Hacked road signs — end of the world in 400 yards

I’m not sure that there’s yet been an inva­sion of Nazi zom­bies, but should one ever happen there’s a fair chance the author­it­ies wouldn’t want to shout about it. Or warn approach­ing motorists.

All the same, it’s hard not to laugh at a recent craze that has seen tem­por­ary road warn­ing signs in the US hacked to read some­thing other than con­sidered safety mes­sages about roadworks.

The mes­sages, repor­ted by the blog Jalopnik, range from the matter of fact (THIS SIGN HAS BEEN HACKED), through the cau­tion­ary (ZOMBIES AHEAD! and RAPTORS AHEAD, CAUTION!) to the rather heart­break­ing (NOBODY HAS EVER /​ LOVED YOU).

Instruc­tions for alter­ing the signs’ mes­sages were pub­lished in Janu­ary on a web­site ded­ic­ated to hack­ing vari­ous hard­ware and soft­ware. In most cases, the site claims, the sign con­trols aren’t pro­tec­ted by a lock or any­thing other than the default pass­word.

But while their altered mes­sages are clearly a little irre­spons­ible, the signs them­selves are yet another example of tech­no­logy making people’s lives easier. In the past, warn­ing motor­ists of impend­ing doom took a can of paint and some dedication:

IMAGES by Flickr users under­bit­e­man and shinythings

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​05 18:20:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Death, Flickr, Image Galleries, Jalopnik, Outdoors, Recreation, Urban Exploration, Website
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Fiat 500 eco:Drive system is a neat (if nerdy) way to green your driving habits

There are plenty of car man­u­fac­tur­ers boast­ing about the eco-​​credentials of their latest models these days. But I came across one this week­end which genu­inely impressed me.

The Fiat 500 is a funky little town car – it echoes the cute style queues of earlier Fiats with the same number back in the 1960s and early 70s.

All well and good. It’s cer­tainly a nice look­ing creation.

But what I think is a genu­inely smart innov­a­tion is the eco:Drive system that comes with latest models.

eco:Drive helps you under­stand the impact of your driv­ing style on fuel con­sump­tion and CO2 emis­sions. You just plug a USB stick into the port on the car’s dash­board and eco:Drive records detailed inform­a­tion about the vehicle and how it is driven onto the USB stick.

Then down­load the free eco:Drive soft­ware from Fiat’s web­site and install on your com­puter. Plug the USB stick into your com­puter and the eco:Drive soft­ware ana­lyses the data on it and con­verts it into useful facts and fig­ures. It gives you your ‘eco:Drive index’ – a mark out of 100 show­ing how effi­ciently you’ve been driv­ing based on your accel­er­a­tion, decel­er­a­tion, gear changes and speed. It then makes recom­mend­a­tions about how you can improve the effi­ciency of your driving.

It even provides inform­a­tion on how much money this could save you. And for the ser­i­ously obsess­ive it lets you set your­self tar­gets and see if you can meet them.

Fiat sug­gests you could reduce your fuel bills by up to 15%. That’s a big saving!

The soft­ware will evolve and improve with feed­back from users – auto­mat­ic­ally updat­ing as time goes on too.

A genu­inely bril­liant idea. My one cri­ti­cism is that it feels very blokey indeed – even a tad nerdy. At the risk of sound­ing sexist, I wonder if girl-​​drivers – who tend to be the more eco-​​friendly of the sexes when it comes to driv­ing and are prob­ably more likely to buy a small funky car like the Fiat 500 – would ever bother to use it?

IMAGES: by Flickr user

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​12-​​02 04:50:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Automobile, Automotive industry, Chrysler, ElectricVehicle, Fiat, Fiat 500, Recreation, United States
Posted in Cars, Energy | View Comments

Using vinegar to deice your car windscreen

The last few weeks have really given us the oppor­tun­ity to test out our car dei­cing tech­niques.

One that we neg­lected to men­tion was this one, cour­tesy of Auto­trader. It’s billed as stop-​​gap if you run out of ‘proper’ deicer.

Mix up a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ solu­tion of house­hold vin­egar and water, place in a old plastic bottle with a hole cut in its lid and squeeze lib­er­ally across your car win­dows. Then simply scrape off the res­ult­ing sludge with an ice scraper or (not-​​to-​​be-​​used-​​again-​​for transactional-​​purposes) credit card.

Having tried brown malt vin­egar over the last couple of weeks, we have to say it does leave the glass shiny, albeit with the odd whiff remin­is­cent of fish and chips.

Though def­in­itely no need to add salt.

For more hints and tips for coping with the cold, see Living’s advice on winter driv­ing.

IMAGE image by Flickr user malias

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2007-​​12-​​21 20:02:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Flickr, Glass, Outdoors, Recreation, Salt, Urban Exploration, Vinegar, Water
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Driving with children

Chances are that when we were kids, most of us were able to ride up front where Mum or Dad could keep an eye on us. Now, with the advent of car seats and safety fea­tures like pas­sen­ger airbags, chil­dren and tod­dlers are ban­ished to the back seat – which can be a prob­lem if you’re the only adult in the car and your child is behind you, play­ing up.

Accord­ing to a Halfords survey, 99% of par­ents had been dis­trac­ted by noisy chil­dren in the car. More than half of the 2,000 par­ents who took part said they believed that driv­ing with a scream­ing child was more dan­ger­ous than using a mobile phone.

This may just be a survey, but road traffic stat­ist­ics from the States show how dan­ger­ous such dis­trac­tions can be. Accord­ing to the Uni­ver­sity of Rich­mond in Vir­ginia, being dis­trac­ted by other pas­sen­gers, includ­ing chil­dren, was said to be respons­ible for 9% of road acci­dents.

But we can’t always leave the kids at home, so that means we must manage the dis­trac­tion they cause. Firstly, a sleepy baby is a quiet baby, so keep your chil­dren awake before you get in the car if you know you have a long jour­ney coming up. If they’re old enough, try to get them to play ener­getic games to really tire them out. Then, when in the car, ensure you have adequate sun shades to keep the light out­side from waking them up.

Once they’re safely in their car seat, feed them! A good way of keep­ing a tod­dler quiet is to give them a small pack of rais­ins, or some­thing that it takes ages for them to eat, like a dried fruit bar.

Take a spe­cial cuddly toy or game with you that they never nor­mally get a chance to play with. For young babies, you can also get activ­ity centres which attach to their car seats. Also, plan some breaks along the way to break the mono­tony for them, and reduce tired­ness for you.

Keep­ing older chil­dren informed as to where you are in the jour­ney will avoid the con­stant cry of, “are we there yet?”

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​01-​​29 12:18:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Airbag, Car seat, Child, Children, Halfords, Traffic collision, University of Richmond, Virginia
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Car crash fraud: how serial cash-​​for-​​crash artist cost

There are peri­odic reports about how much car insur­ance fraud costs the insur­ance industry – the Asso­ci­ation of Brit­ish Insurers reck­ons it’s in excess of £40 for every policy.

Scene of the crimes — Eden Point round­about, on the A34 close to Cheadle (Greater Manchester Police/​PA Wire)

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​21 02:40:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Association of British Insurers, Business, Finance, Financial services, Fraud, Government, Insurance, Regulators
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Greenbird breaks the wind powered car speed world record

Brit­ish engin­eer Richard Jen­kins has become the fast­est driver ever to use only the power of the wind – smash­ing the pre­vi­ous record in the process.

And the all-​​British Green­bird carbon fibre land yacht needed winds of only 30mph to reach its top speed of 126.1mph, best­ing pre­vi­ous record holder, Amer­ican Bob Schu­macher by almost 10mph.

The record-​​breaking run took place at the dried-​​out bed of Lake Ivan­pah on the border between Nevada and Cali­for­nia.

Ori­gin­ally the Wind­jet pro­ject, the craft can oper­ate on both dry land and on frozen water – and is designed to break the record on both surfaces.

It was renamed to cap­ture the spirit of the Blue­bird – the legendary series of craft headed by Donald Camp­bell in the 1950s and 60s before his death at more than 300mph on Con­is­ton Water.

The Eco­tri­city–sponsored Green­bird is billed as being “part aero­plane, part sail­boat, part For­mula One car” and it used some clever, but rel­at­ively simple prin­ciples to speed itself to glory.

Power is pro­duced in a sim­ilar way to how an aero­plane gen­er­ates ‘lift’ to climb in the air; using wind moving over the ’sail’, which is essen­tially a ver­tical wing.

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​04-​​01 17:32:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Coniston Water, Donald Campbell, Ecotricity, Energy, Greenbird, Nevada, Renewable, Richard Jenkins
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