• 5,300 feet of climbing in the Peak District

    Posted on April 20, 2011 by Dave Comment

    I’ve just finished a sprint finish for the first draft of my dissertation which is why I haven’t done any cycling for nearly two weeks, which is unfortunate because the weather has been ideal pretty much the whole time. In celebration of completing the first draft (which admittedly has a few flaws) I went on two rides today. The first was up to Flash and Longnor, the second up just to Leek and then out to Calton Moor and back. I’m using the Cateye numbers for everything except ascent because My Tracks stopped recording the last part of the second ride.

    Flash and Longnor

    Distance: 37.98 miles
    Time: 2:35:32
    Average speed: 14.6 mph
    Total ascent: 1001m
    Route: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=207821707968317225632.0004a15d52c6c365fa193&z=11

    The maximum speed of 44.3 mph is a slight increase above the previous record of 43.4 mph.

    Leek and Calton Moor

    Distance: 27.65 miles
    Time: 2:03:55
    Average speed: 13.3 mph
    Total ascent: 615m
    Route: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=207821707968317225632.0004a15db7b32b23acc9a&z=12

    Adding both together that’s 5,300 feet of climbing in 65 miles. The average speeds are low compared to those of routes in Cambridgeshire and I’d normally expect to be faster on the second route, but then I had already done a fair distance. There are a decent number of hills in there, it was my first time on the bike in nearly two weeks, and I’m reasonably sure it’s the most climbing I’ve done in a day on a bike. Overall I’m pretty pleased.

    I got a nice picture up at Flash too (the same spot as before but the weather was better today):

    1303293151914

    Here is the Google Doc with all the stats:
    http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?
    key=0At0EKwdiLZmYdFg4Mk9fdHltdWlGeWpQTHMzM3RjU3c&hl=en_GB

    This entry was posted in Cycling and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

  • North East Staffordshire 12 & Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks 2

    Posted on April 20, 2011 by Dave Comment

    (Thursday, April 7th)

    Very short route just for comparison with the last time around (Dec 31 2010). Speed back then was 23.96km/h, speed this time was 28.45km/h; a reasonable improvement (just over four minute reduction).

    Route:


    View North East Staffordshire 12 in a larger map

    (Friday, April 8th)

    Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks turns out to be pretty good so I went out and did it again, at the same average speed of 15.9mph. My Tracks seems to have failed to record the start this time but was fine with the end.

    Route:


    View Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks 2 in a larger map

    Here is the Google Doc with all the stats:
    http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?
    key=0At0EKwdiLZmYdFg4Mk9fdHltdWlGeWpQTHMzM3RjU3c&hl=en_GB

    This entry was posted in Cycling and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

  • Wetley Rocks-Flash-Wetley Rocks, Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks

    Posted on April 6, 2011 by Dave Comment

    (Monday, March 28th)

    I’m back home for a few weeks now. Having made reasonable progress with my dissertation this morning I decided to get out on the bike and head into the Peak District that’s located so conveniently nearby. The hills are a pleasant change from the flatness and windiness of Cambridgeshire.

    Wetley Rocks-Flash-Wetley Rocks is a 40.46 mile route that on the way out goes through Cheddleton, Leek, Blackshaw Moor, Upper Hulme, and on the way back goes through Dove Head, Longnor, Warslow, Onecote, Bottomhouse, Ipstones, Froghall, Kingsley and Kingsley Moor.

    The route includes over 3000 feet of climbing (the My Tracks recording stopped 48.82km in and reported 996m, while the Route Tracer import completed and reports 910m; assuming the My Tracks version was more accurate it is reasonable to extrapolate – there are still plenty of climbs towards the end – and assume the elevation gain was actually at least 1100m; over 3000 feeet). The A53, used between Leek and Flash is actually quite reasonable for cycling on, at least at the time that I was using it.

    Maximum speed according to Cateye was 43.4 mph; this is the fastest I’ve gone on a bike yet. On the majority of descents I didn’t dare stop braking, and there were a few valleys that I went into slower than I climbed out of because the amount of surface gravel meant that if I’d needed to stop while descending at anything more than a crawl I’d have been in big trouble.

    Average moving speed according to Cateye was 14.6mph, and according to the My Tracks Route Trace import, 22.31km/h. This is no doubt mostly due to the the amount of climbing, but possibly in part to the amount of back pain I had for the last 10 miles or so.

    Route:


    View Wetley Rocks-Flash-Wetley Rocks in a larger map

    A couple of photos from Flash:

    img_20110328_165759 img_20110328_165707

    British Summer Time is great (photos taken at ~5pm)!

    (Wednesday, April 6th)

    Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks is a 27.61 mile (according to Cateye) route that on the way out goes through Cheddleton, Leek, Bradnop, Bottomhouse and Waterhouses and on the way back goes through Cauldon Low, Whiston, Froghall, Kingsley and Kingsley Moor. An extra bottle cage and bottle that I’d ordered turned up yesterday and it’s a good thing they did; I got through both, but then, today has apparently been the hottest April 6th on record. Average moving speed (again according to Cateye) was 15.9 mph.

    Although My Tracks has had this habit of failing to completely record tracks before, I’ve worked around it in the past by importing GPX files (exported from Route Tracer) to My Tracks. I can’t do that today because I’ve stopped recording Route Traces, as the project is now winding down (I intend to have a first draft dissertation ready on Friday).

    Route:


    View Wetley Rocks-Calton Moor-Wetley Rocks in a larger map

    I’ve noticed that a lot of A roads in Staffordshire are comparable in size, surface quality and traffic levels to B roads and lanes in Cambridgeshire, while many B roads and lanes in Staffordshire seem more like dirt tracks. This is the reason this route is entirely on A roads; the openness (in terms of visibility) and better surface quality make them feel safer than smaller roads to me.

    Here is the Google Doc with all the stats:
    http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?
    key=0At0EKwdiLZmYdFg4Mk9fdHltdWlGeWpQTHMzM3RjU3c&hl=en_GB

    This entry was posted in Cycling, Site News and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

  • How to make PulseAudio work with Nvidia HDMI audio outputs under Fedora and Ubuntu

    Posted on March 26, 2011 by Dave Comment

    Normally the sound setup for my machine consists of a pair of Wharfedale speakers and a Temple Audio Bantam XC2 amplifier. Due to the fact I’ll be returning home later this morning for my final Easter vacation, pretty much everything I have is packed up in boxes right now; the machine and screen remain on the desk, however. Driven by the desire to listen to music while I finished packing, I decided to get output over HDMI working (having had problems with it in Fedora [14] and Ubuntu [10.10] in the past). I have an iiyama monitor which has speakers built in and is connected to a GTX 470 graphics card by HDMI.

    The problem was that although the PulseAudio Volume Control applet (pavucontrol) showed the output (as “G100 High Definition Audio Controller (HDMI)”), when I redirected output streams to the device I simply heard no sound. As I didn’t have this problem under Windows I knew it was a software issue.

    After some more experimentation using aplay I figured out that the problem was due to PulseAudio outputting to the wrong HDMI subdevice. This I did by running aplay -l:

    [dhpiggott@panther ~]$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889 Analog [ALC889 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889 Digital [ALC889 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: NVIDIA HDMI [NVIDIA HDMI]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

    I then tested out each subdevice to determine which actually produced sound:

    aplay -D hw:1,3 testsound.wav
aplay -D hw:1,7 testsound.wav
aplay -D hw:1,8 testsound.wav
aplay -D hw:1,9 testsound.wav

    I found that 7, 8 and 9 would produce sound while 3 did not. Assuming the problem was that PulseAudio was using 3, I set about changing that:

    1. Open /etc/pulse/default.pa
    2. Find the line “load-module module-udev-detect” and comment it out with a #
    3. Paste in at the end of the file entries that will manually load the necessary modules for your hardware. In my case:
    load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:1,7
    load-module module-alsa-sink device=hw:0,0 (necessary so I can also use the Wharfedale speakers, since it will no longer be autoloaded).

    Having done this a simple killall pulseaudio was enough to make things work; I could resume Spotify playback and then redirect it successfully to the iiyama speakers using pavucontrol. One problem that came about was that the volume hotkeys on my keyboard stopped having any effect on actual audio volume as they weren’t being mapped to the right sink. Before I got a chance to look into it more I’d had to reboot the machine to move some cables, and this turned out to be enough. Perhaps even just logging out and back in again would have been sufficient.

    Hopefully this guide will help a few people; I came across plenty of posts by people having the same problem when I Googled it but no solutions.

    Notes:
    1. The system I did this on is running Fedora 14. As such I haven’t actually tested the solution on Ubuntu 10.10, but I know that the same problem exists from when this machine ran Ubuntu.
    2. It may be necessary to unmute the HDMI output channels using alsamixer (press F6 when in alsamixer to change device, press m to toggle mute/unmute status).

    This entry was posted in Site News, Software and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

  • Cambridge-Huntingdon-Cambridge, SO42

    Posted on March 25, 2011 by Dave Comment

    Cambridge-Huntingdon-Cambridge is a 56 mile route that on the way up goes through Coton, Hardwick, Childerley Gate, Great Cambourne, Elsworth, Hilton and Godmanchester. On the way back down it goes through Hartford, Wyton, Houghton, St. Ives, Fenstanton, Fen Drayton, Swavesey, Over, Willingham, Rampton, Cottenham, Landbeach, Waterbeach, Horningsea and Fen Ditton.

    Average moving speed on this was 24.04km/h according to My Tracks. Some reasons for the really poor speed: 1) I underestimated how much food and water to take and thus got “the bonk” about 10 miles before the end; up ’till this point my speed had been pretty good 2) 24.04km/h is incorrect; I again had to import the Route Trace as the HTC Hero failed to log a few stretches, and this introduces errors – the Cateye measurement is 16.3mph, which equals a slightly better 26.23km/h 3) This was my first time out cycling in two weeks, due to my work load being very high (and it continues to be) 4) My sleeping pattern during those two weeks was pretty bad, and I was mildly ill last weekend.

    Route:


    View Cambridge-Huntingdon-Cambridge in a larger map

    Cambridge Semi Oribital 42 average moving speed: 29.38km/h as reported directly by My Tracks (for the first time in a long time the GPS never lost the fix). Interestingly, My Tracks reports 27.74km/h if I import the GPX file exported from Route Tracer. This demonstrates the approximate amount of error added by the fact that My Tracks treats GPX files as pure and doesn’t filter them as it does data it records itself. It also suggests that a lot of my recent rides are reported as being slower than they actually were.

    Route:


    View Cambridge Semi Orbital 42 in a larger map

    Here is the Google Doc with all the stats:
    http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?
    key=0At0EKwdiLZmYdFg4Mk9fdHltdWlGeWpQTHMzM3RjU3c&hl=en_GB

    This entry was posted in Cycling and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.


  • dinamic_sidebar 4 none

©2012 piggott.me.uk Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS)  Raindrops Theme