Es ist irgendwie jedes mal das Gleiche: ich möchte etwas per Internet bestellen, finde einen Onlineshop mit angeblich zügiger Lieferzeit, kaufe den Artikel und dann heißt es warten.

Meistens kommt im Laufe von 24 Stunden eine E-Mail die mir mitteilt, dass die Ware versandt wurde. In Vorfreude öffne ich die E-Mail, klicke auf den Sendungsverfolgungslink und … … … bin enttäuscht.

Ich kann mich nicht erinnern, wann ich in den letzten Jahren etwas im Internet bestellt habe und mit dem Eintreffen der “Versandbestätigung” war die Ware auch tatsächlich in den Händen des Versanddienstleisters. Fast immer ist der Status, den ich sehe ein “Die Sendung wurde dem Versanddienstleister elektronisch angekündigt."

Es gibt genug Onlineshops, bei denen weiß ich, dass wenn ein Artikel lagernd verfügbar ist und ich vor 14:00 Uhr bestelle, die Sendung tatsächlich am gleichen Tag auf den Weg kommt. Es gibt aber auch genug andere Läden im Netz, bei denen zwischen der Ankündigung der Sendung bei DHL, Hermes, DPD, UPS, etc. und dem tatsächlichen Paketausgang durchaus einige Tage vergehen können, selbst wenn das Produkt auf Lager ist.

Ich frage mich in solchen Momenten dann immer ob die Onlineshops wirklich denken, dass es in ihrem Interesse ist, wenn ein Kunden sich kurze Zeit nach der Bestellung verarscht fühlt. Es kann nicht so schwer sein, den automaticshen Versand einer E-Mail-Versandbestätigung an den Status “Die Sendung ist im Verteilzentrum eingetroffen und wird für den Weitertransport in die Zielregion vorbereitet." eines Versandunternehmens zu koppeln.
Für mich als Kunden würde das weniger höhnisch, deutlich aufrichtiger wirken, und die E-Mail hätte einen tatsächlichen Informationswert.

After my failed experiment of trying to mount 650b wheels on Battle Cat, my gravel bike, I couldn’t get the idea of having two wheel sets out of my head; one for off road riding and one for road use.

After a bit of searching on eBay classifieds, I found a lightly used (e.g. ridden for ~ 700 km) set of DT Swiss CR 1600 SPLINE 23 wheels for a decent price. These things don’t come cheap when new and the person selling them had used them on a Canyon Inflite AL as well, before upgrading to carbon rims.

For me, this is ideal because a) I know that these will fit my bike well, b) changing between wheels for road and off road use is going to be almost seamless with no need to readjust the brakes or the rear derailleur (I’m using the same Shimano XT CS-M8000 11–40 cassette on the road set up, and c) these rims will likely last me for years.
I’ve ridden the existing set I have hard over the past two years and while they do have a couple of scratches and one of two dings, I have not yet managed to get them out of true. In addition to that the DT Swiss Ratchet freewheel system is great to ride and easy to service. Having it on both wheel sets is another bonus.

Oh and my Clement/Donelly X’Plor MSO tyres have made a quicker comeback than I expected. Yes, they’re not dedicated road tyres but they are starting to show signs of age anyway and I’m going to use them for winter riding, enjoying the extra grip they provide, instead of buying a new pair of road rubber.

On Wednesday, in an attempt to make good use of the surprisingly sunny weather, I took my gravel bike out for a first ride with the WTB Nano 40.

My recent experiment of using 650b × 47 mm tyres on my bike failed due to tyre rub on the left chain stay, yes, but it gave me a taste of what wider, higher-volume tyres with an aggressive tread could do for riding gravel and some tame singletrack. So after doing some research on 700×40c rubber, I had high hopes for the WTB NANO 40.

(I set up the tyres tubeless with Muc-Off’s No Puncture Hassle Tubeless Sealant and inflated them to 37 psi up front and 38 psi in the back referencing the handy tubeless tire pressure recommendations published by ENVE.)

For this outing I put together a 20 km route that I had ridden before, at least in parts, comprised of fire roads, some root-y singletrack, a few fast descents on what I thought was going to be either fire roads or well-worn foot paths. The bad news is that some of the paths had been shut down years ago and were very much overgrown and hard to navigate, the good news is that I was not only able to try the NANO 40 on loose, muddy, sloshy, puddle-dotted forest roads, I was also treated to a crazy fast descent on a 3 km hard pack and relatively dry gravel road.

After finishing the ride, I was left with two dominant feelings from this first experience with the NANO 40:

1. What an insanely fun ride. These tyres did such a good job and provided loads of grip even in ankle-deep mud.
2. You idiot. You had considered buying these almost two years ago when you replaced the Schwalbe X-One 33 mm tyres on the Canyon Inflite AL that brought you to gravel cycling in the first place but you didn’t do it because you were too chicken about trying a tubeless setup and the tread looked too aggressive.

So what did I learn?

For one that tubeless setups are the way to go for me moving forward, it seems.
Don’t get me wrong, the Donnelly X’Plor MSO 700×40c 120 TPI tube tyres I’ve ridden so far are crazy good. Having now ridden a properly supple and comparatively aggressively treaded tyre, I appreciate them even more. For a tubed tyre, they are very comfortable and robust even when ridden below the manufacturers specification of ~ 50 psi and they offer great traction within their limits.

Then there’s the realisation that once the fear of pinch flats is reduced and I embrace lower pressures, it opens up a lot more paths to ride. That said, I am going to increase the pressure in the back wheel for the next ride to 40 psi, because at 38 psi, it sometimes squirmed too much beneath me especially on faster, slightly rockier roads.

Lastly that I felt the NANO 40 provides a very good mix of a fast rolling 700c tyre and some serious grip on loose ground that the WTB Sendero 47 got me hooked on.

Oh and they look oh so nice on my bike 😏

My colleague and friend Mike sent me a link to an interview with Phil Schiller on c|net conducted by Roger Cheng. The core part of the interview concerns the new 16" MacBook Pro and the redesign of the keyboard away from Apple’s butterfly mechanism to an improved scissor mechanism. Later in the discussion, they talk about how iPads and Macs coexist and the purpose of each device. Schiller’s answer to a question about whether Apple can see the iPad and Mac merging like this:

No, that’s not our view. Because then you get this in-between thing, and in-between things are never as good as the individual things themselves. We believe the best personal computer is a Mac, and we want to keep going down that path. And we think the best tablet computing device is an iPad, and we’ll go down that path.

iPad benefits because we assume that you need to be able to do most everything with touch, and we don’t have to trade off on that experience. Mac assumes you want to do most everything with a keyboard and mouse input. We don’t have to trade off on that path. You can look at some of the other products that will try to go halfway between the two. They end up just compromising experiences. That’s not good.

I have a 12.9" 3rd generation iPad Pro. It’s a device that’s as close to my teenage self’s Star Trek P.A.D.D. dream as I could hope for. But what drove me to stop using iPads for a couple of years after the iPad Air 2 and what still bugs me, even in iPadOS, are the limitations Apple places on the software of the device and on the capabilities of third party software. The way Schiller frames the separation between iPads and Macs is based on the type of input and that, to me, misses the point.

Let me put it this way. When I was shopping for a new tablet at the beginning of the year, the decision to go for the top-of-the-line iPad Pro instead of an infinitely more capable Surface Pro 6 came down to two things:

1. I put a gigantic amount of faith and € 2,000+ in Apple, hoping they would come through and at least add support for external storage with the next major release, as had been speculated. Thankfully, iPadOS delivered.
2. The quality of third party software on iOS (and macOS), particularly from indie developers and once you venture outside of the big name applications, is still completely unmatched on Windows and in all areas: touch-friendliness, UX and UI design, etc.

On this I agree with Schiller: it’s important to have proper support for touch and proper support for mouse + keyboard in the devices you offer.
The best example sits in front of me daily; my lovely Surface Pro 2. This is a full-fledged Windows PC with all of the potential you expect it to have but using the operating system and third party applications in touch mode is a compromise at best and impossible at worst (and don’t even get me started on the schizophrenic nature of Windows 10 itself with a Settings app and the Control Panel app).
But the above also goes to show that it’s not a matter of the devices' form factor or input methods but a matter of having the operating system expose as much potential to the software running on it and enforcing a high standard of optimisation for the form factor and input methods.

Comparing a modern Surface Pro 7 to a current iPad Pro leaves me with this conclusion:

Windows 10 limits how comfortably I can accomplish my tasks but iPadOS still limits what tasks I can accomplish.

And this is what I continue to have issues with, this is the thing that drives me to pick up my MacBook Pro or my Surface Pro 2 for tasks as trivial as using some necessary extension in a browser like Brave

A couple of weeks ago I had the idea to buy a second wheel set for Battle Cat, my gravel bike, to expand the where I can ride it. The plan was to keep the 700c wheel set I’ve been riding for the past two years for longer gravel rides or for road riding (using road tyres, obviously). I would then buy a 650b/27.5” wheel set and a pair of wider tyres with more bite to venture into more gnarly terrain.

I inquired with the frame manufacturer what tyre width would be safe to use in the frame and set out to find a good, used wheel set from DT Swiss because I’ve had nothing but great experiences with these so far. After being told that 1.9“ or 4.83 cm wide tyres should work and still provide enough clearance, I quickly settled on the WTB Sendero 650b × 47 mm pneus.

The result was this sexy setup:

The wheel set I found was an older pair DT Swiss M1700 MTB wheels with a decent internal rim width and the Ratchet Free Hub System. There was a bit of a setback when I found out that the last person to service the hind wheel didn’t just fail to remove a massive radial run-out, they also centred the rim over the hub body and not over the axle, resulting in a rim that was too far on the left. After getting this fixed for a good amount of money, putting the tyres on tubeless and the wheels into the frame, I saw that it was a tight fit but doable with no tyre rub on the frame or fork.

Well, that changed after the first 15 km of singletrack riding on Saturday. I pushed the tyres the way you would and to my great dismay, they expanded/deformed in a way that caused tyre rub on the left chain stay twice in one revolution on a perfectly true back wheel.

What I’m left with is the choice to either sell the wheel set and tyres again or to find slightly smaller but equally gnarly tyres for the wheels. The problem here, of course, is that smaller tyres also mean an even smaller wheel diameter and a further lowering of the bottom bracket, something that already took getting used to going from 700×40c to 584×47c on the Litespeed T5 Gravel frame I’m riding.

There’s one silver lining to all of this, albeit a fact that left me with a very substantial urge to slam my head into my desk repeatedly because I could’ve saved myself the trouble of buying another wheel set:
I started checking out which 700×40c rubber is available that would give me better grip on wet forest floor than the Donnelly X’Plor MSO I love so much. I found a number of options, the WTB Nano 40 being the supposed best among them when set up tubeless. The only issue is that WTB recommends running these tyres on a rim with at least 20 mm internal width and my [DT Swiss CR1600 Spline db](DT Swiss - CR 1600 SPLINE® 23) wheels are 22 mm wide externally … … … or so I thought.
Turns Out ™ I had misread the specs of the wheels because the spec sheet of the bike I bought them on didn’t specify whether the 22 mm were internal or external width figures. Long story short, they have an internal width of 22 mm, meaning they are right in the goldilocks zone width not just for the WTB Nano 40 but for many other ~ 40 mm wide, supple gravel tyres.

I’m likely going to try and get my hands on the Nanos if I can find them for a decent price and maybe, just maybe I’ll get my wish of a gravel bike capable of some gnarlier paths but still fast when I need it to be.

Goodbye 650b wheels, I hardly knew ye.

Last week I came across an article by Geoffrey A. Fowler in the Washington Post titled „Everyone’s AirPods will die. We’ve got the trick to replacing them.“ (thanks to Dave Mark of The Loop for bringing it up).

Sadly, the title is not just slightly clickbait-y, it also belies the sensible discussion about the viability of AirPods the article contains. Fowler goes into detail about how and when the batteries in AirPods tend to stop performing and then dives into an analysis of the economic circumstances and environmental implications of a product like the AirPods.

Fowler quotes a rule by Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair website iFixit.com, that has stuck with me for the past few days:

The life span of an expensive, resource-intensive gadget shouldn’t be limited to the life span of one consumable component. You wouldn’t buy an electric toothbrush where you couldn’t replace the brush. Or a car with glued-on tires.

Sadly and also predictably, the new AirPods Pro are made to be just as disposable as their predecessors (and just like any other pair of wireless earbuds on the market right now).

I bought my AirPods a little over two years ago. These little things are a brilliant gadget with decent sound and when pairing works as it should, they’re the pinnacle of convenience. They’ve also been in almost daily use since I purchased them then and the battery life is accordingly bad at this point: I get less than 1.5 hours of listening or calls out of them nowadays.
When I purchased them, I knew full well that the battery was not replaceable and to be honest, I’m kind of mad at myself that I put convenience over the longevity, repairability, and recyclability of a device. Typically everything I buy needs to be either repairable and if for some reason that’s not feasible, it has be long-lasting and recyclable.
Case in point: in writing this article I remembered that I bought a pair of EarPods a couple of days after they were released in September 2012 and that pair lasted me almost six years — yes, I treat my earphones carefully.

I’m going to keep using my AirPods until the finally give out or rather until the battery life is so bad that it negates any kind of convenience these truly wireless earphones offer and I’m going to go back to wired earphones with an in-line remote for casual listening. I still have two pairs of completely new EarPods that came with my iPhones over the years in a drawer (one with the lightning plug and one with a standard 3.5 mm plug), or I might splurge on the Campfire Audio Comet.

Two comprehensive reviews of the Quoc Gran Tourer have cropped up on sites that I frequently read.

Quoc Gran Tourer Review: Rocks, Gravel, Dust, And Puddles
by Cass Gilbert on Bikepacking.com

A Summer of Riding in the Quoc Gran Tourer All-Terrain Gravel Bike Shoes
by John Watson on The Radavist

I’ve been using the Quoc Gran Tourer for over a year now and up until I saw these two reviews, I had thought of writing my own but I found that the assessment of the shoes by these two persons mirrors my own closely enough that there are only two things I would add:

1. Fit wise, I have moderately wide feet and I appreciate having ample room in the toe box. The Gran Tourers deliver in this area, all the while the lacing system allows me to perfectly tie the shoes so they’re comfortable yet stay firmly on my feet all day long.
2. It takes quite a bit for water to seep into these shoes but once they’re wet, it takes very long for them to properly dry.

I’ve taken these shoes through quite a lot yet they still show only minimal signs of wear on the upper and they’ve only gotten more comfortable with use. I’m very satisfied with the shoes.

When I built up my gravel bike, Battle Cat, I decided to stick with the Canyon H17 Al Ergo handlebar at least for a while because I wasn‘t keen on re-wrapping a new bar and I had, up until then, been pretty happy with it. Recent longer outings with more singletrack sections made me curious about the flared drop bars that have become increasingly popular among gravel and cross cyclists. After quite a bit of research, I decided to buy the Salsa Cowchipper Deluxe.

Yesterday I went out for the first proper ride and the route I picked was a mix of gravel tracks, forest and wine yard paths, and some broken asphalt roads. All of it wet, slippery, loose, and muddy from three days of nearly constant heavy rain.

On the first kilometre everything felt strange. The suddenly angled hoods and brake levers, the flare of the bars (24°), the different transition from the flat bar to the hood to the drops, and all of it combined with the Tune Dahu Skin bar tape.
This completely evaporated once I went up the first singletrack climb. The path was parts muddy, parts wet slippery slate pieces that required careful line choice going up and equally careful weight distribution so as not to lose traction riding on 700×40c Donnelly X’Plor MSO tyres already at 3.5 bar.
The flared bars allowed me to get into a wide and low stance, staying seated the whole time. The first fast decent on a muddy path increased the feeling of control on the bike and sections that I would have typically ridden with my hands on the hoods, I took in the drops because the reduced distance between hoods and drops, combined with the overall different shape of the assembly had me riding less hunched over.

So far so good. I’m going for a longer gravel ride on the weekend that will hopefully be less wet and I’m looking forward to seeing how I feel about the handlebar after 40+ km in the saddle compared to a quick 16 km ride.

In your typical cyclist’s quest to simplify my setup and reduce the things that I carry on rides, I went out to look for a compact, pocketable pump with an integrated pressure gauge. There are a number of options, but none of them have had particularly good reviews – at least not judging by what I was able to find. Most annoyingly, very few reviews even consider the accuracy of the integrated gauge, stating that it’s good enough for (off-)road side repairs.

The Topeak ROADIE DA G is a fairly recent release and being happy with a few other of their products, I decided to give it a go.

Basics

The pump pushes air into the tyre when pushing and pulling on the barrel, which, theortically should help fill the tyre more quickly. The barrel is made out of aluminium, other parts of the pump are made from shock-resistant plastic. Being a road bike pump, it’s equipped with a Presta valve head.

Thoughts

I’ve used this pump fairly extensively at this point and all things considered, it’s a good pump. It’s compact, doesn’t stick out of a jersey pocket too far and even fits into some saddle bags. The included bottlge cage mount is solid and has held up across a number of hard gravel rides already.

I was very happy to find that the pressure gauge is quite accurate. Comparing it with a dedicated digital gauge and the gauge in my floor pump, it yielded almost identical results when I aimed to hit 𝑥.0 Bar or 𝑥.𝑥 Bar on the gauge. This allowes me to much more accurately and quickly get my tyres up to the desired pressure than doing the “pump, pump, pump, detach pump, attach gauge, check pressure, detach gauge, pump some more, check again” spiel.

One thing I consider a downside is the pump’s barrel getting very hot when reaching pressures of 3.2 Bar and up. I’m guessing it’s fine when you’re wearing gloves but more than a couple of times when nearing 4 Bar, I had to stop pumping to let the barrel cool down a bit.

Suitability for 700×40c tyres

The bigger issue from my perspective is the suitability for tyres typically used on gravel bikes. Both my bikes use 700×40c and I tend to vary the pressure depending on the terrain I ride on. Getting this kind of pneu to a pressure beyond 3.5 Bar is hard work and both the pump and I struggle with it.

This issue isn’t limited to the ROADIE DA G, however. Right now, most manufacturers of pumps distinguish between high-volume pumps for mountain bike tyres, and high-pressure pumps for road bikes. Tyres for gravel bikes/adventure bikes/bicycle touring fall somewhere in between and I haven’t yet seen any pump that delivers good results for 700×36c–700×50c tyres.

This feat by Simon and James of GCN is truly something. About two weeks ago I did my hardest ride, yet, burning 4,200+ calories in the process. I was wiped out after and it took three days for my legs to properly recover.