Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
The Weekly apparently can't get enough.
The Sunbreak thinks we're ultra-lowbrow.
All featuring photography by yours truly (although my copyright notice fooled them -- I should have said "photo credit to Ian, copyright to Annex"). Ah well. I don't really care about bylines.
Posted at 13:44 permanent link category: /theater
So, for the last 9 months (sorry for the serious delay there), I've been riding with this Monkey Light on my front wheel. It's pretty cool.
When we last touched on this story, that was my feeling as well. Prety cool. I remain, clearly, unswayed.
What I can now tell you more about is living life with the thing.
So far as I can tell, no one has tried to steal it, and no one has crashed into me from staring at it. I do get the occasional thumbs-up or someone looking intently at it, but nothing problematical. I've stood the bike up on its rear wheel and spun the front to show off the light at a stoplight on about a dozen occasions so far, and I expect I'll keep doing that as long as people express interest.
The battery life is pretty good. With three 2500 mAh NiMH rechargeable AAs, I get many weeks of daily 30-50 minute runs with it running on the lower brightness setting. I have only charged the batteries about 4 times since I installed the light 9 months ago, but I've also mostly left it off for a lot of that time. Now that the days are shorter, and I'm using it every day, I expect I'll have to charge it every month or so. The low-battery warnings (a set of yellow X patterns, followed by red X patterns as the batteries run down) seem to come on with no warning. The difference between "dim" and "bright" (you have to switch from off to dim to bright to off in that order, every time) becomes visibly less obvious as the batteries wear down, but the low-battery Xs still surprise me when they show up.
I've come up with some favorite patterns in the rotation, but I'm not sufficiently motivated to figure out the menu system to set them as high priority, or however it is that that works.
Overall, I highly recommend this light if you're into side visibility that's more interesting than yet more blinky lights. It's a nice feeling to ride around and think that I'm putting a little bit of whimsy out into the world.
Posted at 11:30 permanent link category: /bicycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater