Posts by Moz
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My impression from talking to Maurice at GlowWorm is that he's spent a long time badgering people in China to find decent suppliers, and their existing deal is the result of years of co-development of the bikes they sell. He's had a lot of poor experiences. So when you see a kit on eBay and think "heck, for $300 I could fit that to my bike"... you are setting yourself up for one of those bad experiences. What you get is likely to work, if you assemble it correctly and add the right bits that you didn't know you'd need. Well, it'll work, after a fashion, for a while. Probably. But by all means, if that's all you want from a bike, go for it. But as a word of advice from someone who has fixed far too many cheap, shoddy bicycle-shaped-objects in my life: have a second bike as a fall-back. Don't do this to your only bike, you will regret it.
Also, for those of you starting out, bicycles.stackexchange is one useful resource and we will answer ebike questions. Please use the the search function first, though :)Full disclosure... I've known Maurice from GlowWorm for a long time and he's a friend. So I may be biased. But I'm also an engineer, and a cyclist, and I've built my own frames/bikes (www.moz.geek.nz/mozbike) and broken other peoples (the average rider can do 250W for 30s... in my 30's I could do 1500W for 30s... things break). I ride every day, and "taking the train" is my cop-out but still means riding 5-6km to the station. My main bikes does 5000km/year, rain hail or shine, and I expect it to "just work". So...
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I crashed slightly the other day and made a hole in my shin where it hit a bolt head on my stem. The bone part. That meant not pedalling for a while (weeks to months, depending on which doctor is talking).
So I borrowed an electric bike from the Sydney GlowWorm for a month. Having the electric bike in that situation meant I didn't have to take taxis everywhere, which made me a lot less unhappy. Without pedalling the battery was barely able to get me the 5-6km to work via the train and 5-6km home via the train. Albeit with about 100kg on board, with hills and absolutely no pedalling. Letting the battery fully charge helped (fast charge in an hour... wait another hour for the trickle charge to fill it up). I expect it is all the starts from zero, especially up a hill, that kill the battery (speaking as a 'lectrical engineer). Even just a couple of pedal strokes when starting out made a big difference.
After a week I started pedalling because I am impatient and also it just felt wrong not to, and battery life came right back up.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Apple and the…, in reply to BenWilson,
I had a waterproof phone last year
I had one once. For about a month, until it fell in the water. So much for that idea. It kind of annoys me that I can wash a camera and lens under the tap to get salt water off it, but I can't even expose my phone to water for 10 seconds. You'd think a complex assemblage of sliding plastic bits would be *less* waterproof, not more.
USB-C appears to have to have fairly weak retention
I think this is a feature, and I suspect they're expecting that anything modern enough to have the connector will be running modern software that copes with disconnection. They're wrong, obviously (says the guy who has a Windows XP virtual machine because that's the most recent OS that will talk to some of my USB devices... and they will connect viz a USB-C connector soon). Amusingly the Windows Me VM talks quite happily over "a serial port" provided by a USB-to-serial device that the WinMe OS can't detect, let alone load drivers for.
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like the inductive hob revolution. Yes, they're clearly superior in many ways to an ordinary electric hob. So long as you replace every single piece of stovetop cookware...
What? My copper bottom stainless steel pots all work flawlessly. The one trashy teflon-and-aluminium frypan that doesn't is something I wouldn't eat out of if you paid me. So sad. Being "forced" to replace that one item with a proper one was again, sad. The people who couldn't use a steel frypan have slowly learned. I don't think we've ever had someone bring their own cookware here except for oven stuff. We still have a resistive hob, though, so for those willing to walk out to the front door and turn it on that is an option (it's another 20W when it's "off" load we turn off at the wall).
OTOH, a lightning DAC? I don't know of any good ones available, and my existing portable DAC is definitely not going to work without a USB adapter cable, if it works at all. I agree that 99% of phones won't drive 90% of >$500 headphones worth a damn, but that's a fairly small market (and yes, *I* am so afflicted). But Apople are somewhat notorious for their low-quality phone DACs anyway, so this is in many ways a step forward.
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I kinda reassured that I'm not the only one who decided it was too expensive. I'm not sure what makes him cost so much to have speak, but I'm looking around at other authors and $20-$50 seems to be the norm. For $100-$150 I've been to gigs by Tracey Chapman and Sarah Mclachlan... with their bands. I can see Joelistics perform for $35... and no offence to Dr Goldacre, but he's not as good a performer as Joelistics. Oh dear, time to play some Joelistics.
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Thanks Russell. I won't even try getting you to post tree bits to Sydney, much as I'd like the latest book. Our library will get it eventually.
We did look at going to his talk here, but as you point out it's kinda pricey. The hassle of going out at night to see someone who seems better in print than in video bears on that, but mostly I just look at $200 and think "is this really the best I can do"? I'd rather drop $50 in his tip jar online, in the end.
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Polity: Behavioural economics and Hekia Parata, in reply to Sacha,
delusion that teachers make school budget decisions, rather than boards of trustees
I have not seen very many extra-cirricular activities run purely by parents, though, although a lot of them "help out". It's actually very difficult for parents to create and run programs like that without help from the staff. If staff were actively resisting I'd say no chance at all. Even something simple like a chess club ($200 for chess sets, a classroom at lunch)... oh, which classroom? Uh, one where the teacher permits it, of course. I'm sure the board will be happy to mediate between a teacher unhappy about the state of their classroom after chess club, and the parent who is running the chess club. And of course no teacher would ever disagree when a pupil wants to participate in a chess competition during school hours.
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Legal Beagle: The Spinoff: Offensive and…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Doesn't this mean the turtles will have to go all the way down?
That was my thought. To quote Carl Sagan "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Presumably if you wish to publish an article you must first prove that the universe exists, and likewise with all subsequent claims of fact.
I look forward to all future newspapers having on the front page "In the beginning there was nothing. Which exploded".
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I/S lets us know that Dr Geddis' OIA request has been answered with "no-one has ever mentioned it" :)
The meat is in the PDF from the FYI link above.
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Kinda saddens me that she still has to talk about all the amazing non-stripping things strippers do, in the hope that more people might agree that stripping is a job people do. Perhaps if those people also agreed that playing sport is also a job people do, and they're all people too? Worshipping one set while denigrating the other doesn't help anyone.
Deborah, it'd possibly be more meaningful if after the next assault is reported the rest of the team gave their match fees to refuge. "we are not like him" is a powerful message. Can't bring myself to write "if there's...", it's when.