I did this the other day with my kids, and they thought it was a lot of fun.

It’s a simple experiment to do with your kids when they ask what the gears on a bicycle do. You’ll need:

• A bike with gears
• Sidewalk chalk
• A measuring tape or stick
• Paper for keeping a table of measurements

I started by making a schematic drawing of the two gear assemblies, front and back (we had a 21 speed bike) and numbered them. Then I made a table with a corresponding number of rows and columns and labeled them.

We went out on our low-traffic street after dinner and drew a starting line close to the curb. Next was getting the gears into the first position: smallest wheel in front, largest in back. Then I explained that we would put the front wheel of the bike right on the starting line and make sure the pedal was in its top position (easy to remember). I asked one of my kids to get on the bike and make exactly one whole turn with the pedal, while I held the bike steady during travel (don’t forget the bike helmet!) We then marked how far the front wheel had traveled and labeled the mark with the gear number combination. Now we changed the gear and did the whole thing over until all gears were covered.

During all this it turned out that holding the bike steady was too much work, and we had to be careful not to "coast" without treading the pedal. So I ended up holding the bike myself, turning the pedal while trying to walk alongside, half on my knees. Plus, we had to speed things up because it was beginning to get dark.

Here’s a picture of our markings (from the next morning):

Just by looking at the markings, we could tell that sometimes you can go approximately the same distance with several different gear combinations.

When we were done with all gears and markings, we got out the measuring tape and measured how far each mark was from the starting line. That resulted in the following table:

We then entered this table into a spreadsheet and turned it into a graph:

Sorting by distance, it looks like this:

This is shows that if you want to go smoothly from the lowest speed to the highest, you have to do a lot of shifting. Some steps aren’t doable without shifting both front and back gear, so in essence you won’t be able to go up smoothly.

Anyway, a fun experiment for after dinner or a weekend afternoon.

Categories: Personal
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This is an example of how customer service is done right.

We bought a JanSport backpack three years ago or so for use at school. A few days ago a buckle broke, so I contacted JanSport via their customer service web page. I explained the situation of the buckle breaking and not having a receipt and asked if that would be a problem if I’d like to have a repair done. I got a very friendly reply by email the day after, telling me the service center would send me a new buckle if I just gave them my shipping address. I replied back with my address, but also talking about how I wasn’t sure how to thread the buckle back on, could they include some instructions, please.

Well, today I got the buckle with a handwritten note, telling me how to put the buckle back. Not only that, but the buckle in the package had two pieces of webbing threaded through, held together with paperclips to show me how to thread properly. Brilliant!

Thank you JanSport for showing that customer service still exists in this day and age of outsourcing and automation!

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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Let’s see if anyone cares about this.

CNet News.com posted something about how HP is trying to do an "end run" around Windows. The post seems to quote a BusinessWeek article from last Friday (online edition) and I wonder if anyone did any fact checking.

Now, I’m not about to dignify the speculation around what the future may hold, especially with regards to operating systems and "end runs", with a response, but I can’t stand to see factual inaccuracies about past product development, especially since I was personally involved. You could say this is a matter of personal and professional pride (for better or worse.) The post says this:

HP isn’t confirming the report, but had previously been open about the formation of a new group within its Labs that developed the touch-screen technology and special software used in its TouchSmart PC. The software lets users get around certain features of Vista to do certain multimedia tasks more easily.

Just to be clear: The software came out of the group that designed and developed the HP TouchSmart PC, the Consumer PC division, in conjunction with a few outside partners. Also, the software very much builds on top of things in Vista and couldn’t have been done on XP or any previous Microsoft OS. While it may be true that the software does so, it was not purposely built to let "users get around certain Vista features to do certain multimedia tasks more easily". It was built to provide the user an environment optimized for touch interaction, while providing interesting experiences and useful features at the same time (and yes, we can debate both the word interesting and the word useful, as lots of people have already done.)

CNet, did you check your stories and go back to the sources before posting something like this?

Categories: Personal
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Not sure this is something people run into a lot, but if you are using Windows Live Photo Gallery and you can’t use it to view files by double-clicking on them anymore, the fix is to re-register the PhotoViewerShim.dll like this:

regsvr32 "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\PhotoViewerShim.dll"

This information is brought to you courtesy of winhelponline.com

Categories: Software
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In which I learn that even though the SMART status and drive self-tests report “No problems found”, you can’t trust them all the time.

To make a long story short: Even though I’ve mentioned in the past that it’s a good idea to monitor your hard drive’s SMART status to detect potentially impending doom, sometimes that’s not enough (in my last post on the topic, I replaced a drive based on SMART data.) You also need to look into the Windows Event Log to see if Windows silently is logging read errors (but not telling you in so many words, like “Hey, I can’t read your hard drive. Get a new one before this one goes all disc grinder on you!”)

My new tale involves a drive that didn’t show any signs of bad SMART data, didn’t report any trouble when analyzed with the manufacturer’s tools, but caused trouble anyway. Over the course of several months my main workhorse computer developed an annoying habit of booting slowly, sometimes to the point of freezing up entirely before getting all the little background programs loaded that I’ve amassed over about three years without reinstalling the OS.

I suspected the motherboard to be faulty at first, so I switched that out, with the result that I had to re-activate XP, which was annoying. I thought that had worked, but no, things kept being bad. Then I figured that I’d have to somehow test whether the hard drive controller on the mobo had gone bonkers. Well, since I have two other drives on the same chip, that didn’t seem possible.

Next, I thought “How about doing a benchmark on the hard drives?” So I found this pretty cool free (for personal use) benchmarking program called HD Tune (which, incidentally, also reports SMART data), and guess what – it would sometimes abort the test with a “read error” message. And sometimes the benchmark graphic would look like this:

Believe me, you don’t want it to look like that, blue and yellow all over the place like a shiner! What you want is something more like this:

A nice and steady drop-off in speed (blue) and increase in access time (yellow).

Anyway, the read error prompted me to check the Windows Event Log, and sure enough there were disk read errors quietly reported regularly over the past several months. So I decided it was time for another hard drive replacement. What I learned from that is “meat” enough for another post. Good thing I keep all my data on a physically separate drive (and online at Mozy).

The moral of the story is: “Check your hard drive’s SMART status, but be suspicious anyway!”

Categories: Software, Tech Toys
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