View allAll Photos Tagged Pullbacks
GOLD NOW: bit.ly/pvOEve
NEW DELHI – Demand for gold in India remained subdued Wednesday as jewelry buyers stayed away, despite a slight pullback in prices from record highs, but there was some cautious investment buying in coins and bullion bars.
The price of pure spot gold in Mumbai fell to 25,740 rupees ($571.87) per 10 grams Wednesday after hitting a record high of 25,925 rupees Tuesday, while the October MCX gold futures contract is down 0.4% at 25,630 rupees per 10 grams on a strong Indian rupee to the U.S. dollar and firm equities.
Overseas spot gold was trading at $1,747.05/oz, down from a record $1,779.70/oz Tuesday.
"The demand is slightly slow. People are waiting for the price to stabilize," said Princeson Jose, managing director at Chennai-based Prince Jewellery.
Traders said demand for gold jewelry has almost entirely disappeared and they are not expecting it to improve before the September-November peak festival season, which is considered an auspicious time for gold purchases.
"There was some buying by merchants and investors late-evening Tuesday when prices declined to 25,400 rupees/10 grams from 26,100 rupees/10 grams," said Pawan Chokshi, an Ahmedabad-based bullion dealer. "There is no aggressive buying. That will come only when international prices fall by $100/oz."
Gnanasekar Thiagarajan, director at Commtrendz Research, said there could be some short-term pressure on gold prices as confidence is emerging again in the equities market.
However, traders said the overall sentiment on gold remains bullish and people are betting that international prices could cross $2,000/oz by October-end or November.
"Gold is looking good, even at these levels," said Krishna Kumar Nathani, managing director of Indiabullion.com.
"The Federal Reserve's comment [Tuesday] that low interest rates will remain at least until 2013 is also good for gold. That means there will be liquidity in the markets, which could drive up inflation and gold is the safest hedge against it," he said.
Rajiv Popley, director of Mumbai-based jewelry chain Popley & Sons, said Indian consumers are getting used to high gold prices and they hope jewelry buying will again emerge in the festival season.
GOLD NOW: bit.ly/pvOEve
Finding Welly 1/60 products in Spain is now getting almost as difficult as here in the UK. The days of finding them in various Chinese bazaars has long gone and thus I was rather surprised at seeing a small selection in the small toy section of an Abacus book shop recently. Nothing I haven't already got several times over though they were all pullback offshoots such as this MINI Cooper which Welly have been producing in this same colour scheme for decades.
At just 3.00 Euros each which ain't too bad compared to how much they cost in France for example and remain some of the best licensed budget diecasts on the market.
Mint and boxed.
View Large
The lights on laissez-faire's scorching fantasy flicker & die, taking the American dream into sleepless darkness.
NEWS FLASH
EXCERPT: Bankrupt Circuit City Stores Inc., unable to work out a sale of the company, said Friday it will go out of business _ closing its 567 U.S. stores and cutting 30,000 jobs.
The nation's second-biggest consumer electronics retailer is the latest casualty of an unprecedented pullback in consumer spending that has driven other brands such as KB Toys, Mervyns LLC and Linens 'N Things into bankruptcy ... there will be more to come.
Continue to full text:
www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/16/circuit-city-liquidatio...
###
The occasional white man can jump, Troy is one of them and he's only 5'10"ish.
Strobist:
-LP160 camera left casting the big shadow on the wall
-LP120 camera right near the fowl line but back further.
hotwheels batman and superman with some welly 1/43ish diecast a 2010-14 ford Taurus police car and 2 1999 ford crown Victoria taxies.
This is the mentalray rendered video of my animation. It contains a variety of different elements that are both good and bad. For one, the lighting of this render is much poorer than I had intended and therefore if I was to do it again, i would add more lighting. The render came out smoothly and the flow of the camera seems to capture the movement properly.
The arcs of the throw could be better as I attempted to fix this with FK but failed to make it work with the nurb curves and skinning. As for the timing, it looks better than it did originally and even though it is meant to be in slow motion, the fall should be slightly faster. On a good note the follow through and movement of the ball works nicely and has impact when it hits the character in the face. The pullback time on the character needs work though. The squash on the ball also works as it hits the wall.
Finally the movement of the eyes works well with the reaction of the ball but the skinning issues on the arms result in a problem of arc rotation. I believe that if I had more time then i could possibly paint the weights more evenly to allow for better deformation and bend of the arm joints, resulting in a smoother flow. Overall though the animation has been a learning experience in the principles of animation and the workflow of being an animator and has been extremely beneficial to my degree.
I also added a playblast in my cwsubmit document.
Reference for texture i used: www.voetz.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/3312616822_2e4db...
I DO NOT OWN THIS IMAGE AND THE RIGHTS GO TO IT'S CREATOR.
Pullback: Lit with 2x Hotrod Strip boxes, beauty box out front and centre, Black collapsible background at the rear.
Quneitra was once a bustling town in the Golan Heights and southwestern Syria's administrative capital with a population of 37,000. The word Quneitra derives from Qantara, or 'bridge', between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Known for its abundant water resources, it has been continuously inhabited since the Stone Age. Over the millennia, many peoples, including Arameans, Assyrians, Caldeans, Persians, Greeks, and Arabs have occupied it. St. Paul, it is said, passed through Quneitra on his way from Damascus to Jerusalem.
In 1967, during the six-day war, Israel captured Quneitra. It then became a site of many battles but, except for a brief interlude, remained in Israeli hands until 1974, when a UN-brokered agreement led to an Israeli pullback. Before withdrawing, however, Quneitra was evacuated and systematically destroyed by the Israeli army (based on eyewitness accounts; UN General Assembly resolution 3240 in 1974 condemned Israel's role in its destruction. Israel disputes this account). Many prominent Western reporters, agreeing with the UN and Syrian version of events, saw this as nothing short of an act of wanton brutality — a whole town methodically ransacked, dynamited, and bulldozed.
www.thesun.co.uk/motors/22177601/expert-ten-thing-hates-a...
Ten things EV experts hate about Tesla's
slate.com/business/2023/04/cars-buttons-touchscreens-vw-p...
Car makers like VW bringing back buttons because drivers loathe all the touchscreens
You don’t see a lot of good news about road safety in the United States. Unlike in most peer countries, American roadway deaths surged during the pandemic and have barely receded since. Pedestrian and cyclist fatalities recently hit their highest levels in 40 years, but U.S. transportation officials continue to ignore key contributing factors. In a February interview with Fast Company, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that “further research” is needed before addressing the obvious risks that oversized SUVs and trucks pose to those not inside of them.
Happily, there is one area where we are making at least marginal progress: A growing number of automakers are backpedaling away from the huge, complex touch screens that have infested dashboard design over the past 15 years. Buttons and knobs are coming back.
The touch screen pullback is the result of consumer backlash, not the enactment of overdue regulations or an awakening of corporate responsibility. Many drivers want buttons, not screens, and they’ve given carmakers an earful about it. Auto executives have long brushed aside safety concerns about their complex displays—and all signs suggest they would have happily kept doing so. But their customers are revolting, which has forced them to pay attention.
For well over a decade, touch screens have spread like a rash across dashboards. As with other dangerous trends in car design (see the steering yoke), this one can be traced back to Tesla, which has for years positioned its vehicles as “tablets on wheels.” As a result, touch screens were seen as representing tech-infused modernity. But cost has been a factor, too. “These screens are presented as this avant garde, minimalist design,” said Matt Farah, a car reviewer and host of The Smoking Tire, an auto-focused YouTube channel and podcast. “But really, it’s the cheapest way possible of building an interior.” Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls.
As I explained in a 2021 Slate article, the trend toward car touch screens has been a dangerous one for road safety. Those who drove in the 1990s will remember using buttons and knobs to change the radio or adjust the air conditioning without looking down from the steering wheel. Despite their name, touch screens rely on a driver’s eyes as much as her fingers to navigate—and every second that she is looking at a screen is a second that she isn’t looking at the road ahead. Navigating through various levels of menus to reach a desired control can be particularly dangerous; one study by the AAA Foundation concluded that infotainment touch screens can distract a driver for up to 40 seconds, long enough to cover half a mile at 50 mph.
“The irony is that everyone basically accepts that it’s dangerous to use your phone while driving,” said Farah. “Yet no one complains about what we’re doing instead, which is fundamentally using an iPad while driving. If you’re paying between $40,000 and $300,000 for a car, you’re getting an iPad built onto the dashboard.”
Seeking to address these risks, NHTSA published voluntary guidance in 2013 recommending that a driver be able to complete any infotainment task with glances of under two seconds, totaling a maximum of 12 seconds. But NHTSA’s guidance had no enforcement mechanism, and carmakers have violated it with impunity.
In the last two years further evidence has suggested that touch screens represent a step backward for auto design. Drexel researchers found that infotainment systems posed a statistically significant crash risk even in the early 2010s, before carmakers added many of today’s bells and whistles. A widely publicized Swedish study found that completing tasks with screens takes longer than with physical buttons.
Meanwhile, a revolt has been brewing. A recent J.D. Power consumer survey on vehicle dependability concluded that “infotainment remains a significant issue for new vehicles.” It wasn’t hard to understand why. In a 2022 New York Times opinion piece titled “Touch Screens in Cars Solve a Problem We Didn’t Have,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”
Other stories railing against car touch screens ran in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and tech sites like Tom’s Guide, which declared, “I’m sorry, but touchscreens in cars are stupid.”
Carmakers have noticed—and they’ve begun to change their tune. Given the higher costs of using physical controls, it’s unsurprising that Porsche has been at the vanguard, returning buttons to the interior of the 2024 Cayenne. (Bugatti, meanwhile, never adopted touch screens in the first place.) “One would hope that luxury trickles down,” said Farah. “As they reject the screens, it could over time be seen as luxurious to have buttons instead.”
Volkswagen, which owns Porsche, has acknowledged that customer feedback led it to drop its much-loathed steering wheel touch controls that were nearly impossible to use without looking down from the windshield, and executives have suggested adding more buttons to its future EVs.
Meanwhile, the few big automakers that skipped the touch screen craze have not been shy about letting the world know—while offering a few digs at their competitors. “I think people are going to get tired of these big black screens,” Alfonso Albaisa, Nissan’s senior VP for global design, told Green Car Reports. Hyundai, too, has voiced its commitment to buttons and dials.
With automakers backing away from a trend that has contributed to the U.S.’s sky-high levels of crash deaths, you might expect the federal government to offer a tailwind, perhaps with new regulations or at least by publicly congratulating the carmakers that are adopting safer interior designs. But NHTSA has stayed mum. Asked about any new programs or approaches, the agency said in an email that “Distraction-affected crashes are a concern, particularly in vehicles equipped with an array of convenience technologies such as entertainment screens and other visual displays.”
While much of the recent infotainment news has been positive, that’s not true for all of it. Some automakers seem to be doubling down on their commitment to screens; the new Mercedes 2024 E-Class will come with up to three of them. Even more troubling was General Motors’ recent announcement that its future models would be incompatible with widely used Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, instead requiring owners to navigate a new infotainment interface. As a result, those accustomed to CarPlay or Android Auto will need to ascend a learning curve when they buy a new car, borrow a friend’s vehicle, or get a rental. Learning curves and car safety do not mix well.
Still, automakers like Nissan and Hyundai deserve praise for standing against a Tesla-fueled trend that has made driving more dangerous. And Volkswagen should get at least partial credit for belatedly seeing the light, even if it was a consumer backlash that forced them there.
The invisible hand has done road safety few favors; carmakers’ inability to profit from protecting those outside of the cars is a big reason they shrug off the danger they create for pedestrians and cyclists. But with touch screens, at least, market forces seem to be helping to make U.S. roadways a bit less deadly.
It would have been rude not to venture in the many Chinese bazaars I came across on my recent trip to Spain hunting out weird and wonderful cheapo diecasts.
I already have this and others in the Xiao La Car/Peng Hui line up but couldn't resist grabbing another. For an unlicensed pullback model its actually quite a good representation of a Scania R-Series truck complete with crisply cast and nicely painted cab and fully functioning rear digger.
Mint and boxed.
A simple vehicle made for taking moving videos. The camera mounts on the turntable. It is powered by a pullback motor so it requires no batteries or wasting motors on it.
Stayed here a few weeks back now. Was very basic to say the least and way up a very rough track,they even supply a battered old 4x4 to get you up there,me being a man though "Cough" hunter gatherer :-) thought our car would get us up there hmmmmmm well it did in the end :-( Needless to say next day car was taken down the track and the said 4x4 was brought up the hill:-)Sorry for the waffle. Anyone reading please feel free to offer comments feedback critique on which you prefer if any, and any advice on how I could have done better when taking the photos.
Gaz
A worker uses an excavator to tear down a house in the now abandoned Georgian village of Tamarasheni on the outskirts of South Ossetia's main city Tskhinvali August 18, 2008. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev promised on Monday a "crushing response" to any future attack on its citizens as Moscow said it was beginning a military pullback from Georgia. REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko (GEORGIA)
Contains:
Blue homemade backpack, EPA coloring book, 'You can be a Nurse' coloring book, 'Get to know Germany' coloring book, picture of a boat, composition notebook, toothpaste, toothbrush with holder, 8 pk mechanical pencils, 10 pk regular pencils, 1 color changing pencil, 3 pens, 24 pk crayons, hot wheels car, jelly beans, gum, Pooh bear, 2 bars soap with blue crocheted washcloth, homemade fleece mittens, ring toss game, globe beach ball, jacks, rainbow marble bag with marbles, homemade fleece beanie, pullback racecar/eraser, maroon jersey shirt. Still needs a comb & pencil sharpener.
MOD.212.
Miniatura metálica con motor para pista de looping.
Serie Meteoro.
"Rayo" nº 3.
Escala 1/60. (?)
Pilen.
Made in Spain.
Años 80.
-----------------------------------------------------------
"(...) en 1978 y hasta casi mediados de los ochenta se comercializaba el apasionante Pista Looping de la juguetera Pilen, la cual anunciaba en las cajas de su producto estrella: “Velocidad, emoción y vértigo… son las tres sensaciones que Pilen ofrece a los niños de cualquier edad con la nueva Pista Looping. Rizos y espirales a toda velocidad, un escalofriante circuito por el que solo pueden circular los coches de Pilen con motor: Huracán y Meteoro”.
"Pilen también sacó una serie de bólidos a fricción, llamada Meteoro o Huracán, (...) "inspirados" en modelos de la alemana Darda."
Los 4 modelos y 2 series para la pista looping:
SERIE HURACÁN
Huracán.
Ciclón.
SERIE METEORO
Meteoro.
Rayo.
Fuentes:
pilen.jimdo.com/otras-miniaturas/
www.nostalgia80.com/2011/03/03/pista-looping-en-los-ochenta/
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Darda (toy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Darda is the name of a German toy car racing set (and related items) which was most popular in Europe and the USA throughout the '80s and '90s."
"The unique selling point of the sets was the special Darda Motor, invented by Helmut Darda in 1970, propelled the Matchbox/Hot Wheels-sized cars at speeds of up to 30 mph (50 km/h). The pullback motor was wound up by pressing down the rear of the car and rolling it forwards and backwards on its wheels. Whilst winding the car up the motor clicks and once fully wound the tone of clicks deepen to signify that it can be wound no more."
(...)
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darda_(toy)
More info:
toysfromthepast.blogspot.com.es/2012/08/185-darda-turbo-t...
Surely it wouldn't be a fisheye.
Once upon a time that was certainly the case. Fisheyes found their most useful niche in wide-angle shots that had a dominant circular or elliptical motif somewhere near center frame. A pullback shot of a cheese vat serves as an example of the photographic problem that the fisheye was best at solving. To say the least, that's not a situation a photographer encounters every day.
Neither is the classical Yankee Stadium Fisheye Shot, though it became a staple establishing shot in sports photography, good for a stock photo sale even to this day. As excited as we were about the fisheye, we had to face the fact that it was not a general-purpose lens.
With the advent of easy-to-use "defishing" software, the fisheye became capable of broader application as a rectilinear ultrawide lens. You certainly can't fault the fisheye's capture angle. The Nikon 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye used in the image above has a horizontal angle of view (AOV) of 135 degrees. Even after defishing, the horizontal AOV can exceed 90 degrees, and that's an ultrawide lens sure enough.
The image at upper left above shows the fisheye's characteristic deficits: Bowed trees and a curved horizon as a result of the lens's extreme barrel distortion.
The frame at upper right shows the original image after defishing in Adobe Camera Raw. You can perform the desired transformation manually or by selecting a predefined, purpose-made transform from a pull-down menu of cameras and lenses. Depending on the subject, it may be possible to fudge a few extra AOV degrees with a manual transform, but most of the time (as in the case above) the predefined one-click transform is all that's needed.
Objects near the image's corners are squeezed out of the frame when defishing, so you need to frame loosely, keeping objects of interest nearer to the image's center than you would otherwise.There's an illustration of what's lost in the comments section of an earlier post.
All lenses are sensitive to camera tilt, and fisheyes are so exquisitely tilt-sensitive that you nearly always have to correct a bit of tilt to bring vertical elements (the trees in the frame at lower left, above) back to a more plausible angle.
Finally you can crop out the center section of the image and you have a view that might well have been made with a rectilinear ultrawide lens.
Used fisheyes, particularly those of aftermarket lens makers, are usually available rather cheaply on Ebay a month or two after Christmas. By that time, people have made their zany portraits and stadium shots, and buyers remorse has begun to set in. That's the place and time to get one.
Then you can pack along what may be the most versatile wide-angle lens in your kit. And if one of those rare fisheye-perfect shots arises -- you're all set for it.
Corgi Mercedes-Benz Sprinter box van Ocado – Strawberry.
There are six versions of this which is from the first series, marked ©2008, with pull-back motors.
The second series had ten colours, were packed in smaller card boxes, and the vans had off-white cabs. The designs on the box bodies were less abstract than on this series.
Here is a link to my complete set of the second series: www.flickr.com/photos/adrianz-toyz/53371984637
This is my 2003 anniversary edition heritage softtail, with quadzilla fairing, pullback bars, crome lowers and a bit more crome.
PictionID:43746929 - Catalog:14_006560 - Title:Atlas Centaur 5 Tanking and Tower Pullback on Atlas Centaur. Date: 02/11/1965 - Filename:14_006560.TIF - - Image from the Convair/General Dynamics Astronautics Atlas Negative Collection---Please Tag these images so that the information can be permanently stored with the digital file.---Repository: San Diego Air and Space Museum
pullback of my natural light set up in my dining room...I am a little closer to the window than usual as it was a little overcast that day
Well, here I am with 4 more entries! If I had posted them in seperate photos, they would have taken up a lot of space, but I would have got more praise in the roundup :D However I decided to do it two in one. these were quick builds, but fun.
Flam3d is a minigarage truck, powered by a pullback motor produced by lego a few years ago. It works pretty well and looks cool at the same time in my eyes. Sorry for use of stickers but I couldn't help it, it looked cool that way :) oh, and I know it has two spoilers, don't blame me for that, it also looked cool ;D the glow-in-the-darks look pretty cool here as well, in my opinion. Orange and white always was an awesome combination, huh?
This one's McGraw's, he likes heavy-duty stuff.
MRMV 4x4 is a Minigarage Road Maintenance Vehicle, with offset tires. that is what really makes it stand out I think, it makes it look more off-roady :] with bars on the front, heavy-duty tires (aka. three centimeter long piece of rubber) and a spare tire (see other pic) and a menacing bulge in the hood that can only mean there's a turbocharger beneath, this little off-roader is ready to, well, off-road! :D This one is my favorite of the two as well.
It's Reggie Spader's, he likes yellow.
Please comment :)
The products of Sun Hing Toys have been designed purely to be inexpensive tourist aimed souvenirs and are often dismissed by many collectors. Not surprisingly I find them to be extremely charming especially knowing that many of their castings have been in continuous production for many decades!
They make mainly buses and commercial vehicles so was nicely surprised to discover this 1980's BMW 5 Series in Hong Kong Police livery. Clearly not a licensed affair which explains its lack of badging and strange proportions but lets not forget how cheap they are to buy. Features pullback motor and opening doors.
Mint and boxed.
MOD.212.
Miniatura metálica con motor para pista de looping.
Serie Meteoro.
"Rayo" nº 3.
Escala 1/60. (?)
Pilen.
Made in Spain.
Años 80.
-----------------------------------------------------------
"(...) en 1978 y hasta casi mediados de los ochenta se comercializaba el apasionante Pista Looping de la juguetera Pilen, la cual anunciaba en las cajas de su producto estrella: “Velocidad, emoción y vértigo… son las tres sensaciones que Pilen ofrece a los niños de cualquier edad con la nueva Pista Looping. Rizos y espirales a toda velocidad, un escalofriante circuito por el que solo pueden circular los coches de Pilen con motor: Huracán y Meteoro”.
"Pilen también sacó una serie de bólidos a fricción, llamada Meteoro o Huracán, (...) "inspirados" en modelos de la alemana Darda."
Los 4 modelos y 2 series para la pista looping:
SERIE HURACÁN
Huracán.
Ciclón.
SERIE METEORO
Meteoro.
Rayo.
Fuentes:
pilen.jimdo.com/otras-miniaturas/
www.nostalgia80.com/2011/03/03/pista-looping-en-los-ochenta/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darda (toy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Darda is the name of a German toy car racing set (and related items) which was most popular in Europe and the USA throughout the '80s and '90s."
"The unique selling point of the sets was the special Darda Motor, invented by Helmut Darda in 1970, propelled the Matchbox/Hot Wheels-sized cars at speeds of up to 30 mph (50 km/h). The pullback motor was wound up by pressing down the rear of the car and rolling it forwards and backwards on its wheels. Whilst winding the car up the motor clicks and once fully wound the tone of clicks deepen to signify that it can be wound no more."
(...)
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darda_(toy)
More info:
toysfromthepast.blogspot.com.es/2012/08/185-darda-turbo-t...