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- Kayak to Kaneohe Sandbar – sunken at high tide
- Why does my snorkel mask fog up?
- Waikiki & Honolulu landmarks seen from departing flight DL650
- Actual landing flight path of Delta 650 at JFK runway 22L
- Reign Ares as big-wheel skates for urban marathons
- What are carbon-fiber inline skates ?
- Big Wheels on Carbon Hockey Skates
- Where to Inline Skate on Long Island
- Check that your sunglasses block out all UV rays
- Launching Project Bach Wrote What ?!
- Playing Bach Cello Suite 1
- Slot car racing for the rest of us
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- Asian-fit helmets are a lot of hot air
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Author Archives: Xinhai Dude 辛亥生
Kayak to Kaneohe Sandbar – sunken at high tide
On a windy and rainy day in November, I rented a kayak from Go Bananas, and drove to He’eia Kea Boat Harbor. I launched off towards where I thought the legendary Kaneohe Sandbar would be.
For the entire trip to the sandbar, I paddled alone in a foreboding ocean. Perhaps “bay” is a more accurate description. But from my low vantage point, it looked as if I were in the middle of the wide wide sea under dark clouds. I aimed for Kapapa Island as told. And that was good advice. Because from my kayak, all I could see were breaking waves in every direction, except for that tiny speck of an island in the distance.
I kept turning my kayak back towards the harbor, second-guessing the sanity of my choice. I saw dark clouds pouring rain over entire towns. I pivoted back towards Kapapa Island and paddled some more, all the while frightened to the core and utterly alone.
I reached the last boat in sight, hoping to find tourists having a great time. But it was empty, silent and moored in deep water. No sandbar to be seen. I swung back facing the harbor. I again turned towards Kapapa. I kept going.
After what seemed like a lifetime, I sensed a change in water color. Shortly the sun poked its head out from behind clouds. And magic happened. The sea all around me turned turquoise as soon as sunlight touched them, revealing that I was merely a foot above the sand now. I got why this place is also known as the Sunken Island. Continue reading
Why does my snorkel mask fog up?
In the year 2025, there are plenty of resources online that answer the question: why does my snorkel mask keep fogging up? Before my 2025 trip to Hawaii, I consulted numerous YouTube videos and Reddit discussions on this topic. Chiefly I wanted to avoid repeating my sub-optimal snorkeling experiences from the 2015 cruise trip and the 2009 trip to Trunk Bay and Caneel Bay. One regrettable aspect of these past trips was that I couldn’t stop my lenses from fogging up when snorkeling, despite having done what I perceived to be adequate preparation.
Not surprisingly, today’s online resources are actually worse than in 2009 and 2015. Blogs with insightful resources have gone dark, long replaced by either inaccessible tribal social media, or exceedingly-short clickbait clips tailored to today’s audience. Chiefly the latter peddles quick fixes showing the “hows”, but not the “whys”. The thing is, lens-defogging, like most things in life, follows Tolstoy’s law – that every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There’s a long list of things that each alone can fog up your lenses. You need to remediate each and every one of them, to get to the “happy path”.
During my 2025 trip, I finally attained defogging nirvana. I experienced crystal-clear views from my mask for two hours of snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, for the first time in my life. Nobody had told me that this was the norm for snorkeling. One shouldn’t have to stand up on shallow reef mid-snorkeling to address fogs, ever. Until I had this experience, like countless new merrymakers all around Waikiki, I did not regard having to deal with fogging every 5 minutes as anything unusual.
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Fun, Hawaii, Travel
Tagged anti-fog, defog, defogger, diving mask, snorkel mask, snorkeling
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Waikiki & Honolulu landmarks seen from departing flight DL650
Delta 650 took off from runway 8R at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport due East at 5:15pm local time. Our pilot seemed to have made a point of banking the aircraft to trace the southern coast in the first 4 minutes of the flight to afford those seating on the left side a great aerial view of Sand Island, Honolulu downtown, Ala Moana, Waikiki, Kaimana, Diamond Head, Kahala, Hawaii Kai, Hanauma Bay, and Koko Head. Then the plane turned East again and flew towards the mainland.
Unlike the JFK arrival video I recorded, I was able to recognize all landmarks as I looked out of my window seat. This is largely due to my month-long research into Oahu before our trip to the island. But still, I figured I would write a post showing these famous Hawaiian landmarks. Here is the recorded video. Continue reading
Posted in Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Photography, Planes, Real Planes, Travel
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Actual landing flight path of Delta 650 at JFK runway 22L
I’ve always chosen window seats on flights whenever I could. And I never grew tired of watching my plane take off and land. Possibly I am just fascinated with flying, whether it involves model airplanes, computer simulations, or actual planes. But with only a few exceptional landmarks, I could almost never identify in realtime what the plane was flying over. It amazes me that I can’t recognize locations that should be familiar to me where I’ve driven by countless number of times.
The truth is that aerial views often looks quite different from ground views. Even though I kept thinking that I could mentally reconstruct a god’s eye view of my neighborhood, every landing proved me wrong. And my last trip was no exception. As I the plane readied itself for landing, I looked out of the window and couldn’t tell where the plane was. I put my phone against the window pane for the first time, and recorded the entire landing path.
I played the clip backward at home, and fired up Google Maps with Globe View to rotate its map to match the window view of the terrain. Painstakingly I retraced the flight path backward from runway 22L. This turned out to be the quickest way to reconstruct the landing path. In doing so, I’ve joined a bunch of nerds like Joseph Gunn who document, among other thing, flight paths. In fact, I consulted one of his blog posts on flight patterns to confirm landing paths at runway 22L. Continue reading
Posted in Being a Wikipedian, Flight Simulations, Hawaii, Planes, Real Planes, Travel
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Reign Ares as big-wheel skates for urban marathons
As a postscript to Big Wheels on Carbon Hockey Skates, I mentioned that I discovered Powerslide Reign Ares 100. They look like carbon hockey skates. Yet they’re equipped with Trinity mounts for big wheel configurations, such as 3x110mm. These skates seemingly disproved my assertion that “you simply can’t buy skates with big wheels on full-bodied, carbon hockey shells – they don’t exist”.
I bought a pair of Reign Ares, heat-molded them, and skated on them. I’ve examined them, and pondered on the internal structure of these skates for a week now. I’ve done all I could, to divine how they are made, short of cutting my new skates up. I can confidently say that, “they are no carbon hockey skates”.
But I love them. I think they are the best answer to my quest to find big wheels on carbon (almost) hockey skates. This long post documents my journey to customize and set up Reign Ares. I turned them into the right big-wheel skates for me, for urban marathons such as Wednesday Night Skate NYC.
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What are carbon-fiber inline skates ?
A few weeks ago I set out to write a short article on my quest to get Big Wheels on Carbon Hockey Skates. I organized pictures taken during the quest for illustrations. And I realized there were enough materials to address all topics on which I found no information online, during my quest.
So here is the first installment, on what exactly are carbon-fiber inline skates. How many types are commercially available. How your foot actually feel when you put them on. And how they are made.
Big Wheels on Carbon Hockey Skates
I’ve been skating for a while on inline hockey skates with four 80mm wheels. These are normal-sized wheels popular since decades ago. These skates are great for urban skating on paved streets, skating on bike trails, skating at an outdoor rink, slalom skating around cones, and doing two-foot wizard skating moves.
But they are no good for marathon skating like folks do at Wednesday Night Skate NYC. So I set out to get myself a setup with three 110mm wheels. But it turned out that nobody makes carbon-fiber hockey skates that can take wheels bigger than the usual 80mm. So I had to compromise and make modifications to commercially-available skates, in order to mount big wheels on them.
Where to Inline Skate on Long Island
The availability of skateable trails on Long Island is pitiful, compare to that in New York City. Despite having a much larger landmass, Long Island features very few publicly-accessible trails with paved and clean surfaces. To wit, click on the follow image to look at biking trails and bike-friendly roads in Nassau county compared to NYC, Queens and Brooklyn.
But not all biking trails and bike-friendly roads are suitable for inline skating. Some trails go significantly uphill and downhill – a challenge for beginner skaters. Some trails are not regularly maintained, and are full of debris that can trip an oblivious rollerblader. Furthermore, sharing a road with actual traffic is not something an inline skater would normally do.
For street hockey rinks and skateparks near Nassau, including some locations from Queens, head to the article on Public Skateparks on Long Island.
Outside of these parks, there are actually a few nice biking trails near Nassau that are relatively usable for inline skaters. You can find these trails on the Long Island Bikeways & Trailways map, published by the department of transportation.
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Posted in Fun, Inline Skating
Tagged Inline Skating, Public Skateparks on Long Island
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Check that your sunglasses block out all UV rays
You know UV rays from the sun burn your skin and damage your eyes. So you apply sunscreen and put on sunglasses before you head out. Sunscreen bottles usually come with an SPF number (Sun Protection Factor). But your sunglasses usually carry no indication of its effectiveness. When your sunscreen fails, you know right away within the hour – simply look at your skin. But when you wear sunglasses that fail to block UV rays from reaching your eyes, you only find out years later, after your ophthalmologist tells you that you have already developed cataracts, and suffered cornea and/or other permanent damages.
How do you know your sunglasses actually block out all UV rays? The best and the safest way is to walk into your local eyeglass store. They will usually check your sunglasses for UV protection, for free. It takes only a few minutes.
But you are reading this article. So obviously that isn’t how you roll. You want to check and confirm that your glasses block out UV rays, on your own, in the comfort of your own home. Following picture illustrates the basics of a procedure for just that. Continue reading
Posted in Fun
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Launching Project Bach Wrote What ?!
As mentioned previously in Playing Bach Cello Suite 1, I picked up cello playing seriously again, after two decades of neglect. For months now, I’ve playing with great enthusiasm the first suite of unaccompanied cello music from Bach. In the process I discovered a general lack of music written for an unaccompanied solo cellist.
There is a lack of knowledge about multi-voice-sounding music written for a single cellist to perform. I am talking about music that delivers a full-range audio experience through the use of arpeggios (broken chords), double-stops, and the like commonly found in Bach’s cello suites. Continue reading
Xinhai Dude 