December 2011 - Zane's Blog

Windows Live Writer

Trying out a new tool for adding posts to my blog. My friend Jeff told me about a product called Live Writer by Microsoft. I’ve used some of the other products in the Microsoft Live suite, like Live Mesh and Live Messenger. They have all been pretty useful, so I figured I would give this one a shot as well.

The layout of Live Writer is very much like working in a Word document. You have the ribbon along the top for most of your options. Clicking on the Picture icon quickly allowed me to add the photo below.

I didn’t see how I could add a caption to the photo yet. I’ll have to look around for that. Clicking on the picture did give me lots of tools for working with the picture including changing the Title and the Alt-Text. Previewing the post is quick and easy, just click on the Preview tab at the bottom and it shows you exactly what your post will look like. I’ll be trying this out for my next few posts and see how it goes!

CompuTrainer Improvement CTANT+!!

No Racermate One was not released. Recently I go tired of watching my heart rate disappear during my training rides on the CompuTrainer. It seemed like every ride all of the sudden I would lose my heart rate for a few minutes. I would fiddle with the wires and try to get it to work. I even purchased the ear clip one from Racermate in effort to rid myself of this problem. That didn’t work either. Instead of dropping out, my heart rate would jump all over the place with the ear clip version.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I’d had enough. On the Racermate forums I happen to see someone mention a 3rd party product called CTant+. I’m assuming that CT is for CompuTrainer and ANT+ is for the wireless technology that many of the devices employ to be compatible with each other. I downloaded a trial version from their website http://www.ct-ant.com/ and tested it out. I’m now able to use my Garmin heart rate monitor instead of the CT one. I’ve used it for the last two weeks and it has worked flawlessly! It’s a little pricey at $49.00, but it does get the job done, something that Racermate can’t seem to figure out.

You can also override the Cadence and power source, but if you do that you will lose the SpinScan feature. If you are tired of having your heart rate drop out during your workouts on the CT, I really think you should give CTANT+ a try!