Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

If you sign up to Vodafone home broadband you get their Gigabox router. My one-day experience with it was that it was pretty bad. I kept setting up my wifi network. But then I would reload the configuration page and all of the settings would be gone. The wifi network would still work, but I couldn’t change anything without entering all of the settings again. Then other times, it would be there. It also wasn’t handling out DHCP leases to anything I had wired in. So, I set about trying to configure my ASUS router.

This was both very straight forward and took ages because unless you know the magic combination, it won’t work. The main thing is to configure the internet connection as PPPoE and use the serial number as the first part of the username.

But you also need to set a VLAN of 10. Some forums suggested that the AX6100 does not have this option but that is not correct. It’s just entirely unobvious. If you go into advanced settings > LAN > IPTV you can use the LAN report dialogue to set manual settings and enter a VID there.

As soon as I did this, my internet connected. Hurray! I was many hours into fiddling around with both routers by this point so hopefully this post will shave some time off somebody else’s search.

Recently, I was on an admin system on one of my websites and noticed that some of the AJAX requests had stopped working. They worked for fetching data, and creating it, but I could not update to delete anything. I tried another website. It happened there, too.

Initially, Slim was telling me it was a 405 Method Now Allowed. But I could see I was sending a PUT and the exception said it must be of type PUT. Very weird. In the end, I decided to output the $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_METHOD’] to see what was going on. It said it was a GET request.

I pulled up Paw, my desktop request client, and manually sent a PUT request to a file I had created to print the request method. It too said GET. By this point then, I knew that it probably Apache converting the request from a PUT to a GET. Or more likely that I was sending a PUT but it was returning a 403 Forbidden as a GET request for some reason.

The answer eventually came in the form of Mod Security. It uses something called OWASP ModSecurity 2.9 Core Rule Set v3.3.2 which allows GET and POST requests but denies PUT and DELETE requests. I am not sure why this is as they are legitimate verbs to be using, but when I altered this to allow PUT requests, everything started working fine again.

Apple Time Machine is the built-in backup system for macOS. The problem is that it’s not very good. Having used it for ten years, it consistently fails to verify its own backups. So, the idea that you have this rich history of incremental backups is often not true as it fails and has to start again.

It also takes up a ridiculous amount of disk space. Given that Apple only ship their Macs with 512 GB of SSD, taking up most of that to run a backup is not ideal.

Maybe it could use a different disk. But then it goes confused about how much storage is available. It thinks there is less than 100 GB available:

But I actually had 4 TB available:

I hope Apple sort all of this out at some stage.

I have been playing around with a range of options for tracking training for myself and my athletes. Here is a brief write-up of my findings.

Final Surge

Really nice. The new beta platform looks good. It’s free. The downside is that you cannot integrate TrainerRoad or Zwift, and if you connect Garmin and Strava to get them both, you get duplicate workouts. Actually, TrainerRoad support is there via TrainerRoad. But on Zwift support.

Today’s Plan

Costs money. Very power base and forces you to enter values from the start. I have to put the sports in that I do, but why> I select triathlon but then the other sports, too? It does have integration with Zwift, but despite sticking TrainerRoad’s logo on their page it is actually a manual upload process at the moment.

TrainerRoad

It’s beautiful but it’s all about cycling. It does not import my other workouts so I cannot analyse my load. I use it just for cycling.

TrainingPeaks

Integrates with everything. I have used TrainingPeaks previously but it seemed expensive for what it was. That said, thanks to the integrations and how nicely it all works together, TrainingPeaks is a winner for me.

One of the things that totally flummoxed me was trying to change my Canon DSLR from shooting video at 24 fps to 30 fps. It simply was not on the screen: I only had 24, 25 and 50 as options. And nobody on the internet seemed to have had the same problem.

I suspected it might be a legacy problem of PAL vs NTSC but I could not work out how to change it. In the end, I managed to find the menu option and my suspension was correct: once I changed the setting from PAL to NTSC I was then able to access 30 and 60 fps.

If anyone else is struggling with the same issue, or trying to get 24 fps on a NTSC-configured Canon, here is how to change it:

As you may know, Garmin have had a massive outage. It went down Wednesday night/Thursday morning and started coming back online on Monday, so 4-5 days. It took out their website, call centres, Garmin Connection, production line in Taiwan and even services like flyGarmin and Garmin Pilot.

Garmin’s software is awful at the best of times. Syncs constantly fail with the Garmin Connect mobile app, there are a bunch of bugs in their website that have lastest years (I still can’t see my swim from Wetherby Triathlon) and a lot of stuff crashes and does not work as it should. Hopefully, this will be a kick up their ass to make things better.

As a result, this has put a lot of strain on the things that rely on Garmin.

I managed to record my World Triathlon Leeds virtual event and earn my certificate. I was less lucky with Ironman VR16. Unusually, Ironman was on the ball and extended the deadline but technical problems at Garmin’s end with synced rides going missing and activities not reporting correctly meant I gave up after an hour of messing around. Thanks for that, Garmin. Still, even if I do not have the badge, I know I was a VR16 finisher in my heart.

The cycle was particularly challenging. I did 120 km, but a third of the way through a bolt fell out of my cleat (see above) and I had to do the last 3.5 hours with one foot clipped in and the other riding the flat side of the pedal. Thankfully, there were no major climbs or descents.

If you watch is syncing with Garmin Connect or Garmin Express, but not appearing in Garmin Connect, it could be that the activity has corrupted.

You can fix this by plugging your Garmin watch into your computer, browsing to Device/Garmin/ACTIVITY and finally finding the .FIT file. Try uploading this to Garmin Connect manually. If it says unsupported file type, you know you have a corrupt file.

Take it to Fit File Tools and run it through their fit file fixer. Download the result and try re-uploading it to Garmin Connect. Hopefully, it should be accepted this time.

If you’ve been doing the Ironman Virtual Club races, you may have run into the problem where some of your activities have not registered, and you’re stuck on 33% or 67%. Worse, it doesn’t tell you what was missing, so you have no idea what went wrong.

One of the most likely causes is that your activity was too long. For example, if you run 20km for a 10km race, Ironman Virtual Club will not count it. I ran into this when I ran 1.7km for the 1.5km run 1 of Ironman VR3. And things got worse for Ironman VR4. Last week, they announced on Facebook it would be a middle-distance event:

It didn’t occur to me to double-check the details when signing up, so I went out and did a 5km run and 90km bike ride, only to flip down in front of the TV to watch the VR4 Pro Challenge and realise they were only cycling 40km! By this point, I was in for the full thing, so I finished off with a 21km run on Sunday. But none of my activities had registered with Ironman Virtual Club, even though I had completed the distance (and then done it again).

If you are using Garmin Connect, here is how to fix it:

Download the FIT file from Garmin Connect, then go to Fit File Tools. Remove the section of the workout beyond your required distance. In this case, I deleted the last 50km my bike ride and then downloaded the modified FIT file. To allow me to re-upload it to Garmin Connect, I then used the time stamp modifier to make it look like a new activity.

If you have Strava connected to Ironman Virtual Club, you could also upload the modified versions direct to Strava from the Fit File Tools website.

If you’re using something other than Garmin Connect that doesn’t produce FIT files, you can download the GPX file and use a GPX editor, like WTracks, to make similar edits. You can trim the start and end with WTracks, but I’m not sure how to modify the timestamp.

Last week, I wrote about how IRONMAN, as an organisation, do not always have the best reputation among athletes. I do not think this is justified at their events. However, it is frustrating that nobody within the IRONMAN organisation has ever used a computer. Here are some of the problems we have run into.

Registration not working

It was a pain to get through the registration form to create my profile. When I came back a few months later, they had changed their registration system and I had to re-register. Their new form did not work at all. There was no error; the form simply did not do anything.

When I emailed support, they asked me to re-try it. This time it did not work because something had been created in the background and now I could not register with the same details.

Profile problems

Once I was registered and logged in, my upcoming race was missing. I had to email support to get them to sort it out. It took a few emails back and forth to get it sorted.

When I turned up in Weymouth, my date of birth was incorrect. It was a simple matter to get it sorted with the team there, but again frustrating.

Club registration

You cannot just enter your club in your registration form. You have to get the club to give IRONMAN a bunch of personal details for them, too. Graeme was kind enough to do this so that I could list Hyde Park Harriers as my club.

However, they never sent the email confirmation and when I contacted support a month later, they said they had lost of the club registration and we would have to complete it all again if we wanted the club to be listed.

Online store

The online store does not work. I have tried to buy some stuff several times and each time it says that the item is in stock but when I try to add it to my basket it says they have no stock left.

Website design

Oh my, have you ever seen a website designed as badly as IRONMAN?

It is not a mobile-first design, despite mobile traffic overtaking desktop traffic years ago. In fact, if you try to access many of the pages on the website, you do not even get a terrible desktop-designed page. You get a page saying “not available on mobile” like it is the Nineties.

The website is slow.

The navigation is confusing. If you go to a particular race, you have the main website navigation across the top and you have to click a little red button at the bottom of the page instead to access the pages about that particular race.

It is hard to get the information you want. I was trying to find the results for IRONMAN Wales from last year. They are not there, as far as I can tell.

Their SEO is also terrible. Every time I searched for IRONMAN Weymouth, I would get the discontinued full distance race, rather than the half distance that is still running. This would be a relatively easy fix in a sitemap or a robots.txt.

Garmin has announced a new range of watches, including a new flagship Forerunner model, the 945. At over £500, it’s a lot of money to ask for if you are upgrading from the 935. So, should you? Here is my breakdown of the new features.

Music

You can now store up to 1,000 songs from Spotify on your watch. Thus allowing you to go out running and listen to music without your phone. This isn’t a selling point for me. I don’t go without my phone, nor do I listen to music while running. I do sometimes listen to audiobooks. But as the watch only supports Spotify and one other platform, that isn’t an option. It also means having Bluetooth headphones and I don’t want yet another device to charge.

Full maps

And in colour, no less. The breadcrumbs are gone and now you have full maps with routing capability like a sat nav. Some of my friends who do trail runs have said this would be useful to them. However, as I road run, and have never used the maps on my watch, this isn’t a selling point for me. Might be useful in a triathlon run, I guess, but the breadcrumbs would probably be fine. And I’ve never used them so far.

Garmin Pay

Now we’re talking. The idea that I could go out without my credit card because I could just pay on my watch is appealing. That said, I would still take my phone, so I could pay with that. And what isn’t widely mentioned is that Garmin Pay currently supports almost no UK banks. In fact, none of the banks I have a credit or debit cards with are currently supported. So, this might be something for the future, but right now is pretty useless.

Battery life

The 945 still provides two weeks in normal mode, but the GPS mode now boasts an impressive 36 hours, up from 24 hours on the 935. How does it achieve this? By using a new lower-power GPS chip. This sacrifices some accuracy, however. It also supports the new Galileo satellite system, but turning that on will use more power. So, this isn’t necessarily an upgrade, depending on what you value the most.

Improved stats

The stats look pretty similar to the old ones. And they’re not super-useful. It provides you with a training load, for example. But it only includes activities you record on your watch. It can sync from the Edge 1030, but it can’t sync from any other Garmin product or other workouts. I do my structured training on TrainerRoad, so the Garmin stats are meaningless.

Summary

Honestly, I’m relieved. When I heard there was a new top-of-the-range Forerunner out, I thought that sounded like an expense I did not need. But having reviewed the features, I don’t. Right now, it doesn’t offer anything substantially better than my 935.