The TireTagz were originally made for cramming more ads onto Indy series racing cars. They are attached to the wheels and use high frequency LEDs to show whatever image you want on your wheels. TireTagz have the ability to store up to 32 images and each unit comes with 4 pre-programmed designs. New designs can be downloaded from the Internet:
Is this The Ultimate Way to pimp your car or what?
The National Qualification Event for the DARPA Grand Challenge starts today in California Speedway in Fontana. The admission to the speedway is free and open to the public from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM today (September 28) to October 5. The twenty best teams will participate in the Grand Challenge October 8.
The Grand Challenge was a bit of a disappointment last year as the best participant only managed to travel 7.4 miles out of the scheduled 142. Then again; it is not easy to build an independent, robotic ground vehicle that has to travel up to 175 miles by itself in less than 10 hours. No human interaction is allowed apart from a remote shut down system. The autonomous vehicle must make all decisions by itself in a fraction of a second in order to drive at more than 17 miles on bumpy roads. Red Team had the best entry last year and is favorite of the many teams this year as well. The 1986 HMMWV carries externally mounted carries vision, radar, laser and GPS sensors:
DARPA will award $2 million the quickest vehicle that successfully navigates the course in less than 10 hours on October 8. The exact route will only be published 2 hours before the race starts. There will be video hight lights from the monitoring points and spectators will be able to view the vehicles and talk to the teams. Get the latest news from the teams blogs feed and live web casts from the Grand Challenge Site
LaCie recently announced a ultra thin 8GB credit-card sized USB 2.0 key 
LaCie Carte Orange is only 6 millimeters thick so it easily fits in wallets and small pockets. The plug-and-play hi-speed USB 2.0 device comes with a flexible USB connector that makes it a snap to connect to any computer. The LaCie Carte Orange USB keys are already available at at the online LaCie Store; the 4GB version costs $99 and the 8GB costs $149:
The European Maker Faire should be great fun for technology lovers. Make magazine organizes the free 2 hour event in conjunction with O'Reilly's EuroOSCON Open Source Convention on Wednesday 19th of October in Amsterdam.
Skilled makers can submit details about their projects and themselves to euromakers:
What really makes a Maker Faire work is the grassroots participation
from Makers such as you. If you have an interesting MAKE-like
project that you are bursting to share with your fellow Makers, we
are actively seeking Makers who would like to exhibit at the Faire.
Each exhibiting Maker will be provided with a table, power, Internet
connection, and a simple poster board describing their project.
See you there?
Wouldn't it be great if you could see the car from above when you park in a particularly tight spot? Nissan is working on a system that gives you a bird's-eye view of your car:
Magic? No. There are several cameras around the car that take pictures of the ground and surroundings. A computer combines the pictures to give you a view that shows everything around the car.
Coolissimo!
I want it:
The iPod Nano is tiny and light but packed with features:
It holds up to three days’ worth of music. It plays for up to 14 hours between battery charges. It displays the color album art for the song you’re listening to right now. It carries your photos, podcasts and audiobooks. It syncs seamlessly with iTunes. It connects to a host of iPod accessories.
T3 loves it as well in their review of the iPod Nano.
Via [cuzzle]
The Pocket PC doesn't allow you to look up names in the Exchange address list or invite other people to meetings. I have worked around the problem by importing the users I work with the most as contacts in Outlook. But no matter how many people I import; Murphy's law makes sure that I have not imported the address I need when I am out of office. Mike recently found a free tool from Microsoft that fixes the problems; the Microsoft Global Contact Access. It is intended for the Pocket PC Phone Edition, but it works like a charm on normal Pocket PCs as well if you can access internet via Bluetooth or WiFi.
Microsoft Global Contact Access installs several new applications on the Pocket PC:
It also integrates with the Inbox and adds "Email with Find contact", and "New meeting" menu options.
A must have tool if you use Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Reader can only be activated on 6 devices. I have used all my activations on various Pocket PCs and laptops so I have started looking into "alternative" solutions. Lockergnome has a step by step procedure that allows you to backup transfer the Microsoft Reader registration from one Pocket PC to another. All you have to do is copy these files from the \windows directory to another Pocket PC:
The only alternative I have found for the PC is the free Convert Lit tool. It allows you to extract the contents from a DRM protected Microsoft Reader ebook and create a new ebook in one of the supported formats:
Lindows Linspire is free for a few days. The private "Freespire" project caused some confusion so the author renamed it to 'squiggle' and Linspire did not miss the golden marketing opportunity;
The only true "Freespire," would need to be a FREE COPY of the real LINSPIRE. We thought it would be fun, for all of those who were looking at this project to experience a true "Freespire", to give away a free digital copy of Linspire for a few days! This is actually a great way to highlight what it is that makes Linspire special and unique, and different from other Linux distributions.
The Linspire servers have a hard time keeping up with the traffic created by the popular offer but you should be able to get a free copy in a few hours.
Via Bordoni
