My Phone is Smarter Than Your Honor Student

 Bikes, Gadgets  Comments Off on My Phone is Smarter Than Your Honor Student
Sep 282011
 

I read somewhere recently that I retired after selling Speedgoat. This comes as a huge relief, given how concerned I’ve been about finding a job, and I can’t wait to tell my wife that I’m not currently unemployed, but actually retired. I’m also happy to report that this means the American Dream is alive and well, and that it is possible to retire at 40, provided you’re willing and able to find work again pretty soon after, and put in another thirty to forty years of gainful employment while retired.

It can’t all be polo matches on white tigers and Lamborghini derbies for carefree guys like me, though, so I found myself at Interbike earlier this month, walking around, taking pictures, and writing stuff down. What was different this year–aside from no longer representing the company I owned for fourteen years–was that I covered the entire show live, using a single device.

Whatever disorder compels me to obsess about bikes and bike parts seems to have grown to include gadgets in the past few years. Particularly mobile devices. Very particularly, Android phones. For what it’s worth then, here’s what I used to photograph, edit, and post to my blog during the show.

image

It’s an HTC Thunderbolt, which is a Verizon 4G LTE phone–a fancy way of saying it’s stupid-fast connected to the interwebs, anywhere you can get a 4G signal. If you’ve not seen a Verizon 4G phone load web pages and stuff, I can tell you, it’s a thing of beauty. After a brief and tempestuous relationship with the free WiFi provided by Interbike and the Sand’s Expo (constant fails), I finally gave up on WiFi altogether, flipped on 4G, and uploaded photos and posted blog entries the entire day using it.

You can find specs on the Thunderbolt all over the web, but it has a 4.3″ screen, an 8MP autofocus camera with dual LED flashes, a front-facing camera, a massive 32GB micro SD card, a 1GHz single core Qualcomm processor, and some of the worst battery life on anything, ever.

image

So I was using the Seido extended battery, which ups stock juice storage from 1400 mAh to 2750 mAh, and still, each day I was going through not one, not two, but three batteries–two stock 1400s and the big 2750.

Eight megapixel camera or not, the stock camera app on the Thunderbolt is piss poor, so I shot everything with an app called Camera Magic. Absolutely the best camera I’ve found for Android phones.

Mad thumb pumping seamlessly channeled my innermost thoughts into squiggly lines some of you could interpret thanks to the Swiftkey keyboard. Anyone who thinks he or she has a better keyboard for any phone is just plain wrong. This is The One.

Every image loaded automatically into a great media management program called Quickpic, which let me share each image in a variety of ways, including pushing them to the WordPress app for blog upload.

Battery life being what it was, my little Thunderbolt left it all on the field each day, but this setup let me send a lot of data from the show in real-time, while walking around texting and walking into people. An app called JuiceDefender let me get as many hours as I did on the phone.

I never thought I’d see the day when I didn’t drag my laptop along–and I hauled it to Vegas for good measure this time around, too–but I just didn’t need it, and that was impressive.

Interbike Favorites: Fox D.O.S.S. & Engineering

 Bikes  Comments Off on Interbike Favorites: Fox D.O.S.S. & Engineering
Sep 272011
 

image

Yes, it’s taken them too long to produce one, and yes, the remote lever looks like it was stolen from a hydroelectric dam’s control panel, but Fox’s D.O.S.S. is one of the brightest signs I saw at Interbike.

image

Why? Because it signals actual growth and development. Sure, a lot of us remember the original design, but dropper posts are A New Thing, and if you’ve read most of my rants heretofore, you know I’m rooting for innovation. Any time an entirely new category of products hits the market, and established brands begin to support the category by making products, it’s a good thing.

Maybe I’m hyper-sensitive to this right now because my country keeps being declared a has-been when it comes to innovation, and I’m old and cranky enough to remember when we did actually make some pretty cool stuff for these newfangled bicycle with gears and big, fat tires. And yes, I know the Oregon Manifest is going on as I type, and that some of the most beautiful bikes in the world will be on display in Sacramento this March. Yes, beautiful things are still crafted in the U.S. But that’s not the same as engineering. Confused about the difference? Let me help.

1. Built in the U.S.A.
image

2. Engineered in the U.S.A.
image

Sure, the Escort probably gets better gas mileage, even with the leaking tank, but I can promise you a lot of thought went into that second one, which seems to be a variation of the new Oshkosh M-ATV military vehicle. They were doing brake tests on it on my mountain when I was driving one of the kids home from school the other day. Apparently, it has no defense against idiots passing it and snapping photos.

So, while there are a lot of artisans around, when it comes to U.S. engineering in the bike industry, there doesn’t seem to be much going on, with the exception of precious few guys like Lance and Chris Canfield . While it’d be nice to see more manufacturing going on here in the States, Fox having to play catch-up means at least some product development is still breathing, and that involves smart people in the United States of America who know complicated stuff like math. Regardless of where their stuff is actually made, I know that Fox has U.S. engineers–real, genuine human being ones–that actually live in the United States. I know this because I’ve seen them.

Unlike the case in so many industries, there is still a spark of bicycle engineering left in my country, and every time a brand enters a new category, it means people who ride bikes thinking about how to make them better. When I see that putting food on the table for somebody who knows how to use stuff like PTC, Solidworks, or AutoCAD, it makes me happy.

Pivot Cycles

 Bikes  Comments Off on Pivot Cycles
Sep 142011
 

Breakfast with the guys from Pivot, then we created this ominous rolling mob of black umbrellas. Wal-greens sold a lot of umbrellas this morning.

image

Interbike 2015: a Preview

 Bikes  Comments Off on Interbike 2015: a Preview
Sep 092011
 

Interbike 2011 is about to get underway, and I’ll be there asking questions like “When will we actually see these at dealers?” and “How drunk were you when you designed this?” What with Eurobike just ending and Interbike just beginning, we’re all focused on seeing the latest stuff.

With that in mind, here’s a preview of some products we might be seeing–not at this year’s Interbike, but a few years from now. Think of this as the bike version of seeing the new Nike McFly. Some of what you’re about to see may never come to be, but some will, and all of it’s interesting. Finding this information is possible thanks to my extraordinary powers of prognostication, but also thanks to publicly available patent information anyone can access any time.

Integrated Shifting and Suspension Systems

I don’t know if Specialized will ever produce products using this patent, but they’ve had these plans to integrate shifting and suspension since 2006. As a guy who still dislikes anti-lock brakes, I tend to hope this stays on the shelf, but who knows. Maybe they could do something incredible with this.


Vibration Damping System for a Seatpost

There are plenty of weird things out there in Patent Land that aren’t yet attached to a company with the resources to see them into production, and this could be one of those, but I get the feeling we’ll see this actually hit the market at some point.


Trek Suspension Fork

Difficult to say exactly why Trek would have filed a patent application for a suspension fork in February of 2010. If it’s an attempt to make inexpensive forks for entry level bikes, you’d still think they’d just license something–and they sure wouldn’t put Jose Gonzalez and Greg Buhl, the guys behind anything serious going on with suspension designs at Trek, behind this project.


Trek’s Concentric Rear Derailleur

No, I don’t think Trek is muscling in on Shimano and SRAM’s turf, but this suggests the boys in Wisconsin are dedicated to their Active Braking Pivot frame design.


Craig Calfee Suspension Frame Design

Though it sure seems to pay homage to the classic Moots circa Kent Eriksen YBB design, Calfee’s design for a soft-tail looks distinct, cleanly done, and really intriguing, and it’s certainly possible we’ll see bikes using this design soon.


Shimano Suspension Fork

It’s certainly possible this fork will never see the light or day, or worse–that it’s intended for a hybrid. Shimano already shows fork patents that seem suited to light duty use, but this thing looks a little sophisticated for a trip to the grocery store. In addition to this patent, the same drawings appear in a second patent that details a process for transferring air between two different chambers using a lever, which gets really interesting, once you’ve seen the third patent, filed in April of 2008, that seems to show a dual remote system for managing both travel and damping (Fig. 2 below), or their external reservoir electronically controlled fork damping system.


Bizarre Dual Shock Suspension Design

Okay, so we probably won’t ever see this thing, and maybe it’s for the better, but part of me sure hopes it surfaces somewhere, somehow. Probably won’t be at a show, though. Interbike has become so incredibly expensive for the exhibitors these days that you never see insane, goofy shit like this anymore, and that’s truly sad. Here’s to you, dual-shock, elevated combo-chainstay-linkage design.


My Own Suspension Design

Maybe you’ll see it one day. I’m working on having a prototype built now. Feel free to submit questions about it using the question submission thing up at the top of the page, there on the right.


Electronically Cooled Fox Suspension

An excerpt from this patent application, filed in 2009, suggests the use of a “thermoelectric generator” that would use a magnet passing coiling wires during movement of the shock to activate a cooling device. Another, even wilder, possible embodiment introduces something called “piezo electric crystals” that would generate electricity when under compression. In all cases, these “TEGs” or thermoelectric generators, have the ability to literally move heat around, and that alone is pretty insane. By the time the application starts suggesting the TEGs can “based on the Peltier Effect and correspondingly constructed from thin ceramic wafers having alternate P and N doped bismuth telluride sandwiched between them,” I’m willing to just give Fox the benefit of the doubt and believe this crazy bastards are really serious about making suspension systems. I mean holy shit, guys.


The examples go on, and now that you know where to look, please feel free to roam around all up in the patent club. I haven’t even mentioned some really interesting suspension designs. Good, bad, or ugly, these patents are all proof that we belong to an incredibly creative and innovative industry.

Sep 022011
 

Just confirmed I’m off to Interbike to cover the show for Dirt Rag. Get in touch and let me know what you want to see. I am merely a vessel.

I’ll be posting my coverage directly to be a blog starting on September 14th.

Now check out this rad Firebird I saw today.

image