But I do want to tell you how much I love my Wald folding grocery baskets. Even if my boxes of, say, more fans are too big to fit inside, they make a nice big platform to strap things to.

It’s short and doesn’t get a whole lot of torque, but I just use my foot to break a stubborn nut loose or tighten it down.

While mine would appear to lack the mandatory bottle opener found on commercial tools, it’s a lot easier to open a beer with a metal tire lever than it is to change a tube with a bottle opener, and the beer can wait until I get home anyway. Everything was done with a rotary tool and a cutoff wheel. Fabrication pics follow.

Making sure it will fit:

I need a clamp on bench vise for this table so’s I can take pictures and dremel at the same time. For now, you can imagine the sparks.

While I was waiting for it to arrive I read a lot of mixed reviews, and thought maybe I should exchange it for a 60CX I’d initially wanted. But the latest firmware seems to address a lot of the issues and adds a few neat features. It’s got a nice big high resolution screen, which is good since I’ll primarily use it as a map on the bike. Reviews say it’s a bit dark due to the high pixel density and I guess it is, but barely darker than my brother’s Edge 705 bike computer. It’s a bit hard to see with sunglasses on, but legible. I keep wanting to poke it to scroll the map – a touchscreen is a little easier to move around, but I wonder how rugged even a rugged touchscreen is, and the Colorado’s wheel is probably easier to use with mittens on.

Some people find the bike mount is slippery and maybe it is on a smooth handlebar (in which case, wrap a bit of rubber around it first), but it’s solid enough on my rough finish stem, even riding over roots and rocks. I really like that it has a stem mount option too, because that’s the best place for it and it leaves the bars free to mount other things:

One really neat feature is custom maps – you can georeference an aerial photo, trail map, or whatever else you can turn into a jpeg by making it an image overlay in Google Earth, and save it to your GPS which sees it as a map layer.

I even went and found a geocache:

Update: Canada Post is slower.

The cherry trees in High Park (a gift to Toronto from Tokyo in the 1950s) have started blooming in force. It was supposed to rain this weekend, which can knock all the petals off, so I rode out there on Friday afternoon to have a look. A lot of other people seemed to have the same idea.

Also, here’s a free bonus goose. High Park geese are smaller and friendlier than the geese in my end of town.

Apparently “Fixed speed” means single speed as suspected, but it comes with a fixed/free flip-flop hub. Sounds good, but also as anticipated the quality (or at least the quality control) appears to suck, bite, and blow all at the same time.

He also reviews the Surly Big Dummy (carries things, hard to wrangle indoors).

As often as not we get a last bit of snow at the beginning of April, but this year it’s been almost summery, so on Friday I rode up to the electricity farm way out in the suburbs. I figured the waterfront and downtown would have been nightmarishly crowded on a nice Eostre weekend — and I was right since apparently there were fistfights to get on the Toronto Island ferry, which is still on its winter schedule — plus it’s still cool near the lake, because the water’s still ice cold.

It’s a pretty poor excuse for a ride, but it’s usually quiet when the beach and downtown are crowded and it goes through some interesting industrial areas along the power line right of way.

It’s a pretty poor excuse for a photo, too, because spring sucks for taking pictures. Everything looks like it’s spent 3 months under a dirty snowbank even if it hasn’t. Here’s one of the bike path in greener times:

This isn’t a proper pond and it’s barely a proper puddle but the ducks don’t seem to mind. It’s actually been a really dry spring, after a dry winter with no snowpack to melt, so the trails are probably good for mountain biking already.

Groundhog didn’t see his shadow!

Well, they call it a Fixed-Speed Bike so it’s probably just a freewheelin’ one speed, but I still hope this foreshadows the imminent implosion of the fixie fad. Partly because after evangelizing fixed gears since 1998 I’m almost embarassed to be seen riding one now, but mostly because it’ll mean lots of nice cheap track hubs flooding the market. I like the irony of naming it the “cachet”. I also like how it has all the hipster kids who ruined fixed gears up in arms about how it’s ruined fixed gears.

I jest, but I think it’s actually good that they’re offering a simple, cheap bike that has little to go wrong with it, instead of the $200 full suspension “mountain-style” bikes that department stores usually foist on the unsuspecting. update: apparently it’s still junk.

40 lbs shipped, though… I really hope it comes with 15 pounds of packaging.

One sure sign is that the idiotic whimsical concept bikes are hatching after spending the winter as larvae deep underground below the frost line (thanks BSNYC). Now you know where potholes come from.

My ice tires are off and my mud tires are on.

All the ice is gone from the harbour, and the Toronto Island ferry is getting crowded

Even the bike rack around the corner that no-one uses is starting to fill up:

The surest sign that summer is just around the corner is that the Dutch bikes are starting to emerge in force, to show all us lycra wearing wanna-be roadie poseurs how we’ve been doing it wrong all winter (when you’re a serious and stylish utility cyclist on a serious and practical bike like this, you don’t want to take a chance at getting salt on your kickstand or (gasp) being seen wearing something as gauche and seasonally appropriate as fleece and Gore-Tex).

I know that looks as blurry and fake as a Bigfoot photo but trust me, I saw it.  It also may have been abandoned there all winter, but that’s unlikely, because it’s still shiny like it’s barely been ridden and it has all its parts.