings. The Edge reports the altitude pretty accurately, but when I turned on the correction it showed a gradual upward trend over the course of the laps. I eventually figured out that was because I do the workout early in the AM, so MB’s correction actually reflected the air warming up as the sun rose.
Too bad there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. I imagine this is why Trainingpeaks.com doesn’t record altitude data- they are super-analytical about their data and maybe they just feel that altitude isn’t reported accurately enough to work well with the rest of their data.
So Apple finally announced the long-awaited iPhone. They say they plan to sell 10 million of them in 2008 (!) and from the pictures and descriptions the thing is so gorgeous and sounds so game-changing that I believe they can do it- as long as they can get it produced at all. It seems like it has been delayed as long as it has because they have had technical problems developing it.
In any case, I figured out the one super-extra cool thing I want mine to do, whenever I end up buying one. I have an iPod, a MacBook Pro filled with music and an AirPort wireless router. If I connect the router to my stereo, the MBP will stream music from iTunes to the stereo. Problem is that the MBP is downstairs and the stereo is upstairs.
Rather than have to lug my laptop around the house just to play music, I plug the iPod into the stereo. So, what I want my iPhone to do is act as a remote controller/link between my laptop and my stereo. Pretty much like a Sonos, but since I already own most of the equipment it would be a lot cheaper.
That’s what I want.
I have been experimenting with a couple of different training software programs and the more I experiment, the more it seems like my rudimentary Excel spreadsheet does the best job of them all.
Training Peaks
I had heard really good things about TrainingPeaks so I checked out a trial version. It seems like it may do a really good job for pure cyclists and probably triathletes as well. Its real strength seems like the calendar planning features, where you can build training plans or drop in premade ones without an enormous amount of effort. The ability to manage HR and power zones is also quite good.
However, my main sports are cycling, alpine skiing and yoga. To enter a workout in either of the latter two, I need to select a workout type as “Custom” or “Other”, and even then the s/w seems bike-driven. I.e. it preselects a bike for the workout. There is no ability to build my own custom workout types.
TrainingPeaks also doesn’t track vertical gain (or descent for skiing). I like to climb on my bike and I want my training log to keep track of this data over time.
TP also doesn’t support Macs, which is a pain in the neck for me. Finally, I find the software really clunky and ugly, which just bugs me.
MotionBased
MotionBased is clearly aimed at a different audience. It is slick, easy to figure out and works well (mostly) with Macs. It also tracks altitude (ascent only) and has categories for lots of different sports, with ability to filter and aggregate data in lots of ways. These are all strong points.
MB is a division of Garmin and seems to have been created to help people get more use from, and build a community around, their GPS devices. As such, it is really a location-based service designed for downloading Garmin GPS data and laying it on top of maps. Some of the newer GPS devices (Edge and Forerunner) are intended as training tools, so MB has added functionality to track HR data, but otherwise the s/w is really about keeping a record of where you have been and how far you have gone.
As such, MB is essentially a retrospective tool. There is no calendar, no planning or scheduling of a training program. There is also no way to enter a workout except by uploading data from a device- i.e. unless I bring my GPS to yoga I can’t add up yoga practice time. And it only tracks vertical ascent, which is pretty much beside the point for my resort-based skiing.
Back to Excel
While experimenting with these services I stopped using the spreadsheet I have developed over the past 4 years, but I decided to pull it back out the other day. I have spent a bunch of time over the years developing the functionality I need and it seems like it works best for my idiosyncratic needs. As I have it set up, I enter my daily workouts, sleep time & notes, and the sheet automatically counts workouts by activity, total time spent, distance and vertical climb/descent. The major downside is that building in a training program is extremely time-consuming and a pain in the neck, as it needs to be done day-by-day, week-by-week.
I also can’t download data directly to it, as I can from my Edge computer to both TrainingPeaks and MotionBased. Sometimes seeing a graph of the workout is a lot more valuable than the summary data.
I talked to DP today about cornering on bicycles. He has had a couple of bad spills in the recent past and we have both been analyzing our cornering techniques to try to get confidence back. He told me that someone followed him recently and observed that in right-hand turns he does fine, but he doesn’t set up properly going into left-hand turns- he enters the corner too far to the inside rather than taking the width of the road to set up for the apex. This is an interesting thought. I would love to get someone to follow me, or even better follow me with a video camera to observe my technique.
The conversation also made me think about Grand Turismo. I am not much of a video game player, but I have always found driving games fun and I own GT4. It isn’t a great game, but it has an interesting skills feature: you have to earn “licenses” by completing timed runs on mostly twisty courses. Most of the tests involve difficult course(s) where you have to figure out how to set the car up properly to get from corner to corner without losing speed or crashing.
I don’t know that it is the best kind of training, but it has made me think more analytically about how corners are formed and how to find the fastest lines through them. Some corners are long consistent curves and you can just lean the bike and go. Most, though, have multiple radii and you have to figure out the trick. Sometimes it means coming in a little high and cutting the apex a bit early so that you have enough road on the other side to get through without scrubbing speed. I usually end up getting late on those- waiting a moment too long before diving into the apex and running out of road on the other side. Still, now that I know what to look for and think about it seems to help. Cornering is really almost all in one’s head, so having these things to think about helps a lot.
I guess it goes to show- you never know when you might actually learn something.
