Breathe life into your gearlists

[Dominic Nguyen]

I stumbled upon backpacking light forums and it's amazing to see the care taken in making these gear lists.

I thought ultralighters might be interested in a project I've been working on that visualizes your gear lists called Bindle [http://bindle.me]. I've prepared for jaunts into the outdoors before and know how time consuming deciding what to take, much less packing and weighing it all can be. That's why I made Bindle. We’ve tried to make a better way to visualize the things you depend on to get you from camp to camp. Use it to calculate the weight of your pack, as a visual checklist before leaving home, and to share it back here.

Pictures speak volumes.
Zoltan's Ultralight Hiking Setup: http://bindle.me/EgAAAAAA

In any case, here's an invite if you'd like to try it out.
http://bindle.me/users/sign_up?invitation_code=777cae502debf964be94
No spam intended. :)

p.s., If there’s anything we can add to make your experience better, let me know here!

[Nick Larsen]

Pretty cool actually! Although it still needs a lot of products from the cottage manufacturers. I see a way to add "new item" which requires you to upload a file. What kind of file do you need to upload? How do you upload it? Are you just uploading a picture file? As it seems you have to add the weight and cost yourself anyways.

Also, it would be nice if you could change the weight of things from grams to ounces to pounds to kilograms. Or, a way to display all of the above!

[John S.]

The sample list is incomplete and with an inefficient layout.

[Dominic Nguyen]

Nick: Thanks for checking it out. The upload is for photos. I'd love to get cottage manufacturer products on board. I really wish there was a simple way to keep up to date with what these guys are producing. Any ideas about finding a directory of these products would be helpful! Re: metric vs english — good tip!

John: Sorry to hear that. It seems like there are two concerns, the sample list and the layout. Could you elaborate what you mean by sample list? (not enough products, not the right products…) How can we make the layout less inefficient for you?

[Stephan Doyle]

I like the idea. Great thinking!

Haven't so much gone through it for inspection, but having a "Gear Closet" to display all your items, then choose from that "worn" and "packed" is fantastic. It's a way to visually show people what I have, what I didn't choose for this list, and so what activities I participate in (e.g. my Black Diamond Vipers say, "Hey! I do more than backpack," while another closet might just be filled with 3-season good-weather gear). It could be far more than UL backpacking, but a way of sharing our gear nerdiness to all sorts of groups.

[Jace Mullen]

I feel like this is a lot of work on my end, for what to see pictures of my gear?

I would check out geargrams.com, a site that many of us use for our gear. It allows easy conversion between units, it allows us to see a breakdown of weight by catagories as well as having one master gear list that we can make separate lists from. You may be able to on this, I can't make an account.

I see no real incentive to use bindle on my end. Maybe the cool factor? But thats about it.

A pretty neat site though, regardless.

A note, about not being able to make an account. I have signed up using my email, but I am stuck on the page that says "your profile" and it won't let me edit any of the fields/ move from the page. I am using Chrome on my Mac.

Ninja double edit!: It seems that I had to access my profile from the email you guys sent, that was frustrating. Perhaps change that or at least put a not somewhere saying that I will not be able to make any changes until I verify my email.

[Joslyn Bloodworth]

Gear Grams is nice but I get lost in all the listyness of it. I've actually gone back to writing out all my lists in a notebook old school style because of the headache that can ensue from the mass of faceless stuff and lack of groupings with spaces to visually define my categories. As an incredibly visual person, I love the idea of being able to see a picture of my stuff!

I'd like to see more interests available, like Kayaking, Hammock camping and a choice between ul backpacking and traditional to list a few.

Also I saw where I could put a SMD Starlite on my bindle but not the others, like my Swift. And no Zpacks or MLD. I think this is what people may have meant by the library is a bit small for backpackers.

I did see a place to upload a pic and description of my MYOG Gear which is good, but it didn't work when I tried to upload a picture of my hammock. Also it seems to be very slow moving and stops my computer in its tracks.

It's a good start but it's only half-way there for what a ul backpacker would need for such a tool.

[Dominic Nguyen]

Jace – Great pickups, we're taking a look at them now. I think the path we were coming from was more along the lines of what Joslyn mentioned: visualizing the gear that you have and being able to share that with others. In regards to geargrams, I think it's a great site that makes creating a spreadsheet for your gear easier.

Joslyn – Cheers on the tips. User created categories is on the roadmap. Re: performance, again I appreciate the pickup and it should be faster by the time you read this. Thanks for trying it out!

The gear index is quite diverse. Manufacturers w/o wide distribution aren't represented as well as they should be at the moment, you can however upload photos of the any gear that has a photo. :)

[Nick Larsen]

So if I upload a picture and give it a description, say a zpacks duomid, then will everyone be able to access it? Does it go into the main library, or is it something that only I can use? If it is the former, than your gear library will naturally grow as people make bindles. Would be nice to see something like this married to gear grams.

[Dominic Nguyen]

Nick – the picture is only connected to your account. Good idea about the growing the database this way. Does gear grams allow you to crowd-source weight?

Cheers! Dom

[Charles Henry]

my 2 cents:

1. It's hard to tell what at all your site does from the homepage. Alot of big promises though.
2. After alot more work on my part, it turns out you allow people to present a collection of stock photos of their gear.

So ok fine, instead of writing my gear down I can now do more work to present stock photos of it. In my opinion not very useful to the majority of backpackers, maybe interesting to some but it's massively oversold by phrases like "Breathe life into your gearlists".

I think one big problem with this is: People are who into gear want to show how special and unique their gear is, not demonstrate that anyone with a credit card can also assemble exactly the same gear list.

[Nick Gatel]

All of this is silly to me. I have a gear list to:

1. Use as a checklist – it only changes due to weather, season or water availability.

2. A database with item weights, helps me to compare to potential new products.

On any trip, I am familiar with all my gear and I do not have to agonize over what to bring, I pretty much know what will work. Assembling gear for any trip only takes a few minutes. I just want to make sure I do not have a 'senior moment' and forget something. All the time it takes to fiddle around with a sophisticated gear list could be used to actually go hiking.

Now if one makes a living hiking and writing about the experience, it would make sense to me.

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