Big, honking kudos to OpenShot video editor!

I’ve been trying for the last few weeks to find an intuitive and basic video editing program to run on my Ubuntu Linux system, and I’ve tried a bunch of them. Avidemux, Kino, PiTiVi, Kdenlive, Cinelerra, and probably a few more. All of them either crashed, had broken features, or were just too damn hard to figure out. None were intuitive and good documentation was nowhere to be found.

I’m a longtime *nix user, FreeBSD, Solaris, all that stuff from way back (still using FreeBSD on servers today), and now Ubuntu on the desktop. But damn, if this wasn’t just shouting to the hilltops that Linux is not the way to go for basic video editing. I was even starting to think I’d boot up my laptop on Vista to see what I could get working there.

Finally the other night after one in the morning, having compiled Cinelerra from source because installed as a package it was crashing, and finding it not fully functional, I was about to do something I find just way too hard. I was going to go to bed, exhausted, with no solution in sight. I looked at one more web page listing a batch of programs and saw one I hadn’t seen before: OpenShot. It caught my attention because I thought, “huh, why haven’t I seen of this one before?”

The apt-get program found it, installed it, and it appeared on the application menu. As soon as it opened I had this good feeling about OpenShot. It just looked easy to use right from the start. Suddenly I was hopeful, and because I had to get up for work in just a few hours decided to go to bed feeling now cautiously hopeful.

This evening in about thirty minutes I had the video below finished. Now, don’t get all worked up thinking you’re going to see something fantastic. I’ve set myself some really easy goals for this first attempt. I just wanted some basic opening titles, some transitions to the on-bike camera stuff, and then transition to a closing title. That was it. I have a few attempts in some earlier posts here, but I never got transitions to work, and just to do simple titles at the start and end of a clip was a real pain, with UI’s that were far from intuitive.

The excellent documentation for OpenShot made it a breeze to find the basic topics I wanted, and I was saying “Whoa!” out load when I saw how simple it was to drag and drop a transition between the title and video clip, to size it, change the transition direction, and then preview exactly what I wanted. Kick… Ass!

Again, this is nothing fancy at all, and there’s a weird audio glitch at the beginning of the audio track I couldn’t get rid of, but I consider this my first real attempt, and now I feel ready to take the camera out to the Crud Run next month and get some nice videos and commentary on the super cool, exotic bikes we’ll see, and some road vid.

Quick ride to Roxbury Tavern

Saturday’s weather was just too damn tempting, and new today was going to blow chunks, so got out for a quick ride. Zipped out Mineral Point Road, and up Highway P, then KP, to the Roxbury Tavern.

Check it out.

2012 has finally begun!

Got out today for the first time this year, and tried out the camera. Still got a long way to go to learn to edit video, but hey, this was a start.

Read the full post, check out the vids, and watch how fast a Kawasaki 1200 goes.

Gearing up for 2012 rides

This weekend might be the first ride of the year, depending on the weather. Supposed to rain on Saturday at some point, and Sunday is looking kind of chilly, but probably will still get out.

This year I’ll have this killer video camera my friend Natalie sold me for fifty bucks. At first I had the cable that goes from the camera body to the lens backwards and I thought it was broken. Why would they make a cable that fits either way if it’s not supposed to go either way? Fortunately, I am very tech savvy, and was able to… reverse the cable.

Also trying out the new HTML5 video tags to post the videos I get out of this bad low motor scooter, so here’s a first little test video. So far it works on Firefox and Chrome, but I use Ubuntu so Windows users… bah…

Fuel-injected two strokes

The legendary engine and two-stroke tuner Kevin Cameron once joked about a “turbo diesel fuel-injected two-stroke”, or some such impossible creature. (Wow! Plugging that word salad into Google produces some rather curious results. But I digress…)

Apparently fuel-injected two strokes have been around a while, but I’m no expert on this. This outfit was recently posted to the TZR forums. High Gain Tuning has a fuel injection system it’s selling to owners and racers of two-stroke scooters. Yes, people race scooters. Go figure.

A lot of people think two-strokes will make a comeback, as they are simpler and therefore cheaper to manufacture. Boats and snowmobiles are still using strokers and have gotten much cleaner and fuel efficient in recent years.

I personally think motorcycles are going to go mostly electric in coming years and probably snip in the bud any chance two-strokes have of making a comeback.

phpBB WordPress plugin

I’m a software developer by trade. I’d like to own and rebuild TZRs for a living, but alas, there’s just not much of a market for that, at least not here in the US. Now that I also run the TZR forums and I need to get a handle on writing WP plugins I thought I’d take a shot at creating one to pull in the most recent forum posts to this site.

What I created was the plugin the output of which you see down in the right column that is displaying the last eight posts from the aforementioned forums. It was a quick little ditty, and pretty dang easy to write. I’ve made it generic for any phpBB forum installation and dropped it in a downloads directory on this WP installation. If you’re interested in checking it out click the link below. It also makes a handy little sample of how to put together a basic WP plugin.

Got any questions about it, feel free to fire them my way.

phpBB WordPress Plugin

Dave rides a TZR

Dave has some motorcycling in his past. Enough that I figured he understood enough about clutch and throttle work, shifting and breaking to handle the TZR away from traffic. We headed out to a parking lot for him to give it a try. This was to be a trial run before the Slimey Crud Run this year, when Dave will be riding the newly restored Stink 2, providing it’s ready in time.



I gave him what few pointers I could think of: try to keep the TZR between three and five thousand revs pulling away in first gear; test out the front brakes a bit easing them on a few times, getting a feel before you speed up enough to think you have to grab a handful, that sort of stuff.


He pulled away and made a lap or two around the lot, and pretty quickly I realized he was taking to the bike fine. I listened to the engine as he slowed to stops and practiced pulling away. No over-revving, no bogging the engine, and no stalls. The engine sounded about right on at all stages of the process of getting going, and slowing down.


Crud Run, here we come!

Silencer Gaskets

Since the new Tyga silencers went on last year, the right one leaked a bit of oil where the pipe and silencer bolt together, and it also leaked down onto the swingarm, and at times the tire. Did not need an oily tire out on the backroads, lest ye wind up in the weeds waiting for a passing car to notice a slowly spinning wheel in the grass.


I got some gasket material and found a socket that matched the silencer opening. I drilled the holes at about the right place, just eyeballing it, then used the socket for the holes and a single edged razer to cut them out. This was tricky. Gasket material is kind of tough, so I knew one slip was going to send me to the ER for stitches.


Got them cut and fitted them into Stink 1 no problem, then took the other two over to Scooter Therapy to be fitted as Stink 2 is assembled. I’ll found out on the next ride how these babies work.