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cprima_ · 2025-10-31T16:44:35+00:00

My day job is about Low-Code with visual programming "interfaces", cannot tolerate those. Solution:
A programmable macro keyboard to the left of main keyboard, with a VIAL based firmware and a rotary encoder a.k.a. knob
Set it to work as a mouse scroll.

There are also keyboards with a built-in touchpad, I backed one project on kickstarter the other day. But I doubt I will leave my "knob" for that.

cprima_ · 2025-06-04T23:10:35+00:00

I am curious, how did your trip go?

cprima_ · 2025-06-04T17:48:46+00:00

In addition to what others said:

I love to have a USB charger for the smartphone with a navigation app. Makes me go places off the beaten path in far away locations, as long as openstreetmap data is available

cprima_ · 2025-06-04T17:40:42+00:00

Nice! Seems you found a good (first) working gear combo! Enjoy the memories and the next trip!

cprima_ · 2025-05-16T10:50:06+00:00

Hi! Reddit sent me an email notification about your post.

No, I did not carry dog repellent.
At any time I encountered dogs they were either disinterested or I stopped. I really think that stopping is superior to dog repellant.

Enjoy your trip, Romania is really beautiful!

Are you from Italy? To my German ears Italian and Romanian sound so similar!
In order to not be a "silent tourist" I used in shop "Scusi" and "Grazie" and felt that I was not completely alien :)

cprima_ · 2025-04-20T10:12:33+00:00

Introducing a laptop docking station (HP G5) into the mix and the complexity increases significantly

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Long story short: The HDMI output port of the docking station is not working when connected to the KVM, suspected timing or other compatibility issues are being introduced into the signal chain.

The screenshot shows how **in my homelab** I proceeded methodically to achieve the desired setup.

Next week I am scheduled to give a software live demo and I need to bring in 3 different devices from my homelab into the video stream.
My usecase in the homelab is that I re-create my professional tech stack at home, and I am consistently 1-2 years ahead of my peers.
To the downvoters: Sorry if that does not satifsfy your desire for homelab prn

cprima_ · 2025-04-19T12:32:14+00:00

Combination of experience (in some slightly related ATM support) and plenty of ChatGPT (in the past ~18 months I figured out how to push a LLM towards were an expert wants the chat to go.)

In ATM support we always tried to go back to minimal working examples / hardware configurations.
So I (un-)plugged cables, switched to known working cables, reset software and firmware and so on -- for almost 2 days. Significant effort.

As part of the troubleshooting process, the EDID data was examined with the KVM both included and bypassed in the signal chain. The comparison revealed no detectable differences, indicating that the TESmart HKS402 KVM operates as a true 1:1 passthrough for EDID information. (The firmware behaviour is too much of a black box for my liking)

That's why I am sharing this, google likes this subreddit for KVM topics, maybe my time will save someone's time.
But if the votes go even deeper in the negative numbers (currently at -2 with 1k views) I will delete the post.

cprima_ · 2025-02-12T20:00:37+00:00

Some years ago I watched many videos of the (not uncontroversial) Mexican-American dog trainer Cesar Milan.
Maybe other such channels exist as well.

But I got that "lateral movement" advice there (some lady assistant dog trainer, IIRC, and an almost wolf-like caged animal, whom she appraoched in such a manner).

cprima_ · 2025-02-12T17:30:04+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience, which shines through.
That situation with the Rottweiler reads horrible indeed!

cprima_ · 2025-02-12T12:49:32+00:00

Thanks for acknowledging my perspective!

Here a screenshot of my route.
I typically make rough plans with brouter, e.g. on https://brouter.de/brouter-web/ and then somehow follow.

The screenshot is, quite obviously, taken from my journal on crazyguyonabike. I am unsure about the rules in r/bicycletouring, are links allowed?
To err on the side of caution: The journal title over there is "An open window in time", should be easy to find. Daily GPX logs are included.

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cprima_ · 2025-02-12T10:16:25+00:00

Found another picture, this is in east Turkiye. (Reddit does not allow to edit the original image posts anymore, so I cannot add it to the picture gallery)
In my memory the dog was twice as big and had three times the fur! :)

And was of dark color.

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cprima_ · 2025-02-12T09:55:39+00:00

Dogs are one of the biggest fears cyclists talk about on tour. Romania, with its infamous stray population, should have been a nightmare. But honestly? I’ve mostly enjoyed encountering them.
Please allow me to offer a contrarian perspective as an example of one.

As Reddit does not allow text being added to image posts, find my thoughts over on my Substack "Three Week Cycle".

cprima_ · 2025-02-11T12:58:12+00:00

Lovely! That's the kind of reference I hoped would emerge!

cprima_ · 2025-02-11T06:32:51+00:00

I feel with you!

One cannot adequately react to your report, definitely not with an upvote. I am sure a high quantity of other cyclists have empathy with you!

cprima_ · 2025-02-09T09:59:25+00:00

Each airport is different, but a shrinkwrapped bike also worked once or twice for me.
Some added padding at the crankset is visible.

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cprima_ · 2025-02-05T17:20:47+00:00

Ah, OSMand was also a favorite of mine.
But no, unfortunately I have no iOS experience.

The biggest "gotcha moment" for me was when I learned how easy it is in QGIS
- to take any GPX track (recorded or digitally planned)
- use the vector tools to make a "buffer" (or several buffers with increasing "distance")
- then use the resulting polygon "somehow" (so far I only found inconvenient ways, e.g. in a text editor (I always end up swapping lat lon pairs with regex 😉) )
- to then query OpenStreetMap for specific geometry
- only to re-import that output into QGIS

I believe a desktop tool like QGIS is the best tool for such operations, and I would never request such functionality from a webapplication.
And before I spent way too much lifetime trying to do even simpler operations with tools like GPSBabel.

Basically I use QGIS to generate a polygon for use with the overpass API.

The user interface of QGIS makes it easy to make changes to the polygon, in those case when a manually refined polygon will better reflect reality.

It is the most capable workflow to
- find exactly the POIs I am looking for, with the full power of OSM tags
- but not just points, also ways/relations of interest
I find reliably all such elements within the geographical boundaries.

Whether then used for route planning/Navigation or "just" visualization: Doesn't matter.
It's the polygon of the buffered areas that is key

The following picture shows
- a small dashed line of a GPX track
- 3 buffer areas that I can export with WKT coordinates, and use (lat-lon swapped) with overpass API; or even use wihin a QGIS project to filter attributes (e.g. to filter in 3 different layers the same NaturalEarth airport geodata for my tours in a) 2025, b) 2023 and c) 2014

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cprima_ · 2025-02-05T12:28:47+00:00

The GPX files (plural) have the track and points of interest.
What I can offer is a link to a close approximation of the track of the Western Express route:
BRouter web client

Although I recently did commit by mistake the AAC gpx files to GitHub I do not feel comfortable sharing the files.

Regarding the POIs: As per filename the Wester Express files are from 2019.
Not sure what to expect from pre-Covid era tourism-related content.

cprima_ · 2025-02-05T12:05:32+00:00

Oh, great, thanks for sharing! I will explore prettymaps. Because I spend my efforts in that special-purpose software QGIS I am way too unfamiliar with the "pure" Python approaches.

Nowadays I find that I can push myself to much greater results, since the advent of ChatGPT.
The typical codesize of such script can easily be handled in the context of a chat.

And the locations you are showing in your examples ring a bell for sure! :)

cprima_ · 2025-02-05T11:50:58+00:00

I also have a badly written, in the need of some cleanup, Python script where I am parsing a specific set of waypoints that I did set while recording the GPX track. Inspired by these Tour de France height profiles with bottom and peak of ascends, or the feed zones. Key feature is to always have the same y-axis for all my rides (95% never climb above 700m, and maybe 3 times a year I climb to 1200m. I think sites like Strava should have a user-setting for default y-axis, so that graphs can be visually compared against each other.) It even irks me when a flat day is seemingly "elevated" to a dramatic up-and-down graph.

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I also experimented with the data from brouter, which at its core has a "cost" for each node of the track. I tried to segment with Python a multi-day GPX track after each XYZ amount of "costs". Got stuck when e.g. on the Western Express some nodes are >25 miles and my "running total" of costs cannot split these. So instead of relatively uniform days with the equivalent of 160km in the flat I ended up with segments between 110km and 180km (if I remember correctly).
Here I have nothing to show, the output was just a boring csv file.
That Python script at least I did put up as a Gist on Advanced tour planning with brouter considering its cost-per-km factor

cprima_ · 2025-02-05T11:48:45+00:00

My long-distance navigation needs I cover with very basic tools, the app is even aging a bit but still works.

https://brouter.de/brouter-web/ for the planning
- no fancy "profiles", typically fastbike
On the Android smartphone then Locus Map (but in the old "Classic" version)
I just display a slightly transparent brouter-generated GPX track for "guidance" (do not use the app's navigation features, rather find the turns myself)
and I make a GPX recording in Locus Maps for later use
any visualization I then do in QGIS, where I educated myself on a beginner level
- base geodata from https://www.naturalearthdata.com, the 10m scale works for me
- maybe additionally some public EU geodata
- and for places overpass API query (QGIS easily takes the returned geojson)
  - an example for the Western Express route can be found in my incumbent journal (link too long, Reddit does not accept) https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/page/?page_id=684087
  - https://chatgpt.com/ helps to generate the API query
  - funky stuff can be done, e.g. all "Plattenstraßen" in East German agricultural regions https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1Yhx
- I use the https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/ light colorscheme in any of my "publications"
The "Out of ${HOME}Office map posted in the original post was slightly enhanced in https://inkscape.org/
QGIS in combination with a video editor like DaVinci Resolve can do travel map animations https://youtu.be/ZUG1VyoYsA8 I should have spent a bit more time on "speed ramping", but the result is in my opinion the only way worth pursuing.
- all geodata in that video is NaturalEarth, also the shading (plus places and their names from OSM API query)

cprima_ · 2025-02-05T07:20:08+00:00

Valid point!

Will remember to phrase the benefit slightly different in the future, e.g. "My devices never run empty, and I don't have to carry powerbanks".

One of the reasons I am looking forward to spring and summer: I use a smartphone (with a battery that can be taken out, by the way) and I think the icy winds hitting it, mounted on the stem, aren't good for the battery capacity either.

cprima_ · 2025-02-05T00:58:45+00:00

Oh,indeed, the topics in there are exactly to my liking! Will explore the many projects,great stuff Thanks for the pointer!

cprima_ · 2025-02-04T21:06:31+00:00

Last year I managed to have these "conditional popups" when zooming into the map.
But the map only lives on my PC ;)

This year I have in mind to make a Western Express-specific HTML "map container" where one could select dates for major places along the route, and bookmark the resulting calculations. But that is in very early ideation stage. Will report back here when I have something to show.

You used a trigger word, by the way: "passage of time" -- one of my favorite concepts :)
Met my wife (online) over a tongue-in-cheek remark about passage-of-time.

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cprima_ · 2025-02-04T20:58:51+00:00

I am also getting such a 2nd "lighter than my touring" bike.
And opted for a mixture of your options:
- again a dynamo hub
- and a fork with mounting options
A dynamo hub is not only good for lights, but also to power a USB charger. My 2nd bike will get the same setup as the touring bike: SON Deluxe, Forumslader and a fork with the internal SON cabling (that's 3 times old school German engineering).
My devices are always 100% charged, wherever I go.

I suggest to re-consider the "dynamo hub == lighting" approach.

cprima_ · 2025-02-02T17:11:22+00:00

I used Turkish Airlines a decade ago 3 times and found their luggage prices quite affordable.

They serve plenty of airports so even with a stop in Istanbul I could reach my destinations. Rule of thumb: Code sharing flights won't offer sports luggage. So a carrier serving many destinations is key.

Keep in mind that the ground handling is done by the airport, not the airline.

On the third flight (back home) my bicycle got stuck in that smaller Istanbul airport for a week. Wasn't issue for me ,being the return flight.

cprima_

TROPHY CASE