biphenyl.org

Since buying my bike, I find myself cycling pretty often and I usually bring my camera along to take pictures. Usually taking photos involves stopping and fumbling around in my backpack for the camera — not an ideal situation. Naturally, the first thing I started thinking about after buying the bike was, “How can I mod this to make it uniquely mine?” While looking through Instructables for ideas, I found instructions for a bicycle camera mount. It dug it, and it had the benefit of being cheap, but was a little feature-anemic. Specifically, it couldn’t tilt at all, so would result in unlevel pictures on my bike, and it wasn’t easy to remove the camera — you had to unscrew it from a bolt for unmounted shots. I immediately thought of tripods with quick release plates and decided on a simple remake using a tripod head. I made and attached it this weekend, with pretty excellent results! Now I can make photos while biking and easily transition to hand-held shots when I see something cool on the roadside!

I published an Instructable for anyone interested in making one, and have a photoset up on Flickr.

I was biking through Kiwanis Park in Tempe earlier today and came across this excellent street sign mod. Someone has placed clear vinyl stickers with hula hoops (complete with motion lines!) printed on them around the waists of a few crosswalk signs. They’re apparently a meme that started via distribution at The String Cheese Incident concerts. I cracked up when I saw the first — I’m glad there are other people in Tempe who want to bring some spirit into the streets, especially if it’s an irreverent Discordian spirit! I saw four total — luckily I had my camera with me so I snapped a couple photos:

It’s no secret that I’m a big Wikipedia fan — I’ve got a serious case of NADD and about half my browser tabs at any given time are Wikipedia articles. One of my favorite quirks about the site are the little [citation needed] tags that users can place in an article, indicating that a dubious claim needs a reference. One day an idea struck — what statements are more dubious or outright ridiculous than those in advertisements? Thus, an OM project was born. I had 250 8×2 inch stickers printed, which I handed out to friends, who circulated them further. In true wiki fashion, the final placement of the stickers is a collaborative effort, now distributed and anonymous. If anyone sees one somewhere, please make a photo! I’ve been tagging my photoset on Flickr with citationneeded and wikiffiti — more should start showing up in the next few weeks. I’m also providing the source Photoshop file (or as pdf) for anyone who wants to print their own batch. Note that you may have to resize the canvas or change the image mode to CMYK depending upon the print service used.
Update: A few people have asked via Flickr about printing services. I found uprinting.com via google, and ended up using them simply because their minimum order size was 250 instead of 500 — there may be better or cheaper options available. They simply have a quote form you fill out, then you upload your file (such as the CMYK one above). Very painless overall.