Category: Quick news

6000 people at San Jose Bike Party

An estimated 6,000 people participated in last night’s “Jungle Ride” from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto and Stanford University last night.



Six thousand people on bikes started in Sunnyvale at Sunnyvale Avenue and biked down El Camino Real to Mountain View. They turned up Castro Street then down California Street and up Rengstorff for a regruop at the In-And-Out Burger. They continued to University Avenue in Palo Alto, to the Stanford Oval, and a return to Sunnyvale Avenue via El Camino Real.

No photos from me because I wasn’t there this time, but you can see a little bit of the ride in this news video from NBC Bay Area, which tried for a live report in Mountain View but didn’t quite get the timing right.

Biking While Black in Evansville, Indiana

A man riding a bike through Evansville, Indiana waves at a pair of police officers. The cops, who apparently have a pretty monstrous chip on their shoulders, stops George Madison Jr — a firefighter, respected youth pastor and a friend of the police chief. Officer Friendly pulls out his taser, “>cuffs Madison and pushes him to the ground.

[ Broken video embed referred to in the comments removed ]

The police claim Madison made a rude gesture at them, but legal experts point out that Madison is well within his rights to make whatever gesture he wants — friendly, rude and otherwise — to passing police officers. My dad was a detective, and people frequently took advantage their constitutionally protected right to free expression if they saw his badge.

Via Ammon Skidmore.

Blind man’s bike stolen in Los Altos, CA

Fie on the thief. The news video shows the man’s invention that will hopefully allow the blind to navigate a bicycle, which looks pretty amazing. Maybe it could also allow the rest of us to play with our mobile devices while just riding along. I kid I kid!

Brian Higgins is blind and has been tooling around on a fancy titanium bike equipped with special sensors that beep to tell him to watch out for a tree or post.

Until now.

The 61-year-old hobbyist inventor walked outside last week to discover a thief had broken into his Los Altos, Calif., garage. The padlock had been broken. His $3,000 Litespeed titanium bicycle was nowhere to be found.

More at NBC Bay Area: Inventor’s High-Tech Bike Designed for Blind People Stolen.

Feedly OPML export broken?

I haven’t done a bicycle blog & news roundup in some time, but before I get into that: Has anybody successfully used an OPML file exported from Feedly? Specifically, I’d like to go back to Old Reader. I thought Old Reader had my subscriptions, but nope, not there. So I looked at my Google Takeout downloads, where I saved my Google Reader subscriptions, but it turns out Google deletes those downloads after only a week. So then I exported my RSS feed subscription from Feedly, but Old Reader barfs on that OPML file, and looking at it manually the XML seems like it might be broken.

Any suggestions?


Bicycle news below


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Bike distributor QBP to setup USA manufacturing

Quality Bike Products (QBP) — the large, national distributor behind familiar brands such as Civia, Dimension, Foundry,Salsa Cycles, Surly, Whisky Parts Co. and 45North — plan to begin manufacturing their own bikes in Minnesota within the next two years. QBP is the largest distributor of bicycle parts and accessories in the United States, with many local bike shops ordering much of their inventory through them.

The bicycles and frames sold through QBP’s brands are currently manufactured in China and Taiwan with assembly at QBP’s facility in Bloomington, MN. QBP Founder and President Steve Flagg says that moving from assembly to production will be a leap for his firm, but “not out of reach for us,” according to Minnesota Public Radio.

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