Author: Abdullah Yahya - Page 2

Explore Places On a Bike/Scooter With a GPS Bike Route

I recently picked up an e-scooter and have been having fun scooting around on it. Now, I want to explore more places and make animated route maps. To do this easily, and to film my rides, I’ve come up with the following setup and process.

The Scooter (and accessories)

I have the HiBoy S2 electric scooter with seat.

I strapped a 10′-selfie stick to the back so I can take footage like this.

I used two short ratchet straps.

I installed this U-bolt mount on the handlebar to mount another selfie stick to get footage from the side like this.

and like this

depending on the angle and length of the stick.

Here’s what the U-bolt mount looks like.

For the camera, I use the Insta360 X5. Since it’s a 360-degree camera, it can capture everything around you.

Make sure to get a handlebar phone mount, like the one below, so you can easily see turn-by-turn directions on your phone.

Next time, I might get this more powerful scooter instead.

Create a Bike Route

To create a bike route, I like to use the Ride With GPS website. Create a free account and then click “Plan a Route”. By default, you will see something like this.

I like to change the map from “RWGPS” to “Google Map”.

Let’s say we want to create a bike route in Golden Gate Park. Type “Golden Gate Park” in the “Location” field and choose one of the matches.

The map will show a location in Golden Gate Park.

Check “Bike Paths”.

You should now see a bunch of dark green lines representing bike paths.

Let’s start the bike route at the Conservatory of Flowers. Search for it in the location field. A popup will appear on its location on the map. Click “Start route here”.

There’s a legend showing you the various surfaces. Paved trails are solid. Unpaved trails are dotted. Plain trails are unknown.

Let’s ride from the Conservatory of Flowers to Rideout Fountain. Click on a path by the Rideout Fountain. RideWithGPS will automatically create a travel segment following paved bike trails between those two locations.

If you make a mistake, you can click the left arrow to undo your changes.

Now, let’s go to the Music Concourse and the Japanese Tea Garden. Click on the paths near those locations to continue the route.

Since there is no direct path from the Music Concourse to the Japanese Tea Garden, Ride With GPS shows the route going backward a bit before making a U-turn to head to the Japanese Tea Garden.

Now, let’s ride around Blue Heron Lake and across Strawberry Hill. Click on points along paths where you want to go. This is what I came up with.

Now, let’s see if we can ride through the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Click on points on various paths where you want to ride your bike/scooter. Since the bike paths aren’t all connected, the following is what Ride With GPS gave me.

Now, let’s ride to the California Academy of Sciences and then head back to the starting point (the Conservatory of Flowers). This is what I got.

Click Save and name the route.

Click “View Route”. You will see the entire route, the elevation, and the total distance (4.1 miles).

You’ll also see the distance and percentage on paved and unpaved trails.

You’ll also see the cuesheet, showing turn-by-turn directions.

Create an animated route video in AvoMap

In Ride With GPS, click “Export GPX File” and download the .gpx file.

Go to AvoMap.com, create a free account and log in. You can create a video by specifying waypoints, or you can upload a GPS file. Since we already created a route and we have a GPX file, click “Upload GPS File” and select the .gpx file you just downloaded from Ride With GPS.

You should see something like this.

Now, on the left, you can adjust various settings, e.g.

change units from metric to imperial
enable “Dynamic camera”
add “Fly-in” animation with a duration of 8 seconds, a zoom level of 100 km
add “Fly-out” animation with a duration of 8 seconds, a zoom level of 100 km
“Traveled Distance” activated
Elevation enabled with “Chart background” disabled

If you buy credits, you can export the video, which would look something like this.

Get Turn-By-Turn Directions

When you’re about to go on your ride, you can get turn-by-turn directions using the Ride With GPS mobile app. However, this is a paid feature. If you don’t ride often, you can buy the monthly subscription for $10 a month and just cancel before the end of the first month.

Recording Your Ride’s GPS Data

When you ride, you may not necessarily follow your planned route. If you’d like to track your actual route taken, you can record your GPS data live while you’re riding. You can do this with the paid version of the Ride With GPS mobile app or with the free Geo Tracker Android app. Just tap the red record button to start logging your GPS data, including while the app is running in the background. When you’re done, tap again to stop recording. You can then export the GPS data in GPX format, which you can then import into AvoMap to create a video.

Convert a Google Map to GPX

If you want to create a travel route using Google Maps and then make a video in AvoMap using the Google Maps route, just create directions in Google Maps, optionally with multiple stops, and then copy and paste the URL into https://mapstogpx.com/. Download the GPX file and upload it to AvoMap.

E-scooter Riding Laws in California

Must have a driver’s license
May not ride on any sidewalks
Must ride on designated bike lanes
May ride on car roads where the speed limit is < 25 mph
E-scooters are not allowed on the Golden Gate Bridge, but e-bikes are allowed on both sidewalks.
E-scooters are allowed only on designated bike paths in Yosemite National Park, whereas e-bikes can be used on both bike paths and park roads. Learn more

Yosemite Resources

San Francisco Resources

San Francisco is a foggy city. If you want to go riding in San Francisco, it’s best to check the hour-by-hour weather and live views before you go.

Quick and Easy Fried Rice Recipe

Ingredients

1 cup of Jasmine rice
1.5 cups of water
2 eggs
Cucumber
Tomato
Cilantro
Green onion
Instant Seasoning Paste for Fried Rice (There are many seasoning packets for fried rice, but I like this one the most)

Instructions

Note: if you cook the rice wrong, it will come out mushy. Carefully follow the rice-cooking instructions if you want the rice to come out good.

Place the rice in a fine-mesh sieve or colander and rinse under cool running water. Gently stir the rice as you rinse. Keep rinsing until the water runs clear. This is critical for removing excess surface starch, which is the primary cause of gummy or mushy rice.
Put the rice in a deep pan.
Add the water to the pan and lay the rice out evenly. Note that adding too much water will make the rice mushy.
Cook on medium until the water boils.
Cover the pan with a lid, reduce the heat to low, and simmer the rice for 15 minutes or until all the water is gone.
Turn off the heat and let the rice rest for 10 minutes with the lid still on.
After resting, gently fluff the rice with a fork to break up any clumps and create individual, separate grains. Avoid stirring the rice while it’s very hot and moist, as this can cause it to break apart and become mushy.
Add chopped green onion, cilantro, and the seasoning paste to the rice and mix.
Cook 2 eggs (I prefer sunny side up)
Transfer the rice to a plate, put the eggs on top, and garnish with some chopped cilantro.
Add slices of cucumber and tomato to the plate.
Enjoy

The rice after adding green onion and the seasoning paste

How to Replace a Cracked/Sunken Concrete Slab

One of the concrete slabs (7′ x 8′ x 3″) by my driveway was cracked and sunken. The previous owner created the slab and didn’t include rebar. I paid someone $75 to break the slab into small chucks.

He used my jackhammer to break the slab, which you can buy on Amazon for $140.

I then rented a box truck from Home Depot for $29 / 75 minutes and took the concrete to GreenWaste. The cost to dump the concrete was $54.

Here’s how the space looked after removing the concrete. I would need about 0.5 cubic yards of concrete.

If I wanted to pay a concrete supplier like EZ-MIX CONCRETE to deliver pre-mixed concrete by truck, it would have cost me about $600 because they charge a minimum of 2 cubic yards.

I posted an RFQ on Yelp and Thumbtack and got the following quotes for both labor and materials:

Contractor 1: $1200
Contractor 2: $950
Contractor 3: $800

Contractor 3 happened to live 2 blocks from me. I chose him because he showed me the sample concrete work he had done, which looked very good, and his quote was the most reasonable. He went to Home Depot to buy rebar and about 35 bags of 60 lb concrete.

According to Home Depot, the concrete cost would be about $160 + tax, which includes 10% extra concrete.

There were 3 workers who came at 7 AM to start the project. First, they cut the rebar using an angle grinder and laid it down.

They then mixed the concrete with water in a wheelbarrow by hand using small shovels.

They should have just used an electric mixer to make mixing easy.

They then used a rake and a long bar to push and even out the wet concrete.

They then used a rough float to even out the surface.

They then used a large float to smoothen the surface.

and an edger to create a beveled edge.

This is how the surface looked when the concrete was still wet.

After waiting 1 to 1.5 hours, they came back and continued to smooth the surface, first using a rough trowel

and then using a finishing trowel.

Then, they came back about 30 minutes later to create a brushed texture for traction using a concrete broom.

As you can see, the surface came out very nice.

How to Cut Short a Tall Cypress Tree

Cypress trees are fast-growing, tall, narrow, evergreen trees.

They look nice, but if they grow too tall and it’s very windy, they can become a liability if they fall and damage your or someone else’s property. Unless they’re located far from where they can cause damage, the safe thing to do is to cut them short. If you wait too long, cutting the top off can be difficult and expensive. For example, in the video below, you can see one person on a ladder cutting the tree trunk on one side and two people on the ground holding and pulling a rope tied to the top part of the tree to ensure the tree falls away from damaging anything.

Cutting tall Cypress trees can be expensive. For that reason, it’s best to cut these trees before they get too tall. For example, I have 6 Cypress trees in my backyard. I was able to cut them so they were about 10′ tall. I rented a 14′ A-frame ladder from Home Depot and strapped it to the roof rack of my car using heavy-duty ratchet straps.

I first pruned some branches using the Ryobi 18V Cordless, Brushless Pruner.

I then used a Ryobi 18V Brushless, Cordless, Compact, One-Handed Reciprocating Saw to cut the trunk at around 10′ from the ground.

If the trunk was too difficult to cut with the sawzall, I’d use my Ryobi 40V HP Brushless 14 in. Battery Chainsaw. Cutting the trunk with this chainsaw was easy but a bit dangerous as you had to hold it with two hands due to its size and weight, unlike the one-handed compact sawzall.

Ryobi sells a compact 18V battery-powered chainsaw, which may be small and light enough to use with just one hand.

To be safe, you can have someone hold the ladder while you’re up on it or strap the ladder to the tree or a nearby fence to prevent it from falling over.

How I Block Weeds From Growing Anywhere in My Front Yard

To eliminate maintenance and water costs, I replaced my front yard with rocks and 6 Cypress trees. The front yard slopes away from the house toward the street. Since I don’t need to water any plants or trees (the Cypress trees can survive off of rainwater in the Winter), I put down 20-mil thick pond liner. Where two pieces of pond liner meet, I overlap them by 12 inches.

Along the perimeter, I screwed 2x4s into the sides of the concrete using concrete screws. I stapled the pond liner to the 2x4s along the perimeter and then screwed 1.5″ x 1.5″ brown drip edge to prevent weeds from sneaking their way up along the crevices.

If one of your edges is not a standard concrete slab, you may install a short retaining wall. In my case, I made a wall using 12″ wide pressure-treated wood that I held in place using metal stakes. I used brown deck screws that were designed for exterior use to minimize rust and corrosion.

I should have placed the pond liner under the wood before securing the wood in place. Since I didn’t do that, I stapled the pond liner to the side of the wood and then screwed thin wood wrapped in brown plastic (bender board) over the pond liner and into the wood. That should prevent weeds from growing between the wood retaining wall and the pond liner.

How to Hold a Car Trunk Partially Open When Transporting Large Items

These instructions are for a 2019 Toyota Prius Prime, but they should work for most cars. Some people use a bungee cord, but I prefer this 1/8” Adjustable Rope Hanger I got on Amazon. It has carabiners on both ends rather than hooks, which is more secure. It also has a simple ratcheting mechanism to shorten or lengthen the rope.

To hold your trunk partially open, take one end of the rope hanger and push it into the locking mechanism on your trunk as shown below.

The lock will close, preventing the carabiner of the rope hanger from disconnecting.

Then, take the carabiner on the other end of the rope hanger and hook it onto the metal lock part that’s at the other end of the car’s trunk locking mechanism.

Lastly, pull on the rope that’s connected to the ratchet to make the rope hanger shorter.

Greek Gyro (yee-ro) Recipe

When I was a kid, there were 2 foods I ate a lot of

Pizza
Greek Gyro (pronounced “yee-ro”) Sandwiches

Pizza is available everywhere, but there aren’t many places that sell Greek Gyros in the San Francisco Bay Area. One place that has it is Nick the Greek, but at $12.50 for a small sandwich, it feels overpriced. So, I tried to make my own without the hassle of cooking the meat and making the Greek Tzatziki sauce. I couldn’t find precooked doner kebab (“doner” is Turkish for “rotating”) meat, like a rotisserie, but I did find kebabs at Costco, which take a minute to heat up in the microwave, come out juicy, and taste delicious. For the Tzatziki sauce, I bought Tzatziki salad dressing from Target. It tastes good, but it’s thick, so getting it out of the bottle required using a knife.

Ingredients

Precooked Beef Kebabs (from Costco, $12.50 for 12 kebabs)
Tzatziki Salad Dressing (from Target, $2.49)
Pita Bread
French Fries (I bought frozen ones from Costco and cooked them in an air fryer)
Tomato
Lettuce (I got chopped and pre-washed lettuce for convenience)

Instructions

Cut 10% of the pita bread so you can open it like a pocket
Toast the pita bread in a toaster
Heat the beef kebabs in a microwave for 1 minute
Smear the Tzatziki sauce on both inner sides of the pita bread
Insert the kebabs in the pita bread
Add some lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and french fries in the pita bread
Enjoy

UPDATE

Stuffing a pita bread such that the ingredients are distributed uniformly so that you can taste each ingredient with each bite is a bit difficult to do. Instead of using a pita bread, you can use Lavash bread, shown below. It’s much easier to place the ingredients on Lavash bread. First, smear the Tzatziki sauce all over one side of the bread.

Then, place the ingredients as shown below (I added some extra Tzatziki sauce on the lettuce).

Then, roll the lavash and place it in a panini press.

Enjoy

You can also make it using a hamburger bun.

Use Photoshop Gen AI to Crop/Extend a Video

Older videos tend to be in the 4:3 aspect ratio rather than the 16:9 we use today. If you enlarge an old video, you’ll end up cropping parts of it. To keep all of the existing video, but extend it horizontally or vertically, you can use Photoshop’s Generative AI Extend feature. Here’s an example.

I have a video with dimensions 1350 wide by 1080 tall.

You can see this by looking the at file’s properties.

To extend this video horizontally so that it has a 16:9 aspect ratio, we’ll use Photoshop.

Create a new document with the same dimensions (1350 x 1080 px)

Drag the video to the blank document. The video will be on a layer above the white background layer. Click “Done” or the checkmark at the top to accept importing the video into the document.

Click the Crop tool

A white border with handles will appear on the video. A floating toolbar that says “Generative Expand” will also appear. Ensure the dimensions are set to 16:9.

Drag the handles so that the crop border covers the video. In this case, I dragged the vertical handle on the right toward the right.

The original video had a black vertical bar on the left. I don’t like that, so I will drag the video to the left so he black bar is outside the crop rectangle.

Click the Generative Expand button in the floating toolbar.

You can then enter a prompt if you want. I will just click “Generate”.

Photoshop will generate 3 variations. Click on each one to see how they look.

I like variation 1, but I don’t like that Photoshop added 3 purple and green boxes on top to the right of the original box.

Select the 3 boxes so we can remove them using Generative Fill.

Click the Generative Fill button followed by ‘Generate”.

Those 3 boxes are now gone.

Click “Window” > “Timeline” to open the timeline. Then, click “Create Video Timeline”.

You will see a track for the original and two tracks above it, one for generative expand and one for generative fill.

Drag each generative track so they are the same duration as the original track.

Click the play button in the timeline to preview the modified video.

If the results look good, export the video by going to File > Export > Render Video.

If you inspect the video’s properties, you’ll see that they are now 1920 x 1080 px.

Use AI to Remove Objects / People From a Video

There are many tools for removing objects and people from a video, including Adobe After Effects. So far, the easiest one I’ve found is Fotor. You can also use it to remove watermarks on videos.

Upload your video
Click the “Remove Object” button
Paint over the objects you want to remove (you can adjust the size of the paintbrush, if needed)
Click ‘Generate Preview” to see how it looks. If it looks good, you can download the generated video if you are a paying member.

Here’s an example. Below is a video clip from a music video.

I wanted to remove the 2 people, which I identified in Fotor using the purple paintbrush.

Here’s the resulting video.

Use Runway Act-Two (AI) To Animate Characters Based on an Existing Video

Usually, people create AI videos by describing what they want using a text prompt. This can be very difficult depending on the results you are looking for. Another way to create an AI video is by creating a “driving performance” video, which shows what movements you want to mimic. For example, if you want to make a video of yourself dancing and lip syncing exactly like someone else in an existing video, you can upload the existing video as a “driving performance” video and upload an image of yourself as the “character image”. This post explains how to do it using Runway Act-Two.

In Runway, click on Act-Two. You will see the UI below.

In the top section, you upload a “driving performance” video, which will contain the body movements and facial gestures you want to copy and apply to your character in the bottom section.

In the bottom section, your character can come from an image or video that you upload. For simplicity, and to match the driving video, I will upload an image containing my character.

For demonstration purposes, I want to make myself sing and dance exactly like the subject in the following video.

Runway Act-Two provides the following recommendations for driving performance videos.

Feature a single subject in the video
Ensure the subject’s face remains visible throughout the video
Frame the subject, at furthest, from the waist up
Well-lit, with defined facial features and expressions
- Certain expressions, such as sticking out a tongue, are not supported
No cuts that interrupt the shot
Ensure the performance follows our Trust & Safety standards
[Gestures] Ensure that the subject’s hands are in-frame at the start of the video
[Gestures] Start in a similar pose to your character input for the best results
[Gestures] Opt for natural movement rather than excessive or abrupt movement

Since my “driving performance” video has people playing music in the background, I need to remove them. One way is by using Capcut’s Auto Background Removal feature.

While it’s not perfect, it may be sufficient for Runway’s Act-Two. Here are two other AI-based video background removal tools that seem to do a better job.

Unscreen

VideoBgRemover.com

VideoBgRemover.com seems to produce the best results. However, for this test, I used the imperfect results from Capcut.

If you need more accurate subject isolation or background removal, use Adobe AfterEffects’ RotoBrush feature.

DRIVING PERFORMANCE VIDEO

CHARACTER IMAGE

Runway Act-Two provides the following recommendations for character images.

Feature a single subject
Frame the subject, at furthest, from the waist up
Subject has defined facial features (such as mouth and eyes)
Ensure the image follows our Trust & Safety standards
[Gestures] Ensure that the subject’s hands are in-frame at the start of the video