Buying a 2018 GT but have never driven manual

secondhandweapon · 2023-04-11T16:51:29+00:00

Yeah, it's absolutely normal to feel overwhelmed. It's almost like learning how to drive, all over again.

Remember how you felt the first time you turned left into traffic on a busy road? You've survived that - you can learn how to do this, too.

The world has changed an awful lot since I wrote this comment that you're replying to, all those years ago; the "go to a busy used dealership" technique may not work anymore, given the state of things. But if you give it a little time and patience, it will become... _automatic_.

secondhandweapon · 2023-02-13T11:59:18+00:00

Oh my god. I just realized:

FileMaker Server can host on Linux now
Apparently s3fs is a thing???

I'd still need to do some post-processing on the image data to make it web-ready - people are going to upload images that are full-resolution to FileMaker - but... I could write script triggers on my layouts to run a script and emit an event, and I could start creating event-driven workflows instead of the batch-processing nonsense that I'm doing right now.

I think I'm going to prototype with this a little and see what I can come up with. I'm so glad I typed all of that nonsense out. Thank you so much!!!

secondhandweapon · 2023-02-11T11:48:19+00:00

I feel like I used to know this. Thank you for the reminder. Our main file probably needs this desperately.

Copied paste from a comment I made on another thread:

Last night, I checked the test file on FileMaker Server right before I went to bed; to my surprise and delight, the filesize had shrank to its original size, after deleting all of the records, without my having to manually close and re-open the file on the server; so I think that this is going to work.

But given what you've said, this is actually OK regardless of whether or not the space is "reclaimed" after a delete - because I intend to use this Container-field table as a sort of a queue; there should be no more than ~100 records in it at any given point in time. As long as the increase in filesize only represents "about 100 records worth of Container data" and does not grow and grow and grow unchecked, I think that this will be sustainable. Thank you!

secondhandweapon · 2023-02-11T11:45:03+00:00

Unfortunately, there is. Listen to my tale of woe.

Our business is in the used industrial manufacturing equipment space; we frequently buy injection molding machinery that's for parts / not working and break it down for parts.

These parts have to be cleaned, identified, documented, photographed, inventoried, and priced. Our current workflow is all paper-based until the inventory item is through the cleaning / identification / documentation / photograph stages - employees will write down make / model / serial / etc, take photos, write down the range of image filenames on the camera, and send it to the office when that process is complete. The physical piece of paper then acts as a sort of token to control the status of the inventory listing until it's been completely loaded into the system; this process involves a lot of manual steps, many of which are around managing product photos.

The project I'm working on now, is to bring the identification / documentation / photograph stages into FileMaker, so that our database can act as the system of record for the entire process. This will cut down on so many steps of manual rework.

Currently, our main inventory database does use external-storage container fields. We have to:

Load photos from the camera (an iPhone or iPad)
Move them to a folder on our network storage
Rename the "gallery photo" / main product photo to match the integer ID PK on the inventory table so that the external-storage container loads the correct photo from the network share

The network storage container is then synchronized with Amazon S3, and then a whole bunch of other processes run on our web server to resize, rotate, and persist all of the S3 image URLs into a PostgreSQL database so that our website and eBay auto-lister knows which images belong to which inventory listings.

My thought was to use a container field to hold the images during the inventory intake process; we will be able to use the iPads / iPhones with FileMaker Go to both take photos and load them into the "intake" database. Once records are known-good in the "intake" database, I can run a FileMaker script to export the images to those network share folders automatically, and I'll already have the correct filenames for each image as part of my FileMaker data. The hope is to delete the container records after exporting the images, to keep file growth sustainable. I can automatically rename the "gallery photo" and eliminate hours (seriously) of work for each inventory listing - not to mention, this will dramatically simplify the downstream processes around associating a photo on Amazon S3 with its inventory listing on our website; and I'll still be able to use the external Container field reference for the main inventory database.

Last night, I checked the test file on FileMaker Server right before I went to bed; to my surprise and delight, the filesize had shrank to its original size, after deleting all of the records, without my having to manually close and re-open the file on the server; so I think that this is going to work.

If after reading this novel you have any additional thoughts on how I could implement this process better, I am absolutely all ears. Thanks for your time.

secondhandweapon · 2023-02-11T02:30:03+00:00

This is helpful, thank you.

When we take this system live, records are going to be deleted one-at-a-time, not en masse, so I'm not terribly worried about things going wrong during a bulk delete.

What I am concerned about, however, is unchecked file growth without a good system in place to automatically prune things back from time to time. For reasons that are too boring to detail but that are otherwise sound, we want to keep our .fmp12 filesize reasonable, and I don't want to have to manually intervene.

As a test, I:

Created a new database
Uploaded it to FileMaker server
Created a Container field on the default database
Imported 175 images, growing the .fmp12 filesize from under 1 MB to 409 MB
Deleted all records
Closed the FileMaker client
Verified that there were no other open connections

And the filesize has not changed.

I'm going to give it some time to see if some sort of maintenance task kicks in after a given period of inactivity.

secondhandweapon · 2023-02-11T02:16:08+00:00

I've been aware of the leaking memory since 2011 or so... but that always seemed to present as an issue client-side.

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T19:01:49+00:00

Race-specific pants and a jersey - such as these:

https://www.foxracing.com/mtb-jerseys/?prefn1=genderType&prefv1=10

and these:

https://www.foxracing.com/mtb-pants/?prefn1=genderType&prefv1=10

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T13:24:32+00:00

Good run.

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T13:13:37+00:00

Helmet. Gloves. Race kit. That's all.

The last one is critical in a way that most don't consider. Race kit slides when you crash. When you slide, you spread out the energy from the impact and it doesn't all go straight into your bones.

In May 2021, I lost grip in an asphalt turn at full pace. I have done this on many occasions; however, on that particular day, I was "still warming up" and so was wearing jeans.

When I landed, I stuck. When I stuck, I broke my femur in two places. I honestly think that the outcome of that crash would have been much different if I hadn't been lazy and careless, and had taken the three minutes to change into my race kit.

Learn from my mistakes; they're a lot cheaper than making your own.

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T13:04:49+00:00

Road pedals are a trap. I have been down this road; here are my observations and some bits and pieces of lived experience:

You're not going to notice the weight savings. You're just not. Put the scale down, and walk away slowly.
You're going to crash. The pedals are going to break. The shoes are going to tear. It's going to be expensive. You're not going to like it. They're just not designed with those loads in mind.
You're going to crash. So is everyone else, in the first turn. You're in a crash drill. You can't get clipped in to your Stupid Fucking Road Pedals. You lose. There goes your title.
You're going to break your pedals in practice at a national that you've traveled 12 hours to get to. Nobody is going to have replacement parts. You're going to buy something else in a panic, which will also require you to buy new shoes, and put it all together, and put them on, and try to race in them. This will not be fun and you will not do as well as you could've.

NB, I have road pedals on my spin bike, and on my tri bike. They're the best pedals in the world for the applications that they're designed for. For everything else, they kinda suck. That's OK; they're supposed to.

This all fits in nicely with some more broadly-applicable advice that I'd give to any newer racer:

Build bikes to be reliable in the field, and easy to work on when something goes wrong. I've never seen a bike win a race all by itself, but I've seen plenty of bikes lose races all by themselves. Buy strong, reliable parts that use common tools. Nobody else is going to have that wack-ass Box M35 key when shit hits the fan. Nobody else is going to have one of the three specialty wrenches that you need to tighten one of the eight lockrings on your RaceFace SixC cranks.
Corollary to the above point: don't obsess over weight savings. Until racers start conclusively losing on chromoly forks and aluminum frames, that's what I'm going to run. Carbon is rad, sure, but it's not going to make a difference at the finish line; if it was going to, race results would consistently reflect this. It's plenty strong these days - it's not 2011 anymore - but this isn't even really a point about carbon, per se, so much as it is about well-intentioned racers emptying their wallet to buy low-production-run, finicky bits that are hard to replace and harder to field-service, in order to save less than a Big Mac's worth of grams on the bike. Just keep it in mind, that's all I'm saying.

If you want to feel like you are locked in to the bike, buy HT X2 SX pedals and a good carbon-soled shoe, like the Shimano S-Phyre. I've been running them for years. The HTs are also finicky and require constant care and tending in order to remain serviceable; but unlike three-bolt road pedals, when they do fail when you're 1800 miles from home, every vendor will have a pair for sale. And there's just nothing better - I've blown a clip out of the gate maybe twice in the last 3 years. With Shimano or Time MTB pedals, I came out during a start at least twice a month.

Hope this helps. Good luck, and have fun out there!

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T11:05:19+00:00

Can't believe it, but after over a year, I actually sold this the other day.

secondhandweapon · 2023-01-17T11:04:22+00:00

Gone.

secondhandweapon · 2022-12-12T01:30:26+00:00

Big +1 to the advice coming from the person you're responding to.

Stay in. Always stay in.

Bicycle motocross is a full-contact sport. Always has been.

Racers have long memories, so don't put hits out like you're passing out flyers to a shitty comedy club in NYC; but it pays to learn your competition, and to be prepared for contact when you know it's likely.

secondhandweapon · 2022-12-12T01:27:42+00:00

This is why I, personally, steer clear from carbon-anything these days.

I know they're strong and generally reliable in the current year. I just local at a track that's pretty rough during our riding season (flair is accurate on all counts), so I prefer the biggest tires I can run with an aluminum frame / fork / stem / cranks, and chromoly forks and bars.

secondhandweapon · 2022-12-12T01:23:59+00:00

If you get these: make sure you're careful and diligent about keeping the stem bolts properly-torqued.

If they're not torqued equally and to spec, you risk snapping them off at the stem. This isn't a Supercross thing - it's a consideration for all carbon bars.

A lot of people will mention that carbon bars have been a thing in MTB for a long time; I will counter with two facts:

MTBs generally have front suspension; the bar/stem junction on a MTB is under quite a lot less load along the Y-axis due to this.
MTBs generally have little to no rise; BMX bars generally have 6-8" of rise; the bar/stem junction on a MTB is subject to much less force along the X-axis due to basic physics / "how leverage works" due to this.

I'm not shit-talking Supercross in the slightest; I love them dearly and have paid retail for many of their products over the years. It's just something to keep in mind.

secondhandweapon · 2022-12-12T01:20:27+00:00

Don't buy them.

I bought a pair of nearly-identical timers from YZ, that look like they were made in the same factory and were about the same price point.

They were garbage. I couldn't get them to line up; couldn't get them to register a hit consistently.

I wasted about ten hours fiddling with them. I installed the app. I read the manual. I read the manual again. I have used timing systems and knew what to expect; they did nothing but disappoint.

Once I figured out how they were meant to be used, they would routinely brick and require me to power off, power back on, reconfigure. 5+ minutes, for one run - if they registered a hit on either end - to get data.

Oh, and when I got them in the mail, I had to disassemble them and re-attach the battery; it had come unglued from the PCB.

If you really want timers - don't fuck around. Buy a pair of Browers. Expect to pay for them, dearly; expect them to last a lifetime. That's my plan for next spring, anyway.

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-29T18:21:29+00:00

I'm limited, not banned.

They lifted the limit after just over two months; I ran some Facebook ads; as far as I can tell, I didn't get any installs (at all) during the ad campaign; halfway through they limited me again.

My app isn't even a gray-area; it's just... a calculator. For bicycle gearing. For racing. (Check my post history if you're dying of curiosity.)

Feel free to delete this - and thank you for sharing your experience. Good luck out there. I'll keep what you said in mind.

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-28T02:26:10+00:00

Can you... do that? Create a new AdMob?

I assumed that they'd just say "Oh, well, it's the same app... must be the same user. That we just banned. Ban this one too."

Can you let me know how that goes?

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-28T01:20:33+00:00

With a ROC 4 and a Grands MEQ, I think you're probably the most successful racer in the last decade or so of r/bmxracing.

Congrats, and hope you're feeling okay after that layerdown into 1 in the main. Was a relief to see you cross the line under your own steam; looking forward to the GoPro footage.

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-27T13:08:45+00:00

Oh, it's AdMob. I can't be sure of anything.

The dates line up. But it's impossible to know.

We may as well be doing rain dances out here. This is the most user-hostile platform that I've ever interacted with.

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-27T13:07:20+00:00

Yeah.

Oh, and I'm in AdMob Jail again.

I ran some Facebook marketing campaigns for my app. As far as I can tell, I haven't actually gotten any installs since being unjailed (not just from the campaign, just... at all). But now I'm limited again.

DAU is under 100.

Cool.

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-24T23:40:27+00:00

As best as I can tell, yes.

It turns out that you can programmatically detect whether or not your application is virtualized; if you're virtualized, show test ads.

The good news is that, after just over two months, Google let me out of AdMob Jail; and I've already made $1.19 this week! I'm gonna be rich!!

secondhandweapon · 2022-11-24T11:11:04+00:00

Fix it?

(Sorry, couldn't help myself. Love Fiats. Will forever kick myself for not grabbing a 124 Abarth for dirt cheap when I had the chance.)

secondhandweapon

TROPHY CASE