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For some strange reason, my brother’s Kawasaki KLR Tengai dead-stopped. After starting it again, it made some strange noises. It also had lost a lot of oil somewhere along the way, so we decided to not run it again before we found the cause of the trouble. A few weeks ago we encountered a funny problem, we couldn’t loosen the rotor-bolt. In the Kawasaki KLR workshop manual is a picture of a strange wrench to hold the rotor. Ofcourse we’re cheap, so we wouldn’t spring for a nifty and probably expensive Kawasaki specialty tool for a very old bike which not worth more than the petrol that’s in the tank (okay, okay, but you get the point).
The rotor bolt is tightened to 195Nm. That’s a lot of force there, so it’s not surprising we couldn’t loosen it by holding the flywheeel with our hands. So we set out to create a tool of our own. We even ended up trying to bend an old 32mm Chrome-Vanadium wrench, which resulted in an empty gas can, a very hot workbench and nice colors on the wrench, without it bending even the slightest. We we barely able to heat it to the point it got red-hot, because the metal just conducts the heat away from the point you want to heat.
So I started mailing with Vincent, a good friend of mine which happens to be “quite handy” with motorbikes . He pointed out that you could also stop the rotor from turning by holding the piston. Because we wanted to measure the play in the bigend bearing we needed to remove the sleeve anyway, so I immediately went back to the workshop to do this. After removing the sleeve, I could easily make some wood pegs to block the piston. The wood would have to have a big surface and be strong enough to hould the piston, without damaging the piston or the engine casing.
It turned out to work great! I needed to attach a long bar to the socket wrench to be able to apply enough force to the bolt, but in the end I got it! In the picture on the left you can see a detail of how the wood blocks are resting on the engine casing. After loosening the bolt, there was absolutely no visible damage to the piston or the engine. Even greater news is that there is also virtually no play on the bigend bearing, so we don’t have to disasemble the crank.
When looking at the bolt, the results of applying so much force to the faces of the socket wrench become visible. We know for a fact that this bolt has been removed once before, so these wearmarks are from tightening and loosening the bolt just two times. I think we can tighten it one more time, but after that it needs to be replaced.
If you are looking for a nice alternative for Acrobat Reader, I can recommend Foxit PDF Reader. It is a very small program, free, and starts up in about 1/10th of the time Acrobat Reader takes to display just the splash screen (and subsequently, the annoying update manager). It can do anything I usually need when reading and printing PDF files, and the fullscreen mode is even richer than Adobe’s.
Adobe seems to have gone overboard with their userinterface. People just want to read the PDF, and not be bothered with complicated questions which very often result in downloading and installing megabytes of unwanted software on their machines. I will recommend alternatives to Acrobat Reader from now on, and I think the world will become a slightly better place 😉
Found out about this link by accidentally browsing accros Ian Lewis’s blog. You can find out what your movie rating is. It seems I’m not for “all ages”. 🙂
Suitable for 12 years or older. Starting to get interesting now, with more adult-themed storylines, but we’re still talking in mild doses. You may find more colourful language, some human flesh, and maybe even some violence. Nothing creepy though.Examples: Batman, Naked Gun 33 1/3
For those that can read Dutch. This is a nice example of Dutch gasstation owners wanting to be compensated for the fact that gasoline (or any other fluid you can sell) schrinks when cooled.
Even companies pretending to know about ICT, writing about companies doing it right or wrong, get it (very) wrong sometimes. People who have an account at De Automatiseringsgids know the login screen. But have they also noticed how their username and password are sent to the server in plain text?
Another funny thing a colleque of mine discovered is the really wierd way of displaying error messages. The server returns the error message as part of a redirect. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. No serverside things here guys, must keep memory usage down. No sessions here, move along… A really funny thing you can do is display your own error messages, like so: De automatiseringsgids with weird error
I think somebody will start playing with this, because you can do a lot more (very bad) things. Should they have it fixed allready when you are reading this, I saved a screenshot for you. You would have got something in the lines of this:
After discussing this wierd construction, we concluded that the programmers wanted to do a “post-by-redirect” construction, where you make the server return a redirect to the browser jsut after a post. This solves the “reload problem” where the browser asks if it can re-post the data for you. Since a redirect is a GET, the browser will just reload the page. Normally you solve this by storing thing in the session on the server and send a session reference to the browser. Combined with HTTPS, this would give you a relatively strong, and still not to expensive protection against scripting and spoofing attacks.
A fine example of what happens if you trust an external company to build your web application, but you “forget” to check that they’ve delivered something that’s up to your standards (or at least the standards you paid for). Have fun playing around with this, and let me know what interesting things you found. (hint: Iframes and javascript can do a lot on this page 😉
This article is about selecting a new phone contract. Since this article describes a specific Dutch situation, it will be in Dutch. Sorry.
Dit jaar lijkt een constant “blijven of wisselen” jaar te zijn. Wil je de nieuwe zorgverlof regeling of blijf je spaarloon houden? Wil je een nieuwe Zorgverzekeraar of wil je bij je oude blijven? En vandaag is was mijn beltegoed voor mijn gevoel te snel op, en rees de vraag “Wil je prepaid blijven bellen, of wil je een abonnement?”. Gelukkig was de vraag bij welke provider ik wil blijven snel beantwoord, ik heb altijd goede ervaringen met Vodafone (als bedrijf) gehad dus het moet Vodafone blijven. Ik ben al lid sinds het nog Libertel heette, en heb ook nog steeds hetzelfde nummer.
I will not be driving there, but I am definetely planning on viewing some races!
See you there!
…or should I say “Fire prevention”. Nowadays, more and more fires come from computers left running overnight. Sure it seems harmless, and you have probably gotten away with it for the past 10 years without anything happening. Still, chances are that it will happen someday.
Wikipedia is not as good as you might think. Things written on Wikipedia are copied “verbatim” by other sites. By the time somebody checks the wikipedia story, he finds the verbatim copies and sees them as confirmation of the wikipedia story. And so the story stays on Wikipedia, spreading wrong ideas to schools, teachers, and you and I.
Spreading wrong information on the internet can have very big consequences, and John Seigenthaler knows this by personal experience.