Bike Racks

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 215

Hybrid handlebar and basket

Origin8 CargoUnit

The Origin8 CargoUnit is a great piece of “why did this take so long” common sense technology. These are handle bars that have an integrated basket which is large enough to hold a bike lock, a grocery bag, and anything else that will fit. The construction is rugged, true to Origin8’s line of strong/light components.

These are superior to any number of bolt-on accessories because the basket is part of the handlebars. Aftermarket baskets bounce, come loose, and scratch up the finish of whatever they’re attached to. Because the basket is one with the handlebars, there is none of that. Plus, there’s no way to steal the basket as they are welded together.

Speaking of the weld, these are not toys. The gauge of the tubing and the strength of the joints are on par with pro equipment. This product is serious, and comes at a rise & width to replace bars on fixies, hybrids, or even BMX geometries. — James Roche

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Durable frontside bike cargo platform

CETMAracks

I don’t own a car, so when I go to the store for large quantities of beer or buckets of cat litter I use the CETMA, a lightweight steel rack that’s tough as nails. I know a couple messengers that have crashed and the rack took the brunt of the force dishing it out to car doors or whatever obstacle happened to be there, and the rack only absorbed a slight crinkle or bend without compromising anything at all in it’s performance. I’ve been using a CETMArack for a couple years and currently have a 5-rail on my ’81 single speed, all-weather utility grocery coffee shop beer bike (a 3-rail is plenty big enough if you only plan an occasional twelve pack or a couple library books; they also offer a 7-rail version!). Keeping the load up front over the front wheel lets you control the weight a bit more and doesn’t bog down like a rear rack. You cannot ride like you normally would, hopping curbs or diving into corners when you have 27 pounds of cat litter on the front. But it’s good to get a change of pace once in a while; a gravity reminder keeps you humble. I also like CETMAracks because of the guy who makes them. Made by hand in Eugene, OR. No outsourcing. No overseas production. And now they even include home-baked cookies with your order. — Mark Pilder

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Urban bike hauling

Grocery Bag Panniers

Most bicycle panniers work well for touring, but don’t meet the needs of people who use their bikes for commuting or shopping everyday. The typical pannier has a main compartment sealed with a zipper or flap, plus a few smaller pockets. The tourist packs it like a hiker would pack a backpack. However, these bags don’t easily hold the urban cyclists’ cargo of shopping bags, daypacks, and laptop computers. An open-topped pannier that works more like a basket than a backpack provides a better way of carrying this kind of gear. These large bags, usually called grocery bag panniers, or shopping panniers, allow you to carry all kinds of oddly-shaped loads and fold flat when not in use. The key to using shopping bag panniers is to keep your gear in a separate bag that you can drop into the pannier. Day packs or book bags work well. I’ve used dry bags when it rains, but have found that plastic garbage bags are easier and cheaper. Having an open-topped bag also gives you a quick place to toss your bike lock, and the convenient access makes it easier to shed clothing layers as you warm up.

Several companies make them. The Jandd grocery bag pannier seems to be the sturdiest, but is also the most expensive, at around US$45 for a single pannier. REI sells a similar, but less refined, bag for US$80 per pair. My favorites, which I use everyday, are the Nashbar Townie baskets, which cost US$17 each. Unlike the other grocery bag panniers, they don’t use a rectangular metal frame to reinforce the top of the bag. This means that they don’t hold their shape quite as well as the others, but it lets the opening at the top adjust to different shaped cargo, like a bulky laptop bag. They’re cheap enough that I leave them on the bike all the time, but they remove quickly enough that I can conveniently take one with me to carry stuff while the bike is parked. — Tom Sackett

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Front child bike seat

WeeRide Kangaroo Carrier

Traveling through other countries, we’ve often noticed child cycling carriers where the child sits forward of the rider — this allows them better visibility and puts them in reach/view of the rider, unlike seats that mount to a rear rack. My sister even went as far as to bring one back from the UK to use with her kids. We hunted, but couldn’t find the same thing in the US until two years ago. Now we use it once or twice a week when weather permits. Aside from being a much safer and secure version of the one my sister has, the WeeRide Kangaroo has some other very clear advantages.

The injection-molded seat mounts to an extremely sturdy bar that clamps to the seat post and steerer tube. This allows the seat to be removed quickly and easily when not in use. This is done by unscrewing a single large bolt. Also, the carrier features a padded “face pad” which 1) keeps your passenger from messing with your handlebars and controls; 2) protects your passenger from smacking his/her face on the handlebars (assuming you left the four-point harness too loose); and 3) gives your passenger a natural place to rest his/her head when sleeping. In addition, the Kangaroo’s foot cups are adjustable and flexible, but I’ve never seen a child get his/her toes anywhere near the front wheel.

A few caveats: The harness probably has six feet more webbing than it really needed, but I was able to clean up ours with a handful of safety pins. The seat is wide enough you have to ride somewhat bow-legged, but you get used to it pretty quickly. The footrests don’t go down far enough for larger children. Don’t expect to fit a three-year-old kid into it.

Our youngest just turned one, so we have at least another season with it, which we’ll relish: We love being able to interact more with our passenger, and I’m sure the kid likes the view a whole lot better. — Yitah Wu

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Bicycle truck

Xtracycle

This kit transforms a regular bike into an SUB (sports utility bike) by extending back the rear wheel and adding a seat and baggage platform. I’ve had my SUB for two years now. I find it makes owning a car completely unnecessary! I’ve transported my folding kayak on it. I’ve taken my girlfriend and her Australian Blue Heeler on it. I’ve moved furniture. It’s crazy how stable it is. In many ways I prefer how it handles to my regular bike! And for giving people tours around NYC people just LOVE it.

You can modify your bike yourself, but I ended up taking it to a bike shop to have it installed. — Jens Rasmussen

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Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

11/9/26

Retro Recomendo: Destinations Vol. 2

Recomendo - issue #539

Walk across Bali

I just completed a six-day walk across the island of Bali. We carried only day packs and our luggage was forwarded each day. We walked roughly 77 km from Ubud, up to the volcanoes in the center of the island, and then finished on the north coast. We had two guides to lead the way through the rice terraces, and we slept in local villages, Balinese style along the way. I highly recommend the organizers, who charge only $500 for the whole trip, including all the vegetarian meals along the way. This is miles off the tourist, or even backpacker, tracks. The hosts, Astungkara Way, also offer a 10-day version which goes coast to coast. — KK

Walkable Neighborhoods map

Close.city is an interactive map designed to help you find neighborhoods in the United States that are within a short walking distance of amenities like supermarkets, public transportation, cafes, co-working spaces, bookstores, and other facilities. It’s useful when searching for a hotel, Airbnb, or apartment that’s near the kinds of places that are important to you — MF

Find a Moon Tree near you

I didn’t know about the tree seeds that flew around the Moon in 1971 and were planted upon return until I read this article in The Atlantic: We Almost Forgot About the Moon Trees. All of the locations of these Moon Trees are kept here and up-to-date, including the ones no longer alive. Visiting as many of these trees as possible is now on my travel bucket list. — CD

Offbeat attractions guide

Whenever I travel I search for my destination at the Atlas Obscura website. It will yield dozens of very obscure, very offbeat attractions in the area. How else can you find a nearby museum of parasites, or trail of doll heads, or a restaurant of robots, underground tunnels, or a store for time travel? — KK

360-degree videos from around the world

Visit AirPano to watch 360 videos of beautiful places on Earth, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Scramble pedestrian crossing (the busiest in the world), to a village of the Warao Indigenous people on the Orinoco River in Venezuela. My travel bucket list grew after watching some of these videos. — MF

Calendar of festivals

I try to coordinate my travel to exotic places with local festivals that occur at the same time. Trouble is, there’s been no easy way to find out which festivals are happening where. For example many traditional celebrations run on a lunar cycle. So I built a calendar that will show me all the festivals in Asia that are happening on a particular day. Or I can look at the map and see what festivals occur nearby and when. My site is called Festivo. It provides the local festivals of Asia—which are crammed with color, costumes, and traditions—in calendar format. It’s open and free to all, no ads. If enough people (besides myself) find it useful I will expand it to Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world. — KK

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11/8/26

The South Carolina family that murdered itself out of existence

The Last of the Bighams by J. A. Zeigler

This is the fourth Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.

Leonard Smiley Bigham Sr. established a plantation on the Great Pee Dee River near Pamplico, South Carolina, in the mid-1800s. He was a violent, ruthless tyrant suspected of murdering nine people, but he never served any prison time. He taught his son, Leonard Smiley Bigham Jr., how to succeed by cheating, beating, and killing other people.

Bigham Jr. learned well. He allegedly poisoned his father by giving him a glass of cyanide-laced milk in 1879 so he could take over the plantation, and in 1887 he became Florence County’s first state senator. Unfortunately for Junior, his wife, Dora, used the same poisoned-milk trick to knock him off.

Before she murdered her husband, Dora bore him five children, who carried on the family tradition of mayhem and murder, recounted in J. A. Zeigler’s The Last of the Bighams. All in all, the Bigham clan was linked to nearly 20 murders, and they may have killed even more people. Anyone who got in their way, or merely irritated them, had a good chance of being killed, either in a fit of rage or in a coolly planned assassination.

Zeigler, a newspaperman at the Florence Morning News, self-published The Last of the Bighams, subtitled “With illustrations from the album of a strange family who by their own misdeeds have become extinct.” It is at times awkwardly written and riddled with typos (which I’ve kept), but it’s a fascinating page-turner about an evil family with an unbelievable streak of luck in avoiding prison. Zeigler rushed the book out after the sentencing. It’s hastily written, but Zeigler is a colorful, opinionated, and often funny storyteller.

The Bighams committed horrific acts of violence as thoughtlessly as most people make their morning coffee. And they were equal-opportunity murderers, as happy to kill people inside the family as outsiders. The book’s dramatic peak describes a massacre reminiscent of the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones. It concludes with the multiple trials of the murderer, who almost escaped the consequences of his horrendous crimes.

I won’t spoil the story by telling you who the murderer was. But because the book ends with his sentencing, you might want to find out his ultimate fate, which you can do easily with a Google search.

Download the Book Freak Edition

This is the fifth book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a paid subscriber benefit. Every month, I take an interesting, obscure public-domain book and turn it into an EPUB and PDF ebook, with a short introduction.

The link to the Deep Cuts edition of The Last of the Bighams is below.

If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.org, and I’ll comp you…

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Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.

11/6/26

Easy Travel Coffee/Priciest Destinations/Worldwide Airplane Wi-Fi

Nomadico issue #230

Portable Pour Over Coffee

I mentioned in issue 227 that I bought a French Press for my five weeks in Peninsular Malaysia, but I left it behind when it was time to get on a plane again. Now in Chiang Mai, I bought some disposable pour-over coffee packets that come ready to use. They work well because they adjust to any size mug and only require hot water. They are made of paper and cardboard and open up from a flat packet. I found these that are similar on Amazon, but some other brands end up costing $2 – $3 per cup, which seems excessive. Bring that down by buying your own coffee to put in empty filters that pack up flat ($5 for 50) or pack a reusable collapsible version that will work for larger tumblers.

Priciest Travel Spots

You can probably guess a few countries that are vacation budget-busters, but travel insurance company Squaremouth crunched some numbers to find out for real which ones really will drain your wallet the most. The airfare part of the score is from the USA, so keep that in mind, but the top 6 were Greenland, British Virgin Islands, French Polynesia, Antarctica, and Switzerland. Some of the others might surprise you though since the people living there are far from rich, like four countries in Africa where tourists are paying a bundle for safaris. (Average daily trip cost in Botswana: $1,526.)

Worldwide Wi-Fi on Delta Airlines

The first airline to offer Wi-Fi worldwide to its loyalty members is Delta, as it just completed the project to get its Asia-Pacific flights connected, the last ones on their list. The only planes where you won’t be able to log on for free if you’re a SkyMiles member are the 5% that are narrow-body regional planes, though they will be included eventually as well. See the details here.

The History of Religions

How It Evolved is a project dedicated to showing the evolution of the world’s major religions, with audio chapters you can listen to in depth or a timeline chart showing one or all of them stacked up in parallel. The timeline is especially enlightening when you consider the game of Broken Telephone or Chinese Whispers, when one person says something in the ear of another and it goes down the line. (The end result from the last person is usually comically different from the original.) How much changed in the 300+ years of oral storytelling between when Jesus died and the New Testament books were published for the first time? Or in the 500 years between the death of Buddha and the first recorded teachings? That’s before all the divergent changes and branch-offs still going on today.

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A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

11/5/26

What’s in my NOW? — Stephen Kinsella

issue #277

I’m a Professor of Economics at the University of Limerick in Ireland, I’ve helped create some interesting courses in Software Engineering and Bioscience. I love reading these and thought it might be nice to do one of my own. — Stephen Kinsella

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PHYSICAL

• Halfday Garment Duffel Bag. I travel at least once a week and it is a pleasure to use this bag. It is perfectly formed around a specific need. It helps me carry one suit, a spare shirt, some workout gear, and some toiletries, in a designed bag that is exactly adapted to the use case I have. It makes me happy using it.
• Lamy Fountain Pen 2000. A luxury item, mine is twelve years old now, with the fine nib. It feels great to use, looks great, and it is a little piece of design excellence you get to enjoy daily. I use Asa-gao Iroshizuku ink because it looks fantastic on the page and works well with this pen.
• Rodd and Gunn Jacket. I love all of this brand’s products, and have several, but this jacket is my favourite.

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DIGITAL

• Freedom. I bought a lifetime subscription a while ago. It blocks the stupid stuff when you need to try to be focused and clever.
• YNAB. A budgeting app that saves you money because it forces you to focus for a minute on money. I keep it as simple as I can with this.

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INVISIBLE

᚛ᚐᚏ ᚐᚌᚆᚐᚔᚇᚆ᚜ This is Ogham, an ancient Irish alphabet, written linearly and on stone. What you are looking at is ‘Ar Aghaidh’, or ‘Onwards’.

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11/4/26

MOS: Selected Works / The Art of Zootopia

Issue No. 142

MOS: SELECTED WORKS – A COLLECTION OF THE PLAYFUL ARCHITECT COMPANY’S UNUSUAL AND ECCENTRIC WORK

MOS: Selected Works
by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
Princeton Architectural Press
2016, 288 pages, 6.2 x 8.5 x 1 inches

Buy on Amazon

If the enormous hairy solar chimneys that these architects once built in the middle of Long Island City don’t make you smile, then your sense of play might need renovation. The fun-loving, aggressively eccentric work of MOS Architects includes some recurring motifs: canopies, unusual materials, solar chimneys, shaft lighting, and buildings that look like blocks tumbled to earth. Engaging for architects and non-architects alike, this is a book that I keep picking up: to look through the illustrations, to wonder at, to think about how to work creatively, to show something weird and wild to a friend. While there is some discussion of theory in the included essays, this is a book refreshingly light on architectural jargon.

The architectural historian Lucia Allais suggests in an included essay that one of the primary questions that the work of MOS poses is, “Is this simple or complex?” While the works presented are often simple, the reactions they provoked for me were complex, ranging from confusion to glee to disbelief. Crammed with 300 images, the just-released MOS: Selected Works demonstrates the firm’s unusual range of having produced buildings, installations, furniture, software, films, and pavilions, along with smaller works (like this book).

MOS, as a firm, is on a very serious mission to advance the limits of architecture, but without taking themselves too seriously. Their hilarious office manual is included in the book and will inspire glee in anyone who has ever worked in a corporate office, advising, “You will arrive at the Office when you are awake and ready to work. We ask that you not come to work resembling a “bad version of yourself” (or someone else for that matter; however a good version of someone else is acceptable under § 2.1)…” While the MOS office manual insists that their work merely “mumbles, if anything,” I hope they keep mumbling in my ear for a while. – Brent Garland

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THE ART OF ZOOTOPIA – A FANTASTIC COMPANION BOOK TO A FANTASTIC MOVIE

The Art of Zootopia
by Jessica Julius (foreward by Byron Howard and Rich Moore; preface by John Lasseter)
Chronicle Books
2016, 160 pages, 9.5 x 11.5 x 1 inches

Buy on Amazon

I got my hands on a copy of The Art of Zootopia last week, days before the movie opened, and was so enamored with the fresh yet classic Disney-inspired art that I was already set on reviewing the book. Then over the weekend I watched the movie with my 12-year-old daughter and friends, and wow! What a brilliantly humorous and moving winner of a movie it was. Bravo to directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore! But this is Wink, so back to the book…

The Art of Zootopia is such a treat in the way that it not only revisits the movie’s delightfully heartwarming characters and fantastic art, but gives us an engaging look at what went into the making of Zootopia. The book starts with author Jessica Julius describing the movie’s original story pitch – a 1960s spy story – and how it evolved over four years into the modern day tale of underdogs, prejudice, and fighting for justice for all. She gives us the scoop on how the characters were developed (balancing a feminine yet tough, naïve yet sharp, optimistic yet challenged bunny cop isn’t so easy!), shows us amazing “sets” I don’t even remember in the fast-moving film, and she lets us in on all kinds of fun details, like the fact that it took eight months to get the various animals’ fur just right (color, texture, and direction of fur growth takes more contemplation than I realized). We are also privy to many sketches and scenes that were eventually cut from the film.

Just released today, The Art of Zootopia is both a captivating companion book to the movie, as well as a stand-alone coffee table book that doesn’t need any knowledge of the movie to be appreciated. – Carla Sinclair

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Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

11/3/26

What’s in my NOW? — Stephen Kinsella