Despite there being a clear appetite for rowing in Zwift, the reality is that a rowing machine is not a bicycle. A Concept2 rower will not connect to Zwift out of the box. The Zwift team occasionally hint at a future rowing mode, but it has been “coming soon” for years. I would not hold your breath. That said, people do row in Zwift. So how are they doing it? The key challenge is that Zwift expects to see a bicycle. To make this work, you need a way to translate data from the rower’s performance monitor, the PM5, into something Zwift recognises as a bike. This means inserting a device between the rower and the device running Zwift that can perform that translation. There are already solutions available. Some are relatively expensive, such as the NPE CABLE, which costs around £90 in the UK. Others are technically free, like the RowedBiker app. The downside with RowedBiker is that it needs to run on an additional device separate from the one running Zwift. If you already have a compati...
I've run into a few issues recently with my Moodle site ( moopi.uk ) due to the amount of time it takes for Moodle to compile the CSS cache for the new default theme, Boost. For most this is may be a one off issue that will go away once the CSS is compiled for the first time. This however really affects me as my site runs on a Raspberry Pi and so is lacking the raw grunt most servers will have to take this initial hit. On moopi.uk it takes over 10 mins to run this CSS compilation and as such does not finish within my PHP max_execution time. I could just raise my timeouts above this, but this still would mean my first visitor will probably never see a page load . While this may actually be a bug it's still very much a general problem for me running on such minimal resources. My solution is to run a CLI script to precache the Moodle CSS after an upgrade and before I leave maintenance mode. Now any downtime is graceful and CSS compilation and caching occurs without being affe...