random thoughts

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on диваниVimeo.

Well… the scar’s pretty much gone. Not completely, but at least it’s a handy reminder of why I should be careful on the bike.

A few weeks ago was fun - a trip to London to go to some conference. Best of all was meeting up with Caitlin. Oh, and various cool techy things. Like openQRM.

But it’s all a long story…

A few years ago I had a kona smoke. Even though it was a size or two too small it was fun and ended up getting hacked a fair bit with a new crankset then being made into a single speed and just generally being played with.

For some reason I can’t quite fathom out I got rid of it and swapped it for an on-one pompino. A shame because it was fun and sturdy and did it’s job well. Recently I got a replacement smoke. Partly because I’m selling the pompino but also as a replacement for the bike that got mashed by a car.

Unfortunately the new one has been a bit of a disappointment. In the month or so I’ve had it I’ve managed to trash the crankset (bent a load of teeth on the granny ring when the chain got tangled with the front derailler). Although it was a personal preference I had to change the tyres (700×47c are far too big and heavy) for some 700×32c tyres. And then yesterday a rear spoke snapped with a loud bang. It’s a drive side trailing spoke so if any were going to snap it would be one of them. It’s annoying. And not an easy fix.

In a way I’m not completely bothered about the duff wheels though - when I get a new set of rims I was going to build up a new set of wheels anyway. Something a lot stronger.

Anyway, the gist of all this is that kona smokes are still nice bikes. Cheap and cheerful. And very practical (it came with mudguards for one thing). It’s just a shame they switched to 700c wheels from 26″ ones. It worked nicely as a 26″ wheeled bike and doesn’t feel quick enough to justify the 700c wheels.

There’s something oddly sinister about this keyring. Poor little lego man.

After faffing around with my fileserver a problem cropped up with one of the macs. On every other computer my UID was 1000. Mainly because the first fileserver was a FreeBSD box and it creates the first account with a UID of 1000. But OSX creates its first account with a UID of 501. So this needed to be changed. Which isn’t as easy as a traditional UNIX box.

On most other UNIX flavours it would just be a case of editing /etc/passwd (or /etc/master.passwd) and chowning the homedir. But on OSX all that kind of info is hidden away in various directory services. In 10.4 it was in the netinfo directory and it was easy enough to edit using netinfo manager. But that was changed in 10.5, netinfo has been dropped, and it’s now held in a “Directory Service”.

So how to change it… Use the “dscl” command.

As root, type:

dscl

and you get a prompt in the interactive version of the “directory service command line utility”.To find out where in the directory the account info is the “list” command is useful. On my laptop I got this:

 > list
BSD
Local
Search
Contact
 > list Local/
Default
 > list Local/Default/
...big ling list of subdirs including..
Users
 > list Local/Default/Users
...list of all the local users...

Once you’ve found the username you want to modify you can see its details with

 > read Local/Default/Users/username
...big long list off attributes including...
UniqueID: 1000

Obviously this one is the right value, but if you want to change it from, say, 501 to 1000 you can with

 > change Local/Default/Users/username UniqueID 501 1000

Now all you have to do is exit dscl with an “exit” and chown the user’s home directory. This should work:

# chown -R username ~username

Dead easy. Incidentally, if you type “help” at the dscl prompt you’ll get the usage page for the command line utility. You can ignore the options section and the commands listed should be types without the hyphen at the start.

Last Thursday wasn’t fun. I got SMIDSYed on the way home from work. Went flying over a car bonnet and ended up lying on the road. My bike is looking the worse for wear (bent fork, bent wheel, torn saddle, scratched rack and perhaps the frame is bent) and I’m hobbling around with a knackered knee, ankles and other random bits. This morning my neck started aching. And I’ve not slept in days. Basically, I’m pretty screwed.

I don’t know for certain, but apparently I trashed the car pretty well. The reason I don’t know for certain was that within seconds of landing on the road random bystanders came over and were insisting I didn’t move in case I’d broken my back. Noone seemed to believe that it wasn’t a problem because I’d not done it before in falling off a mountain. But from what they said the car was in a bit of a state. A knackered front wing, windscreen and perhaps the front bumper too.

Eventually an ambulance turned up. And the police. And I got carted off to hospital. Although I’d hate to have to review A&E departments I can easily say Oldham’s was a lot worse than Inverness. Apart from not being seen for about half an hour when I did escape there wasn’t a map of the local area. Just as well I had a vague idea where I was otherwise it would have been utterly lost.

It’s all just another accident I could live without.

The Manchester to Blackpool charity ride was a few weeks ago. This year it was pretty much exactly 60 miles. And I managed it in 3 hours 5 minutes or so.

But it was a dull ride. Noone seemed to want to go faster than 18mph so I ended up riding the whole distance alone, unlike last year. There’s nothing much more to say. It was dull.

Funny that people are complaining about the price of fuel. On Coll it was a bit more expensive than the mainland. As you can see in this picture: