Shimano Coasting Components

BikePortlant posted their exclusive on the Shimano Coasting Components last fall, but now the tech-geek blogs have picked up on Shimano's new 3-speed automatic transmission for bikes.

Shimano has opened up their coasting.com website for public perusal, featuring Coasting-equipped bikes from Trek, Giant, and Raleigh. Shimano has recognized this trend toward easy-to-ride bikes for anybody.

The much-maligned Landrider is known for their "AutoShift" technology to address this need for a bike that you don't have to think about shifting. More recently, Fallbrook Technologies introduced a Continuously Variable Transmission for use on bicycles. They demonstrated their NuVinci Continuous Variable Planetary system on Ellsworth concept bike last fall at Interbike.

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Tags: bicycle, geek, cvt, automatic+transmission, ellsworth, interbike, trek, giant, raleigh

Yahoo Pipes and bicycle love

Yahoo Pipes is flexible and easy to use, but with advanced features that promises some cool tricks. I spent 10 minutes reading the intro, looked at a couple of examples and created my first Pipe: The Cyclelicious Bicycle Love photos. Total time was maybe 20 minutes.

The Cyclelicious Bicycle Love pipe takes the Cyclelicious feed, runs it through Yahoo's "Content Analyzer" module, and uses that output to find photos that are somewhat related to Cyclelicious posts. If you're a Flickr fiend, there's even an RSS feed for this set of photos you can subscribe to. If you like, you can open up my Pipe, edit it to include your blog's RSS feed instead, then save it yourself.

I intend to explore Yahoo Pipes some more. You can filter on keywords, combine feeds, translate, use localization (mapping) modules, sort input, take user input, and do string manipulation.

If you have ideas for interesting mashups involving bicycles or if you've created your own pipes, please feel free to comment and post your links here.

Update: Here are some more pipes I've created --

• L'Equipe cycling news RSS feed translated from French to English. L'Equipe only provides a partial feed with links back to the French-language article, but I'm working on a way to re-write the links so it passes through a translator first. Non-RSS web page here.
  
• Cyclelicious in German - as an RSS feed or as a web page. The RSS feed contains the complete translated text, while the web site shows only a portion of each article.
  
• Cyclelicious in Japanese - RSS and web page.
  
• Rad Spannerei German bicycle blog translated to English (and the RSS feed of the translation).
  
• I also have an English translation of several Japanese bicycle blogs, but the translation module doesn't seem to work for Nihongo.
  

Tags: yahoo+pipes, cycling, bicycles, mashup, pipes