Al’s WebLog

Two recent warranty issues have had me thinking a little about the backup behind bike things. You kind of take a warranty for granted when you bike a bike or a frame. The manufacturer says that if due to a manufacturing or design issue you break it they’ll replace it. Great. So when I recently found a crack in the seat tube of my Ragley Blue Pig X I though “No problem, I’ll take it back to the LBS and get it sorted.”

So I did just that, and to be fair my LBS were great. They asked about the seatpost length and insertion and from there agreed the seat tube shouldn’t have cracked and got in touch with Hotlines to sort a replacement frame. This isn’t the place for me to explain what a pain Hotlines are to get anything sorted with, but after 2 weeks of my LBS trying to speak to the one person who can seemingly do something about a warranty it transpired that Hotlines had no frames. Another couple of days of chasing and it came to light that Ragley no longer made the Blue Pig X Swapout, but I’d be able to get a Blue Pig mid-December.

That was late October. So 2 months or so to get a replacement frame. Not the same frame I had mind, no swapouts, no nice Columbus main tubes, just a straight Blue Pig. But its OK ‘cos I’d get refunded teh difference. Hmmm. Then I did a bit of digging. Ragley have redesigned the Blue Pig for 2013, mine was less than 18 months old. Its not the same bike I had, the frame has different tubes, braces, headtube gussets, cable routing… possibly more, no public details are available. Frankly, its not the bike I bought and not the bike I wanted. But I’m stuck with it, because Hotlines kept no spare frames for warranty.

Its now January, mid-December turned out to be Hotlines having no clue. That date was when they got the first production sample air-freighted over to check before signing off production. Mid-March seems to be the expected arrival for the frames now. That’ll be nearly 6 months of having no frame. Don’t forget the replacement one isn’t the same and isn’t (in my opinion) as good.

Contrast that with my recent dealings with Trek. In late November I noticed I’d cracked the chainstay of my 2011 Fuel EX, a now 2 year old bike. I couple of photos sent over and Trek confirmed they’d send over a new one, but they had nothing in stock ’til later in December. OK, I’ll have to wait (practised thanks to Ragley). Mid-December and an email to Trek reveals the boat won’t me in before Christmas, but no prob, they’ll send over a wrong coloured swingarm for me to get riding over the Christmas break. Ace!

Swingarm swapped over, riding merrily, I noticed (‘cos now I’m looking more) a hairline crack in the main frame, between the seat tube and top tube. Burgers. No sweat though it seems, as Trek are on the ball. No 2011 front triangles for the EX9 left, but would I like a 2012 one? Yes I would. A week later (with New Year in between) and two boxes arrive, one with a front triangle, one with a colour matched swingarm. No fuss, no bother. Nice.

So this got me thinking. The next time I’m buying something, like a frame or a whole bike, its worth thinking about what happens down the line if, when, it goes wrong. Its all well and good having a 5year warranty of a frame, but if a year later its not longer made and there are no spare ones about, that warranty is, frankly, worth shit.

I’m not really sure why this is here anymore. All I ever do is apply WordPress updates and think “Wow, its been a while hasn’t it”. I’m not sure that the idea of a personal blog is that appealing in the modern era of Facebook (not that I ever post there either) and Twitter. Perhaps then I’ll just bump along for another two and a half years until I post again. Who knows.

Given the density of distilleries on Islay (and the closeness of Jura) it seemed silly not to take the bike with me when I was up there last week. I guess you could say its like munro bagging, but with distilleries. All in all it was about 130miles of riding, on road, but the big ‘ol Maxxis were handy given the general lack of road quality! I’m pleased to say the 456 was great and survived its first proper trip (and only its 3rd, and 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th rides) perfectly

My trusty Santa Cruz Heckler is almost 5 years old. Its seen a few changes in that time, primarily a change from a DUC32 to a Pike, but on the whole its been a great bike I enjoy riding. About a year ago I flirted with a Chameleon frame instead, but for various reasons, primarily trying to make it do to many things, I just didn’t get on with it, so it went and the Heckler stuck around. Since then I’ve been pondering a new Heckler, looking out for something else with a bouncy back end and generally thinking that actually the Heckler is great so why change it.

Fresh out of the box, looking quite lovely in blue. The new 456.

So then, why is it that there is a new On-One 456 frame sat next to me as I type this? Well, itchy feet really. Bob swapped her Yeti DJ for a Cotic Soul a month or so back and it got me thinking about trying a hard tail again. I’d been following Brant Richards’ new ventures too, and his Blue Pig made a lot of sense, and if it wasn’t for it not being available and being twice the price of the 456 (£55 cheaper these days than when I last looked is the 456! Cracking value!) I’d have had one of them. But, at 125 quid and just coming back into stock, I kinda half impulse, half plan purchased the 456. At the price if it doesn’t work it won’t break the bank. At 5.8lbs it won’t save me much weight, but that’s not the plan. The plan is to try something new, have a new riding experience, get back to more XC riding… we’ll see. Hopefully she’ll be built up by the weekend (just swapping everything over from the Heckler) and I can take her for a spin.

When the hard disk in your cheapy PBR appears to play up, most people, I suspect, would select teh format option and hope for the best. Oddly, I’m not most people So, armed with some info from a random website I cracked open my Digihome PVR80 and pulled out the misbehaving disk. As the disk is ext2 I figured I’d hock i up to my Linux box, so I stuck the liberated drive into a USB2 caddy and connected it to the box. Two partitions on the disk, one small (~200MB) which seems to have some indexing file on, and one large (~78GB) which should have the data on. I say should, because despite my best efforts with e2fsck and e2salvage the partition just will not mount. xxd show the data is there and the inodes in about the right places, but nope, nothing works. So, I install the ext2 extention for my mac and plug the drive in, cue Mac crashing in a new and interesting way…

Weird crash screen when ext2 drive connected

At this point I kind of figured the drive was fubar and I should just call it a day. But then I remembered that random link and it mentioning DiskInternal’s Linux Reader, so I fired up my Netbook, installed the software and connected the drive. Success!

The files for the videos are stored one directory per show, with the data in 188MB chucks of .trp file. VLC wouldn’t play them, so I downloaded a trial of iSkySift Video Converter for my Mac and pointed it at two .trp files that I’d pulled off the disk so far (copying the .trp files takes ages, I assume that the Linux Reader software isn’t slow and its rather that the disk is knackered, but its taking about 30mins per 188MB file to copy them). The results were good, taking about 20mins per .trp file to convert to mpeg4 for the AppleTV, so I bought license.

As of now I’ve recovered 38.2GB of trp files from the disk and it’ll take about 3 days to convert them all to mpeg4… but I have them Now to try reformatting the disk and hoping thr PVR works once more.

An evening of little updates is quite rewarding. Things like sorting the cert on my IMAP server so it’s not expired and now works properly on my iPhone, plus moving this here blog to WP 2.7(.1). You’d think as a techie type I’d keep my own box up to date..

The little Advent 4211 is chugging along nicely. Its never going to be a day-to-day usable machine, but for a small, light, portable thingie its fine. I chucked another gigabyte of RAM in it ‘cos it was 8quid, can’t say I have noticed any difference to be honest. Maybe I will if I Hackintosh it, which I am tempted to do at some point.

The trackpad has been made usable by a new driver I found on some forum somewhere, that enables you to disable tap-to-click. I still do not like the one button for two buttons thing and I see that someone has hacked it into two butons now which is cool. I’m not sure I can be arsed to replace the trackpad itself with an aftermarket Synaptics one, though it is tempting.

Overall, I’m quite happy with it (but I need tethering for my iPhone to go with it…)

So it’s the second Sunday in November and I have just been eating Xmas (there is no Christ left in it these days) pudding and brandy butter. True enough I am usually the first to lambast the ever earlier starting of the commercial festive period, but as this was in the name of charity, I felt I had to partake in the testing of the pudding. I may well end but burning in my own damnation now…

So I joined the masses and now have a Jesus phone. It’s more toy than phone really. We’ll see how it goes.

Quite how I’m not sure, but I passed my motorcycle test yesterday (DAS, Direct Access) with only 1 minor. Scarily I can now go and ride any motorcycle I want on a public road. Thankfully for my own safety and that of others I was quite scared enough on a Suzuki GS500 at 70mph and I have no desire to own a sports bike. Indeed, I’m not sure why I need a motorbike at all, as I work at home and you can’t stick a mountain bike on a motorbike… Still, its good fun