Chris Bracken

Ride to Okutama-ko and back

I haven’t ridden a century since I moved to Japan but with a bit of spare time on my hands before baby number two is due, I decided I was going to get back into decent enough shape that I could pull one off.  I’ve been using mornings and weekends to get back into riding longer distances, and slowly building up toward the goal of 160 km by riding further and further up the Tama river every weekend.

Five minutes looking at Google maps yesterday morning at 6 am convinced me that Lake Okutama was exactly the necessary 80 km away, so without a minute to lose I got dressed, headed out the door and rode north up the Tama river.

The ride along the river is gorgeous, one of the few places in Tokyo you can ride uninterrupted through a green belt that runs from the ocean at Haneda airport all the way into the mountains in the northwest corner of Tokyo.  The bike path ends at the south Hamura dam, but by then it’s pretty inaka, so you can continue by road from there without much worry about traffic.  At the north Hamura dam, I crossed over to the west side of the river, to pick up Route 411 through the towns of Oume, Sawai, and Mitake before leaving the city completely and starting the climb up into the mountains.
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PR#6

According to Slashdot, this month the Apple ][ turns 30. It was in production for 18 of those 30 years, which likely makes it the longest-selling personal computer of all time. This is the computer I wrote my first program on, and spent countless hours banging in and editing code from Compute magazine — including page after page of raw hex code when a program included graphics.

In tribute, I ran a Google search on PR#6 to see what turned up. For those who don't know or don't remember, PR#6 was the command that kicked off the bootloader code for slot 6, the drive controller. The search turned up two relevant links: an Apple TechTip on a simple copy-protection scheme, and a fantastic blog entry that covers a bit about the Apple ]['s boot process, which brings back a lot of memories of old Shugart drives, including the terrifying sound of a track 0 seek – a process wherein the drive head was moved across the disk very quickly until it physically couldn't go any further, resulting in a loud alarm-like buzz from the drive when it hit the limit of its reach.

Anyway, in celebration of the Apple ]['s 30th birthday, I recommend grabbing your nearest emulator, and banging in a call -151 for old time’s sake.

Google Reader

For years, I’ve been a fan of Brent Simmons’ OS X-based feed reader, NetNewsWire. It’s a fantastic application, and I’ve definitely got my money’s worth out of it. After partnering with NewsGator, I started using their online feed-reader on and off, with mixed results. I like that it keeps my feeds in sync between my computers, and that I can browse articles at lunch, but the interface is still not on par with NetNewsWire itself.

While NewsGator’s implementation was lacking, I really did like the idea of dropping the desktop app altogether and going with a fully online solution, so I started exploring other options. The obvious free alternative is Google Reader, and I have to say, I’m impressed. While the presentation isn’t as customizable as NetNewsWire, the functionality that I use is all there, and in fact, it has some extra search features that I miss on the desktop.

It was only when I launched NetNewsWire today and saw 290 unread items, that it hit me I hadn’t used it in almost a month. So while I look forward to
NetNewsWire 3, I’m sticking to Google Reader for the time being.

I also discovered that my prime news reading hours are apparently 6:30am to 7:30am and 9pm to 11pm, with a strange local maximum straggling out around 12:30am. I’d be curious to compare this to before I had a baby that woke me up around that time.

Update (2007-06-06): NetNewsWire 3.0 is now out.