Charlie is a perfect little Jack Russell Terrier boy of 11 years old. He’s great with children, cats and other dogs and doesn’t mind being left for reasonable periods of time. He’s still active too so will make a great walking companion.
Minnie has had 11 sad months in kennels after years as the devoted companion to her loving owner. She’s a well-behaved girl who loves to be with people and enjoys a fuss, but she isn’t demanding. Minnie’s lively for her age and walks beautifully on a lead. Can Minnie devote herself to you?
Americans scrapped 4 million more cars and trucks last year than they purchased, the first significant drop in the U.S. auto fleet in more than four decades, according to a new report.
The United States scrapped 14 million vehicles last year while buying only 10 million new ones, dropping the nation’s fleet from an all-time high of 250 million to 246 million, according to the Earth Policy Institute .
This is Part Two of a three part interview with Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors. They recently displayed their Rally Fighter at the 2009 SEMA show and look to change the way cars are designed, and built. Read Part One here.
On Monday we covered how Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, had a vision for a new kind of car company. He wanted the people to design and vote on the car they wanted. That is how the Rally Fighter came to be.
Of course, drawing a car is a lot easier than building one. This is the same reason concept cars rarely make it into production unscathed. The Rally Fighter evolved substantially from Sangho Kim’s first rendering, though the resemblance to the famous World War II P-51 fighter plane (where the Ford Mustang also got its name, before going to the equine imagery) remained intact. What came next was actually building a car, based on Sangho’s design, without the benefit of a factory or an army of robots.
This meant it was time to make some hard decisions. But Jay would get help from his community of designers for that too.
The Answers section has seen a lot of activity with loads of questions
and plenty of good answers. To salute the curious and the knowledgeable,
we are posting three top 50 lists. One for the best answers, one for
questions, and a third for total answers. Enjoy! Top 50 members with
best answers …
By: fungus amungus
LAS VEGAS–With its much-anticipated Chevy Volt set to hit the streets by the end of the year, General Motors is beginning to provide a more detailed (although by no means complete) picture of life with an electric car. Focusing on the daily logistics of making sure your electric car has enough juice to get you from point A to point B, Chevy and GM subsidiary OnStar have now introduced a smart phone application to help drivers remotely manage the charging process . The announcement came here late Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). [More]
Efficient, light, and affordable. That is the philosophy behind the Tata Nano, the world’s cheapest car, and one of the smallest as well. Launched earlier this year in Tata’s home market of India, the Nano is a lesson in minimalism, with a trunk that doesn’t open, a single wiper blade, and a number of other cost cutting features that keep its price down to just $2,160. Yes, you can buy a brand new car for just over $2,000 American dollars in India.
In fact, you might be able to buy one here in the good old U.S.A. in a few years. Reuters is reporting that Tata is considering selling the Nano right here in America. The question is, would Americans buy it?
Teaser image of the baby Prius concept Toyota plans to introduce in Detroit next week.
At next weeks Detroit show Toyota will reportedly debut a baby Prius, a subcompact version of the Prius hybrid that comprises 75% of Toyota’s hybrid sales.
Up till now, Toyota’s additional hybrid sales have been split between an assortment of bigger and frumpier hybrids like the Highlander, or the luxury hybrids in the Lexus line. But all seven of those models together only account for the remaining 25% of sales.
So, perhaps wisely, the company is changing direction.
Researchers at Purdue have impregnated paper with iron particles,
creating "ferropaper."
—————————————— Researchers at Purdue
University have created a magnetic "ferropaper" that might be
used to make low-cost "micromotors" for surgical instruments,
tiny tweezers to study…
By: CameronSS
In 1975 electronics pioneer Gordon Moore famously predicted that the complexity of integrated-circuit chips would double every two years. Manufacturing advances would allow the chip’s transistors to shrink and shrink, so electrical signals would have to travel less distance to process information. To the electronics industry and to consumers, Moore’s Law, as it became known, meant computerized devices would relentlessly become smaller, faster and cheaper. Thanks to ceaseless innovation in semiconductor design and fabrication, chips have followed remarkably close to that trajectory for 35 years.
Engineers knew, however, they would hit a wall at some point. Transistors would become only tens of atoms thick. At that scale, basic laws of physics would impose limits. Even before the wall was hit, two practical problems were likely to arise. Placing transistors so small and close together while still getting a high yield–usable chips versus defective ones–could become overly expensive. And the heat generated by the thicket of transistors switching on and off could climb enough to start cooking the elements themselves.
CES is not just about the ground-breaking new big techy things in life, you know, it’s also about weird and wonderful little peripherals — such as these disco-tastic wires from ION Audio. The Desk FX cables hook up to your USB ports, giving an eerie glow to whatever you’re working on, and highlighting all that hideous desk crud in a nauseating booger green. Expect them in a slew of colors in the first half of this year.
Via technabob
Somehow this didn’t make it into the blog earlier – our Time.com video about helium. A flight in a zeppelin, a visit with the Balloon Lady, and the end of an era?…
Related Post:
Japan’s Green House has released a new device that would probably make wine lover and a-list geek Gary Vaynerchuk swoon.
The Cork USB Memory looks exactly like a wine cork but conceals a whopping 2 gigabytes of memory under its deceptively realistic shell. Built using the USB 2.0 standard, this classy bit of flash memory will only cost you 4,750 yen ($52) here.
Via Akihabara News
Liquid Image, which makes lots of underwater video gear, will start selling a helmet camera/camcorder this June, perfect if you’re planning a trip to Antarctica or the North Pole or the top of Mount Everest.
If you wait for snow in your immediate environs, the Summit Series Snow Camera Goggle 335 ($150) shoots 5 MP stills and 720p HD video. Lights inside the goggles tell you what mode you’re in. It’s got 16 GB of flash built in, and a microSD card slot good for another 16 GB. The battery lasts 2:20 hours of video and can snap up to 2,200 still shots, plenty of time to capture ski bunnies on the ski lift up the slope and your tree crash on the way down.
This spring, the company also will update three of its other face-mounted wide angle video gear, the Freestyle 330 swim goggles ($80, April), the Scuba Series HD322 ($350, May) and wide angle VideoMask 312 ($200, May).
And you thought the Chumby One was a tricked-out clock radio? Here’s its well-heeled competitor, the Pure Sensia. Billed as the “ultimate digital radio,” the $349 bedside boombox has a 5.7″ 640×480 capacitive touchscreen (that seemed a bit slow to respond to us, but it’s not due on the market until this summer), theoretically better than Chumby’s conductive touchscreen.
The Sensia’s pumping 30 watts into its speakers, but we couldn’t tell how good they sounded in the noisy room. One thing’s for sure — it’s beautifully designed, albeit too big for a clock radio compared to the Chumby. Its makers say a variety of apps will be available by its ship date, inclusing the usual suspects such as Twitter, facebook, and weather apps.
Since this product is still in its prototype stage, we’re reluctant to judge it, but still, it looks like it has a long way to go before it catches up to the Chumby in the app department. But we like the notion that there are competitors for Chumby, endorsing its worth.
Taipei 101 will spend T$60 million ($1.9 million) over the next year to meet 100 criteria for an environmental certificate that it would hold over Dubai, spokesman Michael Liu said.
The office-commercial tower that reigned for five years as the world’s highest building at 509 meters (1,670 feet) expects the U.S-based Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design to give it the certificate in 2011.
Look out! Here comes the Quadricopter, and it’s controllable with your iPhone or iPod Touch’s accelerometer. The Parrott AR.Drone has 640×480 15fps front-facing camera, transmitting its video to your iPhone. There’s another camera facing down, shooting in lower rez but at 60fps. It’s even smart enough to take off and land by itself.
Parrot says it’ll be available by the end of the year, and now gaming developers are working with the aircraft and its two cameras to create unique content. Let you imagination run wild. While you do that, look at how stable it already flies, easily controlled by tilting the iPhone one way or another. Sure, it’s a toy, but it’s so sophisticated, it comes close to that narrow line separating toys from precision weapons.
Whoa, what is this insanity? A tiny projector that turns any surface into a 10-inch auto-focused touchscreen? Where a similar idea has failed before comes Light Touch, a laser-driven product from Light Blue Optics that we’re hunting down here at CES.
Does it work? We’ll find out and show you. For now, just think of the possibilities: HLP (holographic laser projection). Yeah.
Via Engadget
Today’s laptops are faster than ever, but that processing power comes at a price: excess heat. That heat isn’t just inconvenient — it can be downright dangerous. To protect your, uh, lap, Logitech today unveils its Speaker Lapdesk N700 laptop stand. USB powered, it contains a fan and stereo speakers, all easily controlled by the simple buttons on the side.
I’ve been using the N700 for a couple of weeks and I’m pretty impressed. It’s a good reaction to how people actually use laptops these days — sitting on the couch to chat while watching Gossip Girl, lying back on your bed, or just generally lounging around. Beyond just providing a heat barrier and comfortable padding, the Lapdesk raises your screen a few inches so you don’t have to crane your neck so much. The fan is super-silent; I could barely tell it was on while plugged in, and the speakers were noticeably more robust than the built-in ones on my MacBook Pro.
My only complaint about the Lapdesk would be its power drain; on a couple of occasions, I left my laptop sitting on my couch for a while only to return to find a dead laptop. If you remember to close your lid when you walk away, though (or just are more vigilant than I am about your energy-saver settings), you shouldn’t have problems. At $80, the N700 is a bit steep than other laptop stands, but for the YouTube-addicted roamer, it’s a solid buy.
Via Logitech
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