shinyhappyrainbows

having now ridden a hub drive for a year and now a mid drive recumbent trike for a month or so (actually a front drive because the trike's bottom bracket is out front), I'm starting to get road experience of the benefits and problems of both. One of the biggest claims made for mid drive is better centre of mass - bollocks. the rider is the largest and highest positioned mass on either an upright or a recumbent. Another factor in center of mass is rotational momentum, and here, a mid drive wins on an upright bike, bumps lift the mass of bike and rider through a shorter "lever." On a recumbent trike, a bump lists the mid drive through a short lever (the trike's wheelbase) vectored back to a lever longer than the trike's wheelbase by a factor of nearly 2, the distance between the pedal bracket and the back wheel. All the center of mass arguments for mid drive ignore the rider's mass and, again, on a recumbent, the rider's rorational moment is reduced but...

I have just learned that Soundcloud are planning to introduce a policy allowing AI to train on all the music therein. Being politically opposed to training AI, even for pure academic research, without the express permission of the artist/rightsholder in such works and without payment of a royalty for each instance of such use, I have summarily deleted my Soundcloud account. I strongly advise artists of any field and genre to do likewise, should their gallery site, repository or similar medium require acceptance of such terms. Training AI without paying the originator is possibly the BIGGEST cultural theft in history. If the ceators are not paid, that is piracy, by capitalism's own definition. I stand against the AI industry's "one law for them another for us" attitude to payment for access to human culture. Meanwhile, following my Soundcloud deletion, I decided to refresh my knowledge of my Bandcamp account terms. Big sigh of relief! Bandcamp stand against, and make...

I can code a little, basic Arduino. C/C++ basics, can create a custom library with a bit of online guidance, can code an imperative microcintroller sketch in the simplest of C, without much need for references to how-to pages. Brain's getting old and glitchy, no patience for learning, struggle with the whole in-crowd culture of the programming world, where even "beginner" tutorials assume higher than my level of understanding. That I've successfully coded anything, let alone, say, a MIDI controlled robotic drum kit. (Still got to finish that, but no room in the "secret lab" right now.) Languages like Go or Rust look doable, but see above for "culture," while the whole javascript world seems designed by people deliberately trying to make it impossible for beginners while teasing us with statements like, "JS is easy!" Yeah, pig's arse. Now, before we go further, if you read further than this paragraph, "The Contract," you are...

Mark Rober, the eponymous "former NASA engineer" of the memes, and all round brilliant debunker and educator has just uploaded a "fun" video about obstacle detection and crash prevention tech in cars. Apparently, nearly all "self driving" models of car use LiDAR obstacle detection. Can you guess what Tesla use? Hold your guess and watch Mark's video... Honestly, right now, the people I feel worst for are those who fell for Elon's lies and went with a Tesla. I normally have little sympathy for "lemon" buyers, I'm a cycling advocate and an "urbanist" who vehemently believes cars have become the bad master rather than out good servants they promised to be when they cleaned up cities suffering "horseshit pollution." But, right now, that "flash rat with a gold tooth" and his "pretend uncle Donny" is caught out in more lies and BS that ultimately is leaving people with expensive family transport tha...

The world descends into its stupid destruction as I write this link...

I've lived in Melbourne nearly 16 years, now, the anniversary is June, and the Bay Trail is one of my frequent haunts, yet it was literally only this month that I discovered there's a model of the Solar System, spanning from St Kilda Marina, down to the docks of Port Melbourne, at a scale of 1 in 1 billion. Even cooler, right near the model of The Sun, is Proxima Centauri, because, by amazing coincidence, the 4.1 lightyears between our star and its nearest neighbour, scaled down by a factor of 1 billion, is roughly the circumference of the Earth! Bugger me. If you walked from Port Melbourne, to the North Pole, continued walking from there, down the other side of our planet, to the South Pole, and back to the St Kilda Marina, you'll find a model nearby the Sun model of Proxima Centauri, as well!!! (I won't tell anybody if you cheat, though, it'd be a big ask to make the long way compulsory.) So, I've marked up the approximate in Ride With GPS ... I'll be ...