pmccool's comments

IME most workplaces have showers. It pays to ask; they can be well-hidden. Failing that, ride at an easy pace in the morning, wear breathable clothes etc. Cycling needn't be any harder than walking (unless you have huge hills or something).

Some things I just find easier with pen and paper. A pilot V-Pen (disposable fountain pen) and standard printer paper does me just fine. If I want to keep something for posterity, my mobile phone camera has plenty of resolution. If it's something ephemeral like editing I don't bother. I used to carry a notebook, but much prefer scrap paper + nice, scrap-paper-friendly, pen + camera.

Michael Kirby, formerly of the High Court of Australia, etc etc would seem to agree with you, and he has for some time.

Here's a speech of his touching on this very topic from the '80s.

http://www.michaelkirby.com.au/images/stories/speeches/1980s...

Quite right. I see two issues with regexes: funky syntax and some important and non-obvious limitations. If you want to use them, these two things add up to a considerable barrier to entry. There are many examples of trivial pattern-matching languages (DOS wildcards, UNIX wildcards and SQL text matching to name but three) that address both of these issues by being easy to grasp and surprisingly useful.

I haven't actually tried this, but it seems easy to grasp and I've spent enough time busting up delimited strings that "surprisingly useful" is plausible too.

My experience of the bike-hire scheme in Brisbane (Australia) is that helmet laws are a problem, but not the problem. The legal requirement to wear a helmet is a bit tiresome, and the communal helmets they supply to get around it are a figleaf at best, but helmet law or no, riding a bicycle in Brisbane is harder than it has to be.

The problem, as others have pointed out, is road design and driver attitudes. Going any significant distance involves either riding (legally) on footpaths, or riding in traffic. There's a nice bicycle path along the river, plus some pictures of bikes in doorzones. That's about it for central Brisbane. It's not that hilly but it's definitely not flat. I don't mind riding in traffic, but I say that as a bike racer (albeit an old, fat bike racer) who used to be a courier. Driver attitudes, well, 95% of them are fine, maybe more. There's a small minority who are deranged and vicious and it's socially acceptable to behave that way in a car. It's all do-able, but it needs some unintuitive techniques (ride in the middle of the road in some situations, for example) and, ideally, a bit of fitness. I don't know as I'd recommend it to neophytes.

That helmet laws are the problem is an appealing conclusion, because it's a quick fix: repeal the helmet law. Changing infrastructure OTOH is hard and changing attitudes in harder still. I'd like it to be as simple as repealing a law, especially one where the benefits are so unclear. I just don't think it is.

In terms of the popularity of the bike hire scheme, I can only say that there are a couple of dozen hire bikes out the front of my workplace at the start of the day and it's down to a couple by day's end. I'm not aware of the official figures, but my highly subjective impression is that they're getting used more than when it started. A less convoluted signup process probably has something to do with it, plus the fact that it's a pleasant time of year to cycle.

Also the case in Australia and the UK. Not that the winner gets all their costs back (60% is a figure I've seen bandied around) but it still creates a significant disincentive. Probably a good thing in the case of patent trolls, but not necessarily in other situations.

> I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.

Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem

It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.

"In an interview with Newsgeek, Gafni said that the production cost for his recycled bicycles is around $9-12 each, and he estimates it could be sold to a consumer for $60 to 90, depending on what parts they choose to add."

Assuming they're talking US dollars, that's roughly the price of a bike from the supermarket. Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.

Don't get me wrong, I think a cardboard bike is cool. I'd be particularly interested to hear about what they've done about things like bearings and attaching tyres.

The green side of it is interesting, as is the idea of an explicitly disposable bike. If it's easier to manufacture locally, or on a small scale or whatever, that'd be something. But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.

Bear in mind that this is a decision of a delegate of the Commissioner of Patents. This decision won't bind anyone except, presumably, the Commissioner of Patents. Its value as a legal precedent anywhere else in the world is roughly zero.

>who steals chains??? - apparently the thief had a chain tool handy to break the chain).

Reusable joining link? No tools required. As to the point of doing it, well, I had the QR skewers stolen off my bike once. Stealing a chain makes at least as much sense.

I wish people would stop calling this sort of thing "piracy". Proper piracy -robbery, abduction and so forth on the high seas - is a continuing problem. This is hardly in the same league. May I suggest using "theft" instead, which at least is more or less accurate.

> Non-programmers don’t care about the aesthetics of software in the same way non-plumbers don’t care about the aesthetics of plumbing

I myself think the problem is precisely the opposite: people do care about the aesthetics of plumbing, and of programming. They just care about it in ways that have nothing do to with how well it works. We, as consumers, care far too much about "pretty" and far too little about "effective".

Well-crafted anything doesn't necessarily stand out, IME. It just works. This is an admirable trait, but it can't seem to compete with "beautiful". It's a shame that making things that work well is somehow less admirable that making things that look nice.

I guess. Having next to no experience of using Fahrenheit, I'm happy to take other peoples' word when it comes to day-to-day usefulness.

It seems to me, though, that the relative merits pale into insignificance compared to the potential benefits of picking a standard, doesn't much matter which one, and being able to forget about converting between the two.

The more I think about it, the more the 6-mile range sounds like a crippling flaw. Hills and headwinds will presumably knock this around, but that aside, there's just so little room for error. Forget to charge, make a short detour to buy groceries and there you are walking home with a bag full of perishables and an immobile chunk of carbon fibre.

Nice to see some attention paid to lighting though. It's an important issue for commuter bikes, and one that doesn't seem to get as much attention as it should.

I see electric bicycles as a tool to help people build a bit of exercise into their daily commute. I'm all for that. I'm a bit leery of devices like this, which help people build no exercise at all into their daily commute.

Or the 55 year old started their programming career at age 45. I've seen it happen...

Edit: or whatever age would result in equivalent industry experience

I don't understand how this is a step forward; ease of manufacture, maybe? It doesn't strike me as being any more reliable, comfortable or efficient than any other electric-assist bicycle. I do like the thought that's gone into the various luggage compartments, though.

And I really don't get the CF wheels. They're about the last thing I'd want on a commuter bike.

Interesting rant. I do not think that 3-D printing is going to play much of a part, though. You mention an open-source bicycle; this is a good illustration of the problem.

The bicycle I rode to work today has: - a frame made of heat-treated steel tubes brazed together - wheels made of extruded aluminium and stainless-steel wire - rubber tyres

... not to mention all the other bits and pieces; machined hubs, ball-bearings, etc etc.

I would be impressed at a 3-D printer that could produce any one of these things at a reasonable price, let alone all three. Small scale manufacturing of bicycle parts is confined to high-value niche areas.

I'm afraid I don't see much evidence of decentralised manufacturing here in .au, apart from offshoring, which I doubt has much to do with the sort of open manufacturing you seem to have in mind. I imagine things are the same in most Western economies, although I freely admit this is no more than speculation.

What I don't understand is: how do they move the bikes without damaging the locks?

I was struck by the parallel with blue-black ink (chemical reaction for permanence + dye to see what was written in the meantime).