Shallow Thoughts
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Mon, 18 Mar 2024
(This is a followup to
Upgrading
an Old 1-1/4" Cannondale to a Modern 1-1/8" Fork.)
After
installing
a new headset and fork on my mountain bike,
I slid the stem onto the new steerer tube, cinched it up, tightened the
top bolt and went for a test ride.
It tested out fine, but the way I'd installed it was exactly wrong,
and I didn't realize it until I did some more reading.
It turns out cinching down a threadless headset requires a step
that's not at all obvious if you don't know any better.
Or at least it wasn't obvious to me.
Read more ...
Tags: bike
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10:52 Mar 18, 2024
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Fri, 15 Mar 2024
My (beloved) mountain bike is an old 1993 Cannondale M700, which I've
customized fairly heavily over the years. I know people say the
new (enormous, heavy) mountain bikes are more capable, but I'm
not convinced. I've ridden Dave's new Specialized and while it's
a nice bike (and I love the modern trend of an 11-speed cassette
with a single-speed front), it's heavy and slow-steering and honestly,
it didn't tempt me to replace the Cannondale.
But one thing about the 'dale that could definitely use replacing:
the fork.
Read more ...
Tags: bike
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16:48 Mar 15, 2024
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Sun, 10 Mar 2024
"Easter is March 31 this year," my husband said. "I think that's rare,
having Easter in March."
"I guess so," I said.
"There's a Cray somewhere that they use to calculate the date each year,"
he joked.
And of course that made me want to find out if Easters
in March really are rare.
Read more ...
Tags: programming, python
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12:49 Mar 10, 2024
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Tue, 27 Feb 2024
I've been learning guitar. I've tried several times in the past
without much success, concluding that although I love music, making it is
just not where my talents lie. But this time I'm following a course
(Justin Guitar),
doing things more or less in the recommended order rather than
jumping around randomly. It's fun, and I'm practicing regularly
and feel like I'm making progress.
So far I know about five chords, and surprisingly, there are a lot of good
songs you can play with only three to five chords. But if you want to
play along with a record, some songs need a capo
(one of those little dinguses you can clamp around the guitar's neck)
to map the chords to ones that are easy for beginners to play.
I don't have a capo.
Justin Guitar has a phone app that supposedly can transpose songs,
but I wouldn't know about that, because it doesn't work on my phone,
just spins forever any time I try to load a song.
But I do have a computer; can't I just take a recording and transpose it?
Yes! It's easy in Audacity.
Read more ...
Tags: music, guitar, audacity
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14:06 Feb 27, 2024
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Thu, 22 Feb 2024
I maintain quite a few small websites. I have several of my own under
different domains (shallowsky.com, nmbilltracker.com and so forth),
plus a few smaller projects like flask apps running on a different port.
In addition, I maintain websites for several organizations on a volunteer
basis (because if you join any volunteer organization and they find out
you're at all technical, that's the first job they want you to do).
I typically maintain a local copy of each website, so I can try out
any change locally first.
Read more ...
Tags: web, shell, programming
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16:18 Feb 22, 2024
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Fri, 02 Feb 2024
Last week Craig Martin led a tree and shrub identification walk for PEEC
around Kinnikinnick (yes, I had to look up the spelling) Park
in Los Alamos.
It was a very welcome addition to the summer flower walks that Craig and
Chick Keller have led in the past. Nothing wrong with flowers, but I get
curious about the non-flowering plants I see around me. I guess I'm
not the only one who feels that way, because the walk was very well
attended despite the mud and snow.
And it was fabulous. I scribbled notes as I could, but I'm sure they
won't make any sense to me a week from now, let alone a year.
Hence this writeup.
Read more ...
Tags: plants, nature
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12:34 Feb 02, 2024
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Sat, 20 Jan 2024
Dave and I finally got around to riding the
White Ridge
Bike Trails. It's an area north of Albuquerque, adjacent to
the Ojito Wilderness (which is also on our to-explore list).
Somehow we'd never quite gotten there, but this week was perfect.
Here in White Rock our local trails are covered with melting snow,
which means they'll be muddy for at least a month even if it doesn't
snow any more. But down near Albuquerque they didn't get much snow,
and the temperature was forecast as mid-40s,
so we hoped conditions would be good.
The map paints trails as Beginner (green), Moderate (blue), Difficult (red),
and Severe (black). We're intermediate bikers: pretty comfortable
riding over rocks and other modest obstacles, but not good enough
to do the super technical stuff like we see at Pajarito.
But there's no consistency to bike trail ratings:
a lot of trails rated difficult in the bay area were well within
our abilities,,
while some trails that Los Alamos County puts on their "family friendly"
list are so difficult that I can't ride them (we've argued with the
county's trail guy, who I don't think is a mountain biker;
he insists that they should rated as easy based on some IMBA criterion
or other.)
Anyway, the point is that you can't tell what you'll be able to ride
without going there and trying it.
Read more ...
Tags: bike, MTB
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19:41 Jan 20, 2024
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Mon, 01 Jan 2024
2023 was a good year for books, especially nonfiction.
I only finished twenty books this year.
I think that's mostly because I read a lot more nonfiction than usual
(tending toward long books and slower reading), and I had no re-reads.
Still, quite a bit lower than past years. I guess I've been pretty busy
with other things, and tired and zonking out early instead of reading
well into the night.
Here are some of the books I enjoyed most this year.
Read more ...
Tags: books
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12:34 Jan 01, 2024
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