Between roughly 2013 and 2016 this domain hosted a satirical web tool and a small set of pages around it. The cycling press wrote about it, forums argued about it, and a good deal of that writing still links here. These pages describe what stood at each address. None of them republishes the original material itself.
What the tool did
It accepted an activity file, either read from a connected Garmin device or uploaded as a TCX, and raised the speed recorded inside it by a percentage the visitor chose. The altered file could then be uploaded to a tracking platform, where it appeared as an ordinary ride. Nothing marked it as altered on the way through.
The interface was plain to the point of bluntness. A device selector, a file picker, a single percentage field and a download button. A line of reassurance stated that nothing on the connected device would be altered or deleted, which was both true and beside the point. The device was indeed left intact; the file leaving it was not.
- 01
The earlier build
The first version of the tool, which altered heart rate and climbing as well as speed, and the interface that made the point in two clicks.
2013
- 02
The lawsuit page
The litigation and the public argument the satire was built against, described as it stood at the time, not as it reads now.
Context
- 03
The parody brand page
A full parody of a tracking product, and the sharpest writing the old site carried, preserved at the address it was published on.
Parody
Why it was written about
The tool worked as satire because the underlying point was sound. A tracking platform cannot confirm that a file describes something that happened; it records what a device reports, and a device reports whatever it is given. Demonstrating that gap in two clicks made the argument better than any essay.
Coverage followed quickly, in the cycling press and well beyond it. The conversation it started, about what a segment leaderboard can actually mean, has not been settled since, and the instruments now published on this site approach the same gap from the opposite direction. The question it raised outlasted the tool that raised it by a decade.
The tool is not here
Nothing on this site alters an activity file. The archive is descriptive: it records what stood at these addresses and why they were written about. The working code is not republished and will not be, because the gap it demonstrated is now better served by checking results than by faking them.
The current work is at the instruments, which read files and results instead of writing them.