bicycles
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Make A Handlebar Phone Mount With Modelling Clay
1:30AM Rosa Golijan | Your smartphone can handle GPS, music and just about anything you’d need on the go. With this shock-absorbing, fully customisable DIY phone mount, you can enjoy bike rides without leaving your phone behind. More »
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Build Your Own Mini Bike Light
9:00AM Adam Pash | Last year’s petrol prices and the current economy got you riding your bike everywhere? Up your safety when riding at night with this DIY mini bike light. More »
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Make A Cheap Hard Saddle-Bag For Your Bike
7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Add some storage beneath the seat of your bike with this ridiculously cheap and simple hard-backed saddle-bag. It’s made from recycled material, and you’ll always have a place to stash stuff on the go. Gerry at How to Fix Bikes, a blog about life as an avid cyclist, turned a plastic jar into saddlebag. The steps are as simple as finding an appropriately sized jar, washing it out, and punching holes that line up with the support bars under your seat to anchor it with zip ties. The whole project is dirt cheap and makes good use of old, recycling-bind-bound jars. You can see in the photo Gerry uses his to stash an emergency repair kit for his bike; the peanut butter jar he used is the perfect size for some small folding tools and inner tube. The only modification we’d suggest is hitting the container with a coat of black spray paint to make it stand out less in comparison to the dark frame of the bike, and perhaps saving a thin sheet of packing foam from your next electronics shipment to wrap around the inside of the jar to cut down on bouncing cargo. If you have a crafty bike-related tip or storage solution, sound off in the comments below. How-To Make A Real Cheap Hard Saddle Bag [via Make] More »
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‘Flickr Bikes’ Photo-Map Locales Across the Globe
2:00AM Gina Trapani | For their new “Purple Pedals” campaign, Yahoo has dispatched a handful of GPS-enabled bicycles equipped with cameraphones that automatically shoot and upload photos to Flickr to riders in cities all over the world, from San Francisco to New York and soon, to Singapore, Denmark and the U.K.. The bikes come with solar panels which power the camera, and special software that uses the phone’s accelerometer to snap photos every 60 seconds automatically when the bike is in motion. I was one of the lucky folks to get my hands on one of these bikes, and I’ve been riding it all over San Diego for over a week now. Let’s take a look at how the bike works, how it was made, and how you can turn your handlebars into a tripod and photo-map your neighbourhood in similar fashion. More »
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Mount a Camera on Your Bike
9:00AM Adam Pash | Photography enthusiast blog Photojojo details how to mount your point-and-shoot camera on your bicycle for fun and creative shooting. The supplies are cheap (under $10), and putting it all together is a breeze. When you’re done, you could use it to snap photos at intervals for a time-lapse or shoot some video like Photojojo did above. If your camera doesn’t support time-lapse (or you just want to really soup it up), check out how to turn your point-and-shoot into a super-camera with CHDK. Your Bike? Awesome. Your Camera? Awesome. You Thinking what We’re Thinking? [Photojojo] More »
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The Bicycle Tutor Explains Just About Every Kind of Bike Fix
1:00AM Kevin Purdy | If your two-wheeled transport is in need of a seasonal tuneup or any kind of fix, The Bicycle Tutor can clearly explain what you’ll need to get it done. Run by a photography enthusiast and serious bike geek, the site offers plain-English tutorials in both hi-res video and full text. The streaming videos are free to watch on the site, but you can buy QuickTime videos for a buck or two to load on your iPod and bring out to where the work is. It’s a good bookmark for everything from changing a flat to replacing your chain rings. The Bicycle Tutor [via Get Rich Slowly] More »
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Ugly Your Bike to Deter Thieves
7:00AM Adam Pash | The DIY hackers at Make magazine detail how to deter thieves from targeting your prized cycle by uglifying your bike. The idea: The less desirable your bike looks to a thief, the less likely they are to steal it from among the throngs of other potential victims. Starting with ugly paint and faux rust and ending with a few tacky stickers, the author suggests several tried and true methods for making your bike appear as undesirable as possible. Keep in mind that the article is also quick to point out that this is not theft prevention—a bike lock is still necessary—but considering how easy it is to steal a bike in broad daylight, a lock plus some skilled uglification could make all the difference. U-G-L-Y Your Bike [Make via Hackszine] More »How to collect geographic data from your bike
12:51PM Sarah Stokely | Cyclists and geography geeks will want their very own Frida V – the Free Ride Data Acquisition Vehicle. This project’s website describes the project like so:
“Frida V. is a rugged and comfortable bicycle equipped for efficient exploration and mapping of public urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS positioning device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The consolidated software and hardware assembly enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet. In other words, let the warriding and rideblogging begin!”
As the Make blog notes, all of the open source software and hardware design for the bike can be downloaded from the Frida V. Wiki. Nice.
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