🔗 December 1, 2022

I managed to get out for quite a few really good rides during October and the first part of November, but then the bad weather and illness came, driving me off the road. For the last two weeks, my Triumph Speed Twin has been sitting in my garage attached to its battery tender while I have been suffering from a long bout of RSV. Despite the illness, I have managed to edit a bunch of videos and they will be released every other week over the winter period, together with the usual Raw Sound Sunday videos and the occasional YouTube Short.

During the cold months, I will try to do a little bit of preparation for the 2023 riding season. Despite fiddling around with them all year, I am still somewhat displeased with the camera placings on my bike. Wide angle lenses capture a lot of image and give a nice sense of speed, but because they make objects seem really far away they are not great for capturing shots of riding buddies. I shall ruminate on that problem for a while and see if I can find a solution, because I like to ride with others and I think the videos I make of group rides are a lot of fun. I may also give some thought to how best to capture better audio.

One thing I am determined to do during the off season is get my SW-MOTECH Blaze Pro saddlebags back on the bike. I am still waiting on a part that was ordered from Triumph back in August! Having saddlebags on the bike is incredibly convenient for hauling around wet weather gear and motovlogging equipment.

TM

🔗 October 21, 2022

The cold weather is fast approaching, and the TrekkieMoto YouTube Channel will soon be transitioning to its “off season” release schedule of every other week for the main videos. Once the temperature drops below about 60°F (16°C) I am less excited about long rides, and once it drops below 50°F (10°C) I confess even the short rides are less appealing. I will take longer rides in lower temperatures if I am hooking up with other riders and the meat of the day is expected to be warmer. I will absolutely not ride if there is even a chance of ice on the roads or snow in the forecast.

In last month's post I mentioned I was dipping my toes into the realm of YouTube Shorts. I have done a few now, and while the first couple I published last month performed quite well, the later Shorts have not. Consequently, I will only do these on those occasions when they seem appropriate.

TM

🔗 September 27, 2022

Forgive me for being a little quiet of late, but I have a lot going on outside my TrekkieMoto life at the moment. It's not that I haven't had time to write in this blog, but rather it is that my mind has been occupied with other things and blogging hasn't been a priority. I shall try to do better!

I am still waiting for the footpeg I alluded to last month to arrive. I am considering doing a couple of upgrades to the bike, and it will soon be due for a change of rubber, so I may get everything done together. In the meantime, I have been trying to get as much riding in as possible so that I can build up a little bit of content to sustain my YouTube Channel over the winter season.

This past week, I dipped my toe into YouTube Shorts for the first time. I have created a playlist that has a couple of shorts in it, and I will certainly be adding more in the coming weeks and months.

Lastly, I would like to say a little bit about group riding. I absolutely love riding with friends I have met on Walt In PA's Discord server. I almost always record any group rides I am participating in, but when I turn them into videos they are mystifyingly unpopular. Despite the low number of views they get, I will continue making them because they are tremendous fun and I want to have a visual record of the good time I have had. So there.

TM

🔗 August 15, 2022

First, I want to give you a quick update on the Too Fat Tuesday situation. I am going to be transitioning to making these videos monthly, instead of weekly. I have found that my weight fluctuates so much that a weekly picture is a little confusing, and not very good at showing the overall trend.

Second, I discovered that the left side bracket for my SW-MOTECH Blaze Pro saddlebags had fallen off the Speed Twin, along with the left passenger foot peg and the bolt holding the exhaust end can to the chassis. I visited Martin Moto to remedy the situation and get the bike serviced. The foot peg parts had to be back ordered, but they kindly fitted a temporary bolt to hold everything in place. I am going to investigate getting a replacement bracket for the Blaze bags, but I fear I may have to order the complete $500 package.

TM

🔗 July 11, 2022

It has been a little over a month since I last blogged. I managed to get over that cold I wrote about, but I'm currently suffering from an equally awful chesty cough that is impossible to ride with. Between these two bouts of illness, I am happy to say I was able to enjoy 2 or 3 really good rides in excellent weather; however, I need to get out and do some vlogging before I run out of material. The back pain I complained about before has completely vanished, and it has made an enormous difference to how comfortable I feel on the bike.

My weight loss situation has been mostly okay. There have been some ups as wells as downs, but I am generally going in the right direction. Making myself record a weekly update has been a good discipline for me.

TM

🔗 June 6, 2022

I have had a nasty cold for over a week, so I have been unable to do any motovlogging. To make matters worse, I appear to have wrenched something in my back so badly it is painful when getting up or down from a seat or bending over to pick something up off the floor. It is incredibly frustrating, because the weather this week is glorious and perfect for riding. Hopefully, the cold will soon clear up and my back will heal enough for me to get back on the bike.

In the meantime, I am making a slight change to this blog. Since I intend for it to endure, I will be altering the URL schema a wee bit to make permanent links easy. This is a static, hand-coded website (no database back end), so I cannot generate URLs on the fly in the same way as a dynamic website would. From now on, all of 2022's blog entries can be found at https://trekkiemoto.com/blog/2022/ (a permanent link), whereas https://trekkiemoto.com/blog/ will show just the most recent entries and a link to the archive.

TM

🔗 May 4, 2022

As I write this, I'm sitting in a beach house on Hatteras Island in North Carolina's Outer Banks, finishing up a two-week vacation with my wife. I miss my Speed Twin, but I'm looking forward to jumping back on it next week. Yesterday, the last installment of my “Weekly Discussion Topic” segment was published on YouTube. As I said before, I will still do the occasional discussion topic video if the right subject comes along.

In the meantime, I have a personal issue I need to work through. Anyone who has watched my videos will be aware that I am not a fit man. I have suffered from years of debilitating obesity, and despite pre-pandemic dieting success, I find myself right back where I started. When I return from vacation, I will go back to the strict diet plan that gave me recent success, but this time I have decided to share my story with my YouTube followers. I am not quite sure what form it will take just yet, but I plan to release a brief weekly segment on my YouTube Channel to share my successes and failures. The theory I have is that by putting this out in the open, it will give me additional motivation.

My poor fitness has forced me to bail on a group ride I was very much looking forward to. Losing weight and getting fitter will make me a better rider, and it'll mean I can go for longer rides without suffering so much discomfort and fatigue. Expect the first installment of Too Fat Tuesday to come out very soon. Oh, and you can blame my wife for that title. I wanted to call it Weight Loss Wednesday, but she knows best.

TM

🔗 March 30, 2022

Since July 2021, I have been posting a weekly discussion topic video. In fact I am quite proud of the fact that I have been able to put one of them out every Tuesday without fail. They have varied in length from about 90 seconds to almost 4 minutes, and their purpose has been to promote discussion in the comments section of the YouTube video. In this respect, they have done very well indeed. Some of the discussion has been lively and absorbing, and I have learned much about other riders and their views on all sorts of various topics.

Unfortunately, none of these weekly discussion videos have been very successful when it comes to views, with my most successful to date (a video on riding in the summer) getting only 65 as of this date. For the amount of time and effort it takes to produce these short videos (and their thumbnails), I am not sure I am getting enough bang for my buck, so to speak.

I will still continue to make discussion topic videos, but I have decided they will no longer be weekly. If I have a question to ask, I shall ask it! But just churning them out for the sake of having one every week seems like a pointless exercise. I would rather use more of that time to produce more motovlogs, reviews and group rides. I have a few of these weekly videos yet to be published, so they will be hanging around until the end of April. After that, they will become an infrequent thing, resurrected as needed.

TM

🔗 March 14, 2022

We had three inches of snow in my area this past weekend, but looking forward it seems as if spring temperatures are approaching. Much of this coming week features highs around 65°F (18°C) and I plan to get out and ride when the sun is shining. I am hoping I will soon be able to return to weekly motovlogging and put this “off season” in the mirror. Anyway, stay tuned!

TM

🔗 March 10, 2022

I just wanted to give you an update on my attempt to use a Quad Lock on the MOLLE webbing on the tank bag. It's not an ideal solution, quite frankly. Attaching the phone to the Quad Lock when it is itself attached to a soft bag is a little fiddly. It will have to do for the time being, but I am now firmly resolved to getting a dedicated GPS unit.

TM

🔗 February 21, 2022

Modern smartphones with fancy cameras are susceptible to vibration damage when mounted on the handlebars of a motorcycle. I have been reluctant to risk my Pixel 6 Pro in this way, even with some sort of vibration damper, so I've been carrying the phone in my tank bag or zipped up in my jacket. Unfortunately, that means I have not been able to use the phone as a visual GPS system, and I am reluctant to spend $400-500 on a dedicated unit from the likes of Garmin or TomTom.

My tank bag has MOLLE webbing on the top, which allows me to attach various things if I need to. I have decided to order a phone case from Quad Lock, but instead of mounting the case to the handlebars I will use their belt clip to attach it to the MOLLE webbing on the tank bag. While not ideal, at least I will be able to see my phone screen and use it for navigation until I can afford a dedicated GPS unit.

I will let you know how it turns out!

TM

🔗 February 17, 2022

As something of a fair weather rider, February in Pennsylvania is a time when my Speed Twin sits in the garage attached to a battery tender. But that doesn't stop me thinking about improvements to the bike, the riding experience, and the motovlogging equipment. I just purchased a new seat from Bangok-based Crafton Atelier that I am looking forward to trying out. Hopefully it will make the bike a little more comfortable on those longer rides. I also have a growing wish list of items I am hoping to purchase, finances permitting:

• A Garmin zūmo XT GPS navigation system, because the vibration from the bike will not be kind to the optical components of my new Pixel 6 Pro.
• A DJI Mic wireless microphone system to try to make capturing on bike audio a little easier.
• Another Insta 360 One X2 360° action camera, although I would much rather have a “One X3” with full 4K from each lens (instead of sharing 5.7K between them) and with the gap between recordings eliminated. Take note, Insta360!
• A GoPro Hero 10 Black action camera to replace my Hero 9 on my helmet. The Hero 9 will still get used, because you can never have enough cameras!
• A dedicated video editing computer with several terabytes of solid state hard drive and multiple monitors so I can break up my Adobe Premiere workspace a bit.

None of those purchases are likely to happen for a while, although I really need to get the GPS system before the riding season starts! In the meantime, I need to get busy recording a few “Weekly Discussion Topic” installments because I have run out. They'll have to be off the bike, unfortunately.

TM