Thoughts. Music. Photography. Oh, and of course cats…
Sam Kiley writes:
“Trump has been a useful idiot for Moscow and India”
and:
“Authoritarian populists like Vladimir Putin know that when fellow anti-democrats start calling them “my friend” the writing may be on the wall.”
Yep.
Read more about “keeping the band together” in his own words.
It’s so interesting to read Planet Debian sometimes. Although this is almost entirely collected from Debian developers, and written and collected mostly for them as well, it’s simply fresh. And honest. And even if I don’t understand some of it, once I started giving back a bit to that project, I’m following their planet.
The Debian developers recently had a discussion about the use of LLMs (“AI” as called by the general public), and how to deal with it. That was surely interesting, and here are some I found particularly good to read. The vote is now over by the way.
I’m also often surprised to read about people’s (DDs) main jobs, and sources of income. Aigars Mahinovs for instance works for a big and seemingly very innovative German car maker, and his take on one of the company’s latest models is really interesting, even if you – like me – may not be in the “target” group of buying a new electric car anytime soon. But wow, this would be a model and company to watch, even if I’d really like them to stop offering in-car software on a subscription-based model. You’ve read that right: as it has been reported elsewhere (I don’t read and/or link to that site anymore), some of the in-car software will stop working after a certain amount of time in case you don’t continue to pay for it. But I understand people like my wife’s colleague who wants her next car to be of that brand. The one Aigars is driving now might be the end of “Reichweitenangst“, a term I thought was German, but it was first mentioned in the US…
Like always, thanks for reading.
See here. A nogo.
In case you haven’t heard / read / seen it: yesterday at stage 8 of the Vuelta, the Spanish Grand Tour, Tadej Pogacar had quite a severe accident. He suffered multiple fractures and will / should be hospitalised for quite a while – his race is over, as was Jonas Vingegaard’s at this year’s Tour de France. In case you want to see highlights of that race, TNT Sports (called Eurosport here) has it on Youtube. So to both Jonas *and* to Tadej: get well soon, gents, and all the best to you and yours.
Reminds me a bit of when I last went over the handlebars of my Peugeot racing bike some 52 years ago.
During that time, we didn’t have helmets, nor did we have those “clipless pedals”; ours still had clips and straps around your normal road shoes. In my case, I had taken the bike to go shopping for guitar strings, and on the way back some public transport bus of the city of Cologne crossed my way and “nudged” me sideways onto the pavement. I was far too fast to be able to break, and tried a “bunny hop” onto that pedestrian area, but didn’t succeed – instead, I woke up in hospital with my glasses broken, my right eye thick & blue, and I don’t even remember if I broke my collarbone (most frequent damage in cycling) or not – but I had to stay a while in that hospital. My bicycle was fine though – steel is real as they say…
I still have a steel but more of a touring bike today – you might have seen it on this blog in case you’re a regular reader. But of course I would love to have a “road bike”, as these racing machines are called now, again. Simon, our daughter’s friend has a wonderful Giant TCR with a mechanical Shimano Ultegra groupset, too bad they don’t make these anymore. Being a data nerd through spending half my life in IT services, I’d love to have one with a power meter, either a Giant TCR like Simon’s, or an Orbea Orca, which is the best-looking bicycle in today’s peloton in case you’ll get one in the colours and design of pro team Lotto Intermarché. Looks like this:
That replica costs around 11k€, but in fact all of these are slightly out of range for me at the moment, so I’ll have to make do with my tourer for now…
Anyways, and like always, thanks for reading. And again, best wishes go to Jonas and to Tadej and their families.
Update, from August 30th, ca. 1400 CEST: Cyclingnews has posted a selfie made by Pogy in hospital, although it’s not on his Instagram account anymore. So I have no idea if he wants that posted or not, but as long as Cyclingnews has it online, you can see it on their page.
I just read about Lapierre – and they should consider turining it into a collective, a cooperative, like Orbea. Give the company to those who really own it – the workforce… and the same for Raleigh, and for each other company which deserves to survive bad management decisions from a former buyout.
Congrats and thanks go to Lloyd’s, whose Youtube channel had the best race report I ever saw. No constant ads (like in Eurosport/TNT), no minute-long distractions through documentaries about people & countryside local attractions (like Sportschau/Das Erste), no navel-gazing of moderators who really like to report more about themselves than on the ongoing race – nothing like that. Just a bicycle race, from start to finish. And congrats also to the ladies who were riding really hard, it was a joy to watch this. From the start in the Lake District over Wales back into England, it was a great race.
Oh my. I just read that the Dutch Accell group filed for bankruptcy after an already approved sellout to the Singaporean Dutech group (which btw also owns the makers of our bicycles, the Oldenburg-based vsf Fahrradmanufaktur). The reasons given are stagnating sales after the end of Corona, which didn’t seem to be expected in some management circles.
The sad thing about that is not only that we lose some big names of the bicycle industry like Raleigh, Lapierre, Haibike, GHOST, WINORA, Batavus, SPARTA, or KOGA, but also that now – after the damage done by a war to Iran started by Israel and the US, we face ever-rising oil prices, and as such, we could expect that more e-cars, but also more e- and manual bicycles *will* be sold in the not too distant future. After all, an e-bike is way more energy-efficient than even normal bicycles, or walking, or e-cars, according to a study from velotech.de (this article is in German, but the graphic should show you their results).
Sometimes banks, and “the market” just seem to have bad timing. Too bad for all of us.
In case you’d like to hear BikeRadar’s Simon & Warren discuss about this on Youtube, here’s a link. And yes, maybe these miscalculations did happen because they expected more e-bike (really called “Pedelec”) sales, and why might people not want them? Well, maybe because they’re all proprietary? So the battery of bike A wouldn’t fit into bike B and so on? Plus because they’re expensive? Plus because the more hightech you build into a bicycle, the more can fail? I just read about an increase of interest in human-powered bicycles, with integrated hubs, and/or less tech… also in most cases these are much lighter, like your typical road race bikes for instance… just think about possible power outages – what would you do with your heavyweight pedelec? All these things might be considered before people spend much of their money… and yes, maybe the (“new”) Chinese brands like XDS, Winspace & Co will win, because they simply offer more for peoples’ hard earned cash…
Anyway, and like always, thanks for reading.
DC Rainmaker has an interesting test of the new Garmin Cirqa screenless fitness tracking device, which he compared to several others, like Whoop, the Google Fitbit Aero, some Polar and Garmin chest straps and such.
I’m not interested in a new fitness tracker, screenless or not – but here’s the interesting thing about his comparison: he’s the first one I found who actually tested step counting accuracy, if only for some 500 steps which he manually counted, and then checked his tracking devices. The result? Only one had also counted 500 steps, and that was the Fitbit Aero.
Nice because it’s one of the cheaper ones. Not so nice because I’d never use such a device from Google, which I can’t use with Gadgetbridge, and which would always phone home and tell Google about each of my steps or bicycle rides or whatnot. Thanks but no thanks.
My 30€ Xiaomi device is now two and a half years old, still holds its battery for more than 14 days, and I don’t care if I do 10k or 12k steps per day. But the main point for me is that that data never leaves my phone…
As always, thanks for reading.
After my heel bone fracture, I’ve read already that other disciplines than running would be better in regard of the healing of my bone, here’s one more. Walking is okay, but cycling or rowing would be better as another sports medic confirms.
Even with walking you should be careful after such an injury; things like fatique fractures do exist. I’m making progress tho, and I’m back to my 10.000 steps/day routine since some 4+ weeks. Still I agree: cycling is better; I’ve tried it.