Hasta La Gadget!

It’s Friday, and you know what that means: Time for impossibly specialist bike tools [No it isn’t – Ed]. This week it’s the turn of the LockWhip, a combo-tool from Fixed Gear London. But first, here’s a video of it in action:

As you can see, the chap doing the demonstration is a qualified fixed-gear rider: With no brakes, he terrorizes pedestrians by running a red light at top speed and careers into London’s Picadilly Circus. He also has the obligatory skinny pants with Kryptonite Evo-Mini D-lock in the back pocket. Rest assured: this guy is a professional.

In order to celebrate surviving yet another careless voyage through England’s capital, our hero then decides to change his rear sprocket (translation for non fixed-gear riders: he changes gear). For this he uses, of course, the LockWhip. This contains a chain-whip to whip off the sprocket, a lock-ring tool and an open 15mm wrench to remove and replace the wheel.

Once done, he tucks the oily tool into his inside pocket, wipes his hands on his pants and jumps back into the heavy London traffic with scarcely a glance. If you want to see fellow road users (cars and busses) being surprised by a reckless rider jumping in front of them from nowhere and generally trying to cause an accident, then keep watching until the end.

The 250mm x 40mm, hardened and blackened steel LockWhip isn’t exactly portable, but its more portable than a regular chain-whip and lock-ring combo tool, if only because you don’t need to carry a separate 15mm wrench. £26 ($42 / €31).

LockWhip Tool [FGLDN via Urban Velo]

See Also:

• 5 Inexplicable Fixie Fashions
• Hipsters Grieve: The $150 Walmart Fixie
• Bianchi to Launch Retro-Styled Fixie in 2010
• Public Bikes: Fixed-Gear Style with Granny-Bike Ride
• Bent Basket: The Fixed-Gear of Cargo-Carrying

Confession: I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t even have a smartphone. What I have is some piece-of-crap Samsung “feature” Phone. It’s called the Behave, or the Beyoncé, or something like that (I’d check the name, but then I’d have to touch it). I hate it. But I hated it even more when I got it, and here’s why:

This phone, and pretty much any other phone I have bought since phones started to get cameras in them, have plastic or rubber flaps stuffing up the charging holes, and often other ports, too. These need to be popped out, or dug out with a fingernail, every time you need to charge the phone. Then you need to somehow hold the thing open with one finger while you wrestle the (proprietary) charging plug into place.

The answer is, of course, to rip the cover off like the crusted scab it is, and toss it in the trash. One I did this I experienced the delight of of removing one tiny annoyance from the library of UI errors that make up the Samsung Beyoncé’s design.

“Wait,” you say. “Now your phone will get stuffed with fluff, like the belly-button of a flannel shirt fanatic.” To you I say “No!” I just peered into Beyoncé’s charging slot and it is fluff-free. It’s a little dusty, but so what? The charger slides in just fine. And to be clear, I keep this thing in lint-filled pockets and bags alongside keys and coins. The screen is scratched to hell and the back-plate is chipped back to the bare metal but the power-hole is completely clear.

But that’s just, like, my (vehemently held) opinion, man. There are many who would like to spend $10 on a tiny rubber bung to stuff-up their iPhone’s dock-connector port, and perhaps even the headphone jack (and why not. If you’re going to annoy yourself, why not do it properly?). For you, there is the iCorkz Combo Pack, an accessory that can bring frustration and anxiety of accidental loss to your everyday phone dealings. You’re welcome.

iCorkz Combo Pack product page [iCorkz via Oh Gizmo]

See Also:

• Tat

A fake leather-bound book-shaped case for a laptop computer is pretty dumb, but then the MacBook Air isn’t really like any other laptop computer. Instead of winding up with a huge behemoth of a case desperately trying to squeeze a computer inside, like a portly gentleman trying to hide his belly with a tent-like shirt, you can slide the tiny MacBook Air anywhere you like. And one place we like is inside the new Pad & Quill Cartella case.

The Cartella is an italian leather-bound, baltic birch-framed book-a-like for the 11 and 13-inch Airs. We used to call this category “faux-Moleskine”, but now its probably big enough to have its own name. I’ll leave that to somebody else though, as the best I can manage this Monday morning is Notebook Notebook, or iBook (which I think somebody took already).

Like the iPad and iPhone cases before it, the Cartella holds its contents in place with the pressure from squishy corner pads. And if it’s anything like the iPad version, it’ll grip your Air like Spiderman grips, well, anything.

The case also comes with a document pocket inside the front cover, for carrying those pesky pieces of paper people persistently press on us, and thanks to cut-out in the wooden frame, you can get to all ports while the case is attached. And like the iPad case, you can flip the front cover around the back and make a wedge-shaped lap-table to work on.

The cases weight 13.3 and 14-ounces, and cost $90 or $100, with $10 off right now as a launch offer.

Cartella product page [Pad & Quill. Thanks, Brian!]
Photos: Pad & Quill

See Also:

• iPad Case Smackdown: Dodocase Vs. Pad & Quill
• The Case: Another Beautiful Moleskine-Like iPad Case
• Little Black Book: An Open and Shut Case for iPhone 4

Let’s say that each of these Plattfuss Rubber Bands, made from old bike inner-tubes, is 2mm wide. You get around 70 in a pack, which requires 140mm (5.5-inches) of OG bike tube to make them. The sizes in the pack are assorted, from different tube sizes, but to keep things simple let’s assume they come from 700c tubes.

These tubes fit a wheel with a diameter of 622 mm (forgive the international standard measurements – inches are impossible to work with at small sizes). Thus the circumference of a 700c wheel (and therefore the tube) is πD, or pi x diameter, or 1,954mm, or around 77-inches. Thus you could get 13 packs of Plattfuss Rubber Bands from a single inner-tube.

The price for a pack of the Plattfuss bands? $7. The price of 13 packs? $91. The price of a used inner-tube? Free.

Plattfuss Rubber Bands [Plastica via Uncrate]

See Also:

• IT Clips Turn Inner-Tubes into Bungees, Belts
• Rubber Wallets Made From Old Inner-Tubes
• How To: Make an iPod Nano Case from a Bike Inner-tube
• Rubber Bags Made from Bike Inner Tubes
• (Almost) 1001 Uses for Old Inner Tubes

Apple sought to reinvent the phone with the iPhone, and now a company is trying to reinvent the landline with an iPhone accessory.

Seriously. That’s the gist of the iFusion accessory, which consists of an iPhone power-charging dock and a Bluetooth receiver that pairs the device with a traditional telephone handset as well as a speakerphone. There’s also a USB port on back to connect the device straight to a PC or Mac for syncing the iPhone with iTunes.

The company said customers would enjoy the handset’s ergonomic design. However, unless you have miraculously good iPhone reception, I’m not sure why you’d get this.

I tried placing a call to my friend Heather with the iFusion. I heard her loud and clear when she picked up through the iFusion handset, but she hung up after she couldn’t hear a word I was saying (I think).

Showcased at Macworld Expo, the iFusion Smartstation iPhone dock costs $170. The accessory ships April 2011.

Photo: Brian X. Chen/Wired.com