Silver Case

Spent some more time researching Czech intelligence agencies during the cold war, hoping to get some inspiration for my Favorit bicycle design.

Turns out their is very little that’s inspiring about the Czech StB, the Czechoslovakian secret police that functioned like the East German Stasi, feverishly crushing domestic dissent, real or imagined.

The only thing that attracted me was the former Czech numbers station OLX. I have a few recordings of it from the CONET Project. It broadcast across Europe and is known as the only numbers station that has ever acknowledged a QSL card!

Anyway, I’m thinking numbers stations, instructions to agents, dead drops, bicycles, urban, agents in plain view, simplicity and it occurs to me, “why not integrate a crystal radio receiver set into my bike?” I can wrap the tuning coil (insulated) around the seat tube, in attractive shiny copper wire. Now I need to think of a fun way to mount the crystal detector package. Finally it needs attachments for ground and antenna (could the bike frame be an antenna?). I guess I need to find an antique bicycle seat bag to keep the wires and ear piece in.

Any clever ideas how to do this? It needs to be highly aesthetic and stylish.

Ooh! I just had an idea how to integrate the antenna.

The frame has small attachment points for pannier racks on the read dropouts. I can thread one of those and permanently attach an antenna aerial line. Then I can keep that wrapped up in a tidy antique leather pouch mounted to the seatstay.

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I am doing some research into Czechoslavakian intelligence and espionage activities between 1945 and 1985. I want to get some inspiration for how to detail my Czech Favorit bicycle.

I was reading through some ancient intelligence documents on Cryptome this evening, dated 29 December 1947. One document was apparently an analysis of a potential informer. This was written by some US Intelligence organ:

[Redacted] is obviously a small man of weak character, quarrelsome and devoid of tact. It is felt, therefore, that putting him in a position of trust and conidence is inadvisable. His penurious dishonesties and the smallness of his relations with his neighbors indicates strongly that intelligence necessary to operate as an undercover agent is lacking.

I love the wording of these comments. Reminds me of Jesse Reklaw’s “The Candidate”.

The “smallness of his relations with neighbors” was referred to earlier in the letter, mentioning neighbors accusing him of stealing “her wood (fuel) ration coupon and a pair of rabbits.”

In addition to replacing the hydraulic brake system of my Trek Liquid 20 this weekend, I also started working on my Czech Favorit singlespeed project.

First thing I did was rip the frame apart.  The bottom bracket came out easily (it’s english style) revealing bearings caked-in dried-out grease, but in mostly OK shape.  The fork put up much more of a fight.  The knob that helps tighten the stem/handlebars into the fork tube had totally rusted into a terrible, seized lump.  One clown at a shop suggested cutting the fork tube off (which wouldn’t have fixed anything anyway… the knob would have still been in there.  The other guy had a better idea and utilized his nice heavy workbench and monstrous vise.  He locked it down, twisted and turned and pulled, and it pried out.  Oh lord the amount of friction from that made the stem burning hot. Anyway, it is out.

So now I have a totally-disassembled frame.  Time to start prepping it for a paint job.  I first tried some paint remover. This stuff was horrible and toxic. The first thing I did was open the lid, and the can burped at me, spraying my neck with caustic jelly.  I seemed to be unable to use the jelly without getting burnt, so I decided to halt.  I flushed it down a street drain with a lot of water.  I don’t need that around the house with kid and dogs about.

Next I tried a wire wheel on my drill. This work but was slow-going.  I did about half the frame. It still looked rough. I wanted to see what the painting shop advised, so I rubbed it with some grease to prevent further corrosion and took it to a very interesting bike shop, The Rebound Centre.

The Rebound Centre is a fantastically interesting place.  Located in an industrial estate, it’s anything but a retail bike shop. They specialize in fabricating bespoke bicycles, repairing bicycles (cracked frames and other hardcore problems), and painting bicycles.  In addition to welding and painting equipment, they had a computer-controlled milling machine.  I saw them mid-job in taking a steel frame, cutting it at the top tube and the down tube, and silver-soldering in special joints from Cane Creek that allow you to break the bicycle into two pieces for transportation. That’s  precise work.

So turns out the Rebound Center actually sandblasts the frame anyway, so my wire wheel work was unnecessary.  Doh.  Anyway, I am glad I did it long enough to remind myself how much that kind of work sucks.  It’s already sand-blasted and primed. They tell me they need to fill in some of the rust pits to make it smooth.  I thought they powder-coated the frame, but in fact the spray it.  I saw many examples of their work, and it’s quite nice.

My lunchtime mission took me to a paint store in another industrial paint to pick out a color for the job.  I was told to get Dupont Centari 600 automobile paint.  I want the bike to look copper like a brass penny.  I managed to find a close fit, and from the Skoda line. Pleasing — the color I want from a line of Czech cars.  500ml cost me 19$.

I want to get a nice bike repair stand. Jim Langley recommended a Park Tool PRS3.   Sulaiman agreed that the Home Repair stands were too light and would kick around.  But instead of buying the heavy stand, he said to just buy a clamp and then they’d fabricate a very heavy steel stand and base for it locally, to avoid the expensive freight.  So I manage to get the top-of-the-line Park repair stand for the same price I’d buy a Home Repair stand from a local bike shop.

My paint job and stand should each be done in about 1.5 weeks. Then I’ll be able to start putting the bike together after that.

Speaking of threadfin…

Soviet ‘Fishing’ Vessel

I enjoy eating grilled fish at Kuriya restaurant.  They bring out a whole fish, covered in  salt, and grilled, skin-on, with some lemon and grated radish.  The best fish in the world, Kinki, is brilliant this way, but damn expensive. (At the height of the season (now) it can be $140SGD for a small fish)  Recently I enjoyed Nodokuro (a rare fish even to Edoites and Google, according to a Japanese friend) and the less-expensive Threadfin.

Ling  was out tonight, so she bought me a  Threadfin from the grocery store. Now admittedly it had probably been frozen earlier, and wasn’t airflown from Japan, but it looked fine.  Total cost?  $2.

So what’d I do?  Turned the oven on top broiler element, to max heat.  Preheated a La Creuset iron roasting pan.  Then I split the fish’ belly so that it would sit upright in the pan, rubbed it down with sea salt, and threw it in the oven for, maybe, 15 minutes.

Turned out brilliantly. Nice tasting flesh, few bones, and crispy, salty skin. Really good, really cheap, and impressive (even though it’s cheap and easy).  What else can you buy for 2$ that tastes so good and is so healthy?

I’m going to get an infrared grill and broiler from Rinnai for the 41 Springleaf Height, so this will be perfect for preparing these kinds of simple, good dishes.

We’re finalizing our kitchen equipment selection. I’m planning on buying a state-of-the-art Lainox “The Cube” combi-oven. It’s incredibly capable.

I was reading through the manual for it today. The appendix contains a number of recipes in various sections. This was the cover page for the Hors D’Oeuvres section:

I really have never seen anything grosser. Just beyond words gross. Fish skins, mystery pate, veiny cabbage, congealed egg yolks. The only missing ingredient is a hair-and-shit-covered goose egg.

Wearing his new shoes

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Rare weekend for me. Ling’s brother, sister, and mom all back at the same time, so on Sunday, I had the pleasure of not getting up until 9:30 because they all were out at Tiong Bahru market for breakfast. I puttered outside and started working on my bikes.

I installed a used set of Avid BBDB mechanical disc brakes on my old, broken Trek Liquid 20. It actually went together very easily. There is a standard mounting system for disc brakes on 160mm rotor size. The only thing that varies is the bracket that interfaces between the caliper and your bike. This provides the proper standoff.

So got the brakes installed, cleaned the chain, pressurized the talas shock, and it was all finished.

Woei and I took the Trek and the Specialized for a quick spin at Bukit Timah. One third along the loop, Woei snakebit the rear tire on an asphalt edge (I was suprised — I had the tires at about 60psi, high for a mtb) and had the fun of walking it back. I carried on.

I found that I could climb the formerly impossible hill on the Trek too. Can confirm that the bike is a lot more squirrelly and it’s much harder to track truly.

I am not sure why. Because it is a full suspension frame? Because the front fork is too weak? It’s hard to look at the bikes and see any drastic difference in their geometry.

Just find out from my brother-in-law, who is a pilot for Singapore Airlines, that he gets  300kg (that’s 660lbs) of air cargo free, annually, from any of the destinations SQ and MH fly to! That’s massive. That means I can transit stuff from Newark to Singapore. Having stuff moved from my Pittsburgh way-station to Newark will be a lot cheaper than Pittsburgh to West Coast for a container passage. oooooooh.

I gave my 2006 Specialized Stumpjumper Disc its first real workout recently. I was absolutely astonished how good it is.

I bought the bike while on vacation in Pennsylvania this summer. I only got it running recently. I had left the seat in USA, so needed it mailed to me. Then I stole a pair of pedals from a disabled Trek Liquid 20, as I had scavenged the Stumpjumper’s original Shimano SPD pedals for my Dahon Mu XL.

I went to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve to ride the mountain bike circuit there. Two or three years ago, I used to ride this trail a lot. Then I moved to Casuarina and spent most of my time to the more remote, longer, and illegal Woodcutter trail. There have been some very heavy rains. I love riding these trails in the wet, so these were ideal conditions.

I notice the difference in posture on this bike the most. Compared to the Trek Liquid 20, I lean farther forward, the stem is lower, and the handlebar grips are narrower. Something about this combination and the frame geometry gives this bike a really powerful tracking feel. Bukit Timah is a lot of short, sharp, rocky ups-and-downs. This bike kept a straighter track than anything else I’ve ridden there.

What truly astounded me, however, was the climbing ability. There is one hill on the trail that I have literally never been able to get up without dismounting. Today I road up to it, and just cruised right up, with literally no problems. I’m not sure why it worked so well. It’s some combination of:

• The Fast Trak Pro tires have a lot more small, sharp knobs on them. I think the Trek’s IRC Trailbear’s are bigger, but fewer knobs. This climb is wet and extremely clay-ey and rocky. My wheels never slipped like they used to.
• The posture encourages really hard, forward cranking up hills
• In the last three years has the steepness of the hill weathered and eroded?
• I felt quite strong during the whole ride, but I dont’ think my fitness level is that much higher than it used to be when MTB’d more frequently.
• Is there something about a hardtail that lets it climb better than a full suspension?

At any rate, I was delighted how well this thing tracked and climbed. Descending was fine. The shock performed well. The limiting factor was the stock handlebar grips were too small. My hands were cramping trying to grab hard on the handles yet still work the brakes. I went out and bought thicker handgrips today. That should allow me to run these downhills faster, especially now that I remember the trail again.

I am trying to get a set of Avid BB7 mechanical disc brakes to repair/rebuild my Liquid 20. I will be very interested to do a head-head comparison of these two bikes on the same day and see what I find.

Favorit

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
I bought this old Czech road bike, manufactured by “Favorit” for USD 12.50 today. I’m going to rebuild it into a singlespeed commuter bike for myself. Does anyone know anything about this bike? The guy who sold it to me didn’t know much/anything about it.

I took the wrench to it and tore it down to parts.

The wheels are junk.

I got the bottom bracket off. The grease was all dried-out and dirt-thickened, but the races and the bearings actually seemed to be in ok shape.  I’ll have to find some old-fashioned cranks for the square axle.

I couldn’t get the headset off.  The wrenches I have for removing headset nuts are all too big.  I don’t want to do some obscene with vise-grips or channel-locks, so I will have to go find the suitable tool to remove the headset/fork.

The stem is very cool-looking and has a nice “favorit” embossed on it.  However, I’ll want to replace the handlebars.  Not sure how to get them off though…  the stem is not going to release the bars.  hmmm.

The seat is totally hideous. It’s like sitting on a smooshed batting helmet. awful.

The chainstays appear to have been slightly crushed by clamp-on kickstand (even though there is a mounting for a kickstand welded onto the frame).

The frame is quite quite rusty.  It will take a lot wire wheel work before it’s ready for painting. It had enough ambient rust that my nose was on the verge of sneezing the whole time. (rust makes me sneeze like a maniac)

The problem with this checksum test for corrupt waitstaff is that a sneaky waiter who knows about it should be suspicious of any tip that has value in the least significant digit of the tip.  You can’t really hide the checksum.

I’ve always wondered about this sort of fraud.  They claim it is common. I have no idea, I don’t vet my statements very closely.  On one hand, I’d think it would happen on bigger-ticket business meals.  On the other hand, secretaries who fill out expense reports and things should notice the discrepancy in billings.

Really Foreshortened Luke

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

I uploaded a pile of photos of Luke painting in the driveway this afternoon.

I spent $30 to upgrade to QuickTime Pro in order to rotate these movies. It works inside Quicktime Player, but Youtube appears to ignore the “rotate me” attribute. grrrr.

does it get centered now?

What is this?

I am growing so, so weary of notions of “fairness” in placing the robber.

I beat this guy handily. It had nothing to do with robber placement.

Make Room Layout

OVERVIEW

I want to turn my attic into a refuge where I work on all my various projects and other hobby stuff. It also needs to be an overflow guest room. It’s a 4.5m x 7.5m room. The staircase comes into the middle of the west wall. South of the staircase the wall will be replaced by a glass wall that overlooks onto my office below. Everything else is wall. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a skylight, but not counting on it.

What would I like to get in here?

• Ham radio and other instrumentation (weather stations, geophones, microntroller stuff, scanners)
• Sewing lab (I may end up buying a heavy-duty machine for leather, or perhaps a more advanced embroidery machine)
• Framing equipment for prints and photos
• Games room for playing board games
• Photography equipment, possibly even smallish studio
• Random art (drawing, etc)
• Reading room
• Inevitably many other things

HOW

Electronics instrumentation bench. I’d like to get something that resembles an electronics lab bench. Not especially deep, but with a desk and then racks for gear to be mounted high above, and with a light bank at the top. Brainstorming what features it might need:

• Access to rooftop antenna
• Heavy power bus circuits
• Variable power supply for projects
• Grounding/Static
• Easy cabling access
• Reconfigurable shelves and bracketing

Room Table. The obvious choice is a table with configurable shape and on caster wheels. The Knoll Propeller conference tables are the perfect solution.

Couch/Bed. I have a perfectly fine futon frame, it just needs a better (not cheap) cushion. I’ve always regretted buying the cheap-o cushion for that fucking thing.

The ? Shelf Area. This is where the real mystery is. What’s the clever thing to do here? Just install a lot of shelving where I cram everything? Or should I be attempting to install little kiosks? I’m tempted to leave it mostly as shelving because with a highly configurable table, I should be able to do most everything on that. On the other hand, like ling pointed out, for example, some sort of inbuilt sewing machine kiosk, so I am not forced to conitnually unpack/pack stuff. She knows I’m a mess and inevitably any table I have becomes a total pile of junk. Don’t believe me? Let me snap my iMac’s camera for a second.

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So what I’m looking for is something clever to do here.  Afterall, it’s a bespoke room, I’d like something better than some generic shelving.

Draft floorplan of Office

OVERVIEW

This is the gross floorplan of my office at 41 Springleaft. It’s 4m by 5.5m. The east door leads out to the upstairs living room. The north door leads to the bathroom it shares with Luke’s room. I just told the contractor move the stairs to the north side of the room. These stairs lead to my attic Lab and Craft room. If they were on the south side, as previously drawn, then it would break up the room even more and force me to have my desk in view of the door, which I hate. West wall is a large window facing the jungle.

PURPOSE

• PC desk (iMac, three printers, UPS, network storage, and many other peripherals)
• Store electric devices (ipods, cameras, phones, etc)
• Household administration (bills, taxes, accounting, finances)
• Recordkeeping (files)
• Stationery storage
• Charging station for all my electronic rubbish (cameras, phones, ipods, etc)
• Book storage (we have crates and crates and crates full of books)

HOW

CS: Charging station, this needs to be a cabinet, or set of shelves, or some preferably clean, tidy, clever way to keep that huge bundle of stupid wall warts, chargers, usb hubs, cabling, extension cords organized and preferably hidden. I can’t think of a good way to do this, frankly.

Generic Danish Modern Secretary

DMS: Danish Modern Secretary. I want to get a nice example of a Danish Modern Secretary desk. I can keep all the shit adminstration that I hate doing in one place, take care of it, and then close the door and forget about it. I want all that stuff as segregated from the rest of my life and work as I can. My danish friend is helping me monitor the many Danish-equivalents of eBay (Lauritz and to Bruun Rasmussen, for example) find a nice one of these.

FC: File Cabinets. My calculations show that three file cabinets standing four drawers high and 60cm deep will be adequate to handle all my files for the next five to seven years minimum. Possibly ten. I’d love to get James Jesus Angleton-style “File Safes” — file cabinets made from armor with giant combination locks on the front, in some hideous government drab. I dont’ know if I can. Shipping 2,400pounds of file cabinets overseas sounds ludicrous.

The Question Mark (?): I don’t know. This is dead corner space. Pinched on one side by 5-foot tall file cabinets. Pinched on the other side by a desk. What do I put in that area? I was wondering if I could findsome sort of giant lazy susan to cram back there and keep stuff?

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

• Where can I keep a large fraction of my crates-and-crates-and-crates of books in here?  The best I could come up with was to have high bookshelves above the filing cabinets going to the ceiling.  I would prefer to keep the area above the desk free of anything, leaving room for art.  I also thought to wall in the staircase and mount bookshelves high up on the room-side of the staircase wall.  I don’t know how well (gross?) that would be.
• How to organize/arrange all the printers and crap and the infamous “charging station” into something not irritating?
• Where to keep all my stationary?  Presumably a lot of this could fit into an adequately sized Danish Modern Secretary?
• What clever shit am I not thinking of?

Found a terrific playset for Luke on eBay today and I’m trying to win the auction now. It’s a set of boy’s carpentry tools. As described, “Including 2 planers and a mini hatchet, 2 carving tools , 2 clamps, mini mitre box and saw, a square , a mallet, and a scribe, plus the box with neat tray and part of the colorful original label.”

Boy’s Carpentry Set

When is the last decade where an acceptable tool for a young boy is a “mini hatchet?” hahahaha

Met up with contractor today to see revised set of plans on the house. The Physical Engineer approved converting the dead-space attic into a proper room. Now the project chief, Frank, wants to get us decided on wiring and plumbing so that he can proceed with the ripping-up works.

Deciding on outlets and power service is a big deal, particularly in the kitchen. It’s forcing me to decide soon on what appliances I’ll be using.

To that end, I met with two different kitchen guys today to talk appliances. One is the distributor for an Italian commercial-quality line. The other is a a specialist in used commercial equipment. He’s the guy who I bought my Nuova Simonelli Mac 2000v espresso machine from three or four years ago.

The Italian line guy will send me a quote. I’m expecting it to be very expensive.

Ling and I talked with the used equipment guy for a long hour or two tonight. His advice was basically that I could buy everything used except the refrigerator. He didn’t recommend buying used refrigerators because you cannot judge the compressor or health of the machinery. But for the other equipment, he told us that instead of paying $12,000 for a new Lainox combi-oven, we could get a used one for $3,000, for instance.   The brands I would buy here all have long-term reliable support, not fly-by-night agents.  On Saturday we’re going to a couple dealers to look at equipment first hand and further refine what we want.

It’s also forcing me to decide on how the layouts of my rooms (the workshop, the attic, and the office) will be. This is also not trivial, as I need to decide how to break up all my equipment and projects. I don’t want to be lazy about the design and just default to the desinger, for, as I told Ling, it’s very infrequent we get chances to design rooms nearly from scratch.

meter dimensions of the three rooms

Anway, that is current status as I do more strategizing about room layouts.   Somehow I woke up at 6am today, and now I realize it is closing in on 2am, so I had best get to bed.

Check out the excellent graphics arts on Bagaboo messenger bags

I have a few collections of fonts totaling six or seven thousand different font samples. Of course there is no useful categorization or naming conventions for it. It’s a flat file. All I can do is randomly walk through it looking for something that catches my eye.

Font.com’s Search By Sight promised that by answering some questions it would give me the font I needed. I’ve thought about this idea before, so I was curious to try.

My thoughts are based on the premise that I am not a type designer and am never going to learn the terms and taxonomy of type design. When I read through the fonts, I have a certain impression I’m looking for (’1950s Heavy Industry’, ‘typewriter’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘old letter’, ‘Soviet military map’, etc) Don’t expect me to want to search for fonts by type feature (serifs, spacing, etc) — I don’t know what they are, and they wouldn’t necessarily help me find what I am looking for.

That’s why this font finding expert system was so disappointing. To test it I decided I’d use it to help me find a font that looked like it came from a galvanometer made in 1935. It was hopeless. The system just asked me fifteen tedious questions about the font I wanted, but never anything that got to the heart of what I wanted. Honestly, the critical element of a 1935 galvanometer font isn’t how the tail crosses the upper-case ‘Q’. It’s probably something more like the font being relatively thin relative to its height, for being very unadorned, for having a consistent line width, etc.

I’m not taking the piss out of the system, but this is literally the recommendation it gave me:

Sinaloa? Please. This is more like 1925 Ritz-Carlton New Year’s Eve drinking champagne in a Dusenberg font, not austere scientific equipment of the 30’s.

I have a better idea for a font finder. The interface would be much easier, too.

The artist gives some sample text, and then is shown a list of ten fonts of a wide range. Click on any ones that, for any reason, are close to what you are looking for. Then the system, sees what you liked, what you didn’t, and shows you another selection, repeating the cycle, and narrowing down to a few best choices for the font you want.

The trick here is that as the system shows many iterations of fonts that users choose/discard, it can imply groupings of fonts that transcend their type family or other standard categorization methods. The categorization is implicit and invisible.

Problems with this?

• Would take a long time to build up enough iterations to get any meaningful grouping. (6000 fonts, in iterations of 10 each, is 600 iterations to see each font just once). One solution would be for the system to have an underlying understanding of type and be smart enough to show a variety of fonts from widely different font types. I don’t need to see six examples of Arial in my initial iterations.
• If you mingle different users’ iterations, you might just turn the grouping data into a murky, gray soup. The categorization might just be too person-specific.
• You’d have to be careful in your seeding of fonts to the users to prevent them from consistently running down the same choice paths and choosing similar fonts every time.

There are probably some good computational methods for doing this sort of matching stuff, but I think the key issue is building up the database of comparison results.

This is who we are

Played Settlers of Catan tonight. One opponent, __neo__, was ranked something like 150+ points. The other guy, Wizzy, was a pathetic minus fifty-something.

Early in the game, I got the robber. Wizzy had been doing the naive “build for longest road” race with himself and was up to +5. ___neo___ was +3. I was +4. So I played the robber on __neo__. The game is close, and clearly __neo__ is way more dangerous than Wizzy.

This sent Portuguese __neo__ out of his mind. And so he started carrying on and on and on. Eventually he reverted to taking as long as possible on his every turn. Well, I have other windows to look at too, so I just did other things as he did is pouting. So it didn’t really succeed in driving me away. In fact, I even reported him, so maybe he’ll be banned. That would be fun.

Alas, the only bummer of the night was that Wizzy beat me by two points or so. He had too many cities and was simply too productive. Oh well.