Andy’s session hit the spot tonight! Old and new favourites including

• warming up to a long, bouncy remix of Personal Jesus
• an inspiring but laid-back* cover of Route 66
• an inspiring mix of Joy Division’s Love will tear us apart (Whoever remixed this is a pure genius, I think.)
• Dave Edmund’s Queen of hearts
• the pre-finale of a full-on climb (Andy, what is that track called?)
• the William Tell overture to cap it all, and leave you gasping (for more, in many cases).

​All of this had me happy and pushing as hard as I could** all the way through the hour. I think the bike helped too – it had about 2 turns from no resistance to can’t-move-the-pedals.

I have to congratulate : she’s in ‘Sir’ Hugh McInnes‘ intense road-training class just now. The intensity was booming out of the studio just now – fast, hard sprints to inspiring techno that would pull out superb efforts from anyone! I’d hoped to do this but for reasons I won’t make entirely public I’m not up to two back-to-back spinning sessions today. (I recognise there’s a contradiction between these two sentences but I’m following the  wisdom of ‘your body, your bike – listen to them!’)

I won’t be spinning next Monday (I’m taking minutes for Leith Central Community Council that evening) but I intend to be back the following Monday, pushing on through both Andy and Hugh’s classes into the stratosphere.

*I know what I mean. If you don’t you’ll just have to come to Lifescycle and try it for yourself.

** not as hard as I’d have liked

A comment on LiveJournal prompted me to try a different VNC solution on my iPhones and my dad’s iPad mini.

BTMM/VNC and Mocha VNC
Until today I’ve been using Mocha VNC on my iPhones when I’ve needed to take over my main mac (Iggy) from afar. Every now and then I find I’ve not got a needed file. VNC allows me to to take over my main mac’s screen and slowly, clumsily make Iggy email the file to me.

(If I have my MacBookAir (MIA) and I can connect it to a network, I can use the built-in VNC to take over Iggy much more conveniently:

1. MIA controlling Iggy

This works very well. Thanks to BackToMyMack, I don’t need to remember Servants’ Quarters’ public-facing IP address. If the connection is fast enough, I can work roughly as if I was sat at Iggy, although MIA’s reduced screen area is a limitation. Even if the connection is slow and patchy, whatever I do stays on Iggy and is backed up via TimeMachine, CarbonCopyCloner and CrashPlan. Alternatively, I can put whatever I wish to work on in a Cubby so that it synchronises to MIA. Then I can do the work locally, knowing that as soon as I save it and MIA is online, the work will be synchronised back to Iggy.BTMM and VNC have also allowed me to take over my dad’s mac with ease, so I can sort whatever has troubled him.)

But what if I only have my iPhone? So far, Mocha VNC has been acceptable. Over Servants’ Quarters’ wireless LAN, it can do the job, although there is a lot of screen-resizing and cursing as I make the dock visible, start up the relevant application, then do whatever I need to do. Over a good 3G connection, Mocha VNC works acceptably too. Over a lousy cellular connection, it’s painful. (Of course this is mostly due to the slow connection, and is not Mocha VNC’s fault.)

2. iPhone 4 controlling Iggy via wireless LAN	3. iPhone 4 controlling Iggy via 3G cellular

However, Mocha VNC has always crapped out whenever I’ve tried to use it to take over my dad’s mac, both via Servants’ Quarters’ LAN and via cellular. This occurred no matter whether I used an iPhone or the iPad I’m due to take to him at the end of next week.

Fantasy
I’d also been musing on my perfect portable device. I think that if I had a spare £5000, it would be a ModBook in a bespoke water- and shock-proof case. (£4000 for a high-spec ModBook and £1000 to get someone to make a one-off prophylactic, then an iPad emulator for doing iOS things, along with my existing iPhone for connectivity.) This is never going to happen. So my default single portable device would be an iPad mini (with cellular connection) in a Lifeproof case.

But what if I wanted to do remote stuff? suggested getting a VNC app. As I mentioned, Mocha VNC is acceptable for getting at Iggy but craps out if I try to control my dad’s mac. (I also wanted to give him the opportunity to control his mac from downstairs or wherever he happens to be. [The temporary caveat is that his iPad doesn’t have a SIM, because he’s not yet sure how much he would use the iPad away from home and he doesn’t want to take on another cellphone contract if he can help it.])

VNC Viewer works!
A quick Google found some advice: of the two recommended bits of software, I chose the cheaper, VNC Viewer. (It also just happens to be from VNC’s original developers.) And lo! And behold! I can VNC from both of my iPhones and from dad’s iPad into Iggy and my dad’s mac, via both both Servants’ Quarters’ LAN and via 3G cellular. (OK, that’s not quite true – I can’t yet use cellular connections on the iPad because it doesn’t have a SIM. But if it works via cellular on the iPhones, and works via LAN on the iPad then its seems reasonable to believe it will work via cellular on the iPad.)

The interface is intuitive, with a lot less stuff to enter. (Unlike Mocha VNC, it doesn’t offer more ‘mac-cy’ choices, such as logging using a registered username. Not a hassle, as far as I can see!)

Here’s some screenshots of it in use on the iPad:

4. iPad mini controlling Iggy via wireless LAN; Iggy is controlling MIA via wired LAN	5. The onscreen keyboard takes up a lot of space.
6. iPad mini controlling Iggy via wireless LAN	7. In portrait orientation, the keyboard takes up less space. But only half of Iggy’s screen is visible.
8. iPad mini controlling my dad’s mac via wireless LAN

So it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot less fiddly than the iPhones’ tiny screens.

iPhone 3GS versus iPhone 4
Finally, here are screenshots of my iPhones using VNC viewer to control my dad’s mac. Note the differences in screen resolution!

9. iPhone 3GS

10. iPhone 4

I’ve had iPad-mini-lust for a while, exacerbated by setting one up for my dad. I use my iPhone a lot but the screen is too small for real productivity. The prices for iPad minis aren’t too far into fantasy-land, and they’re about £100 cheaper than their full-size sistren.

Problem?
But for real productivity, I’d want the full-fat MacOS so I can run Adobe Creative Suite, QuankyAbcess, MS Office, Eclipse and similar. Remember I effectively swapped a full-size iPad 1 for a MacBook Air – it gave me the OS I want, and a real keyboard in a package roughly the same size and weight. I’m pretty sure I can find an iPad environment for MacOS if I really need to run iOS stuff.

The two things missing from this package are

• water- and shock-proofness. (Lifeproof make superb cases for iDevices, including the best iPhone handlebar-mount I’ve experienced.)
• lack of touch screen.

Solutions
I don’t know yet how to solve the former but I recalled this morning that if I ever had a spare £4000 or so, there’s a company that will happily swap it for a device based on the guts of a MacBook pro and a graphics tablet. You need to use a stylus with it, so it’s not quite a touch screen but it’s as near as I can find and I use a graphics tablet at home anyway. (It will also run Windows7 natively, thanks to BootCamp, so I guess there would be nothing to stop it also running Windows8. If BootCamp won’t enable Windows8, VirtualBox would.)

Obviously that price is well into fantasy-land. (When I think about road-bikes, I imagine spending around £1000. I guess this is because I believe I’ll never be a good or frequent enough roadent to justify spending more, but I spend a lot of time with my macs and I like to think I know what I’m doing with them.)

For much less money, it is of course possible to hack your own franken-tablet-mac or hack an existing tablet to run MacOS. Or you can make iOS look like MacOS

I’ll try to record this cycle each week. I didn’t record the outward trip because I was running late (as ever) and didn’t have time to set up the recording.

I think I’ve found a maintain a better-than-utterly-rubbish speed up Cramond Road South. This morning I didn’t approach the hill at top whack (under those conditions 17mph) so I wasn’t demoralised by dashed expectations rapidly, and I could maintain a reasonable cadence all the way up. I maintained over 7mph. Given that I’ve been crawling along at 5mph at the top on previous runs, this is quite pleasing.

I’m unconvinced by the app’s ascent and descent measurements. Almost exactly the same route – certainly no difference in the streets I rode – but why the 90-foot diffference in Descent readings?

This might have been funny if it wasn’t real.

Photos from our recent cycling in Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovakia

I want one of these!

Quite pleasing outward speed but I’ve gone faster down the hill from Quality Street junction to Cramond (32mph) and I’ve never yet maintained over 10mph up that hill. One of these days….

It’s back!

Twas bad
My first two spins after returning from holiday were, er, not enjoyed. The bikes, the exercises, the music were all fine – Andy dropped in the William Tell overture for jumps and climbs and The Orb’s Little fluffy clouds – a brilliant track as far as I’m concerned! But I was just plodding along, slowly going through the motions, with hardly enough energy to turn the pedals. I guess that during our holiday I’d got used to slow, long cycles, rather than spinning’s breakneck surges and intense climbs. But I don’t truly believe it’s the explanation. Maybe I was just on a post-holiday down.

Getting better
Then came Sunday, and the Tour de Forth. When we finished I was quite high – flapping around full of mental energy, even though parts of my body felt as though they’d worked.

By the way, here’s some photos:

On Monday, spinning felt much better. My legs had better ideas of what they were supposed to do. No stratospheric feelings, no mental mayhem but just gentle enjoyment and reawakened belief that I could get good feelings from this sweaty madness.

It’s back!
And then tonight it was back! My legs worked fairly well (I still can’t run at any speed out of the saddle), the music was fun and full-on (including Hell’s Bells and the William Tell overture for the final set of sprints and surges), the bike was just right – plenty of turn between recovery and ‘pedals-won’t move’, with the balance between resistance and cadence working for me and by the end I was up there. Not the most stratospheric I’ve been after spinning but up, happy and enjoying it!

This is why I spin – why I’ll drag myself out in the evenings, even if the rain and snow are hammering down, even if I have far too much MSc or freelance work to do, why I’ll sweat my bits off in small room full of humidity and noise, why I’m happy to deal with dripping kit and squelchy shorts night after night. More often than not it’s just fun, and there’s always the chance of something cosmic.

Of course there are other reasons – it’s good for me, it allows me to hope (or should that be ‘pretend’?) that one day I’ll be more than a commuter-cyclist, it’s safe cycling to music, it’s an excuse to wear the brightest lycra I can find and of course the Lifescycle folk are caring, encouraging, professional but fun people to be around. The attention they pay to new spinners, and to the rest of us, comes not simply from ‘hey, we’ll keep this customer if he or she has a good experience’ but because they’re genuinely enthusiastic about people. But I have to acknowledge that I’m a selfish bugger and that I just enjoy the whole deal. Thank you in large lumps to all the Lifescycle crowd!