collideous

Combining SwissTopo With Google Maps

Being a biker, I often use Switzerland’s fantastic mapping service at map.geo.admin.ch to study trails and roads. Making use of the Google Maps API on here, I always thought it would be sweet to add Swiss maps too, as this site’s predominantly about riding within the tight borders of Switzerland. But doing so is not that obvious as SwissTopo isn’t using the same projection and tiling profile as Google Maps. Well, that is until I found procrastinatio’s excellent post about using a proxy and his example getting the mapping tiles through the French IGN API. I looked at his code, tossed it around a little and mixed in a pinch of jQuery. Voilà, another wonderful map added!

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A Few Rare Hours Of Sun

This morning we were greeted by a rare visitor. The sun came out for once. This May I haven’t seen it often and it’s been even less often that I’ve been able to ride under a sunny sky. I’d still like to add a few more miles to May Massive, but in the rain I really don’t need to go out. With 540 kilometers covered, I hope to reach 800 by month’s end. Should be more than doable if the weather starts getting friendlier, and somewhat tougher if it remains as bad as it’s been.

Today my legs felt a little slow so I opted for a ride without as much climbing as the past couple of rides. Interestingly, Strava said something different, as I managed to collect a bunch of achievements along the way. The legs must not have been that slow after all. For the first half of the ride I met predominately farmers on their tractors. At the top of the Chalet Neuf I passed two mountain bikers. Things changed as I climbed towards the Chasseral. Other road cyclists took advantage of the sunny day to hit the climb and it was the same going down the other side. Cyclist after cyclist climbed up the mountain. To add a bit of flatter miles, I added a short loop to the Métairie du Landeron and returned via Lignières, Prêles and Magglingen.

Tomorrow I’ll pass on cycling. Vignoble Cousin is open for wine tasting. And that’s just the right medicine for a tired cyclist.

Distance:	104.4 km (64.9 miles)
Elevation:	2’456 m (8’058 feet)
Time:	04:06:17
Speed (avg/max):	25.4/77.0 kph (15.8/47.8 mph)
Badges:

TiltViewer - Another Way To Present Image Sets

I stumbled across TiltViewer today via a Spiegel story about Mini-Hot-Rods that recently received approval for road use in Germany. Head over to the Wenckstern Mini-Hot-Rod page and you can see TiltViewer in action. After dropping a few files into my public Dropbox folder and editing the JavaScript that powers this Tumblr blog, I can now link to my Flickr photos using tags, such as:

• flickr.com/photos/collideous/tags/focus,mares
• flickr.com/photos/collideous/tags/stalactite
• flickr.com/photos/collideous/tags/bigboy

Now if May would finally decide to bring some nice weather, I could actually head out and take some new pictures.

Ebay And Whatnot

After a day cleaning the house and finally reassembling my cross bike, I was hoping to do a short reconnaissance ride today. Well, that cross bike - what a story. When you use a bike all winter, in rain, snow or slush it ends up suffering a lot. I took the thing entirely apart, cleaned and greased hub bearings, freewheel and much more. One thing I’ve really come to dislike are integrated headsets. Take a quality press-in headset like a Chris King and the thing survives decades of riding and may very well outlive your bike. Take an integrated headset with generally poor bearings and you look at a handful of rust after a year. While spending hours cleaning that plastic cross bike, I analyzed everything I touched and thought about how I’d like a future bike to be built.

• Usage: Currently I own bot a road and a cross bike. I wouldn’t mind combining the two into one and would see an ideal mix of 2/3 road and 1/3 cross, meaning a bike that is more heavily designed for road miles but could fly across gravel roads with no problems.
• Material: After being on a couple of carbon bikes these past couple of years, I’ll most likely look for a metal frame. If money permits titanium, steel if the budget needs to be limited. Carbon’s light, rides really well and is great for folks who change bike every season. Somehow though, I find this material to visually deteriorate quickly. Maybe it’s just because manufacturers trim the weight of these things so awfully much, that they lack any decent longevity.
• Brakes: I never felt the need for better brakes on my road bike. I use it most often in good weather and on pavement braking has never been an issue. Whole different story on the cross bike. Cantilevers are really only adequate on the flat. Steep descents, humidity, mud or snow just ask for disc brakes. A future all-purpose road bike would therefore be equipped with disc brakes.
• Other: I totally dig the wide rims on my Industry 9 wheels. Any future road bike will have to be equipped with 23-25mm wide rims and be capable to run wider tires. Rotor Q-Rings are other must-use components. By the time I get to build such a bike, mechanical groups will possibly be history. While I haven’t jumped on electronic shifting, I’ll make the switch without complaining.

Enough day dreaming back to the ride. Last September I climbed 3500 meters halfpiping through the St. Imier Valley. I’ve been thinking to do a sequel to this ride by adding even more elevation to it. To add a sixth ascent to this loop, I stepped out the door today for a reconnaissance mission. Unfortunately, the minute I got out a dark wall of clouds covered the mountains I was planning to visit and the first rain drops started to reach town. I wasn’t up for a rain ride and my riding window for the day was limited to just these few afternoon hours. I turned 180 degrees, crawled back into the basement and ripped the Industry Nine rear hub apart. I’ve used it for close to two years now. Enough time to treat the freewheel pawls with some fresh grease. They weren’t running dry, but the new grease instantly made them a few notches quieter.

Work done, it was time to put a few items on Ebay. My road bike got some new drivetrain components, so the old ones need to be sold. Next are a few items which I didn’t use on the Forty-Four Big Boy. Available for one week:

• SRAM Red Black Edition 10 Speed Rear Derailleur
• SRAM Red Black Edition Front Derailleur
• Syntace SuperForce Stem, 120mm Length, 31.8mm Clamp
• E*Thirteen Black 36T 4-Bolt 104BCD Chainring
• Watson Cycles Big Sweep Parkarino Titanium Handlebar

Happy biding!

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Chasseral Under Cloudy Skies

Yesterday was a somewhat unspectacular ride. It had rained over night and roads were wet when I left. The air was moist and had this clean freshness that you only get to breathe right after a nightly rainfall. The route for the day took me across the Twannberg and up to the Chaumont. I continued to the Pertuis and turned off to the right to reach Les Bugnenets from where I climbed the Chasseral Pass with a quick out and back to the antenna. A fantastic descent through the greening forest tossed me out into Nods and a nice tailwind pushed me all the way to Lamboing. One last climb to pop through Magglingen and I was on my way back home. With rain forecast for the next three days, riding is all but certain. I’ll be keeping an eye on the precipitation radar as I don’t want to miss an opportunity to collect a few extra miles for the May Massive.

Distance:	89.9 km (55.9 miles)
Elevation:	2’374 m (7’789 feet)
Time:	03:50:37
Speed (avg/max):	23.4/73.8 kph (14.5/45.6 mph)

Gorges De Pichoux Revisited

This first May week, the weather wasn’t exactly kind to us cycling worker bees, or rather working cycling bees. Quite a few times, I was sitting in the office while the sun was shining only to see dark clouds roll in during the late afternoon. By 6PM, the earliest time I can head out for a ride on a week day, it often rained. I managed to head out May 1st, but that was it for the week. Saturday was worse and I spent much of that day cleaning my Focus Mares crosser, which served commuter duty all winter long without receiving the slightest bit of care. It was in dire condition and I have yet to finish cleaning and reassembling it.

This Sunday May 5th, the morning sky looked gray in the south with a hint of blue to the north. Since the flatlands south of Biel are essentially “terra proibita” for the “scalatore” I am, the friendlier sky to the north was a welcome invitation to a long road ride. I decided to do a similar ride as on April 25th but adding a few more miles and a bit of elevation by passing through Glovelier and climbing through the Gorges de Pichoux. I rode through the gorge last back in September 2011. There are quite a few KOMs one could capture through the gorge, but this place is so freaking breathtaking, that I usually drop into a smaller gear and switch my brain into slow-motion recording. I also allow myself to stop in the middle to snap a few photos, KOMs be damned. Just before dropping down to Perrefitte, I pulled over for my customary pause on the old bench. While enjoying the view, I fueled up with a tasty fruit bar. Soon after, I was back on my way to Champoz, Court and the last long climb across the Grenchenberg. Last time, that sucker of a mountain hurt. This time, I was 7 minutes faster without giving 100%. And so the climbing season is on the right track.

Distance:	125.7 km (78.1 miles)
Elevation:	3’130 m (10’269 feet)
Time:	04:57:56
Speed (avg/max):	25.3/78.5 kph (15.7/48.8 mph)

DIY Canon To Flickr Upload

For quite a number of years I’ve been snapping photos with a pocket-sized Canon PowerShot SD850 IS. It’s been a great little camera that I brought along many trips and many bike rides. Because I use the thing quite often, I figured it’d be about time to find a more current camera that does things a little better and that does a few more things the old SD850 doesn’t do. I found just that in the only recently available Canon PowerShot SX280 HS, which packs a huge amount of features in a slightly larger envelope. In fact, this small black soul stealer does more than I’ll probably ever use. I won’t bore you with a feature list nor with a camera review as I’m just no authority when it comes to photography and its equipment. There are plenty of better places to read all about the PowerShot SX280 HS, if it tickles your fancy.

While the camera will snap crispier images and adapt to different situations like distance, lighting or movement intelligently and automatically, two image unrelated features will make the use of the camera a lot simpler for me - WiFi and GPS. I usually took the time with all of my Flickr photos to place them on the map. Thanks to a built-in GPS, I will no longer need to do that. The geolocation will always be stored in an image when it’s taken. More and more cams come with WiFi these days and it makes absolute sense. I know quite a few people who no longer own a computer. An iPad or tablet has replaced a laptop or desktop for them. Take the PowerShot SX280 HS and you no longer need to worry about being able to connect it by wire. The camera has a number of ways to transfer everything across WiFi. For iPhone and iPad users there’s a nifty CameraWindow app. PC and Mac have a similar app in addition to an Image Transfer Utility app. To copy photos from the PowerShot SX280 HS I no longer need to bend down - and risk to throw my back - to reach my desk drawer and pull out a USB cable. I just turn on the camera, switch on WiFi and tell it to connect to my MacBook. A Wireless Camera Service app on the Mac listens in the background and launches CameraWindow the second it gets a signal from the camera. Launch iPhoto and the camera is accessible there as well.

In addition to the image and video transfer to other pieces of hardware, the camera is packed with a few web services to shoot your footage straight up into the cloud. At the moment you can use Canon’s own Image Gateway, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Email and “Send via Server”. I wish they’ll add Flickr and Instagram down the road. If you can’t wait, here’s a little hack I did to send images to Flickr. You’ll need a laptop running at home, a Dropbox account, an IFTTT recipe, “Send via Server” on your Canon and a WiFi connection.

Okay, time to set it up. If you haven’t already, connect your camera to your computer via USB cable and set up the different web services in the CameraWindow app. You just need to do that once and it has to be done with a USB cable. It’s the only time you’ll ever need the cable. With “Send via Server” you can send images to your computer at home from anywhere in the world as long as you have WiFi and your computer is running.

Next, you need to tell the Image Transfer Utility app on your computer to save your incoming images in a public Dropbox folder. I called mine “canon”. Now, jump over to IFTTT (if you’ve never heard of it check it out, it lets you do some mighty cool things) and create a new recipe with a trigger that fires every time a photo is added to the folder you specify, “canon” in my case. Add a Flickr action that uploads a new public photo from Dropbox to Flickr and adjust title, description and tags to whatever you like (see my screenshot above). Done, you can now send images to Flickr right from your WiFi capable Canon. Dropbox and IFTTT make it possible.

The May Massive

For the first time ever, I’ve joined a Strava Challenge - the cycling May Massive - the first challenge in the recently announced monthly training series. Up to now, I’ve never bothered to join challenges that were aimed at riding a certain amount of miles within a specified time period, simply because mileage is the least of my goals. I ride for the quality of riding and for the fun of it. The May Massive is the first challenge with no specific distance goal, it’s just an open call to get out and ride. At the end of the month everyone participating gets some digital milestone badges based on the distance they covered within the month. Last year, May was the month I rode the most. I reeled in a whopping 1’013 kilometers and nearly 30’000 meters of elevation. It was a particularly sunny month and I had a week of vacation where I rode every day. As always, riding time will very much depend on the weather. If it rains cats and dogs, rides will be few and short. If it’s dry, rides will be plentiful, but always with a focus of having a good time climbing hills. Along the way, I hope to eternalize those rides in pictures on Flickr - just as I’ve done in the past.

Unlike most of Switzerland, I had to work today. We worked til noon, then had a company lunch that went until 3.30 PM. It was a fantastically sunny day, but by the time I got home, clouds had darkened the sky and threateningly looked like rain and possibly thunder. Initially, I planned to do a 50km ride but the uncertain sky kept me closer to home. The Montagne de Romont seemed like a safe climb. It’s a nice uphill and close enough to be back should the weather sour. The long and heavy lunch and the couple of glasses of wine didn’t sit well, so I left it at climbing the mountain without extending the ride any further. It did help burn the lunchtime calories and sweat out the Blauburgunder, though. Things got windy as heck, but other than a few stray rain drops the ride remained dry. And so begins my May Massive.

Distance:	35.2 km (21.9 miles)
Elevation:	904 m (2’966 feet)
Time:	01:30:37
Speed (avg/max):	23.3/79.2 kph (14.5/49.2 mph)