• Melbourne Route Planning and Cycle Maps

    I generally use the Strava route planner for pre-ride planning and Trail Forks for navigating while riding. But, what’s out there for exploring paths and dirt around Melbourne beyond the standard Strava (strava.com/maps), Komoot (komoot.com/discover), and Trail Forks (trailforks.com/trails/map) maps?

    VicBUG

    vicbug.app screenshot with example route from Southern Cross Station to Peak Cycles.

    The relatively new vicbug.app and their web app (vicbug.app/route-builder.html) offers significantly more detail and insight into the types of cycling infrastructure available throughput the area and along any chosen route. I heard about this one on the YarraBUG Show on 3CR (3cr.org.au/yarrabug). I’ve noticed some missing trails and paths and the routing often leaves a lot to be desired, but the app seems to be updated fairly regularly and continues to improve.

    wandrer.earth

    Wandrer Screenshot

    I have been using Wandrer (wandrer.earth) for many years. This one is more fun for tracking how much of your neighbourhood or region you’ve covered by bike. Remember burbing? I seem to remember there was a great piece from Andy Van Burgen and/or Matt De Neef on the now-defunct Cycling Tips, but that now seems to be swallowed by Velo. The Bicycle Network references their articles in a brief explainer, The ‘burbing’ phenomenon.

    Melbourne Bike Paths and Trails as a Transit-style Map

    An updated Metro-style map of Melbourne's bike trails
    byu/LordQuinzulin inmelbournecycling

    Finally, I came across this transit-style cycle map of Melbourne bike/shared paths and trails (reddit.com/r/melbournecycling/…). I’m not sure of the exact use case for this one, but it’s fun and interesting to see the network represented in this way.

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  • crossgeared . com

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    A screenshot of crossgeared.com loaded in Firefox 148.0.2 in MacOS 26.3

    The internet is truly an awful place in 2026. The enshittification of everything continues, arguably right down to the enshittification of thinking. I’m not going to link directly to The Nation and their terrible site. If only there were a word to describe what happened to thenation.com… You can instead get there from Bluesky, which is itself a product of the wreckage that was Twitter. ugh.

    How is any of this relevant and why am I writing about this? I was recently listening to the new Radavist Podcast interview with John Watson (of The Radavist) and it got me thinking about this site, crossgeared.com. I liked the serendipity of discovering blogs and sites scattered around and I’ve decided move back and participate in that version of the internet. So, crossgeared.com back from its 13 year break. After a couple hours of updates, debugging and fixes it appears that the site is mostly running and ready to be rediscovered by potentially dozens of people.

    What have I done?

    1. Backup everything
    2. Move the site to a new directory (I’ve been with the same host for over 20(!) years)
    3. Fix a handful of SSL issues with Cloudflare, the host, and within WP
    4. Clean up the SQL tables
    5. Update decade-old plugins and replace a few with new ones
    6. Patch up the old theme to mostly work in the current version of WP and current themes

    No guarantees for future updates, but I do have some ideas. Next up, I’m going to continue updating the theme, plugins, and other site infrastructure to something a little more recent. More soon, perhaps.

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  • iOS 26 & iPhone 16?

    Is it surprising how little has changed? The top row and dock are unchanged, although I did turn off the unread email count after it surpassed five digits a few years ago.

    Highlights? It’s fine.

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