photo: lake mist
I learned of it last night on The CBC’s As It Happens: Miles Hilton-Barber, blind since age 30, has flown from Biggen Hill, south of London, to Gosford, outside Sydney, by ultralight in a journey that took almost two months.
Aviation regulations required he take a sighted co-pilot, but in the As It Happens story he [...]
Even Bob Borchers, Apple’s senior director of iPod worldwide product marketing, calls most iPod car setups an “inelegant mess of cassette adaptors and wires.” Indeed, while Apple aparently doesn’t want to get into the car audio business, they do want to improve the in-car iPod experience:
What Apple really wants you to buy is a [...]
If the DeLorean looks at all like a Lotus Esprit, it should. Both of them were designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, and much of the engineering work was done by Lotus founder Colin–to add speed, add lightness–Chapman. Amusingly, John De Lorean also owned a company that manufactured snowcats under the DMC name.
Owners and wannabes can join [...]
A recent comment here reminded me to check in on our options for flying cars, now at least seven years overdue.
It turns out that Moller International, the folks developing the M400 Skycar aerodyne, are accepting deposits:
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is accepting deposits [...]
Greenstemstudios is selling a sweet-looking 1980 Vespa with sidecar.
In gleaming Cinder Red and House of Kolar Black, riding on white wall Continentals, “the scooter gets 60 to 70 miles to the gallon and can easily maintain 60 mph even with the sidecar attached.” The starting price is $3,750.
I’m plenty happy with my scooter, but [...]
That’s me on JetBlue Flight 481 to Long Beach, wearing my noise canceling headphones. Sandee saw me wanting them, so she was especially happy to make them a Christmas present to me. And, with all the flying I’ve been doing lately, I was especially happy to have them.
I wanted the QuietComfort 2s not just because [...]
Watch this video a few times. It’s funny. It’s catchy. It’s kitsch.
Now watch it a few times more. The ad, for a Lada VAZ 2109, appeared sometime in the 90s. It reflects the influence of MTV and other cultural imports from the West, but the details betray it’s command economy provenance. The snow appears trodden [...]
It’s late summer and the heat wave killed the grass on your lawn, so what better to do than challenge Bob Cleveland’s record for the fastest lawn mower yet? Not sure your mower has what it’ll take to race down the salt flats at over 80 MPH? Wimp.
Utah’s KSL TV quotes Bob saying “we don’t [...]
While we’re still waiting for flying cars (or even just fuel efficient cars) I’m keeping track of tiny helicopters like the GEN H-4 and this one, the AirScooter II, pictured above.
The company, AirScooter Corporation of Henderson NV, introduces the new craft with a tip of the hat to Igor Sikorsky’s earliest designs featuring counter-rotating blades. [...]
I pointed out this Jet Turbine Powered Toyota MR2 a year ago, but now I’ve discovered Ron Patrick’s Jet Powered VW Beatle. The story is well told in a San Francisco Gate article from April (with bonus video), which describes the builder:
Patrick is a 48-year-old Stanford-trained (Ph.D.) engineer who owns ECM (Engine Control and Monitoring), [...]
The light Sunday evening was golden, so I stopped to take way too many photos of the meadow in the sunset. Just before filling my memory card with all that, I got back to my scooter to find this scene with a haze settling on the field and the sun just ducking behind enough of [...]
The members of this Taiwanese scooter gang might really be cooler than me. Well, they would be cooler if the scooter gangs weren’t also known to be violent:
A scooter gang viciously attacked and injured 12 teenagers — three critically — while on a violent joyride in Taipei County’s Tucheng City…
The gang of more than 20 [...]
I told Vincent that I didn’t really care much for cars. It was my sister, I explained, that wanted to look. Vincent agreed quickly and said it was rock climbing that excited him most. Cars, it turned out, were just a family thing he had to play along with.
Still, he told me about the Lotus‘ [...]
My new scooter. It’s not much of a picture, but we’ve had two weeks of rain and this is what I could get.
A friend pointed me to PlaneCrashInfo.com and I can’t help but explore. I was told to start with the pictures (which end in late 2001, and so don’t include recent incidents like the flaming nose-wheel at LAX or the overshot runway in Chicago), but it was the collection of “last words” transcripts from the cockpit [...]
