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I mentioned Koga-Miyata below in the post “The Bugatti of Bicycles”, it seems that the dutch company has some VERY interesting alternatives among their more normal bikes.

Something I noticed was that some of their models are made in frame sizes as large as 66cm. Which might be interesting for me given my length (~195cm).

Among their models I found the following especially interesting:

ROADRUNNER - Fairly light model (13.9kgs) with Shimano Deore components all the way. Click here for a picture. Max frame is 63cm. Fork doesn’t support low-riders.

LIGHTSPEED - Very light model (12.9 kgs) with Shimano Deore LX front and back. This one is available with a 66cm frame!! Click here for a picture. Fork doesn’t support low-riders.

TRAVELLER - Touring bike weighs a big more than the ones above (16.3kgs) but sports a bit more equipment as standard. It’s available with a 66cm frame!! Click here for a picture. Supports low-riders, but they’re not included. Uses Shimano Deore LX parts.

The all have hub-generators and diod lights as standard, saddle-bags are also standard on all of the above models.

It feels like they really live up to the standards they’ve set for themselves (check the site for a bit of brand information).

When searching the net for possible candidates for my next bike I came across the dutch company Koga-Miyata. Seems like a VERY good brand, focusing on quality and equipping the bikes with full equipment from start.

Under their “specials” category they have a bike called the Aeroblade (pdf-link) that I would call the Bugatti of bicycles. It’s custom made for each buyer and the production is limited to 50 bikes. Features a titanium frame, luxury leather handles and saddle, hydraulic disc breaks, 14 speed hub gear transmission and plenty of exclusive exotic materials such as “aluminum glass fibre coated carbon composite”. Take a look at it, it’s beautiful, but costs as much as a small car (€12.500).

I’m currently gearing up for the coming seasons, today I bought two things: a handlebar bag and waterproof shoeprotection (overshoes).

The handlebar bag is an Ortlieb Ultimate 3 Classic (same as the 4, only it includes the now optional map holder). I’ll use it for keeping all the smaller things and of course a camera. There is an inset that can be added that provides compartments and padding for a camera. However I will see if I can reuse something from one or more of my camera bags before I shell out for one.

The shoe protection looks like this.
As usual I had to buy the biggest size they had, but it fit nice and snug on top of the shoes and should keep out most of the rain and splashes. It even has a bit of fleece lining that should help keep the feet warm during the winter.

I’m still looking for alternatives to my current bike which is a very classic swedish brand Skeppshult, I’ve got the model called ARC which has the Shimano Nexus 7 hub/gears. It’s probably carried me more than 16000 kilometers by now and is holding up very well. But I’m starting to feel I should switch to something a bit more fun (lighter & faster).

Apparently Trek has a bike called Portland that they label as a commuter bike. Looks very much like a touring bike except that it doesn’t take low-riders on the fork. Another alternative could be one of the Nishiki hybrids. They’re good alternatives if a straight handlebar is preferred. I haven’t tried a racebar yet, but I think it might be good for me, since I don’t have that much traffic on the way to work. Trek’s fitness series is another candidate, atleast most of them can take low-riders (except the top-of-the-line ones).

I’m still waiting for Focus to reveal their lineup for 2007. I’m guessing there just might be something there for me.

Yesterday we attended the Royal Dramatic Theatre Lobby (!?) and enjoyed a magical evening with the Romeo & Julia Choir which is a renaissance choir connected to the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden.

The program for the evening was “The Murder in Mantua” by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643).

And the choice of locale was perfect.

It took place in The Marble Lobby which with it’s wall paintings gave the perfect setting for this piece, and the acoustics took up both the harpsichord (cembalo) and the archlute (beautiful instrument) aswell as the choir without any (acoustic) disturbances. With an audience of around 100 people it created a very intimate setting that contributed both to the story and the geniune feeling of the music and chorus.

Benoît Malmberg, the Chorus Leader took a very active role in the performance and his enthusiasm spread a feeling of joy and enjoyment. The Choir handled the Italian songs almost flawlessly and their acting on the floor was exemplary. I must also give some tribute to their clothes and costumes which felt fully authentic and was worn with ease and elegance.
This was one of THE best music experiences i’ve had this year! I will definately keep an eye out for further performances by them in the future.

I just got me a new Lamy Fountain pen. It’s the Lamy Joy, which has a 1.5mm calligraphy nib. It uses the same cap as the Lamy Al-Star and has a rubbery finish that gives a very nice grip.

I was happily surprised that my handwriting works well with the broad calligraphy nib. With use it will probably force me to work out some of the kinks in my handwriting.

Btw, the pen at the bottom of the blog is the Lamy 2000 which is my favourite pen that I use every day at work. I’ve got two versions of it. One with a ‘fine’-nib and the other with the standard ‘medium’-nib. I’ve also got a multi-color ballpoint version of the Lamy 2000, the 401 Lamy 2000. But it doesn’t see too much use since the fountain pens are so much nicer to use.

Just found this gem, the Kona Sutra 2007 among Kona’s new offerings for 2007. Looks like a nice touring setup complete with discbreaks. Supports racks etc. A bit pricey though, bare it’s somewhat cheaper than the Cannondale Touring bikes, but when racks, and flaps(?) etc. are added on it reaches almost the same pricepoint…

The big difference between them is the discbreaks which could be an advantage during Autumn / Winter seasons when things get icy and dirty. Haven’t seen the prices for the 2007 Cannondales yet, and there are a lot of alternatives at this pricepoint.

I just registered for a discounted upgrade of LWCAD 1.5 to LWCAD 2.0 by WTools3D. There is currently a upgrade drive by Newtek Europe that lasts until 20th of August. There has been some massive improvements of the tools since the 1.x series. Check out the tutorials…
I’m very much looking forward to putting it to use. The first two things will likely be to model the new Server cabinet for the kitchen, more on that later.

The other will be the hifi-bench that needs to store all of our CD’s and DVD’s. I’ve reached the conclusion that drawers is the only viable solution for media storage (m^3 storage instead of m^2). I’ll put up some drawings when they’re ready.

Daniel Nylander gave me a tip to check out Workrave which is a small application that helps you avoid work-related injuries by reminding you to take breaks etc.

It keeps track of how long time you’ve spent actively at the computer and tells you to take small micro-breaks (30 seconds) and longer coffee-breaks (10 minutes), with the longer breaks is also a small exercise program to loosen up the joints after a computer session.

However, one of the best things for me is that it keeps track of the time spent at work (something I’m hopeless at). I just need to remember to put it to sleep during lunch and it will keep accurate track of the working hours.

It’s written using GTK+ and runs under Linux / Windows, should be possible to get it running under MacOS X without much troubles I guess. It’s opensource and freely available, and it’s got  a cute Sheep that lives in the systray :O)

Download WorkRave and give it a try.

Saw this Portable Rotary Phone on the newspages today. They’ve actually outfitted a really old (50 years) rotary dial phone with batteries and triple-band gsm.

Here is a writeup on what they did and how they did it. And here is an mp3 of the ringtone :o)

This one reminds me of the wonderful retro-handset that was seen about a year ago on the net, however that one was atleast remotely useable.

The Portable-Rotary-Phone could hardly be called useable (I wonder how you use it for text-messaging).

I’ve been looking at setting up some central server or possibly NAS-solution for quite some time now.

It would provide a central location for storage between the machines here at home, currently it’s quite annoying that some data is on the laptop and some on the workstation, by having a high-performance network storage unit available this would ease things.

Another requirement is that it provides a reliable and secure storage for data, especially backups and photos which would be awful to loose.

Most NAS solutions that don’t cost and arm and a leg do not provide the reliability required. Typically they are just a USB-drive featuring an ethernet port. And on top of that almost none of them support Gigabit-ethernet which caps the transfer speeds at around 8-9MB/s (theoretically you can achieve 10MB/s, but not sustained).

My requirements for a NAS are the following:

• Reliability, it must support RAID
• Expandability, one drive will not be enough for the whole household so support for 3-4 drives is basically an requirement.
• Low maintenence, I’ve got too many other things to mess with and care about to spend time with a tricky DIY solution.

I’ve found three major possibilities for a household NAS that would fulfill the above requirements.

1. The DIY solution, dig up some old hardware in the closet and buy some hotswap capable cage and disks for storage. Then install NASLite on the machine and everything is up and running in notime. NASLite is available both for free and for next to nothing, and provides almost a plug-and-play solution from COTS-hardware. It boots from either a Floppy or a USB-memory and support all major Operating Systems.
2. Commercial solution, there are a couple of decent vendors of NAS solutions that cost a bit, but not as much as the enterprise solutions. The most promising I’ve found is the Infrant ReadyNas NV, it’s only drawback at the moment is that it’s a bit too noisy, but apparently there is a kit-upgrade on the way that will make it whisper-quiet.
   It supports all major RAID-levels aswell as their own X-RAID which supports hot-upgrades. You can start with a single drive installed, giving no security against failures. And then just plug in a second drive and it will switch to mirroring mode, install a third and it will switch to something like RAID-5 where you can utilize 2/3 of the diskspace. And then chuck in a fourth drive to further increase the storage. All this without any configuring or need to backup/restore. Sounds almost too good to be true, but I’ve read plenty of review and comments that this actually works.
   They also seem to be proffessional and are improving on the system all the time. Their solution is built around a custom hardware platform running a linux kernel using Samba and other standard applications to provide network storage. But it’s all controlled from their easy-to-use Web-gui so no need to read man-pages and spend hours configuring or compiling stuff. This is actually the alternative I end up on every time I’ve looked at this, now I only need to save up the money needed to get one (hopefully they will have fixed the noise issue by then).
3. The “FREE” solution, get some hardware from the closet, install Linux and setup everything from scratch (I haven’t been able to find any special distro for NAS).
   However this would hardly be the reliable and low-maintenence solution I need and would just increase on the burden of worries. It’s the best solution for some of us, but not for me.
   Tip: It’s possible to use a Linksys NSLU-2 unit and “unslung” it and install a special linux-distro and firmware on it. See NSLU-2 Linux. It’s a small fanless unit that can live in your bookshelf, just hook it up with one or two USB-drives and you’ve got one sweet solution. The Western Digital MyBook USB-drives are just perfect for the bookshelf position :O)

So I’m currently biased towards the commercial solutions, most reliable and the least amount of work and worries. It’s just the pricepoint.

It’s worth noting that Buffalo Technology, the pioneers in NAS is an alternative to the Infrant unit. However Infrant seems to win most tests in both ease-of-use and performance… and of course there are others who want in on the market.