August 5: Week 5 wrapup
This week is all about timelapse ride videos and shady websites.
But first: the replacement toeclip straps arrived. These replace the lefthand one that wore through and broke, and the fraying righthand one. (It’s easiest to explain what these are with a photo, see the gallery below.) One thing I hadn't fully appreciated is how they work. They don't stay in place through pressure and friction like most other straps I've seen: these stay closed because steel teeth are biting into the strap. So the full upstroke force of my unreasonably trained Tibialis Anterior is transferred through half a square centimeter of alligator chomp. This is not reassuring. But the last set survived the whole European Divide so I'm going to worry about other things.
Such as timelapse videos. I'd like to have a camera on the handlebar to capture a timelapse of the ride for posterity - but couldn't find a reasonable way to do it. The obvious answer, according to everyone I mention this to, is to get a GoPro. But they have a 4 hour battery life, which doesn't work since I'm on the road for 8 hours on easy days. One forum post suggested mounting the GoPro on your helmet, cutting holes through the helmet to run power cables to it, and keeping very big battery in the pannier, which does not sound reasonable to me for at least three different reasons.
To cut a long Googling story short, there is a camera called Ghost XL which advertises a battery life of 9 hours! It was released in 2019, and it's been replaced by the Ghost XL Pro which is a step backwards: it has a battery life of 7 hours. So it looks like a great option, but it's effectively been discontinued. The only places still that have it in stock are shady outfits like sportsbikeshop.co.uk. Trustpilot suggests they're trustworthy enough so I paid them a slightly unreasonable amount of money to get one. But it did arrive.
I also need a handlebar mount, which is as discontinued as the Ghost XL is and likewise, the only places that have them in stock are even shadier places like ebay.co.uk. I've ordered one and it's on its way but it's going to take at least another week to get here.
From left to right: toeclip strap, showing buckle with teeth. The weekend training ride, including a “Swan camp” sign which may or may not be a warning.
But the camera does work. It's got a timelapse mode where it takes still images, and videolapse mode where it automatically turns them into a movie. Timelapse will take a 1MB image every second, which sounds just right, but it means 9 hours will need 32GB. That's quite a lot of data to upload over a dubious back-country Wifi connection - and if it did upload, it multiplies up to several terabytes for the whole ride and the cheapest places to store that much data are highly shady outfits like mega.co.nz.
So it's not working yet and there's far too many shady things going on here. But I'm still optimistic I'll find a solution.
