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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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I Folded Up My Bike and Put It In My Closet: The Curve

Living in a New York apartment means never having enough space. Some people have bike rooms in their apartment building in New York, but mine doesn’t. What’s a person to do? One option is to just deal with it and find some way to hang a bike or just dedicate some of your precious floor space to a bike. Another way is to find a bike that you can fold up and put away when you’re not using it. That’s what I did.

The Curve by Dahon, selling for about $400, has 16” wheels, much smaller than typical bike wheels which are around 24”. With those smaller tires, it’s more difficult to go really fast. I don’t think that’s a problem given that I ride my bike in New York. It’s also got 3 gears which has been fine for city riding so far.

The Dahon site says the Curve will fold in about 15 seconds. I bet it’s more like 45 seconds for me, but I’m sure that will just take some practice. It weighs 25 pounds.

If this bike isn’t geeky enough for you, check out the post that holds the seat, it has a “hidden” floor pump to fill the tires with air. Cool.

Click the small images to view larger pics of the bike.

Found Home Movie from 1976

Several months ago, I brought a Super 8 film reel to Pac-Lab, a film transfer shop in New York. If you’ve got some reels of film you want transferred, I would highly recommend contacting them. They were really friendly. This single roll cost me $35 to transfer, but it would have been cheaper if I had more than one reel. It was certainly worth the $35 for me.

My mom found this single reel of film when clearing out some stuff that my dad had. It has no sound or date. I think it must have been taken at Christmas 1976, but I’m not sure. My mom said that my dad didn’t use the Super 8 camera very much, so this may be the only roll my family ever gets to see. It brings back a lot of memories of a place and time I don’t have much recollection of. After watching it a few times, it’s brought back memories I thought were long gone. Besides the obvious personal connection I have with this piece of film, I also love the film grain and the overall look of it, so I thought I would share it here. (By the way, I’m the older kid.)

How to Download Flash Video and Play It Back on Your Mac. (And More.)

Have you downloaded a video from YouTube or some other video sharing site? If you haven’t, you might not know about KeepVid.com, a site that lets you give it a URL from YouTube and then download the .flv file and keep the video. (Hence, the name.) Another option to downloading videos to keep permanently is to install the Ook? Video Ook! or VideoDownloader for Firefox, add-ons which basically do the same thing. Both of those add-ons are free.

Ok, now you’ve got a .flv file, a Flash Video file. If it doesn’t have the file extension of “.flv,” you might need to manually change it to “.flv.” But how do you play it? That’s the point, right? If you double-click the file’s icon, I doubt you will see the video play back because QuickTime does not automatically know how to play this type of file. What do you need? You need Perian, a component that will give QuickTime the ability to play back .flv video. Once you install the free component, simply drag any .flv file to the QuickTime icon and it just plays. Nice. Even nicer, it gives you the ability to play many other formats as well, like .avi, 3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and Xvid . What more could you ask from a free add on?

Maybe you also have some Windows Media files, with the extension .wmv, that you want to play? Check out Flip4Mac, another free component that gives QuickTime the ability to play those files. Whew! Now that’s a powerful little QuickTime you’ve got there.