All Rickshaws and Vangari’s in Bangladesh have only a single gear. It’s something like 61 gear inches and way to stiff when under load. We adapted a vangari with a retro-direct drive system which means that if you pedel backwards you get a different gear. The upshot of this over a normal geared system with derailleurs is that it uses much fewer parts and is potentially more rugged. This first attempt has got some issues to work out but it might have some potential. Here’s the Video.

I just got to Macau this evening.   So very good to be back here.  I left Cambodia yesterday.   I really enjoyed my time there.   So drastically different from Bangladesh, but in some ways very similar.  I put some photos up on flickr.  Probably the most notable event though was that I have a neice now, which makes me an Uncle.

I spent another day in Kaula Lumpur, however that was mostly a non event.  I stayed out at LCCT and while I did go in to the town center, I didn’t see much.  This morning I camped out in a Starbucks taking advantage of their free wifi.  I’ve been thinking about a redesign of the old blog for a while now, something a little more minimalist and this seemed like a good way to use a slow morning.  I’ve been reading Dive into mark and I’m liking a lot of his thoughts, especially things like Simplicity is hard lets go shopping.  So I started hacking this morning and by check in time I had something that looks like his site, maybe too much, even if it is the MIT license.   I’m not sure how important blog design is these days, I mean I use RSS feeds for most of my friends blogs.  It’s fun to have something that looks good though, or at least that I think looks good.  If it doesn’t look good, well, stop using Microsoft explorer, or let me know.