News items for tag recumbent - Koos van den Hout

After I visited earlier Dutch hacker events HEU, HIP97, HAL2001, WTH2005 I missed HAR2009, OHM2013 and SHA2017. I can only say 'life happened' because my son was born in the interim and my interests changed.

In the beginning of this year I heard about the new planning for May Contain Hackers as the original plan was for 2021 and it was postponed due to covid-19. I started thinking about attending and when the opportunity to get a free ticket arose due to my links with Surf I got serious.

Life is still happening so I coordinated with the rest of the family whether I could be missed at home and for how long. The result was that I would go Friday evening until Tuesday afternoon and I would go there by recumbent bicycle with the luggage trailer so the rest of the family could use the car.

The people from Surf set up our own village Village:SMRF next to Village:OS3. I slept in my own tent because I really want my rest at night and I want that rest at a somewhat normal schedule (not really a hacker schedule). I brought a 1-person tent, a sleeping bag, clothes, gear to make breakfast with tea and coffee, a smartphone with charger and a handheld radio with charger. Having to move all my luggage myself on the recumbent bicycle made me very selective in what to bring.

I went to several talks spoke a number of well-known people, got to know new ones, saw people there I didn't expect and had a good time.

What I really enjoyed was the friendly atmosphere. One aspect of that caught my attention: besides people with non-traditional clothing and hairstyles I saw several people who looked like they were somewhere in a gender transitioning process. They felt free at MCH to be themselves. One person responded to me when I shared this observation: "I saw more LGTB flags here than at Pride in Amsterdam".

Also MCH was really non-commercial. Mentions of the sponsors were minimal and never in-your-face.

The weather cooperated a lot! It might have been quite different with bad weather. There was some rain before Friday so I saw mentions of "Mud Contains Hackers" on twitter. Saturday and Sunday were hot, Monday was cooler. Tuesday started with rain and some more showers, so my tent wasn't completely dry when I packed.

Cycling the 45 kilometers was fine. I used google maps for navigation (but with the smartphone not visible, just the instructions on my earbuds). I had to stop several times to check the screen to check the instructions and sometimes google came up with weird things. I had it set up for cycle navigation but it still said to take three-quarters of a roundabout to go left while the roundabout allowed me to go from one cycling path on the left of the road to the other. It took me about 2 hours 45 minutes including stops for navigating and stops for drinking, eating and adding some water to nearby trees.

All in all I had a great time. I had my moment of "I am getting too old for this" but that faded and I really enjoyed myself.

List of talks I attended, with links to the place to view it online:

• Everything is an input device (fun with barcodes)
• Honey, let's hack the kitchen: attacks on critical and not-so-critical cyber physical systems
• Radio Amateurism via commercial satelite (no video available), workshop with a demo of the QO-100 broadband transponder
• A Brief History of Automotive Insecurities
• Hacking COVID: Hackers helping the government
• Finding 0days in Enterprise Web Applications
• Audio networks and their security implications
• drand: publicly verifiable randomness explained
• The War in Ukraine: Cyberfront
• Cyber crises and what you can do to face the challenge
• Around the world in 80 networks, Hacking Universities Worldwide. ( ...lessons learned at age 15. ) - Rob Coleman (no video available)
• Payment terminals as general purpose (game-)computers
• A Smart Light Hacking Journey
• Sensor.Community - Global Open Environmental Data Platform
• How do GPS/Galileo really work & how the galmon.eu monitors all navigation satellites

Yesterday I cycled the same ride as I did last October and a few times since then.

It was a good way to spend a few hours riding on our kings day. I stopped along the way to drink some water and relax. It's still 36 kilometers and the average speed according to the speedometer on my recumbent bicycle was 21.77 kilometer per hour.

I recently wanted to do some serious cycling to improve my mood and raise my maximum distance per day again. So I found a day off and set a goal of riding more than 100 kilometers. With a bit of planning on the map I decided that Utrecht - Hilversum - Bussum - Almere - Nijkerk - Utrecht was a good way to get about 105 kilometers cycling.

In the end the odometer stopped at 112.53 kilometers. And I do feel better.

On Sunday I wanted to do some cycling and deliver something in another part of the city of Utrecht. Those two can be combined! After finding the right part to do my delivery I cycled out of the city in north-west direction and returned via the northern ringway.

I noticed when viewing my resulting track that there was something weird about the time. In the gpx file it was visible that the waypoints were not processed in order. So I searched for the way to make gpsbabel sort the waypoints by time. It took a bit of searching because I couldn't find any sample of sorting by time or other sorting options. But with some reading and thinking I found:

koos@kernighan:~/garmin$ gpsbabel -x sort,time -i garmin_fit -f 2020-10-20\ 13-12-51.fit -o gpx -F 2020-10-20\ 13-12-51.gpx
koos@kernighan:~/garmin$ 

The -x sort,time is 'sort by time'.

And I cycled 36 kilometers today. Some slight uphill parts, which lower my speed seriously. And the accompanying downhill parts increase my speed (and I keep pedalling, no need to limit my speed options as long as it's safe).

I have a few days holiday and today I decided to work on cycling a bigger distance. In the end I cycled 90 kilometers (on my cycle computer) or 84 kilometers (according to the GPS). Both are fine with me, a good test of doing such a distance.

I tried to get routes with lots of long straight paths, which are nice on my recumbent. That worked out ok. I cycled home - De Bilt - Bunnik - Odijk - Werkhoven - Cothen - Wijk bij Duurstede - Amerongen - Elst - Veenendaal - Renswoude - Scherpenzeel - Woudenberg - Zeist - De Bilt - home.

Average speed according to my cycling computer which will stop measuring when I pause: 20.60 kilometers per hour. Top speed was 47 kilometers per hour on a long downhill stretch near Zeist.

We went cycling today and I fixed the speed computer on my bicycle and brought the GPS unit to get a good tracklog. Both worked fine so I know where I cycled, when and how fast.

The Garmin GPS saves data in .fit format but it's easy to convert that to gpx using gpsbabel, and visualising the resulting gpx is done with gpxviewer. The maps in gpxviewer are from openstreetmap, which means they are both good and free to use.

The magic conversion command from Garmin .fit to .gpx :

koos@kernighan:~/garmin$ gpsbabel -i garmin_fit -f 2020-09-27\ 16-37-30.fit -o gpx -F 2020-09-27\ 16-37-30.gpx

Which doesn't produce any output messages when things go well. No news is good news.

Dankzij het thuiswerken de laatste maanden viel mijn conditie recent toch flink tegen. Omdat ik voor de toekomst wilde plannen heb om door Europa te gaan ligfietsen vond ik het een goed idee om eens een stuk te gaan ligfietsen vandaag. De tijd was wat beperkt dus ik had al een plan gemaakt waar heen te gaan (een keer naar het Oosten) met diverse mogelijkheden om terug te keren als de tijdlimiet er aan kwam.

Maar ik had er niet op gerekend dat ik onderweg meerdere regenbuien mee zou krijgen en ook nog door een beweging mezelf zou openhalen aan een scherp deel van de fiets. Toen leek het me toch een goed idee om terug te gaan rijden maar dat ging uiteindelijk weer vlotter dan gedacht. Hier en daar is de keuze in routes soms wat beperkt. Uiteindelijk toch relatief veel 'bekend terrein' en minder ver gekomen dan ik verwacht had. De resultaten vielen ook een beetje tegen: 23.81 kilometer gefietst met uiteindelijk gemiddeld 13.90 kilometer per uur (inclusief schuilen voor de regen). Als ik serieuze afstanden wil afleggen in een langere fietstocht moet er toch meer uitkomen.

As I mentioned before I have some future cycling goals which include some form of long-distance cycling journey, with serious influences from the book Computing Across America. Naturally amateur radio will play a part in such a cycling journey, just as Steven K. Roberts had on his trips.

Via the german amateur radio club DARC I found this bit in the "Deutschland-Rundspruch 24/2020":

DK3JB erreicht erstes Ziel auf seiner Funk-Fahrrad-Reise

Hans-Gerhard Maiwald, DK3JB, hat nach mühsamer und beschwerlicher Fahrt, teilweise auch wegen schlechter Radwege, am 15. Juni gegen 21 Uhr sein erstes Ziel, Kappel im Hochschwarzwald, erreicht. Dabei legte er ohne E-Unterstützung 580 km mit seinem 40 kg schweren Radanhänger zurück. Dem 72-jährigen OM geht es gesundheitlich gut. Hans-Gerhard gelang es, den weitaus größten Teil der Strecke permanent mit seinem TH-D74 in APRS aufzuzeichnen. Dabei hat sich der 1200 g schwere 12 V/20-Ah-Lithium-Ionen-Akku sehr bewährt. DK3JB hat zahlreiche Verbindungen in FM und D-Star vom Fahrrad aus getätigt. Durch Ludwigshafen wurde er von mehreren Funkamateuren gelotst und seine Route mitverfolgt. Hans-Gerhard bleibt bis Sonntag in Kappel und radelt danach vorerst an den Bodensee weiter.

And I found out more about the cycling tours between Siegen and Friedrichshafen in Germany via Funk-Fahrradtouren of DK3JB and it is very inspiring to me. There is also an article DK3JB wieder mit dem Fahrrad unterwegs nach Friedrichshafen - funkamateur.de with information about this tour in 2020 (all in German, which I can read but not really write). He has done this tour several years already, I found an article from the June 2008 trip: Mit Fahrrad, Zelft und FTM-10SE durch Süddeutschland (pdf).

After having read a book about cycling through Europe with the Rhine as one possible route, this confirms my earlier thoughts. Combining recumbent cycling, amateur radio and a nice ride through Europe is the direction I'm thinking.

I decided that after 11 years of very regular use of my Nazca Pioneer recumbent bicycle it was time for a new one. I ordered a Challenge Chamsin in the same colour as the Nazca Pioneer: Apple Green. It has all the parts to be road legal such as lights and fenders. And a luggage rack on the back for using it on my daily commute.