I was at the local Bike Friday retailer inquiring about my custom Tikit order (it's been 5 weeks so far and it may take 2 more weeks to arrive, it appears BF is backlogged) and the bike shop had a Giant Twist electric bike they let me test ride to compare with my Crystalyte.

The Twist is a pedal-activated, front wheel drive electric bike with two lithium-polymer batteries that give it a total range, on the economy setting, of 70 miles. (Compare with 20 miles on my Crystalyte.) It's a comfort bike, not too different from a beach cruiser, with a wide seat and an upright sitting position.

It's a very smooth ride. The seat is springy and the tires are size 700x38c. It has front suspension, but I'm not sure if that helps any. I rode it up a steep embankment next to the beach, and it scrambled up just fine.

Because the motor is geared, it doesn't impose any drag when you're coasting, unlike the Crystalyte. So if you should happen to run out of juice on a ride, pedaling doesn't sound like such a bad option.

The bike ships with custom panniers. Normal panniers won't fit because of the batteries, which hook onto the side of the rack where the panniers would be. But the advantage of putting the batteries there is to keep a low center of gravity. And since the bike is doing most of the work, you can wear a backpack and not have to worry too much about a sweaty back.

A battery set should last about 4 years, and the replacement cost is about $450. Considering the 70-mile range, this is a really good price for batteries.

At about $2,100, the Giant Twist isn't the cheapest option for an electric bicycle. My Giant Cypress with the Crystalyte electric motor upgrade kit and the custom rack for the battery came to about $1700. If you're converting an existing bike, you can save several hundred more dollars. But for a brand new bike, the extra $400 gives you more than triple the range which may make all the difference.

Tags: bicycle, reviews

I've noticed two more issues that cropped up from the electric conversion.

First, the cassette (rear gear) (Shimano MF-T207) that came installed on the motor is a 7-gear 14-28. The one that came with the bike was a 9-gear 12-26. So the high gear isn't as high as it was before. When I'm using the motor and pedaling, going downhill, I can get to 30mph, but I can't pedal any faster because my legs simply won't move that fast even without a load. I suppose for safety I shouldn't be going faster than 30 anyway, but I may someday look into switching to a different cassette.

The second issue is with the brakes. I needed to swap out the brake levers to the ones that were supplied with the electric motor upgrade kit, and since then I haven't been able to get them tight enough to get the wheels to skid. My guess is that the new levers don't pull the cable as far as the old ones did. I've taken the bike to a local bike shop, and they suggested some thicker brakes. They're going to install them and see if that helps. Since their repair shop is backed up until Wednesday, I'll be without the bike for a few days. I will report back with the results.

By the way, my e-bike commute has dropped from the initial 37 minutes down to 29 minutes.

Tags: bicycle

This page says gasoline engines are 20% efficient. This article [pdf] says an engine optimized for ethanol is 40% efficient.

Tags: biofuels, e85

The world needs a universal plain text file format standard or a file system with metadata that describes, out-of-band, the following about text files:

• That the file is text and not "binary".
• The encoding or code page (ASCII, UTF-8, EBCDIC, Shift-JIS, etc.).
• The line ending format (CR-LF [Windows/DOS], LF [Linux], or LF-CR [Apple])
• Endianness (if >1 byte per character, e.g. Unicode). (Unicode uses a byte-order mark (BOM).)
• The tab size (number of spaces or elastic tabstops).

Tags: programming, software

So I picked up the Crystalyte electric bicycle conversion kit and installed it. The only major issue I had was finding a place to install the battery bracket. I had printed out the fitting guide which made me believe it might fit fine on the top tube, but that didn't leave any room to install and remove the battery. So I went back and purchased the rack with custom mount and modified bracket, returning my existing bracket. Then the battery itself wouldn't slide into place on the bracket, so I took a small metal file and beveled the lower edges on the bracket. Even now, it's a tight fit, but at least it doesn't rattle.

The controller has an on/off switch. You unintuitively have to turn it "off" for the motor to work. The reason is because it's actually for the pedal activation feature which the kit doesn't include.

I took it out for a 14-mile test ride last Saturday, through the hills of northern San Diego county. After all that, the motor was still going, so the advertised 10-15 real-world miles is not an exaggeration. I also found that I don't need to use the gears on my bicycle. I just set everything to the highest gear and pretty much leave it alone.

Today, I rode my bike to work for the first time. This was months in the making, since at least September, studying how to ride in traffic and then figuring out how to get around even though I'm really out of shape. (I get exercise-induced nausea. After only a mile riding through the hills on a non-electric bike, I would have to pull over and throw up.) My solution was an electric bike. Today I took it to work, and was able to make the 10 miles without a problem. It took 37 minutes where it would take 20 minutes driving, or 100 minutes on the bus (to be fair, 70 minutes of that is walking). Plus, since I helped by pedaling (which is optional but increases your speed and the battery's range), I got a good workout. This may eventually get me into shape to make the same trip in the same time but on a normal road bike.

At work, I topped off the battery. (I may get a second charger so I can keep one at work.) The bike computer said my ride home was 10.66 miles. When I got home, I plugged the charger into my Watts Up? watt meter, and it showed 257 watt hours to charge the battery. 257 watt hours for 10.66 miles equals 41.5 miles per kilowatt hour, or about 1390 miles per gallon-equivalent. (1 gallon of gasoline contains 121 MJ or 33.6 kWh.) That's almost an order of magnitude better than even the Aptera!

I'm trying to decide whether the effort of converting a brand new bicycle to electric is worth the effort, or if it would make more sense to purchase a prebuilt electric bicycle like something in the eZee line or a Giant Twist once it's introduced to the U.S. market. Crystalyte parts are slightly (but not significantly) cheaper than eZee parts, and this route lets you choose the bike and reverse the conversion later, but an eZee bike should be easier to assemble out of the box, the battery is less conspicuous, and the motor doesn't cause a noticeable drag on the wheel.

In any case, I think it's money well spent. I get a workout, save gasoline, save wear and tear on the car, and I still get to work in a reasonable amount of time.

Tags: bicycle

I ordered an electric bike conversion kit from ATIV Solutions. They're local, so I will pick it up without needing to pay for shipping. My bicycle is a 27-speed Giant Cypress flat bar road bike, with 700c 28mm tires and twist shifters. I chose the 700c tire option for the conversion kit, and the thumb throttle instead of the twist throttle (which would have confliced with the twist shifter). I will have to adjust my bike's rear gear shifter (which is currently set for 9 gears) to work with the new 7 gears, but other than that it doesn't look like there will be any issues installing it.

Apparently the battery pack is made up of a bunch of ordinary D cell NiMH batteries. When the pack needs to be replaced, I could just replace the batteries individually, although the cost of that would be about the same as purchasing a whole new battery pack.

I wish La Crosse or Maha made a smart charger/conditioner for D cell batteries.

I didn't choose the BionX kit because it's proprietary and expensive. ATIV's 500W kit with a 36V 10Ah NiMH battery was $700 (plus tax), while BionX's 350W kit with a 36V 9.6Ah NiMH battery is $1300. BionX however gives an option for a 9-speed freewheel (which would have made installation easier for me), comes with an LCD handle-mounted computer and provides pedal assist and regenerative braking, although I hear regenerative braking doesn't give you much. A replacement battery pack from ATIV is $300 while the BionX is $450.

If this works out, once I get a pannier and some wet weather gear, I hope to get by without a car at all, at least for my commute. A number of other important destinations would be within range if I had a second battery pack. The rest I go to so infrequently that I would just take the bus or a taxi.

Tags: bicycle

I made the trip to San Francisco again this week. I decided to get off in Oakland so I wouldn't have to walk any distance to get to a BART station.

This week I also made a trip to Phoenix. I took the 3pm bus on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Around 3pm, two buses arrived. Unfortunately, they don't indicate their destination on their front marquees, so we didn't know which one was ours. The first one parked (the second just circled the parking lot waiting) and when I heard the driver mention Oakland, I knew this wasn't my bus.

15 minutes later, the first bus left, and finally we were able to board our bus. We ended up leaving around 3:30pm, half an hour late. It was scheduled to arrive in Phoenix at 10:30pm, but due to horrendous traffic trying to leave Los Angeles (3 hours of stop-and-go), we didn't arrive until midnight. Out of 10 Megabus trips I've taken, this was the first one to arrive late.

The next bus, coming home today (Sunday) on the 8am to 2pm Tempe to Los Angeles bus, again it was late, this time by 45 minutes. Again, it was probably due to the Thanksgiving traffic. And again, the parking space was taken--in fact, by two buses this time: a Megabus and a Coach USA bus.

So Megabus needs to adjust their holiday schedules, and add more Megabus parking spaces.

I recently decided to take the Megabus from San Diego to San Francisco for the Vintage Computer Festival, to save money and to find the most carbon-efficent way to travel. Round trip tickets were $45, which included fare from San Diego to Los Angeles and then from Los Angeles to San Francisco. If you book further in advance, you can get better deals, as low as $1 per ticket. In fact, my San Diego to Los Angeles ticket was only $1 (the return trip was $3).

The San Diego station is at a parking lot in front of an Albertson's. There's a space in the middle of the parking lot marked "Megabus" on the asphalt.

The seats are fairly nice, slightly above the seats in coach class on an airliner in comfort, but not much roomier. There's no armrest separating the pairs of seats, but if you don't like being so close to a stranger, I should mention that on all 4 legs of my round trip there were always empty seat pairs.

Each bus has a bathroom. You can eat on the bus, but there aren't any convenient fold-down seat trays.

We arrived in Los Angeles right on time, despite the driver driving like a banshee. So either we left late, or the schedule needs some tweaking.

The bus stop in Los Angeles is behind the Union Station terminal. There's a sign under a small tree next to a bench that marks the bus stop.

I discovered on the trip to San Francisco that it's kind of hard to get to sleep. The seats don't recline very far. I brought an inflatable neck pillow, which helped, and so did putting my feet on the seat next to me, but another problem was finding something to wedge under my lower back. This is where some larger pillows would help, but my backpack worked for the purpose. I was able to sleep for a few hours of the 7-hour (with rest stop) trip.

We arrived in San Francisco an hour early. The bus stop is at the Caltrain 4th Street station. Since it was early Saturday morning, the Caltrains weren't running yet, but it's maybe a 15-minute walk to the BART Powell Street station. I think there's also a bus that will take you in that direction, but my plans to use it were foiled when I discovered that it was a one-way road and the traffic was going in the wrong direction.

My return trip was on Sunday. Caltrain doesn't run early enough so Sunday to get me back to the station on time for the Megabus, but the first southbound train arrives in Millbrae just in time for the Millbrae Megabus departure. In fact, while Megabus says to arrive 15 minutes early and Caltrain only arrived something like 11 minutes early, it worked out because the Megabus was late anyway.

On this bus, the trash closet door at the rear of the bus kept banging open. It had been duct-taped closed. So I worry about how well Megabus plans to maintain their fleet. We'll have to see.

Despite leaving late, the return trip to Los Angeles again arrived early, at about 3:00pm instead of the scheduled time of 3:30. Which was unfortunate because there was already a 2-hour layover scheduled. Unfortunately, the nearby train won't get you back to San Diego any earlier on Sunday. If it was a weekday, there would be more options, such as the Metrolink train 602 on the Orange County Line at 3pm to Oceanside if the Megabus arrives early enough. From there, it would be local buses for me the rest of the way home.

The bus from Los Angeles to San Diego turned out to be a Coach USA-branded bus, with about 6" more legroom than the Megabuses. Everything else was the same as the Megabus-branded buses.

For $45 round trip between San Diego and San Francisco with 3 weeks notice, it's hard to go wrong. Megabus is faster and cheaper than the train, and cheaper even than Southwest's lowest fares. Bring snacks, water, something to do or read (I brought a portable DVD player, zoarre recommends a Nintendo DS), pillows, and earplugs. If you take the overnight bus, budget some rest time at your destination.

Tags: reviews conservation

Thou shalt not define functions in header files. As a small mustard seed groweth up, and becometh greater than all the herbs, and putteth out great branches; so shall thy compiler warnings and errors from thine inline functions and methods defined in thy class bodies be magnified greatly.

The following are the reasons I won't buy an iPhone, at least for the time being, in order of highest to lowest priority:

1. I currently have a prepaid GoPhone from Cingular. If I were to buy an iPhone, I would need to activate it on a new account with a new phone number. So I would lose my current number.
2. Replacing the battery will probably require mailing the whole iPhone to Apple if the battery gives out.
3. No instant messenger client.
4. Can't connect a Bluetooth keyboard.
5. You can't use the iPhone as an external wireless modem.

What I would really like is the iPhone's functionality in a standalone iTablet which would connect not only to WiFi networks but also to your mobile phone through Bluetooth. This would absolve the iPhone from responsibility for #1 and #5.

Perhaps software updates will address #3 and #4. Hopefully the next iPhone will fix #2.

One point I didn't mention was the fact that the iPhone only works with EDGE, not the faster 3G network (I didn't mention this because I don't have experience with either), but an iTablet would also absolve Apple from this omission.