Xmas prezzies!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and is looking forward to the New Year. Had a mildly bitter sweet Christmas, I was given an Autocom system and a Grip-Lock for my motorbike. Of course I am overjoyed to have them, but it did remind me that I don't have my bike yet, something I am hoping to hear about on Tuesday. Still I am looking forward to being able to use them. As soon as they have been used a few times I will be putting up some reviews on them.

3D Bike

If anyone out there has some 3D Anaglyph (Red/Cyan) glasses then here is a 3D picture of my old GS500 I took. First one is of the bike itself and the second is where I tried to get a little 'arty' with the engine cooling fins.

Dynomaster

Why is it I find things to play with on my bike when I don't seem to have it?! Quite by accident I discovered a program for my Android phone called Dynomaster by Trackaroo (click title to go to website). In short it is a program for dyno-testing your vehicle, bike, car, truck you name it. Seeing as I don't have my bike back yet I can't run this on it. Even more annoying is I can't even test the software with my hire bike; as my road is currently sheet ice from all the snow we have had recently.

Currently the software is at version 0.3 and isn't available to buy in the UK. That means you are stuck with an 18 day trial version. I wish programmers would put this sort of information on the apps description. Otherwise I would have waited until I got my bike back or was able to get out on the hire one.

Still it has an interesting amount of options. Able to give you 60ft, 1/4mile and 1/8mile speeds. It seems that once you have done a run you can also input your own Elapsed Time (ET) to determine other information such as your 0-60 time. The data can then be outputted to Twitter, Google Earth or as a XLS spreadsheet for use in Excel or OpenOffice. Within the program you are able to view graphs for you crank power, wheel power and speed. Another graphic will show you your G levels in any given direction.

Possibly one of the more interesting abilities of this software is that it is able to speak the speed and time information to you. Granted not the most amazing feature but as a biker you can't see the screen so this, as long as you have a way to hear it in your helmet, is a great way to know when to start and stop.

That main reason that some people may want to use this for is, as its name suggests, to find out what your vehicles power is. Anyone who has been on a 'proper' dyno may well ask how can this figure it out if it isn't actually connected to the bike. Not that I will be able to tell you in detail, but with the information provided as you set up the software, it can mathematically figure out what the power is based on speed, distance, time taken etc.

Once I am able to get onto a bike without the risk of sliding off it on my ice rink, er, road, I'll try to give a more complete review of using Dynomaster.

[UPDATE]
The program has now gone to version 0.4 and has reset the number of days to 30 when I downloaded the update.

Click Here for details on the V0.4 update.

New theme and update

Have update to what I hope is a more pleasing theme for the blog.

Last Monday I was involved in an RTI (Road Traffic Incident) as the police would say, my first one too. I don't what to go into details yet, but suffice to say the bike has suffered damage as have I. Bike is currently off getting fixed so have a hire bike, a Suzuki GSF650. Its an okay bike, but can't wait to have mine back again. I'll write a review on the bike soon.

Hoping to get my old GS500 apart to do some maintenance on that as well, getting it ready for sale next year.