Be careful of wet newspaper!

Riding into work today, I got about half way in before noticing that my rear shifting wasn't working very well. Looking down, it looked like a rag had got caught in the jockey wheels/cassette.

So I stopped on the Moonee Ponds Creek bridge and had a look. It turned out to be a single sheet of damp newspaper, all caught up and mashed around the jockey wheels & cassette & under the chain.

Cleaning it out was difficult because it was caught up under the chain, and that it disintegrated when picking it out. Took about 5 minutes to get it out but then I noticed that the cassette, the paper had somehow loosened the locknut on the cassette and the cassette & the separate sprockets were very loose. Tried finger tightening the locknut, but that only worked a little bit, it was still loose.

Seems that the paper must of compressed on each rotation, in the gap between the locknut & chainstays. And since the chainstays are "going backwards" in relation to the clockwise drive of the cassette when pedalling, it unscrewed the locknut!! Who would of guessed, I'm going to make it nice & tight when I get back home to my cassette locknut spanner.

PS. I've heard some horror stories of plastic shopping bags wrecking the rear derailleur, so I got away pretty cheaply, especially since I just replaced my Shimano Deore 2001 rear derailleur with a SRAM X.9 2007 one.

Firefox Mouse Gestures (Optimoz extension): Snapback gesture

It seems the Optimoz gesture exchange page is down. But the project page on Mozdev seems to be up!!

matt added a comment (well 3) to the Firefox Extensions I use (2007-08-09) post, asking for it since the page is down and googling didn't find anything, so here it is:

1. In Firefox, goto Add-ons -> Mouse Gestures -> Options -> "Edit Gestures" button (at the bottom of the General tab, and click New.
2. In the Gesture code textfield, enter: LR
3. For Function Type, select: Custom
4. In Gesture Name textfield, enter: Go to first page
5. In Custom JavaScript code textarea, enter: if (gBrowser.sessionHistory.index > 0) gBrowser.gotoIndex(0);

Now, you only have to hold down the Right mouse key, and flick the mouse to the Left and then back to the Right!!

Bikely.com - Cleaner (Stylish site style)

Bikely.com - Cleaner site-style at userstyles.org

I been using the www.bikely.com site for a while now to plot my bike routes or to plan them. I've created some Stylish (a Firefox extension) site-styles to modify the page to remove some of it's clutter. I finally got around to publishing it, mainly because of the functionality lose (favourites adder missing in the header) that users in the forum's have been complaining about. Seems Bikely hasn't been actively developed for a while now, hopefully Jules or someone from BikeRadar continues to develop Bikely soon. Here is my created "site specific stylesheets" site-style:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://www.bikely.com/maps/") {

/* Get rid of Flash object and make the title info wrap */
#headerline > OBJECT { display: none !important; }
#lblRoutetitle > BR { display: none !important; }
#lblRoutetitle { clear: none !important; }

/* Hide Google Ads & Map copyright details */
#mapadcontainer { display: none !important; }
#map > div:first-child + div { display: none !important; }
}

So install the Bikely.com - Cleaner site-style & enjoy!! The userstyles site let's you install it directly into Firefox via Stylish or optionally, as a user-script into Greasemonkey. The user-script also works with Opera.