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Review of Planet Bike Superflash Tail Light

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When I’m cycling, I’m most concerned about traffic coming up from behind me. I want to do all I can to ensure that distracted motorists will be able to easily see me. To help make sure this happens, I always use a tail light.

One of the best tail lights I’ve found for cycling is the Planet Bike Superflash tail light. It is extremely bright and can easily be seen even in bright daylight. At dawn or dusk, it is incredibly noticeable.

Typically the light will be mounted on your seat post or attached to the back of an under-seat bag. It runs on 2-AAA batteries and battery life is excellent. I easily get a season out of one set of batteries. It’s diminutive size belies it’s amazing performance. The superflash is about $20 and available from Amazon.com

Remove Sansa Clip+ Duplicate files preceded with ._ in track listing with dot_clean terminal command

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I’ve got several Sandisk mp3 players… Sansa Fuze, Sansa Clip and Sansa Clip+. They all exhibit a peculiar issue with track listing names. The “problem” is that there seem to be duplicate track names for all the music that I’ve added to my Sansa by dragging the tunes in from iTunes on my Mac.

I was fortunate to have an extremely helpful and knowledgable chat session with a Sandisk support person named “Apollo D.” In conjunction with that chat session and some additional Googling this issue, I have finally found a solution for this vexing problem.

Basically the “._” in front of the track listings is a result of the way that Mac OSX handles filenames. When you drag your iTunes tracks into the Sandisk player, the “duplicate” file names get created as a result of this MacOSX naming issue. What is bothersome is that you cannot delete the files directly from the player because as soon as you click on one of them, the player scans to the next “real” file and begins playing it. So you never get the chance to get to the delete menu on the player to delete the “duplicate” file name. Furthermore, these duplicates are not really music tracks anyway and don’t play. You also cannot see these files when the player is hooked up to your computer so you are not able to delete them this way either.

The solution is relatively painless and here is what you want to do to rid your Sandisk player of these files. If you must know more, then just Google…there are many places that discuss the “dot_clean” terminal command.

1. Make sure that the System Settings > USB mode on your player is set to MSC.
2. Hook your Sandisk player up to your computer via USB.
3. Launch the Mac OS terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal.)
4. At the prompt, type in the command:dot_clean
5. Hit the space bar one time to insert a space after dot_clean
6. Locate the icon of your Sandisk player on your desktop and drag the icon of the player into your terminal window. This will copy the path of your Sandisk player into the terminal window.
7. HIt Return
8. That’s all there is to it. You terminal window should have returned you to a new line after completing the command you just issued.
9. Unmount your Sandisk player.

Now after the player refreshes itself after it has been disconnected from your computer, you will notice that all the “duplicate” tracks have been removed.

If you add new tunes to your player after doing this the first time, you will have to follow this procedure again to rid the newly added files of the ._ track names.

Review of Ultra Light Bike Mirror by D+D Oberlauda

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I have a love/hate relationship with cycling mirrors. Most of the ones I’ve tried, and I’ve tried quite a few over the years, just haven’t worked out well. I think I’ve finally found one that works pretty well and is fairly flexible in where it can be mounted.

On my road bike I found three areas where it seemed to be good. I mounted the mirror in three different locations; At the end of the bottom of the bars, around the brake hoods and just below the brake hoods on the handlebar. My video review will demonstrate these three positions.

The mirror is very light, weighing about 2 oz. The light weight of the mirror makes it less prone to vibrating. The mirror surface is convex which results in a distorted view and that makes it hard to judge distances using the mirror. However the convex shape gives you a wide angle of view and seeing approaching vehicles is much easier with this type of mirror.

I paid about $25 from Performance Bike and think it’ll do the trick for me.

Some of the other mirrors I’ve tried but didn’t like for various reasons were the…

CycleAware Reflex Mirror: This is a helmet mount mirror and it vibrated quite a bit. Also, it was always getting whacked out of shape when I’d take my helmet off. I found it difficult to adjust and the mirror gives a very small field of view. It takes some getting used to.

Blackburn Road Mirror: This mirror has a bracket that mounts over the brake hood. I didn’t like it. The mirror vibrated and the extra thickness around the brake hood just bothered me.

Everyone will have their preference, but right now I like the Ultra Light bike Mirror by D+D Oberlauda. I got mine at Performance Bike.