A better city bike

I have three* bicycles, a road bike, a mountain bike and a town / hack bike**.
The one that is used most frequently (as opposed to the one that does the most miles or takes the hardest knocks) is the oldest, cheapest and ugliest of the three, a hack bike in the classic sense. It has mudguards, a rack, 28mm semi-slick tyres, a single-speed converter and security bolts on the axles. It also has a coating of grime so thick that it serves its own anti-theft protection purposes, but it's a few things away from a perfect city bike.
So what might a perfect city bike look like?
Well, one thing you can guarantee is that it would look nothing like the various ridiculous concepts that get splashed around every now and then. Take this one. Please just take it. With that much fancy carbon-fibre on show you can guarantee that if you don't someone else will. As long as it's not raining of course, because there are no mudguards. And as long as there's nothing to carry (no rack). And it's full daylight (no lights). And...
I'll stop there, you get the picture.

So, again, what might a perfect city bike look like?
I think there are a few constants that would be welcome anywhere:
Integrated lights. Good ones, one that will do a job both to be seen by and to be seen, built into the bike so as to be theft-proof and running off a dynamo with a back-up battery for the traffic lights.
An integrated lock. I don't want a d-lock swinging off my handlebars and taking chips out of the paintwork, worse I don't want to arrive and realise that I've left my lock at home.
A belt drive. Whether linking to a hub-gear or a single-speed (we'll come back to that) a good city bike is one that you arrive on clean and presentable (or at least as much as you left the house). I want a nice clean belt-drive (this at least the bad-example above does get right) and I want it enclosed as much as practical. If I forget my bicycle clips I don't want that to mean that I need to buy a new set of trousers because of chain marks all down the right leg.
Some kind of secure compartment on the bike where my emergency toolkit can live without needing to stuff my multi-tool, pump etc into my pockets every time I go to the pub.
Integrated mudguards. This should be optional, not everyone lives in such a god-forsaken climate, but if you're selling a town bike in northern Europe then full guards, with mud-flaps should be there as an option.
An integrated rack. Again optional, but a key job of a proper city bike is to be able to transport stuff around. Personally I don't like cycling with a rucksack, give me somewhere for my stuff.
Security bolts on the wheel QRs. I don't want to be un-hitching a wheel every time I lock up, sorry, I just don't.
Tubeless tyres. Possibly a bit controversial this one, at the moment there isn't a lot of choice in road tubeless road tyres but, having switched to tubeless on the mountain bike about 5 years ago and not having had a puncture since, I'd like that same confidence in my city bike please.
Disc brakes. Again this is potentially a bit controversial but better modulation and more consistent braking in the wet is worth, to me at least, a slight weight penalty. Also brake pads are much cheaper to replace after a crappy winter than rims...

So if those are the constants, what are the variables?
Firstly I see two types of geometry being required; a sit-up-and-beg Amsterdam-style option for those who prefer to be upright and relaxed, and a more aggressive, compact set-up for those who like to go and play in the traffic and take a faster route (my preferred approach).
Secondly there is the variable of local geography; places like Cambridge, or York, or Amsterdam can be easily tackled on a single-speed bike. The topographies of Sheffield and Durham however, require gears.
Finally there is the matter of climate and all-year cycling; for some a full set of racks and mudguards is essential, for some lucky buggers (living in LA or Seville perhaps) rain is simply not worth worrying about and wet-weather protection is simply unnecessary mass.

From these variables I see a line of 8 bicycles being derived: two geometries, each offered in a hub-geared and single-speed version, with all 4 of these available in a fair-weather*** or all-weather flavour.

Below are some sketches suggesting how such a machine might look and work. Feel free to criticise the artwork but know that in doing so you are missing the point...

Integrated lights:

Front and rear would have two LEDs, a flasher and a constant. Both rears and the front flasher would be set up to disperse as much light as possible, the front constant beam would be correctly set up to light-up the road and not on-coming traffic. I think a 300 Lumen high-power and 150 lumen low-power should be sufficient for open roads and lit roads respectively.

Integrated lock and retention point:

A cable lock permanently attached at one end with a spring-retention mechanism to help with re-coiling the cable. The lock is designed to loop around a fixed object and lock on itself. I know it's not as secure as a D-lock but it has practical benefits and the lock you have with you is always better than the one you left at home. The rubber strap on the top-tube stops the lock head rattling around and is designed to be replaceable in the event of  it perishing.

Bottom-bracket locker:

Simple bit of bent aluminium, attached to the frame with some security-head torx or allen-bolts. The lid lock is the same as the one on the main cycle lock so only one key is required. Large enough compartment for a spare-tube, a multi-tool, some instant patches and a couple of CO2 cannisters with an adaptor. Again not perfectly secure, but nothing is.

Initial thinking, Frame options and seat-tube cluster:

A basic upright frame and a compact variant. The kick up at the back of the compact top-tube is to ensure the rear light remains clear of any panniers or racks. The seat-tube cluster is designed so that the frame has a naturally compliant nature to offset the necessary size of the bottom-bracket area. Heavy use of hydro-forming is required but this can be done quite affordably now.
Throughout I have attempted to balance the requirements of integration with use of standard components, hence the lighting wiring doesn't go through the bars and stem, the rear light isn't built into the seat-post and the option remains to have a version without mudguards and rack so that standard after-market parts can be used.
I suspect you might not be able to hubs that have a dynamo / disc and gear / disc combo yet but I believe this will come along fairly quickly.

Looking at what's currently easily available it seems that Gazelle appear to be the closest I can find to this kind of approach but some bits really don't feel that integrated and the locks aren't really fit for purpose. They do seem like nice bikes though.

Anyway, that's my thoughts, what are yours?

* Well, 3 1/2 if you count my share of the tandem.
** This is widely recognised as the minimum number of bicycles by the way, if you were wondering.
*** N.B. Mounting points would still be included on the frame and forks of course.

Nokia Lumia 1020 review and comparison to N8

After a great deal of waiting I have finally got hold of the phone some of us have been waiting for Nokia to make for the last couple of years, the Lumia 1020, so I thought I'd write up a quick review on it.
For the most part I'm comparing this to my old N8.
This may seem a bit of an odd comparison (why not any of the newer Apple, Samsung, HTC or Sony phones for example?) but there are two simple reasons for this:
1) I suspect a reasonable number of people who bought the N8 for its camera have been hanging on for the 1020 for the same reason.
2) I do not own any of the other above-mentioned smart phones (though I did manage a couple of comparisons with an iPhone5 on the same night).

Hardware:
Physically the 1020 is a much bigger unit that the old N8 (on a par with a Galaxy S3), though it's actually slightly shallower at the deepest point. It still slides into your pocket easily enough but, with my average-bloke-sized hands it's really not as easy to use one-handed as the N8. The lens bulge seems to sit in a a bit of a funny place when you're holding it as well. From a design perspective I really don't like how they've chosen to house the additional gubbins; there are a number of alternative methods that would have produced both an easier-to-hold design as well as one that looked a bit sleeker.
A different design approach might also have allowed them space to fit in a couple of the nice hardware touches from the old N8, e.g. an expandable memory slot and the HDMI output.
Overall, of course, the phone hardware is much better - as you'd expect from a device several generations newer - the screen is a delight, both from a display and a touch perspective. Though it can register a false touch if you hover your finger too close. It being a dual-core processor (and newer software) everything runs much faster, with the possible exception of the camera start-up, it's a world apart in terms of regular use.

Software:
This is my first windows phone (I shouldn't think there are many people who are on their second) and I have to say that overall I've found it very easy to use and I'm more than happy with the operating system. There's a couple of things that took me a couple of attempts to find, and I miss the slide down access to wifi / data / silent but aside from that it's been very simple to figure out. The only things I had to look up were how to add a playing song to an already extant playlist* and how to close down apps when they're running in the background (a two-touch process rather than the old one-touch one).
On the app front, anyone coming from an android or iphone will find nothing like the same range and number of apps (it's much more like the symbian store) but so far the only thing I'd like to have but haven't got is a Strava app, but that wasn't available on symbian either so...

Anyway, the thing that most people wanting a 1020 will want to know about is:

The Camera:
It's good. Better than the N8 by a chunk actually. The reason for that bulky protrusion on the back of the phone is so that it can fit in a whopping great 1/1.5 sensor. Interestingly this is smaller than the old Pureview 808 (which had a 1/1.2) but still about 4 times the size of most other top-end camera phones and also larger than a lot of budget point-and-shoot cameras.
Some reviews will tell you that you can dump your compact camera once you have one of these but that is going to depend on what your compact was, if it was a cheapish one then this is probably true, if you've got something quite nice then you might want to do a bit more research.
I even read one review that claimed you wouldn't need your DSLR anymore - this is what's technically known as "bollocks". It's good, but let's not be ridiculous.

So, some details.
Firstly the phone comes with two camera apps, SmartCam and ProCam, built in. SmartCam takes a sequence of photos and lets you do funky things like removing background objects, correcting blinking faces, picking the best shot of a sequence etc. All very nice - and probably good if you have kids or do lots of other people photography - but I've never used it.
ProCam is a nice little app that gives you a bit more manual control of your photos. A series of simple swipe arcs allow you to make basic adjustments to white balance, focus (as well as tap focus), ISO, shutter speed and aperture. Whilst these are fairly basic they're actually very useful. Being able to ramp up the ISO at a gig for example (no flash required, especially as there's a mechanical stabiliser on the camera too) or being able to crank up the shutter speed for action shots.
Again, it's nothing like a proper set of manual controls on an SLR but it does allow you be much more creative than the competition.

Before I link you to some sample shots, a quick word on the output files. The 1020 saves two files for each shot, an unprocessed 41mp file and an over-sampled 5mp file for easier sharing etc. Weirdly if you look at the 41mp file it can look kind of blurry and out of focus. I don't know why this should be but frankly I've been sufficiently happy with the 5mp shots that I've never felt the need to export the 41mp version and try and play around with it. Anyway, for the comparison shots below, it's a 12MP N8 shot vs a 5MP 1020 shot as I figure that's what most people will use most of the time. (These shots have been uploaded to picasa, I'm not sure what compression they might use so this could be a bit of a dodgy comparison but I'm afraid I don't have any personal web-hosting to put the uncompressed files on).

Sunny(ish) day, outside, detail and inside shots:
N8 Outside, N8 detail, N8 inside
1020 Outside, 1020 detail, 1020 inside

Very low light (Dan Webster gig) shots:
N8 Stage, 1020 Stage.

A few shots to show different ISO effects in low light:
ISO400, ISO1600, ISO4000

A couple of other gig shots to show the zoom effect (again, very low light):
Low Zoom, High Zoom

The video is pretty handy too. Not having any other kind of camcorder I don't have anything to compare this to but here's a couple of clips you can make your own mind up about:
Low Light, Daylight and a Low light recording from the N8

And finally a couple of shots to show that with any camera, when the light is right, you just have to point it in the right direction:
Brough Castle 1, Brough Castle 2

So that's it for now, any questions or follow-ups, please shout.


* The reason I couldn't figure out how to do this was simply because you can't, well, not without plugging the phone into a PC and doing a drag and drop. This isn't just on the music player that comes supplied, but on any of the independent apps either - I find that to be a significant, and odd, omission.

Et tu McVitie's?

Dear McVitie's,
I am not happy with your new packet sizes, not happy at all. What, in the name of all that's holy, made you think that people who have been buying your products all this time would suddenly want fewer biscuits in the packet? Did you imagine that all across the country people were discarding, unwanted, the last half dozen biscuits in the packet? Throwing away your produce for fear of over-eating? Filling up store cupboards with the remnants of the packet twisted tight shut, never to be re-opened?
When I reach for a packet of dark chocolate hobnobs I want 300 grams of rich chocolately oatey goodness, not 262. If I want to eat an entire packet of dark chocolate digestives, and frequently I do, then I want to eat 400 grams of the king of biscuits, not 332.
For years we have had these measurements and whole journeys and adventures have been planned around the correct amount of biscuits being available in the packet.
My world has been rocked and I am most, most disappointed.
Yours Sincerely
Drew the-chocolate-fiend Stephenson.

How not to do it.

Now, full disclosure upfront, I'm not a fan of Virgin media at the best of times. I'm not a customer of theirs but, despite being on the Mail and Telephone Preference Services they continue to bombard me with advertising. One of these days I will completely lose my rag with them, but in the meantime i'm working on the principle that moving house is the easier option.

But I digress...

Through the door the other day i got this abomination of a mail shot (click it for full size).

Would you just look at the small print at the bottom of that? Seriously, an eighth of the page is small print. WTF?
There is more text in the small print than in the advert ffs.
If i didn't like the company before receiving this i certainly wouldn't trust them afterwards.

Talking crap

I've been accused of this many times, but this time i'm doing it deliberately...

Toilets are funny things, i have no idea if it's different in other cultures, but here in the west we're still a bit embarrassed about it all. As such it's an area of design that really hasn't progressed very much (I know Toto are doing interesting things in Japan though) so i will probably return to it on a number of occasions.

There are few things in life more satisfying than taking a well-needed dump in the privacy of your own toilet. You know this is true.
Now compare this to the horror of those situations where you absolutely-cannot-possibly-avoid having to use a public toilet. Especially ones at any kind of transport interchange.
Slightly less unpleasant are the loos at work. There's probably a multi-point sliding scale that could be derived, but that's not the point of this post.

This post is about a change of architectural approach and the installation of some simple technology.

Let's talk architecture first; it's an area of design that likes to consider itself cutting edge, right up until you get to the toilets. They may have a swish new sink or a funky Dyson airblade but chances are, on the other side of the room, is the usual grim array of stalls.
I recently started working in a new office block, and there the architect has made a fantastic decision. Instead of one large room with a number of toilet stalls, half that number of sinks and only one hand-dryer (why do people always seem to think that that is an acceptable ratio?) the architect chose to put in 6 small, individual rooms off a short, central corridor. Proper rooms with proper doors and walls. They each have their own wash-basin and hand dryer as well.
The whole toilet experience is much more pleasant; perhaps this is why they appear to be better looked after by the staff as well?

"But wait!" You may be thinking, "surely that takes up much more floorspace? And surely small rooms retain the previous occupant's odour for a much longer time?"
Both of these are good questions, let's look at them one at a time.
Floor space. For the benefit of the regular office moves my company publishes floor plans of all our buildings. Using these i have been able to work out that, on a like-number-of-stalls basis, the individual room approach takes up only a fraction more space. It could easily be made to take up the same amount of space with just a small (read negligible) reduction in individual room space.
And what of the whiff? Well now, this is one area where it does appear to fall down. Despite each room having its own extraction duct it can be an unpleasant experience to step into a frequently occupied and heavily used room.
And that's where the simple technology comes in.

Toilet timers. I shit you not.*
Have display above each toilet door showing the time since the room was last vacated. Link the timer to the lock so that it reset when the door was unlocked and that way anyone entering the corridor can take a quick look around and see which room has the longest period of absence (and thus the highest chance of fresh air).

You may snigger at such a suggestion, but that is just our western embarrassment coming to the fore again. Ask yourself what other scenario would it be considered to expose yourself or others to aerosolised human faeces?
If you can think of an example i don't want to come to any of your parties.

So, individual rooms, with timers. Taking a dump at work could be as relaxing as doing so at home. Just don't install a magazine rack or your productivity could take a huge hit.


* Did you really think i was going to let you get through this without that joke coming in somewhere?

A light in the darkness

Driving along yesterday in the bright sunshine, approaching a roundabout the "other half" pulls out causing me to emit a more-than-slightly-panicked gasp as she then desperately accelerates across the gap. The reason for this sudden cardial exercise? In the bright sunshine she hadn't seen that his right-hand indicator was actually on and we shouldn't have been pulling out. I had seen this but hadn't realised that she hadn't until too late. As it were.

Anyway, we're alright, he probably gave us a mouthful, but there was no sudden impacts or deafening squeals of brakes and children.*

But it got me thinking.

Given where we are with the state of our technology and its inclusion in automobiles, why don't we have ambient-light-sensitive indicators? Ones that are brighter during the day and then revert to normal levels at night (so as not to dazzle or distract). Doesn't look like there are any patents on this one if anyone fancies making a bob or two...

Similarly, why don't we have pressure-sensitive brake lights? The harder you brake the brighter the light. This is potentially very useful information to following vehicles.

A patent was filed on this in 2004 FFS! Tell me we're not going to have to wait until it expires in 2021. Please.

Both of these things are absolutely piss damn easy to do, with obvious benefits.
So where are they?

And why aren't they on your car?

*As my brother is wont to say

Yet Another Music, Design And Cycling blog

Welcome, Wilkommen, Bienvenue, in the words of the best band in the world ever*.
So here we are on our first of an irregular series of blogs that will cover, generally speaking, Music, Design and Cycling. I've chosen to write about these three things as they are intrinsically linked in a singular way.
I.e. I'm interested in them.
But nowadays with music comes technology; so i'll be touching on that here and there as well.
In fact, we'll be starting with that.
I've just finished reading a very interesting article on The Technium called Better Than Free; it talks about ways to monetise a product in a world where copies are free. And it's a lot better thought out than most posting on the subject.
This is especially true when read in conjunction with two of his other posts: The Reality of Depending on True Fans and The Case Against 1000 True Fans.
It seems the debate is still very open with only one clear example of someone managing to make the new paradigm (did i really write that? I guess i did, oh well) work being Jonathan Coulton.
I suspect that where we will end up is with the rise of either the marketeer / artist or close collaborations of the two. Either way, it's not enough just to produce music and publish it on the web, nor is it enough just to produce music and play live. There's a huge amount of effort required to persuade people to get off their arses and come to a gig, and then another chunk of effort to persuade them to buy what they can otherwise get for free.
And sometimes that's kind of hard to do at the same time as holding down a day job.

* Blot - Midnight Oil