Urban Adventures & More

To clarify what I wrote in my previous post about safe street riding, consider this passage  (taken from the California DMV code), a bike should stay as close as possible to the right unless,

When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge, subject to the provisions of Section 21656. For purposes of this section, a “substandard width lane” is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

So, when there’s no shoulder, you should take up a lane. It’s that simple.

In typical Urban Adventure-fashion, I went on an unplanned trip to New Jersey today. The route is basically this one, or, more precisely, the one given on maps 10 and 11 (about page 34) of the New Jersey Greenway Guide. Also seen easily on the New York City Bike Map route.

Continue reading…

There isn’t much to it; this post explains it all. Make sure you use the driver version they tell you to download, not the one off the linksys website.

You don’t get the Linksys interface this way, but the built-in windows software works as well as I recall linksys working; I am getting a signal from 3 stories down and 30 linear feet away.

I was totally not expecting to do yesterday’s ride. I just went out for some fresh air, and found myself a couple hours later in Red Hook. However, along the way, I realized I have been developing what I am tentatively calling “New York’s Most Beautiful Spots”. Currently on the list is Roosevelt Island (in the “Places to Be” Category) and Inwood Hill Park (in the “Seclusion and Beauty” Category). New entries:

• 25th Street Pier in the Hudson River Park, for its view in all directions, including the Empire State, Starrett-Lehigh, Jersey City, Verrazano, Statue of Liberty, and George Washington Bridge, as well as being a great addition to the park itself.
• East River Bridge Pedestrian Paths, for the vistas, perspectives of the city and the bridges themselves. (See below for more.)
• At the foot of the Brooklyn Pier of the Manhattan Bridge, for vistas. You can see all three of the southern east river bridges, midtown, downtown, and the waterfront. It would be a beautiful spot to be as well if not for the constant rumbling of subway trains over the bridge. (See below for more)
• Red Hook Waterfront, particularly the Lous J. Valentino Park Pier, for vistas. Here you feel as though within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty; Manhattan rises behind Governors Island, and the entire area feels like a sleepy seaside town (on the weekend at least, when the port is closed).

Continue reading…

This post on the dropbox forums says exactly what to do: you can either install an old version of dropbox (I couldn’t figure out how to make it run properly in Linux), or you can use that guy’s Python script. He even provides a Windows binary.

To use the script in Linux, note that you have to change a few lines to manually input your dropbox.db file loation (since the APPDATA variable will not be set). Also, when entering your new dropbox location, don’t use a trailing slash. It worked perfectly for me; now I have Windows and Linux syncing from the same directory!

I have long wondered about Roosevelt Island: who lives in the mix of public housing and gleaming condos? (No one; they live in either one or the other. Har har.) How do you get there? What is there to see?

Last summer I noticed the green ring on the bike map that encircled the island, and figured that it was easy enough to get to — go over the Queensboro bridge and turn left — that I added it to my list of trips. The interest was heightened by an article in Essential New York, and one in the Times.

Continue reading…

Following is my suggested route for what I call the “circum-Manhattan bike tour.” It is all river, (almost) all the time. It’s also an amalgam of two rides I did; in the first, my uptown leg was all on the streets, and on the second, I discovered the superior uptown (river) route. Since I haven’t done the whole route, I have only an approximate distance of 31. See the bottom of this post for the map with some annotations, as well as the official city bike map.
Continue reading…

If you listened to me and installed dropbox, kudos! I hope you love it as much as I do.

I just started using the software to collaborate on files, and found that it behaves very funny. In particular, when you open an excel (or other MS Office file), Dropbox does not sync the file to the server until after you close it. Furthermore, if a person opens an excel file, even if they make no changes, dropbox will mark the file as changed and potentially create a conflict.

The solution, according to this forum post is to mark your spreadsheets as collaboration. As a result, excel doesn’t lock the files, so saves will be synced automatically, and changes will be merged across files. (And presumably, changes will also be updated as you work on them, but I’m not sure how that works).

I haven’t tried this yet, but I will follow up in a few days once I have had a chance to look at it. I can see that dropbox may still get confused as two people are editing the same file (particularly macros, which don’t like to change once you have opened a file), but I think MS has probably conquered this problem by now.

This tip is for anyone who frequently adjusts the number of decimals visible in a number range. Sure, you know to hit Ctrl-1 to make it an orderly set of numbers, but what if you want only want to show the integer part, or if you want to see 4 decimal places? Instead of using the mouse to click the appropriate toolbar button, the trick lets you assign a hotkey to that, or any other toolbar button.

1. Right click on the formatting toolbar and go to “Customize”.
2. Right click on the toolbar button you want to assign a hotkey to (in our case, Decrease or Increase Decimal)
3. If you want to make the hotkey “Alt-/” then change the text in the Name box to “&/”. If you have an “opposite” function, for example the opposite of Decrease Decimal is Increase Decimal, then this automatically makes Alt-Shift-/ perform that opposite.
4. Change the button style to “Image and Text”.  (If you want to disable your hotkey, you can change this back to Image only.)
5. Close the Customize window, and you’re done!

(Adapted from Bankers Ball link above.)

For anyone who maintains multiple accounts with the same website, they know the pain of logging out and in again on the browser to check the other one. It is particularly painful when you are synchronizing two accounts to have similar settings, and you are constantly going in and out of them. It turns out there are four (really three) solutions I know of.

1. Use two different browsers. Most people have two browsers installed: Firefox and IE. Just open one account in one, the other account in the other. You’re done.
2. Use IE tab in Firefox. Simplify Window clutter by installing IE tab and doing #1 again, but this time without ever leaving Firefox. Just click the little Firefox icon in the corner of a new tab and now you’re using IE, but within Firefox!
3. Use Cookie Pie. This works pretty well by letting you set per-tab cookies, but there are a lot of conflicts with other addons (look at their blog page). Right now, I’m using it to log into two Dropbox accounts (by the way, Dropbox is amazing. I have referral codes that can get us both more space. Ping me in comments.) However, I have very irritating conflicts when using it on facebook, gmail, and Roundcube (webmail program).
4. Use CookieSwap. This doesn’t let you set per-tab configuration, but you can switch back and forth, which is pretty similar. This focuses on multiple computer users rather than a single multitasking user as Cookie Pie does, I think.

All options right now have their limitations, but I think #2 is the most reliable.