| Date (yyyymmdd) | Comment |
| 20080901 |
I still got bikes on my mind. Funny that al lot of people think once you have a bike it's free. If you use it every day there is a lot of wear and tear though. If your lucky you can ride a good bike for some years trouble free. I am not that carefull with bikes however. I hit a lot of curbes with the front tire for example. I am not the kind of person that does a lot of preventive maitenance either. If something not essential breaks I take it of it it hinders me but I don't repair, replace or invest time and money if I don't have to. Today my point was proven that a spare bike doesn't hurt. When I took my son to school, I noticed that I had a puncture. I was already on my way and in a hurry and the front tire was not flat yet. I decided to ride on. As usually in cases like these this made things worse. After dropping my son of, I went home again and took my wifes bike to ride to work. I got home relatively late, and had a lot of small chores to do. My son was a little difficult. Sometimes I try to get him to help me fix stuff. But fixing the punctured tire was not something at which I could have him around me. In the shed he is touching stuff that can fall down or over him, so thats too dangerous. He didn't want to play with chalk next to me but wandered of. After I took him to his bed there was not much daylight anymore. It had been a while since I last repaired a punctured tire so I was lacking practice, had to find and gather all the tools in a dark and small shed. It turned out there were 3 separate punctures close to the valve. That is the worst spot for a puncture. Altough the punctures were all close together, they were not close enought to fix with one patch. I found a small nail on the outer tire, and I think the other punctures came from driving on with a tire that was too soft. I think I had it sealed airthight at the end, because I checked it in the water and saw no bubbles. But something went wrong putting the inner tire back in the outer. (Because the puncture was close to the valve had take it out completely. I hoped it was the valve at first so I exchanged it with another, without success. After all that work and frustration I have to use my wifes bike again tomorrow. Tomorrow evening I will get the inner tube out once more. I will check the hole inside of the outer tube for sharp glass metal or stones. I think I was a little too hasty because there were no less then 3 punctures , it was getting dark and I was tired at the and of the day of course. If I had all the time of the world I would have even sanded the edges of the patch flat so it would not get stuck behind something. I want to be able to do this kinds of small repairs myself even it is not the easiest spot to fix a puncture. But if I still don't succeed tomorrow, I will buy a new inner tube, they are not that expensive. While working on the bike, I noticed that the other outer tire ( the back one) was in a much worse condition. While the back tire was more prone to punctures because it was terribly worn, faith decided that the front tire was the one to go flat first. Some people would replace the worn outer tire right away to prevent inevitable punctures. Replacing a tire is not that hard, but the inner tire can get damaged when you put the outer one on. When you replace the back tire you have to unscrew the wheel from the fork to get them past the axel. That is a little tricky, with some bikes you need special tools to do this. When you put it back together the chain should have the right tension. This is why take my chances for the time being with the old worn back tire. It is interesting, sometimes you see a very old broken bike with brand new tires and sometimes a relatively new bike with worn tires. That fact that I can take my chances with a worn outer tire comes from the fact that I don't use the bike for long distances. I can always continue on foot and not be much to late. Next day, I can walk again, use a spare bike, even have somebody lend me a bike, or maybe I have it fixed already. I was suprised to find out how cheap some shops will do small repairs (like punctures). However as I have said earlier, I want to do simple things like that myself. It might turn out that if they see 3 punctures instead of one they will charge tripple. Or use a new inner tire and charge you for that on top of their labor. Maybe they even refuse to help you if you don't replace a worn outer tire or something. |
| 20080903 |
Yesterday I found out, that it was indeed the patch near the valve that had gone a little loose and leaked air. I tried to patch it once more, again it was only airthight until I had to put it in the outer tire. During the day I had already checked the prices of the inner tubes and they were dirt cheap, as I expected. The DIY stores are open till quite late, so I took notice of the size I needed and went out to buy a new inner tire. The first DIY store I visited, only had the right sized inner tires with the wrong kind of valve/nipple. I know I have an adapter somewhere but I didn't feel like searching for it, so I took my chance and hurried to the other side of town to get to an other DIY store before closing time. I had to search a little, but I found a very cheap inner tube with the right nipple and the right size. Carefully I put it in the outer tire, and inflated it, checked for hissing sound but it was OK! I have a nice collection of old inner tires with punctures at the moment. More than I will ever need to cut out patches to cover other punctures. So because I had some time to kill today, wanted to improve the bike and use the old inner tires for something else than rubberbands and patches, I became creative. The bike used to have rubber ends on the handlebars, they were low quality and came off months ago. Everytime I pulled the handlebars to accelerate they came off more easy then the time before. So finally I left them were the fell on the street. But in wintertime the bare metal of the handlebars can be uncomfortably cold to your hands. So I used double sided duck tape to glue foam tubes (dirt cheap at DIY store) over the handle bars. I already had the tape and the tubes. The tubes are normally used to insulate heating pipes, but because they are so cheap people find other ways to use them. Children love them too. It's relatively safe for my three year old son to play with. He can hit anything with the hollow tube without breaking it or hurting anyone. At his school they use small pieces of cut tube for craft projects. Because these rubber foam tubes are already meant to go over other metal tubes, they have a groove running across were you can easily split them. At the under side of the handlebars there was some bare metal left, because the pipes the foam is ment for, are narrower. Because of this and because I didn't like grey color of the foam, I pulled a section of innertube (snuggly) over it. This adds to the general strength and protects the ducktape from rainwater. This was actually one of the things I wanted to try out concerning bikes. The exact details I worked out on the go. Again I checked the prices of rubber-handlebar-ends in the store. They are relatively expensive and I reckon that they come loose just as easy as my old ones. If you do need them at all, it might actually make sense to make your own. Maybe next time I have a puncture and no time or energy to patch the tire, I will just replace the inner tire though. I will keep you posted on my small DIY enhanchements on the bike. At the end I might even post a picture. Probably I will not post a "before" picture though. Even I don't have that much time to kill :-). Back to computer-programming now! Yesterday I worked a little on a c64 sprite-drawing tool in JavaScript. Months ago, I had been working on a vector based drawing tool in JavaScript. This tool is not finished yet and more or less abandoned or at least on halt. For this new tool I reused some snippets of code from the previous project. It also happens that, as I go along with new projects, I develop techniques that, at some point, I would like to retrofit in the old projects. Even "finished" projects could be redesigned this way. As many other computer nerds I downloaded Google Chrome today and tested it on my computer at work. I did notice a slight speed advantage with some JavaScript demos. Most sites seem to work OK with chrome. The interface was nice. For the c64-JavaScript-sprite-game and the sprite drawing tool I use the real zoom a lot lately. This didn't seem to work in chrome; I could only zoom text. This last point is the main reason I don't install chrome on my PC at home just yet. It is nice that Google chrome does support SVG, but I don't like SVG that much. I have this pixelplot library that work cross-browser and SVG is not supported by all browsers yet. What I can remember of what I have seen of SVG is, that the functions are a little awkward. Maybe I become converted when all the major browsers support SVG. Then I can convert all my JavaScript Demos to SVG. I couldn't find anything concerning new audio capabilities of chrome. It would be nice to construct a sound (waveform, voice, enveloppe, pitch, duration) in JavaScript like you could on the c64. Or use a reciter, choose a voice (boy, girl, man , woman) or even a specific voice ( Balkenende, Wilders) and let it pronounce a string. |
| 20080904 |
Today I took note of the frame-number of my bike and the bike of my wife. When I sell one of the bikes, I will print these properties on the receit (proof of ownership). When one of the bikes gets stolen, I will report this to the police with the frame-numbers. I got my bike from my father when he became to old to use it. He was the first owner. I don't know the history of the other bike. The history of the bike is not that important as with cars though. Except for the fact that a bike you buy second hand, might have been stolen some time long ago..... The age of the frame is not important because it is mostly the parts that break and you can replace most of them. For the fun of it I might take pictures of both bikes and put them online. Again I can use those pictures when I have to report them when they get stolen. In case on an accident caused by someone else, the pictures can be used as proof of the state the bikes were in before the accident. This might be an issue for the insurance. Yesterday I worked on the JavaScript sprite designer. I copied a sprite of a motorbike from a book with it. Today I tested the recognizability of the sprite on my son. And he immediately yelled motor! It suprises me that the lowres charm of the sprites still works, even on today's kids. Later on I copied the sprite and adapted it to look like a bike. The sprite book only contains bikes as seen from the front and the motorbike sprite was from the side. Today I copied the sprites of the bike from the front; one with left leg high, one with rigth leg high. I adapted the following name convention; objectname;view;sequence. This will give BikeFront1,BikeFront2. Actually for animation you will want to put both sprite arrays in an array of sprite arrays. This way you can "cycle" through them with an index. The kind of animation you get this way is nice for games. Some objects you not only want to move left, right, up and down. for a plane this is usually good enough, but even for a helicopter you might want to see the blades turning. Maybe if you see the helicopter from the front moving from left to right and it turns to move right to left, you want at least one frame from another view point; the front. It is also nice to make them bigger and smaller to get the 3D effect that they move away in the dept or come toward you. For this kind of animation vector based grapics are better. But I did make a function DrawSprite2 which uses 2 by 2 blocks instead of 1 by 1. The blocks/pixels just get bigger but the sprite definition still has a resolution of 24 by 21. I also noticed that the point of origin is important if you rescale, you want the centrepoint of the sprite to remain static. Otherwise the sprite will not only seem to move toward you but also to the left or right or up or down. I am also thinking of working with shadows that move and resize with the movement of the sprite. |
| 20080905 |
Today I went to the place where the bikes confiscated the police are auctioned. I heard that is was important to be early. So I woke up very early and arrived ten minutes before they handed out numbered tickets. To my suprise ther was already a large queue. Just after I got my ticket they started warning the other people in the queue that the number of bikes was small and that the people still standing in queue had a very slim chance of getting a bike. I had expected dealers that were buying large volumes of bikes, but there were none. You were expected/allowed to buy only one bike per person. There were a lot of students and foreigners. Maybe it was extra busy because it is September, the university is just starting and there are a lot of new students in town. So there I was with one of the last tickets which would give me a reasonable chance of getting a bike. I had to wait and come back one hour en 15 minutes later when the sale actually started. But it was so early all the shops were still closed so its hard to kill time in the deserted city. When I arrived a the specified time everybody was standing in queue again. Then they were letting the first numbers in at batches of 5. Two young guys who had numbers in the second batch of 5, told me that they were standing in queue an hour before they started handing out the numbered tickets. I had arrived only 10 minutes before so I had to wait for a lot of batches of 5. I had planned to go to work and maybe only take the afternoon of But I could see this was becoming very time consuming. So I went to the office which was close by fortunately, and returned after I had done some work. There was still al large queue and the numbers being called were not even close to mine. So I decided to let it be for today. I know exactly how I works and what to expect now. Next time I while be present one hour before they hand out the numbers. I will take that day off in advance so I am more relaxed and less impatient. I expect that the sale next month will be less busy anyway. I have already put the date of the next sale in my calendar. More or less by accident I found the adapter for the valve/ nipple this evening. Today I found out that the strange kind of nipple is called a french nipple over here. The thing is, you have to press it on the top before it can let air in the tube. As it turned out I don't have one adapter for it, but there were 2 screwed together Tomorrow I am getting up early again because I want to visit a fleamarket and have to take both my kids because my wife is working. I will take some stuff with me for somebody who is always there and I know that he will like it. I will give it away for free. I don't have a stand, but I am taking some extra small stuff with me, hoping that I will have some opportunity to sell it anyway even with the kids with me. In the afternoon I have a birthday and I have to find and buy a present before I go there. I hope my wife has returned by then so I can leave the kids at home. Beforehand things always look more hectic. You tend to take things more easy the day itself and drop some things you were planning Anyway it is good to know that the fleamarket is there every saterday, but next saterday I have.... This evening I finally had some time and energy to play with my son, we played football with some kids from our street. After that I showed him how to use the foam-insulation-tubes as a blowpipe. It was a little hard for him, because he can't make the paper darts. Also the foam is flexible, so he can easily bend the pipe and that takes the power out of the shot. So I decided to fold some paper planes for him but by then he was getting tired. I am thinking about showing him some youtube movies of blowpipes next time to give him the general idea and appreciation. I want to try that for some other father-son DIY/play activities too. |
| 20080906 |
The fleamarket was a complete waste of time. The only thing I bought was an abacus. I noticed that my son is still to young to use the abacus though. I didn't see the slightest posibility to sell something myself. Neighter did I get some ideas from what I saw. They were selling some bikes too, at ridicoulous prices. I also saw a nice chess game. But I already have one and I am not collecting them. When I was looking for a present, I drove by a bike shop. They had billboards saying that they were having a sale. May some evening this week I will check it out. Tomorrow I am delivering some chairs, it is a small detour on the way to my parents. I have to bring both kids again because my wife is working. Somebody did a bid on something else, still waiting for details when to make the deal. Both bids came this weekend both last weekend the were online already. So you just can never tell when people will bid. Where the secret lies is your attitude, if nothing happens don't get disappointed. If someone is bidding when you don't expect and don't have time don't get stressed. Go on putting stuff online. All in all it can be labor intensive for a small amount of money. I once set a minimum price but then there was nothing left to sell, because I didn't have anything left that I wanted to get rid of that I could ask that much for. The spirtes I copied lately are hard to integrate with the game I am working on, from a conceptual point I mean. I you are flying in plane it makes no sense having a motorbike sprite with you in the air. I have been working on design and conversion tools, I made a string to decimal date converter. Once I have a routine for the other way I have access to a lot more sprites. Better yet would be a hex converter so I can even rip sprites from game images (dsk files etc). I uploaded a simple 2 fase sprite animation. In the book there was also a 5 frame horse/jockey animation. Those sprites were not on a grid, only screen shots. The datalines however were in the book. Once I have my Decimal2Sprite routine ready this 5 frame animation may be my next project. It's not hard to do anymore and you get nice results. It is a lot of work though. This is the poitn were I usually loose interest. In this case there is an advantage that I don't have to draw the art work myself. Sometimes I wish I could ask sombody to make a small and easy routine for me like the decimal 2 sprite thing. |
| 20080921 |
Nice to read the last entry right now. Already made the routine I mentioned there myself. The guy's who I talk to about these kind of things, are interested in the stuff that I do and I am interested in what they do. The problem is that they are just as busy with their projects as I am with mine so we have little opportunity to help each other. And of course as computer freaks we know everthing better ourselves :-)... I discovered a site with the raw sprite data from the game impossible mission. It took some time to reverse enginering and figure out what to do with the raw data but I constructed the "running animation". Along the way I developed some handy routines and tricks. I found a way to get the raw data file in a javascript string as hex numbers. I posted the animation and the link to the site where I found the raw data on the main page. I could also construct the summersalt animation, mirror the animations (running and summersalting both ways) and control them by keys. Same problem as ever arises, I loose interest. It's hard to find the time if you don't have the energy and if you don't have the interest you can't find the energy. I tend to work in a spree/frenzy/spurt after the idea has been haunting me. I know it can be done but it is a little bit difficult or a lot of work so I put it off for a while. All of a sudden I just have to get rid of it and I work hours on end. After doing this C64 animation stuff, I think I should restart working on the c64 style game. However the idea of vector based graphics is bothering me again lately. The problem with zooming these things is that the vectors start from the outline. When you zoom you also get a displacement; it not only moves towards you but also to the left, bottom or whatever. I want to find the centerpoint of the vector based objects I already have (finished or not), then move with "pen-up" to the start of the existing vector, which is on the outline. Also with rotations you need to know the centerpoint. With rotations in 3D the centerpoint you need consist of x,y,z. The c64 sprite stuff is not working under chrome browser, I suspect because I delete elements under the DOM. The early stuff where I move the elements on top of each other on one point works quite fast under chrome. I am not considering yet to make alterations to make things work under chrome. Fact is I feel confident that I can do just about anything, especially with graphics even in JavaScript if I only had the time. I always tell people who are a little into computers and who are going to retire because of health of age, that it can be great hobby for them. It has been for me for years and I hope it will be after my retirement till oldage. It doesn't need to be an expensive hobby. You can control the level of intensity yourself. To be honest; doing the complex stuff isn't relaxing. It is exhausting, sometimes frustrating and sometimes I get emotional; angry after failure and extremely happy after success. But it is a shortlived high. After a long successfull night I go to sleep very content. The next morning you see everything in perspective and you wander what all the fuss was about. I havent been busy with the bike thing lately. Didn't sell a lot of stuff on internet neighter. Did a lot of stuff with the kids, a lot of cleaning and fixing things (more then normal). The normal household stuff,finance and administration also keeps going on. The blowgun/blowpipe playing is still going strong. My son has a problem with not only rolling the paper darts, but also blowing hard enough. He is however happy retrieving the darts for me, loading them into the pipe, assisting with aiming, shouting fire, setting up target blocks to knock over. I think I am going to make a blowgun with a drinking straw and extra light darts for him because that doesn't require that much force. The lenght of the pipe might also make a difference, because if its extra long the darts can excellerate gradually and he doesnt have to blow hard all at once. The challenge as a maker is not the pipe, it is the darts; make them efficiently, quick and cheap. They have to fly good, be reuseable, retrieveable, safe. Plastic is best for darts, they keep their form after impact and moisture form spit is not a problem. I should have my son wear (sun)glasses so I can't shoot him in the eye. Also I should find a rod to unplug the tube when a dart gets stuck. The dart I use at the moment doesn't get stuck much though. In addition to traget practice,i t might be nice to see how fast I can fire the darts after each other; the machine gun test. Line them up next to each other in advance and let my son put them in the pipe. It is also fun to see if you can hit a traget shooting with an arch/angle; drop the bomb from above. Of course I have to test how far I can shoot, I have to try that outside. That brings me to another issue concerning darts; when used outside in "nature" the darts should be bio-degradeable/environment friendly. Before I go to sleep I want to pay homage to Mark Hoekstra of Geektechniques who passed away last saturday because he lived in the same city as I do. |