Okay, this is pretty seriously "other stuff", but as I'm watching the end of the Tour de France, I figured I'd note I finally pulled in a sprinting jersey in Zwift. Zwift is a virtual bike riding service where you hook your bike onto a "smart trainer" that translates the work you're doing to a computer (I use an iPad mini) connected via bluetooth. It's neat virtual world... the smart trainers make things more difficult when you go up a virtual hill and faster on the way down. It does feel like road biking, but from the safety of my garage.

There are usually sprint segments in each Zwift route in their many virtual worlds, from routes based in Paris to London to Richmond, VA. So if you're going for a 20 mile ride, you might have three sprint segments sprinkled in that route that range from a sixth to a quarter-mile or so.

And if you're the fastest person to have ridden a sprint in the last hour or so, your virtual in-game rider is awarded a "sprint jersey", kind of like sprint jerseys that are awarded in the Tour de France.

I have a love-hate relationship with the sprint segments in the middle of routes. If I try, I can usually get times that land me in the top 5-10% of riders (most of which probably aren't even going out of their way to sprint, to be fair), and I do lots better the shorter the sprint. But then I'm absolutely shot for miles and my overall route time craters. It's a weird risk-reward. It's fun to look like a dope in my garage peddling like a madman to get my name up on a leaderboard, but it's sad seeing my wattage (they measure the power you're producing and put it on your screen at [essentially] all times) crash.

Anyhow, there was a fancy virtual "kit" (biking outfit) that you could get this month on Zwift if you fully ran any two routes in France (Paris or the countryside) this month, give or take, and I was starting my second French-based route this month when a sprint segment rolled up. I knew it'd kill my fairly long ride to sprint hard, but as the starting line appeared, I noticed I was speeding up for a good sprint start. I didn't quite "leave it all out on the road" in the hopes I wouldn't completely ruin the rest of my ride, but it was danged close.

The result? I was one hundredth of a second away from winning the sprint. DAGGUMMIT! This is what you get when you don't quite sell out to something, I guess. Let this be a lesson to you.

But then, about four miles later down the road, it looks like the rider in front of me on the sprint leaderboard dropped offline, promoting you-know-who to sprint leader. AMAZE. Woohoo! I almost didn't notice, but suddenly my usual kit wasn't visible and it had been replaced by a dark green jersey.

Turns out I didn't get the normal bright green Zwift sprint jersey -- maybe because I'm "in France" during the Tour -- I got the official Tour jersey, Skoda green with a Tour logo on the right breast.

At the very least, Zwift (free for 25 [virtual] km each month!) tricked me into working a little harder by making me think sprinting like a madman on a 25 year-old mountain bike in my garage is fun. 😉

Labels: Other Stuff, zwift

I've been using BBEdit as my compare tool on macOS for a few years now, but recently noticed that it keeps opening a window that's maybe 90% of my screen's width and height. That might be useful on a large monitor, but my 13" MacBook Air felt especially cramped.

Welp, to change the default size of a window in BBEdit, you apparently use the menu! Feels very OS 9-. /nostalgia

From "BBEdit > New Window Size & Location > Set Default" on ArsTechnica:

When I began my search for how to set the default location for new windows in BBEdite, I was certain that to set this required a "write defaults" from the command line.

Not so -- no need for BBEdit Expert Preferences for this ... it's in the menu:

Menubar > Window > Save Default <type of> Window

The Save Default Window command stores the position and size of the front window in BBEdit’s preferences, and BBEdit will create all new windows of the same type with the stored position and size.

In my case, the "type of" is "Difference".

So, to be overly clear, first open a difference window, size and position it to taste, and then run the "Menubar > Window > Save Default Window" jive.

I'm sure I've mentioned I've been using BBEdit since the year of its birth (not sure exactly, but certainly in 1992. I still fondly remember [a few years later] using it in tandem with Transmit). I'd wandered away from BBEdit for years, using Ultra-Edit on Windows for a while, then VIm, Visual Studio, and a number of language-specific editors (sort of like (and including) PhpStorm), Coda (super briefly), Sublime Text, and now largely (and largely happily) VS Code crossplatform.

It's kinda neat to have a daily use for the "old grey lady" of text editing again and to continue not to be disappointed in its feature-set. BBEdit doesn't suck.

Labels: BBEdit, noteToSelf