Porsche at the time, served as the inspiration for the Type 1's eventual chassis specification. Hans Ledwinka, who was equally as well-known as Dr. This, though, is self-evident by any Beetle enthusiast upon viewing the car. The Porsches themselves accredited this particular automobile with being very influential on the eventual shape of the Beetle/Type 1. Here is a photograph of the Tjaarda-Ford show car of 1933. When Ferdinand Porsche and his son, Ferry, visited the United States on one of their several "fact-finding" missions during the thirties, the Porsches, known to be admirers of Tjaarda's automobile, studied it closely. The car was an international sensation of the time. Tjaarda's full-sized, four-door sedan was radically streamlined, constructed as a monocoque, and had a Ford V8 engine mounted in the rear, with swing axles turning the drive wheels. The American industrial designer John Tjaarda created a "concept car" (the term had decades to wait before being born) for Ford Motor Company's large exhibit at the Chicago "Century of Progress" World's Fair of 1933. Its whereabouts today are unknown, but the history buffs at Hemmings Auto Blog have uncovered some vintage coverage of Reo's Doodlebug and scanned it for our enjoyment.īefore this goes too far into left-field, the correct "victim" of Doktor Porsche's larceny needs to be properly identified for the sake of accuracy. Other seat-of-the-pants engineering included a gravity-feed gas tank that was positioned precariously above the engine, before it was relocated to the front trunk in the name of safety.Īfter the Doodlebug's designer retired in 1934, he bought the concept and stored it until 1937, when his son - himself a Reo junior draftsman - bought the car and drove it until the onset of World War II. The design of the Doodlebug was strictly on-the-cheap: There was no clay mockup of the car before its hand-formed steel panels were welded into place and the seams filled with lead. Motivated by a 25-horsepower Hercules IXB tractor engine, with radiators set at both sides of the engine bay, the Doodlebug fed its power through a three-speed manual transmission and had a top speed of 60 mph. This gave rise to some interesting concepts, one of the most awkward being Reo's 1932 Doodlebug, a unitized-body, water-cooled, rear-engined four-seater that the company figured could be sold for $400. People laugh when Indian manufacturer Tata Motors talks about a $4,000 "everyman" car, but they forget that, when the US was down-and-out during the depression, American manufacturers were racing to the bottom and experimenting with cheap entry-level vehicles.
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And its YouTube adblocking is most useful only on a Mac. On the Mac, adding sites to your Allowed list requires a bit of extra setup, too: Rather than copying and pasting a URL straight into the app, you need to open the Extensions panel in your System Preferences, enable Adblock's access to the Share menu, and then use the Share menu in Safari to add a given site to the list.Īdblock works only with Safari, so if you mostly use Chrome, Firefox, or other browsers, look elsewhere. Nor can you see which sites are on the community-generated list of allowed advertisers. But you can't see any further details about what those rules are, and you can't edit or add to them yourself, other than unblocking certain sites. Whether you're using its free or Pro version, you can see a list of how many new rules Adblock has added and when. (Look on your App Store account page, under Manage Subscriptions.) Once you subscribe to Pro, it can be tough to figure out how and where you can end or cancel your subscription, which seems especially irksome since that payment's set to automatically renew otherwise. The updates take only a few seconds, but sometimes - not always - the app uses this opportunity to nudge you about upgrading to Pro, an extra step its previous versions seemed to lack. Toggling Adblock off and reloading the page in question provided an easy, not-too-annoying workaround.Īdblock's free version makes you open the app to load new rules every time they get added, which can happen as often as once a day. It consistently blocked package tracking links from FedEx and UPS and seemed to prevent Twitter embeds from showing up on websites as well. I occasionally noticed Adblock getting a little overzealous. It does its job well but doesn't really stand out from the crowd until you add its Pro features. Having tested out a few other top-tier adblockers, there isn't much separating them from Magic Lasso. (Image credit: Nathan Alderman for iMore) To add sites to your allowed list, you'll have to take a side trip into an obscure corner of System Preferences. If you ever want to switch Magic Lasso off entirely, you can do so with a quick toggle straight from its menubar icon in Safari on the Mac or via the Magic Lasso app on iDevices. If you want to ruthlessly crush all online advertisers, you can toggle those allowed ads off as well. I never minded it or felt like it clogged up or slowed down my browsing. In practice, this seemed to mean allowing modest text ads on the margins of a select handful of sites. It makes note of which sites its users most frequently add to its "Allowed" list - though not which specific users allow which sites - and lets you permit those ads as well by default. On Macs, you might have to click the "Restore Purchases" button iOS apps seem to get with the program without any prompting.īy default, Magic Lasso rewards sites with respectful, non-intrusive ads through its community allowlist, which the company says draws on a base of 200,000 users. In my tests, videos sometimes stopped for a second or two where an ad was supposed to be but then kept right on rolling.īecause subscriptions work via your Apple ID and App Store account, one subscription on one platform will seamlessly follow you to any and all of your other devices. A Pro subscription ends those irritations, at least when you're visiting YouTube through Safari on a Mac. And I'm still upset about the time my four-year-old, innocently watching videos about fire trucks, got treated to a mid-video advertisement for bulletproof body armor. I would gladly welcome that feature every time election season turns every YouTube video into a stress-inducing game of political ad roulette, if only for the sake of my mental health. Most enticingly, Pro kicks 10 different kinds of YouTube ads to the curb, including preroll and midroll ads and paid promotional videos Pro also blocks cookie configuration menus, pop-up privacy notices, and other online aggravations. For laptop users, the app boasts that its Battery Boost feature can increase battery life while browsing by up to 50% by blocking custom JavaScript code, unscrupulous pages' sneaky attempts to highjack your processing power to mine cryptocurrency on the sly, and other power-hungry tricks advertisers conceal beneath the web's shiny surface. Paying up for Pro unlocks additional useful abilities. |