Category: Transport
Pioneer's DEH-P4100SD – a car stereo with an SD card slot to aid choice and/or piracy
Pioneer’s just revealed its latest in-car entertainment solution for the businessman trapped in a snow drift with no mobile signal or radio reception – the DEH-P4100SD.
The big selling point of the P4100 is its SD Card slot, allowing you to do away with the middle man (DJ, CD writer, iPod, cable) and load up your MP3 collection to a cheapo SD Card and whack it straight into your car via the slot hidden behind the removable faceplate.
Pioneer’s “rotary commander” dial-slash-joystick lets you navigate through tunes while still managing to pay some attention to the road, while there’s also full support for iPod playlists if you’re the sort of person who likes to spend your spare time painstakingly sorting all your music into very tightly-organised playlists…
Mileage Tracker: GPS tech comes to the rescue to help with your expenses
Perhaps now isn’t the best time to remind you that (if you have to do the dreaded Tax Return) you’ve a little over a day left to complete it.
However, if nitty-gritty stuff like car mileage tracking has been a real pain to calculate then the Mileage Tracker could be the answer.
Using GPS (naturally), it can track what distances you’ve travelled in your car and export it to a CSV file (boring) or Google Earth (cool)…
Soviet K-7 bomber blots out the sun
Second and final in our series of posts today about very big things is this Soviet K-7 bomber, which dates from 1930s, before jet propulsion. As you can see by the tiny little people in the bottom right, this thing is vast – 28 metres long and 53m wing-to-wing. It weighed 38 tonnes when loaded.
It carried 120 passengers within wings which were 2.3m thick. Melded from chrome-molybdenum steel, the design originally called for six engines, but when built, a seventh had to be added. It first flew in August 1933, but crashed that November, killing 15 people. Two more were ordered, but the project was cancelled before they could be delivered.
(via Gizmowatch)
Related posts: No phones on planes please, we’re British, survey finds | XCOR Lynx – Tech Digest’s Space Plane of the Week
VIDEO: Worldwide air traffic over 24 hours
Click play on the video. Now watch as the world’s aeroplanes cross continents and oceans. It’s strangely relaxing in the same way that watching a trail of ants in a garden on a warm summer’s afternoon is relaxing. One thing that’s worth looking out for – compare Europe at the start of the video to Europe at 0:45 – the flight volume changes dramatically between day and night.
Seen a similarly fantastic depiction of data? Post it in the comments below. I love stuff like this, so if you’ve got a favourite visualization of information then I want to see it too.
Nitmesh (via @damiano)
Related posts: First photo of Hudson air crash surfaces on Twitter | No phones on planes please, we’re British, survey finds
Voice-controlled toy helicopters coming later this year
Evil geniuses, take note. Your army of drone planes that currently need to be controlled by an army of assistants will, in March, become obsolete when Tokyo-based Taiyo corp releases a voice-controlled toy helicopter. It’s going to understand English and Japanese, and understands “”start engine,” “up,” “hold,” “down” and “stop”. No “forward”?
It’s battery-powered, 18cm long, and can fly 10m away from the operator. You need to wear a headset to control it, too. Still, it’s likely you’ll be able to mod it to carry tiny miniguns, and hack it to fire on voice command, too. If everything goes wrong, you can control it by conventional remote, too. It’ll cost $60 (£42 or so).
(via CrunchGear)
Related posts: Libelula: Rocket powered helicopter back pack – er, wow! | The DIY helicopter powered by a Honda Civic engine
ECCENTRIC BRITISH HEROES: Neil Laughton driving/flying his Skycar from London to Timbuktu
Adventurer and after-dinner speaker Neil Laughton’s customised dune buggy can fly. So he’s going to fly it – taking off from London this Wednesday, and landing/rolling up in Timbuktu approximately 42 days later.
The buggy comes with a detachable ParaWing (parachute/aerofoil thing) and has a fan on the back of it, allowing it to take off into the sky when it hits 45mph – and it can then cruise at 70mph at a possible and terrifying maximum altitude of 15,000 feet…
Twitterer liveblogs his own plane crash
On Saturday night in Denver, Colorado, Continental Airlines flight 737 slid off the runway during takeoff. One of the engines caught fire, but passengers escaped out of the opposite side on slides. Although 38 people were hurt, thankfully no-one was killed.
However, one of the passengers was Mike Wilson, aka @2drinksbehind. He live-Twittered the crash(!), and so if you’re phobic of flying on planes, then you might not want to click over the jump.
Glasgow tube stations get O2 phone reception today
That nice gentleman up there has probably just fainted with delight, after discovering that today he’s able to use his O2 mobile on the tube in Glasgow. We’ve known about it for a while, but today, O2 has brought phone reception to the five busiest platforms on the Glasgow subway – Buchanan Street, St Enoch, Partick, Hillhead and Govan.
The move is just a trial, but if it goes well, then you can bet your bottom dollar, or pound, that it’ll show up in London, and any other subway systems around Britain. Get ready to ask loud people to shut up underground, as well as on buses and trains.
Are you in Glasgow and on O2? What’s the service like – perfect? Or a bit patchy? Let us know in the comments.
O2 Press release (via O2UKOfficial Twitter)
Related posts: O2 brings mobile reception to the UK underground | The other first mobile phone use in the UK underground?
Petrol-powered Snowboard is snow joke
Okay, in reality this bears as much resemblance to a regular snowboard as a petrol-powered, three seater lawnmower with cupholders does to a hand-pushed traditional lawnmower, but bright yellow paintwork aside, doesn’t it look awesome?
It’s got a 6.5 horsepower engine, and can carry up to 250lbs as fast as 18mph. That might not sound fast if you’re used to cars, but when you’re whizzing along millimetres from the snow, it feels a damn sight faster than is comfortable. You steer by – *gulp* – leaning to one side, and it’ll run for two hours on three quarters of a gallon of petrol. The cost? A slick US$2,000. At that price, I’ll stick to my skis.
Hammacher Schlemmer (via OhGizmo!)
Related posts: Sno-Baller: huge tongs for making perfectly spherical snowballs | 20,000MW Speakers made of snow
The Novus Mini Coyote – happily exploiting a legal grey area to give drivers real-time speed camera updates
The Novus Mini Coyote lets drivers radio in the location of hidden, newly-placed and mobile speed cameras, compiling a central database that will alert aggressive BMW drivers to when they need to slow down.
It isn’t illegal – but presumably soon will be. We can’t imagine THE LAW putting up with this sort of anti-social, rule-flouting behaviour for long. Here’s how Novus describes its all-seeing, all-warning anti-radar machine…
