I decided to bring it to the car-shop today, though I needed a car for driving to work and back again. First, I’ve called Andi and asked him, whether he could organize some vehicle from Sixt, on a holiday at around 8 PM in the evening. He told me, that it would be possible, but after I’ve heard the price for a Smart Fortwo, for one day, I already dropped the idea of renting a car there. Some minutes later, he just sent me a link to http://www.flinkster.de, together with the info, that I should register there to avoid the car-problem in future. I took a quick look at the site, completed the registration form and half an hour later, Andi, me and our girls were on the way to STR/Mainstation, so I can sign the contract and receive a customer-card. After that, he drove me to Echterdingen/Mainstation and I picked up my Alfa Romeo for today.

The first thing I have to say about the Flinkster stuff is, that it’s extremely cool, especially for spontaneous car-needs. The pricing is really attractive, since you only pay for the time you have the car and the Kilometers you drive with it. Per hour it’s €1.50 and each Kilometer costs €0.25 additionally. This price includes the gasoline, so if you need to refill the car, there’s a fuel card within the glove box you can use. However, the procedure is pretty simple:

You go to the point where you’ve chosen to pick up your car, mostly at main-stations, hold your customer-id over a scanner build right under the car’s windshield, on the lower left corner and the car unlocks. Then, you pick the keys from within a “scanner” built into the glove-box and can start your journey. When you bring back the car, you need to drive it to the exact point where you picked it up and park it on the very same parking space. Then, you just stick back the car’s key into the “scanner” and lock the car within your customer-id. Done. All data will be transmitted to the data-central and you’ll receive a bill within your customer-portal online (or even printed on paper, if you’d like to pay for that).

It’s a pretty cool and uncomplicated concept, especially if you’re lucky to get a car when you need one spontaneously. Pickup-stations are around Stuttgart and Cologne, but I think that as soon as the project gets more popular, the DeutscheBahn will provide more stations within Germany.

The pricing and everything is really cool and more flexible, compared to providers like Sixt or Europecar, though it’s only worth for short-distance drives that do not take too long. If you need a car for one whole weekend because you would like to drive several hundreds Kilometers, choosing a regular rented car would be the better idea.

The only fail within that service is the car itself. Flinkster yet only provides the new Alfa Romeo MiTo, which is a terrible car. It doesn’t accommodate good visibility, especially in parking-situations and it’s just to chubby for a city-runabout. A Mini or some other compact car would have been the better choice. And especially on the German Autobahn the car totally sucks. The speedo shows a Vmax of 260km/h, though at 180km/h in the sixth gear it already stops accelerating. And what’s even worse: It decelerates at a rise, so you need to change down to the fifth to keep your speed. Besides, the driving dynamics are similar to the ones of a eighteen-years old Dutch caravan. But eh, whatever, the car is not intended for driving drags or other races, only if it would be a bit smaller and provide better visibility through the mirrors/windows it would really kick ass.

I actually had pretty much work to do at the office and besides in private I also had to do stuff like learning for a certificate I’ve been doing for quite a long time, working on some private projects and of course not forgetting my princess. Also, due to the long working-days over the week I didn’t feel like sitting down in the evening and trying to hack something into my Blog, just to have written. At the weekend I’ve been away most of the time, as you could read on my Twitter profile and see within my gallery, heh.

Right now it’s around quarter past two in the morning and I’ve mostly finished everything I wanted to do for “today” – “today” as in saturday. The past hour I’ve been spending on writing e-mails to the developers of Apps like TextMate, Pixelmator, Wallet and Viscosity, to ask about their licensing models. I’m actually planning to use the licenses I bought for my desktop also on another machine, but before I wanted to be sure that I’m allowed to. By now I’ve already received the answers from the TextMate-, the Pixelmator- and the Wallet-guys, which were all the same: It’s no problem. It’s pretty cool that these Apps use a model where the license is bound to a person and not to a machine or a machine+person.

Aside from the IT stuff, my car said Hello again. Last week I had to do a day home-office, since I had to bring in my CRX to the car-shop. After I got it back, it had its oil and its brake fluid changed, new summer-tires put on and some news regarding my rear suspension: It’s fscked. Now I’m wondering whether to get replacement parts for the lowered suspension I’ve built in… or…. just get a K&W adjustable suspension. The second choice would cost me €799 + working hours. However, I’ll think some more about that.

Another thing I thought about was getting an Apple TV, since Apple finally managed it to provide movies in the german iTunes Store. The only two reasons that keep me from doing that are first of all the price (a.k.a “Apple ‘cool’ Tax”), which is way over the device’s value (especially when regarding the american-$-price for comparison), and as second the hope that Apple might introduce new hardware for the Apple TV soon. I mean, they haven’t had a hardware upgrade for a long time now. Eh.

I guess that’s all for now.

Of course, I could go together with my girl and party a bit in STR, but somehow I really began disliking the city. How it looks, how much it has going for, the people, the atmosphere. Nearly everything. Maybe I’m just already living for a too long period in STR.

Whatever, maybe I’ll just organize some last-minute trip to the outside of germany.

Besides, I’ll need to get up tomorrow pretty soon to visit my friends from the city hall. My ID expired at the end of September and I finally need to request a cool, new RFID ID card. Anyone interested in sharing his microwave-experience in that area? Heh.

Also, I’ll need to drive to STR tomorrow (d’oh! Not that city again!), to get some stuff changed. Yes, right, pre-christmas presents. Yes, I bought them myself. No, I haven’t been drunk. Meh.

Oh well… it’s late again.

What else happened. Well, I solved the problem I described some days ago, regarding the Windows XP Sysprep stuff. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out the way I actually planned it:

The scheduled task seemed not to be ran, because (at least this is what I guess) Sysprep changes the system’s/system-user’s SIDs within the Mini-Setup. So when a scheduled task is being added to the scheduler while running the Sysprep procedure, it adds the task using the Administrator’s current SID – which won’t be the same after the reboot. Because of that, the scheduler then reports the miss of the actual user, under which this task should be ran.

However, I’ve solved it by adding the AutoLogon=Yes and the AutoLogonCount=1 parameters to the sysprep.inf. The first one generally activates the AutoLogon feature, so that the Administrator will be automatically logged on after system boot and the second option defines, how many times the Administrator should be automatically logged in after boot. By setting it to 1 the Administrator will be automatically logged on only after the machine’s first boot – on the following boots no more AutoLogon will be used.

Then, I added a RunOnce key into the system’s registry (within the mini-setup, using the “reg” command), which executes a batch-script. Within this batch script then I was able to do everything I want – unlock the firewall’s port, enable RDP and add the Domain-Group to the RDP-Users. Yay.

It’s quite an ugly hack, but at least it does the job. And it’s the only method I found out to work.

What other things occurred this week… hm… ah yeah. My car. It smells. No, not a joke. Let me go into greater detail: Last Thursday, I went to the gas station and filled up my car with gasoline. The day after, I drove to work and left it there on the parking space, since I had a company car for the weekend. When I returned on monday and sat into my CRX, intending to drive home, the whole car smelled extremely of gasoline. I thought, that it might be, because I left it fully refueled there over the weekend, so I just drove off. The smell didn’t disappear when I reached my home, so I left the sunroof open. When I entered the car again later that evening, it still smelled. The next day I brought it to the garage and had it checked. On Wednesday morning I went there to pick it up, and they told me that nothing could be found: No leaking tube, no holes, nothing. They couldn’t even tell me if this is actually dangerous.

Now I kept the car driving until today, because I wanted to see whether the strength of smell decreases proportional to the fuel-amount in my tank – and of course it does. Unfortunately it only decreases, but does not completely disappear. So now I’m thinking of brining my car in to the official Honda garage hear here and let it checked up again there. Maybe they could tell me more, since they use to have more experience with these kind of cars.

It’s not only that I don’t know how dangerous this situation actually is, but besides it’s really annoying since the smell uses to makes me pretty dizzy after a while – what’s kinda disadvantageous while driving. So I definitely need to get this fixed until my car burns out – either because of some leakage or because I drove it into a tree, due to the dizziness. Hmpf.

And now I guess I should finally go to bed. I’m still a bit sick and I didn’t sleep that much the past few days. Good night everybody.

Anyway, we planned to catch our train at 01:04 PM and just when we arrived at the main-station (on my clock 01:03 PM) the train left. Without us. Argh. After a lot of waiting, we finally arrived at the Neue Messe Stuttgart, at the Airport STR.

The exposition itself was pretty small, at least for the price I paid for the tickets. It was located in hall 4 only, and there weren’t that many exhibitors. I really expected more, at least for that price. But, whatever.

There was a lot of foods and drinks (especially wines) to try, and of course there also were a lot of things to buy: From salami, coffee and chocolate over fruit and vegetables up to pans and coffee makers. But the best thing exposed there was – in my opinion – Karl Lagerfeld’s EGO collection for Rosenthal. The dinnerware really had some nice shapes and would fit perfectly to (for example) the furniture by Herman Miller, heh.

I came back home around three hours later, with a package of Ettli coffee and three bars of Camille Bloch chocolate. I didn’t taste the coffee yet, but the chocolate tastes really delicious!

And now, I think I should walk down and search the old winter-tires in my cellar. I wouldn’t like to have to also buy new steel-rims for the winter-tires I’ll be hopefully getting by tomorrow (or the day after) on my CRX. Who’d like to help me carry them into my Honda? *totally unmotivated*

Finally mounted my sexy red valvecover!

Yay! In spite of the very shitty weather today I still managed it to half-way finish my new valvecover and mount it onto my 1.6i-16v. The first thing I did today was, to paint the H emblem black – or at least try to do so. I masked everything but the H, grinded down a bit the red paint and sprayed (non heat-resistent) black paint onto it. After taking of the masking, I thought Hm, not bad! – I didn’t expect it to be so not-fuzzy. Now I’ll keep it like that until I’ve been driving a bit, to see whether the black paint flakes off after getting hot and cold and hot and cold. If it doesn’t, I’ll “anti-alias” it using a black touch-up stick. And then, maybe I’ll also paint the “Honda Motors Co.” and the H’s border black… though it will be pretty hard to do that.

By the way, I’m wondering why the valvecover looks orange on the picture I took with my Motorola. Because, actually in #real-life, it’s glaring red. Hm… interessting.

A "chrome look" Valvecover bought on eBay.

Around half a year ago, I bought a customized valvecover for my CRX on eBay. The guy was selling these things like as he would mass-produce them. However, on the picture it looked shiny and chrome, but when it arrived I thought Ugh, wtf? – it was pretty ugly and that “chrome look” described by the seller looked more like a plastic-toy you get when buying a Happy Meal at some big fastfood franchise. On monday I decided to finally do something with it, so I went to the Honda dealer and ordered a new valvecover sealing with overnight express. Unfortunatelly I missed the 12 o’clock deadline, so it took two days instead of one. Still the express was faster than waiting six or more days for it.

The "chrome look" Valvecover after I sandblasted it, heh.

However, today I went to that friend’s of mine garage and sandblasted the whole chrome paint off the cover. After that, I was thinking of what color to paint the valvecover…. yellow? Green? Blue? Black? White? But after a while I decided to take red. Red is a pretty cool color combined to the black of my car/my underhood and the chrome of my strut bar. So, together with that friend of mine I went to a local car shop and bought a can of heat-proof red paint. That stuff is pretty expensive, by the way, but it doesn’t look that bad. At least while it was still wet, it had a nice glossy look which I hope it keeps after it dried. Now I’m going to let it dry until friday and then I’ll start painting the Honda emblem/text.

My shiny, red-painted Valvecover.

I was thinking of painting it either black or white, though I’m not yet sure on how to do that. I guess I’ll sand off the red paint from the logo and then use a tiny little brush to handpaint the letters.

Anyway, after it’s all done I will polish the valvecover and mount it onto my CRX’s engine. I’m really excited of how it will look. I’ll handwash the underhood and make some pictures of it as soon as it’s in. So far, so good.

Full interior concept drawing

After some more drawing I finally got a detailed plan on how the construction could look like:

Detailed drawing of how the construction could look like

Then I bought the materials I needed and went to a friend’s of mine garage. Together with him, we started implementing the stuff I doodled on that paper. First, we had problems with the welding points, because the used to just break up like nothing. After replacing the gas with a new bottle it worked out pretty good. We bended the small steel-pipes for the speakers and created the “arms” that hold the amplifier. Actually I wanted to bend these two pipes, too, but it would have looked pretty ugly, so we decided to just leave them straight. For mounting the speakers and the amplifier, we took screws and welded them onto the pipes, with theirs screw thread to the upside.

After everything was welded together, we started grinding all the ugly welding points away and sprayed the black-metallic paint onto the construction. Then, we waited. And waited. And waited. God, I hate this sleazy paint. And still waited. After nearly two hours the paint wasn’t at least running away anymore, so I carefully took the construction and mounted it into my CRX. Then, piece for piece I started putting together the hifi components and did the wiring through the car, to the front where my capacitor is. I know, a capacitor should not be more than thirty centimeters away from the amplifier to be efficient, but actually the only reasing why I have that capacitor in the front of my car is for not having to wire every little cable (central-locking, amp, etc.) directly to the battery.

However, after wiring the whole thing up I tested out the sound and quality, and I have to say that I imagined worse. The problem is, that these speakers are hanging “in the air” and have no resonators, so I didn’t expect to much from the output, but it’s actually better than I thought. Now I’m wondering whether to just build two resonators or make an open baffle construction out of it, for example by using two thick plexiglas disks.

Anyway, I will think about it some more. So far, so good.

See all pictures on my Picasa WebAlbum.

My gimped version of that hot, red Honda CRX.

So, I just took the CRX’s picture I wrote about and thought, How about gimping it a little bit up? And so I did. I actually “implemented” everything I was talking about. The black lights (though it is pretty hard to darken lights with The Gimp), the stock gas cap and I also removed the spoiler on its back. I actually also wanted to darken the rims to make them look more like graphite or even black, unfortunately that’s not that easy and the draft I designed looked pretty crappy – so I just left them as they were. Now only the H-emblem on the hood’s still missing. I was wondering, whether to place the original, chrome H onto it, or maybe brush it matt-black to fit the lights and the fence.

This CRX really kicks ass, in my opinion. Unfortunately, red is a very complicated color which shouldn’t receive too much sunlight anyway. But I think that the <color>/black-combination looks pretty cool on any color – yellow (for example the one that Audi uses to paint on their RS4), pink (the one from the S2000 in TFTF) or orange (some chameleon sunrise-orange). Besides, I really start loving the rims, though I think that without a bodykit which extends the car to the bottom, these 18 or 19″ rims would look pretty stupid on the CRX.

Later today I will go and buy some more steel for bending and welding, to finally finish the HiFi built-up in my car. I love holidays.

Really hot CRX with very sex rims.

As I was saying yesterday, I’m really thinking of getting an 1988 Pontiac Fiero GT 2.8 V6. Unfortunatelly that car brings so many disadvantages that it could only been driven as second car. Besides, I would not want to sell my CRX, since I’m really attached to it. Yesterday evening I was browsing a bit the internet and searched for parts for my CRX, when I just found this really nice and red CRX. I really like the way it’s been built up, though I would do some more modifications on it. First of all I would paint the fence in its front lip black, just like the blinker lights, the headlights and the rear lights. Besides, I would unmount that ugly spoiler and replace it by the CRX’s original one, of course painted in the car’s red metallic. And the last two things I would change back to stock would be the gas cap and the H-emblem on the hood. I don’t like it when people clean away the Honda sign. What I actually really do like on that CRX are the rims. By now, I could not find out what make they are, so if anyone actually knows how these rims are called please tell me.

Whatever, I think the guy who did that put about three or four K into the car’s exterior design, what would just be the price for a used, stock Fiero. Humpf.

Found at: http://s24.photobucket.com/albums/c33/davikan/

In the past few days/weeks I was constantly playing with the thought of buying a new car. And by new I don’t mean a 2008-year-of-manufacture car – I was more thinking of an specific ’88s automobile: The Pontiac Fiero GT.

The Fiero is an american, mid-engined sports car that was designed by a great and famous car designer – John DeLorean – and built from 1984 until 1988. The Fiero was available with two different engines, a 2.5 L 4-cylinder and a 2.8 L V6 and – what’s actually the best part – also with 5-speed manual transmission. There are two different body styles of the Fiero: The notchback and the fastback. Of course, I’m searching for a fastback version, since in my opinion the Fiero fastback has some similarities with my actual ’91 Honda CRX (ED9). *crouching down* *running away*

However, with around 1200kg, the Fiero isn’t the lightest car and from what I’ve found out the V6 only has around 135 HP. My CRX weights around 400kg less and has a 125 HP high-drive 4-cylinder which makes it in less than 8 seconds from 0 to 100, depending on how fast you shift. Of course, at around 120 kilometers per hour, the Fiero might smoke my 1600ccm Honda with its V6 mid-engine, but from 0 to 100 km/h I think that my CRX would beat the Pontiac. Besides, with my 1.6i-16v engine I need around 6 to 8 liters of gasoline when driving in a gentle way, and I really doubt that the Fiero could keep up with that.

Still, I really love the way this car looks, especially when it’s good in shape and maybe also a bit modified, like for example the YellowFiero. Unfortunatelly, there are a handful of disadvantages on driving a Fiero here in Germany. Would the car get a pollution badge? Where to get replacement parts for it? How long does it take to get them? Who repairs the car by actually knowing what he does (unlike some independent shops)? Indeed, the acquisition costs for a used Pontiac Fiero with less milage are pretty low, but with all that questions in mind, I think that the maintainance costs could eat me up. I guess I will spend some more time on researches about the car and its issues, do some test-driving and then decide what to do. Besides, I would really regret it to sell my CRX.

However, time for work!

Anyway, what’s left to tell…. err.. yeah, last weekend I tried to connect the car alarm system I have lying around at home but somehow I didn’t really like the way it was working, so now I’m searching for another one. The one I have is some “Shark”-branded product for thirty bucks and I don’t really know how reliable such an alarm system actually is. I think I might just get another (a bit more expensive) one somewhere. Well, whatever.

To get the whole thing running you first of all need to get VirtualBox (not the OSE!) 1.5.6 and of course the REX.tar.gz. After creating a new Guest OS (Linux, Kernel 2.6) and adding the REX.vdi as Virtual Hard Drive you can already start it up. The first thing you’ll see will be the Splashy Bootsplash (which of course I’ve designed to fit into my car, heh). After some seconds you should see a regular Linux login-prompt. You can log into the system using root:install. After that you can start the REX user-interface by typing /etc/init.d/rex-ui start go. To make the interface start right after the boot just edit the init.d-script to remove the “go”-check. I didn’t make it start right after booting since I’ve experienced problems when doing that. Besides, the mouse does not work. Well, like I said, it’s a preview. Somewhy the Xserver doesn’t recognize the mouse so that you’ll need to navigate using the keyboard – but it shouldn’t be too hard.
However, altogether it’s like I said just a preview to make a first impression of how I’m imagining REX to be. I’ll package the software itself (REX User-Interface + Bootsplash Theme) as Debian Packages and provide them here for download so that everyone can build up a custom system.
Anyway, enjoy!

Download REX.tar.gz (Hendrik’s Mirror)

This means that I still won’t be able to provide a first preview of REX, what I’m really sorry for. Somehow it seems like everything just has to go wrong at the moment…

Btw: I’m still searching for a place where I could upload at least one GB. If anybody knows a good place, please feel free to mail me.

However, I have the system running virtualized on my 1.6 GHz Pentium(R) M processor and I noticed that the system-boot takes quite a lot – not because of the services, much more because of the whole hardware detection and module loading the kernel does. Though, I think that it would startup pretty fast when not running virtualized on such an CPU – I wouldn’t like to use some bloated Dual Core crap only to make the Enterteinment System boot faster, because for the actual work that REX needs to do a 1.6 GHz M should be more than enough.
I’m now trying to find some location on the web where I could upload the 1.7 GB VDI so that everyone can have a look at it – unfortunatelly the traffic it would produce when downloaded would be quite too much for my Webspace. If anybody of you does know a good place for uploading the package (besides SF.net or BerliOs): I would be thankful for some hints.

So, today I definitely learned that buying tuning-parts for my car is much less expensive than getting stocks.