@Criggie the bit I replied to. If you hover my reply it should highlight the relevant line. The "suit all sizes of normal frames" bit.
Also, I'd love to know why "three brakes two levers" guy believes that upright and prone tadpoles have brakes that work so differently to reciumbent ones that solutions for the latter are inapplicable to the other two. It seems that several people believe that, and now I'm curious.
Somewhere online is a discussion of using firearms to accellerate bicycles, and the conclusion was that even with 100% effective momentum transfer you'd need a heavy machine gun to have much effect. Other than the "falling off the bike" one :)
Note that most of the rocket and jet bikes take a long time to gain any speed. There's not huge wodges of thrust there, because the penalty for "huge thrust" + "crash" is harsh.
@Criggie yeah, I don't do a lot of that. I mostly use my phone for playing Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne, and basic phone stuff (including "taking photos" and "listening to music" as basic phone stuff, anyway). And the two apps I actually "need" the phone for, the work one and SBrick Lego control one.
@Criggie I was somewhat saddened to find that many basic cellphones have awful cameras. When I was looking for a basic cellphone recently. Instead the girly has bought a dual sim smartphone and given my phone back. Which is a bit of a win, and hopefully we can sell (most of) her current collection of phones off.
There's a slightly sad non-answer to the "three wheels two levers" question that would be an excellent answer to a completely different question. I tried to get him to clarify and he clarified... that he wasn't trying to answer the question.
I'm more about finding someone who has a use for it. I'd rather give a working smartphone to a homeless person than recycle it, because that way it's likely to actually be used.
that comes up at bike giveaway time a lot.... we had a squad of vietnamese kids who would come to get a replacement bike every time. They simply didn't care about the old one.
@Criggie it was more person was fearful of the unexpected obligations that come with someone you vaguely know giving you free stuff. I wasn't able to convey that the only obligation was to actually use the camera. Because I would rather have the whizzy camera used by someone who valued it than have it be the prize in a contest of "what a piece of shit, but if I can get it cheap enough I can use it for something".
Canon 1DIII - "famous" for its dodgy focus. Viz, in a very speific situation (strong horizontal contrast stripes, speed ~ sprinting) it would only get about 80%-90% of the frames in focus at 10fps.
The difference between pro focus speed and consumer is night and day - going back to consumer felt like using a phone as far as focus speed goes. Press-pause-shoot.
@Criggie using the vertical focus fields, yeah. It was a firmware issue, AFAIK, one that wuold have required taking the camera apart to reprogram something deep in the bowels, so they patched it a bit in a downloadable upgrade but couldn't really fix the underlying issue. People who cared waited for the next one.
@Criggie I don't recall that being considered an option, at least by the 1% of online commentators who both were going to buy the camera, then didn't once the flaw was revealed. But that's a guess - the overwhelming majority of internet commentators had never owned a !D-series camera and likely never will.
@Criggie thing is, for 99% of users it would always work, and for the 1% it'd work 99% of the time. You need to point the right focus sensor at exactly the wrong target in exactly the wrong situation, to miss about 1 frame in 10 more than you expect it to.
I shot probably 30k frames of bike racing and almost all my missed focus shots where me slipping a little and the camera focussing on the rider in front of or behind my actual target.
I even shot a ride at an indoor velodrome with mixed lighting where the colour temperature changed from orange sodium lights to blue fluorescent 100 times a second. So I shot raw and that worked fine, even trying to focus on a smoothly curved white velomobile travelling at 60kph. It struggled at times, but that is one of the cliche "you can't focus on that" situations. OTOH, at 10fps you have a lot of margin for spray'n'pray shooting
The hassle of dealing with rapidly changing colour temperature is hard to overstate, for every final shot I had to manually set the colour balance. Luckily the main target was white so I at least had a consistent colour to set off, but I often had to tweak shadow or side colour to deal with uneven, miscoloured lighting.
@Criggie there are setups for that around, it's not too hard.
My bank just rang to confirm that the large sum they've lent me has been transferred into "my" account, and that I'm right, they can't see the account it went into either. But we can both see the account with the $LARGE debt in it. They will ring again if they can work out what happened to the money.
@Criggie other way round... I owe interest on the full amount borrowed, and they're going to see if they can find out where the corresponding credit went. It's also an offset account, so in theory they don't take money out of it, we do. Or we immediately transfer the credit amount back into the offset ount less a dollar (to stop them automatically closing the zero-balance account).
They also want to close my transaction account, because that was linked to the old offset account somehow. There's a whole heap of "I asked for X, you did Y" going on. If there was a bank that offered close-enough interest rates I'd swap. I think when we do actually buy a new house I will see if the other cheap-ish bank is usable. I'd rather pay an extra grand a year than deal with this shit
@Criggie there is an HPV crew in Chch, so it's not going to be too hard. Not like when I wanted to try and the only one in NZ that I could find was conveniently close... Mechanical Engineering at Canty Uni, but they guarded it like a precious jewel
Instead I rode the Sinclair C5 that Elec Eng had and decided that whoever bought it had the right idea... donate it to the engineers and pretend they never knew anything.
kiwihpv.org.nz OMG, someone has an actual velomobile now
@Criggie I think you should buy a welder instead :) If you want to shave the really complex bits Greenspeed or Trisled will sell you the front cross member and wheel mounting bits. But at least one Chch member has built their own trike so the skills are local.
@Criggie they're human powered, what more do you want?
Just got back from a ride. Was listening to muzak and had a moose RUN PAST ME AND CUT ME OFF. I was doing 18 mph and it past me. Scared the crap out of me because it was like 8 feet away before I saw it and it past like 3 feet in front of me.
The moose looked scared as hell. Hackles all up and everything. I think it's sibling got killed on the expressway this last weekend and it was trapped in the meridian for a bit after with the carcass.
I wonder what happens when the battery dies, or the running track gets contaminated. I know it wouldn't work in the cold :)
I also don't understand how the throttle works; is it still running while you brake?
having one throttle system for the rear wheel and a different for the front seems dumb.
