Cozy Tech Revisit: Juiced Bikes u300/u500 v3

It has been awhile since I did my evaluation of this bike and I have gone through quite a bit with it over the years. Since Juiced Bikes has not updated the u350/u500 and probably never will, I want to discuss how the bike has served me as well as my thoughts on the concept and the future of this kind of bike

Just to recap, the u350/u500 (I will refer to the u500 from here on as they are the same bike with some extra bike goodies like 3-speed suspension and fenders being omitted in the u350) was a step-through cargo bike that stood out to me because of the slender frame, incredible carrying capacity, and massive battery. Over the first 8 months of owning it, everything was great. the front motor is an acquired taste and very…erratic. But once you get used to it, its a very fun experience and great for riders who do a lot of stopping, starting, and swift low speed turning (all things that you have to do riding through New York City). Being able to commute to work two days in a row without recharging is great as well. the back rack allows you to carry very large and heavy loads but doesn’t look like it because the bike is so small (by comparison, my Radwagon cannot fit in practically every elevator without standing upright, something the u500 has no issues with). 

Then, some issues arise. The first issue that came up was the fact that my cruise control has stopped functioning reliability. It will sometimes not exit cruise control when pressing on my brakes. This is circumvented by twisting by throttle, but the fact that the bike does not detect brake pressure is annoying. Another issue I have with the u500 is the motor. the motor cable is 2 cables with an extender in the middle, and the extender is too damn long. Compounding the issue is the fact that the slim frame of the bike is a curse here as it is hard to route the various cables on the bike in a way that keeps them organized but also flexible enough to be able to bend if say, someone knocks the bike over and the handlebars twist on themselves. This is a concern for me since it has already broken the rubber outer layer of my extension cable, which means that I should be putting tape on it to protect it from water since I can’t remove the cable anymore. 

Why can’t I remove the extension cable? cause it melted onto itself. This cable is so terrible, that the plastic part of the connectors melt onto each other since the motor is constantly being pumped max wattage from the battery and heats up pretty fast. This essentially means that an issue with the cable OR the motor now would mean I would need a new one. Since Juiced Bikes only has a couple of spare bikes left, this can spell the end (at least through juiced) of being able to repair the bike. Luckily, after the last motor died I didn’t use the bike for almost a year, so it does not have as many miles on the frame as it should. 

Recently I purchased a new motor and cable to replace the old one and rode the bike for the first time In over a year. Coming from the very comfortable yet boring ride experience of the Radwagon, riding the u500 again was a breath of fresh air. I've jumped between both bikes often but usually, opt for the U500 unless I need the space to carry larger loads (or people) that I get with the Radwagon. I find it sad that Juiced bikes have essentially abandoned their unique platform to focus on the higher end (once upon the time, this was Juiced Bikes halo product) products as well as other electric fields such as skateboards and scooters. These sell more than cargo bikes but I find that the ODK platform was very versatile in what you can do with it. It also seems to have a lot of potential for modification in the future, which I will explore more once the original components die. Since this bike has essentially paid for itself with the thousands of miles it has racked up over the years, I would still say this is easily one of the best electric bikes I've owned for just normal use. 

Since writing this Radpower bikes have come out with the RadRunner, which is essentially a u500 with shorter rack. Radpower took that utility bike frame and took it to the next level. The biggest plus of the RadRunner is not only the fact that it is incredibly cheap but has a TON of different accessories that you can kit out the bike to be something beastly. As my U500 was stolen from me, I am in the market again for a do-all bike and this bike (so long as too many corners weren’t cut to get the price down) seems to check all the boxes. 

Cozy Tech: The iPad Pro

I use this thing for everything now. It is my laptop, my notepad, my video watching, and video editing device. It has made me leave my MacBook docked at home at all times. The iPad Pro seems like it still isn’t quite the alternate device Apple envisions for its tablet, but its closer than anything that came before it. I use it to write when I’m on the train to work (like how I’m writing this post), which is slightly uncomfortable due to the keyboard attachment, but this will be solved over time once better third party solutions come to the market. My iPad also has finally ended my use of Microsoft surface, as the combination of the notepad app being useful and the low latency of the Apple Pencil makes for a more comfortable experience than using OneNote. Microsoft's treatment of OneNote lately has left me very frustrated at what is still the gold standard of note-taking apps...until they force their “Modern” version down our throats. 

What has impressed me about using an iPad is the fact that it has replaced 95% of everything I use a laptop for. If I need to edit a picture or make a quick image like say - a button for my twitch profile, I can use Photoshop for iPad (Adobe has some work to do as there are some basic edits that I cant do on the iPad OS version which to me is pretty garbage for an app that costs $120/Year to use). If I need to edit a video quickly for use, I can use iMovie (which is another featureless app that needs serious work to even have 10% of the features final cut has, let alone desktop iMovie). I can do these things without feeling too limited, so long as I curb my expectations. And my expectations should be to approximate what I would do on a desktop computer. The iPad Pro is ALMOST there, the developers just need to see it for the awesome computing device it can be.

How cartoons can inspire entrenpenural mindsets.

Ed Edd and Eddy is one of my favorite cartoons of all time. It's a simple story about 3 different boys coming together to achieve a goal, usually revolving around money to get massive amounts of jawbreakers. It seems so simple at first glance, but as an adult, I see that it served as the model for how I think today. To a kid, it just seems like 3 kids having fun. But to me now, I see three people who had three different and unique skill sets. Eddy was the smooth-talking salesman, Edd was the brains and the voice of reason to counteract Eddy, and Ed was the brawn that did all the heavy lifting when it came time. Individually, they were incredibly ineffective but as a team, they always achieved their goals. And while all the other kids in the neighborhood were annoyed by their presence and antics, they ultimately came to respect them and even came together to achieve things at times. I think that the emphasis on teamwork and working hard for something is something that is lost nowadays. I inspire to find creative ways to make money not because I don’t like working a regular job, but because a regular job bores me to death. Being an entrepreneur and having an entrepreneurial spirit has been very important to me recently and this show reminds me of why I have that mindset today.

Cozy Tech: the AirPort Extreme

Routers are an important piece of home technology that is often overlooked but is the source of most network-related issues. Having used ISP-provided routers, it is almost always recommended to switch it out for your own for a couple of reasons, not limited to 

1. having to pay to rent the router*

2. long term reliability issues.

3. No way to manage the router.

4. (depending on ISP) the router may turn itself into an accessible hotspot for others like customers of the ISP, leeching your precious bandwidth. 

The issue is that networking is a subset of the IT tree that literally does not makes sense to a lot of people. “The internet” is just something that happens to most people, and it's not something they want to even think about even a little bit, so they defer to the ISP to do it for them or they get their IT guy to help them set up a network. Well, I want to be that IT guy for everyone so before I get to the AirPort Extreme, I wanted to get to a topic that causes so much confusion for people who don’t know networking, And that's 2.4/5GHZ WiFi. 

In the interest of not confusing and boring you, I’m going to keep this description of WiFi as simple as possible. When you make a connection that comes over a wire and transmit it wirelessly, you lose a lot of potential speed. So if you have a 10Mbps internet connection, for example, you may see only perhaps 6-8 Mbps of effective speed due to the latency. Compounding this is the spectrum. Most wireless devices utilize the 2.4 GHz WiFi Spectrum. The issue that this causes is that so many devices covering the same spectrum also leads to latency issues as well as overall connection issues. There is another wireless spectrum that can be used, however, and this is the 5GHZ band. In addition to the fact that only newer (ish) devices have a 5GHZ radio, the 5GHZ spectrum has less overall range than 2.4GHZ which in a way is a benefit because there is less effective range for devices to latch on and interfere with your precious bandwidth. Compounding these two things is the type of WiFi being used. The four most common types seen today are Wireless B, G, N, and AC. These letters represent the amount of theoretical speed that they will output. I say theoretical speed because of the speed loss due to wireless latency as well as band interference. Wireless AC is the top tier, having about a 1GBPS speed maximum over wifi.* 

All of that was to be able to explain why I love the topic of this post, the AirPort Extreme. It is a wireless AC router created by Apple in 2013. It is the last router Apple has made, though it continues to be updated regularly to patch potential security holes and provide stability. It supports both the 2.4 and 5GHz bands and is a pretty sleek rectangular thing (that’s the best way I can describe it - it looks pretty cool in most environments and reminds me of Apple's previous obsession with white and matte plastic in their products). What makes this one of my favorite pieces of tech is that it is so dead simple to set up. The Airport utility (which is a default Mac app and can be downloaded for iOS) is easy to set up and troubleshoot and it just works. It works so well, I recommend it and use it when I am rolling out home networks for people. It's really that good. You would think a router from the early 2010s would be useless in 2020 and obsolete, but it's not. Since Wireless AD is still new and isn’t even included in most devices yet, I predict that it will be at least 2 years before wireless AD is adopted industry-wide and probably another year from then for the technology to mature where the theoretical speed can be generally realized like how Wireless AC is currently after years on the market. Even then, I would still recommend the AirPort Extreme…..if and ONLY if Apple continues to update it for security. The second that stops, I will sadly have to move on. But, in a surprising move, Apple supports their entire Airport line from 2007 onwards even though these are products that apple call “vintage” and provide no hardware support for whatsoever. That’s very unlike apple, but I love it and I hope they keep doing so until they see that most of them are dead or the technology is terribly outdated. But then again, Wireless n is horrendously outdated. 

*The latest standard is Wireless AD, which is capable of ridiculous speed and throughput. However, it uses an even higher 60GHZ spectrum, which has an even shorter range than 5GHZ and doesn’t like walls and obstructions at all. This makes it hard to justify (for now) the premium that you will be paying in order to get this tech.