Sheldon Brown

Cycling is great, I highly recommend it. Don't think of it as a cheap hobby though, once you get into it you are almost guaranteed to start breaking things on a cheap bike and want better gear.

As a side note, if you do get a bike on a shoestring budget get an older bike as those things were built to last; modern cheap bikes have gimmicky suspension setups (suspension is great but there are vast differences between cheap elastomers and a plush oil based setup) that don't help and add weight (and parts to go wrong) to the bike.

Also if you are finding it difficult to get into, try different styles of cycling. Fast road riding, cross country mountain biking, long distance cycle touring , downhill mountain biking and BMX riding are all vastly different experiences that use completely different skills and muscles.

On another note, if you get serious I do highly recommend so called "clipless" (a cleat in the shoe locks into the pedal) pedals for most styles of riding.

These things seem so scary and dangerous to start with, but I can virtually guarantee that once you are used to them you will not want to go back even for technical offroad riding. The extra efficiency and control you gain is astonishing, toe clips don't even come close. Of course make sure you practise on a grassy area first and get the feel for them and make sure you are confident with them before heading into traffic.

Falling off your bike when you stop for a red light is at best embarrassing and at worst…

Frankly, I don't think this goes far enough: "Ban advertising" would be better.

Almost every problem with the internet right now is caused by advertising if you dig through the chain of causality. From social media patterns that addict you to conflict and conspiracy, to popups, adware and spam, to constant attacks on our attention even when we're driving and could literally kill someone with inattention, to spreading dissatisfaction, fear, and poor financial advice, advertising is the root of much evil. And at its core, advertising is just never a good thing, in any context.

Proponents of advertising will say, "How do people find out about products and services?" but advertising is an extremely poor answer to that question: there's an inherent conflict of interest when the people selling a product are the primary source of information about the product. In the worst case, this leads to advertisers just lying to consumers and manipulating people's emotion. In the very best case, advertisers present information only about their own product, which doesn't allow consumers to make educated decisions--it's arguably not lying but the effect is the same. You might say, "Why would advertisers be obligated to provide information about competitors?" and you're right, they aren't, but we aren't trying to establish blame or responsibility here, we're trying to find a solution that's good for consumers, and advertising just isn't that.

A better solution is independent review sites.…

> Somewhere along the way, people stopped building well organized sites and started producing chronologically organized writings and content.

For news or personal diary-format blogs, it makes sense, but I agree. Why did the blog become the default way to present a page on the internet? Aside from serving as an indicator of 'freshness,' publication date usually has no relation to the content I read. It's weird that most content is organized around publication date by default.

I like reading old bike websites with stories about touring and such published around the 90s [1][2][3]. Most sites back then had a small section called "News" with short blurbs letting readers know about the status of the author, or new content added to the site, but it was not the main content itself. Content was usually organized in a way that makes sense to humans, rather than feed aggregators and content recommender systems.

It's so much better to explore a site by navigation through a few index pages. Ken's site [1] is especially a pleasure to browse. Right on the home page he lists his directories along with straightforward descriptions of what you'll find in them. On a directory page will be a list of pages organized under subheadings, and each one has a brief description. To me, this may be peak internet. It's easy to get a sense of what's there, how to get to the part of it that interests me, and doesn't keep me on a treadmill searching for something I want to read co-mingled with…

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ -- Sheldon Brown (RIP), Bicycle Technical Information

http://www.dansmc.com/MC_repaircourse.htm -- Dan's Online Motorcycle Repair Course

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ and https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/ -- AI philosopher Aaron Sloman's ("disorganised") web pages. Brilliant examples of the charming mess that was so easy to create with 1990s plain html'ing. Impossible to navigate, but I still always want to go back, although I know next to nothing about AI.

Also, his sub-section titles like "Separate file listing main contents of this site" or "CONTENTS LIST (BELOW)" are hilarious in this context.

Oh, okay, this must be the real gem:

"APOLOGIES FOR MESS

This page badly needs reorganisation

My web pages started soon after the internet began, around 1992. Available tools were very primitive for a long time, and later I was too busy to do anything about reorganising the pages. An attempt to get external funding to help reorganise it was unsuccessful.

So here it is (above and below), and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here."

Gotta love 1992 and prof Sloman's sense of humour!

Thanks! I celebrate weird hobby web sites. Here are some of my favorites:

* 59828 different definitions of "triangle center" https://faculty.evansville.edu/ck6/encyclopedia/ETC.html

* Amazing reference on bezier curves https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/

* Sunbeam radiant toaster http://automaticbeyondbelief.org/

* How to pack geometric shapes inside other shapes https://erich-friedman.github.io/packing/

* Pictures of library cards https://librarycards.tripod.com/id1.html

* All about pc fans https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php?title=PC_Fans

* Cross sections of candy bars https://scandybars.tumblr.com/

* All kinds of info about bicycles https://www.sheldonbrown.com/

* Every type of plastic used by lego https://bricknerd.com/home/every-type-of-plastic-used-by-lego-5-20-22

* Ian's Shoelace Site https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/

The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html

Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.

Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.

Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.