The world’s first road legal flying car!
I’ve been watching Parajet’s Skycar development since January ’09 when I heard about what the flying car they had developed and their planned expedition to fly from London to Tombouctou, on Chris Evans’ BBC Radio 2 Show Podcast. Back then they were testing it out and preparing for the expedition.
It was mentioned on the show, a few key things that immediately caught my undivided attention:
- To fly it you only needed a Paragliding licence
- The car would be fully roadworthy to drive around town
- It takes about 3 minutes to self launch the Parafoil wing
- Runs on standard fuel (prototype ran on biofuel)
- And the key thing – they were planning to make these cars and sell them at a low price of ?50,000 (British pounds)
?50,000 for a car you can drive around and fly and without a full private pilot’s licence (PPL)? Wow!
I followed the expedition on their website as they travelled the 9000km in the car which was fantastic.
All fell silent for a while – I guess as they were in development of the production version. Well 18 months later, I see they have a new website and are taking deposits for the first 50 SkyCars right now, at yep – ?50,000. A ?10,000 deposit will secure you one the of the first to roll off the production line (or workshop) planned for delivery late 2010. If I wasn’t renovating my house right now, and I had a bit more money to spare, I’d be signing up for sure! Mind you, for double that price you can go into space with Virgin Galactic… but that’s only for a few minutes – this will give you years of fun.
This is an amazing piece of engineering, in some ways simple but very effective idea, and with an affordable price (for some).
Just fantastic.
There’s no need for me to give you more detail here as I’d be just be copying what you can see on their website, but I will point you at the Wikipedia page which also references some of the history and other good news links from last year’s expedition. The pictures above are taken direct from their website – I hope they don’t mind.
I’ve been using UK2.net to register my domains and host my websites for 10 years now. I keep looking round for better deals when it comes to new domains or renewal time but I rarely find one that’s as good as these guys. I keep getting vouchers for free domains and various other deals that are well worth it. With my web hosting space can be shared with all my other domains and also with those hosted elsewhere with simple set-up. With the business package you control your interface using the very versatile cPanel. Their customer support is superb, they resolve [read more...]
(Article last updated 30th August ’10) I’ve tried and tested 4 different apps for online file storage / syncing across computers and accessible by iPhone: Live Mesh Dropbox SugarSync Zumodrive Each one can be used to sync files between Mac / PC and the Cloud – i.e. are stored on a remote server accessible via a web browser. All work very well, are secure and sync no problem, and all except Mesh have a dedicated free iPhone App. You can share files or folders with anyone else people (privately or publicly) and most main features are similar. Please note I’m not [read more...]
I have been a fan of Cooliris since it’s first release as PicLens in 2007, and it just keeps getting better. It’s a fantastic must have plug in for your browser, that is designed to present your photos and other media as an interactive 3D wall, easy, intuitive, fun and a delight to navigate around. Initially it was for photos and linked with Facebook, Flickr and Picasa sites to view albums there. Now it includes movies and other media and is also available for your iPhone (stating its “The best way to enjoy media on iPhone” – and I agree) or [read more...]
Since my original list of bits and bobs, these have been a part of my recent internet safari: h2g2 aardvark IMDb ReQall Twitterfeed Dlvr.it Duck Duck Go Movie Clips iPhone icon Generator Blubrry Many WordPress Plug-ins Always happy to answer any questions on these topics or those on my initial list. Just ask!
As important as what have I been playing with lately (posted over a month ago) is, since then, what have I stopped playing with. I like to try out all the new things on the web, some described as “Could this be the next big thing?”, or this is a good idea, or another cool little App. Well it’s good to look back over a couple of months and see what I simply gave up and couldn’t be bothered with using any more. So many Apps and sites come and go in popularity. When I try something out I usually attempt [read more...]
Stephen Fry got his first iPad today – one of the lucky chosen few. That was a cool and exciting bunch of tweets, twitpics and little video story to follow! I look forward to trying one out and owning one myself one day. Much more fun than reading any proper techy blogs, though Boing Boing did a good first look review.
movieclips.com is a great and fun site if you are a keen film buff like me. Much better than trying to search out your favourite (and likely pirated) clips on YouTube. Here’s one of my all time favourites. Sergio Leone was a genius.
Well, if you can see a photo album of two here then the Facebook Photo Fetcher plug in I’ve just installed is working fine. It was extremely easy to set up was the Fotobook – another Facebook photo album catcher for your wordpress site. So you can see for yourself how it works and looks. Facebook Photo Fetcher supports one album per page, and can be placed on any page or post Fotobook supports one main page showing all the albums you choose, and automatically creates subpages to display each one < my example here > – it also gives you [read more...]
Further to my previous post on flavors.me, which is a brilliantly simple yet effective concept to gather up your many profiles and persona, and present yourself on the web (read more detail in previous post if you don’t know about it) – They’ve just updated the service with some key improvements that us users had asked for:
