Payton Place

Although I’ve never had opportunity to drive and electric vehicle, I hope to own one someday soon. Strangely enough, my ultimate vehicle wish is to own an electric pickup truck. I’d like a four door truck that’s about the size of a Honda Ridgeline but better looking. Perhaps an electric vehicle the size of the Toyota Tacoma would also be cool.

Unfortunately, I won’t own a Toyota truck until they reverse the direction of their grills. I just can’t imagine owning a vehicle that looks like its frowning. I want only smiles from my trucks! The Phoenix SUT comes close to “a grill with a smile” but still isn’t in production. One look at is grill and I think you’d agree, its more of a smirk than a smile.

Imagine what it would be like to drive an All Electric vehicle around town. Unlike the traditional mechanical noises we’ve grown accustomed to with four, six, and eight cylinder cars, electric vehicles make very little noise. Now Lotus is developing a technology called HALOsonic Electronic Sound Synthesis which is designed to recreate the engine sounds hear from internal combustion engines. Check out this video of the HALOsonic system tested in a Toyota Prius.

My favorite is the second Futuristic sound. And with the exception of the flying part, driving a vehicle that sounds like this would be oh so “Back To The Future!”

~SP

Thanks to Tom Young with Electroacoustic Design Services for pointing me to this very cool video . . .

VortexBox is an open-source CD ripping and media server solution. Based on Fedora 10, VortexBox is capable of streaming in multiple formats allowing you to hear your music on your other computers, iTunes, media centers, slim devices like squeezeboxes and other media devices. Installation is straight forward, download the ISO file, burn it to a disc, pop the disc in the unused computer you want to turn into a jukebox and you’re on your way. Once the installation is complete you can access the box remotely with the build in web server. Ripping is completely automated, just pop in the disk you want it to rip and it rips, tags, and gets the cover art. VortexBox is an open-source linux-based media server.

Windows only: Free media file converter FormatFactory is a handy all-in-one utility for taking one kind of audio, video, or picture file and converting it to another. The interface is a dead-simple drag-and-drop affair, and it’s meant for running batches of files through converters?FLVs to Windows Media, MPEGs to iPod-friendly video, DVDs to DivX files, etc. You won’t get a lot of options for quality control, compression rate, or other tweaks, but for some folks, that’s really a benefit. FormatFactory is a free download for Windows systems only.

Courtesy Lifehacker