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News January 28, 2022

Specialized Goes Direct

It’s really hard for me to see Specialized’s move into direct-to-consumer sales as anything but a way to take margin away from dealers. Which, yeah, fine, it’s their sandbox – at least on the surface. Digging a little deeper, it’s important to understand that this is pretty bad for their customers too. I’m not going to get into how the relationship works with their dealer network (this is covered in the CyclingTips…

News January 19, 2022

Whoops, epix fail

In my fēnix 7 learning frenzy, I totally missed that Garmin also launched a new epix. The cheat sheet is that it’s a more expensive fēnix 7 with a fancy AMOLED screen. Of course that screen costs battery, both because it’s beautiful, and beauty is never free, but also because there’s no option for solar. My take after looking at several reviews is that if you can stomach the upcharge, get the…

News January 18, 2022

Garmin Launches fēnix 7

If you’ve been tracking the fēnix 7, you already knew that today was launch day. Some cool things have been added to the watch, most notably touch screens, multi-band GPS on Sapphire models, an updated optical heart rate (OHR) sensor, and Garmin guess-metrics like Real-Time Stamina (which seems similar to Xert’s MPA to me). Personally, I don’t see much that would compel me to upgrade from my 6 Pro. But! It is…

News January 13, 2022

Garming fēnix 6 – 20.30 Firmware Released

If you’ve been following the 20.x BETA cycling, you’ll have seen a lot of “Improved altitude calibration” entries in the change logs. IIRC, that was the only change, every time :). Having updated to each of these releases, I can attest to the introduction, and solution to many an altitude calibration issue. So if you’re rocking 20.x, you’ll probably want to update to 20.30 either when it shows up for you, or…

News January 13, 2022

Zwift Game Update 1.21 Deprecates Pre-Windows 10 PCs

Zwift updates are pretty common, and generally very welcome. The latest one removes support for anything pre-Windows 10 on the PC side of things. Personally, I don’t see this as a bad thing, mostly because anything pre-Windows 10 isn’t supported from Microsoft either, so it’s a security landmine. It’s never awesome when something that was working before stops, for no reason besides progress. But, on the flip-side, keeping support for unsupportable things…

News January 13, 2022

Garmin Edge 530/830/1030/1030+ 9.22 BETA Brings Back Di2 Battery Percent

I wasn’t a fan of the changes Garmin made to the battery display for Shimano Di2 in the 9.10 release, so I’m thrilled that among some other changes, they’ve brought back the percentage display. There are builds for all the latest gen EDGE devices, 530 is linked below. Changes made from version 9.20 to 9.22: Changed gear battery data field to display percentage remaining if available, which affects Shimano Di2 single-battery systems.…

News January 7, 2022

apeman SEEKER R1 – Asscam + Lasers

Looks like a good time to be in the market for an asscam tail light, because now there’s another option. But naturally the apeman SEEKER R1 is better, because LASERS. Unfortunately, these aren’t the kind of lasers that would let you blast hostile drivers. More the boring kind that draw lane markers around the bike. Still a very useful feature, just not as proactive :). Also, if you’re the mount-a-phone-on-you-bars kind of…

News December 20, 2021

TOOO Cycling Kickstarting DVR80 Asscam + Taillight

Having a rear-facing camera on the bike is very useful, for a lot of reasons. Integrating one into a taillight is very cool. Personally I see two issues with this though. The first one is that rear radar (i.e. Garmin Varia) is always useful, where a camera is only useful when there’s an event. So displacing my Varia isn’t going to happen. The other, is that light and potentially resolution are going…

News December 14, 2021

Geometry explainer

CyclingTips does a good job of explaining how to understand bike geometry, but there are a couple things they flubbed in the video below. First, “twitchy” isn’t a good word for a bike with a short trail. Twitchy is somewhat pejorative, and implies that the bike might be difficult to control. IMO, “responsive” is a much better term. One of the things I love about my Tarmac is how responsive the bike…

News December 13, 2021

Garmin fēnix 7 – Coming Soon

Of course it was really just a matter of time, but that time appears to be “soon” as the Garmin fēnix 7 / 7S / 7X are up on the FCC test site. Rumor has it that they were supposed to launch last spring/summer, but Garmin held back because of the global supply chain and logistics issues. It will be interesting to see what they offer over the fēnix 6, which I’ve…

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