Archive for February, 2019

In this video, I’ll review the Kitbrix kit bag. They’re not your ordinary sports bag: instead, they’re constructed like bricks that can be chained together in a long line for transporting loads of equipment. Is that something you need, though?

They’re really rugged. They come with a rigid bottom that holds the shape of the bag, and the walls are double lined so that they are way more waterproof than an ordinary bag, or even your waterproof coat. They come with three internal pockets, one of which is transparent for holding paper notes. There are a further four mesh pockets on the outside.

The zip is super heavy duty so that it will keep water out and allow you to chain the bags together without fear. This does make it really difficult to use, though. It’s not broken, as far as I can tell, it’s just built to last and this means sacrificing a lot of ease of use.

One of the key features of the Kitbrix is that you can take two of the bags and turn them into a backpack. I’ll show you how to do this in the video. The zip is a bit difficult to do, but otherwise the system works really well and I use this every time I go to a triathlon race.

Overall, the bag system works really well. Every time I go to a race or cycling sportive I take a couple of them so that I can divide my gear into different sections: pre-race, transition bag, post-race recovery and change of clothes. It is expensive, though. And less convenient than the backpacks and transition bags you can buy. So, it might come down to how light you travel. For me, I travel heavy and these work great.

My triathlon club, Hyde Park Harriers Tri, recently added a spin class to their line-up. I went to my first session last week.

On the plus side, it was great to spin with the other members of the club. However, it’s also frustrating to have to pay for the class when I have free classes at The Edge, and while the instructor is fine, she’s not my favourite spin instructor.

Overall, though, I’ll be going back, at least for another session.

Last weekend, the Super League Triathlon final took place in Singapore. Katie Zerefes continued her domination of the women’s event while Vincent Luis managed to hang on to his lead, despite picking up a puncture. Jonny Brownlee was the highest placed Brit in third.

It’s a weird system. Vincent Luis won the overall championship because he came first in the final race, but also because the guy in 6th outran the guy in 7th or something like that. Even the commentators didn’t seem to know what was going on. They need to simplify that.

I don’t like it as much as World Series, as sometimes it feels a bit gimmicky, and the racing is over pretty quickly. But it is a fun addition to the triathlon schedule.

Super Bowl III saw the New England Patriots face off against the Los Angeles Rams.

Picking a side was difficult. I don’t like the way US sports teams sometimes just move and leave their fans behind. So, cheering on the Patriots to beat the St Louis Rams seemed the obvious choice. However, a few days before, Patriots owner Robert Kraft came out and said Trump was doing a wonderful job and Rupert Murdoch was the best human being alive. Not sure how to respond to that.

As it was, we were treated to quite possibly the dullest Super Bowl ever. The game finished 13-3 to the Patriots. There was only one touchdown for the entire game. I mean Super Bowl XLVIII was massively one-sided but this was the lowest scoring Super Bowl in history.

Still, every Super Bowl is a chance to party, and party we did. In many ways, it is nice that the sport did not get in the way of conversation.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the next major version of Rauma, 4.0.

Rauma is a full-stack PHP framework that gives you database, templating, session, authentication and many other functions out of the box. It’s the framework behind many of Worfolk Online’s websites.

Not much as changed in the 4.0 release, but it gets a major version bump because it’s a breaking change. Here’s what you need to know:

Authentication has been overhauled. The auth service now includes an isLoggedIn function to be a bit more verbose than checking for data. More importantly, you can now extend the base Authorisation class and create your own. This allows you to cache more data, connect to other services and implement persistent logins.

We’ve also deprecated the user description field, in favour of the new attributes feature that was added in version 3.6.

Two other things to be aware of:

There are now a set of proxy objects for things like JsonResponse so that you don’t have to import them from a different namespace.

This bumps the PHP version requirement from 5.6 to 7.1. This allows us to bring in a load of cool new stuff, including a far more up-to-date version of PHPUnit.

It’s available now on GitHub and Packagist.

Photo credit: Brett Donovan.