Category: Uncategorised

Radar on the Bike

When I first started to ride my road bike, it was just my ears that was primarily the oncoming car detector from the rear. As drivers begin to pass more fiercely, I started to ride with these inexpensive USB charged rear lights.

I got the this pair for like less than $20 CAD on Amazon. They last for about five hours and they typically don’t need to be charged on every ride, more like every other ride. Since I got two of them, I have one as a reserve and swap the other when the active one runs out of batteries. They also do not take long to charge, typically less than an hour or so.

When I upgraded my bike computer from the Garmin Edge 500 to the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt, I was wondering whether I should get the Garmin Varia. At the time, I personally did not think it was worth it. These $300 CAD gadgets has a rear facing radar that detect passing cars, and relay their relative distances on your bike computer. The concept is seemingly, very cool, and it gives you about a 5 to 10 seconds warning before the oncoming vehicle actually pass you. The Varia also can detect and show multiple vehicles coming and it is pretty good in determining whether it is a vehicle or a bike that is passing you.

With the advent of the pandemic, it just seems there are more dangerous drivers out there when passing cyclists. I do not know whether this is a result of lower driving test standards, or simply people are out of practice because they are doing less driving. Regardless the reason, the result is more dangerous.

This week I spotted the Varia RTL515 on sale on Amazon, so I picked one up for $250.99 CAD. Also my wife was heckling me to get one. I guess safety is priceless afterall.

On my inaugural 50km ride with the Varia today, here are my thoughts on using the Varia. First the device and its vehicle detection worked extremely well. Throughout the entire ride, there was only one instance when the display showed no cars, while a car passed me in a split second. My ears still serve as backup. There was also an instance of a false detection, when a group of three cyclists were behind me.

Each detection comes with two beeping notifications. The first when it first detects one or more vehicles. The second when the way is clear. I am debating whether I should turn off these audible notifications. They were starting to get annoying after an hour, especially on busy roads during rush hours.

One area that does help a lot is when making a left turn, the device is a great early warning system whether there are any vehicles behind you. This is an excellent added assurance.

I think it is extremely easy for someone to take the detection results for granted, but I would say that this investment does not relegate the practice of checking your blind spot or cycling in a straight line into the whelm of extinction. In the end, it is just more information for you as the rider to process, but you will still have to judge your own situation (in the moment) and act safely and accordingly.

AirPods Pro Replacement

I purchased my AirPods Pro as soon as they were launched back in 2019. During the pandemic, I had one earbud replaced due to crackling noises when I moved my head. This replacement was performed under warranty, so Apple provided great service.

About two weeks ago the same thing happened with the other original earbud. I called it in, and was advised to book a Genius Bar appointment, which I did yesterday.

Today I went to the Apple Store, waited for 15 minutes, and they replaced both my earbuds no questions asked. Apparently to Apple’s credit, they found out that not one but both earbuds were defective.

The breakdown of the earbud was fortuitous timing. About a month ago, my wife informed me of this AirPods Pro Service Program. I did not think much of it because both were working. Now I am glad such a program existed.

When I first started to use the brand new AirPods Pro, I found out how bad my previous pair really were. The noise cancellation on these new earbuds worked twice as good as my defective pair.

Once again Apple Services can be dependent upon. I am glad to be sporting brand new AirPods Pro earbuds as a result of their service quality. These new earbuds will have a 90 days warranty.

What more can I say? I will continue to purchase Apple products not only because of their quality but also because of their prompt service and retail presence, a competitive advantage or feature that is often overlooked.

Rogers All Day Outage

Today we experienced the longest residential Internet outage that I have personally experienced since I have been a Rogers customer for more than 20 years.

My firewall records show:

As per the records above, one can observe that initial instability started at around 2:15am and then at around 4:51am it failed for a very long time. There were attempts at around noon and in the evening to resurrect the system. These attempts proved to be unsuccessful. In each of these attempts, there were issues with domain name lookups, and possible routing problems.

Our Koodo LTE on our mobile devices were able to make phone calls, but data rates were very slow. Usability was intermittent at best. To get the latest news, we had to resort back to our emergency radio.

We found out that this radio’s dynamo generator no longer works, and we should probably replace it soon. We tried solar but finally settled for batteries to operate the radio.

It turns out the whole country is impacted with specific incidences of:

Point of Sales (POS) terminal issues with using and clearing debit cards;
Work at home businesses can no longer function;
Issues with ArriveCan applications for those entering the country;
Possible 911 reception issues in certain areas;
This Toronto Star article has more.

I am writing this post at around 10:15pm. At this point the Internet is backup now longer than any of the previous Rogers attempts in fixing the outage. I hope we are up for good.

My speculation is that Rogers’ provisioning database was hacked and got corrupted causing the disablement of Internet access by all of their customers. This is my GUESS. I have no proof. We will see what really happened if Rogers choose to divulge such information in the near future.

There has been precious little information at this point on what caused the outage. My curiosity is piqued to find out what happened, and how Rogers can prevent this in the future.

Thoughts on Inflation

Like others, I have been reading and experiencing about inflation. It seems like everything but GPU graphics cards are going up. Everything from prices at the pump, grocery shopping, and eating out are all going up. In short, these are the commodities that are needed to sustain life.

Normal people do not stock up on extra food and gasoline, not in huge supplies any ways. Most of us typically buy and use them as we need them. Therefore, price increases in these categories of goods are most likely caused by supply constraints and not by excess demand.

When central banks around the world sees high inflation rates, their immediate monetary policy change is to increase interest rates. This increases the cost of borrowing and impacts on cash flow. For example, you tend to use your credit card less and therefore you end up buying less. There will also be less investments and ventures. People will tend to save more.

If the current inflation is a result of supply constraints of key commodities necessary to sustain our current way of life, then a forced demand reduction means a pare back to our quality of life. The increased interest rate will have a dampening effect on items other than food and energy, at least not immediately.

It will eventually reduce demand on the essentials when people are indirectly impacted through layoffs due to lower business activities in other areas. This means people will have to buy less food and consume less energy. A lower quality of life.

Okay. Why raise interest rates then if it is going to do more damage than good? Unfortunately interest rate is the only main lever that central banks have. Interest rates will have to increase to the point where demand of the essentials are align back to their corresponding supply levels. This means to fight this type of inflation, we will necessarily see a recession in the economy and our livelihood.

The alternative is to allow for inflation rate to go uncheck and await for supply to naturally fix itself. I do not think this will work as high inflation effectively act as a brake to economic growth for everyone. The central banks now face a difficult decision. Let inflation create hardship for all or raise interest rates to cause pain for some (less than all), and reduce demand on the essentials. I fear they will have no choice but to choose the latter. As a result of this choice there will be a further widening of our social class gap. The rich will be more prepared to weather through the increase in borrowing costs. They may even seek opportunities to increase their social status. The poor will have to deal with making ends meet with less necessities.

In short, things will get much worst before they get better. When inflation is tamed, and I think this will be some time considering the current Ukrainian war, sanctions, and logistical issues, the poor will be less well off than the rich in the next cycle.

Let me know your thoughts on my thoughts.

Safari Cannot Load Certain Pages (iOS 15.5 & macOS 12.4)

I upgraded my iPhone and iPad to iOS 15.5 and my Mac’s to 12.4. I noticed in the past couple of days that certain web pages would not open. I have discovered that the following domains were effectively blocked:

assets.adobedtm.com
fonts.gstatic.com
platform.twitter.com

This causes web sites containing references to the above domains to load very slowly or not at all.

I first took the attitude that this was a great feature and Apple is helping me to remove more SPAM or prevent further identity tracking. However, this morning when I try to access canada.ca, which is our government site also has the same symptom. Clearly Apple’s technique of applying privacy tracking has crossed the Rubicon sort of speak and is now generating enough false positives that is hindering day to day use.

I do have the option of using Chrome on my Mac’s but this is a huge CPU guzzler. I prefer to stay with Safari.

I came across the following thread on the MacRumors forum. The discussion pointed to the Limit IP Address Tracking feature to be the culprit. After turning off the feature on my iOS and macOS devices, I am now able to load the problematic web sites without any issues.

This may be a temporary problem with Apple with their cloud relays, so perhaps it will be automagically fixed in the future.

Below are screen shots from my iPhone and my MacBook that shows where you can turn off this feature.

If you are experiencing similar difficulties, I hope you will find the above useful and you can continue to visit certain web sites without issues.

Update: It looks like you also have to check to make sure the Safari Privacy Settings as well:

Reminiscing PC Tech

We are in the process of shredding our paper records from twenty years ago, stuff like tax returns, invoices, insurance papers that are no longer relevant or needed.

During this paper demolition process, I came across this invoice from 24 years ago!

A Windows 95 PC costing over $4,500 in 1998 money. Wow. I did not realize I had such an appetite to spend that much money back then.

Notice that we were still using dial in modems back then. No high-speed internet yet. Most motherboards did not come with sound and video either. I also have to laugh at the hard drive specification. At 8.4 GB, that would be smaller than most USB flash drive you can now get at Staples.

Fascinating walking down memory lane!

Gold Bars

This year on January the 31st, I purchased a gold bar from TD Canada Trust. It is one ounce for $2,414.67. The idea is from my wife. She wanted to establish a new trend as her annual birthday gift.

As the kids are grown up and our RESP savings are being maxed out. the redirection of funds to accumulating gold may not be a bad idea. The world has become a more unpredictable place, the pandemic, and growing geopolitical issues.

This morning I was curious and check the price for the same one ounce of gold and it is sitting at $2,540.03. Already up in about three weeks.

We will continue to monitor to see if this is indeed a good long term investment.

3D Printer to the Rescue!

It has been a long time since I printed something with my 3D printer. The last project was to print out a traveling pill box, which I ended up using when I went to Montreal during the last Thanksgiving holidays.

This morning my wife approached me with a request to create a part for the Silver Reed LK150 Knitting Machine. This part had custom dimensions, which I had to design with Autodesk Fusion 360.

It has also been a very long time since I designed something with Fusion 360, but kudos to the people at Autodesk to continue to allow people such as myself to use Fusion 360 for free as long as it is for personal use.

As always with these 3D project, it is very much measure three times, and draw once. I have to re-acclimate myself with how to use Fusion 360, but after about fifteen minutes, I was back at it, drawing lines, and creating polygons. The final outcome is shown below.

As you can see, I did a pretty good job!

My Mistress has a Problem with Its Bottom!

I brought my No. 22 Great Divide Titanium bike to Evolution when I found out that my bottom bracket was making creaking and crunching noises during my last few rides. Finally the crank nearly seized up on my last ride.

I was not sure whether it was the bottom bracket or the crank shaft. I have had wonderful services from Evolution before, so instead of taking apart the crank and the bottom bracket myself, I decided to leave my precious with the capable gentlemen at Evolution.

They did not disappoint. They treated my bike with respect and we had excellent communication in terms of expectation setting; what needs to be done; and the replacement parts that were required. Chris was very knowledgeable and thorough and made sure that I knew all the options.

In the end I got my bike in the best time possible, under these pandemic schedules with scarce parts. Super thankful to the entire team at Evolutions and especially Chris for making it all happen without any surprises.

I will not hesitate in bringing my bike to Evolution again for any type of issues in the future.

Wi-Fi 6 Upgrade with HomeKit Headaches

I recently upgraded all my WiFi access points to the Unifi UAP-U6 -LR and UAP-U6-Lite. This will elevate my home to Wi-Fi 6 capable.

This was extremely exciting as my 802.11ax capable devices can now get between 100Mbps to 400Mbps depending on where we are in the house. It seems even the 802.11ac devices got about a 30% speed bump.

As a result of this upgrade, two UAP-AC-M mesh and one UAP-AC-Pro access points were retired from my house. I don’t recommend buying these devices any more since the Wi-Fi 6 devices from Ubiquiti are way more capable with higher performance and increase range than their 802.11ac access points.

However, the honeymoon period did not last long. After about a week, HomeKit devices started to show the dreaded “No Response” labels. Specifically, I had connectivity problems with Leviton Smart Decora Dimmers. In the past, all I had to do was recycle the HomeKit device and it was all good. Another episode of HomeKit and Leviton dimmer switch nightmare was experienced and documented by my previous blog post.

In this particular instance, the Leviton dimmers were able to join the Wi-Fi network and I can validate that with the Unifi Controller software. However, our HomeKit App was not able to connect to the dimmer switches. It took me sometime to figure out that the dimmers were unreachable by other Wi-Fi clients, but was reachable by computers that were physically wired to our network.

I found out which access point the dimmer switches were connected to and ssh into the access point to see if I can ping those devices, and sure enough they were unreachable. Below is a screen capture of the ARP listing from the access point.

Normal ARP listing from the Wi-Fi Access Point

When the dimmers were unreachable, the HW address was set to 00:00:00:00:00:00. After rebooting the culprit access point, I was able to access the offline dimmer switches again from the HomeKit App.

In summary, when HomeKit devices are offline with the dreaded “No Response” labels, here are the following things to try:

Ensure that local DNS is working properly and caches are emptied so that the latest data are available;
Ensure the device itself has acquired a valid IP address that is from your network;
Ensure that the device is reachable from the HomeKit App, typically from your iPhone or iPad;
Back trace the physical upstream networking equipment that is connected to your HomeKit device such as switches and access points and see which requires rebooting;

Apple could improve the HomeKit experience by allowing users to perform a full backup of the HomeKit configuration and reset the Home and perform a restore. Unfortunately, the closest thing that I found was from the Home+ App, but they do not restore device connectivity just their configurations.

When HomeKit works, you are literally like god, able to command light and switches with your voice in your home. When it does not work, it is extremely difficult to debug, due to a lack of diagnostics and logging.

After this update, my current networking layout now looks like this: