Have A Bentley? Well, This Keeps Your Other Tresures Safe

We know that only a small percentage of the world’s population own a Bentley. And we all know that if we collect all the Bentleys on the road right now, they could probably feed an entire third world country for many years to come. But don’t imagine that thought just yet because Stockinger, a leading German brand when it comes to luxury safes, is adding another element to this insanely expensive car.

Bentley and Stockinger have joined forces to keep the rich people’s riches safe and secure. How did they do just that? Take a look at the picture of the Continental and the Arnage safe above.

Done drooling over the picture? Well, here are some additional facts about this baby. This Stockinger product features two limited edition lockbox variants that exemplify style, security and extravagance to the highest level. For watch lovers, there’s the the Continental while jewelry aficionados have the Arnage for them. These limited edition safes also mean that there is only a couple made in the entire world so getting your hands on a Bentley with this feature is close to impossible. Forget the previous line if you own a ship-load of cash, precious stones or oil.

But wait there’s more to this Stockinger and Bentley brainchild. The lockbox also has Arnage features where you can store expensive watches safely. And if someone does make their way inside the Bentley, that someone would be sorely disappointed. Why is that so? This lockbox is designed to be impenetrable to keep those naughty hands off your treasure. Plus, there’s an addition of built-in alarms and a Global Positioning System (GPS) to keep you informed about your jewelry or whatnot.

Going back, how limited are these Stockinger-equipped Bentleys anyway? Why only 200 of them are made, my good friend. So if you think you can have this car in your garage, just be prepared to shell out all of your life savings and everything you own because it will cost you more than an arm and a leg.

In the meantime, let’s fill our mind with imaginary things we know we can’t have. Here are some things you could keep in these lockboxes:

- Your last will so no relative or loved one can illegally change whatever it is you’re going to leave behind. If you just want your 12-year old nephew to have complete control over your financial empire without any jealous relative out to scam you, then this is the place to keep your last will.

- Your comic book collection. Over the course of time, their prices will eventually grow until you can’t count the zeroes anymore. Plus, if you have a first appearance of a popular character and you managed to keep the book in mint condition, you can be richer than any other comic book geek out there.

- Along with comics, you can also keep your trading cards safe until their prices reach their highest point. Who knows? Your old Michael Jordan rookie card can topple even Bill Gates himself.

- Your old high school sweetheart’s picture. This safe is the best place to keep this picture away from your wife/husband/fiancée/significant other’s prying hands. But if you do have your old flame’s picture, you’ve got some serious issues buddy.

- Your treasure chest key. If you’re not confident enough this lockbox can keep your beloved possessions, then you could just use it store your other lockbox’s key. Now that’s safety and security doubled!

- Your collection of dirty magazines. That’s reason enough but we think this Stockinger is too much. Well, that’s the price of protection eh?

All You Need To Know Comes With This Genera Motors Display

General Motors has a surprise in store for Cobalt and HHH SS owners this 2009. What’s the surprise about? No, it’s not a flying car or some groundbreaking device to eliminate the use of fuel in their cars. To be honest, it’s rather simple but very useful for every car owner. Read on and find out.

By 2009, GM will give you the option to have a reconfigurable performance display in their 2009 Cobalt and HHH SS. This will give the driver an easy access to configurations such as traction control and stability control. Plus, you’ll also get to view the tachometer, boost, air fuel ratio, cam phaser angle, engine torque, horsepower, temperature, battery voltage and barometric pressure. In this way, you won’t have to step out of your car and look like a fool inspecting your car in every point for these details. All you have to do is activate the performance display and all the information you need will pop out.

This will be a big help for GM Cobalt and HHH SS owners to keep track of their car’s performance. And for only $295 as a factory option, this is a steal. Unfortunately, GM didn’t find a way to include a way to see the future or watch television in this device. But hey, you can’t have everything in life right? Plus, the things this GM device will let you view in its display are enough to make your driving experience easier anyway.

Getting Lost Isn't An Option With The Sony NV-U94T

Do you always lose your way whenever you’re driving your car? Do you always get confused by the crazy road schemes of your city? Do you always get pulled over by the cops because you entered a one-way street?

If you answered even one of the questions above, here’s something that might help you out with your woes. Sony is planning to unveil its new GPS navigator, the NV-U94T, this coming September 2008. This gadget boasts of a 4.8 inch touchscreen, simple portable media player (PMP) applications, accelerometer, barometer, Bluetooth and an expadable memory slot. Just install this new Sony gadget inside your car and making your way through any city will be a certain breeze.

Just be prepared to shell out $400 when the new Sony NV-U94T comes out in September. But hey, isn’t that a lot cheaper than paying fines whenever you get pulled over by the cops? Or isn’t this Sony gadget more practical than wasting gas whenever you get lost? The choice is still yours but you’ll have an easier time having this GPS navigator inside your car.

Autopartswarehouse.com | iPhones

We really love gadgets that can do it all right? Gadgets that can make life easy and enjoyable. Now, we have iPhones.

There are several applications located on the Home screen: Text (SMS messaging), Calendar, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Stocks, Maps (Google Maps), Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, Settings, and iTunes (store). Four other applications, docked at the base of the screen, delineate the iPhone’s main purposes: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.

The YouTube application streams videos over Wi-Fi, 2G, or 3G after encoding them using the open H.264 codec, to which YouTube has converted about 10,000 videos. As a result, the YouTube application on iPhone can currently view only a certain selection of videos from the site.

At WWDC 2007 on June 11, 2007 Apple announced that the iPhone will support third-party “applications” via the Safari web browser that share the look and feel of the iPhone interface. On October 17, 2007, Steve Jobs, in an open letter posted to Apple’s “Hot News” weblog, announced that a software development kit (SDK) would be made available to third-party developers in February 2008. Due to security concerns and Jobs’ praise of Nokia’s digital signature system, it was suggested that Apple would adopt a similar method.

The SDK will also allow application development for the iPod touch.The iPhone SDK was officially announced on March 6, 2008, at the Apple Town Hall facility.The SDK will allow developers to develop native applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, as well as test them in an “iPhone simulator”. However, loading an application onto the devices is only possible after paying a Apple Developer Connection membership fee. Developers are free to set any price for their applications to be distributed through the App Store, of which they will receive a 70 percent share. Developers can also opt to release the application for free and will not pay any costs to release or distribute the application beyond the membership fee. The SDK was made available immediately, while the launch of applications had to wait until the firmware update which was released on July 11, 2008. This update is free for iPhone users and there is a charge for iPod touch owners.

Many third-party Safari “applications” and un-signed native applications are also available. The ability to install native applications onto the iPhone outside of the App Store will not be supported by Apple. Such native applications could be broken by any software update, but Apple has stated it will not design software updates specifically to break native applications other than applications that perform SIM unlocking.

Autopartswarehouse.com | 2008 Lamborghini Reventon

Lamborghini Reventón is the most extreme and the essence of the marque: just 20 examples of a design masterpiece
Obviously a Lamborghini, but nothing quite like it. A super car without equals: the Lamborghini Reventón is a road vehicle with an extreme specification and, at the same time, a limited edition masterpiece – a coherent style, angular with sharp lines, inspired by the very latest aeronautics.

With just 20 produced, each 1 Million Euro (without taxes) Lamborghini Reventón is a symbol of extreme exclusivity, yet still offering the extraordinary performance that makes the Reventón so unrivalled: under the completely autonomous design, the Reventón possesses the entire technical and dynamic capability of the twelve cylinder Lamborghini.

At autopartswarehouse.com, Lamborghini prides itself on being the extraordinary manufacturer of extreme super sports cars without compromise. Sensuality and provocation characterise every Lamborghini, with an aggressively innovative style. ‘However, the Reventón is the most extreme of all, a true automotive superlative. Our designers at the Lamborghini Style Centre took the technical base of the Murciélago LP640 and compressed and intensified its DNA, its genetic code,’ affirms Stephan Winkelmann, President and CEO of Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.

Autopartswarehouse.com | A Car That Parks Itself

Thinking of the future like in the movies that cars can drive itself is really possible. We have now cars that can park by itself.
When I heard the new Lexus LS460 flagship sedan could park itself, I knew there had to be a catch. Maybe it would only do half the job, or require a parking space twice the length of the car — or some other unreported disclaimer. I went to Detroit yesterday to try it myself, determined to discover and report the ugly truth. The truth, it turns out, is that the car freakin' parks itself. It really does it. Line it up, and the optional Advanced Parking Guidance System does the hard part. This is the coolest spectacle any of us jaded automotive journalists has seen since the retractable-hardtop convertible.

Here's how it works, starting with parallel parking: You pull up alongside a space, making sure to pass the rear car before aligning next to the front car. A sonar sensor on the front fender measures the length of the space and your distance from the cars. Put the car in Reverse, and the rearview camera, which comes with the required navigation system, presents a wide rear view on the in-dash display. (This feature comes with the optional navigation system, which is a prerequisite for APGS.) Pressing the parallel-parking icon at the bottom of the touch-screen places a simple green square roughly over the parking space.

Arrows let you adjust its position.
Once it's centered, you press OK, take your hands off the wheel and use only the brake to ease the car backward.

The steering wheel flings itself around under control of the electric power steering, angling you in. All you have to do is keep the speed low enough and stop the car when the display shows that you're closing on the rear car's bumper.
Then you put it in drive, square the car and you're done. Basically, the car controls only the steering. If you let it, it will drive into the car behind you. Though it may change in the future, APGS doesn't tell you when a space is too small for the car. For now, it lets you try, no matter how small the space.

A few conditions can interfere: If you pull up too close alongside the front car, the box appears red instead of green, which means you're too close to make the cut, and the system won't work. If you go more than 2 mph, grab the steering wheel or step on the accelerator, it defeats the system and you're on your own. An incline of 4.5 degrees or greater may prevent APGS from working because the car won't reverse up a steeper hill under idle power alone.

If you push the back-in icon on the screen, APGS will guide the car backward into a parking-lot space, too. The only difference is that it lets you rotate as well as slide the target box, to adjust for whatever angle you're at when you begin. Overall, I was impressed by how close to perfectly the system placed the target initially.

Automatic parking won't come cheap. The car itself will cost roughly $60,000, and the parking feature requires the navigation and rearview camera option, which are sure to cost at least a couple grand. (On the current LS430, navigation comes only in option packages, the cheapest of which is $5,000.) Lexus says only that APGS will be a stand-alone addition priced "under $1,000" — which in marketing-speak means something like $995.

I have mixed emotions about automated parking. We've already bred a generation of drivers who can't stop short without ABS, can't stay on the road without a stability system and can't drive at all without an automatic transmission. As a Midwesterner, I pride myself on my ability to parallel park almost anything almost anywhere. Shouldn't everyone be required to pass that part of the driving test before they get licensed? ... Come to think of it, maybe automated parking isn't such a bad idea. The bumper it saves could be your own.

Parking lot screens
Sonar sensor

Source: blogs.cars.com

Autopartswarehouse.com | Information About Amplifiers

Amplifiers makes sound larger. They get the signal from the source and enhance it to make it loud. Some disadvantages of amplifiers are amplifying signals without causing distortion, you should have enough power supply to keep them going and it must store enough current to deliver all of the transients in the music.

Some Features of Car Amplifiers:

• Bridging amplifiers are very flexible because they can be used in different system configurations. One amplifier can be used to power one, two, three or four speakers.

• Speaker-level inputs are the only way your car amps can get signals if your radio doesn't have RCA-type output jacks.

• Preamp outputs are very useful when creating a multi-amplifier system because they allow an un-amplified signal to pass out of one amplifier to another.

• Remote bass control is available in some amplifiers that have a port to add an optional control knob. This varies the amount of power going to the subwoofer driven by the amplifier.

• High-pass filters, low-pass filters and crossovers give you the flexibility to remove the frequencies you don't want to send to the speakers powered by the amplifier.

• Bass boost is available in some car amplifiers. This lets you boost the bass significantly up to 18dB through a circuit.

An amplifier can have one channel of output or as many as eight channels. The most common amplifiers are two and four channel models but mono amplifiers are also becoming popular.

Classes of Amplifiers:

Class A amplifiers gives the least distortion, but are terribly inefficient. They are rarely used in commercial amplifiers because they produce too much heat and give too little output power for the effort. In class A the output transistor(s) are always conducting, even at idle with no signal. The power draw of a class A amplifier is roughly constant and they are most efficient at full-output. If the load ends up drawing too much current the amplifier can wind up leaving class A (one transistor switches off in a push-pull, for example) during a cycle.

Class A/B is what most commercial amplifiers are. They are much more efficient, but do produce more distortion. A class A/B car amplifier is formed when a class B style output stage is biased so that around the crossover point both transistors are conducting. This yields more distortion than either a proper class A or class B amplifier, however the bias point is much less critical.

Class B amplifiers have two transistors, one per supply rail. In properly-biased class B, only one conducts at a given time, but there is always one conducting. Much of the bad name class B has is due to amplifiers actually being underbiased into class C where there's a portion of the cycle around the crossover point where neither is conducting.
Furthermore, Class B proper biasing may be made very difficult to achieve due to thermal stability issues (especially proper thermal coupling and tracking between the biasing circuit and the output power devices). Class C amplifiers are useless for audio. They are used in RF applications where the harmonics can be filtered out. Nonetheless, the so called "Class G" is just the plain combining of a normal Class AB car amplifier output stage with a Class C "booster" enabled to operate only if high power peak are required by the load. If properly designed they performances are equivalent to that obtained by normal class AB amplifiers.

Class D amplifiers are a rather new phenomenon in the hifi world. They are extremely efficient (80%) and can give a very good result. They use pulse width modulation to amplify the signal; this lets them use the output transistors in switch mode where they're most efficient and dissipate the least power. Originally only for subwoofers, newer designs have since surfaced making this technology capable of sounding very good as a full-range amplifier.

See more info at: caraudioproductreviews.com

Autopartswarehouse.com | Microsoft Into Car Wi-Fi

Nowadays, most people enjoy surfing the net, playing online games, doing business. But how can they do that while driving? Microsoft made an amazing job getting internet and car side by side.

Dubbed Vi-Fi, for vehicle Wi-Fi, Microsoft’s latest endeavor into car technology looks promising. In a partnership with the University of Massachussettes and the University of Washington, the software giant is working on making Wi-Fi connections in cars a steady and reliable experience, unlike current offerings from cell phone manufacturers and their laptop cards.

The new system will allow multiple Wi-Fi signals to come and go at one time in order to keep the signal strong and avoid “hand-offs,” which often fumble, leading to spotty service.

The real question is, “Why?” Why do we need in-car Wi-Fi? Do we really want to surf the net while driving? Oh, ye of little tech understanding. The real reason Wi-Fi would be a terrific addition to in-car technology is two-fold: It would replace expensive satellite subscription services like XM, and it would allow for an almost unlimited variety of applications. Think of how the iPhone has hundreds of applications. With in-car Wi-Fi, an iPhone-like onboard system could display not only weather and movie times (like many satellite systems do today), but it could also display live stock quotes, internet radio, instant messaging and virtually anything else you can access on a laptop computer.

There still needs to be a larger Wi-Fi infrastructure to get this to work for the everyday driver, but Microsoft has shown it can produce terrific in-car technology, like its Sync system.

Soon people can do their job while stuck on traffic so they will not be bored.


Source: Daily Tech