[if you are looking for info about the aspire one, try this post]
Some things are simply better. That is, they are considerably better for being consider
ably simpler.
A few months back I converted an old road bike into a single speed – it only has one gear – which I use for my 14 mile round trip commute each day. It’s lighter and has fewer parts that might break or wear out; it’s efficient and fast and cheaper to maintain and set up; it’s actually great fun to ride and not having to think about changing gear means you have more time to enjoy the ride and focus on not getting wiped out by a bus.
Once I realised I didn’t need 2 gears, let alone 18 or 24 (Manchester is fairly flat) I was free to liberate my cycling experience from unnecessary 
complexity, weight and expense.
But the principle carries over to other areas of life. All my gadget lust at the moment is directed towards the new wave of low cost ‘ultra-portable’ laptops. The don’t do very much (relatively), but they do the basics very well, have low power consumption and don’t cost much (sub £200).
In times of rising fuel and food costs, I think consumers will become better at working out what they really want to pay for, and what they really want to be lumbered with. Are you paying for and carrying around more gears than you need?
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June 23, 2008 at 5:07 pm
toast
i do like singlespeeds, like the way they look stripped down and sleek – is that pic yours? its stunning. I decided to trade down a few gears and scoured ebay and came up with a 3-speed 1930’s raleigh, i love it.
My gadget lust has waned a lot in recent years, i have a couple of laptops that are 8/9 years old that were doing nothing – i installed xubuntu (ubuntu without KDE, so a little more responsive on older machines) and got gelaskins on it to hide a multitude of sins on the case and i now use these machines for most day-to-day stuff – i love them.
June 24, 2008 at 9:05 am
Geoff
sadly no, that’s not my bike – mine is a conversion from 35 year old road bike, in need of stripping and repainting to get thoese kind of looks.
I like the idea of Xubantu, might give it a go…
October 18, 2008 at 6:32 pm
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