Review: garment bags for commuting bikes

For years I've had a fairly popular Commuting/Touring Bike page on my site. It's old and changes little, but bike touring in 2006 is not all that different from touring in 1986. So the page still works.

Today I received a submission for the page. It's very detailed, so I'll excerpt only a portion of it. I'd like to be able to link to the full article however. This blog is just the vehicle. Here's the article from Thom B of Chicago:

Well, I bought a 2004 Jamis Ventura (touring road bike), which is quite a bit lighter than my Jamis Aragon (cross/hybrid). I turned the Aragon into an Xtracycle, which does not have a rack and so cannot fit either bag anymore.

I ended up using the twowheelgear bag exclusively on the Ventura and tried listing the Jandd garment bag on craigslist. (Didn't get a response yet, I guess I should relist. Putting it up in the middle of November probably wasn't very timely.) There are some things I'd change about the twowheelgear bag but just the basic design alone does it for me.

I don't like the way the Jandd bag only hangs off of one side, and folds the clothes right in half. The Jandd will keep a few items 'pressed' (a suit, shirt, pants, etc) but does not easily accomodate a full load of shirts from the cleaners. The twowheelgear's way of distributing the weight of the clothes over both sides of the rack also reduces the 'fold' in them. There are good straps for securing them inside.

It's about half of the cost of the Jandd. (Remember the twowheelgear is sold in canadian dollars.)

I took the twowheelgear bag on an MS 150 ride and did the century loop both days (200 miles!) and no problems. Its many pouches and smart organization kept all my tools, spare tubes/tires, changes of clothes, sunscreen/bugspray, etc. easily accessible.

There is an angled hook design where the bag attaches to the rack that just slightly slants it backwards at the bottom. I have big feet and my heels don't catch on the bag. I used to always catch my heels on the Jandd grocery panniers.

The straps that hold the bag onto the bike rack don't have enough velcro on them, IMO - we ended up removing their velcro strips and putting longer ones on so that it would have that much more sticking power (call me paranoid).

Similarly, the two-strap system sometimes comes apart and you have to re-thread one strap through a 'D-ring' on each side to reconnect it. Not the end of the world, just a little annoying. I have some ideas for the company that I may send them, a way to prevent that from happening on a future revision of the product.

I wish that the bag itself was just the teensiest big wider and longer - sometimes I feel like the shirttails get a little folded over, but nobody ever sees those.

There is a curly strap loop hanging off of one side of the bag. Presumably this is to hang the bag lengthwise, eg on a hook when I get to work to keep the clothes straight. Sometimes that loop taps the spokes. Little worrisome, but doesn't happen that often.

I don't want the shoulder strap hanging off while I ride, so I detach it. Then the plastic buckle taps the part of the rack which angles up nearest the seatpost. Not tragic, just annoying. It makes me think something is broken.

The Jandd bag is made with more heavy-duty materials and zippers. Though it might force twowheelgear to raise prices slightly, it would be worth it for them to do so (IMO) because they could be more competitive on quality.

I also like the Jandd's bright yellow waterproof cover. I'm thinking about wintertime and how all that wet snow & ick has affected the twowheelgear. The bottom can get pretty crusted with dirt and salt residue. In fairness, I just have the rack on my road bike (yeah yeah, cardinal sin) and no fender, so there's that to consider.

As it is, I leave my clean clothes in dry cleaning bags when I bring them in. I've never had an issue with clothes getting ruined by water/muck soaking through, etc. There are thin plastic panels inside of the twowheelgear bag, between the 'bottom' (when putting shirts in) and the 'inside' (sides closest to the wheel when attached), and they keep things ridgid. The zipper on the twowheelgear bag sometimes catches on the dry cleaning bags but by 'leading' the zipper with my fingers, I can usually prevent that from happening.

I like the way the Jandd bag attaches to the rack, those little 'underhook' devices with elastic (held in place by a small cross-strap) and the 'spring clip' device which secures the strap attached to the clip that pulls down against the top of the rack, holding the two in opposition. It holds well, but is harder to take off and put on.

Rebates and why I won't buy from Brother

Update 1/11/06: The rebate showed up today, 12 weeks after I sent it in. So it was 50% past its deadline but it did appear. I also found the rebate company had quite a good web site (though it didn't match to my rebate, probably due to a data entry error) and very good phone service (which did locate my rebate and told me it had been mailed out). So I'm annoyed, but no longer angry.

I bought myself a Brother MFC-7820N multi-function device about 10 weeks ago. It's got some bugs, but on the whole I'm very pleased with it.

Even so, I won't buy from Brother again.

Why?

It came with a $50 rebate. I don't make buying decisions based on rebates, but this was enough money it was worth submitting. After 8 weeks I wrote the rebate site asking what had happened. No response. Now it's been 10 weeks. I don't have time to pursue this further.

I'm human though. And humans, as we know, are programmed to punish cheaters. It's a large part of what has made us a successful intensely social species. Brother cheated. Logically, since the device is worth more to me than what I paid for it, I should still recommend buying it. In this case though, I'll go with my biological imperative.

I won't buy from Brother again. Cheaters.

The absurdity of embedded CPUs - resetting an Apple power adapter

This is nuts. Power adapters allegedly have embedded CPUs and thus may need a reset?

On power adapters, PMUs and the new PowerBooks - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... Unfortunately, a PMU reset still didn't solve my dilemma. Getting nervous, I finally decided to take advantage of Apple's insulting "90 days of complementary support" to see if they could bail me out. Fortunately, after some troubleshooting, I learned my second lesson of the day: PowerBook and iBook adapters, if left plugged into a wall for too long, might need to actually be reset. This can easily be done by unplugging both of an adapter's ends for at least 60 seconds. We didn't delve into the inner workings of these power adapters for an explanation, but I've kept one plugged into a specific outlet in my apartment for probably at least a month or two, and I guess that might be just enough to make a power adapter a little confused in the head...

Huh? I know LiOn batteries require a processor to manage, but embedded in the power adapter?! I hope this is wrong.

Non-contiguous selections in 10.4 Cocoa apps

macosxhints - Create non-contiguous selections in Cocoa apps:

Discontinuous selections were introduced in 10.4 ('Tiger'). Hold alt and drag for a 'rectangular' selection (only truly rectangular with monospace fonts); Hold command and drag for discontinious selections.

Select then command click on items in selection may also make the selection discontinuous, but the comments are confusion. Need to test it myself.

Paste with current style (Cocoa only)

I do this all the time on my XP apps, but it's an annoying trip to the menu. I didn't know of the OS X kb shortcuts. Another reason to use Cocoa apps ... (Firefox, time to go Cocoa!):

macosxhints - Automatically reformat text pasted into Cocoa apps:

... Edit menu in Tiger, the 'Paste and Match Style' option, invoked by the Command-Option-Shift-V shortcut. It does exactly what it says, and I've used it in TextEdit, iChat, and Mail.

This feature is very helpful for pasting things from websites that generally have weird formatting and colors (and require a lot of clicking to remove).

... It's not new to Tiger, though -- in Panther, it was called 'Paste With Current Style,' and accessed via the same shortcut.

Cool OSX Apps great picks: Including Google Earth for Mac

Cool OSX Apps has several great picks today, all relevant to me:

TextWranger update

TinyAlarm: handy for limiting those "quick" sessions at the screen.

GoogleEarth for Mac has been released!
Not!I misread the note. This is an unreleased copy. I wouldn't touch it. Sigh.

AppleJack has been updated (I really need this installed)

Mail.app hang when mail images from iPhoto - fixed

I have had a very annoying bug with sending images from iPhoto. If Mail.app were not running, my system would hang with a spinning beachball of death (aka SBOD, spinning pizza of death, SPOD) for at least 5 minutes. Then I would get this error message: "mail got an error: apple event timed out". If Mail.app were running, there was no problem.

I tried various fixes such as cleaning caches, testing with different iPhoto libraries, etc. I began to feel the problem was in Mail.app. Stupidly, however, I forgot the standard fix for OS/X problems -- delete the preferences (.plist) file. I did ask on Apple's discussion forum, and I received a helpful response from Robert K:

Apple - Support - Discussions - iPhoto and Mail.app hand on email images ...

> I was having the same problem. Others have advised
> to delete the following file: com.apple.iphoto.plist
> in /users/library/preferences/. This had no effect
> on the freeze. I then deleted com.apple.mail.plist.
> This cured my problem. I did have to set up my mail
> accounts again in mail, but no more freezes when
> sharing a photo from IPhoto and Mail.

Your advice fixed the problem. There were some interesting twists.

I was pretty sure the problem was in Mail.app, not iPhoto, since switching iPhoto libraries had no effect. First I opened com.apple.mail.plist in a plist editor and saved it externally. I figured that would fix any true corruption. Interestingly when copied this file to the Prefs folder and tested I only got the beachball for about 1-2 minutes, then the images appeared. HOWEVER, I then remembered I'd recently set my CPU to higher performance. I suspect there's some odd race condition here and what happened was the race condition resolved before the AppleEvent messages timed out.

Then I deleted my mail prefs file and restored the settings. On testing if Mail.app was running the image appeared instantaneously, if it was not running I got a beachball for five seconds.

So evidently there's some prefs value in com.apple.mail.plist that causes this problem. I have my old prefs file if Apple should want a copy!

So the problem is gone for now, until I do something in Mail.app to alter the preferencess in such a way that the problem recurs. I wonder if it's somehow related to having once had a .Mac account then having discontinued it.

Update 1/9/06:

I may have identified the cause of this bug. We know that deleting com.apple.mail.plist fixes it. But why? What was "wrong" with the original.

I think the trick is to delete the default .mac account for both sending and receiving. When you do that, and try mailing an image, you'll get the beachball and the appleevent error.

I have to guess for some reason Mail.app is trying to do something with the .Mac account, and when it's missing it hangs.

It doesn't matter whether the .Mac account is active or not, it simply has to exist.