I started riding my bike to work. I figured it would be good for the environment, save a bit of money, and I need to take more exercise anyway so it’s a win win win.

The ride is about 6 miles one way. Depending on the head wind, and how I feel about taking on the hills that day, the trip takes 35-45 minutes.

In my Chinese class, I am memorizing poems to work on my tones. It seemed like there should be a way to use that extra hour plus of pedal time to study without killing myself.

Here is my simple, cheap way of having my reference material available while I ride. (This is a really, really simple hack).

By the way, this is not something you can use to read while riding (unless you are crazy). This will probably only be useful if you are trying to memorize something, and doing a quick glance down is enough to check yourself.

This is what it looks like when you’re done:

You can probably figure out how to do it from the picture, but here is how I put mine together.

Get a sandwich bag and three twisty ties. The ties can be anything really, but I happen to have some fancy cable ties.

Cut 4 small slits on the back of the sandwich bag. Two horizontally below the zipper, towards the top, on the left and right side. Then cut two slits vertically towards the middle of the bag about an inch apart.

Then feed the ties though the top slits, and secure the ties to the handle bars. Finally, feed the other tie though the middle slits, and secure it to the bottom of the handle bars.

You can fold a piece of paper with a good amount of it showing, and slip it in the sandwich bag. If you do it right, you can close the sandwich bag to keep water out.

You could also use it to hold a map, but it probably wont stand up to serious mountain biking. However, I’ve been using the same bag for two weeks now and it’s still going strong.