offtrail.guru

A couple of weeks before we moved last November, my trusted Mac Book Pro died. I took it to an Apple computer shop that was certified to do repairs, but they only confirmed what I already suspected; the motherboard was toast and replacing it wasn't worth it. In December of 2019, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 so that I'd have a simple computer to do basic things online. I ran Raspian for several months and in the summer I installed Ubuntu Mate. In June of 2020, Chuwi launched an Indiegogo campaign for a tiny Windows 10 mini PC; the Larkbox.

Looking at the photos of all my road bikes since 1992, one very noticeable change is the handlebar, and in particular, the position of the hoods. On my early bikes, the hoods were extremely low on the bars. Thinking about wrist and arm alignment, particularly in that photo of my black Trek 5200, I wonder how it could have been comfortable. Well, I was a lot younger and rode just fine with that setup. The last couple of years, I’ve standardized my handlebar on all my drop bar bikes, and used a 44 cm wide Thomson KFC-One carbon handlebar. Before that, I ran 42 cm and even narrow 40 cm bars.

For some time I've been using flink.run to log my cycling activities in a Google sheet. I kept a bunch of stats in that Google document and then every so often manually updated the stats here. Nicolas Zimmer, the creator of flink.run, decided with a heavy heart to shut down his service. As his small side project became more popular it started to take away lots of his personal time and cost him money; hundreds of dollars per month. Time being a scarce resource, he decided it was time to pull the plug.

In order to continue populating my Google sheet with new activities I turned to Zapier, which can do the same thing, though it won't add any past activities, which flink.run could do for you. With my stats in that Google sheet staying up to date, I dove into Google's Data Studio to create a visual report of all my Strava cycling activities. After a few days of playing with it, this is the current result.

When you're the mean bastard who tortures his wrists on top of mountain bikes without suspension like I do, the least you can do is let your wrists hold onto the bars in the most natural way possible, so that they're not angled or twisted in any way. Alt bars with tons of sweep are the solution. I went from Answer bars with a 20° sweep to Jones with a 45° back sweep and my wrists have been happy ever since. Ritchey now has an alternative available with a bit less sweep. The Kyote with 27.5°. At the same time, the Kyote is considerably wider than a Jones H-Bar. 800mm versus 710mm. When I saw it on Bike24 and saw the price tag (25 EUR), I had to get one. Due to the different shapes, I also needed a new stem in order to use the Kyote. I went from a 100mm long stem with the Jones H-Bar to a 40mm stem for the Ritchey Kyote.

I've been using the flink.run app to add my Strava data to a Google sheet with a bunch of additional tables that crunch the numbers. Each time I add an activity to Strava, flink.run adds a new row to the data table in my Google sheet. The stats in all the other calculated tables are therefore always up to date.

I sent my FortyFour Big Boy fat bike into retirement and wanted to look up my first ride on it. On Strava there's no easy way to find the first activity with a specific gear. In my Google sheet, it's a simple formula to look for the first occurrence of a specific gear within the activity table. Since I was at it, I added a first ride and last ride column to my gear table.