Category: hacks

DIY Bike wheel hub end cap puller

How to make an end cap puller using a leftover piece of carbon bar and some hose clamps.

  1. Carefully place a piece of carbon (or metal) bar into a vise.
  2. Make two cuts along the length, removing about 1/4 in. (~5mm) to make room for the piece to tighten around the end cap.
  3. Slide the piece of bar over the end cap. Then slide a hose clamp flush with the hub and tighten it (I used two small interlocked clamps).
  4. Wiggle and pull the cap off!

Escape from music subscription services

Like the rest of the world, I’ve moved on from CDs for music. However, since I’ve converted all my discs to digital format, and I’m not likely to pay for a smartphone that can hold 140 GB of audio, my music collection has only received attention while I’m bleeding MTB brakes in my garage. Since I recently upgraded my radio in my car to a Boss Carplay radio, which supports loading media from a thumb drive, I decided to try to revive my old tunes.

The first issue is that while the Boss Radio BE7ACP.WX (an upgrade from the original BE920WCPA I purchased, and had to warranty once for the screen flashing on and off repeatedly, and another time for the screen information appearing completely upside down!) only supports MP3 files (and a thumb drive formatted with FAT32 with a max size of 32 GB!~). No problem, this can be done with FFMPEG…

However, what if you have 140 GB of music, with a folder for each artist, and inside that, a folder for each album?

Thus I share this project github.com/omundy/convert-music-library, which will convert an entire iTunes (or other) music library from .m4a to .mp3 (or .wav), maintaining the original directory structure (Artist/Album/Song). It still requires FFMPEG, and Node, but it may help someone else out there avoid locking themselves into a stupid subscription service. Enjoy!