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There are cheap fixes to prevent crashes on Law Lane

Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana included in their 2010 master plan an expensive and ambitious plan to extend Law Lane. The plan specified that the updated Law Lane should include bike lanes and off-street pedestrian sidewalks. A 2020 update to the master plan added detailed plans. The angled parking between

Law Lane Pedestrian Safety Audit

Last year, a pedestrian was struck crossing Law Lane at Fee Lane in Bloomington, Indiana. Was this a one-off accident, or has there been a pattern of crashes at that intersection? Are there changes that could be made to improve pedestrian safety in the area? I took a deep dive

Where deer crashes happen around Bloomington and how to prevent them

Over the last 20 years there were more deer involved in collisions with vehicles in Monroe County, Indiana than either pedestrians or cyclists. Here's a heatmap of the areas with the highest rates of deer-involved crashes from 2003-2022 around Bloomington. Best viewed on a desktop monitor. The map

Intersection Crash Analysis with QGIS

How to perform four different methods of intersection crash analysis. Compares how and why the results differ.

Email Productivity Tip: Sending without Checking

Checking email can be a big distraction when I just want to send an email and move on. If I have new unread e-mails, I may not want to know about them until after I've finished focusing on sending out a new message. Thankfully, a number of email

Fuzzel, app launcher and fuzzy finder has feature-packed 1.11 release

Fuzzel is a Wayland-native app launcher and fuzzy finder for Linux, inspired by Rofi and dmenu. The five-year-old Fuzzel project recently had a feature-packed 1.11 release. Here's a visual rundown of what's new. Instant filtering of huge lists 0:00 /0:08 1× Fuzzel was

Rofi alternatives for Wayland: app launcher, window switcher and picker for Linux

Rofi is a popular window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux. dmenu was a tiny text-only utility to display a list of binaries or lines of text and select one. The dmenu design follows the Unix philosophy to "do one thing well". Simple! Rofi took the

cocot46plus: A Corne-like unibody keyboard with trackball and encoder

My split, ergonomic Corne keyboard is great. I love pairing with a trackball in-between the halves: But what if you took the two halves of this split keyboard, jammed them together with a built-in trackball and threw in some extra features? That's the cocot46plus. I prefer the ergonomics

Toolkit for Sidewalk Location Priority

Given limited funds for building and repair sidewalks, where the's optimal place to find them? Ideally, we'd like to factor in the potential demand for the sidewalk, how it might improve safety, and equity. The solution should be comprehensive– considering all locations in a city. It

What's new in Fuzzel 1.10

Fuzzel is a rofi alternative for Wayland. It's a versatile picker and launcher utility for desktop Linux. The last time I gave an update on Fuzzel was when 1.8 released which compared it to some altenatives. Let's look at some recent feature additions since then.

How Ann Arbor used spatial analysis for sidewalk prioritization

Ann Arbor, Michigan got a lot right in their efforts to build out their sidewalk network in an objective and equitable way. More funding: a larger pie First, they not only considered how to slice a funding pie more fairly, they raised money for a much larger pie of funding

Calculating Connectivity Rank for Bike Network Planning

You've got a plan to build out a 100 miles of of additional bike facilities. Which ones should you build first to make the biggest impact? In addition to all the metrics that would usually apply to bike lane planning, now there are a few others that are

Tips for organizing Sway keybindings

Here's how I set up my keybindings for the Sway window manager for Linux. Most of the tips here would apply to any keyboard, but let's get one detail out of the way first that's specific to 40% keyboards like the Corne. It doesn&

How not to have a 45-hour outage like GigabitNow

My home internet was recently restored after a 45-hour outage of my GigabitNow service in Bloomington, Indiana. This is the worst internet service provider outage I've experienced in 30 years. The outage apparently affected only my account. Part of my job is maximizing uptime for internet services, so

The most dangerous intersections for pedestrians in Bloomington, Indiana

Where are the most dangerous places to cross the street in Bloomington, Indiana? This report analyzes and visualizes crash data involving pedestrians from 2003-2022. Summary Positive Findings * The top intersection was Kirkwood and Dunn, which is already safer thanks to seasonal bollards. * College and Walnut crossing downtown also appear in

On-Call Credos

I've been in on-call rotations for more than a decade. When computers I manage have a problem, they page my team 24/7 for help. I use these credos so being on-call goes as smoothly as possible. Find out before the customer does Whether the customer is internal

How to replace the battery in a Garmin Fenix 5 Plus watch

The Garmin Fenix 5 Plus was released in 2018 and is still a great running watch in 2023. Some features include heat rate tracking, VO2 max, recovery advisor, payments and offline music. There's also my favorite: offline maps and navigation. When I bought a used Fenix 5 Plus

Why I found myself running 50 miles alone in the wintertime

An edited and improved version of this story has been been published in the Limestone Post. I recommend reading that version. Estimated reading time: 24 minutes It was dawn in mid-February when I stepped outside to check the weather. Snow was on the ground, but the roads were clear. The

Using QGIS to map a county-level metric from a spreadsheet

🇪🇸o para cartografiar todos los cantones de una provincia Let's say you've got a spreadsheet with a metric for every county in a country that you want to map. There's no geo-data in the spreadsheet, so how to visualize it? This post expects some

Comparing Safety of Cascades Road and Gourley Pike Pedestrian Bridge

This post continues a series related to Cascades Road, in Bloomington, Indiana. See also: The past and future of bike/ped connectivity to Cascades Park and Three projects to improve pedestrian access to Cascades Park. The Bloomington, Indiana City Council will be considering soon the closure of a section of

A dozen automations and DevOps practices I replaced with Ansible

Ansible is an automation tool that can you run from your laptop or a server to automate tasks across many servers. It's simple enough to use for personal tasks, flexible enough to introduce incrementally, and powerful enough to scale. As I learned to "think an Ansible"

How I ended up running 5 marathons in 5 weeks in the spring of 2020, and even more in the fall

A recap of my 2020 running season. I got this idea in December of 2019 to start 2020 with a reflective day of running: a solo, self-supported, 50k run. Try to spend most of the run unplugged, not looking at the stats of my GPS watch-- just out there running.

Ghost as blog and newsletter software for a local political campaign

Yesterday Hopi Stosberg won her primary in a location election. I volunteered to setup web software for her. Here's what worked. Local campaign software goals In this small, local campaign there was no paid staff, so the candidate would be posting website content and sending out newsletters herself,

The past and future of bike/ped connectivity to Cascades Park

In a recent interview, Mayor Hamilton said "our transportation plan says we need to have a Bike Ped Trail from Miller Showers and then kind of though the center of College and Walnut and on north up to Griffy and all that." What does Bloomington's Transportation

Should private parks be included in Walk Potential?

When calculating the Walk Potential of locations, one metric that's considered is parks with 10-minute walk from a location. Should private parks be be included in the calculation? I think it depends on how you plan to use it. The original use of Walk Potential was to aid

Three projects to improve pedestrian access to Cascades Park

As there’s some discussion about improving Cascades Park for walking and biking, it’s useful to ask: What’s within a 10-minute walk from it? Ten to Fifteen minutes is a comfortable distance that people are willing to walk to get to services. Here’s a visualization of places

Who can walk to parks in Bloomington, Indiana?

Here's a map of the buildings in Bloomington along with parks in light green and areas within a 10 minute walk in translucent green. Observations 1. The "Ped shed" around Cascades, the big park at the north appears too ambitious, perhaps because it's in

Measuring the Walk Potential of Large Amenities

To calculate the Walk Potential around most amenities, we find the center of amenity, and generate a 10-minute walk radius around it. This area called a "ped shed" or more technically an isochrone. That works well for a small downtown store front, but it's not great

Training with Sleep Dog: First Long Ride with a Nap-prone Toddler

Sleep Dog worked hard. I had a particularly tough assignment for the large stuffed animal and I wasn't sure he was up to the task. I stood next to our bakfiets cargo bike, knelt down and asked my 16-month-old daughter Therese her opinion: "Are you ready to

The non-advice of my car-free mentor

I was nervous about giving up my car in Richmond, Indiana and heard that Wayne had been car-free for ten years. I invited him out to lunch to hear about his experiences. He accepted, but his experiences weren't what I expected. I braced myself for the horror stories.

How to find out if bike lanes will fit on your street for $25.

There are likely roads in your own community that you suspect are already wide enough to accommodate a bike lane– They just need stripes to mark the lane. You can check road widths yourself by using a measuring wheel, found for about $25 on E-bay.  A measuring wheel measures distances

How to carry a mattress on a bike

A twin-sized mattress can be carried on a bike by using the Bikes-at-Work Trailer. If you need a bike trailer just temporarily, you may get lucky and live a city where one might be rented or borrowed. Call your local bike shop to ask around. In the photo above, I

Why is biking not recommended on sidewalks, but is on multi-use paths?

Plenty of bike advocates will recommend against biking on sidewalks, but at the same time will recommend biking on multi-use paths. Both are often next to roads and intersect with roads. So what's the safety difference between biking on a sidewalk on a multi-use path? Other similar bike

Better behavior when biking

My kids have consistently behaved better when we are cycling, whether they are three or thirteen.  Even if we aren't getting along great at home, our bike trips together tend to go smoothly. Here's my parenting theory. Just as video games engage by providing a series

Wanting to get rid of my car was easy, committing to it was hard

I found myself driving my car a short distance to work because I had it. The car was easy. I drove it when it was very hot, or very cold, or very rainy, even though I could have walked or bike the same distance. In an “Aha” moment over cereal

Calculate True Average Vehicle Speed

What if time earning money for transportation was factored into your average speed? I call this "True Average Speed". Consider: You are broke in Los Angeles and need to get to New York. How fast can you earn the money to buy a bike and ride it there?

Couch hunting: A cargo bike sport

Making sport of cleaning some of the biggest household junk out of our cities and towns. Works best if you have a city dump within biking distance Couch hunting rules 1. Cruise alleyways to find abandoned furniture. 2. Tie down acquired furniture to bike trailer or cargo bike 3. Proceed

How to avoid sweating when bike commuting

Here are some tips to avoid and manage sweating when bike commuting. E-bikes help avoid sweating If an e-bike is an option for you, e-bikes are great reducing cycling effort when you want to avoid exertion that can lead to sweating. Typically on the way home from work sweating is

Dressing a toddler for winter cycling

“There is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” Ranulph Fiennes The best way to keep a child warm on a bike in the winter In Cargo bikes vs bike trailers, I recommend cargo bikes over bike trailers for carrying kids. But bike trailers have one thing going for them: the

Top Five Tools for Bike Tour Route Planning

From my experience bike touring, here are the top tools to use to plan and navigate a bike route: * Ride With GPS is the tool for advanced bike route planning. Beyond just providing “bike directions”, you can add custom waypoints to your maps, like icons for ice cream stands. You

Even Keel Trail Bars Recipe

This is a family-friendly, make-ahead recipe for family bike camping– the kind I used on Mother's Day Off family bike camping trips. These calorie-dense no-bake trail bars were designed for backpacking– packing the most amount of calories into the the least weight. They are also recipe my whole

Oatmeal Banana Bites

This is a family-friendly, make-ahead recipe for family bike camping– the kind I used on Mother's Day Off family bike camping trips. This recipes contains the primary ingredients I like to have for breakfast anyway– oatmeal and bananas– but in a more portable format. Although they are quite

How I stay warm winter bike commuting: Bar Mitts and diet

Bar Mitts are an great way to keep hands warmer on cold bike commutes. The other thing that's helped me considerably is adjusting my diet for the season. I have long thin fingers and bought one glove and mitten design after another, yet my fingers would get cold

How to attach a Burley Piccolo to a Surly Big Dummy

This post used to be titled "How to attach a Burley Piccolo to an Xtracycle. While the Surly Big Dummy originally used Xtracycle brand rails and top deck, in 2022 all Xtracycle bikes use 24" rear wheels, which changes the geometry of how the Piccolo would attach and

Carrying a baby stroller on a cargo bike

There are a few options carrying a stroller on a cargo bike, like Radwagon, Yuba Mundo, Surly Big Dummy or an Xtracycle. The simplest options is do without. Perhaps a sling will do. If the stroller is to be used primarily on lightly used sidewalks, a bicycle with a child

Counting Cows: Our Favorite Family Bike Touring Game

To pass the days bike touring with our five and eight year old children, my wife taught the rest of us a car game she learned growing up in Vermont. The game involves counting animals you see along the road. The game itself is now near extinction as a car

Surly Big Dummy vs Yuba Mundo vs Bakfiets

Update 2022: I wrote this in 2012 when I had all three bikes, and reviewed and refreshed it this year. The basic differences between these models remain unchanged. Enjoy! Cargo bikes are increasingly viable as car-replacement vehicles, but there are some significant differences between the options to choose from. The

Crashing when the stakes are lower

I learned about gravel the hard way, when I was twenty.  I biked into a sharp turn off a busy street at full speed. There was gravel there and I went down hard and fast. Bam. No one was there to give me a hand up. Fortunately, the intersection was

Cargo Bikes vs Bike Trailers

own Let's look at cargo bikes vs bike trailers for a couple different cases: first, for everyday, around-town user. Next, we'll consider what's best for a bike tour with children. To qualify my answers, I've owned single wheel trailers like the BOB

Mother's Day Off: The gift of solitude while I take the kids bike camping

When our kids were younger my wife has happy to get the same gift each Mother's Day: a day off! May in Indiana also begins the season my family likes to camp. So the annual Mother's Day Off family bike camping trip was born. Here are

My Ghost Headline theme fork with dark mode

This blog is powered by the free, open source Ghost blogging software. Why I like the Headline theme For my personal site I wanted a dark mode theme that would work well for writing about a range of unrelated topics. I also go for months without writing anything at all,

Winter Bike Commuting with Kids

Wearing your car: Using your car as weather protection for a trip you would otherwise walk or bike. Does carrying my children around town in the winter require a car? I experimented to find out.

Surly Big Dummy Long Term Cargo Bike Review

It's been over 11 years since I bought a Surly Big Dummy longtail cargo bike. Here's a summary of how I used it and why I'm still riding it. The Surly Big Dummy was a great bike with growing kids and now continues to

Review of Carsick Designs "Xtra Big One!" Slingset for Surly Big Dummy longtail cargo bike

If you are shopping for bags for a longtail cargo bike like the Surly Big Dummy, you could buy some bags from Xtracycle or Surly's own "Dummy Bags", but this review is about the Xtra Big One! Slingset by Carsick Designs. The closet product to compare

Comment on Ordinance 22-35: Traffic Calming and Equity

This is regarding Bloomington, Indian's proposed Ordinance 22-35. It proposes amendments to our traffic calming program to add a step of Common Council approval and raise the number of residents required to move forward. First, some context then my feedback at the bottom if you want to jump

How to Create a Heatmap of Sidewalk Location Priority

Your city has an incomplete sidewalk network. The budget to build new sidewalks is limited. Which sidewalks should prioritized to build next in a way that is objective,  transparent and improves transportation equity? Here's how to build to heatmap of locations to prioritize to build sidewalks, based on

How to map apartment buildings in OpenStreetMap using ID and JOSM

Here I show briefly how to add apartment buildings in OpenStreetMap using the web-based editor on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and also the desktop Java editor, JOSM. Installing and setting up JOSM is not covered. Mapping local apartment buildings was useful to support spatial analysis about Neighborhood Associations and Housing

How to create a missing sidewalk map in QGIS

If you've got a GIS map of your city's roads and a map of your city's sidewalk, you can use the QGIS software to create a map of your missing sidewalks. A missing sidewalk map can be useful to plan where new sidewalks should

Self-hosting Matomo with a shared MySQL database

The official way to self-host Matomo Analytics is using it's own dedicated MySQL container along with a container for Matomo. I'm hosting it on a VPS with limited resources that's already running a MySQL database, so I wanted Matomo to connect to the MySQL

xpanes, a parallel ssh tool

iIdeally, you don't need to log into your Linux servers. They are set up and managed through automation tools like Ansible. All key monitoring metrics and logs are shipped off-site and presented in beautiful dashboards. But we live in an imperfect world where the Ansible playbooks aren'

markstos Corne keyboard layout

💸Deal alert: fengsbay is selling the newly released Corne v4.1 keyboards on eBay for $132 and up. 💡Update Jan, 2024: QMK has removed userspace keymaps. I've published QMK userspace repo for the markstos Corne layout which includes a new Vial file for the layout as well.⌨️May

Fuzzel: A great dmenu and rofi alternative for Wayland

Fuzzel is a versatile app and utility launcher for Wayland. If you are familiar with dmenu and rofi, fuzzel is largely compatible with them. Screenshots What's Fuzzel good for? Besides launching applications, as a dmenu alternative Fuzzel can be used for many utility tasks. These include: * Emoji picker

Reverting to previous post revision in Ghost using SQL

Ghost 5.2 stores the last 10 revisions of blog posts in the database, but currently there's no interface to revert to a prior version using the web interface. Here's how you can restore a previous revision if it's not too later. What to

How to Add Recipe Schema Markup to your Ghost Blog

When it comes to food blogging, Wordpress is king. But if you only have a few recipes to add to your blog, perhaps like me you've chosen Ghost as your blogging software instead. What is Recipe Schema Markup While humans will read the your recipe blog post, software

50k Instant Pot Oatmeal Recipe

Skip to recipe. I was sleeping when the text arrived at 11 pm on a Thursday night. "Want to run a marathon with me on Sunday morning?" Accepting this invitation from a college roommate and friend from two decades ago didn't seem particularly advisable. I had

Towards a better keyboard design

Keyboard design has real-world consequences. Yesterday, I worked with half a dozen people across the country to locate and retrieve a misdelivered package. The issue traces back to keyboard design. A FedEx store employee had been handed a hand-written note with the delivery address: 1125 Main Street The employee quickly

Reflections on a year of running with a 10-year-old half-marathoner

2021 did not turn out to be the year of running that I thought it might be. Entering the pandemic in 2020 upended life. With everything closed, I coped by running more, clocking 5 marathon-distance runs in five weekends in the spring, then 6 marathon-distance runs in six weeks in

Richmond, Indiana Reeveston Road and 24th Street intersection makeover

Here's a suggestion to improve walk-to-school safety for Charles Elementary School in Richmond, Indiana. I sent this to the Richmond City Planner in 2013. Although it was well-received, Google Maps shows the intersection remains with all the same problems. I've since moved to a new town

Richmond, Indiana 15th and South D intersection improvement

Here's a suggestion to improve walk-to-school safety for a Vaile Elementary School in Richmond, Indiana. I sent this to the Richmond City Planner in 2013. Although it was well-received, Google Maps shows the intersection remains with all the same problems. I've since moved to a new

Software to Calculate Walk Potential for Cities

I have open-sourced code to calculate walk potential for cities. Some assembly required. Walk Potential Calculator This code is used to calculate "walk potential" across a city. It's based on the 10 Minute Neighborhood concept of having a neighborhood with having many common types of destinations

Neighborhood Associations and Housing Equity

Spatial analysis and a StoryMap was used to look at the relationship between neighborhood associations and housing equity. The full StoryMap is at: https://mark.stosberg.com/associations-equity Research Impact * This spatial analysis was featured in the CityScape journal as a collaboration with Deborah Myerson under the article title Mapping

Who Gets to Walk Safely? A Sidewalk Equity Audit

This is an executive summary of a sidewalk equity audit conducted in Bloomington, Indiana and delivered to City leaders on November 9th, 2020. The full report is here: https://mark.stosberg.com/sidewalk-equity-audit Recently, Bloomington, Indiana’s Mayor Hamilton announced the Recover Forward Bloomington plan. This plan prioritizes rebuilding from

Seven Lessons Learned from a 37 mile run

On Sunday I ran from Bloomington, Indiana to Nashville, Indiana, had lunch with some friends and ran home– a 37 mile round-trip in an almost 44 year old body. Here are seven insights I learned from the experience. 1. Choose your own adventure My longest runs prior to this had

Review of Black Diamond Distance 15 and Osprey Daylite Packs (for run commuting)

I’ve been using the Osprey Daylite pack for almost 5 years for run commuting with a small laptop. It’s been totally great and is an amazing deal at about $50. I’ve been running more frequently recently and bought a second pack to give the Daylite more of

Building and Maintaining Back Health

I would not have been able to enjoy my recent bike camping trip if I hadn’t improved my back health. When my back health was worse, sleeping on a mat in tent each night made it worse. Multiple days of tent camping would only compound the problem. Here’s

Using rsnapshot with systemd

rsnapshot nicely illustrates some of the features of systemd timers. As of Ubuntu 16.04, the rsnapshot package doesn't ship with systemd service and timer files, so you have to set them up yourself. Before I show how to setup rsnapshot with systemd, I want to cover some

Possible solutions to empty files after log rotation

You rotate your logs and then find the log files are empty. It appears no more data is getting written to them. Having done server maintenance for several years, this is a common issue that is not specific to the app writing to the log file, such as forever. Here&

Swapping the last two git commits

So you made a "WIP" git commit that you didn't intend to push and then you made another commit after it. Now you'd like to undo the WIP commit but it's no longer the most recent commit. Here's how you

How my Marmot Precip and Membrain waterproof breathable jackets failed

Consider this a kind of long-term review. I’ve been a loyal customer of Marmot’s waterpoof, breathable rain jackets for several years. I’m on my third (or fourth?) Marmot rain jacket currently and my wife and daughter have them as well. Everything wears out eventually. Here’s what

The Perfect Day

What can you do to make today perfect? Of the parts that you can control, what will you do to make the day the best day possible? On the day I took this photo, I was playing the Perfect Day game. I woke up early, forced myself out of bed

Review of Extreme Bar Mitts versus original Bar Mitts

New for this winter bike commuting season are Extreme Bar Mitts. Like the original Bar Mitts the Extreme Bar Mitts are like mittens for your handlebars that stay on the bike. You operate the controls inside of them, possibly with additional gloves or mittens on. I have long, thin fingers

Review: Yuba Mundo vs Xtracycle EdgeRunner (like Stoker)

This is a guest post by Don Galligher of a Yuba Mundo and Xtracycle Edgerunner which is similar to the Xtracycle Stoker that replaced it. Neither model reviewed here has electric. This review compares the 2013 Yuba Mundo cargo bike with the 2014 Xtracycle 27D EdgeRunner. My daughters have named

How to attach a Burley Piccolo to a Yuba Mundo

The Yuba Mundo is a great bike for carrying young children, and the Burley Piccolo is a great way to extend a bike so that child from ages 4 to 10 can help pedal. With our Burley Piccolo, our older child is happier riding than sitting, as parents we get

The comments a mom gets when cargo biking with kids

The following post was written by wife in 2013. Reviewing it now as we head into 2023, the comments still sound familiar. I get a lot of comments when I am riding my Yuba Train with the kids. They are usually mostly positive and sometimes make me crazy with irritation.

How a car-loving mom found herself running errands with two kids by bike

A guest post by Mrs S. I don’t consider myself a hardcore cyclist, but after completing the April 30 Days of Biking Challenge and now having signed up for the Endomondo National Bike Challenge I have to admit to myself that at this point I am bicycling with at

Hauling couches by bike

Couches are fun to haul by bike. Workcycle's bakfiets, pictured above, is not particularly well-suited for the task, as the couch is much too large to fix in the box. That didn’t stop it from being fun to make it work, anyway. The best choice for hauling

Best practice for handling UTF-8 when percent-encoding?

In my previous post I summarized the current state of Percent-encoding in Perl. One of my conclusions was that the perfect percent-encoding solution would automatically handle UTF-8 encoding, using logic like this: utf8::encode $string if utf8::is_utf8 $string; Respected Plack author miyagawa quickly responded in a response post

Percent-encoding URIs in Perl

This post is about the current state of URI encoding in Perl. This is the problem space of being able to safely pass arbitrary text into and out of a URI format. If you've even seen a space in URL represented as "%20", that's

First Christmas tree by bike and the day I bought Bar Mitts

In previous years I had done the Christmas tree recycling by bike, but this was first year I picked up the Christmas tree by bike. It was about a 15 mile round trip to the tree farm in Centerville, Indiana from Richmond with snow falling and temps in the mid

Hauling 800 lbs of e-waste with an electric cargo bike

I needed to move about 800 lbs of e-waste from a church where I had a project to collect it to a location a mile away where there was an annual RecycleForce e-waste collection drive. The Yuba Mundo is rated to carry over 400 lbs of cargo and the Bikes-at-Work

A car replacement day with an electric Yuba Mundo

Today was a car replacement day with the electric Yuba Mundo. My wife and child rode it about 20 miles around town for various trips that would have otherwise been done by car. I pedaled as hard as I could to keep up. Smiling. We stopped by the grocery on

How to haul a 32 foot ladder

This was Ron’s solution for getting a 32 foot ladder home from the store. The store as only about 2 miles away, and the ladder weighs only about 50 pounds, so using a using 4,000 pound car seems like a particularly inefficient solution. That is, if Ron had

Richmond, Indiana: Completing U.S. 27 piece of bike route network is essential

This message is a public comment on INDOT’s proposed renovations of U.S. 27 as it it passes through Richmond, a project budgeted at $21 million. I support the City of Richmond’s response on DES#0100701 and offer the following in support of it. What’s wrong with

generating HTTP headers: sorted or unsorted?

Recently I've been reviewing  how various Perl frameworks and modules generate HTTP headers. After reviewing several approaches, it's clear that there are two major camps: those which put the response headers in a specific order and those which don't. Surely one approach or the

The cost of saving sent e-mail

I don't tap my own phone.  I don't xerox postcards before I mail them back from vacation. I don't take a voice recorder when I go out with friends. And I don't have a copy machine at home to duplicate hand written

Modifying PDFs so they open full screen

The PDF spec includes an option to cause PDFs to open full screen when users open them. I'm a fan of the feature because it maximizes screen real estate and creates a simple, focused, experience for the PDF readers. Using this option is one of my two essential

Stewardship and Sustainability of our online lives

A few weeks ago I had my laptop stolen. Earlier that morning I had been reflecting and writing on the laptop about the intersection of our spiritual lives with our digital lives. And then, as if by divine intervention, my laptop disappeared-- during church service no less-- and I was

Cargo bike touring with an 18 month old

So I had this crazy idea to take a heavy, hundred pound bike on a five day, 220 mile bike trip through the rolling hills of Southeastern Indiana. To make the trip more interesting, my 18-month old, 30-pound daughter would ride in the bike I pedaled. My wife and retired

New Bikes-at-Work Trailer

My new eight foot cargo trailer from Bikes at Work. (See more photos on Flickr). It's rated to haul up to 300 lbs, or cargo up to 15' long. These trailers seem to make an appearance in so many bike move videos because of their ability to

I lowered the gear range on my bakfiets cargo bike and I didn't regret it

I used to have a Workcycles bakfiets cargo bike with a Shimano Nexus 8 rear hub. Here are some notes on the original and lower gearing. The change was great and I kept it for years, even taking the heavy bike on a multi-day tour. My only regret is that

Against Mandatory Helmet Law for 18 and Under

This was originally written in response to specific proposed law in Indiana which failed to pass. In case a similar bill gets introduced again, here are my thoughts on the topic. Mandatory helmet laws are a point of controversy of cyclists. Many cycling organizations and riders advocate for voluntary helmet

Effective bike advocacy in the face of declining city budgets

One approach to bike advocacy is to believe that persuading the the right people in government is the way to get things done. Here in Richmond, Indiana, the issue is generally not getting the local government on board to support cycling, it’s that the city budget seems to be

Richmond, Indiana hardware recycling growing

The Richmond Church of the Brethren provides free space for me and some other volunteers to operate this "Hardware Coop".  We take in computer hardware that people are ready to get rid of. As our resources permit, we test it, spec it, label and inventory it, install Linux

Fix cold wrists winter bike commuting with DIY sleeve extenders

Wrists are prone to getting cold while winter bike commuting. With arms stretched out to reach the handlebars, a gap appears between jacket and gloves. When my wrists are cold, I’m cold. I tried jackets with sleeves that cinched over my gloves. These slipped. I tried giant over-mitts that

A guide to DIY bike route maps: How the Richmond, Indiana bike route was made

In 2008, Richmond, Indiana had maps printed for a network of recommended bike route map developed by experienced cyclists. The city government endorsed and supported the project but was did not lead the effort or fund it. You can preview the front and back of the 17×22 map online.

First Saturday with a bakfiets cargo bike

Our first cargo bike arrived eight months before our first baby so I had some time to break it in. My wife and I kept it busy from breakfast to dinner. This was back in 2007 before Strava, so there's no GPS trace of the route, only the

The virtues of a small hard drive

A small hard drive is a like a small house. Less to clean. Yesterday I got a visual alert that my drive was 99% full (Thanks for the hint, Ubuntu!). I responded immediately in two ways. First, I immediately searched Ebay for hard drives that were are least 60 GB

Bike Tour Journal: Richmond, Indiana to central Kentucky and back 2007

This was a 293 miles (472 km) trip over 8 days from May 12, 2007 to May 19, 2007 on a RANS V-Rex recumbent bicycle. Introduction Howdy, here are some notes from my most recent bicycle tour. I'm writing with an audience of current and potential bicycle tourists

Recumbent bike helped with Sciatica recovery

A newer, longer version of this post has been published at Building and Maintaining a Healthy Back. My journey to recovery is also covered in this episode of the Glen Merzer Show podcast: * Two years ago I was diagnosed with a herniated disc in my back. This caused my sciatic

The Story of the Golden Bicycle

With the sun rising in the distance, I found myself staring at a golden bicycle, abandoned by a dumpster. I’m not talking about a standard golden paint job. This was an all-over, no holds barred spray paint job. The seat was golden. The tires were golden. The water bottle

Open Source Software: Presentation Talking Points

I recently gave a presentation about the culture and values of open source at a local church I roughly covered the following bullet points. I've linked to points to pages with further context. * The Four Freedoms of Open Source Software * Accountable and Accessible Leaders * Open Source Is A

Wheelchair as a DIY camera dolly

In college I got the opportunity to help film a TV production using an ingenious low budget budget dolly. ( the following page about the handy-cam was taken from Bill Nixdorf's website at geocities. ) THE HANDY-CAM Made from 1 1/2" square tubing and a wheel chair, this

Linux: The Tinker Factor Wins the Day

The Ritchie family had a classic computer problem to solve. They had a used digital camera which didn't "just work" with either Linux or Windows in their home. The photos from the camera showed up on both, but didn't download properly on either. They

Open Source: Culture Shifting Software

For the last six or so years, I've been directly participating in the open source software movement. I maintain the popular Data::FormValidator perl module. I regularly participate in several other projects through mailing lists, bug reports and direct feedback. I have found the open source software community