One Bike Cycling to work today on my touring bike, it occurred to me that whilst I have three bikes, I would probably be happy with just the one.
This was in my mind because yesterday I was thinking that when the time comes around for the Cycle to Work vouchers at work to be issued, I could consider getting myself a Pashley Sovereign to commute to work on (that’s besides the fact that I commute to work on my Dawes currently!
The iPad is a great device - sitting on the sofa, on the train or just where ever, the iPad (Mini in my case) is a fantastic tool. I can happily write a blog post, browse the Internet or generally do pretty much anything I can do on the Mac on the go using the iPad.
One exception has been to plan my biking or running routes. For this, I’ve used Ride with GPS on the Mac to create my routes.
I picked up a new toy for my bike this past week. My Dawes bike hasn’t had a bell on it, probably since I bought the bike. It came with one, but it’s pretty poor bell that the bike came with (something cheap and nasty that the bike has to be sold with in the UK). It just about works. Nothing special.
Anyhow, I’ve been using the bike for a while now but I’ve not had a bell on it and this can get annoying - riding to work, the majority of the route is along a shared path and it means that I can’t warn people that I’m coming up behind them.
It’s been a month since I attended a London Brompton Club ride, so I’d been looking forward to the one on the 20th Feb - London to Gravesend. It would take the Pilgrims Way for some of the route and having done this as part of the Whitstable ride last year, I was looking forward to it as I recalled that the scenery (once out of South London) was fantastic.
Heading to work on Monday morning, I had my first Road Traffic Collision (RTC). It’s not really an experience I want to go through again!
I’d left for work just before 7am as I normally do when I’m riding - this gives me plenty of time to get to work and then grab a shower before I start. I’d taken the Brompton as it had been a while since I’d ridden it.
I’ve done something this week that I don’t think I’ve done for almost five years - I’ve removed Dropbox from my Mac.
gasp
I know, how could I?
Well, I think it’s slowly been a long time coming. Since I bought my Synology1, I’ve been using that more and more for various items. Up until recently however, it hadn’t come close enough to replacing Dropbox fully. However, I think the time now has come.
For the past two years, I’ve been writing my blog in Markdown and plain text - in fact, almost everything I write at home is in plain text format - using nValt, Byword and Marked2 I’m able to write everything I need (blog posts, emails and magazine articles) 1 2. With these three apps, I’ve been happily able to work on my MacBook, Windows laptop, work laptop, iPad, Amazon Fire tablet, Android phone and iPhone 3 - plain text documents synced to the cloud via Dropbox and accessible anywhere from pretty much any device I happen to be using.
Looking at one of my PR’s on Strava today in regards to my ride in at the start of the week and I noticed some odd sections. It seems that Strava was pushing me down roads that I hadn’t actually been down.
![Strava app, showing my route not on the cycle path](http://vox.me.uk/images/2016-02-02 16.07.25.png)
I first thought that this was my GPS being silly and placing me in the wrong location. However, I compared the same GPS track in Ride With GPS as it is in Strava.
So another article on the Garmin Vivoactive!
As you know, I’ve done a few other articles on the Garmin Vivoactive (here and here). However, I can add a bit more to the continued “series” now! I’ve tested the device on Android (a Wileyfox Swift, a British mobile phone brand) and can now compare this to iOS, which I had been running it on.
The Wileyfox is running Cyanogen OS, so results might be slightly different on other Android phones with different brands.
Background I never used to be a watch person, though that all change when I started running when at Loughborough and then when I moved to London and was at the mercy of trains (and meetings), I found a watch to be something I couldn’t leave behind.
For years, I used a classic - the Casio F-91W.
Not only was it bombproof (though, perhaps the wrong word to use there considering that owning one of the watches in Afghanistan was apparently enough to cause the Americans to detain you for questioning as it was often the watch used for detonators!