By mike
To quote Gizmodo today:
Sure, you can get a fuel-efficient hybrid car, but it’ll cost tens of thousands of dollars. That’s too much for the Top Gear crew, who’ve set out to build a 70MPG car for only $7,000.
They’re doing this by buying a 28-year-old Volkswagen Rabbit, driving it up to CWS Tuning in Saskatchewan, replacing the engine with a “modern, computer-controlled, turbocharged VW TDI engine” and then driving it down to UCLA where aerodynamics professor John McNulty will help, as they say “make the car more slippery.”
And for reference, a 2009 Toyota Prius achieves 48MPG and costs $22,720, while a 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid achieves 40MPG and costs $24,320. This thing will get 70MPG for $7,000.
It’s a downright awesome project, one that they’ll be covering step by step online via video and images. And they’re looking to get the internet to name it for them, so look for the Ballsmobile to hitting the road in the near future. We can’t wait.
By mike
Yeah, there were a whole ton of people all pissed off about the latest Facebook terms of service (ToS). As Consumerist says:
Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s Facebook’s now.
Queue the millions making FB groups denouncing Mark Zuckerberg, and so on. It now looks like the people at FB are taking a longer look at their decision:
Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Whether you decide to keep your Facebook account or not, you might want to get just a wee bit more paranoid about who can see your stuff. And thus the recommendation of an excellent article over at AllFacebook: 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know. There were more than a few good suggestions in there that I had no idea you could do. Read it. Facebook it.
By mike
Click for larger image
’cause I’m dead-set on an iPhone, and I’m dead-set against T-Mobile. But how cool of a feature is My Tracks?
Many GPS receivers require you to plug a separate device into a computer, install software, transfer, convert and upload your track to the web. With My Tracks, this has become a whole lot simpler. I no longer need to carry multiple devices when I go out for a ride, and I can easily share my rides on the spot with anyone I’d like by recording and uploading my track right from my phone and then sharing it out via email or even Twitter.
Granted, I think that Twitter is utterly stupid, but how useful would this be for motorbike rides, 4-wheeling, mountain biking, proving just how many tracks you got in last weekend at Mary Jane? So cool…
EDIT: The folks at TheAdventureLife.org have posted up their top 25 outdoor iPhone apps. Maybe “Trails”?
By mike
I have no idea how I missed this – I guess I keep my desktop too cluttered up with stuff to notice? I’ve been running Windows 7 since it was released as Beta and love it. Enough so that the next laptop most likely will be a PC? (gasp!) Anyhoo, I had disabled User Account Control in Windows 7 simply because I’ve honestly never run into an issue in the past on non-UAC-enabled Windows versions like XP – read: I have no problem running everything as administrator. But disabling UAC ended up closing all my gadgets. And I’ve liked gadgets in the past and I want them back. How do you do it? Via the registry, of course.
Fire up regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Sidebar \ Settings
Create a new DWORD (not a 64-bit QWORD) named AllowElevatedProcess. Set that value to 1 and close regedit. No need to reboot or anything. Go back to Control Panel, and gadgetize-away.
Take this all with a grain of salt, as there are those that view this issue as a major security flaw: Sacrificing security for usability: UAC security flaw in Windows 7 beta.
To quote Gizmodo today:
