Category: Miscellaneous babble

Walking to my car after work yesterday, I noticed a new thing  that popped up on campus.

Upon closer investigation, it turned out to be a bike repair station complete with air pump and tools for doing some very simple basic repairs.

This bicycle front mounted to the column serves as a hanger for the air hose. The valve for the air compressor is located near the ground at the base of the column.

A tubular stand bolted to the concrete sidewalk serves as a bike stand and also houses the tools which are attached to the column by cables. The label on the column identifies it as a Dero Fix It. The QR code and website takes you to a web page with some videos for some very basic repair jobs you can do with at the stand.

The bike holder integrated to the stand is a pretty cool idea, and gets the bike up high enough to make it easier to work on.

All the tools you need to do simple emergency repairs or adjustments on your bike are right there: wrenches, screw drivers, allen wrenches, and tire irons.

It’s a pretty genius idea I think.

For the past 12 years, my blogs have been powered by MovableType, then OpenMelody (the open source version of MT), then back to MovableType (MTOS).

With MovableType solidly a commercial product now (at $999/license for MT6) and development on MTOS 5 down to bug and security fixes, it’s time to find something else.

It’s a move I’ve been considering for a while now. I’ve been wanting closer integration of the photo gallery and blog, as well as a place that could serve as an online notebook for my electronics experiments.

At the moment, I’ve got the usual suspects installed on my computer to play with

• Drupal 7
• e107
• phpwebsite
• Joomla
• WordPress

Most of them have a fairly sizable collection of plugins, modules and themes to work with so I should be able to get pretty close to what I’m looking for eventually. Except for Joomla, I’ve played with each of them a little at some point. Of the 5 so far, WordPress is the only one I’ve been able to import a MovableType export file into. e107 has an import facility but I wasn’t able to get the import module I wrote to work.

I think of the bunch, it will likely come down to either Drupal or WordPress. I’ve still got a lot of playing around to do though before I decide on anything.

I learned that Leonard Nimoy died earlier today. It was sad news to hear for me and countless other fans out there.

Leonard Nimoy’s Mr .Spock on Star Trek was one of my favourite characters and served as a huge inspiration to me in many things. Spock’s logic and rationality heavily influenced me as a kid, and his narration of In Search Of… catered naturally to my curiosity about everything (even though young me found some of the episodes really creepy).

Much later, I discovered his photography which gave me yet another thing to appreciate about Mr. Nimoy.

He made appearances at Dragon*Con, and although I never got to meet him there, other people I knew did and always spoke about how he enjoyed meeting his fans.

As Bones says at the end of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, “He’s really not dead, as long as we remember him”.

We didn’t make it out to the beach today (I stayed home to do the Lord of the Rings marathon), so Nala and Simba (and I) are wishing everybody a Happy 2015 from the back yard.

Mischief prefers to wish everybody a Happy New Year from the comfort of her futon.