Crank it up your biking experience with these must-haves

When enjoying a bike ride, besides the scenery and company, your gear makes up a large part of a bike riding experience. Here are a few must-haves for the road or trail rider to make your outing on two wheels carefree and pleasant.

Smart conversation

Cycling with a friend doubles the fun, though trying to communicate while you ride can be a challenge. The Bluetooth-enabled Sena pi ($99) headset allows you and a companion to converse while you ride with a range up to a quarter of a mile, with a six-hour talk time. The 2-way intercom system features a pair of devices for you and your biking buddy. Two components about the size of thin thumb drives fasten with clips onto your helmet straps. The components house the Bluetooth technology, microphone and speaker and are strung together with a cable that you tuck into your helmet. The system, which works with an app on your smartphone, can convert almost any sport helmet into a smart helmet. A huge advantage to connected riding is that you can watch the road instead of turning around to talk to a fellow rider, which is not just more convenient but safer. Instead of catching up with your pal after the ride, you can chat, give directions, and check in with each other for the duration of your ride.

Vibe with vibrant earbuds

If you enjoy listening to tunes while you ride, pump up your audio experience with JVC’s Gumy Mini True Wireless earbuds ($30). These comfortable small-sized, sweat-and-rain-proof earbuds feature Bluetooth 5.1 technology and a battery life of up to 15 hours with the included USB-C-powered charging case. They conveniently auto-connect right out of the charging case, and they can be controlled remotely and are voice assistant compatible. For the cycling fashionista, you can wear a color to match your jersey with five colors to choose from: black, white, red, blue and green.

Carriers with coolness

How cool is the brand that describes its product’s fastening power as “Secure AF?”  KOM Cycling is the epitome of the cool cyclist brand with products designed by and for cool cyclists. Among their large assortment of accessories, they carry the ultimate carrier, a frame strap ($29.99) for tube and tools that is almost non-existent, but fully functional, durable, and built for speed and performance. The sleek and minimalistic design keeps the weight low and your necessities – tube, CO2 inflator and canisters, tire levers and tube repair tool — streamlined to stay out of your way, Velcroed in a bundle, with a soft nylon lace facing to protect your frame. If you need a bit more capacity, the KOM Cycling Tool Roll ($39.99) features three pockets and is large enough to accommodate your multitool, larger-sized tubes and other essentials, neatly and securely with the ATOP knob lacing system under the seat. Like its accessory-keeping cousin, the roll features non-abrasive materials that won’t scratch your ride.

Make the best of being stuck at home with these five cabin-fever killers

Maybe you once dreamed of how great it would be to cut your commute and work from home full time. Perhaps you imagined the domestic bliss of home-schooling your kids and having more quality time with the family. Now, that’s your reality be default, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and living-working-schooling at home is not all you expected. Well, here’s a few ideas to make your home life more liveable and comfortable while we all ride out this current crisis and look forward to the day when we can leave the house without worry of COVID-19.

A DIY Pillow

The first thing many of us think of about homebody life is sleeping in and nestling in our beds — sleeping in, taking a mid-day nap, or hitting the hay early when you’ve binged watched every great series on Netflix and there’s no place to go out.  Make your snooze time especially cozy with a Coop pillow. This stuff-it-yourself pillow comes with a plushy quilted case that you can fill to your heart’s (or your head and neck’s) desire.  In fact, it came with so much shredded foam filling that I made a smaller travel pillow out of the remainder after I fluffed my pillow to the perfect size.

Good Scents

After being cooped up in the same house day after day can make you miss going places,  and if you’re quarantined with a houseful of people, the air quality can get a bit stuffy. That’s when Moodo can be a mood saver. The electronic air freshener features unique pods that can be dropped into a diffuser to spread a variety of aromas around your indoors environment.   A smart version of the Moodo dispenser can accommodate up to four pods in which you can mix-and-match scents and control with an app on your phone. A smaller, more portable Moodo one-pod diffuser fits discreetly wherever you want, even a car cup holder, to fill the air with exciting fresh fragrances like beach party, lawnscape or classic vanilla.

Smart Switch

Now that you have time at home to do all those chores and fix-ups, finally you can smarten up your living space with Treatlife smart switches. With these sleek switches you can control lights remotely with the Smart Life app on your smartphone, IFTTT, Alexa or Google home devices, so you don’t even have to get out of bed to turn on or off the overhead. You can even schedule lights to come on and welcome you home, or turn them off if you forgot and left them on, when you make a rare venture out of the house, to social distance with friends.

Soft Walls

Designers often advise painting walls a new color to refresh a space, but Vant panels are a way better way to make your space go from blah to brilliant in an afternoon. These cushion-like panels snap into place on a aluminum bracket that can be installed on a wall in minutes. The assortment of colors and textures can accommodate the decor in any room, from the bedroom to a wet bar. At my home we used them for a special ambiance in a home podcast studio, where the panels provided excellent sound-proofing in addition to looking fabulous.

New Old Photos 

Those boxes of old photos and slides have been gathering dust for years, so use your lock-down leisure time to digitize them and make them look like new with Vivid-Pix, a software program that restores photos with artificial intelligence that can improve scanned photos in seconds.  Suddenly sepia-tones and muted colors appear bright and crisp. Our family historian, my cousin, used Vivid-Pix on more than 1,000 photos that he uploaded to a family Facebook page in a single day, to the delight of family and friends who joyfully pursued these once-lost and forgotten photos — keeping precious memories from literally fading away.