one monkey typing

I've been badly negligent in posting. Here's a quick recap

Back in February I bought a very cheap Honda Goldwing motorcycle, a 1997 model with 150,000 miles on it. 150K isn't bad at all for a Goldwing, they easily do 300K and more. I spent 6 or so weeks on it, replacing a ton of dodgy hack jobs and some worn out stuff. I got it rideable, rode about 400 miles on it, and determined that I don't like big bikes. It's in excess of 800 pounds without a rider. So I'm putting it up for sale for what I have into it. It'll probably go pretty quickly.
I'm not sad about this, there was an even chance it would go this way and I have it out of my system.

I'm getting ready for an 8 day bicycle ride in June. A few friends and I are going to ride the Erie Canal, about 400 miles between Buffalo and Albany. The plan is to have one chase driver in my pickup, who will be enjoying the sights on her own and meeting up with us end of day and possibly for lunch, whatever she likes. The rest of us will be on the trail. Since it's a canal path, it should be extremely flat, moreso even than rail-trails. We're meeting up in Buffalo with a couple from PA, leaving their car, piling into the pickup, going to Albany, then the next morning starting the ride.

My project/hobby of visiting historical markers (a thinly-disguised excuse to ride my motorcycle around to random places) got unmanageable the way I was doing it, so I'm currently spending hours moving everything to a blog. The idea is to also incorporate days out at museums, probably natural attractions, and anything else that I can in some way claim are 'historic'.

In the unlikely event that you're interested, or if you need help falling asleep, it's at historicrides.blogspot.com

I'm still singing with Out Loud Chorus, an LGBTQ+/allies choir in Ann Arbor. They outgrew their rehearsal space on the west side of Ann Arbor and are now in Ypsi, so I have about twice as far to go. Gives me an excuse to ride the bike a bit farther though honestly buzzing 70 MPH down the expressway for 30 miles at night isn't a particular treat.

We still have two cats. Jiji is pushing 18 years old now and is still in relatively good health. He has hyperthyroidism which is under control with meds. His weight is lower than I'd like but it's stable and he seems fine there so I don't worry about it much. He sleeps a whole lot, but he's a cat and it's still cold out. He still gets the rips from time to time and an occasional frolic isn't unheard-of.

I've been pushing on divesting myself of stuff I haven't used in a long time. Some amount of DSLR camera gear has gone though I still have the 80D.

There is, of course, an unending list of little things that need doing around the house and grounds. And because there's no end to them, there's sometimes little urge to start. But I do try to get to a couple a week especially if it is nice out.

Here's where I make a pledge to update here more often. It's a dirty lie.

TTFN y'all.

Oh right. I'm trying to move my social media presence towards BlueSky. A bunch of friends have established presences there. The lack of friends on a site is the reason I've not gone to several of them. Hopes high for BlueSky - quite a few prominent folks have already been there for a long time and post frequently so I'm hopeful.
Install the app or go to bsky.app to get started.

johnridley.bsky.social

Our water here destroys the anodes in water heaters, making a hydrogen sulfide smell while it's at it. I think we got past that with the old water heater because the anode was eventually completely eaten away. With the new one, a few weeks on and suddenly we have a TERRIBLE sulfur smell.

Normal anodes are zinc, they create a small dielectric current that eats away at them instead of the tank. They're sometimes called "sacrificial" anodes. They're technically meant to be replaced occasionally because they get chewed up. This is all by design.

The problem is that there's a bacteria that thrives in the conditions caused by the zinc anode along with sulfur and iron in the water.

I did a bit of research and the best solution seems to be a powered anode. It's a short piece of titanium, and a small power supply. The idea is that the titanium does NOT get eaten up, but the power supply creates the same protective effect but does not give the bacteria a place to thrive.

An alternative method is to shock chlorinate the water but this is a huge pain in the butt and has to be done at least once a year on average. It involves dumping bleach down the well, running every faucet and toilet and shower until you smell chlorine, then leaving the water system unused for 24 hours (you can't use water during this time), and then flushing that all out again. For $150 I think the powered anode is a better idea.

With a normal water heater doing the replacement is super easy. With the hybrid, a bit less so but still not terrible. I had to cut power, disconnect the wiring, drain the hot water, remove the steel top, then spin the old anode out and install the new anode. There's a bit of force involved, it's a big threaded thing. 1/2" drive socket, a long extension and a breaker bar got the job done.

I put a valve in the hot water outlet side as well. It's not required but I decided I wanted one there.

The product:



The old anode rod:


The new one installed:

It's time for computer musical chairs again. My brother's laptop finally died - it's like 13 years old and is physically wrecked and super slow anyway. I gave him the Inspiron that I had been using as a travel laptop - which gets used maybe 2 hours a year. And I found the newer version of that which is new enough to run Win11, with USB C and m.2 slots, for about $200 refurbed with a year warranty on eBay. So that's showing up today.
But I still have a few things I need Windows on my main desktop for, and I have an old laptop running Win10 for the security cameras, so I decided to combine the two. Jenn's old desktop is sitting unused, so why not that. While grabbing it, I realized that my day-to-day usage is much less intensive than running the security cams, and running Insta360. And also if I'm shuffling things anyway the machine that runs Windows should be Win11 capable, to keep getting updates.
So Jenn's 10 year old desktop is now running Linux Mint and is my primary desktop that I'm typing on now. The newish Dell that I've been running will be running Windows 11 with security cams plus the scanner, printer, and Insta360.
I had to do some creative stuff to get the monitors working with the old machine, starting with griping that I'd JUST thrown away my last VGA cable, and now I could use it. But I did find a combo of cables that got both monitors working.

I had a smallish project turn into a laundry room remodel.
Step one is nearly finished - getting the 30 year old gas water heater out of the first floor laundry room and putting a heat pump heater in the basement.
There were no unexpected incidents. I had one solder joint leak that I had a hard time fixing - somehow there was water in the pipe even though it had a clear drain. I finally jacked the pipe up a bit to make the water flow away and got it fixed.
I bought the tools and used PEX for this. Damn I should have switched from copper to PEX decades ago. SO much better. I see why plumbers don't use copper anymore unless the job specification requires it - and I don't know why anyone would ask for it. So much easier to work with, basically zero chance of a installation failure that are more common with copper, and easy to rework without having to drain the whole system.
Anyway it's in and working. Couple of little things - condensate drain and overheat relief valve need piping on them. And of course I made a gigantic mess. And the rest of the project is yet to come.

Gotta find out when the county recycling event is so I can get rid of that water heater.

Since last posting I've been on a narrowboat trip to the UK. This is my first ever international outing.
Things went incredibly smoothly. I'm told that I lucked out on pretty much everything especially at customs and security, but it does help my confidence.

I took my Yamaha motorcycle to the airport, which means free unlimited time parking very near the terminal. I was through security in about 7 minutes. I showed them my driver's license. Nobody looked at my physical passport on the departure, though I did scan it into the Delta app and it was linked to my boarding pass (which, again, nobody looked at). As I was getting on the plane they used a facial recognition thingie, that was it.

Arrival was very smooth. The automated passport machine didn't like my passport so I was diverted to a manual lane. Several of the machines seemed to be wonky, causing rescans or rejects on several people in front of me. In any case the manual lane took only 2 or 3 minutes.

I immediately hit an ATM to get out some cash to pay the balance on the boat and some walking around money, and I got a UK SIM. I really didn't need the extra 20GB I paid 10 extra pounds for, something to remember in the future. Then lots of walking at Heathrow to get to the Central Bus Terminal, then bought a ticket to Oxford/Headington Shops. It turns out I could have saved a few bucks buying the ticket on my phone instead of at the desk. I did buy on my phone for the return trip.

Once arrived in Oxford, after a moment of panic where I couldn't find my phone (it was just in a fold in my jacket), I found Dobsons' house, got the tour and settled in.



I was honestly beyond exhausted, but the weather wasn't bad and the next day was forecast to be 90*F or higher, so Perdy and I went out to do a walking tour of Oxford. I saw a ton of very beautiful and old buildings, and Perdy is a wealth of historical knowledge (as was Dermot, as I learned in subsequent days).



Dermot arrived on Monday. I pretty much stayed in and tried to recover from the time difference and the generalized headache I had from the flight.

One thing I didn't talk about until the end, we were all sharing a cough and a bit of a fever from about Wednesday/Thursday on.

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Tuesday 8/13: Lower Heyford to Aynho Wharf:

On Tuesday Kevin and Tegan arrived on a bus (off the train I believe) and Dermot and I went to collect them as they had significant luggage. The large costuming suitcase lived at their house during the boat trip.

Then later we went to the boat hire place in Lower Heyford, got everyone aboard (there is a train station a few hundred feet away by which most of the rest arrived). We got an abbreviated intro since many of the crew had already been narrowboating before.

We soon were motoring north. The first lock north of Lower Heyford is a pretty normal lock, but the next one is the Somerton Deep Lock, which is something like a 12 foot lift. It was a short day and we moored up at Aynho Wharf.



At our first mooring, Barry missed his footing (the shore was very spongy and had holes, but looked solid, so no blame here. I was closest and tried to stablize him, and got his glasses off and safely on the shore. Unfortunately Jerry also went in as well during the struggle. Eventually everyone got out and the two dunk-ees had a shower.

We had dinner at the Great Western Arms in Aynho, where Kevin asked for a draft "to go" and was given one in a glass, which he now treasures.

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Wednesday 8/14: Aynho Wharf to Banbury then on to Cropredy

We moored for lunch at Banbury, where everyone had Nando's, which was an experiment all around. Basically acceptable fast food. There were quite a few restaurants right on the canal, and across a foot bridge was Castle Quay, a reasonably large mall, and through that downtown Banbury.


After lunch and some time for shopping, we continued on to Cropredy where we had dinner at the Brasenose Arms. We ate on the patio, and "enjoyed" quite a bit of time sitting very near a very loud man. Barry wasn't feeling well and stayed on the boat.

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Thursday 8/15: Cropredy to mooring near Puddleduck Cafe

Barry was feeling quite poorly this morning. We had to determine if he could carry on since beyond this point we would have a tough time getting a taxi for him to return to someplace with better care. In the end he decided he could soldier on and indeed he did improve day by day from this point on.

It was another day of motoring along.

Just north of Cropredy is a series of 3 locks, and about a mile later a flight of 5 locks. The last of these is #17, the Claydon Top Lock, which takes us to the "summit." This means we locked up as far as this canal goes, either side of the summit you're locking down.

The water is shallow since it only flows out from here, and we heard from another boater that this summit hasn't been dredged in 30 years, and I can believe it. We hit silt quite a few times. This is a contour canal so it's extremely bendy at the summit, and on several bends the bottom of the boat hit silt and just stopped turning, insisting on going straight forward. The only solution then is to reverse hard to stop, then rudder hard over and run the engine hard to try to pivot the boat in place.

We also managed to run aground once or twice. On this leg, we were able to push off with the pole and get free.

We stopped for lunch around 2:30 at The Wharf Inn.


After lunch, we continued on 4 or 5 miles and moored up in a spot near the Puddleduck Cafe. Dinner was in the boat. It got pretty rainy during this bit, but as I didn't want to moor in the middle of nowhere, I put on a rain jacket and piloted through it.

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Friday 8/16: Puddleduck Cafe to Napton on the Hill and back to Fenny Wharf



On Friday we motored north for just a few miles, hitting some locks taking us off the summit just before going through Napton on the Hill.

We went past Napton a bit to the winding point where we turned around, then returning to Napton to moor up for lunch. We were on a slow schedule to get back by Tuesday so this was an exploring day.

Jerry, Kevin, Tegan and I went on a bit of a walk to get to the top of the hill where they say seven counties can be seen. It was a lengthy uphill walk, with a very nice view. We stopped at the Cidery on the way back, then backtracked and picked up some groceries at the post office.



The others had gone to The Folly near the canal for a meal and a round, the hill walkers joined them for our dinner as well.

After dinner we headed south again to Fenny Wharf, which means we locked back up to the summit again. We were quite late getting in, mooring up south of the marina at around 8:28 and getting scolded by a grouchypants for being on the move after 8. We later heard that the canal trust volunteers know all about Mr Grouchypants and advised us to ignore the old coot.



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Saturday 8/17: Fenny Wharf to Banbury

Saturday morning we got going sometime around 7:40.

One interesting bit of the canal in the summit is the "tunnel" (with quotation marks). It's a long, straight, very narrow bit, I think it used to be a tunnel but it's been dug out into a cut since then. There are long sections of it where it's only one boat wide. Luckily we did not meet any other boats on it in either direction.

We moored up in Banbury near Castle Quay and all set out for exploring on our own. Barry, Jo and I went right over for pizza. Dermot and Perdy also had pizza, at a different shop a few stores down.



Our first mooring at Banbury had a ground wasp next right at the boat. Unfortunately when moving it to another point, Dermot fell and bruised some ribs.

We spent the night moored in Banbury.

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Sunday 8/18: Banbury to Aynho Wharf

Sunday morning, Dermot and I went in to hit Superdrug and another shop or two, and discovered a very nice Sunday market going on in town. I bought a Greek sausage breakfast, and Dermot picked up a bag of jelly donuts for everyone. We split up and went our ways.



When I returned to the mooring point, the boat had moved on. I walked up to the water point where the rest of the crew had moved to top up the tank.

After that, it was a slow motoring along to Aynho Wharf.

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Monday 8/19: Aynho Wharf to Lower Heyford

We left getting going fairly late since we had only a very short distance to cover.



Jo took us several miles including through the Somerton deep lock. There we found a boat already in the lock, with the lower gate open. It turned out to be an older couple who had been stuck in the lock all night as they were unable to close the lower gate. We got them sorted, they locked up and we were then able to go down.



We moored up in Lower Heyford just a few hundred yards from the boat hire place around 1:45. Dermot was suffering badly from his bruised ribs, with the COVID that we all had he was coughing which hurt his ribs, and also he does not sleep well with confined air, and he had not slept at all for two nights. He walked down to the boat hire place, only a 10 minute walk, and got his car and drove home to get some proper sleep.

At about 4:45 the rest of us wandered into the village to find dinner. We went to The Bell and found there was no food Mondays and Tuesdays, which is fairly common. We stayed for a round or two, then retreated to the street where we could borrow their wifi and find a delivery. Eventually we found that Thai To Go was one of the few options, and ordered up.

We originally asked them to deliver to the canal bridge but as there's no cell signal there, I returned to the street outside The Bell and texted that maybe they should deliver there so the card machine would work. They agreed.

While waiting, Morris dancers began arriving and going into the pub. Later they came out and had a practice. I got to watch them do two pieces before the food arrived. I nearly ran to the boat to let them know what was going on but I feared missing the food.



The food came, I took it back to the boat and we had a proper meal on the boat, the first one (mostly) together of the trip, really.

We did most of the cleaning and we got most of our stuff packed up.

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Tuesday 8/20

Tuesday morning we just went about 1/4 mile down the cut to the boat hire place, cleared our stuff out and turned the boat back in. I think the total fuel bill was something like 74 litres of diesel.

Dermot met us there with just Jerry and Gehms' spare luggage that had been stored in the car. Jerry, Jo and Barry took the train to London I think, and Kevin and Tegan to Oxford. Dermot, Perdy and I took the car to Oxford.

Later on Monday Kevin and Tegan turned up at the house to pick up the costuming bag and repack some stuff.

Dermot did a COVID test and was very much positive. The whole lot of us were coughing the whole time and I was running out of energy mid afternoon most days. There's no way that anyone on such a boat won't wind up with anything anyone else has.

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On Wednesday my plan had originally been to tour Bletchley Park with Dermot. However he was not up to the drive and there is effectively no mass transit to there, so I re-thought to go to London to visit Lightroom and their Apollo show, and swing by Novelty Automation, Tim Hunkin's arcade.

However, having had a positive COVID test on Tuesday, I decided that I should not be unnecessarily carrying my germs all over and took Wednesday as a rest day. I did pick up the surprise I'd planned for Jenn, which required several walks to the hardware store.

Thursday was an early morning walk to the bus stop at Headington Shops, to Heathrow and home. Lots of sitting on busses, gates and planes.

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General notes:
For navigation, we did have the official book, but I used the open canal map app, which I found very useful, especially since I had it on me always even when walking between locks or at the pub when we talked about what to do the next day.

I traveled with just one carry-on and a sling bag, which was more than enough - I didn't even wear all the clothes I had between laundry days, and I didn't really need all of the pared-back tech I brought either.

I used our 10 year old Canon G15 camera. While it did the job, it's definitely feeling its age. I'm tossed up about replacing it. It does pretty well. A new camera would certainly improve photos and especially video, but OTOH the Sony RX100 VII that I have my eye on is something like $1300. We'll see if I can save up that much.

I used my phone to record GPX tracks, which is OK but drains the battery and isn't totally stable. I have a dedicated GPS logger on the way for future trips. Trying to figure out where we were and when has been surprisingly difficult. I think some journalling or at least note taking during the trip is definitely a good idea.

More photos here.

Yesterday I got the rocket engine tooling done. 2 or 3 hours on the lathe and generally dorking around. I also bought a bit of 2x8 and bolted the arbor press to it. I need to decide if I'm just going to leave the press up north. They're not too expensive and I don't really have a place to put it here anyway.

The remnants of hurrincane Beryl are blowing through. Lots of rain and will be continuing today. Last night the power was out for a couple of hours. The batteries were already down to the 25% reserve so we only got a couple of hours on them before they hit 10% and the inverter stopped. I moved the system to backup only this morning and it's charging from mains, since there's no way we're getting enough sun today to charge them at all and I'd like to have topped up batteries if the power goes out again.

I had thought about building a modest trebuchet, a new design I saw online, to take up north. I do have time to do it.

The lawn needed mowing yesterday. It's going to be very ragged by the time the rain stops and the lawn dries out.

Jenn's new PC is arriving today. I'll need to do some data copying but mostly it should just be ready to go. I bought a 4T SSD to drop into it for storage. I also need to set up backup to the NAS. I think before now it was just backing up to a separate spinning hard drive in the unit itself.

My PC is back running Linux, which is a relief. I've gotten to the point where I feel Windows is a definite step back, it feels clunky and slow in comparison even on a 20 core i7 12th gen with tons of memory. I was only switching back to Windows because I thought Linux was the cause of some irritating crashes.

However, the crashes were traced down to a bad memory stick. Crucial is replacing it, meanwhile I'm running in "only" 32GB and things are solid again.

While I was messing with warranty replacements, I pinged WD on the 256G SD card I sent back to them in April. They turned out to have just forgotten about it somehow, and are replacing it with their super high performance version as a "sorry."

I saw something on FB on the Yamaha Tracer group, went out and checked and sure enough, the tail tidy I put on the Tracer keeps the luggage from being mounted. I don't think any tail tidy would work with that luggage. So I put the regular tail/plate mount back on again.

I also put in a brake light flasher. I'm not super happy with the flasher, I think I could do a better pattern but until I decide to mess with it I'll just use the $8 Amazon version.

I bought an ST2 brake module - it's supposed to activate the brake light when you engine brake/downshift. It advertises as having accelerometers and gyros and has algorithms to decide when to light. This is all lies. It's a friggin' steel ball tilt switch and some simple analog circuitry to drive a relay. It's useless junk that flashes the brake light spastically whenever you hit the slightest bump in the road. Removed. Unfortunately their money back guarantee is useless since to use it you have to ship the unit back to Slovenia, which costs > $50. I did go up and find the most-watched ST2 brake videos on YouTube and splashed them all with "this is useless, here's why" and did the same on the Tracer forum. Hopefully saved a few people from wasting their money. A ton of other people had made the same comments and I didn't read them though...

We've lost two of our own in a day. Kevin Kinnell died after being in a vegetative state for months, and Dave Ihnat is failing and will have his life support removed soon. I hung out with Kevin in college and appreciated his combination of smart-assery and absolute brilliance. Dave, well Dave has been a fixture since forever. It's weird to think of the world without him.

(Archiving this here)
Not that I would have anyway, but I'm sure glad I didn't actually pay for the navigation on my Ford truck. (well, except that it was "free" with the Lariat package).
I've related before about the ludicrous routes it's tried to put me on (like telling me to go down a sandy two-track through scrub areas with a camper trailer on the back, or taking me PAST the highway turnoff so it could tell me 1/2 mile later to take a dirt path through the woods, I guess because it was a few hundred feet shorter). I should note that I have NEVER flipped the "include 4x4 routes" switch to "on."

Today I was en-route to a destination I just went to a few days ago, I was unsure on one turn so I just brought it up on nav. It told me that the route was too dangerous to tow a trailer down and refused to start the route, even though the route was visible on the screen. The "start" button was greyed out. The route was 100% good paved county roads with no significant tree or bridge overhangs.

Then I tried starting the route via voice rather than "recents" and it plotted the route, started on it, the map switched into nav mode tracking my progress, then about 10 seconds later it said "route unsuitable for towing. Use caution" - I clicked OK and it cancelled the navigation.

And the idiot thing bings at me a few hundred yards before every bridge on the interstate telling me "height restriction ahead" even when I have told it that the trailer I have attached is only 4 feet high, far shorter than the cab of the truck. I did manage to figure out how to shut that off.

Mostly the features in this truck give me something to try to figure out how to disable when they finally bug me over the edge.

I'm just happy it has Android Auto. Navigation and audio that just works. Pretty much. If I hook up via wifi, sometimes it just randomly decides the connection failed, and I can't reattach even with USB, unless I stop and turn the truck off and restart.

As for its operation as a truck, I really can't complain. It's a lovely truck and a joy to drive and just to sit in.

It is throwing a evap code, but very infrequently, only 3 times since I've had it and it clears after a day or two. The freeze frame data on the codes indicate that I was either standing still with the engine not running, or moving with the engine not running, so I suspect it's a software issue with the hybrid system.

I have occasionally felt a slight bucking that seems almost like the 4WD is engaged when just driving, but I think I would have to jack the truck up all 4 corners, or mount a camera watching the front drivetrain to see if it is engaged or not.

Gearing up. Wednesday was picking up borrowed platforms from a school, then taking everything in the trailer to the auditorium on north campus and setting up. Then tech rehearsal ran from 7 to 10.
Today is dress rehearsal at 7, then Friday and Saturday performances. This should be fun. I'm looking forward to seeing the whole thing especially the solo acts that we haven't heard through yet.