After last week’s flat battery event – the first time in a few years of keeping a bike uncharged throughout the winter and an eye-opener to how much the alarm and other processes drains a couple-of-years-old battery – I returned with a fully charged up battery to connect up and ride in 5 degrees of an early March morning.
Below is everywhere I’ve ridden in the last 4 months. I ought to get out more often.
Tomorrow is going to be raining all day. Today is sunny but with an icy wind, an altogether better prospect for getting out on my slightly neglected bike. I wanted to go up to St Ives to see if there is somewhere nice in that old town to get a coffee and pass some time. I headed off into the mysterious (and I always think of it as swampy and neglected) region due north of Cambridge heading through Cottenham, Swavesey (even sounds weird) and Over (there are cruel jokes about Swavesey people devised by Over dwellers), Rampton (sounds like the name of a high security prison for mad offenders) but for a mysterious reason decided to head in another direction instead of find St Ives. The sun was bright but dazzling. The whole trip was 42 miles and the temperature a chilly 7 degrees.
There’s not that much time at the moment that coincides with good weather to ride and even do some slow speed work. Here’s my slow moves through the car park north of Cambridge. I had no idea that Garmin Basecamp would let you look at graphs of speed and single out a piece of a trip.
Here’s the whole trip.
Now that the weather has turned nasty, getting out for rides starts to be tricky. A couple of weeks back to thought I would ride through the villages that look so pretty from the train: Stansted Mountfitchet, Newport, Elsenham, but strangely from the road they are disappointing and the roads are also uninteresting.
screenshot from Adze
Yesterday I had SBW fit auxiliary lights to the bike. Something about the way the headlight comes on has been changed. I haven’t worked it out yet but the new lights are good (despite what some seem to be saying in discussion groups).
auxiliary lights on Belinda
The weather turned from bright sunshine on the way there to dark windy and raining on the way back – in honour of increased visibility. The journey is three miles longer via the A10 but much nicer that the A1(M).
Journey on Triptrack.org
There are so many things to do at the weekend when I am in Cambridge. My usual delights are getting stocks in from Arjuna and wandering in town. This morning was sunny against all forecast expectations and I got out on the bike. Since seeing the curious statistic saved by the bike’s computer that my average throttle opening was 11% I have been wandering what would happen if I opened it to 100%, so I headed down to the A14 towards Bury and Ipswich and hoped for an empty road to try it. Sadly there was heavy traffic for a Sunday but I tried all the same. But I never actually made it. I found myself moving at between 95 and 100mph within a few seconds of this action and still accelerating fast so never made it to 100%.
Bury is very different to Cambridge but it is buzzing on a Sunday though not nearly so cosmopolitan. There’s a small section in one of the town car parks for motorbikes so I snuggled up next to a Triumph Tiger Explorer and came to the conclusion it was better looking than the 1200gs, such is the nature of desire and disatisfaction, then grabbed a coffee in Costa (no cake after my weighing scales shock this morning). On the way home I shouldn’t have asked the GPS to send me back. I headed off on some nice roads to Mildenhall and a little further but ended up back on the straight but speedy road home before I knew it.
Once back in the garage I tried to work out yet again where to fit the electrical wizardry I bought for the bike a while back (PDM60 module), the little box of cleverness that you can attach all other accessories, like auxiliary lights or other sockets to. There is no room for anything on this sleek and economical for space bike. There has to be a solution.
Now I’m back from my trip I can return to geekery. My lens collection for my camera is growing. I have just got a fisheye lens. I bought it on Ebay on an impulse. When I won it I wished I hadn’t bid on it, however, now its here I intend to make the most of it. Its a Nikkor 16mm AF D lens for those in the know. Unlike the ghastly gimmicky 1970s fish eyes, this lens fills the whole frame with an image, not just a circle in the middle. The question then is how to convert what should be projected onto a curved surface onto a flat film – or rather computer screen. As with maps of the world there is more than one way of doing it. And in fact, some come free(ish) and some you have to shell out for.
Here is pretty much what comes out of the camera:
Its a reasonably sharp lens though has noticeable chromatic aberration (corrected I think in this shot) but I find the curved uprights quite nightmarish. Its amazing, for such a physically small lens it really sees 180 degrees.
Adobe Lightroom comes with a vast database of lens characteristics built in that can correct their characteristic distortion. For most lenses this is mild and it works well. This is what it does for this lens.
Its ok. Its a real relief to not be living in the LSD world of the first picture but the corners are really stretched and lose definition. Also it crops out quite a lot of the image, so the wide view is rather wasted.
Now here is what the hemi fisheye plug in produces:
Its an odd perspective. You can tell that the way it remaps the image varies across it. But it produces the best image. It is much sharper at the corners and does not lose any of the image. So, the £25 that it cost – the plug in that is, not the lens – is worth it. It makes the lens a useable ultra-wide angle lens rather than a novelty that you quickly tire of.
This is what it looks like, courtesy of Mr Rockwell:
Before this, I bought, also on Ebay, a more conventional lens, Nikon’s 35mm f1.4 lens, which is much easier to use. this is what it does:
