Fix on Nanikore

The Hassle of Punctures

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 03:18:00 +0000

I’ve always found punctures on any vehicle to be quite sad and annoying events. If they happen when you’re out and about they really ruin your day and require an amount of time and effort to get fixed - even if your car has a spare (a rarity nowadays) or inflating slime, you still need to get to the shop to get a new tyre sorted out. In the worst of cases, they can be a serious safety issue. The situation with my Tracer was fortunately not dramatic, and whilst I wasted a lot of time getting it sorted out, I did at least learn a few things along the way.

A few days ago I was riding home and had that feeling that the back tyre needed a pressure check. This was unexpected as I check tyre pressure regularly and before any kind of run out, so I stopped at a local garage, let the bike sit for a short while for the tyres to cool down, which wasn’t so easy given the air temp was around 33°C, and checked the pressure with their free air system - sure enough, the pressure was 250KPa instead of 290KPa. That may not sound like much, but I don’t let my tyre pressures get that out of spec and it’s noticeable even riding on asphalt. I put more air in and decided to check the next day. Maybe it was one of those things. (Yes, here in Japan most local petrol stations still have free air systems.)

metalintyre1.jpg" alt=“Embedded object in tyre” caption=“Embedded object in tyre”

The next morning, as I suspected, it had gone down to around 230Kpa. Something was amiss. I put it up on the centre stand and gave the rear tyre a closer inspection than I had at the petrol station. As expected there were a couple of small stones in the tread which is to be expected, and then … ah, a metallic object in one of the water draining sipes. It was flush with the surface tread, but was definitely into the tyre. Even though I was at home, I got the pliers from the under-seat tool kit (always know what’s in there and what they can be used for), and started pulling it out. This isn’t always the best thing to do, since it’s often better to leave as much air in as you can and get your plug repair kit ready, however, since I was at my house I decided there wasn’t much to lose. I got the piece of metal out without much fuss - it was about 4cm of curved steel. Not a nail or screw as I expected, but some piece of metal itself broken off from something else.

metalobject1.jpg" alt=“The Object in Question” caption=“The Object in Question”

I always have a tubeless tyre plug kit, so broke it out to try to get the tyre to hold enough air to get me to a shop to see if the tyre could be professionally plugged from the inside, or if I needed a new one.

Plugging a tyre is (often) fairly straightforward. First, remove the cause of the puncture as I’d done, then use a reaming tool to smooth out belts and make a consistent hole - this should follow the trajectory the puncturing object took - then apply glue to the plug, which looks like a sticky brown shoe-lace and push it through with an applicator tool so it forms a tight ‘V’ in the hole, then yank the tool back out, leaving the plug filling the hole. Then you just need to slice the protruding parts off so the tyre can roll smoothly. It sounds a bit odd if you’ve not seen or done it before, but there’s plenty of videos on Youtube showing this (e.g. Revzilla or Motorcyclist).

To be clear, my kit did not have the brown plug types, but a uniform rectangular block type plug, which were sort-of sticky. Long story short, I tried three of these and each simply snapped when trying to push them in. This could be their design, though I still see them for sale in Daytona’s kit (which is the one I have), or it could be because they’re four years old and the rubber has hardened. After three of the five snapped I popped to the shop and got some brown ones.

daytonaplugs1.jpg" alt=“The Bad Plugs” caption=“The Bad Plugs”

I then went through the procedure successfully with the brown type, but unfortunately the plugged tyre still wouldn’t wholly hold air, or more specifically, it wouldn’t hold enough of the 32g of CO2 I put in from the compressed gas cannisters in the kit. And yes, I felt bad letting all that CO2 out.

Why didn’t it work? When I discussed it with a couple of tyre shops I was getting quotes from, their theory was that it was likely due to the object being curved, and it being in a sipe where the rubber is thinner. Punctures are not my area of expertise, but it sounds plausible. Indeed when the tyre was removed, this seems to have been the case.

At this point then, I still had bike with a partially deflated rear tyre and the need to get it from my house to a local shop. As it would turn out, it wasn’t that difficult.

First up, we called the local motorbike gear and parts place, NAPS, and asked if they did tyre repairs, and if not, a quote for a new rear tyre of the same model. It turns out they no longer offer tyre repair, which is where they take the tyre off, and plug it from the inside with a special kit. More surprisingly the mechanic told us they wont be doing any engine repair work soon either. They did however give us a decent quote for the tyre, swapping and disposal of the old tyre.

I always like to get a few prices though, so I also called for pricing for the new tyre from Red Baron, where I bought the bike originally, and SpeedStar in west Tokyo where I usually get my tyres done. It turned out though that neither of these places were keen on trying to fix the tyre after hearing my description of the damage.

That left me with the task of getting the bike to the shop. NAPS and Red Baron had pickup vehicles, but as the Baron pointed out, I should check if my insurance would cover that, even though it’d be a third party pickup team. This actually reminded me that I do indeed have roadside assistance in my insurance for my bike, though the reseller I bought the policy through said it only could be used if I was away from my home. Only one way to find out so we called the insurance company directly, explained the tyre got a puncture on the road and I’d managed to limp it home, and yes, no problem they said, even to get to my preferred shop of Speedstar which was the furthest away but also the cheapest. A few minutes later they called back, and we were booked in for a 8.30am pick up the next day with a company called Kirin Auto.

Kirin actually turned up a bit early, with a full car sized loader. The driver was really friendly and easy going it has to be said. He couldn’t take me with himdue to insurance reasons so I’d have to go by train, but he loaded the bike up, strapped it down and we made sure we all knew where we were going. We’d also let Speedstar know the situation for when the bike turned up since I was likely to be a bit later.

There’s something faintly embarrassing about sitting on a train in bike gear, holding your helmet. I just don’t know what it is.

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I’ve been using Speedstar for over a decade. It’s a small shop in the fairly nice Setagaya area of Tokyo - I actually lived just down the road for a couple of years. It only does tyres and the shop can fit just two lifts in at a time, or one enormous Harley. They operate a first come, first served system, but they also own a small cafe around the corner, so you can wait there, and they’ll even come in to tell you when the bike’s done. I’ve always liked this place - the staff are relaxed, and keen to talk, and they’re open about issues they find on bearings, axle bolt torques and anything else near the wheels. That can be helpful. I could go somewhere closer, I could go to a large franchise nearby, but I quite like the place, even if it’s a pain to get to by train for me. Also, cash discount.

speedstar2.jpg" alt=“The SpeedStar Cafe, Tokyo” caption=“The SpeedStar Cafe, Tokyo”

So now I have a new rear Michelin Road 5 tyre on the bike, which feels great to have with its new curvy profile. It’s like slipping into a bed with new sheets with your new pyjamas.

newtyre1.jpg" alt=“A New Michelin Road 5” caption=“A New Michelin Road 5”

I have 2 new CO2 bottles in my puncture kit too - don’t forget to replace consumables - and 5 remaining new brown plugs in the kit and am planning to replace them every 3 years in case the rubber ageing is a factor.

All in all, whilst the plugging wasn’t successful, it seems my technique was correct, and my kit had all the things I needed, even though those initial plugs just didn’t work. It also seems my insurance isn’t too difficult to deal with, which is something you only know when you need to use it.

[Fixed for me] Mac rebooting during sleep

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 12:53:27 +0000

Posting this in case it can save someone else some time:

It all started so innocently. I’d bought a Logitech wireless mouse (an M325) and put the tiny receiver into the keyboard USB port for proximity, because I never use those ports. It seemed to work fine and also reduced the number of cables on my rather cluttered desk.

A couple of days later, whilst I was playing Minecraft on my Windows box, I noticed that the Mac Mini was unexpectedly rebooting, so I trawled the Macs logs in the Console.app, and found an odd error message regarding a sleep issue. It wasn’t a one off either - in one evening it had rebooted and actually shutdown three times.

9/24/14 11:35:04.000 PM kernel[0]: Sleep failure code 0x00000000 0x1f006900

I read around on the net about that message, and what it could be related to, and it seemed that some people were having similar issues and suspected USB devices, especially drives, such as for Time Machine, as the culprit.

Of course, the first thing you check for should be recent changes, and there had been some Apple patches go in, but I decided to test the Time Machine USB drive theory first (almost dismissing the new mouse!). In summary:

- Removed Time Machine drive - same problem.
- Removed the Logitech mouse dongle, but crucially, put the old known good basic Microsoft mouse in that same keyboard USB port (previously it was plugged into the rear of the Mini) - same problem.
- Tested disabling sleep to confirm it was sleep related, and yes, confirmed that there was no problem with no sleep.
- Finally, decided to plug the Logitech dongle into the USB hub attached to the mac - and yes, all was fine, no sleep problem anymore.

It would seem that keyboard port does not like USB HID devices.

The bottom line: never dismiss any change, and never underestimate the weird things which can cause issues - [Fixed for me] Mac rebooting during sleep!

Curse you, MX records! Sorry, my fault.

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:49:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I put a techie post up on here - shame on me! Here’s one about me doing something stupid, cursing my MX records then apologising for it being my fault.

Like many, I have a couple of email addresses. Actually, I have a silly amount I’ve set up to play with services over the years, but I’ve been slowly culling them. Anyway, I basically have two main addresses now - one which I use day to day for sign-ups, and one based on a domain name I own, and is mainly for friends and family which is now quite a few years old.

That, for a while now has been run from Google Apps, a relatively under appreciated offering from Google as far as I can tell. Essentially what it is, is a Gmail and Google Apps backend for your own company/domain, so all my mail for that address comes and goes from my address @ brightblack.net account, but is purely going through Gmail and gets all the benefits of the spam filter and 7GB+ of storage, for free. I like it - so much better than a Hotmail account or an ISP namespace.

My problem actually started a few weeks ago, but I didn’t notice as it’s not a high volume account, but I wasn’t getting any new mail. Then, last week my parents mentioned they’d actually got a bounced reply. I actually replicated it straight off from my phone thanks to Softbank’s insane timeout setting:

Action: failed Status: 5.2.0 Remote-MTA: dns; brightblack.net (___.___.___.___) Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 5.7.1 : Relay access denied

(IP address obscured there!)

Odd. So I logged in to my Google Apps account, nope, all looked fine there, but no new mail. So I went further up the chain. My domain registrar is called PairNic, who have always been good to deal with, and the www.brightblack.net domain pointer seemed fine. So the next logical question is: what had I changed with this domain - any aspect of it - lately?

Answer: I’d re-set it to point to this blog … a few weeks ago.

Ah.

That’s a coincidence.

From Google Apps, I did a quick MX records test, where it basically does a DNS lookup (of which MX records are a component) on my domain and as somewhat expected, no MX records found. Well that explains why I wasn’t getting mail and people were getting bounced. As far as the internets were concerned, I wasn’t there.

So, I logged in to Pairnic again, went into their DNS/email config, and lo and behold - nothing - so a quick check at both WordPress and Google apps showed me my MX records should look something like:

Priority          Mail Server
1           ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5           ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5           ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10         ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10         ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

So I entered that into PairNIC’s pages, waited only a few minutes for it to replicate, and then the test from Google showed I had MX records again, and a quick email from my phone successfully arrived, followed over the next day by a small deluge as spooled messages came in.

You can actually get some good, simple steps to troubleshoot this in the Google Apps Tech Support area, as I discovered mostly after I’d fixed it.

So how did it break? As I suspected, it was when I re-pointed my old brightblack website address to this blog through PairNic, I missed a large amount of red warning text saying exactly what would happen:

Warning: Enabling any Forwarding features (E-mail or Web site Forwarding or Parking) will remove any previous DNS settings that you may have had with your account. Any previous nameserver, DNS, or e-mail settings will be lost.

How I missed that, I’ll never know - PairNic obviously make it pretty clear, but I must have thought that since I was only playing with NS (website) settings really, my email would be unchanged. I should have re-read that! All in all, I got off lucky - it took me less than an hour in front of the computer to realise what an oaf I’d been and to fix and test it - looking at some of the Google forums, some people have much larger issues.

If nothing else, I’ve refreshed my rusty knowledge of DNS, MX records and how my own email setup actually works, which is no bad thing. It’s also got me delving a little more into parts of DNS I hadn’t really looked at, like priorities, CNAMES, SPF records (sender-permitted-from), and gain a bit more knowledge on the subject of email in general, and some of the changes coming with IPv6!

Read the red text. Twice.

Cool Graphics

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 09:52:05 +0000

Since building my new PC, I’ve been feeling like tinkering a bit, and one thing I’m trying to do is keep my PC quieter. As much as the Elsa 6800GS is quieter than an nVidia stock part, it can get a little noisy after a couple of hours play, so I wondered just how much a GPU cooler would cost, and whether there were any decent ones out there. A few reviews led me to the Arctic Cooling 5NV Silencer.

After about 30 minutes I had the new cooler attached (it takes up another space on the back of the PC effectively!), and not only is it much, much quieter (nigh on silent in the case to be honest) it also keeps the GPU and the temperature around it much, much cooler. Here are some very un-scientific numbers I got from the nVidia control panel:

Elsa Cooler vs. Arctic Cooling Silencer

At boot / rest in Windows
GPU core: 46 C 38 C
Ambient temp.: 35 C 32 C

After 3DMark05
GPU Core : 61 C 42 C
Ambient temp.: 41 C 35 C

After 30mins in Half Life 2
GPU Core : 65 C 50 C
Ambient: 50 C 40 C

So as you can see, not only is it quieter under load, it’s much cooler too. The benefits to me of this are that in the summer I don’t have to worry as much(!), that the rest of the PC stays a little cooler, and that if I like, I’ve got a bit of overclocking headroom there.