micro, air

Houseplants probably don't improve indoor air quality.

In reponse to the oft-quoted NASA Clean Air Study, The Altantic writes:

[T]here’s nothing especially wrong with Wolverton’s 1989 study. Its results “fall right in line with other stuff that’s been measured in the literature.” But taking its results at face value significantly overstates the power of plants, he said. Wolverton measured whether houseplants could remove VOCs from an airtight laboratory environment. But a home is not a hermetic chamber. It has open windows and doors, drafts and leaks, and much more clutter.

Recently, Waring and his colleagues reanalyzed all 195 studies that have examined whether houseplants can filter the air. They found that some types of plants can remove higher amounts of VOCs than others. But once you factor in the effects of working in a large room, none of the plants are able to do much.

Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,” he said. That’s 10 plants per square foot of floor space. Even if you chose the most effective type of VOC-filtering plant, you would still need one plant per square foot, Waring said.

bicycle, gear, edc

The Tube Roll

I carry a spare tube underneath my saddle.

The Tube Roll: Mounted

  • The Tube Roll: Unrolled
  • The Tube Roll: Rolled

With my Schwalbe Marathon Supreme tires I rarely get flats. When I do, I usually prefer to use a patch, but sometimes you need to replace the tube. To protect the spare tube from the elements – UV rays, abrasion from dirt, etc – I wrap it like a burrito in a piece of black Tyvek. This is then stuffed underneath my Brooks B17 and secured to the rails with a 12” nylon buckle Voile Strap.

The package is easy to get to when I need it, doesn’t move until then, and isn’t very visible unless you’re looking at it. When I moved the spare tube from my pack to my bike, I wanted to avoid a noticeable bag like my Revelate Jerry Can. I’ve yet to have anyone steal this setup, but if they do, I’m only out $5 for the Voile strap, $8 for the tube, and a few pennies for the Tyvek. I can live with that.

In the case of a tire blow out, I’ve wondered if a piece of the Tyvek could be cut, folded, and used as an emergency boot like a dollar bill. I have not had the opportunity to test this, because I buy good tires that don’t blow out. The repair kit I carry in my bag also contains a couple actual reifenflicken, more so because carrying them increases the opportunities that I have to say reifenflicken than because I feel I actually need them.

micro

While I appreciate the resurgence of personal email newsletters as an alternative to the toxic walled-gardens of Social Media™, I much prefer consuming that type of content in my feed reader.

For discussion groups, where I’m going to respond to messages and follow threads, email is great. My relationship with the newsletters I subscribe to is that of a consumer, and for that interaction I want good old HTTP and feed syndication. Kill the Newsletter is a free service that generates Atom feeds from the email sent to an address. I use it to keep newsletters in my feed reader where they belong.

gear, edc

The Burrito Bag

As a cyclist in San Francisco, one of the great challenges in life is how to carry all the burritos you’ll consume. The quality of a burrito as a fuel source is directly correlated to its slopiness. If placed directly into a backpack, it will inevitably leak through the imperfect foil wrapping and soil neighboring equipment.

To solve this problem I revisited my DIY Tyvek Stuff Sacks from years past and created the Burrito Bag. The burrito is placed into the Burrito Bag for transport, containing any mess, which is later easily rinsed out.

Burrito Bag

The Burrito Bag is constructed from black Tyvek I had from another project, rather than a USPS Priority Mail envelope. I cut out a piece 13” x 16”, folded it in half and used the awl from my Expedition Sewing Kit to close the bottom, side, and create a channel for a piece of Technora (because it’s cool) and cordlock to use as a cinch cord.

The Burrito Bag is strategically engineered to contain dual burritos, or a single burrito with a generous side of chips. Actually it was patterned off of one of my original Tyvek stuff sacks, which I still use to contain my Trail Designs Ti-Tri cook system. It seemed like the right size for this application.

The Burrito Bag weighs in at 8 grams (0.3 oz), and when not in use folds down to a size smaller than that of the napkin you forgot to grab on your way out of the taqueria.

The Burrito Bag is multipurpose. Despite its name, it is also capable of holding a shawarma wrap from the neighborhood Lebanese joint. I even once used it to takeaway a sushi roll.

Burrito Bag

gear, footwear, run, physical training

Tightening the Bedrock Cairn

I bought a pair of Bedrock Cairn Adventure Sandals when they were released back in 2016. They are my favorite sandals. In addition to being great everyday and hiking footwear in the warmer months, the Cairns are my preferred running footwear year round.

Bedrock Cairn Running

My only complaint with the Cairns was that the adjustable strap would occasionally slip, loosening the sandal. The webbing would only slip a couple of millimeters over a handful of miles. If walking or pedaling I wouldn’t notice it, but when running this allowed just enough movement of my foot across the bed of the sandal that I would eventually develop a hot spot if I didn’t reach down to tighten the strap every 6 miles or so.

I mentioned this in one of Bedrock’s customer surveys. They reached out to me and suggested that when tightening the strap, rather than keeping the loose end of the webbing inline with the part connected to the wing, I kink the webbing slightly forward. This allows the buckle to get a bit more bite. The added friction from this adjustment has eliminated any loosening of the sandal on my runs.

Bedrock Cairn Webbing Angle

micro, radio, conflict, blogroll

Avian carriers achieved a message delivery rate of 95% in the first World War, and were reported to reach 99% success in an Army study published in 1944.

In an article at At War on the Rocks, Dr. Frank Blazich provides a brief overview of the military use of homing pigeons and argues for their reintroduction as a response to electronic warfare.

Considering the storage capacity of microSD memory cards, a pigeon’s organic characteristics provide front line forces a relatively clandestine mean to transport gigabytes of video, voice, or still imagery and documentation over considerable distance with zero electromagnetic emissions or obvious detectability to radar. These decidedly low-technology options prove difficult to detect and track. Pigeons cannot talk under interrogation, although they are not entirely immune to being held under suspicion of espionage. Within an urban environment, a pigeon has even greater potential to blend into the local avian population, further compounding detection. The latter presumably factored into the use of pigeons to clandestinely smuggle drugs, defeating even the most sophisticated of walls.

Furthermore, pigeons provide an asymmetric tool available for hybrid warfare purposes. The low-cost, low-technology use of pigeons to transport information or potentially small amounts of chemical agents — or even coded cyber weapons — makes them a quick and easy asset to distribute among a civilian population for wider military purposes. During World War II, the British Confidential Pigeon Service of MI14(d) dropped baskets of homing pigeons behind enemy lines for espionage purposes, gathering invaluable military intelligence in the process from a wide array of French, Dutch, and Belgian civilians. Even as a one-way means of communication, the pigeon proved an invaluable military asset.

Via Schneier, who reminds that we have an RFC.

gear, review, food

Oatmeal Capsules

When I began mixing my standard issue oatmeal I stored it in Ziploc bags. The thicker freezer bags were reusable for a couple months before they needed to be replaced, but I wanted a longer lasting solution. This led me to the Sistema Klip It 1520. At 200ml this container is the right size for a single serving. The seal and locking clips keep the contents fresh. It is durable enough to last pretty much forever, and the stackable design makes it convenient to store multiple units.

Oatmeal Capsules

I’ve been using these as oatmeal capsules for about a year now. Five of them suffice for my weekday breakfast, but the size is useful enough that I purchased a handful more. I use them to store tea and snacks like umeboshi, dark chocolate covered almonds, and baby carrots.

Tea Storage

Sistema makes a handful of other containers that can be used with the 1520 to build a modular, stackable system that stores well in small spaces. The 1540 has the same footprint as the 1520, but is twice the height. The lids are interchangeable between the two. The 1550 is the same height as the 1520 but twice as wide. The 1600 has the same footprint as the 1550, and shares the same lid, but is the height of the 1540. These four units work well together.

audio, sleep, shell

Delta Drone

Last year BoingBoing linked to a video featuring delta waves produced by the idling engine of an ice breaker in the arctic. I found it to be a useful tool, so downloaded it for offline access. Later, I decided I wanted the audio on my phone. The video is a 10 hour loop, resulting in too large a file for mobile storage. To turn it into something reasonable for a phone, I used ffmpeg to extract the audio, chop it down to 3 hours, and add a 10 second fade on either end.

$ ffmpeg \
    -i ~/library/video/web/White\ Noise\ Sounds\ of\ Frozen\ Arctic\ Ocean\ with\ Polar\ Icebreaker\ Idling\ -\ Creating\ Delta\ Waves-gpW7iYfuGDU.webm \
    -vn \
    -ss 00:00:00 \
    -t 03:00:00 \
    -af afade=in:st=0:d=10,afade=out:st=10790:d=10 \
    ~/library/audio/misc/soundscape/arctic_white_noise.mp3

I then added ID3 tags from the metadata of the original video.

$ id3tag \
    --artist="Relax Sleep ASMR" \
    --song="White Noise Sounds of Frozen Arctic Ocean with Polar Icebreaker Idling - Creating Delta Waves" \
    --year=2017 \
    ~/library/audio/misc/soundscape/arctic_white_noise.mp3

The result is a 165 MB file of loopable delta waves, perfect for drowning out the world.

The original video has since been deleted (a reminder to download any data that you find to be useful), but is available at the Internet Archive.

Delta Waves

The above spectrogram of the file is produced by Spek.