Where is Darran?

Five years ago, I would have told you riding a bicycle is weak, uncivilized, and not fitting of any human being. Today, I use a bicycle as my main mode of transportation and in recreation. I can count on one hand the number of times I have been in a car in the past 5 months. When I need to get somewhere long distance, I rely on public transport. However, the new ride is not for commuting, it is for racing. As cycling training for Ironman Australia reaches 100+ mile distances, I decided rolling a triathlon specific bicycle would be ideal. With than in mind, I searched every bicycle shop in NSW and Victoria for a deal on last years models. The search resulted with a 2008 Giant Trinity Alliance 2 for sale at Bates Bikes. The bike was 15% off and the thing rolls. The service at Bates is good and the service is friendly. For example, there was a crack in the internal cable routing inlet on the carbon part of the frame and they called their Giant dealer and have a replacement frame coming in right now. This differs from some of the attitudes that you can get from bike shops in the city. I put a 65 mile ride on the Trinity the day I took her home and am looking forward to many more long rides.

Connection speeds on the internet are fast for most people compared to old school dial-up days. Regardless,  mo faster = mo betta. How should we make web browsing faster? A web proxy. I set out to setup a web proxy server locally on my notebook. Rather than run the proxy on my main operating system and risk catastrophic failure, I decided to use virtual machines. To begin, I downloaded VMware Player. Next, I downloaded an Ubuntu VM to play in VMware player. Once you have these, open up the Ubuntu VM in VMWare player. Using Synaptic Package Manager grab Squid (Squid is the web proxy application). Next, a tutorial on how to get Squid up and running. An alternative Squid/Ubuntu tutorial. To configure clients to use your proxy server, see the following tutorial. Want to remove advertisements while browsing? Try adzapper and the following tutorial. An initial report using SARG, shows that bandwidth consumption for my laptop was reduced by 20% using Squid.

It is a pain to login and edit wordpress pages that are updated everyday. For example, the training page and the travel log page are updated almost daily. To remedy this situation and preserve some sanity, I began looking for a solution. I found a solution in the form of a wordpress plugin. The plugin is called Inline Google Docs and can be found here. The installation is as simple as any other plugin and using it is easily done using the instructions on the plugin description page. All that is needed to update the training page now is to login to google docs and update a spreadsheet called Training. The spreadsheet is set to automatically publish as a webpage when it is updated. Each time an edit is made to the google spreadsheet,  the edit is reflected on the wordpress page. To make things even easier, there is a plugin for open office that automatically syncs your local documents with google documents. This would make updating wordpress pages even easier. A future process flow could be this: Open Training document on desktop, add new entries, save and sync with google docs. With those three simple steps, I would have created two stored copies of my training log in different locations and updated the blog. meow.

A short intro: Google Chrome is a web browser released by Google. It is lightning fast compared to alternative browsers, however, it has no support for 3rd party plugins at this point. Firefox has a massive selection of freely available plugins and one of them is Adblock Plus. For about a year I have been using Firefox with Adblock plus and browsing the internet ad free. After initially testing Chrome, I stopped using it and returned to Firefox. The other day I decided to give Chrome a try again after getting fed up with how slow Firefox was. Chrome is fast, but I didn’t want to have to go back to looking at ads again. After searching, I found the same solution that was around when Chrome was initially released, Privoxy. I was initially skeptical so I didn’t try it out, but I did today and it works well. Here is a tutorial on how to get Chrome up and running with Privoxy.

Chrome with Adblock Tutorial

This is how browsing the web should be. I have also started using Privoxy with Firefox. I am also looking at getting a Squid proxy up which provides caching services. Caching would assist in making web browsing even faster and save bandwidth.

One thing that helps me stay focused on important milestones is documenting them. www.calendarsthatwork.com is a site that I have used previously to download custom calendars that I can then add important events to. Check it out. I am a fan of this one: http://www.calendarsthatwork.com/calendar.php?calendarId=monthLSf1&sid=wXs4kYLt

Also, if anyone knows how to have a wordpress page updated by a google document/spreadsheet please let me know. I have been trying a plugin called inline google docs, but I don’t think it works on the most recent wordpress release. I know how to have a google doc/spreadsheet publish a post to wordpress if you need help with that.