‘Poker Face’ is the millennial ‘Columbo’ riff I’ve been waiting for

Poker Face isn’t the sort of show that can be spoiled, but have a warning anyway.I always think there’s been a gulf between production-line TV and its prestige brethren, but that the internet helped demarcate its edges. NCIS was the most-watched drama …

Swytch Air expands your world for less than the cost of an e-bike

I’ve worked from home for twelve-plus years now, and between that, kids and COVID lockdowns I hadn’t realized just how much my world had shrunk. We have one car that my wife uses to go to work, so I spent my days getting around on foot, or using the local bike share scheme. But it was only when I started listing where I go, that I realized how small my world has become. These days, I’m limited to my office, the backyard, my kids’ school and the nearest, admittedly lackluster strip mall. I think I blinded myself to how small my horizons had become until I was given an excuse to probe beyond.

This, I should explain, came in the context of my 38th birthday, after deciding that I would try a ground-up rebuild of my bike. A 2005 Falcon Nomad, which had been sitting in a succession of sheds for the last 15-or-so years. I figured I’d ask for the tools, and a book explaining what to do, and then teach myself to strip and reassemble a bicycle as I went. This, friends, did not go very well, since the bike’s advanced age and poor state meant every repair I attempted, from paint job to brake replacement, went horribly wrong. (Maybe I should just concede that I’m not, and never will be, “good with my hands,” and that when the apocalypse comes, my role will be to be hunted and eaten.)

Close up of the Swytch Kit (2022) front wheel hub motor.
Daniel Cooper

It also seemed the ideal moment to try Swytch, a product I’d been interested in for several years at this point. The company produces a retrofit e-bike kit that can be easily bolted onto existing bicycles, giving them a new lease of electric life. All you need to do is swap out the front wheel for a new one with a built-in 250W electric motor, which comes with a battery, pedal sensor and controller. Now, depending on your patience and budget, you can snag a Swytch kit for around £450 ($550 before tax), although it’s commonly more expensive. That said, a Swytch kit and an analog bicycle is often far cheaper than all but the most basic (and ugly) of new e-bikes.

(There’s also the longstanding point that millions of people have bikes in similar states of disrepair in their own sheds or garages. But a lack of confidence, or fitness, means that they won’t get them out and reacquaint themselves with cycling. If you could easily and cheaply add an electric motor to one, however, then most of those objections fade away pretty quickly.)

Buying a Swytch kit is more complex than just heading down to a store and snatching one up – you’ll need to let Swytch know the size of your existing bike and wheels. You’ll need to send them detailed measurements of your front forks, and the size of the gap into which a wheel can be inserted. Then, after some delay, it’ll send you a custom-sized wheel built to fit into the space, with all of the necessaries to get you up and running.

Close up of the Swytch Kit Air (2022) Battery and handlebar mount
Daniel Cooper

The ads say that if you’re capable of changing a tyre, then you’re capable of installing Swytch, which is accurate. Even I, who couldn’t get my rear brakes to sit properly, was able to screw in the wheel and wire up the cable. Once you’ve done, it’s mostly self-explanatory, although I would have liked some more guidance as to best placement for the pedal sensor. You basically just use a hex key to bolt on the little OLED display, battery controller / mount and wire up the (color-coded) cables, using the cable ties supplied to keep everything tidy.

One tip – when you’re attaching the wheel of magnets to the crank arm and the Hall Effect sensor, leave your cable ties loose until everything’s lined up. That way, you can make finer adjustments, useful since every Swytch customer is entitled to a quick video call with a tech support person. They’ll survey your setup, and make sure that your installation has been successful, and offer any hints to improve your performance. (To be honest, I still don’t think I’ve necessarily got mine in the best place, but imagine that my ability is very much the deepest floor and that most people will do much better.) 

Previous Swytch models required battery packs that were closer to purse sizes than anything more elegant. The new innovation with this generation of kit is the greatly reduced size, with the Air battery pack now small enough to fit into your pocket. Swytch Air’s 36V battery pack will run you around 10 miles of assist on Level 2 power, and is a little bigger than a beefy mobile power brick. The company has made a deal about the fact that Air is more or less “pocketable,” although you wouldn’t want to keep it in your back pocket for any serious period of time.

Image of the Swytch Air OLED display.
Daniel Cooper

More crucially, at 700 grams, or around 1.5 pounds, it’s light enough to toss into your bag when you’re parked up. Oh, for completeness’ sake, there is a larger version of the Swytch battery, Max, which has a quoted range of around just under 20 miles and is a little under twice the size and weight. Although both of these are on the conservative side, mostly because the kit won’t kick in if you’re cycling in flat, easy conditions. So you can actually expect that distance to run for quite a bit longer, good for days where you’ll be covering plenty of ground.

I had a fairly busy day last week, with a trip to two different medical centers on opposite ends of the city and the bank in between. The whole journey would have taken me about 20 minutes for each leg of the trip by car, or several hours if I’d taken the bus. But while I’ve not cycled 10 miles in a single go, on mostly major roads, for… decades at this point, I felt that the Swytch could help. After all, if the terrain was rough, I could kick in the assistance to help me, and I wasn’t worried about running out of energy for the same reason.

Image of the Hall effect sensor and magnet wheel attached to my crank arm, which I'm 99 percent sure is installed wrong.
Daniel Cooper

The other thing a Swytch kit does is offer you the power that gives you the confidence to do the hard stuff. Like powering up a hill, or sitting between cars at the lights, knowing that you’ve got the electric power to not get chewed up when we have to start. Knowing that I can pretty easily kick up the assistance level and get my speed up to 12-or-so miles an hour before the driver beside me can put their foot down makes for a sturdier ride.

Now, there’s nothing that Swytch is doing that more technical-minded riders couldn’t do on their own. I’ve seen forum talk about saving money by opting for a third-party wheel kit and some hefty DIY, but I don’t think this applies here. Swytch isn’t charging mad money for the setup, and offers a cohesive, sealed package that offers you peace of mind and proper technical support.

There are downsides… obviously there are downsides. Bolting on the machinery for an e-bike onto one that wasn’t built for it is a little inelegant. It required a lot of fiddling, and I’m still not sure that I’ve got it set up as perfectly as I could do, but it’s certainly achievable. Taking up so much space on your front handlebars, too, means that you’re losing a lot of real estate to the battery mount and controller. If you’ve got bike lights that sit close to the bar, you might need to relocate them to the head tube, and then find it’s not as useful a place to stick them.

My bike, with the Swytch Kit (2022) installed.
Daniel Cooper

As for pricing and availability, that’s a little complex: Swytch will charge you up to £999 (around $1,010 excluding the UK’s sales tax) for a kit if you want one as quickly as it can ship one to you. But it’ll also offer – at the very minimum – a 50 percent discount if you choose to wait for a later shipment from the factory, with that figure rising up to 60 percent depending on your patience. If you’re prepared to delay your gratification for long enough, you could snag one of these things for £450 (around $550 before tax), which as far as I’m concerned, is the price this thing becomes a no-brainer.

I’m sufficiently impressed by the Swytch kit to want to buy the unit currently bolted to my bike. The ability to quickly and easily add so much power, with all of the privileges that conveys, is pretty darn special. I can heartily recommend it to people with bikes rusting in their sheds, who want to get back on the road but are worried their fitness level won’t permit them to travel very far. Take it from me – it’s worth it.

Samsung’s display injunction leaves repair technicians worried

Samsung may have found a way to strike a hefty blow to the United States’ burgeoning right to repair movement. It has approached the International Trade Commission (ITC), requesting an investigation into the importation of third-party OLED displays for…

What happens when smart bulbs meet dumb software?

The official Philips Hue app sucks.

You’d think that, being the oldest name in the smart lighting world, Philips would have the best app on the market. More than a decade of iterative improvements and a mature hardware world would see the app rise proudly above its competitors. Sadly for me, and every other Hue user, the company seems to have fallen asleep behind the wheel.

(Yes: I know that Philips Lighting rebranded itself as Signify, but let’s not confuse matters here.)

I picked up a Hue starter kit and some additional Lux bulbs back in 2013, and was very impressed with the setup for at least ten minutes. It very quickly became one of those gadgets that only really got used to show the power of your smart home to visitors. And they rather quickly tired of my ability to change my living room lights from white to purple, and back again. In fact, I mostly used the bulbs as glorified dimmer switches, which wasn’t enough to justify the high cost of the initial investment.

At some point, the app started insisting I replace the v1 (round) Bridge for the v2 (square) model. And I bristled, already feeling aggrieved that Hue was all mouth and no trousers, I resented having to pay when the existing system worked perfectly well. Especially since I could have used that money to buy more Hue bulbs and further lock myself into Philips’ ecosystem.

No tears were shed when the Bridge eventually got smashed by one (or both) of my kids when I was out of the room. I decided, in a tiny flurry of COVID-19 lockdown-induced Marie Kondo-ing, that I’d toss the box into the trash and be done with it. After all, it was broken, and changing the color of my bulbs did not spark the joy I was expecting, not to mention the fact that Philips loves to charge a lot of cash to sync your lighting to a movie playing on your TV.

Last month, my wife asked me why we weren’t able to use Hue any more, and I explained the situation. She asked how much it would cost to fix it, and found a sealed, unused, second generation Bridge available on Facebook Marketplace for half the price at retail. So we snapped it up, obviously making the usual security checks about buying second hand IoT gear before plugging it into our network.

That was, however, when the troubles began, since you can’t just sign in to your existing Hue account, hook it up to the new Bridge, and be done. Nobody at Philips seems to have imagined that it might be worthwhile building out the ability to revive an account tied to a dead bridge. In fact, there’s no way to connect anything without a fresh login, and the bulbs themselves are tied to the old one. The app also doesn’t provide any way to hard reset a bulb, or in fact do anything beyond leave you staring at a splash screen.

For about half an hour, I did wonder if I’d just wasted some cash on a new Bridge but never to get things working again. I felt a frustration, a powerlessness, the sort that comes when you’re locked and bolted out of a building at 2am in an unfamiliar city and your phone’s out of charge. My login wouldn’t work, because my bridge wasn’t connected to the internet. A new login won’t even acknowledge the presence of the expensive hardware all over my house. My hands got very itchy.

This is the kicker: I’m not the first person to learn how bad Philips’ software development is, because there’s a whole army of third-party Hue apps out there. Much in the same way that charity is an indictment on behalf of the state, the depth and breadth of Hue apps available is a massive critique on Philips’ lackluster app development. You’re paid to do this, and there’s no available function in the app to be able to fix what could be a fairly common problem.

I opted to use Hue Lights, one of many independent apps that offered the ability to hard reset a bulb. All I had to do was bring each bulb close to the bridge (you’ll need a lamp handy), turn it on, and hard reset each unit individually. Then I could reconnect them to the new bridge and, as if by magic, could then start using them with the official Hue app. Not that, I’ll be honest, I really want to. Because this third-party, very simple app has more power than the official Philips app and it’s easier to use. If you haven’t tried it, I heartily recommend that you do. At least until Philips gets its act together.

There was a lot of pee on the CES 2023 show floor

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and I’m not sure if you can count four instances of a product as a trend, but it’s certainly an interesting thread at this year’s CES. At this year’s show, a quartet of companies are showing off urine analysis tools d…