I just finished my first long ride on my bike (~ 2000 Km in 4 days) after 3 years of riding and more than 42k Km on the bike.

This was my fist group ride, until now I done all the 42k Km on my bike as solo rider.

It was a blast, I really enjoyed it but I also made mistakes and learned a lot, here’s some suggestions I can give as a newbye:

Don’t underestimate the “emulation effect” of the group.

Riding with people with more experience or more powerful bikes than you means that you’ll always try to keep the pace and ride like them: DON’T DO IT.
Keep your pace, ride at your speed, nowadays everyone has a phone which can work as a GPS navigator, maybe you’ll arrive later, that’s fine, but don’t underestimate the danger of riding at other people speed or pace.

Riding comfort matters.

Riding is hard for your body, don’t feel ashamed to stop to make you butt rest or to drink some water.

Long rides are like marathons, completing them is already like winning them.

Consider riding underpants (like these https://www.revitsport.com/us_en/motorcycle-pants-airborne-2-black ) and a comfort seat, usually riding gear is not comfortable and will scratch you skin after hours of riding, those underpants prevent this and will help with sweat.

A mistake I did was using underwear like this and the last days they caused me a huge pain on the edges because of rubber bands, small details like that can make a huge difference between a comfortable and fun ride and a constant pain in the ass (literally).

Take it easy, take your time

Don’t let the trip consist only in riding riding and again riding, otherwise you’ll end up exhausted.

If you found a stunning panoramic view stop and enjoy it, this will help your mind and your body.

If you want to take a photo stop and do it, remember: it’s not a race, it’s an holiday.

Start early, end early.

Usually I hate to get up early in the morning, but in a riding trip it’s the best solution.

Riding when you’re exhausted is too dangerous, you’ll risk mistakes that can be fatal; also consider that, as I said, riding is hard for your body, you’ll see very soon that even if you to sleep early (early than your usual habits) you’ll fall asleep in no time.

Get a good H2O protection gear.

Riding wet is an awful experience, that may seem obvious but it still true.

Get an helmet with pinlock

Ride early in a chilly morning or under the rain may cause your visor to get foggy.

Buy a helmet with a pinlock ready visor, and mount the pinlock, it’s the cheapest and most effective way to prevent this problem, it will make a huge difference, believe me.

Stop when you don’t enjoy riding anymore.

After hours and hours of riding is perfectly normal to not feel the ride enjoyable, that’s the moment you have to stop, take a break or find a place to rest, don’t force you to reach your goal for the day.

Just a quick tip to remind myself how to properly commit some data that needs to be encrypted with git-crypt.

First of all, if you need to change files pattern or paths of the data you need to encrypt you have to change your .gitattributes file:

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. modify .gitattributes
3. git add & git commit
4. git push

In case you only have to change encrypted files or add new encrypted files

1. git clone the encrypted repo
2. unlock it with “git-crypt unlock <key path>”
3. verify files are not crypted with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”.
   If they’re shown as “data” it means they’re still encrypted (unless they’re binary data by themself)
4. add/change files
5. git add & git commit
6. git-crypt lock
7. verify files are encrypted before pushing repo with “git-crypt status ; file <encrypted files path>”
8. git push

After all this you can blame yourself for turning one more simple thing into a hard one.

These days I’m playing a little bit with Authentik, quite a pretty piece of software if you need a flexible identity provider for your services and don’t want to pay a ton of money for Okta or some other humongous commercial idp.

To be honest the more I spend time on Authentik the more I think It’s probably the best option if you’re looking for an “open source” Okta.

Honestly I don’t need a service like this, I have a basic experience with federation (mostly with SAML2 protocol) but I never had to setup and idp.

This time I tried to federate WordPress and Matomo with Authentik.

With WordPress it was fine, I had only one problem with the RedirectURI that has a querystring, and that means that the question mark needs an escape character, for example:

/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php\?action=openid-connect-authorize

With Matomo… well It was a different story:

1. first of all I had to install the only plugin available (LoginOIDC)

2. as for WordPress I had to escape the querystring question mark for the RedirectURI

3. I had to create a rewrite rule to accept a static RedirectURI

RewriteRule oidc/callback /index.php?module=LoginOIDC&action=callback&provider=oidc$1 [R=301,QSA]

4. I had to manually create the database table for the plugin to work, because the plugin installation procedure missed.

I used this SQL syntax onMariaDB 10:

CREATE TABLE piwik_loginoidc_provider (
user VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
provider_user VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
provider VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
date_connected TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT current_timestamp() ON UPDATE current_timestamp(),
PRIMARY KEY (provider_user, provider),
UNIQUE KEY user_provider (user, provider),
FOREIGN KEY (user) REFERENCES piwik_user (login) ON DELETE CASCADE
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb3 COLLATE=utf8mb3_general_ci;

…and finally the OpenID federation plugin start to work.

A couple of considerations:

WordPress: how is it bloody possible that in 2024 the most used CMS, the platform that runs more than 70% of the web does not support out of the box at least one federation protocol?!?!?
This is absolutely crazy imho… stop working on the damn interface and fix this nonsense…

Matomo: c’mon guys… you pretend to be a serious alternative to Google Analytics and you don’t support out of the box at least one federation protocol???? Seriously?!?!?
And the only plugin available was updated almost 1 year ago, we have two options:
1) it has no bugs, maybe it’s the best written piece of software ever made in human history
2) its development is basically abandoned

I would like it’s the first option, but if I had to bet some money I’ll bet on the 2nd one…

Today I did my longest trip so far, around 160 Km, here is what I learned.

Lesson number three: be humble
I know, this may sound obvious but it’s always good to remember.
You have your first bike, you have your license, you have your safety gear, what can go wrong? Well everything.
No, nothing bad happened to me, but the more I ride the more I understand there’s always something to learn, and the moment you feel too comfortable is the moment you’re closer to make mistakes, bad mistakes.
A few days ago I went to a grocery store for buying some stuff, while I was coming back there was a bump in the road and I though I was some sort of enduro superstar, so I was standing on my footpegs just before a turn. I was too fast for it so I started to brake, but while I was braking I was still twisting a little bit the thrust and I almost crushed on the side of the road on a small wall.
Thanks to the ABS I stopped… but I went so close to ruin my day. In that case I don’t think I can get some injury because I was not that fast, I was riding on an empty street and nobody else was involved… but it was a good lesson :’

Lesson number four: your body needs to adjust to riding
Serious adventure riders can ride for hours, hours, hours, and if you look to their fantstic videos you can think that’s a piece of cake, right?
Well, no :)
I’m not speaking about commuting or a small 50Km trip, I’m speaking about riding for 200-300 Km a day, that’s exhausting for your body.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do it, but you need your body to get used to it, you need training and, most important, you need to be patient, Rome was not built in a day, right?
The last time I went to the lake I did about 100Km with one break in the middle, when I returned home I was happy as a child but my legs were really really tired and specially my butt was hurting.
Today I did 160 Km in total, I did 3 breaks; when I stopped for the first break my butt was hurting and I felt my legs tingling a little bit, after a 5 minutes break I was as good as new, same after each of the other breaks.
At the end of the day the trip was fantastic and I was really happy, I felt like I was able to go around the world and more… but no, remember the previous point, be humble, be patient and train yourself :)

As you may heard on march 10th a large fire destroyed part of a big datacenter in Strasbourg owned by OVH (maybe the biggest european service provider), and yes, this blog burned with it.

After the accident there was a huge discussion on the web, flames (sigh…) on Twitter and Reddit about this crazy provider which doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan or some sort of automagic backup, so people get stucked with no options other than start their site/service from scratch…

Some of you may think I’m mad about it and I would run away from this provider… well I’m not and I’ll remain with OVH.

The reasons are very simple, first of all as you can see the blog is back (maybe better than before, things like this always makes you think how can you improve stuff, or at least this is how they work for me) because (surprise surprise!) I had a backup every 6 hours on another location (thanks restic).
The second reason why I decided to stay with OVH is that their vps offer is perfect for my needs, it costs like a shared hosting service and runs so much better, and obviously I can do whatever I want with my private vps, instead of get stucked with only a wordpress hosting service.

And no, I’m not mad with OVH, because even without reading carefully the contract I signed, I knew from the beginning that I had to take care of backups, even if they were included in the service (and they’re not in my case).
Why? Because I want backup made on my way, so I can control them, I can check them, I can figure out the best recovery plan for me.

I understand those who were complaining about backups made in the same location where the burning happened, they payed for a service and it has a flaw (a big one, don’t get me wrong).
But from my perspective there was a bigger flaw, and it was their thinking “ok I paid someone to take care of the backup, job’s done”.
No… no…. NOOOOO!
If you own a service you have the responsibility to take care of the backup, to understand it, to figure out the recovery plan, and to test it; if their backups burned with servers it’s because they missed one, many or all those points.

That’s it, for me the case is closed.