This weekend, despite removing 15" of snow from my driveway, the calendar convinced me that the weather will be changing in 4-6 weeks to something that's more suited to riding atop a bicycle. And, given my stated intent to get my *electric* bike built "this winter", I needed to get off my butt and at least get the parts ordered.

So, I ordered the 600W hub motor kit from We're Electrified. It's initially going on the cheap Target bike ($100 or so). That's to help establish a baseline. That this project can be done and works with a clunky cheap bike, ridden by a guy who's never likely to be much smaller than 200 pounds. It looks like the total cost for the project will be about $500. The bike was $100, the kit $350 and the shipping $50 (lead batteries aren't cheap to ship).

Once it's built, I'm going to be using a plug-in electric meter to track the kilowatt hours required per mile traveled. That's for a couple of reasons.

1. To know exactly how much this replacement commuting option costs and saves over driving the truck.
2. To be able to properly size a solar charging solution, rendering the commute powered by the sun.

It'd be easy to over or under estimate the size of the solar charging setup. I want it to match my actual commute fairly well.

Beyond the electric bike, I want to also get a gas moped of some sort. Either a "traditional" 49cc moped or something more "bicycle" styled like one of these or these. I'm also intrigued by this 3 wheeled electric vehicle. That kit, my electric bike and a gas bike would cost less than $4500, and provide a variety of options, ALL of them greener than my current truck. The point being a continuum of transportation options.

I'm still going to keep the pickup, because it's paid for and is useful for hauling cargo. However, I'd like to have it shift to occasional use (which has the side effect of it lasting longer) to be replaced by lighter options rather than trying to have a single vehicle for all of my needs. That "all-in-one" approach is what's led to so many SUV's on the road in the United States. Since we believe we can only have our one vehicle (per person of course), we insist that it can take care of everything we might possibly need.

As a result, instead of renting a van, the 1 time per year we need to transport a group of 7 adults somewhere, we drive around 364 other days of the year by ourselves in an 8 passenger SUV. Instead of considering an electric vehicle that will cover our needs for everything except for 2 trips to Grandma's a year (and renting a car for the long trip), we turn it down because it can't drive more than 150 miles in a day.

So, I'm taking a stab at incremental improvement. I'm not going to pretend that I'll somehow find myself willing to take up full human-powered cycling. I've tried that in the past and didn't get very far. I think the key is to treat this as something where you work toward improvement *over your current situation* instead of worrying about comparing to the ideal, you are making things better. Success needs to be anchored to the appropriate benchmark. And, that benchmark needs to be *your* starting point, not the perfect end point.

And with every gallon of gas not burned, you save 19 pounds of carbon dioxide from getting dumped into the air. If I replace 105 round trips to work, that's a literal ton of CO2 that stays out of the air.

Now, I just have to figure out how to get a decent MP3 speaker setup strapped to it by the time I'm ready to roll.

I recently picked up a few of the Moleskine Cahier notebooks (yes, I'm aware of the linguistic redundancy). These are the thin little Moleskines with brown kraftpaper as their covers. I like the feel of the paper and like doodling on the front and back. As I was writing my phone number on one in case it was lost, I found myself wanting to run the cover through my inkjet printer.

As there was a big stack of notecards sitting next to the printer, I figured I'd give it a shot. The result is a little 3"x5" DIY Moleskine covered in a brown kraftpaper that I'm calling a "Kraftskine". This one is a prototype and I'm going to do some things different the next time, but it's pretty simple to put together.

I took 25 notecards as the base size. That turned out to be a good number of cards to work with. I clamped those cards together with the big binder clips to make sure that one edge was pretty much solid paper. To bind the cards together, I used Gorilla Glue along the edge.

Once that dried, I removed the binder clips and checked to make sure that all of the pages were in tightly. I then moved on to the cover.

I found a pack of paper in the scrapbooking section of Target that included various shades of brown paper, including the matching kraftpaper in 8.5×11 pages that would go through the inkjet.

Since I wasn't sure how thick the book was going to be, I just made up a Photoshop file with a 5" wide band at the top and put the edge of my front cover on the right. I left the back cover blank, planning to just wrap the book and cut off the excess. For future books I'll aim for more of a wraparound graphic.

At any rate, I cut the cover and made sure it all fit dry. I then applied more Gorilla Glue and clamped the cover on with the binder clips to let it dry. The results are in the photos.

For the next one, I think I'm going to use a spray adhesive like Super 77 and glue the cover directly to the outer 2 notecards. That will make for a cleaner cover setup and cut down on the little bit of bleed-through I got on the spine.

Overall, I do like the results and think I'm going to use this method for little reference books, gift books, etc. It's a nice size and I already know the notecards print well on the inkjet as well, so printing the entire book would work fairly well.

Photo: Windell Oskay

MAKE Magazine's been collecting a nice list of projects for spooking it up for yourself. For several years, we've gone through a really well-done haunted house put on by the Jaycee's here in town that goes through a natural cave system. It's made me want to do something in that vein ever since the first time through.

So, I'm starting to buy and make stuff to gradually build up my own little haunted section of the block. Next week's prime bargain hunting time as stuff goes on major clearance sales at nearly everywhere that sells anything in black and orange.

I've also been checking through this great long list of projects that the whole little underground community of haunters have put together detailing how to come up with great stuff with cheap materials. I'm particularly intrigued by the projects involving "monster mud", which is joint compound for drywall mixed with black paint. There are some really neat projects using that goop.

You can check out the photos submitted by participants in MAKE's contests to come up with cool Halloween stuff.

Oh, and anyone with a spare $100 to throw around can buy me one of these.

A while back, I went looking for A5 paper (about half a "normal" American sheet in size if you didn't know) and came up empty. At the time, pretty much no one had a reasonably priced option. I have a hard time paying $20+ for 250 sheets of ordinary paper.

Anyway, one of the sites that came up as a decent source of A4 paper recently started stocking A5 and dropped me a note. It's still like $8 a ream, but, apparently, that dropped it below my unwillingness threshold because I ordered 3 reams.

They came today, which means that I'm pretty much equipped for the project I wanted the paper for in the first place. An article from back in May detailed how to do your own paperback book binding without the complicated equipment, sewing needles, etc. A similar article shows another simple setup (though with a simple jig instead of the basic clips).

Beyond the fact that I just like the idea of messing with bookbinding because I like books (even if I more aggressively use them than some others do), it's a handy way to put together little reference books, poetry, short stories, etc. I probably won't do any binding until this weekend, but I can think of a few things worth compiling into documents for printing this way.

After a couple of really hectic weeks, I'm in the latter half of a 4 day weekend. Lots of things that had been put off, some enjoyable, some not so much are getting crossed off of the invisible list in the back of my brain.

I've spent time with family, had breakfast with my good friend Aaron (something we're going to be doing more often), cleaned dangerously under-tended areas of my house (the health department should have intervened in my bathroom), played poker with good friends, and did some chilling out with the 2 fuzzy monks watching movies like Buckaroo Bonzai and Ghostbusters.

One of the enjoyable things I've been putting at the bottom of my priorities was filling the 75 gallon tank in the home theater. I had Aaron help me move it in and level it *months* ago and even filled it and got all of the equipment up and running and then just left it sit dry and empty for far too long. After doing the hydroponic project, I had a renewed taste for doing more of the hands-on stuff for a bit and grabbed all of the technical bits and set it up during the week, leaving it ready for fish yesterday.

I headed to World of Fish and picked up the first batch of livestock which are now swimming around in the new tank:

• 4 Yellow Labs
• 2 Red Zebra
• 1 common pleco
• 2 clown pleco's

I'd post pics of mine specifically, but the tank's cloudy with bacterial bloom (just like it should be with added bio-load). I'm already digging this group of fish. They're colorful and active (the cichlids) and suitably strange looking (the plecos) to make for an interesting tank going forward. I'm not 100% on what I'm going to be adding next.

I'm deliberately leaving the house painting project alone this weekend (though the rain is making that more of an academic distinction). I'll get back on the ladder next weekend.