motogobi

Little known fact about me: I’m pretty damn good with a weapon or two. But not even remotely as good as some of these guys (mostly military):

Some comments from glin1216′s YouTube page:

danshyu: Heh, I’ve always thought those Magpul fore grips are nothing but a gimmick, do they actually make any difference or are they just another one of those tacticool gadget?

glin1216: @danshyu It allows me to better snap my muzzle onto threats. I personally feel it gives me better control of my weapon. The downside? I get labeled a Magpul whore by everyone.

(BTW: I have a Magpul AFG on my 16″…)

Web service fave of mine Mint.com just released a pretty nifty update this morning in the form of Goals – although there is a curious lack of that news on the update blog at mint.com. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of Mint – I would go so far as to say that I’ve never really gotten more control over my finances until I surrendered them to a service like Mint, which tracks our finances automagically and cleanly. I definitely know I’ve gained more ground on expenses and trimming the fat over the last year as a direct result. Well, Mint.com just quietly gave me one more, very important dashboard item to help get more enjoyable control of where our money’s going: Goals.

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Why, a 1977 SAAB 99 Turbo notchback. Being a mere mortal, I owned the non-turbo version of this car in high school.

No, this particular car is one of just four notchback 99 Turbo sedans brought into the U.S. as early test cars, part of an overall fleet of 40 99 Turbos.

While everyone waits to see what Spyker will do with SAAB, Jalopnik has taken a drive in my current most-lustworthy automobile. Current, I say, while probably mentally cementing it into the slot of “All-time most lustworthy.”

As we reach down between the seats and turn the key, the old 99 protests just a bit until we coax a breath out of it with a slight stab of the throttle. The car warms up within a couple of minutes, at which point we mash the throttle. Boost builds steadily, but serious acceleration doesn’t really happen until around 3500 rpm.

What I wouldn’t give to own this 99…

This, my friends, is what true stardom should mean:

This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a crapcan off Craigslist to run against the $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It’s the story of a gearhead who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned race.

Most of all, it is a story of hoonage.

I’m somewhat speechless:

Slocum and I were estimating.¬†I signed autographs for three hours straight on Sunday alone. He thinks it might be close to 1500 or 2000 autographs and maybe 1000-1500 pictures.¬†A couple hundred people were screaming “Caswell! Caswell!” at one point. But I guess the fact that Ken Block and I are the only Americans that came down makes me legit or something?¬†We finished third in class. Don’t know how I got here. Nuts.

Just read it. Nuts, indeed.

via Jalopnik:

Tyler Shipman loves Pontiac Fieros so much he posed for his senior picture with one he bought for $150. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d need a miracle to finish his project car.

And boy, did that miracle show up in a big way. Watch the video above for the story.

This is huge for anyone who owns an Apple product and has ever dealt with having to fix, say, a keyboard that your cat puked on (ask me how I know this…): iFixit has released it’s fixit guides for iPhones, iPods, Macbooks, and Mac desktops under a Creative Commons license. For the average person, this basically means that you can access their online guides for free.

via Lifehacker:

We’ve always been impressed with the detailed, step-by-step guides iFixit has posted for MacBooks, iPods, and other devices. Now the site’s put every bit of its content, and future posts, under a Creative Commons license, one that allows for free, non-commercial distribution and modification, with attribution. That doesn’t mean you can go selling your own knocked-off repair guides, but you can rest assured that iFixit will get better international translations, and that its sometimes irreplaceable repair guides will stick around in one form or another for some time.

…or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overview.

I’ll freely admit that I suck with money: I spend it if I’ve got it, I can’t keep track of it very well, and budgeting is… well… one of those things I’ve never learned. For the last 10 years or so I’ve been an avid Quicken user, using it much like a high-powered check register: I’d enter every single transaction, and as those cleared the bank I would reconcile them in Quicken. With the advent and proliferation of debit cards and my preference to use cash less and less, the amount of transactions I was entering and reconciling was in the thousands per year. That’s a lot of work, and for very little gain it turns out. continue reading…

Oftentimes I look at my iPhone and wonder why I’m not enjoying it more like all those people on the commercials who link up with 27 of their closest friends in downtown San Francisco for some flashmob Titterific event… or something.

And then I find an app like RedLaser. So incredibly worth the $2 they’re charging for it. In short, point your iPhone at a bar code and it almost instantly will give you price comparisons across Amazon.com and Google Product Search. I started scanning everything in my house. It told me we could replace Anna’s BlackBerry for $249, told me where to purchase Ramen by the case, and even gave me price comparisons for a box of Winchester .308 FMJ. ($14.99? Are you kidding me?) It would seem that if something’s got a UPC barcode, this app will look it up for you. Simply awesome.

1. VirtualBox is much, much faster on my Windows 7 PC than VMWare Workstation 6.5. And cheaper.
2. ted, the torrent episode downloader, is possibly one of the most efficient fixes to an organizational problem I’ve had in quite some time.
3. Videora, while incredibly bloated with ads and general GUI ickiness, is very adept at getting DivX video onto my iPhone.
4. I have to tell you I’m not being paid to shill for any of these products

In a Hyundai. We seem to have come a long way from the Excel, folks.

via Jalopnik