A little game for you

Following on from the last post about food and its sources, I will let you into a little game I play when I am in the supermarket.

There are three things which are routinely added to the food you eat, and which ought to be avoided where possible.  These are artificial flavourings, artificial colourings, and preservatives.  If a product is advertised as free from any of these, you can bet your life that what is not being said is the real story.  You can translate the advertising or packaging as follows:

NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURINGS!!!
Full of artificial colourings and stuffed with preservatives.

NO ARTIFICIAL COLOURINGS!!!
Flavours from a chemistry lab, and it won't rot in a million years.

NO PRESERVATIVES!!!
But the colourings and flavour all begin with the letter E.

I say this on the basis that the manufacturers know that artificial additives are unpopular, and therefore if they were able to claim (honestly) that the product was made without a certain type of additive, they would do so, and in capital letters and a snazzy font.

Check the ingredients list on the side of the packet for the additives not mentioned in the headline.  You will see I am right.

OK, confession: white (undyed) smoked haddock doesn't taste the same.  Guilty on this one.

Horse Sense

There are a few things I would never countenance eating, which in other parts of the world are considered delicacies - dog, brains, eyeballs and blowfish come to mind - but horsemeat isn't one of them.  I may well have eaten it (consciously, that is) when in France, although I can't remember doing so.  But I have no moral or gustatory objection to it.  Dobbin is a vegetarian, after all, and there can be no logical objection to turning him into a nutritious snack after his days are done, as long as you are happy to eat his sister the cow, and his rather dim cousin the sheep.

That is not my problem with the 'horsemeat scandal', as the BBC keeps calling it.  My problem is this:

If you are selling something as beef, and you don't even know that it really is beef, what the hell else don't you know?  Organic?  No preservatives?  Free-range?  British made?  All these things are taken on trust by the consumer, and if the food industry can get it so grossly wrong over the actual type of meat in a product, we can surely have no confidence in any of the other claims made about it.

Anna and I made the decision many years ago to eat less, but to eat better quality.  We don't always stick to it, but usually if we have meat it is from the local butcher.  If you buy beef there, he can name the farm it came from, and it will be within a mile or two of home.  There is a good feeling to this; not only are you supporting a decent local business and local farmers, but the quality of the meat is beyond reproach.  And because of the personal contact with the butcher, the trust thing is still there.  If he said the steak I bought was from the field to the left of the A40, third one along, and the cow was called Primrose, I would believe him.

As a nation, we have got into the habit of shovelling anything into our mouths as long as it is cheap, and it's got to stop.  Good food is never cheap, but it is always worth the price.

Another day, another IAM poll ...

This time it's on toll roads.

Go on, tell 'em what you think.  You don't have to be a member, etc. etc.

LED there be Light

One of the additions I was going to make to the little GS was a pair of auxiliary riding lights.  I'd seen a lot of the big Beemers with the Touratech aux lighting, and they certainly look the business.  But then I clocked the price of them, and thought that a luxury weekend for two in a health spa would be cheaper.  But then a quick trawl round eBay (on a quiet night shift) brought up a cheap alternative.  Three Cree LEDs in each, low current draw of 15W, waterproof and, if not Touratech cool, at least not horrendously ugly.  Thirty-three of your British pounds brought them to my door, I put them in the garage, and that was that.

The fact I didn't fit them on the first available day tells you something.  I was already doubting whether I would keep the GS, and it seemed a waste of time and money to spend half a day putting them on there only to take them off again.  Happy to buy them, unwilling to fit them, work that one out.  So on a shelf they stayed.

Today was the first dry, sunny day for weeks, so I put some warm clothes on and spent the afternoon fitting them to the XTR.  I needed to take the tank shrouds and tank off to do the wiring, and what a pleasure it is to have a bike where this is a two-minute task rather than a lengthy chore.  On the XTR, the sidelights and indicators share a separate fused circuit, so I tapped into this for the power source.  The lights between them should only draw 2.5A, and the XTR's generator puts out a maximum of 20A, so there shouldn't be a problem with having them on full-time.

Not matt-black and adventure-touring cool, but not two hundred quid either.

When I got them wired up and going, I was surprised how bright they were.  From the front of the bike, they are brighter than the dipped beam.

The pattern is a focused spot beam rather then a foglight-style flood, so they won't make much of a difference to the light from the rider's point of view.  The Yamaha's headlight is pretty good anyway.  But they do make a very distinctive triangle of lights, which should aid my conspicuity.  I'm not a big fan of hi-viz, always-on lights or the crazier gadgets like headlight modulators, but if others see me and identify me as a bike rather than an odd point of light somewhere in their field of vision I will be happy.  At this time of year, my evening and morning commutes are in darkness, and the majority of my journey is on fast and unlit roads.  If people see an unusual triangle of lights approaching them, assume it is an alien craft full of little green men come to kidnap them, and don't pull out in front of me because of it, that is a win as far as I am concerned.

It's dark now, and I have had a bit of a play trying to get them angled so that they are visible to the front without dazzling oncoming traffic.  Already I can feel that the right-hand one is starting to get loose on its bracket, so tomorrow I may need to take them off again and do some beefing-up of the fittings.  Thirty quid only gets you so much.

More on this at the weekend, when I have had a chance to use them in anger, as it were.

The Dashcam Cometh

Ordered on Friday, arrived today (Tuesday).  That's pretty good, considering it was the weekend.  As I said before, there are many of these cameras on eBay, most being sold from Hong Kong or China, but I chose to buy from a seller near Cardiff.  It's still a Chinese product (I am sure of this from the garbled instruction 'manual'), but at least it got here quickly and it's giving someone relatively local a bit of business.  The seller was South_Park_Shop_2013, and I have no complaints about the transaction.

First impression, it works (phew).  Second impression is that it's a damn sight better quality than it has any right to be, considering the price (£22.95 with free P&P).  The slip of paper that contains the instructions needs a bit of interpretation, but it was enough to guide me through the setup and basic operation.  First job was to mount it on the screen, and I've got it to sit just below the rear view mirror so that it doesn't get in the way too much.

It comes with a car charger, and the lead is both heavy-duty and about a mile long, and visually that is the only negative: there's a lot of it dangling about and it seems to coil round the gear lever like a drunken snake. However, that is something that can be addressed in due course.  The view from the driver's seat is not too badly obtruded:

The little 2.5" screen is very useful for getting the aim right, and it will fold away if I feel I no longer need it.  It's taken me a while to get a really firm mounting from all the swivels and joints, and I probably don't need the screen any more, but it's still a novelty, so it's staying for now. The image is small but clear:

Some initial observations about it in  use:

• It's of fairly flimsy construction (obviously) and there's a persistent rattle from the audio playback which sounds like a dog chewing lego.  There's nothing in the car to make that rattle, so it must come from the casing itself.  Not a big deal, considering the price.
• Colour rendition is fair only.  There's little saturation and everything looks greyish, and also bright light sources burn it out easily: green traffic lights look like oncoming headlights.  But it's certainly good enough for the purpose, which is to provide a record of what goes on around the Nowheremobile.
• The wide angle of the lens (120 deg) captures a lot of action, but it has the side-effect of making the drive seem faster than it really is.  In the sample below, parts of it look like a stage of the World Rally Championships, but in reality it was a very calm and legal drive.
• You can choose how big the recording segments are - 2, 5 or 15 minutes.  I have selected 5 to start with and this seems to work OK.  When the card is full (it takes a standard SD card, with a maximum of 32GB), it starts to overwrite the oldest file.  For the purpose, this seems a very practical arrangement.  In the case of an accident, you would only be interested in the final 30 seconds or so of the most recent segment.  However, there is a delay of about 3 seconds between the recording of the segments, during which nothing is recorded, so it makes sense to keep the segments as long as practical.

I am using a 1GB card at the moment, and this is probably plenty.  Using the VGA setting (lowest quality), a 15-minute drive used half the card's capacity, suggesting a ratio of 30 minutes per GB.  For the purpose of recording a scenic journey, it would make sense to have a much larger card and record in 15-minute chunks, but for simple traffic monitoring the 1GB card will do.  (However, I notice that Currys are doing a two-pack of Sandisk 16GB cards for twenty quid at the moment, so I am going to get one of those for the dashcam and use the other for my still camera.)

Here's a sample, recorded today in the pouring rain while coming back from getting some bits and bobs in Halfords.  It's not intended to be interesting or sexy, so don't get the beers in and make a night of it, but it shows a fair example of what it will do.  (There's a nice watersplash at 4.00.)  I recorded this on the WXGA setting (1280 X 960) but the actual output isn't significantly better than the VGA (640 x 480) I tried at first, and the higher pixel count seems to make the motion a bit jerky, so I think I will revert to VGA for the time being.

There seems no reason why I can't mount it on the bike, although I think it will take a bit of ingenuity.  But there's no way it will be weather-proof, and taking it out today would have drowned it.  But come the summer ... It could be a cheap way of getting some on-bike footage, as a way of deciding whether it is worthwhile splashing the cash for a GoPro or something equally decent.

And another thing: it has IR illumination for night-time and a motion detection setting.  I've been thinking about getting a wildlife camera to put in the garden at night, so tonight I think I am going to point it gardenwards with the IR on and see who visits.

Good so far.