Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
A few days ago our dryer began making some new rattling noises when running, so I took it apart to clean and repair† it. In the process I removed the plastic paddles from the inside of the drum, as I d previously bobby pins stuck behind them, so I figured I d clean them out as well.…
I like troubleshooting things. It s basically what I do at my day job, and I m kinda good at it. Sometimes I m asked for illustrations of how I troubleshoot stuff, so I m sharing this example of figuring out a noise on my Pivot Trail 429 s cassette that cropped up yesterday when riding at Poto with some…
As much as I try to avoid them, I m unfortunately familiar with the bumps and scrapes that come with mountain biking; typically minor injuries from brushing a tree of or falling over in the dirt. A few weeks back when riding at River Bends on a far-too-worn-out tire and working on faster, flat cornering, I…
The idea of spoilers, and trying to avoid them, for everything from fiction to time-delayed sports matches, is nothing new. Discord and Reddit have special features allowing text and images to be hidden with a spoiler tag so users must click to show the content. I m planning a post about the things I learned while…
Last winter, after getting a Wahoo KICKR CORE 2 trainer and designing some variable height feet to level the bike I kept thinking about tennis ball feet. These provide a bit of give, allowing the trainer to rock and pitch a bit, reportedly making it more comfortable to ride. (And yes, for some reason I…
Even for a few-hour project, I find it interesting to look back at the various iterations of developing something. In this case it s six different versions of a slip-fit shim that latches on to our stove s knob shafts, preventing them from being pressed in turning the gas on or igniting. Kristen wanted these to help…
This past Tuesday, at the CRAMBA River Bends With Friends ride, I had a both-tires-slide-out fall on a tight, flat, sandy-over-hard trail that resulted in a pretty-decent scrape to my left calf. Why did it happen? Two reasons. One the primary reason is because I exceed my ability to handle the bike. Two,…
In the biggest clean-up to this site since back 2020 when I took the photo gallery down and static d the wiki, I ve cobbled together a new theme and logo, made a bunch of under-the-hood changes, and went waaaay down the rabbit hole automated content cleanup (fixing broken links, missing images, etc). One of the biggest…
I ve been using it for a while now, so I guess it s a good time to announce the revamp / relaunch / whatever of trailmaps.app. This is a personal project website which started one frosty January morning as I sat in an Ishpeming rental waiting for temps to rise before heading out on a fatbike…
For all the potential problems that come with vibe coded stuff, generating/composing one-off fix-it scripts can be damned handy. For example, this blog got a big tune-up over the past day: almost 2000 embedded images have been unbroken. For a lot of years I maintained a personal online photo gallery using Gallery2, but as it…