Gone In 60 Seconds

Cult-classic from 1974.

—

Maindrian Pace leads a double life. By day he is an insurance claims investigator, and by night he runs an illegal chop-shop and makes big money stealing cars. One day he takes it upon himself to deliver 48 different luxury vehicles to a South American druglord. Almost all of the cars are delivered without a hitch except one - a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1 which proves difficult to acquire…

—

This is one of those cult-movies from the 70’s that everyone who’s into car-movies talks a lot about. It’s usually mentioned together with two other legendary movies; Vanishing Point from 1971 and Bullitt from 1968. I’ve seen both of those, and personally I think Bullitt is a long boring winding road towards a chase-scene that ends way too quickly, while Vanishing Point is a white-line masterpiece virtually defining this now dead era of movie-making.

Gone in 60 Seconds is the ultimate low-budget car-chase movie. It’s got a story wrapped around it somewhere, but it’s paper-thin. The acting is awful and the editing up to the final chase is lackluster and mostly serves to confuse the viewer. You can find some shred of story, but it’s mostly just foreplay to the grande finale - the spectacular car-chase the movie is known for.

As far as a movie is considered this is a pretty crappy one. But as car-porn it’s absolutely spectacular. Totally recommended to people who like me is into cars from the 60’s and 70’s.

I’m a big fan of Linux and Open Source. I abandoned Windows back in January, and haven’t looked back since. In fact, the only machine running Windows in this entire house is the acting-HTPC, due to having an ancient graphics adapter that refuses to display through TV-out under Linux. Whenever that gets upgraded, Mythbuntu will be the OS of choice there.

But there’s one area that seems to keep annoying me within the Open Source-community. That particular area is the area of MP3/Media-players. I don’t have very high demands as far as playing movies go, but I do have some fairly specific wishes when it comes to playing my MP3’s.

What is it that an MP3 player has to fulfill in order to qualify for my use?

At the bare minimum it needs:

* A not too retarded library function. This needs to have some kind of quick-search functionality
* Smart playlists, i.e. I set a parameter (Artist = Radiohead, for example) and it automatically fills the playlist with songs matching those criteria.
* Support for scrobbling songs, either through plugin or built-in.
* Inotify-support. Inotify is a mechanism where the kernel can report changes in a directory to inotify-aware applications. With a music-manager this means it’s automatically aware of songs that are added/removed from watched directories, or changes in those files (such as tag editing).
* Support for GNOME’s multimedia-keys function. I hate having to click around in a music-player - I want to easily play/pause and change songs via my multimedia keyboard.

Additional features which in my humble opinion should exist is:

* Notifications of song-changes and such. Preferably via libnotify, but I’m not picky here. Also, it would be nice if it’s aware of virtual desktops and always notifies unless a full-screen application is running.
* Support for Shoutcasted internet-radio. Doesn’t need to be brilliant, but should be there.
* Preferably a built-in tagging system that doesn’t suck. It doesn’t need to be very advanced since I would only use it for occasional mistagged songs - I use EasyTag for my more serious tagging needs.
* A notification area icon. That’s the “tray” to most people who are still damaged from Windows.
* The ability to remove songs from disk without having to use another filemanager.

Bonuses:

* A decent plugin system with a somewhat generous amount of plugins.
* Neat things such as automatic downloading of covers or lyrics, wikipedia-links, etc.

The default music manager in Gnome is Rhythmbox. This is the one application that I keep coming back to after trying others. Not because it’s the best (because it isn’t) but because it has most of the features I like and manages to annoy me the least. Among it’s positive sides is that it’s very fast even with a large library such as mine, has most of what I want, has most of the absolute requirements (even though some of them are half-working) and does the job. Minor amusing part about Rhythmbox is that it’s quite unstable and has a tendency to suddenly die without any warning, likes destroying ID3-tags and seems very whimsical about listening to inotify - there’s a lot of times when it just ignores any changes made.

I’ve tried a whole lot of players, and it didn’t take long for me to find something I disliked about them.

* Listen: Weird and unwieldy interface, no inotify as far as I could tell, didn’t respond to keyboard.
* Quod Libet: Too minimalist, didn’t respond to keyboard, various others.
* Muine: far too primitive, almost no features to speak of.
* Banshee: Not too bad, but there’s no inotify-support which makes managing your library a huge pain. Even worse, there’s no built-in function to remove “dead” entires in the library. Add to this that it’s slower than molasses on a cold day (Thanks, Mono!)
* BMPx: Bloated interface, didn’t respond to keyboard and seemingly doesn’t want to scan my library by it’s own volition. Add to this that I can’t find the magic button to make it start the scan…
* BMP: Too winamp-like. No inotify, horrible library management, didn’t respond to keyboard.
* XMMS: Too primitive, no inotify, too winamp-like. Decent plugin system, if it wasn’t for the fact that half the plugins don’t work as advertised. Didn’t respond to keyboard.

EDIT: Gave Audacious a go. Fairly nice, but the dealbreaker was the non-existent library function as well as no plugin for multimedia keys. I did find a plugin, but requiring me to compile it, then figure out how to install it (not a word in the documentation) was a little too much for me to stomach.

(Yes, I’ve also tried Amarok, which everyone is raving about. Since it’s a KDE-application it didn’t recognize my keyboard shortcuts and in addition I find the application UI so badly designed that it hurts when using it. Essentially I prefer to have things native to Gnome, unless they’re really spectacularly brilliant in every way - and IMHO Amarok isn’t that.)

The only player that’s better than Rhythmbox is Exaile. Essentially it’s a Gnome-clone of Amarok with some UI improvements. It’s very good - except for the fact that it’s written in python and thus runs at a snails pace whenever you want to work with more than ten songs at a time. Also, if there is any inotify support I haven’t seen it yet. The lack of speed and inotify-support is why I keep going back to Rhythmbox - it’s blazingly fast despite it’s many shortcomings, and have at least 75% working inotify.

So, I ask every Linux-user or -fan out there to help me out here. Is there a music-player for Linux, preferably available in the Ubuntu repos, that doesn’t suck? So far my search has turned up that there is none, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

So, a few weeks ago I got a little bored. Started snapping pictures of my monitor with the lesser/smaller of our two digital cameras. Thought that it might make a fun wallpaper if enhanced in Photoshop. Did just that. Turned out rather geeky, and not one of my more spectacular wallpapers. But I looked at it again today and thought maybe someone might like it. As always it’s imaginatively titled, in this case “logfile“.

The text is a “tail -f” of the Apache logs from my domain. Most of the entries visible are regarding this blog. It’s 1280×1024, in PNG-format. Enjoy if you like it.

This is easily the weirdest news I’ve read in a long time.

First off, to understand how weird this is, you really need to have seen the movie “Idiocracy” directed by Mike Judge. He’s the guy that created Beavis and Butthead as well as directed “Office Space“, the cult movie about frustrated cubicle-dwellers.

Here’s the story. Mike got badly burnt by Fox after directing Office Space for them. They didn’t market the movie and it sank from public view quite quickly. Thankfully it gained cult-recognition in the small screen, and is one of my many favorite movies. Despite being so disrespectfully handled by Fox he agreed to make another movie for them - Idiocracy. This is easily one of the darkest comedies I’ve ever seen, right up there with masterpieces such as Dr Strangelove. Anyone with a brain-stem needs to see it, and hopefully understand why it’s so funny and scary at the same time.

But, fairly unsurprising, Fox abandoned Idiocracy and let it sink without a trace just like they did with Office Space. Which sucks, since it’s a brilliant movie.

And this is where it gets really weird. In the movie there was an energy-drink called Brawndo. It was marketed with the slogan “The Thirst Mutilator” and supposedly contained “electrolytes”. The company behind it was so successful in it’s marketing that it managed to get water banned from usage, and this in turn caused a world-wide famine since the morons of the future were instead using Brawndo to water plants - which of course promptly died since electrolytes is salt.

Fox, in it’s infinite lack of wisdom has now chosen to make this drink a reality and profit from it. It’s pretty much as it was in the movie, the same name, the same slogan and also claiming to contain “electrolytes”. All the while giving Mike the shaft.

If this is not the ultimate bitter irony, then I don’t know what is.

(Via: Slashdot)

So, I sat earlier browsing through one of the stores on the net catering to home-theatre nerds such as myself. I love movies, and this extends and combines with my interest for technology and gadgets to make me yet another geek who knows the difference between THX and DTS and why such things are important. Admittedly I’m a movie/home theater-nerd of limited financial means, but none the less I do spend some time dreaming about hardware…

But, I digress. I sat browsing a fairly popular site full of projectors, speakers, receivers and amplifiers. You know, porn for nerds. The slogan of the store went something like “for those who are SERIOUS about their home-theater!” or something to that effect.

And this got me thinking. I’m an intermediary nerd with a home-theater costing a little more than US$1500. That’s not a whole lot of money since this kind of hardware usually doesn’t come cheap. I don’t claim that my nice little system has any bragging-value either, but it does add some nice atmosphere to watching a film. If I had unlimited funds to spend on this hobby of mine, I could easily spend a hundred times that amount, buying and replacing equipment until I found my dream-setup.

Alas, I don’t have unlimited funds. So, does this mean that I am any less serious about my interest than someone who has/does spend a lot of money on their setup? I’ve surfed around various forums and sites catering to people of my persuasion, and most of them seem to exist solely as some kind of virtual dick-measuring contest.

“Oh, so you think that your [SOMETHING] is cool? Well, check out MY really neat setup, I’ve got a [COOL TOY], isn’t that impressive?”

And then some other yahoo shows up to blow the first two punters out of the water with his… well.. whatever.

While taking the dog for a nightly tour around the neighborhood this chain of thought continued. Wilma (the dog) was more interested in smelling the scents of the local genteel rather than listening to my mutterings, but she’s a good sport for at least feigning interest.

See, the way I see it our society has become a society obsessed with one certain thing. This thing can be summed up in one word:

“more”

This doesn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone with functioning eyes and a working brain, but none the less it might be needed to point out once again. Also, it makes for an excellent blog entry as far as I’m concerned.

Yeah, “more” is really the best word to define a majority of the attitude today. Humans have become engaged in a never-ending race to have “more” than anyone else on the planet. We keep getting bombarded with commercials telling us we need more, we need better cars, better telephones, better homes, better houses, better EVERYTHING than our neighbors or friends or relatives.

Now, I fully understand the lust for having good stuff. Quality things that do what they should, when they should. Nobody likes a dishwasher that needs to be coddled into doing what it’s supposed to, or a toaster that doesn’t toast bread. But after a certain point this all turns into an arms-race. Did [SOME PERSON] buy a newer, shinier toaster than yours? Saddle up, honey; we’re going toaster-shopping!

This whole hamster-wheel starts at birth. Your neurotic parents are obsessed with making sure you have better diapers (or whatever) than the rest of the unwashed masses. You get fed the same mentality through the mothers milk, provided you’re not bottle-fed. You grow up, in your teens you need to have better clothes and a better phone than your peers. When you’re an adult, the toys become more complicated and elaborate but the general principle is still the same - you need “more”.

And it’s not limited to gadgets or other paraphernalia. We’re force-fed an image from television that we need more glamour, more travel, more excitement, more adventure, more beauty, more talent. We’re fostered to never be content, to never be happy. To always strive for something more. Not only do we live in an era of commercialization so decadent it would make the ancient Romans blush, we live in an era where we not only consume physical items, we are also obsessed with buying non-corporeal things such as beauty or influence.

We need to have the best, and even when we have the best we’re taught to still not be content. No wonder people get burned out or depressed from this hysterical tempo we set for ourselves and our progeny. It’s a downward spiral of madness, fueled by an insecurity we’ve created for ourselves.

Thanks to my generous parents I fairly regularly receive gift-subscriptions to Time. Those subscriptions combined with my daily dosage of skeptically scanning the big media helps keep me somewhat afloat as to the situation around the world.

Now, I personally feel that Time is one of the better rags out there. Admittedly I do feel they have a very slight bias to the more conservative end of the spectrum, but it’s a very slight one and I feel that overall the articles are fairly objective and of very high quality. The most refreshing thing about them is that they’re not very sensationalist, and rather tend to report on things as it unfolds.

Nevertheless, I do occasionally find things about this publication that rubs me the wrong way. Almost always are these things about technology, and I feel that Time is way to quick to accept the corporate view of technology as some kind of fact.

Last night I was perusing the latest issue and in the “briefing”-section there as a little blurb entitled “The Biggest Online Threats” where they briefly (and probably extremely compressed) reported what the SANS Institute recommended in order to avoid the majority of threats on the ‘net today. The SANS Institute is one of the oldest computer-security groups around, and I respect most of what they publish. Hence, I should point out that I think that the problem here is Times extreme over-simplification of complex subjects as well as their aforementioned tendency to go on the corporate line when they talk about things they don’t understand themselves.

But, here’s my response to these four “threats” listed in the blurb. I’ve copied them straight from the magazine in order for fair use, but they’re also available at Times website.

Vulnerable Websites
Sites can be “poisoned” if holes exist in the applications they host. SANS recommends using only apps written by experienced programmers.

I might be slightly paranoid about this one, but I got the distinct impression that by “experienced programmers” they mean “proprietary developers”. There’s an extreme bias against free/open source software in the corporate world, and this is of course cultivated by proprietary developers who stand to benefit from just such a prejudiced opinion. It would be wise to remember that the world of proprietary software is rife with uncertainties - you don’t know what the software does, and the developer doesn’t need to enlighten you as to it’s functions either. When you invest in proprietary software, you also invest in not knowing full well what the software does, and you have no possibility to extend or control such software. From a security standpoint Free/Open Source-software is vastly superior, since it’s constantly being improved upon and since security issues are constantly being fixed.

One should also keep in mind that the proprietary IIS (Internet Information Server) from Microsoft has a long history of being insecure, and every day I find hundreds of attempts to use exploits for that server. Of course, I’m running Apache (which is open-source, and has a long history of being very secure) and thus none of those exploits work. Security is also a state of mind just as much as it is a choice of software.

Of course, there doesn’t exist such a thing as a 100% secure application, and even the mighty Apache has had it’s share of holes. The turnaround-rate is however much faster in the world of Free/Open Source Software, and anyone in the world can download Apache’s source to peruse at their own leisure and make sure that it’s verifiable. This is impossible with proprietary software, you can only hope that issues get discovered quickly and patches are produced by the developer. Microsoft is known to have a policy of not releasing patches to security issues that aren’t actively being exploited in the wild. That’s re-assuring, isn’t it?

Gullible Users
Computer users are sometimes too busy or ill educated to recognize spam e-mail that can drain away personal information. Security-awareness training is only the first step, but it’s a good start.

Now, this I mostly agree upon. No chain is stronger than it’s weakest link, and as far as computer security goes it’s always the Average Joe that’s the biggest hole in the fence. I personally blame Microsoft for this - Microsoft exploded Windows upon the world, and while it’s good that computers became a commodity item thanks to that, I deeply dislike how Microsoft always handles security issues. See, Windows users aren’t security conscious. They’ve been conditioned to click every button they see and never read any warnings since those are “annoying”. This is why phishing is so popular - phishers know that 95% of Windows users will happily click anything that pops up. This is even worse in Vista, where you essentially have to click “Allow” regardless of what you’re doing.

Zombie Computers
Internet-connected computers that are hacked can be turned into “zombies,” which are used to launch further attacks. Tight firewalls and up-to-date antivirus programs will help keep you safe.

I find it very annoying how antivirus software and firewalls are constantly made out to be some kind of “magic bullet” when it comes to computer security. Surprisingly often the firewalls and antivirus programs that most users have are the ones that came with the computer, and those are glorified demo-versions that have long since expired. This gives a false sense of security, and users tend to think that I can click anything since this impenetrable shield of software will protect me and before you can say “botnet” they’re belonging to just such a thing. This again shows that security is a difficult thing to arbitrarily construct, since the weakest point is still the user.

Add to this that operating systems designed with security in mind doesn’t really need either antivirus or firewalling software. I’m running Ubuntu and I have neither. I don’t need neither as well, since Ubuntu is a Linux-distribution, and Linux has it’s roots in goold old UNIX, a system designed from the bottom up for security. And if you’re going to hit me with the “security through obscurity”-argument, feel free to shut up. Windows is inherently insecure, and needs to be reinforced with third-party additions. Pretty much any Linux-distribution as well as MacOS X (which has it’s roots in BSD, a variation of UNIX) will be vastly more secure out of the box than anything Windows can produce, while at the same time not hindering the user in his/her daily routine.

Unprotected Chatting
Instant-messaging applications and peer-to-peer file-sharing programs can leave a system open to compromise. SANS suggests using “tightly secured versions” or even prohibiting them entirely.

Fairly surprising it seems that me and Time/SANS agree on this point. If I was the sysadmin for a corporation or school I would completely ban IM-applications. P2P applications would also be blocked of course. This is simply since both of these types of applications open up a wide range of attack-vectors as well as invite abuse of systems. That’s not to say that people should start running through the streets screaming, it’s simply that neither of these types of applications belong in a workplace or school. Admittedly though, IM is very handy for people communicating over projects rather than doing endless conferences or running around the office - and if such a situation was required then the ban would be lifted.

To round things off, I again repeat something that I was told many years ago: the only truly secure computer is one that’s turned off, unplugged and locked inside a vault deep below the surface of the earth guarded by vicious dogs and armed guards - and even then I wouldn’t be completely sure about it.

Back in January I turned 29, and as a kind of present I received a second-hand Nintendo DS from my friends Andreas and Johanna. It was a “long-time” loan of Johannas DS since she’d bought a DS Lite as a replacement for this. I immediately liked the little gaming device, and noticed that it had a lot of potential. Among other fun projects planned was seeing how difficult it would be to get Linux running on it.

Unfortunately it spent most part of the spring and summer collecting dust on one of the shelves. This wasn’t really the consoles fault, but rather that I only had one game (The Urbz, an incredibly boring game which I totally understand why Johanna happily parted ways with) and didn’t really have the finances to change this. This changed in May when I discovered something called R4DS. The R4DS (Revolution 4 DS) is a cartridge with a memory-card enabling the user to play both homebrew as well as downloaded/backup-games. Very cool! Unfortunately my very, very tight finances prevented me from investing in one of these things sooner, but it was worth the wait.

Add to this that almost none of the domestic as well as foreign suppliers had any of these in store - my guess is the demand for them vastly exceeded the supply - but at the end of July I noticed some suppliers started having them in store. During this time me and Ash was up north visiting parents and friends in Jokkmokk, but never the less I placed an order guessing it would be delivered just in time when we returned home again. Nope, it didn’t get shipped for some reason (my guess is a huge backlog of orders) and I promptly forgot that I had even ordered one.

At least I forgot until recently, when a mysterious package showed up on my doorstep. The contents was of course an R4DS. After some bried experimenting everything worked like a charm, and I have to say that this is one smooth and simple solution for people who want to run homebrew/downloaded games on their DS.

The two vital components are first the R4DS cartridge and secondly a tiny MicroSD flash-memory. The roms get copied onto the Micro-SD, which is inserted into the cartridge which in turn goes into the DS like any other game cartridge. A user-friendly menu enables browsing of the content. Apart from rom-games you can also use your DS as an MP3-player, ebook-reader or movie-viewer (after converting to a format the DS understands). The whole thing is extremely easy to use, all you need is the R4DS cartridge and a flash-memory. No passkey, no nothing. Battery-time and speed of games isn’t affected at all, which is also a nice bonus.

At first I planned on buying it from a domestic retailer called Chipper. However I found the prices there absolutely ludicrous, and with shipping the price for the thing would be outrageous. Instead I ordered my R4 from DealExtreme in Hong Kong. Sure, it took a little longer getting it when it shipped, but there was no cost for shipping and the price was very, very decent. When writing this an R4 including a 1 GB MicroSD from DealExtreme costs US$53, including shipping. When I ordered mine it was a bit cheaper, I think I paid somewhere around US$40 for my R4, including shipping and a 1 GB MicroSD. None the less the price was significantly cheaper than anywhere in Sweden. There was no problems with shipping either, the package was delivered as an ordinary letter.

This thing is an absolute must for any DS-owner.

(A minor observation: MicroSD sure makes good use of it’s name. If anyone told me five years ago that I’d have a gigabyte of storage the size of my pinky-nail I would have laughed my ass off)

UPDATE: For those of you who own an M3 Simply, it’s essentially the same thing. Different brand but virtually identical functionality.

(Not actual size.)

—

(This is a translation and slight update/rewrite of my earlier Swedish-language posting from a few months ago. I feel that there’s a lot of writings in my previous three years that might be enjoyable to people who don’t understand the language. Postings that I’m a little extra proud of, and thus I’ve started translating a few of them for your questionable enjoyment.)

Today I found something interesting in my inbox. It was an email from an unknown band in Stockholm asking that I listen to their demo and if I found it good that I write about it. This was a mass-email thing, but none the less I found it interesting and kind of flattering that they included tiny old me in that list.

There’s a lot of hopefuls out there, and in my opinion too many of them have very high hopes. I’m also extremely cynical to the “music industry” thanks to various things. At first I wasn’t sure if I was interested enough, but I figured I’d give it a go and see if the music was worth listening to. The band writes that they’re trying to build up some momentum for their debut-cd that’s going to be recorded in January 2008.

The band in question calls themselves “Six Figure Transatlantic” and even though that’s a rather weird name it kind of goes well with their music. They have a homepage and of course also a presence on Myspace. Pretty standard fare, the website and Myspace-page gives you all the information you need, and in case you’re interested their demo is available for listening on the Myspace-page.

So what is the demo like? Well, it wasn’t quite what I had expected. I’m not quite sure what I expected, probably some generic pop from some hopefuls who were rejected by the Idol-jury. I was happily surprised when I was completely wrong about this.

No, Six Figure Transatlantic instead plays some very listenable melodic pop-rock. The music makes me think of older Radiohead-material, back when they focused on great melodies and interesting lyrics. As far a demos go this one is also surprisingly well-produced, making the band sound good and giving the listener a good idea of what the band is capable of as far as songs go. Overall I found the demo very accessible. I just hope that they don’t dumb down their sound in order to become more commercial - I think this band would be perfect for a small club or other intimate settings. The demo consists of five songs, one of which is a cover of an old Cyndi Lauper-hit; the five songs are an excellent showcase of the type of music SFTA makes.

If you’re into music such as Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young then you might want to give this band a listen.

The other day I read on my favourite news-source that Activision and Blizzard will be merging. This is quite huge, but I didn’t really sit down and think about it until now, this since my mother-in-law is here and we’re just having too much fun together. Yeah, I’m one of those freaks who actually get along with my in-laws.

Anyway. I’ve had time to think now, and even though I think that this might be a boon for gamers in the short run, I’m convinced that it will mean crap for them in the long run.

I’m not much of a gamer these days. Hell, I never really was much of a gamer, but I did (and still do) enjoy the occasional game of Quake $NUMBER or driving around in Need For Speed $VARIATION. But my very little gaming took a big hit after I got deep into Free/Open Source software. What small gaming needs I have now is either covered by free software or by my Nintendo DS.

But back to the topic. I really don’t think that this merger will be good in the long run. Why? Look at Electronic Arts. They’ve been swallowing up every independent developer they can lay their hands on and while this was good for gamers in the beginning everything owned by Electronic Arts has now been turned into an endless rerun of old crap. Every year a new NFL/NHL/NBA/Sims/Tiger Woods/Whatever game comes out, and it’s just a glazed over remake of the same thing that came out last year. Electronic Arts isn’t interested in making good games, they’re interested in turning everything possible into a franchise that they can run into the ground.

EA seems to be run by people without any passion or love for the business they’re working in, and instead cynically re-releasing every game year after year with only minor improvements.

I’m afraid that BlizzardVision will mutate into the same. I’m also afraid that if this trend of merging into bigger companies continue, then gamers of the future will have only one source of games - and those games will be even more devoid of imagination and passion than anything Electronic Arts produces today.

I’m no market analyst or expert on the gaming business, but I’ve observed this time and again. Each time two already huge companies merge it rarely makes things better for the customer. ActiBlizzard will according to my gut instinct become the same, it’s just a matter of time.

This all also ties in with my worries that game reviews stopped being real reviews long ago. I mean, every other game today gets at least a 9/10 from pretty much any reviewer you choose to pick. I remember in the mid-90’s when a 9/10 game was freaking excellent, and the award itself was handed out less often than the Nobel prize. Today it’s just become another part of a business that is becoming more and more corrupted in the name of profits. Consider also the reviewer that got fired due to writing a negative review of a game that his employer had merchandising ties to.

Me, I think that the writing’s on the wall. Game quality has steadily fallen over the years, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to change this.

When I was a little boy I read a lot of the classic french/belgian comics. Lucky Luke, Tintin, Asterix and Spirou. I was especially fond of Spirou, and in later years I learned that it was the Franquin-helmed albums that most appealed to me. One of the more exciting things about Franquins Spirou was the car that Spirou and Fantasio drove around in. It was called “Turbot-1″ (pronounced as “Turbo 1″ with a silent t at the end) and what made it particularly unique was it’s powerplant - unlike most normal cars it was powered by a gas-turbine, essentially a jet-engine. This was the cause for the cars name and it’s impressive top-speed, it had absolutely no problems at all achieving up to 200 mph. Franquins comics mostly took place in the ’50s and early ’60s so for this time it was most impressive. The vehicle also had this extremely cool styling with typically ’50s design cues such as white-wall tires and chrome hubcaps. The Turbot-car was a constant in the Franquin-comics, and even though it was later superceded by the Turbot-2, it was always my favourite.

(The image showing Turbot-1 is borrowed from this page, where all of Spirous more or less exotic cars can be seen.)

A few days ago I took a walk down memory lane and re-read all of the old Spirou-albums published. While perusing them I started thinking about gas-turbines. Why do we never see gas-turbines in ordinary cars, and did the corporations ever do any development on such a vehicle? Is it even possible to power a car using a turbine, and what would the advantages/disadvantages prove to be, compared to a conventional engine? My experience with turbines is limited to seeing them in various flying machines such as airplanes and helicopters, but cars?

After lots of googling and a lucky find on Wikipedia I had read up on the subject. Fact of the matter was that the Chrysler Corporation spent a lot of money and time on a fairly succesful project involving turbine-powered cars that started at the end of the 1940s. The project was however cancelled during the ’70s without much ado. The reasons for killing it was primarily political and financial, but the project none the less had proven that it was somewhat possible to build turbine-powered cars.

Chrysler was very ambitious with this project, and it culminated in a public prototype where the company built 55 turbine-powered cars. Five of these vehicles was retained for internal testing purposes, but the other fifty cars were distributed to a very exclusive selection of drivers. This was the first time in history that anyone beside the engineers had access to a prototype for an extended period of time, and Chryslers intent with this was to gain broader experience and input with this new type of propulsion. This would in turn be used for the evaluation of the project. Chrysler was very selective about those fifty drivers, and an extensive application process was used to determine them.

When the project ended 46 of the vehicles were destroyed in order to avoid import-tolls on them - the bodies had been built by Ghia in Italy, and thus were considered imported vehicles. It was also done to put a definite end to the prototype project. Nine of the vehicles were however kept and most were donated to car-museums after having made the turbine inoperable (by removing a vital part). All nine of these are still in existence, and four are in running condition after Chrysler gave the missing part to the current owners. One of the nine has been lovingly restored by its owner, is in perfect running condition and regularly tours exhibitions and car-shows around the USA. Anyone who drives it has to sign a logbook.

The styling of these prototypes was extremely futuristic and incorporated a turbine motif. Among the more unique aspects was the wide range of fuels that the engine ran on. It would happily run on pretty much anything that burned - diesel, kerosene, regular gasoline or even jet-fuel made no difference. Unlike earlier turbines the engine didn’t need adjusting for each fuel-type either, all you did was gas and go!

The feedback from the drivers was interesting. Among the positive things mentioned was the extremely smooth ride, since a gas-turbine has almost no vibration. Among the negative aspects was the engines thirst for fuel, especially when idling or driving in a city. Many drivers also complained on the noise, a gas-turbine sounds like a jet-engine with a high-pitched whining much like a vacuum-cleaner rather than the smooth rumbling of a conventional engine such as the V8’s that most american production-cars were equipped with back then.

Chrysler wasn’t the only company though who experimented with turbines. British Rover also experimented with turbines, although on a much smaller scale during the 1950s. Rover JET1 was the product of their project, and even though it also proved possible to use turbines in cars it suffered from the same drawbacks as Chryslers later project - high fuel-consumption and various mechanical issues.

Apart from these two interesting historical projects I also found a bunch of Swedes currently building a custom turbine-powered Dodge Charger. Their homepage is however very sparse on details, but there’s some pictures and two interesting movies to enjoy.

Below is two pictures of Chryslers turbine-powered prototype built in 1964. This was the 55-vehicle prototype program. Personally I think this is an extremely cool car and it’s visual styling reminds me a lot of the mid-60s Thunderbird with it’s elegant and thin body. There’s plenty more pictures of the Chrysler turbine-car (especially the one that’s been restored) over on Allpar and I highly recommend a visit there if you’re the least bit interested in it. Make sure to check out the really neat interior with it’s dominating turbine-motif.

(These images have been borrowed from Allpars page about the Chrysler turbine-car, which also has plenty more detailed information about the same.)

UPDATE (080221): I recently discovered that General Motors also built three concept-cars called the Firebird (I, II and III respectively) in the 1950’s. These were not intended for production, but rather as a proof-of-concept. There’s more info about them on Wikipedia, complete with photos of their futuristic styling.

—

(This is a translation and slight update/rewrite of my earlier Swedish-language posting from almost a year ago. I feel that there’s a lot of writings in my previous three years that might be enjoyable to people who don’t understand the language. Postings that I’m a little extra proud of, and thus I’ve started translating a few of them for your questionable enjoyment.)