plug-in

They don't go up for sale until 2012, but Zipcar has managed to snag eight Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles (PHV) for its members to rent as part of a testing program with Toyota for the prototype vehicles.

Zipcar locations in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., San Francisco, and Portland, Ore., will receive the plug-in Prius cars, which have an electric range of up to 13 miles on a full battery and can be charged from a standard 110-volt outlet in up to 3 hours. For longer distances, the plug-in Prius achieves an average of 50 mpg, according to Toyota. … Read more

Battery-powered vehicles will come in a range of electric and hybrid models in coming years, rather than come in one or two configurations.

The Electric Drive Transportation Association (EDTA) yesterday hosted a teleconference where battery company executives predicted how auto electrification will take hold and how the industry will tackle the cost of batteries.

Hybrid cars are now a familiar sight in the U.S. and many consumers are already aware of the battery-electric Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, which uses a gas engine to run a generator that charges its batteries. Automakers are investing in plug-in vehicles, relying … Read more

The technology to shift U.S. transportation from oil to electricity is basically ready to go, but political and infrastructure issues could stymie growth beyond a niche set of drivers, according to a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The report, put out today by the MIT Energy Initiative, said that the two main reasons for electrifying transportation are to lower greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce dependence on imported oil.

Conventional hybrids lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to gasoline engines by about 33 percent, it found. If a plug-in hybrid were charged by carbon-free electricity, such as … Read more

Add-ons to Web browsers are exceptionally popular, but sometimes can result in features being tacked onto the brower's interface that can be annoying at best if they're not used. Many times these add-ons are simple drag-and-drop plugins that can be removed from the various Internet Plug-Ins folders in either the global or user libraries, but at other times the add-ons may use alternative means of loading, which can make removing them less straightforward.

One of these is the Community Toolbar, which is developed by "Conduit" and may be customized by other developers for specific purposes and … Read more

It looks like automakers will be required by law to add audible alerts to silent-running electric vehicles to keep sight-impaired pedestrians safe.

President Barack Obama this week signed into law the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act (S. 841), which will protect the blind and other pedestrians from injury as a result of silent-vehicle technology, said the National Federation of the Blind.

The new bill, sponsored by Senator John Kerry, and 29 other co-sponsors, allows the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) begin crafting standards for an alert sound.

"The National Federation of the Blind is pleased that this critical legislation … Read more

Mobile Opera may be driving the Norwegian browser company's growth, but that doesn't mean that the desktop browser is getting ignored. Debuting today, Opera 11 for Windows, Mac, and Linux has only gotten more stable since the beta version of the browser launched last month.

The most requested of the new features is the lightweight extension API framework, which brings to Opera a long-missing capability to directly add to and customize the browser. Having launched while the browser was in beta, there are already several popular extensions available, including ad-blocker NoAds; YouTube downloader FastestTube; Image Preview Popup for … Read more

Web Snapper is an app and Safari plug-in that provides a fast and flexible way to capture screenshots of web pages. The Mac OS provides some very limited screen-capture capabilities with Grab, but Web Snapper provides many more options (especially in terms of format, and in its easy-to-use integration with Safari), and it can capture multi-page vector PDFs with actual text, links, and styling intact.

Web Snapper gives you a few different options for your interface, which will likely vary based on your workflow and browser preference. Using any browser, you can drag and drop URLs onto Web Snapper's … Read more

Web Snapper is an app and Safari plug-in that provides a fast and flexible way to capture screenshots of Web pages. The Mac OS provides some very limited screen-capture capabilities with Grab, but Web Snapper provides many more options (especially in terms of format, and in its easy-to-use integration with Safari), and it can capture multipage vector PDFs with actual text, links, and styling intact.

Web Snapper gives you a few different options for your interface, which will likely vary based on your workflow and browser preference. Using any browser, you can drag and drop URLs onto Web Snapper's … Read more

Linky is a free Firefox add-on that increases your power over hyperlinks. You can use it open all or some of the links on a given page, including images--even links on different tabs.

Linky installs normally; when we restarted Firefox, it was listed among our add-ons. We clicked Options, which called up a dialog with tabs for General and Advanced settings as well as an About tab with links to the developer's Web site. We selected several General options, such as the ability to open both new tabs and windows, show all images, and copy links to the Clipboard. … Read more