Monthly Archives: September 2020

First ride – Fall 2020

Motorcycles

The hibernation is over.

Unlike grizzlies, BMW Airhead motorcycles hibernate in the summer, when it’s too darned hot to leave a vintage machine in a 130F greenhouse passing as a garage, here in Scottsdale, Arizona.




Back on May 1, 2020.

So with temperatures finally dipping back into single figures, it was time to get the 1975 BMW R90/6 out of its refrigerated comfort zone and back on the road. Where it belongs.

The Odyssey gel cell battery needed no recharging, having dropped from 13.11 volts to 12.97 volts. On the other hand, the tubed tires did need air, each having lost some 50% of the usual 32/36 pounds in pressure. Easy. Oil? No need to check. German motorcycles do not leak.

So a gallon of high test later – the tank had been drained before indoor storage – a prod or two on the kick starter to get oil to the piston rings, full choke just for the start, a touch on the electric starter button to get that huge, antique Bosch lump of a starter to do its bit, and off we go. Kicking those big twin 450cc pistons into life from cold is no fun. Electric starting is the way to go, introduced in Airheads in 1970.

Nothing, but nothing, beats two motorized wheels.

Meat cleaver

Cooking

A superior tool for any cook.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Over a decade ago I extolled the benefits of a good chef’s knife, writing like many before me that it’s the key kitchen tool.

Well, for the last three years my chef’s knife has seen very little use and I prepare three meals daily. It has been replaced – nay, obsoleted – by this:




A superior tool.

This tool is superior to the chef’s knife in just about every way imaginable. The cutting edge is much further from the fingers. The leverage that can be applied on the broad-topped blade is an order of magnitude greater. Rocking the cleaver over vegetables, like onions, to dice and chop them up is trivial and safe. But as the dents in mine confirm, the last thing you really want to do with this tool is use it for hacking up bones. Yes, the steel is soft, meaning it both blunts and distorts relatively easily. I will gradually wear through my dents, but they remind me not to be silly. You never hammer this down on anything. Make noise with it and you are using it incorrectly. Want to hack up bones? Use a saw.

The blade is very thick which just helps with the impression of control and yes, it just fits the sharpening machine I have now been using happily for over a decade:




In the Chef’s Choice sharpener.

What about the Mezzaluna, you ask? After all, celebrity TV chefs are all over this tool:




An awful, single-use tool. Dangerous, too.

I have to tell you that this is one of the worst conceived single-use tools ever. First, all you can do with it is rock it back and forth on vegetables. Second, the unprotected blade will slice you up when you retrieve it from the drawer where you placed it, because it was just too large to hang on the wall.

And unlike the cleaver, it cannot scoop up chopped material for placement in the skillet (the chef’s knife’s narrow blade is also sub-optimal in this task), nor can you use it to gently crush garlic cloves to permit easy peeling – and subsequent dicing. Fughedaboutit. It’s a solution looking for a problem, strictly for poseurs. And if you think this is the right way to slice up a pizza pie, think again and get a pizza wheel. It’s nice having ten fingers ….

Brand choice for the cleaver? I don’t think it matters. Just do not waste your $100 on a costly, hard steel German one which will be hell to sharpen. Instead, get something like my $25 choice and make sure you have good sharpening hardware available. And make sure your cleaver of choice has a hanging hole in the blade, as you will want to hang it in an accessible spot. After all, you will find you are using it daily.

The cleaver rules. All I use the vaunted chef’s knife for today is to split open large melons or cantaloupes. Point in first, for safety, then rotate.

Smooth that video

Photographs, Software

A new algorithm.

Back in the early days when founders Brin and Page were mere multi-millionaires, they concluded that it would be chic to adopt the catchy ‘Do no evil’ catchphrase for their company, Google. They then proceeded to do mighty evil on a global scale, stealing and reselling your identity, while maintaining that all their software was free. You, poor sap, were the product, to be sold and resold ad infinitum.

Now that Page and Brin are retired, needing the leisure time to count their ill-gotten billions, Google has actually gone and done something distinctly not evil. “Working with UC Merced and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (they) have detailed the development of DAIN, a depth-aware video frame interpolation algorithm that can seamlessly generate slow-motion videos from existing content without introducing excessive noise and unwanted artifacts.” (The quote is from DP Review).

This algorithm, and the related free software, allows interpolation of frames in low frame rate videos to restore smoothness. At the same time, the code is smart enough to properly treat overlapping and moving elements in the frame. The results are simply stunning, as this video from 1890s Paris – enhanced and colorized, as well as up-frame rated – shows:




Paris, 1890. Click for the video.

Wait a minute. Did I write that Google had momentarily given up its evil ways? Ooops! Now you can interpolate your cheating spouse into that video and, whammo!, a million dollar alimony settlement. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Rollie Free

Motorcycles, Photographs

Motorcyclist.

By any measure it’s the most famous motorcycling photograph ever.

Riding a lightly modified Vincent Black Lightning, a descendant of the iconic Black Shadow, putting out some 85hp from its 1000 cc V Twin motor, the wonderfully named Rollie Free (1900-1984) determined that his racing leathers were costing him speed on previous runs, where he maxed out at 147 mph. So he stripped down to bathing cap, trunks and sneakers and had at it, prone on the machine.




Bonneville, Utah, September 13, 1948. 150.313 mph. Protective gear optional.

Free’s record setting speed was on a machine which you could buy off the shelf. I would guess that the mufflers were removed and the Lightning had slightly hotter cams than the already fearsome Black Shadow.

The V Twin motor was known as ‘The Plumber’s Nightmare’, and you can see why:




Plumber’s nightmare. ‘HRD’ stands for Howard R. Davies, the founder of the Vincent factory.

Reminder, if any was needed, that there are two kinds of British motorcycles. Those that leak oil and those which will. But there was only one Rollie Free.

Exakta Varex

Cameras

Oh! boy.

If you think the ergonomics of the iPhone as a camera are awful – and they are – you should try the 1950s Exakta Varex.




Ergonomic nightmare.

Made in East Germany, which probably says it all, this camera was uniquely bad when it came to hand-held use. The film wind was left handed, though a massive arc with a pencil thin lever which needed two or more hands to operate. Multi-stroking was a no-no. So, naturally, the shutter release was also left handed, and with auto diaphragm lenses the protrusion on front of the lens covered the shutter button on the body. First pressure stopped the lens down, further pressure tripping the shutter. The release button stuck out a mile, making use a challenge. On early lenses the diaphragm had to be manually re-tensioned with a concentric lever on the lens. There was no focusing aid in the dim pentaprism so you sort of sawed the lens back and forth until the image was at its least unsharp. True masochists opted for the waist level finder, which made things even worse.

There are two shutter speed dials, but the main one atop the body can only be set in one direction, counterclockwise, so you may have to hose it around through almost a full circle to get to the next slower speed. Set it to ‘B’ and the secondary dial comes into play, with extended speeds down to 12 seconds. There is no rhyme or reason in the speed settings or progression and you have to separately wind that second dial. Well, you are beginning to get the idea by now. This thing is a disaster.




1/5th second? No prob. Choice of two.

The bayonet lens throat was very small, making design of fast and wide lenses a challenge. For reasons known only to themselves, the excellent Swiss Alpa and the no less excellent Japanese Topcon SLRs used the Exakta mount, though both had the sense to opt for a right-handed shutter button. Alpa stuck with external aperture actuation whereas Topcon at least had the sense to internalize the mechanism. Unsurprisingly, both marques failed. A real shame in the case of the Topcon which was extremely reliable and robust, much favored by the US Navy.

However, should you opt for cassette to cassette transport of film in your Varex, there’s a film cutter in the base. Pull it out and your film is sliced in half. So you have that going for you.

The chances that all this wonderful Commie engineering will actually see anything work in this body after all these years – they have a nasty habit of rusting as stainless metals were anathema to Stalin’s forces – are pretty near zero, which is in keeping with the general spirit of this disaster. I recall selling these new (they struggled on with later models through the late 1960s), during my Years in retail and they felt fragile even when brand new. The last version – the VX1000 – added an automatic return mirror, just one more thing to go wrong. Nice to display these for their funky looks, but if you want lousy ergos in a working camera, stick with your iPhone.