It made riding up the Col de Joux Plane and Colombiere quite interesting! And yes, it was taken in the shade!
Alpine temperatures
July 19th, 2010Garmin Edge 605 and 705 – new 3.20 firmware available
June 22nd, 2010Garmin Edge 605 and 705 – new 3.20 firmware available.
Garmin: Edge 605/705 Updates & Downloads.
Change History
Changes made from version 3.10 to 3.20:
- Improved calculation and reporting of total ascent, total descent, and grade.
- Improved handling of history files when saving.
- Correctly calibrates wheel size when using PowerTap hub.
- Backlight setting now saved to configuration and set automatically on power-on.
- Improved ‘Go Home’ functionality to search for any user-created waypoints named home.
- Added new timezone for Santiago, Chile.
- Allow house number 0 on find address page.
- Improved range on power calibration page.
- GSC10 sensor improvements to reduce speed spikes.
- Uses elevation calibration point when starting an activity during a course.
- Added message indicating elevation calibration point has been found.
- Expand elevation calibration radius to 50m.
- Translations updated in the user interface.
Shimano Dura-Ace 7900 lever rattles
June 5th, 2010Follow these instructions at your own risk – It is preferable to discuss your rattling levers with your retailer!
Do your Dura-Ace levers rattle on rough road surfaces? According to Madison Sales who look after the Shimano Service Centre Web Enquiry service, it’s “not a known fault”, yet I’ve met lots of people with the same problem and a quick search on the Internet reveals we’re not alone. I was quite annoyed with their brush off, after all, these are levers with a RRP of £429.99! So rather than get into a protracted debate with my retailer (Planet X) and Shimano and then ultimately lose the use of the bike for a few weeks (longer? Who knows!) I decided to see what I could do on my own.
If you inspect your levers carefully and in good light (not a job for the dimly lit garage), you’ll notice after a little trial and error that there are two main surfaces inside the lever that have the potential to rattle against other components inside the lever. I thought that some super glue, off cuts from an old inner tube and some string might bring me a solution.
So, you’ll need some string, super glue and some off cuts of old inner tube, I find MTB tubes are best as they’re thicker. Make sure you put the glue on the outside of the old tube, not the inside as it will be full of talc and won’t glue well. In any case, clean the tube thoroughly to guarantee good adhesion!
Where to place rubber insulation material
This picture hopefully explains more or less everything, you need to use the string to pull the lever all the way to the inside of the bars to reveal as much of the plastic protrusion (arrowed) as possible. This plastic protrusion rattles against other components in the lever and needs some rubber insulation. Do this for both levers, be sparing with the super glue, do not undo the string for at least 15 minutes to allow the glue to properly dry.
There is another common rattle point, again using the string technique, apply a small rubber patch to the area arrowed below (rubber patch is in place in this photo but it’s no the greatest of pictures I’m afraid!). If the patch wasn’t in place in this picture, you would see a small circular piece of metal that resembles a rivet. Place a tiny piece of inner tube on top of it.
Side view of lever for placement of 2nd rubber patch
That’s just about it really, not the most elegant of solutions. Hopefully the pictures tell the main part of the story without me rattling (did you see what I did there?) on, I’ve had the patches in place for about 700 miles now and they haven’t need re-fixing.
Good luck!
Liverpool – Chester – Liverpool charity ride 2009
February 9th, 2009This is worth an update I think, now in its 16th year, the LCL will this year include an additional event in the form of a 90 mile sportive. There are also 20, 25 and 54 mile routes as usual. The 90 mile route will start and finish in Liverpool and take in Delamere Forest, criss cross the Sandstone trail and visit Alvanley, Woodside and Great Barrow. Chester will be utilised as a refreshment stop.
Another first for this year will be online registration, which removes a lot of headaches in my opinion.
http://www.pennineevents.co.uk/Events09.html
http://www.pennineevents.co.uk/News/LCL09.html
An intersting bit of trivia for this event, it’s the only one in the country to include 5 miles of underground cycling, as one of the Mersey Tunnels will be closed! It’s always a good natured event, experienced cyclists – please give the novices extra room in the tunnel, it’s been like human skittles in previous years! Many of the novices will turn up on fairly low-end machinery, but a bit of encouragement and a good experience may see them return next year as devoted cyclists!
Google Latitude
February 8th, 2009This is an interesting little application, if you have a compatible phone you can install Google Maps onto your phone and latitude will display your location to your friends on a map. Likewise, you’ll be able to see the whereabouts of your friends. Perhaps you could use it so your significant other 
can keep tabs on you so you get a nice cup of tea and a meal when you get back from a ride! It’s got to be better than continually calling to say how long you might be!
http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html
Privacy issues are largely overcome by the configuration options available to you, you can even tell latitude you’re somewhere you’re not if that makes you happy! You don’t actually need GPS in your handset, latitude will attempt to locate you using GSM triangulation, but GPS adds more accuracy.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
February 8th, 2009New gadget alert!
I finally decided to upgrade my mobile phone, my last one – a Sony Ericsson w800i, was well suited to me at the time I bought it, but with increasing dependence on an online existence, it was time for a change!
You’re probably wondering why I’m writing about a cellphone on a cycling blog, but some of the gadgetry in these devices has useful applications if you’re a cyclist. On some of my longer solo rides, I like to listen to music, podcasts or the radio but prefer not to use headphones or earbuds, so a decent speaker is a must. The Nokia 5800 (just like my w800i) has speakers, but these are stereo with a fuller sound. I find that with the phone in my breast pocket (or napolean pocket as some call them 
), with the zip slightly open you can follow podcasts and talk shows on the radio easy enough, but I’m on the lookout for an unobtrusive and tiny external speaker to attach to my arm or something.
So what other functionality is useful to a cyclist? Well, this unit has full Satnav capability, you can download the maps via your PC or have the unit seek out the maps as you go over a WLAN or 3G connection. I doubt if this will replace the Edge for me, but it’s useful to be able to interrogate the Nokia maps when you’re at rest stops.
In addition, and possibly the biggest threat to the Garmin Edge, is Nokia’s Sports Tracker, there isn’t an officially released client for the 5800 on Nokia’s site, but a beta has escaped and can be found on some sites. I haven’t fully tested it yet, but something tells me that Garmin Edge has this area of the market well sewn up, but we shall see – and I would honestly prefer to carry only one gadget on a ride, and one that can do it all is going to win for me.
For a more simple bicycle computer like funtion, the built in Positioning feature which will give rudimentary (compared to the Garmin Edge) speed, trip distance, average speed information. Not bad, and adequate if you only want to know how far and fast you’ve been – there is no data-logging though, so you won’t be able to import it into something like SportTracks!
The camera is competent, with 3.2 Mega Pixels, video and geo-tagging (uses the in-built GPS to tag the location of each picture). There is no native geo-tagging application in the 5800, but you can get it from Nokia here, they call it ‘Location Tagger’. The icing on the cake is a built in FlickR client so you can upload pictures at the press of a button, it really is so simple and quick.
Despite the fact that this is one of the most feature rich phones on the market, with touch screen and a large display, battery life is excellent. I made full use of the radio, camera, GPS and 3G yesterday on a ride and a full day of meddlling didn’t even knock the battery down a bar on the display.
Finally, I’ve got Google’s Latitude on there, too. This application, built into the downloadable Google Maps application, allows you to see geographically where your friends are. I can see this becoming very popular once people get over their initial suspicions over privacy.
More later.
Using SD card map data on your PC
January 4th, 2009The following guide has been tested and proven effective.
By popular demand (it seems), for those of you without the DVD version of City Navigator, here is a brief guide to using SD card map data on your PC.
1. Back up your SD card by copying the entire contents of the SD card to somewhere safe (you should do this anyway as if you lose the SD card, you’re stuffed).
2. Assuming you already have Mapsource installed, navigate to C:\Garmin\PCBSMP2 (you might have installed it elsewhere, but this is the default).
3. You will see a file called ‘pc_basemap2.img’ , rename it to something else (for example pc_basemap2.OLD).
4. I don’t have the SD card, but I assume there will be one big file somewhere on the card, copy it to C:\Garmin\PCBSMP2 and rename it to ‘pc_basemap2.img’ without the quotes obviously.
5. Now open Mapsource and select ‘PC Basemap’ in the dropdown near the top and you should now be able to see City Navigator.
What you’ve effectively done here is to trick Mapsource into opening City Navigator instead of the basemap that is supplied with Mapsource.
The only problem you may have is of performance, Mapsource will have to open the entire file even if you’re only viewing one part of the map, but if your PC has plenty of memory, you should get by.
Firmware 2.50 released for Garmin Edge 605 and 705
November 7th, 2008A worthwhile upgrade, fixes several issues and adds some features. More info in the link below.
Garmin Maps
August 11th, 2008More mapping shenanigans! As some of you will know, there are already some open source maps available for the Garmin Edge 605 and 705. I’ve only just realised that these maps can also be displayed in Garmin’s Training Centre. Simply download the map for your region and put in the the appropriate folder on your PC (where the current base map is installed) and rename it to the same as the existing version ‘pc_basemap2.img’ (mine was in C:\Garmin\PCBSMP2 ), make sure you rename the old one first with a .old extension in case you need to go back.
http://www.mapomatic.net/garmin-maps-download is where you will find the maps, some of which are optimised for cyclists!
Good luck.
Bicycle maintenance and repair videos
May 29th, 2008Here’s a link to a great site packed with well made videos describing how to peform some common bicycle maintenance tasks.
It’s pretty good!