techimoto

A Kansas man drives a 1983 Lincoln Towncar - forever!  The odometer just turned over 1,300,000 miles. He loves his car, and who can blame him; it gets about 22 mpg on the highway, and it has never broken down.  That car doesn’t owe him a dime, thats for sure. 

Now, lets talk about “planned obsolecence“.  Hmmm.

How much gasoline could US citizens save by driving around in light-weight hybrid vehicles? Up to half what they currently use, say scientists at MIT.

The US consumes about 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year. A team of researchers led by John Heywood has completed a five-year assessment of what can be done to slash that and save fuel for the nation.

They looked at how gas and diesel engines, as well as hybrid electric cars and plug-in cars, are likely to evolve between now and 2035. They also assessed what can reasonably be expected from new fuels such as hydrogen and biofuels.

“Improvements” in cars in recent years have largely focused on increasing performance, driven by the demand for ever-larger and more powerful cars. As a result, no significant fuel consumption gains have been realised over the past 25 years, says the team. Read the rest »

Need a computer that will match your new outfit? Help is on the way. Researchers are working on a low-tech computer that would cost as little as $12.

You can get these already in India. They look something like the original Nintendo console that many of us played video games on as a kid in the 1980s.

Variations on that original console sell in India for anywhere between $10 and $20 and plug into your TV, complete with game controllers and a computer keyboard. The consoles eventually expanded their game repertoire beyond “Duck Hunt” rip-offs to very basic word processing software.

“Now, would you like a computer to go with your new purse?”

To me, the presidential race reached a turning point last week when John McCain opted for a campaign of denigration employing racial stereotypes, sexualized talking points for surrogates (Obama as “internet date”) and copious ridicule. It’s made the curve that much of the media still uses to grade McCain’s more obvious shortcomings all the more conspicuous and significant …

I love it when someone with celeb status (meaning they get media attention more than anything), does something beneficial for our country. Right on Paris. But lets look a little deeper into this phenomena. What Paris gave as an “energy policy” seems intuitively obvious. In fact, it’s probably nothing that all of us interested in such matters haven’t thought of at one time or another. So why is such a blatently obvious solution to our energy crisis never considered by our supposedly highly educated, and informed congressional members?

In a recent Techimoto article, written on July 29 of this year, entitled Just Remember Us When You’re in Office (wink, wink), I stated that the majority of congress had to be on the take, and under the influence of Lobbyists. Why? Because issues about to be voted on, issues that are so obvious as to what makes sense and what doesn’t, issues that have, via polls, the support of the majority of Americans, get voted in the opposite direction! Read the rest »

Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. plans to sell its company-owned gas stations, saying they aren’t profitable enough even with gasoline selling at $4 per gallon.
The 2,220 stations make up about 1/5 of the Exxon and Mobil stations in the United States. The nation’s largest oil company, which earned nearly $41 billion last year, says it will sell more than 2,000 stations over the next few years.

“As the highly competitive fuels marketing business in the U.S. continues to evolve, we believe this transition is the best way for ExxonMobil to compete and grow in the future,” said Ben Soraci, U.S. director of retail sales for ExxonMobil.

Sorry Ben, I don’t buy it. Big Oil has been making record profits, have have more money floating around than they know what to do with. I realize that the retail end is different from the “manufacturing” component, but gas stations as a loosing proposition? I doubt it. Read the rest »

El Monte CA - iBUYPOWER, know for it’s innovative and powerful gaming PCs, is excited to launch its new line of Video PC’s. The Video PCs’ are built with the amateur videographer on mind – individuals who prefer to shoot video rather than stills, and post their experiences on sites like You Tube. The iBUYPOWER Video PC line includes the Video Bot, Video Pro, and Video Extreme, which are priced at $1,299, $1,799, and $4,299 MSRP respectively.The Video Bot, housed in an NZXT Appollo case, features the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 CPU, nVidia 9800GT GPU, and 4 GB of DDR-2 RAM. Customers looking for a little more power will find it in the Video Pro. iBuyPower packed an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor, ATI HD 4850 graphics card and 8 GB of DDR- 2 RAM into a Gigabyte Poseidon case.

The Video Extreme however, is built to be just that – extreme. Housed in a Thermaltake Armor case, the Video Extreme is stocked with the best components available – an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9770 CPU, ATI HD 4870 graphics card, 8 GB of DDR-3 1333 RAM, Blu-ray burner and a 1200W power supply. Read the rest »

Zero Pollution Motors (ZPM) expects to produce the world’s first air-powered car for

the United States by late 2009 or early 2010, and better yet, it is expected to be for sale for less than $18k. One of the planned Air Car models, reaches 68 mph, and goes for a range of 125 miles. It will take only a few minutes to refuel at gas stations equipped with custom air compressor units, and it should cost only around $2 to fill the car up with 340 liters of air!

Hmmmm. You know the saying, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. I can’t help but wonder what energy expenditure is required to compress the air. Electricity, I suppose, so that opens up that can of worms. But, hey, any candle is a bright light in total darkness. Lets keep our fingers crossed that this is real, and the developers of this technology don’t get run over (literally) by big oil. Rock on folks, and be sure to check under your hood before starting your car in the morning. Watch the video on the next page… Read the rest »

Some people who have received the CNN daily top ten email spam have unknowingly downloaded the trojan get_flash_update.exe file. If you are among these people, your anti malware software may identify the threat as Win32:Trojan-gen (Avast); Trojan.Erotpics (Symantec); TrojanDropper:Win32/Nuwar (Microsoft); BackDoor-DNM (McAfee) and I-Worm/Nuwar.W (AVG).

If the get_flash_update.exe file is downloaded and installed on your computer, it will proceed to download further malware that are set to start on your computer automatically when you reboot. When the whole infection process is complete, you will notice a variety of changes have occurred. The first change you will notice is that your Windows desktop background has been changed to a warning stating that Spyware was detected on your computer. Next, your screen saver will be changed to use SysInternals BlueScreen Screen Saver, which when running, emulates your operating system crashing into a blue screen of death.

Read the rest »

Today at 5pm on the 101 southbound between Oxnard and Thousand Oaks was a nice looking Blue Cadillac El Dorado burning to the ground…

The sad part about it was there was no firetrucks in sight just a ABC eye witness news cameraman filming the carnage. If i was in my Jeep i would have been there next to ABC filming away…

some more photos: