Weeknote 17: Failed demos, hotel rooms, travel and snippets of exercise (Week 18. 2018)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week, I’ve learned that:

  • I must trust my better judgement and never allow anyone to push me into demonstrating their products without a properly rehearsed demo and the right equipment…
  • There are people working in offices today who not only claim to be IT illiterate but seem to think that’s acceptable in the modern workplace:
  • That operations teams have a tremendous amount of power to disregard and even override recommendations provided by architects who are paid to provide solid technical advice.
  • That, in 2018, some conference organisers not only think an all-male panel is acceptable but are hostile when given feedback…

I’ve also:

  • Gone on a mini-tour of Southern England working in London, Bristol and Birmingham for the first four days of the week. It did include a bonus ride on a brand new train though and a stint in first class (because it was only £3 more than standard – I’ll happily pay the difference)!
  • Taken a trip down memory lane, revisiting the place where I started my full-time career in 1994 (only to be told by a colleague that he wasn’t even born in 1994):
  • Squeezed in a “run” (actually more like a slow shuffle) as I try to fit exercise around a busy work schedule and living out of a suitcase.
  • Managed to take my youngest son swimming after weeks of trying to make it home in time.
  • Written my first blog post that’s not a “weeknote” in months!
  • Picked up a writing tip to understand the use of the passive voice:

So the week definitely finished better than it started and, as we head into a long weekend, the forecast includes a fair amount of sunshine – hopefully I’ll squeeze in a bike ride or two!

Combining GPX files for Strava

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This morning was spent on my bike… as was a fair chunk of this afternoon… as is a fair chunk of many summer weekends, much to Mrs W’s disappointment.

My friend Andy and I put in 60 miles in the sunshine, on a big loop around Milton Keynes. It seems my route planning is pretty spot on, as it was almost the exact opposite of a charity ride going the other way around (we passed the same riders twice!). Unfortunately, my ability to “press the start button on my Garmin cycle computer” is clearly less good – I was about a mile from home and heading out of town when I realised I’d forgotten to start tracking my ride!

My OCD can’t cope with this. It would be able to cope with turning around, going back up the hill, starting the computer and starting the ride again – but not with some missing kilometres in my ride data! Luckily, Andy was also riding with a Garmin bike computer. Even though he’d also forgotten to start his, he was wearing a Garmin watch too – so I could combine his data and mine (we’d ridden side by side for the first part of the ride…).

I’ve blogged before about GPS Track Editor, which is a fantastic piece of free software. Using this, I could edit Andy’s data to just the part I had missing, then combine it with mine and merge the two tracks (the short gap doesn’t matter – Strava will straight-line the route between the two points). I also tried merging the files with a tool from gotoes.org – unfortunately, that ended up with a ride that was effectively double the length of what we rode (two loops). it would probably have worked with my edited files but I could also merge them in the GPS Track Editor…

Combining tracks in GPS Track Editor

I then deleted the original (short) ride from Strava and re-uploaded. Sorted.

Just one thing to sort out – all of the PRs I got on today’s ride (and there were a few) were recorded as second places by the second upload. No worries – Strava has a “refresh my achievements” tool. which sorted out that particular issue. Now my ride has the complete distance… and my achievements are correct too…

Reducing the time taken for a Garmin Edge 25 to find a satellite signal

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Regular readers will know that cycling is one of my hobbies (with my eldest son looking like he may follow in the same direction…).

I have a Garmin Edge 810 cycle computer to use on my big rides but for commutes (e.g. on the Brompton) I use a smaller unit – an Edge 25. The Edge 25 is a cracking little unit, with all the basic functionality I’d expect and Bluetooth connectivity, but one of the issues I’ve found is that it can be slow to pick up a GPS signal.

I think I may have made a breakthrough though, thanks to a comment in this review from Average Joe Cyclist:

“Satellite Acquisition on the Garmin Edge 25
The Garmin Edge 25 can connect to both GPS and GLONASS satellites. As it has more satellites to choose from, it can lock in faster. I know that Garmin Edge bike computers with only GPS can be frustratingly slow to lock in, so this is important. It was a very happy surprise to find GLONASS on such a relatively cheap bike computer as the Garmin Edge 25. This is obviously a huge selling point for this tiny bike computer.

Note: GPS and GLONASS are different kinds of satellite systems – the GPS was developed by the USA, and the GLONASS is Russian.”

Sure enough, I checked my settings and GLONASS was off. So I turned it on and limited testing suggests that it may now be faster to pick up a satellite. Time will tell, as will experience with the second Edge 25 that’s in the post for my son to use…

Some more reading suggests that using GLONASS and GPS together may affect battery life but could also improve accuracy. If satellite lock-in is still slow, then a master reset may be required. To reset the Edge 25:

  1. Power on the device whilst holding the two right-side buttons down.
  2. Release the top button when you hear the first beep.
  3. Release the bottom button when you hear the second beep.

Garmin Edge software version as viewed in Garmin ConnectI also upgraded the firmware (unfortunately breaking the rule of only changing one thing at a time when troubleshooting tech…) which got me thinking “what firmware did I have before?”. It seems the way to tell this is to view an activity in Garmin Connect, where the details of the device used to upload the data shown on the right-hand side.

Turbo trainers, Zwift and other such things

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks ago, with Summer turning to Autumn, the wind getting up and the sun going down, my thoughts turned to Winter cycling.  I’ve been considering getting a turbo trainer for a while now and I originally ordered a Jet Black Z1 Fluid Pro until I saw a smart trainer on offer at Wiggle for about £85 more than the “dumb” fluid trainer I was going to get… added to which I got nearly a tenner’s cashback via TopCashback…

Bianchi C2C Via Nirone mounted on Tacx Vortex smart trainer wit Zwift running on a Windows PCThe trainer I’ve gone for is a Tacx Vortex and it’s proved pretty easy to set up.  Ideally I’d use a spare wheel with a trainer tyre but I don’t have one and my tyres are already looking a bit worn – I may change them when the bike comes out again in the spring, meaning I can afford to wear them out on the trainer first!  All I had to do was swap out my quick release skewer for the one that comes with the trainer and my bike was easily mounted.

Calibration was a simple case of using the Tacx Utility app on my iPhone – which finds the trainer via Bluetooth and can also be used for firmware upgrades (it’s available for Android too). All you have to do is cycle up to a given speed and away you go!

I found that the Tacx Utility would always locate my trainer but the Tacx Cycling app was less reliable. Ultimately that’s not a problem because I use the Zwift virtual cycling platform (more on that in a moment) and the Zwift Mobile Link app will allow the PC to find my trainer via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.  There is one gotcha though – on the second time I used the trainer I spent a considerable time trying to get things working with Zwift. In the end I found that:

  • The Tacx apps couldn’t be running at the same time as Zwift Mobile Link.
  • My phone had a tendency to roam onto another Wi-Fi network (the phone and the PC have to be on the same network for the mobile link to work).
  • My Bose Soundlink Mini II speakers were also interfering with the Bluetooth connection so if I wanted to listen to music whilst cycling then a cable was needed!

I’m guessing that none of this would be an issue if I switched to ANT+ – as my Garmin Edge 810 does. The trick when using the Garmin is to go into the bike profile and look for sensors.  Just remember to turn GPS off when using it on a stationary bike (or else no distance is recorded). Also, remember that:

“[…] when doing an indoor activity or when using devices that do not have GPS capability, the [Garmin Speed and Cadence Sensor] will need to be calibrated manually by entering a custom wheel size within the bike profile to provide accurate speed and distance.” [Garmin Support]

[Related reading: Bike wheel circumference and its effect on recorded distance]

And, talking of ANT+ – one thing I couldn’t work out before I bought my trainer was whether I needed to buy an ANT+ dongle for Zwift? Well, the answer is “No”! as the Zwift Mobile Link app works beautifully as a bridge on my trainer – it’s worth checking out the Zwift website to see which trainers work with the platform though (and any other gear that may be required).

I’ll probably write another post about Zwift but, for now, check out:

In the meantime, it’s worth mentioning that I started out riding on a 14 day/50km trial. I was about to switch to a paid subscription but I found out Strava Premium members get 2 months’ Zwift free* and, as that’s half the price of Zwift, I’ve upgraded my Strava for a couple of months instead!

So, with the trainer set up in the garage (though it’s easy to pop the bike off it if we do have some winter sunshine), I can keep my miles up through the Winter, which should make the training much, much easier in the Spring – that’s the idea anyway!

*It now looks as though the Strava Premium-Zwift offer has now been limited to just November and December 2016 – though I’m sure it will come around again!

Bike wheel circumference and its effect on recorded distance

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back, I rode the Prudential London-Surrey Ride 100. That’s a 100-mile sportive, except that my Garmin recorded the route as 155.9km, or 96.871769 miles. Somewhere it seems I missed about 5 km/3 miles… or maybe I just cut all the corners!

Well, even though I was using GPS, I may tonight have found something that might account for a little bit of that variation – it seems my Garmin cycle computer was set to the wrong wheel circumference. Not wildly out but about 0.8%, which won’t help.

The Edge 810 software has options within a bike profile for both manual and automatic wheel size adjustment.  For my Bianchi C2C profile, it was set to automatic and had decided that my wheel circumference was 2088mm, probably when I originally paired my speed/cadence sensor as, according to the Garmin website:

“Wheel size is automatically calculated when a Garmin Speed/Cadence Bike Sensor (GSC 10) is paired to a GPS-enabled device”

With 700x23C tyres fitted, it should actually be closer to 2096mm (which seemed to be the default when I switched to a manual setting, or maybe that’s what I had originally entered before it was overridden by the software?) but I switched to 700x25C tyres about a year ago which will have a circumference of around 2105mm according to this table (and this one).

For completeness, I checked the profiles for my mountain bikes too – they both showed an automatic wheel size of 0mm (so presumably get their distance from GPS) but have now been changed to 2075 for 26×2.20″ and 2037 for 26×1.85″ (defaults seemed to be 2050).

As for the rest of the difference – well, tyre pressures are a factor – as is the weight of the rider. One school of thought says you should put some paint or water on your tyre, ride along and then measure the gaps between the dots. That assumes you ride in a straight line and that the other factors (weight, tyre pressure, etc.) remain constant between rides.

If the organisers said it’s a hundred miles, then I’ll go with that. Hopefully now I’ve amended the wheel circumference that will help a bit in future though.

Tracking spin classes with a Garmin; and some thoughts on cycle sportives

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

So, as I hit the half-way point in an 8-week block of 90 minute Endurance Spin classes with Jason Martindale (@martindale72) – and with the nights drawing in and winter weather making road cycling less attractive – it’s time to start planning my winter training schedule.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a turbo-trainer for a while, and I’ve just ordered a Jet Black Z1 Fluid Pro though UK stock seems to be hard to track down. I’ll also be giving Zwift a try (though I may have to wait for the iOS version to ship as I don’t have any spare PCs with a suitable spec that I can move to the garage, where the bike and turbo will be).

In the meantime, I thought I’d write a bit about my experience of using my Garmin Edge 810 in spin sessions…

Spinning with Garmin

Riding on a spin bike means there’s no speed/cadence recording – and being stationary in a spin studio means there’s no distance – but I still log my workouts on Strava (if only to keep a training record). I can still record my heart rate though (which remains stubbornly low – even if I think I’m working hard). I’ve set up new bike and activity profiles in the Garmin and then all it needs is for me to remember to turn off the GPS in the System Settings before starting the workout.

The end result looks something like this:

So, what’s the point of all this training? Apart from general fitness, I don’t want to have to go back to zero again when I get my bike out of the garage next spring and I like to fit a couple of sportives in each year, which leads me onto some more ramblings…

Some thoughts on the big closed road sportives

This year I rode the Prudential Ride London-Surrey 100 again (this time it wasn’t cut short for me – though many riders had their ride massively reduced due to delays). The verdict: too many people; too much variety in capabilities; too dangerous; won’t be riding this one again (I had more fun in the Ride Staffs 68 earlier in the summer).

The trouble with Ride London (apart from the ballot system and the having to make a separate trip to London to pick up the registration pack) is that it’s just too popular. “How can a sportive be too popular?”, you may ask.

Well 27,000 riders is a lot of people and although the organisers try to set people off according to ability, some overestimate their skills (and crash – even though 33 injuries from that many riders is a pretty good ratio, 33 is still too many); others clearly didn’t read the rider pack and ride in the middle or on the right side of the road, making it difficult to pass safely; and others chain-gang through in mini-peletons as if they are a professional team. That mix makes things dangerous. Coming off some of the hills I was having to shout “coming through on the right” to get slower riders to move left (the bicycling equivalent of a motorway, with everyone driving in  the middle lane, the left lane empty, and lane 3 backing up…). And in one place I came to a dead halt because but then I got marooned on the wrong side of the road at the bottom of an incline and needed to wait for a gap to cross back to the left of the road as a steady stream of 30-40mph riders came off the hill I’d just come down.  Yes, the public whose neighbourhoods we rode through were great, and the atmosphere riding on closed roads through central London is epic, but on balance it was a pain to get to and a long day that could have been more enjoyable than it was.

I hit my goal of riding the full route in under 6 hours, according to Strava rather than the official time (with stops for accidents, etc.) so I feel I’ve done London now. Someone else can have the place next year…

I could do the Tour of Cambridgeshire again, but last time I did that (in 2015) it took nearly an hour to get over the start line and I missed the cutoff for the full route (though riding at a decent pace) – which kind of put me off that event…

So, 2017 will see me riding Vélo Birmingham, a new closed road sportive, with just 15,000 riders. Many people seem to be put off by the price but the way I see it is:

  • Staging events (particularly on closed roads) have an associated cost.
  • Ride London-Surrey is an example of what happens if you have too many people.
  • Reducing the number of riders by 40% is bound to mean each entrant has to pay more…

So what’s next on my bucket list. Well John O’Groats to Lands End for sure – but that’s probably a few years away. The near future’s more likely to include London Revolution (though I can’t make the 2017 dates), England Coast to Coast (possibly in a day, though more likely over a couple) and then maybe Wales in a Day (I’ll need to build up to that).

Recovering data after Garmin crashed whilst saving activity

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Unfortunately I spent most of it in my home office but I did manage to get out on the bike for a quick ride before sunset (the first time I’ve worked at home in weeks, with a correspondingly low occurrence of exercise on a work day…).  Unfortunately, when I got home, my Garmin 810 cycle computer froze whilst saving my ride.

It actually needed a reset (holding the lap and power buttons together for about 5 seconds) before I could get it to respond at all but my biggest concern was whether my ride data had been lost (if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen).

The Garmin Connect app on my phone wouldn’t upload the ride, so I tried installing Garmin Express on a PC.  It decided that there was a file on my device that couldn’t be uploaded. Sadly, that file was the data from last night’s ride.

Garmin Express - Some files could not be uploaded to Garmin Connect

I ignored Garmin Express’s offer to remove the file and, thanks to Chesilboy’s post on the Garmin forums, I managed to rescue some of the data.

  1. First, I connected the Garmin to my PC and navigated to \Garmin\Activities.
  2. There, I located the .FIT file for the ride and copied it to somewhere safe.
  3. Next, I uploaded the .FIT file to Strava.
  4. Strava read the data, warning me that the file was damaged, possibly truncated and that some of the ride would be lost. Importantly though, it would use the data that could be read (as it happens, almost all of my ride – only missing the last 1.5 kilometres).
  5. At this point, I could export a GPX file and import it to Garmin Connect, but I’m not really that bothered about my records there (I find the site clunky and unreliable and I only really use it to get my data to Strava).

As Chesilboy notes, shame on Garmin for a) not keeping the data safe (why not write it throughout the activity) and b) actually offering to delete it! Thank goodness Strava is better at data processing!

Short takes: Shrinking Outlook OSTs; locating and removing “stale” Yammer users; editing GPS tracks

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some more snippets of blog posts…

Reducing the size of your Outlook offline store

Tim Anderson commented recently that he’d noticed how recreating his Outlook offline store (.OST) file was more effective than compressing it.  I decided to give mine a go (especially as my recently shrunken Inbox means there wouldn’t be much to re-sync).

Unfortunately, my IT admins appear to have locked down my configuration via group policy so I couldn’t disable/re-enable cached mode. @p3rfact came up with a suggestion that worked though:

As it happens, my file was not that large – although recreating it did reduce the size by around 25%.

Clearing out users from Yammer

Yammer  networks can be synchronised with Active Directory using Yammer Directory Sync but ours is not (for various reasons). There is a pretty simple workaround though for clearing out users from Yammer who have left the company (credit due to @AlanPurchase for working this one out):

  1. From the Network Admin view in Yammer, export a .CSV file with all the users in the network.
  2. Open the .CSV file in Excel and filter on the state field to show active users and on the email field to include domains that you are interested in (for example, I only wanted those in our UK organisation).
  3. Cut and paste email addresses into a new email in Outlook, then use Ctrl+K to resolve the names against the Global Address List. Anyone that isn’t in the GAL will not have their email address resolved.
  4. In Yammer, remove each of the users that are no longer in the organisation – you have the option to remove their posts or leave their posts and remove the account (more details in Microsoft knowledge base article 2820235).

GPS Track Editing

I’ve blogged before about how I log all of my bike rides, runs, etc. – it’s sad, but I like to see where I went on a map – and to know how I performed. Every once on a while, things go wrong though – like one time last summer when my Garmin suddenly decided I was several miles away and the route I was following became nonsense. The only answer was to reset the thing and start tracking again (breaking my ride into multiple tracks).

I found a free GPS Track Editor that helped me to merge/edit tracks (directly editing the XML in GPX files is a chore) and create something that at least represented the route I was on (although it does have one section that is a dead straight line “joining the gap” between my two usable tracks – it should actually follow the road via Whittlebury)!

Messing around with maps

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself making quite a few conversions of maps between different formats, for different uses (mostly cycling-related).  The things I’ve found might, or might not, be useful to others… so I’m writing them down anyway!

Firstly, I wanted to see what the profile of a route was like. I had a GPX file for the route and used the excellent GPS Visualizer site to create an elevation profile.  And then quickly decided it had far too many bumps!

Next up, one of my fellow riders wanted to be able to view the route in Google Maps (not Google Earth).  This wasn’t quite as straightforward but, again GPS Visualizer comes to the rescue. Using that site, it’s possible to convert to a KML file that Google Maps can work with.  Unfortunately, the “new” Google Maps doesn’t have an import option so you need to switch back to the “classic” Google Maps (it might be enough to use this version of the URI: https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic), after which you can use the Google Maps Engine to create a map (like this one, which was stage 1 of my recent London to Paris ride):

Finally, I bought a Garmin Edge 810 (cycle computer).  After months of saying “I don’t need a Garmin, I have Strava on my iPhone”), I gave in.  And I’ve been pretty glad of it too – already it’s been great to monitor my stats as I climbed Holme Moss last week (does 98% maximum heart rate mean I’m 2% off a heart attack? </joke>) and last weekend I decided I was 20-odd miles from home and bored of my ride, so the sat-nav could show me the best way back to my starting point (even if it did mean cycling along some trunk routes…). Added to that, Mrs W has been glad to track my rides using the Garmin 810’s Live Tracking (although it didn’t work last time I was out…).

The Garmin comes with “base maps” but these are really just the main roads.  As they’re probably not the ones you want to use for cycling, it’s handy to load on some more detail. Ordnance Survey 1:50K maps (GB Discoverer) may be great (the 3D view in particular) but at a penny shy of £200 I wasn’t prepared to pay that much, with Open Street Maps available for free.  ScarletFire Cycling has made a video with an interesting comparison of the OSM and OS map options:

Downloading the Open Street Maps to a Garmin Edge 705/800/810 is brilliantly described by DC Rainmaker and Forgot has a write-up for getting turn-by-turn navigation working on the Edge 800, as does ScarletFire.  It can take a couple of days for the maps to be generated though and I did find a direct download link with maps that had been generated fairly recently (July 2013), so I used that.

Finally gave in and bought a Garmin

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many of my cycling buddies tell me how great their Garmins are and I just didn’t “get it” but, after having to neuter my iPhone to get through a day’s riding, I decided that it was time to take the plunge.  Actually, there were a few reasons…

Increasingly, I live by the stats.  If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. And I want to work on my cadence and on training in particular heart rate zones.  I can use a dongle to get ANT+ connectivity on an iPhone, but I decided to buy a dedicated cycle computer instead.

Secondly, my wife worries when I’m out and about on my bike.  Some of the recent Garmin cycle computers have a connected features like live tracking, using a Bluetooth-connected phone with the Garmin Connect app (iOS or Android, not Windows) and, after watching this video (yes, I’m a sucker for marketing), I thought that it might be just the thing to give her the peace of mind from knowing where I am (Find my iPhone was just a little too much of a pain with a complex password set on my Apple account):

There are some good deals around on the Garmin Edge 800 at the moment but that doesn’t have the connected features found in the 510, 810, and the new 1000.

Finally, I decided that, as my distances increase, riding in unfamiliar places means a map can be useful.  Whereas in the car I have a £9.99 map-book and a good sense of direction, the time had come to get myself a sat-nav for the bike.