Singer Vehicle Design makes 911s.

The Singer Concept 911 attempts to channel the spirit of the delicate 1960s original, the race-bred chic of the ’70s longhoods, the ’80s bombproof solidity and the power and sophistication of the 964/993 series [in a] single jewel-like form that represents the golden era of the world’s most important sports car.

The body is a lovely bespoke carbon fiber throwback, the chassis from the 964-era, but significantly strengthened, and the powerplant is a souped-up version of the air-cooled (duh) 3.6L from the Heathenmobile-era 993s. I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done to take it from 275 ponies to 410, but then again I’m not the target market.

They’re hand-built, so it’s no surprise that buying a new 997 instead would represent the “cheap” option by comparison: entry level here is $175K, according to a Robb Report article in their press kit. Even so: Gorgeous, enough so that I’m forgiving them for the utter bullshit of their Flash-heavy, music-playing web site.

Weird fact: ex-Catherine Wheel singer Rob Dickinson appears to be a Singer principal, at least according to this Excellence article.

“My Blackberry Is Not Working“:

Nobody was caught quite as flatfooted by the iPhone as was Canadian tech darling Research in Motion, the company that brought us the Blackberry. Palm was on the ropes, and Windows Mobile has been a joke more or less since introduction — but RIM had a solid product and a committed user community that Apple has steadily eroded as they improved the iPhone platform.

The MobileOpportunity blog has a great rundown of this, complete with charts and graphs, that really is a fascinating read. One of the takeaways is that, for a firm like RIM, new subscriber growth is a major deal. You can sell all you want to the converted, but you don’t grow your market that way. You’ve got to sell to new users to do that. And RIM’s new subscriber growth is down.

As a follow-up bit of information, Gruber points out something interesting from RIM’s last earnings statement, which showed those distressing new-sub numbers:

RIM says it will no longer report subscriber growth in future quarters.

They’re in a bad spiral. I hope they can fix it, because Palm is dead and gone, and I think a happy, healthy handset ecosystem needs RIM.

In the middle 1980s, the fastest production car in America was, for a brief window, not some piece of European exotica; it was a Buick. The Grand National and its big brother, the GNX, were sleeper cars — they looked just like every other G-platform GM car, but packed serious heat under the hood. The GNX variant pushed nearly 300 horses (Buick sandbagged the rating at 276) and over 350 lb-ft of torque. Sixty miles an hour was less than five seconds away. Quarter mile times were similarly impressive.

Of course, being GM products, they mostly all fell apart by the mid to late nineties. Except for one, apparently: Boulevard Buick, in LA’s Signal Hill area, still has an unsold, pristine GNX on the floor; it’s got 167 miles on it, accumulated mostly going to and from the service bay for periodic maintenance.

It is not for sale.

Surviving The World really makes me want a proper, old-school chalkboard for my office.

The linked comic isn’t the latest, but it’s a good one.

So AT&T has this new “microcell” product out, and I think it’s pretty poorly understood. I say that because there’s no way rational people would accept AT&T’s pricing if they understood how it works and what it does.

The pitch is simple: If you put one of these $149 devices in your home, you’ll have better cell service there. This part is true, but the next part is nefarious: AT&T wants to charge you, one way or another, for the calls that are routed over this device.

If you have no idea how they work, this probably seems reasonable, but let Uncle Heathen explain something to you: The AT&T Microcell is an example of the femtocell class of devices. They work by being, basically, a short-range cellular-to-Internet bridge. The device, about the size of a wifi router, works as a short range cell tower that covers (basically) your home, and which only works for certain phones. It then routes the calls placed by those (in-range) phones not over the cell network, but instead over your broadband connection and thence to the AT&T mothership for completion.

That’s a pretty neat trick, obviously, but leave it to AT&T to turn a technology boon into a way to rape their customers one more time. Calls routed via femtocell never touch the AT&T wireless network, and yet AT&T wants to either count those minutes against your allotment, or charge you a monthly fee ($20) for “unlimited” Microcell minutes.

That’s astonishingly brazen, and completely full of shit. An iPhone on another carrier simply cannot get here quickly enough. I know they’re all sociopathic greedheads, but I’m tired of giving this particular pile of jackasses my money.

The Intimidator is beautiful. And silly.

Please to be getting for me this book.

Dr Fritz Sennheiser, founder of the company that bears his name, died on Monday.

Check it.

MyTypewriter.com could be a dangerous thing to keep bookmarked. BTW, I’m totally writing this on a Hermes 2000.

My guess is that as soon as Mrs Heathen sees this, she’ll start agitating to move to Portland and somehow displace the owners.

The net has been all a-twitter about the anticipated Apple tablet product, but remember that they’ve trod this road before with the Newton. Unfairly maligned at the time, the Newton was actually an absurdly capable device that was simply in the wrong market at the wrong time; proof of its ultimate efficacy is found in the near-complete domination of the PDA market by Palm only a year or two after Newton’s launch — a device that can legitimately be called a smaller, less capable Newton. The experience of using either was very similar, especially in key areas (for example, neither had what you’d recognize as an “OS” visible to the user — you just moved from app to app).

Perennial Apple booster John Gruber has an excellent essay about the Newton you should read if you’re at all gadget-geeky.

Disclosure: I had three Newts: A 110, a 130, and a 2100. They were my constant companions for several years until I could no longer deny the appeal of a perfectly-synced device, and switched to Palm.

What can YOU do with a tape measure?

Frank, your contact lenses are ready.

A middle-eastern sheik has built at Dodge Power Wagon replica — in 64:1 scale. That is not a misprint.

Why has no one given us this lamp?

A review of the $2.1 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport. This is a vehicle that generates over a thousand horsepower from an 8-liter, 16-cylinder engine, and uses it to get to 60 in under three seconds.

The author’s takeaway? It turns out not to be nearly as much fun as you’d expect:

The car comes with a great cocktail-party boast: if your Veyron, at rest, were passed by a $500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR doing 100 m.p.h., you could floor the accelerator and still reach 200 m.p.h. before the Mercedes could match its speed.

That kind of physics-textbook problem is where my issues begin. At speeds where cars from a $40,000 Nissan 370Z to a $90,000 Porsche 911 become your wingmen, delivering pure blasts of driving joy, the Bugatti feels bored to death. The artillery-shell acceleration is diverting, but the Bugatti leaves you nowhere else to go, except directly to jail.

Yeah, you read that right. The official sports car of Heathen Central costs less than 5% of the Bugatti.

Many Bugatti buyers surely have access to racetracks, yet I’m equally sure that 90-some percent of them won’t have nearly enough driving talent to exercise this car. Mostly, I picture Euro-poseurs needing valet assistance to back up the Bugatti in Monaco, while jaws drop and the owner barks orders into his diamond-encrusted cellphone. When your car makes a Lamborghini seem tasteful, there’s a problem.

As with the New York Yankees or most Picasso paintings, I respect the Bugatti as an engineering exercise and a conglomeration of overpriced talent. Yet I might argue that any $2 million car should be powered by hydrogen, electricity — even nuclear fusion — not a gas engine blown up to overkill proportions. The Bugatti isn’t the future of the fast car; it’s the past writ in extra-large type.

[…]

For half the Bugatti’s price, one could buy four genuine exotics that I find better looking and more rewarding: the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Audi R8 V-10 and Aston Martin DBS. That would still leave $1 million for a 10-car garage filled with classics like a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette Sting Ray fuelie.

Update from the comments: I thought my old climbing buddy Joe was making a joke when he said “If you want to pick one up cheap, someone parked one in Galveston bay,” but it turns out someone really did put a Veyron in the marsh this week. Whups!

Ladies and Gentleheathen, I give you the Bluetooth Banana.

Some MIT kids made a balloon-based camera rig that made it 17 miles up. And they did it for $150.

It is entirely unclear to me why, given the broad realms of expertise on offer in Heathen Nation, that we have not yet undertaken to build any seige engines.

Heathen Nation, please account for yourselves. Or, failing that, signify in comments below your willingness to undertake the mission of flinging large objects great distances for the sheer flying (yes) fuck of it some time in the near future. I am willing to start with fall harvest gourdfruit, chiefly because I believe them to be cheap, plentiful, and possessed of a satisfyingly dramatic endgame.

What we need:

• A truck.
• A place to fling.
• Power tools.
• Raw material (hello, Home Depot)
• Plans (hello, Google)
• Beer (not strictly required, but it sure seems wise, doesn’t it?)

Again, signify your willingness to participate in said tomfoolery with a comment below, or an email to me.

Please gets us a coelacanth, k?

(Sadly, the linked story doesn’t give us an order link. Who are these Wild Safari people? Where’s the “add to cart” link? C’mon, Interwub, don’t let me down!)

There’s a new, special edition 911 available for a cool quarter mil.

Please, Santa?

They’re being crushed by Nintendo and Microsoft in gaming, and Apple has made them irrelevant in portable music, but their revisions to their eReader line are sure to be a hit with anyone who doesn’t want to rent their books from Amazon.

The kicker: Sony is explicitly embracing open content and multiple sources. This is very smart, and very good for the consumer. (Let’s not give Sony too much credit though; given the Kindle’s position, it’s pretty much the only play left for Sony.) Oh, and now they’re also Mac-compatible out of the box.

Color me interested. They’ve even got a unit with an always-on 3G connection, just like the Kindle.

These Star Wars figures are better than the ones you have at home, because they’re based on Ralph McQuarrie’s concept drawings and not what Lucas eventually put onscreen.

My people call it. . . SasqWatch.

I like gadgets. Everybody knows this. I also travel quite a bit, and have for years, and this isn’t news, either.

In my gadget-loving travels, I’ve had plenty of chances to use GPS systems, initially just the Hertz NeverLost system. Hertz’s Magellan-based car-mounted tool was fanTAStic in 2004, but has really not aged all that well. I didn’t really realize this until I had to use National in Kansas City this winter, which gave me my first exposure to the Garmin line.

I’d already seen and played with these units, and was pretty sure I’d choose a Garmin if I bought my own, and my early trips to Kansas City with National’s Garmins convinced me of that pretty handily. A touchscreen beats the Magellan’s interface all to hell, and having the unit on the dash makes more sense than keeping it in the passenger footwell, too. (National’s approach is also more flexible than Hertz’s, since they don’t mount the devices in the cars — renting with the GPS option means they just give you a little bag with the Garmin and its cables inside, which makes yield management easier for them.)

Of course, busy as I’ve been, I never bothered to actually go buy one — sure, it would be cheaper in the long run to own a $200 Garmin than to rent it for $15 or $30 a week, but the $30 is corporate money and the $200 wouldn’t be. Also, I really only needed them occasionally, and so I kept putting it off.

Then I bought a new iPhone this summer, and realized a purpose-built GPS is probably a dead letter. Google Maps + the internal true GPS of the 3G/3GS iPhones isn’t quite at Garmin quality levels, but it’s enough that I don’t need to spend another $200 or tote around another gadget. I’ve used it plenty to navigate in new cities or unfamiliar areas of Houston, and even without turn-by-turn, it’s absolutely good enough to make the idea of a Garmin redundant, at least for me.

The real head-scratcher, though, is this: We took the Benz in for some routine stuff last week, and the loaner car was a 2009 C-class. It’s a very nice car, to be sure, and comes with a fancy in-dash screen for managing various car features, including the built-in navigation system.

Which sucks. It’s unremittingly halfassed, and I’m sure constitutes a several thousand dollar add-in. An entry-level $149 Garmin beats it all to hell; shit, the outdated NeverLost system at Hertz is nicer and easier to use. What the hell?

It’s not just Mercedes, either. I have yet to see an original-equipment built-in GPS system that’s better in any way than the current crop of pocketable Garmins. Frankly, the iPhone’s drastically better and easier to use than any built-in, too, and gives the Garmin a run for its money. How long, though, do you reckon before carmakers get this news? Since Audi was still selling analog cell phones for $2000 in 1999, it seems likely we’ll see these things persist for quite some time.

Weird.

Tom Knapp knows his way around a shotgun.

Intrigued, I found Knapp’s own site for more information. Here you can find the answer to the twin questions “Are those stock guns?” and “How do you do international travel with shotguns in this day and age?”

ARE TOM’S GUNS CUSTOMIZED?

Although Tom’s shooting performances are out of this world, his show guns are right out of the box.

The story gets even better.

When Tom is performing shooting exhibitions around the world for Benelli, he doesn’t carry his guns with him. The Benelli importer for the country Tom is visiting supplies the Benelli models that Tom will use during his performance there. Tom assembles those guns right out of the box in front of his first audience.

Cool.

After the publisher decided “you know, maybe electronic publication isn’t what we want to do after all,” Amazon deleted 1984 and Animal Farm (oh, the irony) from any Kindle that had purchased them. That they provided a refund as well is pretty much irrelevant to me.

More at Pogue @ NYT:

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

If I buy a paper book, it’s mine. Amazon can’t come to my house and take it back, even if they want to pay me for it.

So, I got a new iPhone, and it’s big enough to also be a reasonable iPod (32 gigabytes). This requires the acquisition of some new Serious Headphones, since the Serious Headphones I already own have no mic or switch; while they work with the iPhone, I have to take them off to take calls, and I can’t pause the music without touching the phone.

I’ve been very pleased with my existing Etymotics, but had heard good things about Ultimate Ears, so I thought I’d give them a go. MISTAKE. for one thing, even the smallest of their silicon earbud tips made my ear canals ache, and — odder — listening for more than a few minutes produced a vague sense of nausea, which is just plain weird. All symptoms went away when I switched back to my ER-6i set.

Fortunately, Amazon has a liberal return policy, so my UEs will go back tomorrow for a full refund (minus a $5 shipping charge) in favor of a new set of Ety HF2s.

Lesson learned? Stick with what works. Heathen faithful — or, at least, those of you interested in fancy headphones — take note.

It had to happen, and of course it’s Top Gear who’ve done it.

The Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport has 1,001 horsepower and a 2.5 second 0-60 time — and will ding you a cool $2.1 million, or an order of magnitude more than the Aston-Martin DB9.

Did we mention a 2.5 second 0-60? Yeah. It’s like that.

And you’re gonna like it.

Check out the new gesture support in Firefox 3.5.

Turns out, if you’re in the right spot and really lucky, you can catch a shot of an F-22 just as it goes supersonic. Neat.

ONE: I go to the ATT store. They take my name at the podium; as I enter, I establish with the clerk that they do, in fact, have the iPhone 3GS in stock. He confirms this, and tells me it’ll be a 20 minute wait.

Twenty minutes later, another ATT drone starts taking my information and drops into the conversation that “pre-ordering” takes 7 to 10 days. Um, no.

TWO: I go to the Apple store. I have a new phone, activated, with my existing number on it, in less time than I waited at the ATT store.

Please explain to me why we at Heathen HQ do not yet have a tiny robot that makes us coffee.

We are most displeased.

Jeremy Clarkson testing the Fiesta in a shopping mall: “I’ve got 120 horsepower . . . you don’t want any more than that on marble.” Stay with it until about 4:15, and then continue until you get to the part about the beach assault.

If that’s not enough fun, then how about “It’s like listening to the Cirque du Soleil being chopped up by their own chainsaws,” which is what Clarkson has to say about the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder.

The folks at 9ff have created a hotrodded version of Porsche’s 911 GT2, because apparently the 520 horse, 3.8 sec 0-60 stock version was too slow.

The Widowmaker turns 850 horses, gets to 60 in three flat, and tops out at 240 mph. And it has a 1,120 horsepower big brother in the works.

Price isn’t listed. I’m assuming it’s just as absurd as the whole notion of 1,000 horsepower.

Mrs Heathen just this moment signed the papers making this delightful vehicle an official member of the Heathen Motorpool. The Hyundai received a diagnosis that proved financially terminal, and we thought we’d shop longer, but the deal on this little wagon — a 2005 C240 — was too good to pass up. Reached for comment, the existing German portion of our motorpool was cautiously – Teutonically, even – optimistic.

(Even after factoring in the warranty and total payments over 3 years, it’ll still cost less than the new cars we were looking at. Score!)

CardStar is an iPhone app that stores the barcodes for all your shopping/affinity cards. If it works, it’s gonna save my wallet.

You need an online kaleidoscope, don’t you? It’s from Ze Frank. C’mon. You know you want to.

When I was a kid, the best tie-in toy had nothing to do with Star Wars. Sure, the Death Star playset was cool, but nothing from Lucasland could compete with the Enterprise kit’s “functional” transporter. Spin the box, hit the button, and Kirk’s gone planet-side. Plus, the Trek toys were pre-shrinkray — 8 or 12 inches tall instead of tiny and cheap like the Star Wars figures. (Let’s not even talk about what they did to G.I. Joe.)

Turns out, it’s back, and so are vintage figures. I’m not really a fill-my-office-with-SF-toys guy, but for this, I may make an exception.

Someone took a 30-minute exposure, in the dark, of their Roomba’s path through their room. Neat.

How about a wind-up vibrator, free of all those nasty batteries?

Check it out.

“I used prosciutto (Italian for ‘expensive bacon’) because it is a superior engineering grade of meat.” (Via Rob)

(The whole Greymatter subsite there is fantastic; he also hotrods a Weber to make his own glass, which means putting about 2,000 degrees in a kettle grill. Delightful.)

Don’t you want a Royal Enfield Military 500 motorcycle? Holy cow, it’s only like six large, too.