I believe gadgets help me ride my bike faster, better higher etc.

It makes perfect sense.  Take your mind off any sensations of muscle fatigue, breathlessness, dizziness and concentrate your mind on some cleaver little device telling you something interesting.  More to the point, concentrating on something which is hopefully telling you how well you’re going - despite the pain. 

So I have decided that I will never perform at my best unless I have a fancy heart rate monitor, more exactly the Polar S725x which looks like it’s made from carbon fibre (making anything look like carbon fibre immediately increases a the value by at least 50% if not 100%).  It’s about $300, that’s $200 for the device and $100 for the carbon.

If you think that’s a bit too much, just wait until you hear what it does.  It’s more than just a heart rate monitor!  It’s a watch (I think), but it also links up to your bike to measure how fast you’re wheels are spinning.  AND! it has an altitude function which monitors the air pressure and tells you how high you’ve gone up and down, unless the weather is changing of course then it just tells you about impending rain, but even that is handy!  Then, if you’ve got money to burn and legs to burn as well, you can get an energy measuring kit, which tells you how many watts you’re pumping out! 

On a side note:  I found out when I was young, that measuring your output in watts if you’re a skinny kid is very disappointing.  I found out, the energy I put out racing up some steps (in record time!) is about the same a big fat kid puts out while they’re standing in line at MacDonald’s.  Teacher’s words, “don’t worry Miles, 60W is a big figure for you…” !!

I won’t bother with the energy stuff, but I’m not completely satisfied with what the S725x is offering.  Why don’t these things include a GPS?  A GPS would be fantastic, with the height stuff, (do they do height anyway?) and the wheel speed, and the heart rate.  You could look at the data at the end of the day and know all sort of interesting (but ultimately useless info).  But the GSP could be useful at the time as well.  I’ve been lost before! Or finding those hidden tracks?  I don’t know, I’m sure it could be very useful for all sorts of things that I haven’t thought of…

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Polar is going to bring out a GPS model any time soon, (plus it would be even more expensive!)
So I am wondering if I can turn my PDA phone into a cycling companion?  Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. I can get a GPS thing for it (a Bluetooth one) I know this. 
2. I can upload street maps to it as well, a nice little side benefit of the GPS.
3. But can I get the other measurements into it as well?  Bike speed?  Altitude?  Heart rate?
4. Is making you’re own Bluetooth device hard?

So, is it possible?  Does there happened to be a bluetooth bike computer out there?  Or a heart rate monitor?
How good is GPS these days at measuring altitude and speed second by second.  (The speed is important, as you want to know you’re top speed is a real one, and not just a glitch in the GPS reception.)

I guess the Polar thingy, and a GPS for the phone would have all the ingredients, but I really don’t want to have two things hanging around.

I’ll look into it!

I thought, I had better put up a second post about that human powered flying machine thing I was thinking about.

It turns out that these things have been in steady development over the last few decades. NASA have had a couple of goes at it - they still hold the record for distance 115km done in a little under 4hrs.  Although I don’t know who to believe, NASA say 199km, FAI (who keep the records) say 115km.  Since then, the main development seems to be by Japanese students trying out for the Birdman Rally which they run there every year. The record for distance in that competition is 34km.  I guess it comes down to a matter of fitness.

So it seems I need not wonder if it’s possible, or if humans can generate enough power, apparently they can! Just on that, it seems that 200W is the figure to go on for flights of any duration. Elite athletes can conjure up more for short periods, 1600W and 1000W for a few minutes, or 2000W for instantaneous measurements.

So I want to know why we aren’t all using them to get around in? Well there’s the The Royal Aeronautical Society Human Powered Flight Group who are wondering the same thing. They have put up a prize for first sports flyer that can be used for racing and the like and a second prize for first flyer to cover the distance of a typical marathon in under 1 hour.

We I looked into it a bit more, it’s easy to see why these things aren’t common place. They can only fly in all but the stillest of air, they typically have 20m - 35m wing spans and do not handle anything more than slight turns. Not exactly convenient.

This hasn’t ended my thoughts on this though, all it’s done is make me wonder how these things can be made better. After all, someone has already flown one 115km. Now I assume that they didn’t take it all that high as they probably didn’t want to risk their life, so they’ve got to pedal constantly, which was a huge effort probably. But in reality, once the risks were reduced (ie. take a parachute), wouldn’t you get up a bit of height, pedal pedal pedal - then glide? Find a thermal maybe - pedal some more, gain even more height - then glide maybe even the rest of the way?

I left this discussion last time on whether wings or propellers are better? All the ones made so far have large propellers, driven by pedals and chains as far as I can tell. Maybe a dynamo and motor might be another option in certain circumstances as well. But what about flapping wings? Ornithopter is what you call something with flapping wings. Planes have been designed as such, but gee they look ugly! Plus, they make an unpleasant racquet. Of the radio control variety, there do seem to be a couple of exceptions. One, which has stiff foam wings looks a bit like a flapping glider, it appeared to fly effortlessly!

The only reason why I want to consider the alternative is that propellers were developed along with an engine with a rotating shaft. They went very well together at the time. The Wright Bros actually had a little 4 cylinder engine built for them which was lighter than normal. Engines were developed further and hence the propellers have their place ever since. Now considering things for human power I didn’t want to assume the propeller would be best just because they are so widely used.

But I don’t know. Maybe propellers are best, and flapping wings around is just a bit impractical. Obviously, one of the main factors is efficiency. Are they more efficient, both when in use and when not? That is, when you’re not driving flapping wings or a propeller, is the aircraft a good efficient glider? When in use, do they use the available energy efficiently?

I’ll look into that more between now and next time

I have always enjoyed thinking about human powered flight!  Why not, after all it would be good, to be able to hop on a thing something like a bike and hit the skies.  Sure it would be dangerous, but if it was possible it would be a revolution!

Anyway, I discovered something new about this the other day which I’ll get to in a moment.  But how I first started thinking about this was to wonder if nature had actually succeeded with this already?  I mean is there precedence?

So I went about looking up the biggest flying bird, just how big is it?  My search ended with the Kori Bustard, here’s the wikipedia entry for it.  Up to 34kg!! That pretty big.  There’s even a link there to a video of one flying (ok.. here it is for you).  

At that stage, I decided that if the biggest flying bird was only 34kg (only!), and even then it was reluctant to get airborne.  Well maybe it was going to be much harder to get a human up in the air at 60+ kilograms.  Not forgetting the extra weight of the device.  So what took me down that path of thought?  My first step was to consider the energy required!  More or less, I wondered, if no other animal body could output enough energy to overcome gravity, one way or another for a given size… then as far as I was concerned it was over. 

If big bird weighed 34kg, then I figured human powered flight was not impossible, just very very hard.  Let me explain one step further.  Nature had apparently hit a wall, Yep, plenty of birds are bigger than 34kg.  So it was not that birds simply didn’t get any bigger than 34kg, it was more to the point that once they got bigger - they stopped flying!  That in my opinion, didn’t bode well for human flight.

Then something popped into my head, I remembered the terradactyle!  Those things were huge.  So I went looking.  Ok so, I didn’t find those exactly, but I found the Quetzalcoatlus a Pterosaur.  These things were hanging around with the dinosaus, and left when they did.  But their size! - 12m wingspan, no 18 metres maybe and their weight? 65kg!! We have a winner!  Well, that was until I just discovered the condor like Teratorns.  These were very big birds that lived 3-8 millions years ago… apparently like overgrown condors.  Weighing 80kg! with a 8m wingspan, (or maybe 7m). 

I know all these figures are best guesses, but the bones are big!  You can even find larger estimates, but the point is… it’s been done!  Nature has created creatures that can fly, that weigh as much as humans do.  That’s a much better start.

Mind you, on a side note, I noticed that apparently aroud the times of the Pterosaurs O2 levels in the atmosphere were considerably higher than they are now.  Maybe they were turbo charged!  I was also reading that birds consume far more energy or if you like far more rapidly than humans do.  Well I guess that’s not hard considering what the majority of us do most of the time.

Now, what next?  In my head, I did a couple of quick calcs on the energy that has to be expended to keep 65kg in the air.  My mechanics is rusty… I know not all that energy has to come from the flyer all the time… but on average a significant amount of energy has to come out of them sooner or later, and how much can a human produce on average? 

That’s about it for the time being… next time I touch on this subject, I want to go over the economies of flight.  Wings vs propellers vs something else??  Propellers are great for things that spin!…but humans don’t really spin all that much - ok they do pedal, but birds flap.

In the mean time, I’ll brush up on my physics a bit and address that energy issue.

Here are a few pictures of a glass picture I’m working on.  Since the next stage of this little thing is to cut it up and reconstruct it a little, I’ve decided to take a few pictures of it while it is still in one piece.  The section you can see in the pictures is really just the base of it, there will also be a top half which will be all clear glass but with a few lumps and bumps.

Okay, so this is really just a placeholder to prevent a dead link that used to occur when somebody like you pressed on “general thoughts” just up there. 

But since I’m here I may as well make mention of those UMPC’s that seem to have come and gone even before they have come out!  I think UMPC stands for Ultra Mobile PC for those who don’t know.

(I should mention that I don’t plan on turning this into a technology blog but I just read something about these things a moment ago and since I’m here now trying to think of something to write, well…)

I’ve never been quite sure just how many varieties and sizes of computers we actually need, and what we actually need them to do?  Funny thing is, that don’t think it’s just me who’s wondering that.  I think actually nobody really know what they want to do with one of these things.  I know you can probably come up with a list of things you think you might use it for, I can to.  You see I came up with a similar list when I bought my first PDA, and I used it for a couple of those things at least once… maybe twice.  That was a long time ago now, these days I have a PDA phone which I must admit it’s very useful and I use many of its functions quite often.  Let’s see, I guess I use for:

1. A phone
2. I scribble messages down on it
3. Take the occasional photograph 
4. A calculator
5. Calendar
6. Address book
7. I play a couple of games on it.
8. Read PDF files
9. Show my Demoreel off
10. Keep files; and,
11. Occasionally, when I am very desperate I browse the internet on it.

That’s probably not a bad list, but that has taken me several years of training to remember to use those functions and still I have to remind myself to use it when I normally might find the back of an envelope to write on instead.

So where would a UMPC fit in? 

I have a laptop as well, nothing unusual, a bit big and heavy admittedly but I can carry it around.  I like it because I can use it like a normal PC, keyboard and screen, easy-to-use, easy to see.  However, I do think twice about taking somewhere because of its weight. 

So a UMPC would fit in my bag, I wouldn’t notice its weight I guess.  It can run all the applications I’m use to.  But, can I work on it like a laptop?  Probably not. Why?  Because I can’t type on it, it probably won’t recognise my speech, and I will probably find the screen too small. 

Can I watch a movie on it, probably.  But that’s not too important to me.  I simply don’t want to watch movies if I happen to be sitting in a park somewhere and at the moment I don’t have to travel very far on public transport.  What else is it good for?  Music?  No.  Data storage, maybe but my 1 GB CompactFlash card is much smaller.  Wireless Internet, now there maybe a use for it there, so do I have to signup for some sort of wireless account, will it work here?  hmmm… what would be useful, is to have internet in my car!  Maybe it’s good for that.  I’ll think about that, but in the meantime…

It seems that it has fallen into a funny position; too small to be useful like a laptop, too big to be pocket sized. 

So what is the solution?  The people who are working on these sorts of things really have to figure out a better way to communicate with such a device.  Keyboards are simply too big, that’s the problem!  And you can’t make them smaller because then our fingers are too big!  Only once a solution has been found to that problem (the keyboard problem not the fingers one!) will such a device be any more useful than a large PDA.  A large PDA by the way, is not much more useful than a small PDA, except a small PDA fits in your pocket!  I hope you see my point. 

Okay, thinking about the some more , I know handwriting recognition is getting better all the time, so maybe I should get use to handwriting things again, as I guess that’s how you supposed to communicate with a UMPC. But, I’ve only just got used to typing and even so, I can probably type faster than I write.  So, I’m not sure if that’s the right answer, who knows maybe it is?

A few years ago I would have been going on about screen size as well, but I get the feeling that rollup screens are not too far away.

I hope you enjoyed my little rant, that feels like enough for a first go.  Feel free to make a comment, any comment, it would be the first!

Cheerio, Miles 

These are all photos I took the day after Rose’s birthday celebrated in Robinson (the pub! mainly).

I can’t remember the name of waterfall we went to see, suffice to say it’s near Robinson and no, it’s not Fitzroy Falls! 

After the walk to the waterfall, we drove down the road a short way and did a different walk.  This walk sort of finished at the top of some cliffs, others might say that we were lost, and happened to be near the top of some cliffs.  Either way, it was around the point that we turned around and started walking back again. 

Fun all the same and is about as much as anyone take after a ‘Rose’ party.

This is my first post in this category!  At last I’ve got a place to put these photos up for everyone involved to see. Click on the thumbnail to see the full set.

The day was the 31st of December 2005, a day or two before that record breaking hot day in Sydney, that 45 degree day!  Wasn’t quite as hot as that, but it was hot.  Amirah and I hadn’t been climbing in a long while, so for me it was a day to take a few snaps and give climbing a go again.  As it turns out we remembered a thing or two and had fun. 

If anyone is interested in a particular photo here I do have the full size versions available, plus there are more photos from the day.  If you would like to have some more photos of someone (and you’re not a crazed stalker) email me.

Enjoy!