Al Gritzmacher's Blogosphere

After a couple months, I finally broke down and bought the Dinotte 140R bicycle tail light. It is by far, the brightest LED tail light available and has been shown to be effective, even during daylight, in being seen by cars approaching you from the rear. The light is painfully bright, so much so that it gets attention other lights don’t get. Maybe it’s curiosity, maybe it’s annoyance, but drivers wake up and give you a wide berth when they see it. Video of the lights is at the end of this post.

Some other innovative bicycle lights have come across my computer screen. I haven’t tried any of them, but they are worth considering if you’re in the market for such a thing. Continue Reading…

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I’ve added a set of panniers (luggage bags) to my trike. I hope to go off and do some camping/touring with it. Along with the bags, I picked up some camping gear.

The panniers are made by a company called Arkel. They’re in Quebec, but have a U.S. office in Vermont. I ordered them online and they arrived in just a few days. The model I chose are specifically tailored for recumbents and are lower and wider than traditional panniers. They are also angled to fit behind the slope of the recumbent seat. With only a couple minor adjustments, they fit perfectly and very securely on my rear rack on the trike.

I hated to have to buy them, but I got a tent and sleeping bag. I already have a tent and we have a closet full of sleeping bags. I have one I really like that I bought a number of years ago, but is still in great shape, but it’s just too big and heavy to put on the bike. Same thing goes for the tent, a 3 or 4 person tent that I’ve used both alone and along with the pop-up camper we have.

Touring on a bike, recumbent or regular, is like ultralight backpacking. There is a limit to how much you can carry. The backpacker just has a smaller number, but the same principles and a lot of the same equipment apply. I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading online about it in preparation. Continue Reading…

While outfitting my new bike, I had to choose a taillight for nighttime use, or in case I get caught out at dusk. I’ve always used a blinking LED taillight in the past and they are pretty good at getting you seen in the dark. The flashing LEDs really stand out. But this time I wanted a little more because the recumbent is so low to the ground and might not be recognized as a moving object in the dark.

I had seen some lights that were really bright, so much so that they are actually of use in the daytime. I went in search of one online. It’s really hard to get real information about how bright these really are. You can see photos or watch YouTube videos, but because cameras adjust to the light available, they all look blindingly bright individually. Only side-by-side comparisons are useful. They’re hard to find, though.

Typical generic LED tailight You’re probably familiar with lights that look like this. I’ve had dozens of them in the past and recently threw away a bunch that had quit working and couldn’t be revived by new batteries. Some are good quality, others are cheap knock-offs, but they’re all about as bright as the other. I bought four of them a while ago for $1.25 each at a flea market. Continue Reading…

The Bicycle Man shop

I took a trip yesterday to Alfred Station NY to visit a bike shop. I know I could have found a bike shop closer to home, but not one like this. This was The Bicycle Man, a shop whose simple name gives no clue to the rare and special product they have.

Just as an idea how special this is, I visited the largest bike shop in my area last week, a mini-chain with four stores, and out of the hundreds of bikes they had on display, they had only one model of a recumbent!

The Bicycle Man, you see, specializes in recumbent bikes, those laid-back, weird-looking bikes you might have seen on TV, a movie or rarely in real life. I had been wanting one for a long time and finally decided to try some out. This shop is a rarity in that they almost don’t want to sell you a bike, unless you try several out and are sure it’s right for you. It’s really cool that they spend so much time making sure the customer is happy before they take a dime. I spent most of the day there, and there were several customers besides me who also spent considerable time trying things out. Some went away without making a purchase. Maybe they will be back, but not until they are sure! Continue Reading…

Today I got three emails from Facebook. One told me that my password was changed and that, if I had not done it myself, I might have been a victim of a phishing attack.

The second one told me my account had been deactivated and that if I changed my mind and wanted to reconsider, all I needed to do was log back in. Too bad I changed that password…

The third one, was titled Facebook Service sent you a message on Facebook… and came from “Facebook Team.” Wow! Were they going to beg me to come back. Were they asking what they could do to make me stay? No.

This is what it said:

To read this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=156102208989&mid=6f888e491cd35db616b1089c9fe2d4da&n_m=facebook notify

Okay, so it wasn’t a personal message. Maybe it was something they wanted everyone who was quitting to see. Maybe about the changes they are making to correct the issues people have been complaining about. I had my hopes up.

Nope. It was a Viagra Ad. Canadian Pharmacy spam. Just one last shot to tell me I had made the right decision…

Incidentally, all the while I was a member in good standing with FB, I don’t ever remember getting a message like this that portrayed itself to be an important message from the “Facebook Team.” Guess I know what the “Team” thinks of me now…

Well, I did it. I committed “Facebook Suicide.” That’s the term for deleting your profile in the social network as if you no longer exist.

Of course, as soon as I was done, they announced sweeping revisions of their privacy policy and a simplification of the user controls that had become so complex that most people gave up and just didn’t deal with them.

I wasn’t terribly worried about my privacy. I assumed that pretty much everything I put in my profile or said online was visible to everyone. I mean, it may be only your “friends” who are supposed to see what you write, but if someone is determined, anything is available.

You can still (always) find me online. I have Twitter, MySpace, Google Buzz, AIM and other accounts. And of course, this blog. For all of my stuff, just Google me, my profile is there.

Continue Reading…

I’ve been playing around with Linux for probably close to 15 years and am still far from comfortable using it. I keep hold tightly to my security blanket of Windows.

The first time I tried to put Linux on a computer, I bought a set of disks, CD’s in fact and tried to put it on a spare computer I had. It was a version of Slackware Linux and featured the latest installer to automate the job. That meant feeding it disc after disc and watching as screen after screen of text scrolled by, periodically stopping to prompt you for some arcane information that I usually had no idea how to answer. I gave my best guesses and it worked, sort of. I got it to run and create a root account. I even had a graphical interface (X-windows) running on it and it recognized the mouse. But I could never get the GUI to match the screen size, no matter what I did. Continue Reading…