Blade XT3 electric motorcyle

Accelerating from 0-30 mph in 4 seconds, reaching a top speed of 45mph, all with a simple twist of the wrist – no clutch, no gears and NO-NOISE ! . . . . the XT range of bikes (XT3 & XT4)have a runtime of up to 3 hours . . . that’s similar to the runtime you’d get from a tank full of petrol on a conventional MX bike. Re-charging the XT will take approx 60 minutes from a domestic power supply . . .at a cost of around 50 pence !

E-style is the freedom to ride when and where you want. The ‘range issue’ is countered by the access benefits. You get to ride electrics just about wherever you please. Campgrounds, backyards, parking lots, horse trails, bike paths, woods trails, parks, BMX tracks; the list goes on. E-style provides more access than gas-engined moto-ing, so you get to ride a lot more. Lunch breaks, after work, whatever. No more waiting for the weekend and driving off to the desert or recreational riding area.

ELECTRICMOTO XT3 BATTERY ELECTRIC MOTORCYCLE

The media has written off battery electric vehicles as an experiment that failed so all the attention is being given to fuel cell vehicles. For true long range electric vehicles the future can only be Lithium ion batteries since these combine the high power density of Lead Acid batteries with the highest energy density of any battery type. Lithium has particular appeal for use in batteries for two reasons; first, it is the most electro-positive metal, which means it can be used to make batteries with higher terminal voltages (typically, four volts rather than 1.5 volts) than other designs. And, second, it is the lightest metal, having the capacity to store 3,860 amp-hours of charge per kilogram of weight compared with 260 amp-hours per kilogram for lead.  Electricmoto introduced the XT3 (extended time) model in April 2006 at a price of £3400 plus VAT. You can see a picture and specifications of the XT3 here:

www.goblade.co.uk

The Lithium ion battery has not been specified except to say that it has a total capacity of 1200Wh which is 50% greater than the capacity of the Lead Acid battery of the Blade yet doubles the run time. Typical heavy-duty vehicle lithium ion batteries for vehicles have an energy density of 125 Wh/kg compared to the energy density of 35 Wh/kg for Lead Acid batteries. This allows 4 wheeled vehicles to have a range of 120 miles. Vehicle Li-ion batteries are designed to have a service life of 8 years but if you are prepared to sacrifice some of the battery’s service life then range of up to 280 miles is possible in electric cars. You will get the most bang for your buck with the cylindrical 18650 camcorder battery, but it has to be the 2200 mA hr version. As these super high energy density Li-ion batteries can be unstable they have developed flat ones with a solid polymer electrolyte. Here is a range of 3M Li-poly cells for RC cars. Their main disadvantage is that their higher internal resistanc means that they cannot supply the high currents required by vehicles during acceleration.

www.maxamps.com/index.html?lmd=38722.504028

There have been experimental vehicles built using thousands of such cells wired together but this is very expensive as you can imagine.

The XT3 also uses a Lynch ‘pancake’ motor but it is the more powerful LM200 model. Read the specifications here:

www.lemcoltd.com/performance.htm

The 21.2 kW specified as the power output of the XT3 cold only be maintained for a short time without burning out the motor. The maximum steady state power is actually 8.5 kW which is consistent with it’s top speed of 40 mph. Another more advanced option would be the brushless synchronous motor with neodymium permanent magnets for the rotor and electronic commutation using a transistor inverter. This would have the advantage of low noise, no maintenance, programmable torque/speed curve and regenerative braking. When power is cut off the motor acts as a generator and the inverter becomes a converter to recharge the battery. This form of braking can be so efficient that you may never have to replace your brake discs. The disadvantage of AC synchronous motors is that they require a bigger and more expensive controller, which makes more noise than the simpler type used in the XT3. The Blade has a noise level of 60 dB incidentally.

If the XT3 has a three-hour running time for ordinary trail riding then it should have a range of at least 60 miles. This would make it suitable as an urban runabout and casual off-roading at a special site having been taken there on a trailer. Combined with it’s cool styling this makes it a desirable acquisition for someone with £3995 to spend. The dilemma for me would be should I buy one now or wait another year for the next model with a greater range. As this model only weighs 83 kg there is the potential for beefing up the frame, wheels and forks to carry the weight of a bigger motor and battery pack. This would make a bike that would be comparable in performance and range to typical 200cc trail bikes, although a 15-minute boost charge may be necessary for a days riding. As it is the XT3’s light weight, mountain bike tyres, and low noise output would be ideal where a machine of low impact is required such as mountain bike trails. With such a machine you could say ‘up yours’ to GLEAM, the Ramblers and the government.

Making Your Own Photoshop Brushes

We’ll be using a bunch of techniques that involve making a new brush. Okay, technically, it’s called defining a brush preset, but many people refer to it as making a brush since it also can involve tweaking the settings in the Brushes palette. You start with a photo or paint a shape, make a selection, and then choose Edit>Define Brush Preset. Here I made a small selection in a photo (shown in Quick Mask mode, just so it’s easier to see). After choosing Edit>Define Brush Preset, name your brush and click OK. In order to make the new brush more interesting, I used the Brushes palette (docked in the Palette Well by default) to change some settings. I used the Brush Tip Shape options to rotate the brush slightly and increase the spacing. In the Shape Dynamics options, I changed the Size Jitter to 3% and increased the Angle Jitter to 29%.

I created a new blank document and, using the Brush tool with my new brush shape, I clicked once on one side of the new document. Then while pressing-and-holding the Shift key, I clicked on the other side of the document. This painted a straight line but as you can see, the brush rotated and changed size slightly based on my settings in the Brushes palette.

Another way to make a brush shape is to start with a blank document and create a painted shape. Here I used a standard brush to paint a few lines in black, applied several filters (Motion Blur, Glass, and Dry Brush), and then finished it off with Threshold and a little Gauss-ian Blur. (I’m deliberately not giving you step-by-step instructions here because I want you to start experimenting and making brushes.) Once you’ve created a shape you like, again use Edit>Define Brush Preset to create the brush shape, and then if you like, tweak the settings in the Brushes palette.

Man captures Loch Ness Monster on Video!

An amateur scientist has captured what Loch Ness Monster watchers say is among the finest footage ever taken of the elusive mythical creature reputed to swim beneath the waters of Scotland’s most mysterious lake.

Sightingings have become a well
known phenonmena in Loch Ness,
a deep fresh water in the Scottish Highlands, whose deepest point
sinks down to over 700 feet.

The description of these sightings
are often accompanied by hoax videos
and photos of the monster, resembling
Plesiosaur, a long-necked aquatic
reptile that became extinct during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.

For those of you interested in sighting this creature, the Loch Ness tourism welcomes you to come sit on the shore of Loch Ness, just after midnight, alone. And have a few glasses of the finest pure highland malt whisky, and then you just might see this mysterious beast.

For further information on holidaying in Loch Ness, click here: Loch Ness tourism.
*note: I am in no way affiliated with this program.

Stay, the movie

This is a review for the movie Stay, and  I’ll be breaking it into two parts. The first is for those of you who haven’t watched it and the second is for us who have watched it but need an explanation to understand the movie. (cause the movie’s too smart for most of us, me included)

Stay(2005) is directed by Marc foster, starring Ewan Mcgregor, Naomi Watts, and Ryan Gosling. You can catch the trailer by clicking the pic on your right.
Stay is a story of a psychologist (Ewan McGregor) trying to unravel the twisted trauma of a suicidal young man (Ryan Gosling) and convince him that life is worth living, Stay is a mystery wrapped in a dreamy enigma.
Right from the start, Stay demands our attention. You are compelled to take in every visual clue given and try to make sense of it all. This is cause you get the feeling that something isn’t right, the visual pieces do not add up (this is why it frustrates many, cause people don’t like to think when watching a movie). The transitions from one shot to the other are swift and suble at the same time, a visual strategy so well done by Mark Foster, which isn’t there for show rather is crucial to understanding the meaning and perspective of the movie. If you pay close attention to the movie, you’ll probably feel like you’ve seen a character before; there are also a few instances where you see doubles or multilples of the same person, all this seems odd, but hold on to those things till the end for an explanation.
Another odd thing you notice about the movie is that the characters do not evolve. They seem to have a specific role to play and do just that to further the story as Dr.Sam (Mcgregor) tries to solve the reason behind Henry’s (Gosling) words, who claimed to having hurt some people, and had to kill himself on saturday midnight. Ultimately when we come to the end, things seem to finally tie up. To understand why we were led to this, we have to think back through the whole movie, to reveal the purpose of it all.

Part 2: Breaking Stay

Ok, so you’ve watched the movie. But it still leaves you puzzled, had me too the first time I watched it, so I watched it again, and the revelations was very satisfying. This is the only movie I really enjoyed watching it a second time. Ok the below explantion’s a bit of rambling excuse my bad writing.
The entire movie is Henry’s Stream of conciousness, all the characters who surround him in the last scene are given a role by Henry. They present various aspect of Herny’s character. Beth, was the 1st person at the site of the accident, but she didn’t help instead she cried “i didn’t move him, i know your not suppose to move them”. Hence Henry gave her the role of a psychiatrist whom he intented to meet in the start of the movie but wasn’t available, instead Dr. Sam who was the first person to help Henry in the accident scene, fills in for Dr.beth(whom Henry makes her to be suffering from trauma or some psychological breakdown). From what I can tell, Henry probably entered into this dream when he heard Dr.Sam tell Nurse Lila that the others in the car didn’t make it. So that’s probably why he struggles with the decision to live or die after having killed the people he loved.

In case you were thinking Why is Sam’s trousers just too short, well the reason could be because when Henry first sees Sam (the last scene: Henry’s dying moments) he sees him from that particularly low angle distorting his perspective of Sam’s pants and jacket. Many shots of the movie have that awkward low tilted shot, giving us more of Henry’s perspective. You’ll also notice that some of the same actors keep appearing with different roles, which are some how connected with what they do or say in Henry’s dying moments, like the old man instructing the lifting of the piano, who later opens the door to henry’s apartment or the old man who mutters” he’s not gonna make it” and the mom and the kid with the balloon. You’ll also see many doubles and triples, easily noticed in the scene where the students exit the lecture hall.

Often you’ll hear that the background sound has got the sounds of cars screeching, or muffled voices, and traffic – those are instances where real world events leak into Henry’s dream, no wonder he says he hears things. What about all those spiraling stairs? Well I think we’ve all had psychedelic spiraling  dreams; where we can’t tell if we’re awake or not – so I guess the director’s making it obvious to us, tripping on the world as an illlusion theme, of dreams within dreams.  There are a few references to Buddha in the movie, like when Henry heals his dad’s blindness, he does a namaste with his hands – you could also associate that gesture to Hinduism and yoga i guess. But yeah later when Henry’s dad meets with Sam, he quotes Buddha’s saying “the world is an illusion”, this brings me to an ealier scene where Henry mutters Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you, then later Sam gets those same lines from his fortune cookies… Then there’s Athena, who is cast as Ophelia (who is doomed to die), but would rather be in Hamlet’s shoes (debating death, as Henry is) HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams… lots of speculations but It’s all been good.

People can interpret this movie however they see it. Because this movie is as open-ended as any movie gets.

Speed up Windows XP

Eliminate programs that run at start-up
Stopping programs from running at start-up is especially daunting because there is no single place you can go to halt them all. Some run because they’re in the Startup folder, others because they’re part of logon scripts, others because of Registry settings, and so on. But with a little bit of perseverance, you should be able to keep them from running.

1. Start by cleaning out your Startup folder. Find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, where username is your Windows logon name. Delete the shortcuts of any programs you don’t want to run on start-up. As with any shortcuts, when you delete them, you’re deleting only the shortcut, not the program itself. (You can also clear out the start-up items by going to Start > Programs > Startup, then right-clicking items you want to remove.)
2. Next, clean out your Scheduled Tasks folder. Go to C:\Windows\Tasks, and delete the shortcuts of any programs that you don’t want to run automatically on a schedule.

Note: You can bypass all the programs in your Startup folder on an as-needed basis. To stop XP from loading any programs in the Startup folder, hold down the Shift key during bootup. No programs in the Startup folder will run, but the items will still remain there so that they will start up as they would normally the next time you boot.

Using the system configuration utility
Taking the previous steps will stop the obvious programs from running at start-up, but it won’t kill them all. The best tool for disabling hidden programs that run on start-up is the System Configuration Utility. To run it, type msconfig at a command prompt, and press Enter. (If that doesn’t work, first do a search for msconfig.exe; when you find the file, double-click it.)

1. To stop a program from running at start-up, go to the Startup tab in this utility, and uncheck the box next to the program. It can sometimes be difficult to understand what programs are listed on the Startup tab. Some, such as America Online, are clearly labeled. But often, you’ll see a phrase or collection of letters, such as fs20. That’s the name of the running file–such as fs20.exe, which is Free Surfer mk II, an excellent free pop-up killer.
2. To get more information about a listing, expand the width of the Command column near the top of the Startup tab. Expand it enough and you’ll see the start-up command that the program issues, including its location, such as C:\Program Files\Free Surfer\fs20.exe. The directory location should be another hint to help you know the name of the program.
3. When stopping programs from running at start-up, it’s best to stop them one at a time rather than in groups. You want to make sure that you’re not causing any system problems by stopping them. So stop one, then restart your PC. If it runs fine, then stop another and restart. Continue doing this until you’ve cleared all the programs you don’t want to run automatically.

Each time you uncheck a box and restart your PC, you’ll get a warning that you’ve used the System Configuration Utility to disable a program from starting automatically. If you don’t want to see that warning, disable it by checking the box in the dialog itself.

After you’ve used the system configuration utility to identify programs that run on start-up, you may want to try disabling them from with the programs themselves. So run each program that starts automatically, and see if you can find a setting that allows you to prevent it from running on start-up.

Speed up shutdown times

It’s not only start-up that you’d like to speed up; you can also make sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can take to speed up the shutdown process:

1. Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown. For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because sensitive information such as unencrypted passwords sometimes ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a high priority, you might not want to clear it. To shut down XP without clearing your paging file, run the Registry Editor (click Start > Run, then type regedit in the Run box) and go to:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
2. Change the value of ClearPageFileAtShutdown to 0. Close the Registry, and restart your computer. Whenever you turn off XP from now on, the paging file won’t be cleared, and you should be able to shut down more quickly.

Note: Please be careful when editing the Registry; you can do a lot of damage here. Don’t change or delete anything unless you know exactly what it is.

Disable services that run at start-up
Constantly running in the background of XP are services–processes that help the operating system run or that provide support to applications. Many of these services launch automatically at start-up. While you need many of them, some are not required, and they can slow down your system when they run in the background.
You can disable services at start-up by using the system configuration utility, similar to the way that you halt programs from running at start-up, except that you use the Services tab instead of the Startup tab. But the system configuration utility doesn’t necessarily list every service that launches on start-up. A bigger problem is that disabling services is more of shot in the dark than disabling programs. When you disable a program, you can get a sense of what the program does. But when you disable a service through the system configuration utility, there’s often no way to know what it does.

1. A better way of disabling services at start-up is via the Services computer-management console. Run it by typing services.msc at the command prompt. The Services computer-management console includes a description of all services so that you can know ahead of time whether a particular service is one you want to turn off. It also lets you pause the service so that you can test your machine and see whether that service is needed.
2. After you run the console, click the Extended tab. This view will show you a description of each service in the left pane when you highlight the service. The Startup Type column shows you which services launch on start-up–any with Automatic in that field. Click that column to sort together all the services that automatically launch on start-up. Then highlight each of those services and read the descriptions.
3. When you find a service you want to disable, right-click it and choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box that appears, choose Manual from the Startup Type drop-down list. The service won’t start automatically from now on, but you can start it manually via the console. If you want the service disabled so that it can’t be run, choose Disabled. To test the results, turn off any services that you don’t want to run by clicking Stop The Service in the left pane, or by right-clicking the service and choosing Stop.

Here is a list of some common services you might want to stop from running at start-up. 

Service	What it does
Portable Media Serial Number	Retrieves the serial number of a portable music player attached to your PC.
Task Scheduler	Schedules unattended tasks to be run. If you don’t schedule any unattended tasks, turn it off.
Uninterruptible Power Supply	Manages an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) connected to your PC.
Automatic Updates	Automatically checks for Windows updates. (You can check manually by going to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/.)
Telnet (service available on XP Pro only)	Allows a remote user to log in to your computer and run programs. (This will not be found on all versions of XP Pro.)
Wireless Zero Configuration Service	Automatically configures a Wi-Fi (802.11) network card. Disable this only if you’re not using a Wi-Fi network card.

Hope u find this as useful as I did, courtesy cnet insider’s secrect.

Matt Damon says No More Jason Borne Movies For Him

Matt Damon told a room full of press at the Cannes Film Festival that he would not be returning for a fourth Jason Bourne film. Here is an account of some of the conversation thanks to Variety.

So the question now becomes, will the Jason Borne series move on without Damon? The James Bond series did that and is working out just fine. But in many senses, this is different since Bourne’s story is a continuation while Bond’s film’s are more episodic than anything else. Could the series continue with a new actor at the helm? And if so, who?

Head first with html, css and xhtml.

Head first with html, css and xhtml is a books for us who can never quite finish a book we begin(computer books in particular). Yeah it is engrossing with a bit of humor. A perfect book for those totally new to web design. Makes sense on your first read.
You begin with learning Html, and designing a website for an imaginary company called starbuzz coffee. The book is never boring, I doubt you’d find another teach yourself book that’s got as much color as this. Yeah every page and image is in color.
You’ll have puzzles, crosswords, answered questions and other exercises at the end of every chapter to engage your brain to work what you’ve just learned. To get a sense of what i’m saying here’s a link to headfirstCh8
As u progress with the book, you’ll learn to make necessary changes to your websites making them web compliant, and graphically presentable. A very intuitive book that teaches you correct practices. If you’re a newbie to web design you’ll have no regrets buying this book.

Incubus, Dig music video premiere!

Incubus’ video for dig of their album lightgrenades is up on their site Enjoyincubus. Not too long ago there was an idigincubus contest, where anyone across the U.S could submit their video for the band’s lastest single. Incubus then picked the top contenders for the official song video. So we voted for what we thought was best. From what I can tell, Incubus picked a video which they thought was best and made a few transitional changes to the video. But it’s alright