Archive for the ‘Transport’ Category

A Visit To Kragujevac

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

yesterday, my friends from zastava fan club went to kragujevac, to the Zastava now Fiat factory to say goodbye to the last zastava car produced

I wasn’t able to go since that was a working day but I see they had a great time

now for some clips…

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Electric Yugo

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

some time ago I heard a local company started selling electric yugo

a car with led batteries and maximum speed 45 kilometers per hour sells for like 15000 euros

wow

talk about high price

and practically unusable car at those low speeds

but I like their effort

someone has finally built a local electric car

oh yeah

they also offer jobs for their customers with a salary of 200euros/month

so basically they’re asking their customers to credit them and in return they get a low paying job assembling those cars

this is a bit funny ;)

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BBC Sunday November 16th, Belgrade Arena

Monday, November 17th, 2008

we had a great meeting at the Belgrade Arena parking with BCC, B92 and some media from Kragujevac

here’s the BBC video link :)
and BBC website link





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zastavafanclub.org

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

As many of you know, I’ve been the technical administrator for yugofanclub.com, making sure that the forum runs perfectly from the technical side

I didn’t edit the posts, tell people what and what not to do

well, it turned out that some forum members had issues with the forum owner, and things got really ugly

I tried to help both parties calm down and settle the issues but after a lot of effort I finally gave up and I quit doing my voluntary job for yugofanclub.com

some time later, a friend contacted me, some of the guys from yugofanclub.com made their own forum, but at some shared forum website that charges you like 100 usd or so to get a database backup

I decided to help them and I bought a domain name, zastavafanclub.org

I selected .org because I wanted to emphasize that we were going to be an organization, and we would do our job as a community

a year ago, I bought also zastavafanclub.com and I gave it to yugofanclub.com forum owner to use as he pleases

now, something like a week has passed since I bought the forum and made it working

tonight, we had a meeting where I expected some 20 people to show up

I guess there were like 40 people, most of whom I didn’t even know from before

thank you guys for being there

we have to actually make an organization, and a few people showed up with concrete proposals about how we do that

we want to make the organization management responsible to its members

the organization should be funded from memberships at start

we hope to get sponsors to help the organization, print hats, t-shirts etc.

we also will report our meetings to the police so that they don’t bother us any longer

after the organization is set up I plan to sell them the domain name for the exact same price I bought it and then I plan to retire and let them manage the organization :)

I hope I will provide web hosting though :)

here are some pics from today featuring me and my green yugo car

photo-0168.jpgssa51175ld6.jpg

and some more pics can be found here

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Tata Air Car

Monday, February 25th, 2008

Tata car manufacturer should be shipping it’s first car to run on compressed air within a year

the car, named OneCAT, will be very light, around 300+ kilograms, should go up to 200 kilometers on a charge with a top speed of 150 kilometers per hour

and that will cost you like 2 euros or so :D

that’s nice :cool: a perfect car for me

it should cost around 4000 Euros, will be Euro 0 (Zero Emission Vehicle or ZEV)

you charge it in like 3 minutes with a compressor and you could do it at home, just by plugging it in

it can be combined with some liquid fuels to heat up the air and achieve more speed when driving on the freeway

with one tank of petrol you should be able to drive from east to west coast USA in the future

the air is put into a carbon fibre tank and the engine is done by a French man, Guy Negre

I hope in time we can convert our existing cars to compressed air

it looks to be much cheaper than buying/converting to an electric car

I hope this technology can be used for storing energy :)

read more about it here



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Electric Car Is NOT Dead!

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

now read what I think…

we live in a selfish world

but probably the most selfish are the big corporations.

why?

well, because they make BIG profits. and the more they make the more selfish they become

they don’t care what they manufacture as long as it brings them money. environment? community? what’s that?

corporations just don’t give away their money. they may give some to make an impression to the public that “they care” when in fact they don’t ;)

don’t fall for that

what’s the problem with the electric car?

the problem is that it works. right here. right now.

and they don’t want you to know about that.

because if they were to implement the electric car on your request

the oil companies could loose A TON of profit on gas, gas that is about to get ridiculously more expensive than it already is

the car part companies would also loose money on maintenance because electric cars have so few spare parts

and the winner would be you, John Doe, Jane Doe

because you would charge your car at your home

your environment would be better (no exhaust on electric car) and your children would have less asthma

you could lower CO2 emissions and control the global warming

you would pay like a quarter of the prices for fuel you’re paying right now

you would feel better driving in a lot less noise and your engine would have a good torque

you would not need all those pricey repairs

you would not use the motor oils that pollute

etc.

sure, the electric cars have their problems

like the limited milage (batteries related)

actually the biggest problem are the batteries

but, it is usable if you don’t drive more than 60-100 miles before recharging (battery dependent)

actually there are better batteries nowadays, that give more driving economy

the thing is

those companies do not want to bother to make the electric car work

because of their profits

they want something that will drain the money out of you

a fuel that would have a lot of problems before getting to you

a fuel that they can charge you more because of those reasons so their profit could increase (take a look at the hidrogen fuel problems and the fuel cells george bush is promoting)

the whole corporate economy is based on profit

not on ecology (global warming)

not on what you consumers actually need

well the thing is, by using corporate owned media (TV, newspapers etc.)

they are telling you what your needs are, what you should think about various issues

they modify you so that when voting time comes, they know you will make the right choice

and that you’d feel good about that choice because they’ve also told that to your peers, you all think now the same

today, the electric car technology is usable

we need an effort from the people to make those companies manufacture it

or we have to grow aware that we can modify existing cars

an interesting thing happened in California, one of the most polluted countries in the USA

they made a Zero Emission Act (or something like that)

requiring companies to sell like 5% of the cars that do not pollute

at all!

and while the companies didn’t like that, they did it

because they wanted the market share of those few %

and then they lobbied

so that the act was canceled

also, at one time, the government was giving 4000 $ tax reduction when buying electric car

but the government was also giving 100 000 $ tax reduction when buying a truck like a hummer

the message there?

go buy a big car that will use A LOT of fuel

by using A LOT of fuel the oil companies profit will get A LOT bigger

you just have to be smart enough to actually go with the scheme ;)

if you haven’t seen it already, go and watch the movie called “Who Killed The Electric Car?

search for it on youtube, maybe you’ll find something ;)

I’ve been investigating on the electric cars, and I’ve found websites selling conversion kits for various cars :)

I’ve also read a thing or two about the flywheel

that can be used to store energy instead of batteries (is more efficient)

but as long as they can charge you on an obsolete fuel technology they will do that and their profits will grow since the there’s so little of oil left

my idea was about using flywheel to store cheap electricity at night and use it at daytime, maybe sell it to my electricity company

I even found some products on the market based on flywheel

but those need to get improved and I’m not optimistic in that regard

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Electric Car And The Flywheel

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

Flywheel is a system for efficient energy storage, that can possibly replace the batteries in electric cars and other applications.

The main problem with electric car are the batteries. People made several dozen miles per charge using led acid batteries, and had more success with NiMH or LiIon batteries.

Actually, I think electric car was ready for mass production almost two decades ago but the large companies stopped development because nobody would buy oil then and they would be left without A LOT of money

maybe I’m wrong but maybe I’m not

take a look at the documentary called “Who Killed The Electric Car”

Now, flywheel should be able to power an electric car.

It works by speeding up flywheel (rotor) and just maintaining that rotational energy. You use it by speeding it down. Energy, once accumulated can be present for years. It charges in a few minutes. Rotates about 20 000 to 50 000 RPM in vacuum to reduce friction.

Read more about it here

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Yugo Fan Club Party - Restaurant Ozone January 2008

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

I just got back from a meeting with my Yugo friends at the Ozone restaurant in Belgrade, Serbia.

Every month or two we make a meeting where about 15 people show up and we talk Yugo cars.

Why Yugo? Well there are many reasons but we really love our cars (or do we?) ;)

This time we gathered first on a parking lot, talked some and then went to the restaurant to warm up (it’s 0 Celsius right now, that’s 32F).

We had two guys from Zagreb, Croatia in an ex cop Yugo. They had cop rotations so they put it for our picture gallery ;) They were the stars of the show ;)

About 30 people showed up for the event.

The pics are a bit blurry since we took them at night

260101yj0.jpg

At the parking lot

260102rc8.jpg

Just chatting

260103am6.jpg

Ex cop Yugo from Zagreb, Croatia

260108ub3.jpg

Me (on the left) talking to a friend

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IBM Gets A Silly Patent

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

I read today on Slashdot that IBM got a pantent for charging you for leaving a highway to avoid traffic congestion.

How does this sound to you? To me it sounds absolutely hilarious. I always leave a highway when it becomes congested and now IBM has a patent on charging me (us) for that?

Great ;)

Read about this issue here

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Yugo Fan Club

Monday, December 31st, 2007

It’s almost new year and this is a great time to draw some conclusions.

I act as an administrator for this website, Yugo Fan Club. I do the technical things and I don’t want to get into the personal stuff. I am interested in Yugo cars since I own one :)

So, I started making friends on the internet via this Yugo forum website and I got promoted to an administrator.
We started with some lousy hosting in Serbia but then we got a good hosting in USA (well apart from that accident that I talked about some time ago).

We also started as friends, helping each other out with various things, learning about cars and stuff. But about a year ago, some administrators had personal problems about running the forum. So two of them left and made their own website that I helped them make. Now, at the end of 2007 lets see some stats about Yugo Fan Club website (also featured on Wiki).

Recently, I’ve put PHPBB 3 and the users thought both good and bad about it. The ones that had problems didn’t like the new theme and after they found out they can have the old theme back everything was ok in the house ;)

In December, the number of unique visits is 24126 (today is the last day and it’s not over ;) ) which amounts to 778 unique visits daily (per ip).

Daily, people open 2715 pages (4 per visitor) which is 84192 for this month.

Our traffic for December is 12 GigaBytes and our forum compression is turned on.

Most visitors came from .com, .net, .org, then Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina etc.

There are 62367 posts, 4149 subjects and 1254 members

:)

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