"Our opponent is an alien starship loaded with atomic bombs."

"We have a protractor."

The funniest line in Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I'm rereading it four years later and there's a bunch of little things I missed the first time.

That quote sums up how I feel about fighting the GOP sometimes...

What are your favorite funniest lines in SF?

Performance, by MC SpandX

Performance, that's the name of the game
I pump up my tires and I oil my chain.

James Blackshaw: Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death

1685 MPG

Yep, that's the EPA equivalent mileage I'm getting on my electric recumbent bike I posted about here a few weeks ago.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11282343

The EPA says a gallon of gas is equal to 33,700 watt hours of electricity and I've now had an opportunity to measure how much juice my bike uses, 20 watt hours per mile. Divide it out and you get 1685 mpg.

Even a moped has a really hard time breaking 150 mpg, so my ebike is roughly ten times as efficient in energy use per mile as a moped.

135 mph downhill pedal bike

When was your first actual job and how much did you make?

And how much would it be in today's dollars?

You can find out what your pay would have been here.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

For me it was 1969 and I made $4.00 an hour which would be $25.37 today.

You ever notice when you're driving that everyone going faster than you is criminally irresponsible?

And that everyone going slower than you is a moran?

The only people who really, really know how to drive are those who go exactly the same speed as you and you're not always sure about them really, particularly the ones who evidently are addicted to the odor of your exhaust fumes.

Ahem..

Well, politics is kind of like that, or at least DU and every other political forum I've been on since 300 baud modems were the latest tech.

Everyone to the left of you is a cretin and everyone to the right of you a sociopath.

Carry on, I'll be out in the shop doing the spring tuneup on my flamethrower.

Off the wall programming problem

So, I have one of these..

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1350

And I want to talk to it over USB with my PC in order to access the A/D converter and digital outputs but all their examples, SDKs and code are in languages that might as well be Carthaginian as far as I'm concerned, my last programming experience was with Visual Basic for DOS although I do speak FORTH and several varieties of assembly language and even some machine code. I find modern high level languages very confusing to use and have avoided them for a long time now.

I've found the language QB64 that's free and I think I can handle and I've actually managed to send a byte or two to the board through the USB but it triggers an error code every time and I can't figure out what to do to fix it.

http://www.qb64.net/

I used this code to open the (virtual) COM port to the USB.

http://qb64.net/wiki/index.php?title=OPEN_COM

Then I used GET and PUT to send and receive bytes from the device but as I say, I get an error (red light on the board) every time. I've been scratching my head over this for a couple of weeks now and if someone has an understanding of it I'd sure appreciate a hand. The manufacturer's help forum isn't much good to me because none of them seem to be really familiar even with VB6 and something like QB64 is well beyond their ken.

Here's a link to the relevant section of the docs on the board but I'm so out of practice with this stuff I'm having a hard time understanding it.

http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J40/all#5

Crossposting my latest ride from Frugal & Energy Efficient Living group

I've posted both of the bikes I use and have used for a lot of my transportation here, the first one is my recumbent BikeE that I've had for about six years and the latest which is still on the front page of F&EEL is the folding electric I bought a little while back.

I finally realized that I disliked the riding position on the folding ebike to the point I was riding my non assisted bike in preference even though the ebike is much easier to climb hills with so being a handy soul I decided to combine the electric power system of the folding bike with the comfort of my recumbent.

There's really not much to say, I stripped the electric bike of the essentials, the rear power hub wheel, the electronic control system, the battery, the handlebar twist throttle and brake levers with cutoff switches built in. With a little hacking I managed to get it all to work very well. The bent is a couple of mph faster than the folder, fourteen or fifteen instead of twelve or thirteen on pure electric for two reasons, more aerodynamic riding position and much better tires, the knobby horrors on the folder wore like iron and pedaled about as hard, the ones I have on the bent are fat balloon tires that have very thin sidewalls and are made to soak up bumps while rolling very easily, Schwalbe Big Apple's if anyone is interested.

Here's my bent as it looked in 2011.



Here's the folding ebike I got for $100.



And here is the bent with the electric bits added, the combo is very sweet indeed, I'm stronger on the bent than a standard bike anyway, I push against seat back, so the setup goes up hills like a rocket compared to just leg power alone. The battery weight is nice and low and centered so it's actually hard to tell it's on the bike, the handling is a lot less twitchy at speed than the folder was and I can see better because I'm looking forward rather than down. The hardest part of riding the bent is starting off from a stop going uphill, you have to push hard on the pedal and get the other foot up quickly to continue with the pedaling motion, the electric power solves that problem entirely, it's great, I don't have to worry about shifting down for every stop.

And most of all it's comfortable.

A new seat cover and a repaint job in safety yellow is coming soon, I'll paint the battery and brackets the same color and cover up the electronics and virtually no one will know it's electric. The bike looks so different anyway people don't focus on the details of it well.







I paid $300 for the bent about six years ago and with the $100 I paid for the electric I now have a $400 EV that's comfortable and remarkably frugal, it costs me about a dime to recharge the battery and I can go more than a dozen miles now, closer to fifteen or so.

A Synergetic Frugal Metamorphosis

I've posted both of the bikes I use and have used for a lot of my transportation here, the first one is my recumbent BikeE that I've had for about six years and the latest which is still on the front page of F&EEL is the folding electric I bought a little while back.

I finally realized that I disliked the riding position on the folding ebike to the point I was riding my non assisted bike in preference even though the ebike is much easier to climb hills with so being a handy soul I decided to combine the electric power system of the folding bike with the comfort of my recumbent.

There's really not much to say, I stripped the electric bike of the essentials, the rear power hub wheel, the electronic control system, the battery, the handlebar twist throttle and brake levers with cutoff switches built in. With a little hacking I managed to get it all to work very well. The bent is a couple of mph faster than the folder, fourteen or fifteen instead of twelve or thirteen on pure electric for two reasons, more aerodynamic riding position and much better tires, the knobby horrors on the folder wore like iron and pedaled about as hard, the ones I have on the bent are fat balloon tires that have very thin sidewalls and are made to soak up bumps while rolling very easily, Schwalbe Big Apple's if anyone is interested.

Here's my bent as it looked in 2011.



Here's the folding ebike I got for $100.



And here is the bent with the electric bits added, the combo is very sweet indeed, I'm stronger on the bent than a standard bike anyway, I push against seat back, so the setup goes up hills like a rocket compared to just leg power alone. The battery weight is nice and low and centered so it's actually hard to tell it's on the bike, the handling is a lot less twitchy at speed than the folder was and I can see better because I'm looking forward rather than down. The hardest part of riding the bent is starting off from a stop going uphill, you have to push hard on the pedal and get the other foot up quickly to continue with the pedaling motion, the electric power solves that problem entirely, it's great, I don't have to worry about shifting down for every stop.

And most of all it's comfortable.

A new seat cover and a repaint job in safety yellow is coming soon, I'll paint the battery and brackets the same color and cover up the electronics and virtually no one will know it's electric. The bike looks so different anyway people don't focus on the details of it well.







I paid $300 for the bent about six years ago and with the $100 I paid for the electric I now have a $400 EV that's comfortable and remarkably frugal, it costs me about a dime to recharge the battery and I can go more than a dozen miles now, closer to fifteen or so.