Robin Clarke – Life and Tech

I just spent a few days getting my old media archives in order.

I’ve previously used F-Spot for managing my photos, and errr… folders for videos. Unfortunately F-Spot development seems to be stagnating, and I’m not too impressed with the performance and frequency of crashes…
Sooo I opened up Shotwell (the (not so) new default photo manager on Ubuntu), and proceeded to import all my photos. I can’t say it went without a hitch – I had to fiddle around with a few batches of photos which got tags I never defined hooked on them in a way Shotwell wouldn’t remove, and some other tags just dissapeared altogether… but all in all the effort for migrating ~25k photos was acceptable, and the end result: Shotwell is pretty sweet!
Shotwell is soooo much faster and responsive than F-Spot, and I love the way that any enhancements you make on a picture (cropping, colour/hue adjustment etc.) are stored as transformations in the database, and only applied to exported pictures – the original image data remains untouched. The F-Spot solution to this was to create Modified versions, but that always bugged me having so many versions of the same file hanging around, and progressive loss of quality…
Also I love that tagging in Shotwell is much faster than in F-Spot (for a keyboard junkie like me): [ctrl]-t, and type in (auto-complete) a list of tags.
For video editing (I recently got a camcorder) I tried out Kino (no development in last year and a half, and working with .MOD files was a pain) and Cinalerra (horrible GUI…) but ended up settling for OpenShot, and while it probably can’t be considered a fully fledged video editor, it’s more than enough for my needs, and pretty intuitive.

Google has a pretty neat service for getting driving/cycling/walking directions between places, and now there’s a perl interface to it: Google::Directions (and on GitHub)

It’s Moosey and it’s juicy… I hope it helps you get from A to B with Perl a bit faster! 🙂

If anybody is top-fit with Moose::Util::TypeConstraints, I have some issues in this module which I don’t understand and would really appreciate some tips with. 🙂

And here’s some sample code:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Google::Directions::Client;
use Getopt::Long;

my %params;
GetOptions( \%params,
 'origin=s',
 'destination=s',
 );

my $goog = Google::Directions::Client->new();

my $response = $goog->directions( %params );
my $first_leg = $response->routes->[0]->legs->[0];
printf( "That journey will take you %0.1f minutes and %0.1fkm\n",
 ( $first_leg->duration / 60 ),
 ( $first_leg->distance / 1000 ),
 );

# $> ./test_directions.pl --origin "Munich, Germany" --destination "Hamburg, Germany"

# That journey will take you 443.8 minutes and 778.5km

This post should have come out in September 2011 because that’s when the odometer on my bike wrapped from 9999km to 0km.

The stats

• New price: 450€ (city bike, aluminium frame, solid carrier, hub dynamo, …)
• At the 10000km my bike was about 4 years old (but one year in storage)
• I cycled an average of 3300km per year that I used it
• Never cycled outside of Munich city
• No recreational cycling – all commuting
• Average speed with winter tyres: 15km/h
• Average speed with summer tyres: 18km/h

How much wear and tear on the bike?

• Replaced break blocks 3 times
• Replaced 3 tyres
• Replaced 2 tubes
• Replaced break and gear cables
• One broken crank shaft bearing
• One new saddle
• Replaced rear sprocket
• Replaced crank set and pedals
• Purchased studded winter tyres
• Replaced front halogen lamp with powerful LED lamp
• Lots of oil…

Total cost of ownership

Assuming a linear depreciation to 100€ over 5 years, the cost of the bicycle, plus maintenance (my work time not included): 127€/year

Given that at least 2/3 of the distance travelled was work related I can write off 5ct/km (flat-rate in German taxes): 110€ per year, so it only costs me ~17€ per year to cycle.

Had I driven that distance by car (assuming a car which I would own: a 7 year old compact) it would have cost me about 200€ taxes, 500€ insurance, 400€ maintenance, and 700€ depreciation, plus 188€ for petrol: 2000€, minus the tax deduction of 660€ leaves 1340€ for a small car.  Granted I wouldn’t have only driven the car in the city, so it’s not exactly comparable…

Had I got a year round ticked for the local municipal transport system (MVV), it would have cost me 438€ for public transport. This could be written off 100% by using the flat rate.

Other effects

• Depending on the distance between home and work over the years, I had anything up to 1.5 hours of fresh air and light exercise per day.  At my last general medical check-up the doctor did a stress ECG on me and found all parameters well above “healthy”.  I’m sure that has something to do with cycling.
• I haven’t had a single sick day in the last 10 years of work.  That’s not to say I was never sick, but nothing bad enough to keep me home.  Maybe not sitting in public transport (confined metal tubes full of coughing and sneezing people) helped too…
• I hate sitting in traffic… I hardly ever sit in traffic… 🙂
• Taking into account the time for walking to a car, driving through traffic, finding a parking spot, and walking from there to the destination, I’m always faster by bike than you will be by car in the city.
• I’m always faster than public transport over short distances, and in the spring/summer/autumn faster over all distances (without breaking a sweat!).

Enough already?

Get on your bike! 🙂