Har kört med Dunlop Sport 9000 SP förut på GT:n och var väldigt nöjd med hur de beter sig i framförallt vått underlag. Har även haft några underbara körningar med de på banmöten runt om i landet, bl.a. på en avancerad körkurs på Kinnekulle banan. Så det blir riktigt kul att jämföra upplevelsen med de nya däcken om man blir utvald.

Dessutom kommer det i vanlig ordning att bli en hel del körning i hög fart runt om i Europa. GT bilar finns till för att glida över kontinenten och det är precis det vi kommer att göra i sommar igen. Så nu är det bara att hålla tummarna och se till att man kommer in bland de fem utvalda som ska få testa däcken.

Du kan läsa mer om testet och ansöka om att bli testpilot på Smartsons webbplats.

I’m going down with my whole family of course, so that wasn’t really all that practical idea. Mirjam is going to be 2yr old by then and little David is going to be, well… still very little. There’s still a chance that Jeppe and Katrin will join us and they have a nice (well, kind of) Mazda 6. My idea was that Jeppe and me can ride in the Alfa and gals and kids in the Mazda.

To say the least that proposal was not very popular.

Anyway, I was watching the ads at CARs site and Blocket (Swedens largest buy’n'sell site) for a while. There are always some nice old Alfas on sale, but I was looking for one that I could just fill up with high-octane gasoline and drive all the way to Italy. Most of the GTVs and Giulias that were on sale had lots of problems to deal with and/or were way too expensive for my budget.

And then, suddenly, there she was…

Sandros Alfetta GTV 1987

A beautifully restored 1978 Alfetta GTV. The owner has done really good job with it, he invested some €5.000 in it during last few years.

The price was really good too, especially considering the amount of cash he invested in it. I could have bought it for just €3.500.

Reason he sold it was that he (lucky bustard) has a friend in Italy that saved a nice Montreal for him. Damn, I need that kind of friends too. Anyone? Please…?

I was almost on my way down to his place to buy it the next day, but he needed to fix an issue with tires or something so we postponed it… And of course I was unable to get down there the weekend after that because a boring trip to Stockholm. So my beautiful madonna went to a nice couple that wanted to have a nice weekend car. For those two sunny days we have every summer here in Sweden.

Damn. It’s just so typical. I was so disappointed that I probably won’t take any Alfa down to Italy. But then again my dearest can consider it as a very nice and mature decision from my side. And the only positive thing about all this is that I actually can buy a new Alfa in Italy.

I sure hope You’ll really enjoy the car you nice old couple you

Nice movie, really nice. I always liked Woody Alen’s movies, and this one is not an exception. Penélope, Scarlett and, well, just everyone did a great job. Nice little story told with great passion and with all those lovely details…

I’ve watched it in Full HD, it’s really beautiful, don’t spoil it by watching some stupid cam or screener…

There is even a beautiful Duetto in it… Just another lovely detail for us that have extremely good taste.

Read all about the movie here. I gave it a clean 9 on imdb, it’s a must see movie that just makes you feel good every time you watch it. You can see a trailer at the official website imdb too.

Lovely music, especially the main song, Barcelona by Giulia y los Tellarini. There’s an official video that you can watch here.

I ended up with a Panasonic TZ3 model, the one in black finish…

I really like it a lot… The 10x optical zoom is extremely good, and we were able to produce some really nice shots even tho we never bothered to open the manual and check all those settings.

So why did we opt for this model? Well, I do like Panasonic cams even tho I never owned one myself. I had few IXUS models and I was pretty happy with Sanyo Xacti too. The most important reason for buying TZ3 was a really good widescreen mode and a 10x optical zoom. Now there is a Panasonic LX2 (10.2 Mpix) model too that has more of everything and even better widescreen movie capture, but the noise levels were way too high on that one. I bought that one for a customer who needed the movie options and a good overall camera. It’s really good, especially it’s raw mode, but I wanted something else… So, after reading an extremely good article on megapixels I decided on TZ3 which has 7.2 Mpix display.

I highly recommend reading that article btw, it’s well written and easy to grasp. Probably won’t change consumer behavior, but it’s a good effort.

And without further ado, the winner is:

So how did I come up with that one?

Well, first of all I was pretty much clueless about technology, plasma vs. LCD, screen sizes, input connectors and all that techy stuff.
I wasn’t even sure that I will buy a new TV as I was perfectly happy with my old fat tv,a nice 29″ SONY. But being a tech freak I wanted to get into all this so I can make a better decision when I decide to buy one.

So I’ve starting reading all those reviews, checking prices and scanning through some forums. The only thing I knew to begin with is that it has to be Full HD display, probably an LCD (don’t ask me why…) and nothing less than 37″.

It’s a darn nice media extender or, better said, probably the best and easiest way for watching your Full HD content. There is a lot to like on this one, it supports most of the regular file types, it’s pretty easy to set up and it lets you stream your media files through the network.

The networking part is not as easy to set up as I’d like to, but it works fine once You get it to work. I use a 500Gb SATA drive most of the time anyway.

The picture quality is very good and it scales everything nice. I’ve got a bunch of good quality Full HD movies and the picture is really good on our old fat 29″ SONY. I’ll definetly get a new TV set and I’ll go for Full HD screen. Looking forward to test it in full glory there…

When it comes to music, I guess it’s pretty OK, even tho I feel it’s really made for video. There’s not so much You can do there, You can create playlists and… well, play the music. You can play around with background images and stuff, but I can’t really be bothered with that. So I listen to the music through my music equipment as I can’t really see the point in having a TV set on jut for that.

All in all, I can highly recommend the TviX if You want to watch HD quality material. You can get a TV tuner addon and transform Your Tvix into a good video recording system. I haven’t opted for that but I’ve read that it works really good.

There are some glitches in the system of course, more on that after I’ve tested it with a Full HD TV set…

Den har suttit i garaget i två år och väntat på bättre dagar. Eller, snarare sagt, bättre koppling. Jag har så klart varken tid eller ork (och inte kunskap heller för den del) att ordna det så den blev ståendes i garaget, utsatt för en massa damm och en hel del elaka skriverier i rutorna.

Bilen är en 164TS, född 1989. Alfa rosso färg så klart.

Jag är den tredje ägaren och hon är mycket välvårdad.

Det finns ingen rost vad jag vet och en hel del nya prylar.
Innan hon blev avställd har jag bytt en massa delar.

En liten list kommer här:

• Remus sportavgas; fantastiskt ljud, riktigt snygg är den också
• Sachs dämpare och lesjöfors icke-progressiva fjädrar (röda). Sänker ca:4 cm. Bilen blev riktigt fin och låg och sitter som ett strykjärn på vägen.
• Powerflex bussningar
• K&N luftfilter (i originalboxen)
• Greenstuff bromsskivor och bromsbelägg
• Goodridge stålomspunna bromsslangar
• Raid II sportratt i skin, (original finns kvar)
• Dubbla uppsättningar aluminiumfälgar; 15″ sommar med nästan nya däck (bara Claudio hittar de på lagret), 14″ vinter också i nyskick
• Nytt batteri

Kvitton finns på det mesta skulle jag tro.

Det som inte är friskt:

• Kopplingen sliten
• Alla vätskor har väl runnit ut efter 2 år av ensamhet
• Bromsok höger bak bör nog bytas, ingen handbromsverkan (handbromsvajern är helt ny)
• Något för höga avgasvärden, tändningen bör ställas in, (enligt folk i Uppsala, vad de nu än hette… Bilen var där för service)

Jag har just flyttat den från garaget. Efter två år utan användning startade bilen utan gnäll. Det bullriga ljudet fick hjärtat att slå lite fortare igen.

Bilen kommer att finnas på gården hos Linderholms på Bromsgatan 12 i Karlstad (Våxnäs, mitt emot BMW återförsäljaren)

Jag vil verkligen inte bli av med bilen, men nya, yngre syster behövde platsen i garaget. Familjen växer nu och kräver en bil som man inte behöver meka med.
Det jag absolut inte vill göra är skrota den, bara delarna är(var) värda mer 10.000kr och jag antar att det finns bättre hem för bilen där ute.

Sälja den i delar skulle nog vara det smartaste, men jag orkar inte hålla på med och stycka bilen. Förhoppningsvis vill nån som har lite tid och plats i garaget eller i gården ta hand om henne.
Har du en v6:a bör du nog passa på om inget annat så pga avgasröret… Det passar både v6 och QV/Q4 modeller. Vi har testat på en QV och bara ljudet är värt det hela…

Pengar då… Ja, tack, några tusenlappar skulle inte skada mig. Hör av dig så kan vi diskuttera priset om du är intresserad. Finns du i Karlstad kan du även komma förbi och kika på den. Ring innan bara…

Today is a good day. I’m actually extremely tired, haven’t slept for ages. Or some 50 hrs maybe… But it was well worth it. This morning I’ve brought home my new Alfa. A sweet GT with 2.0 JTS engine. And I must say… What a beauty. You can see her down here with new winter wheels and tires. Not as gorgeous as with the original 18″ wheels, but hey… She’s really a looker.

The whole process of importing the car from Germany to Sweden shouldn’t be complicated.
Or at least I don’t think it should be. I bought the car from a private person. There are some horror stories on the net about that kind of import. I don’t know, I guess it’s about the feeling you get about people you get in touch with during the process. I was looking for a potential car for few months before I bought this one. Mostly on usual search sites, mobile.de and autoscout24. I was there every day, searching for my Alfa.

From the beginning I started looking for a nice diesel 166 or 156 with the new 175bhp engine. Fast, reliable and economic. And, as our little family is growing, it felt even kind of responsible decision. Few more grown-up points in life must be a good thing…

Then I stumbled upon a beautiful 166 v6 3.2l TI in Italy. In Lecce… As far as you can come in Italy. But I was hooked. The whole diesel/responsible/economics/grown-up thingie just vanished. I’ve mailed the company at once, called them few days later and almost got a good deal. Almost…
Too bad there still aren’t same rules in whole EU. Or too bad Italians are just so damn… well… special. They couldn’t decide on a final price (even tho we discussed it first time we spoke). They weren’t quite sure if they can arrange temporary plates and insurance for the car. They were not sure about the transport prices either. I think the problem is that they actually didn’t know anything about doing business on European level.

Oh, well… I still think it was an extremely sexy car.

Anyway… I was still doing regular searches for other Alfas, and I somehow found a red GT with 2.0l petrol engine. Weird, as I was (still) looking for a diesel. It looked nice so I mailed the owner. Usually there’s an alarm bell ringing when the deal is almost too good to be true. It usually is… Most of those are cheap scams. This one was few thousand € cheaper than it’s siblings. It had half the mileage too. And it looked really good on pictures.
I’ve mailed the guy anyway, it’s easy to ignore scam mails when they arrive.

Few hours later, the mail popped in. The owner sent all the info that I asked about. No usual scam stories. He didn’t have time to use the car as much as he wanted to.
I was still pretty sure something was wrong… So I asked for more, hi-res pictures. And description of all bumps, damages, scratches… Anything I could think of actually. And I was telling myself that I’m not even interested in one of those. I was looking for a diesel after all.

Then another mail popped in, as quickly as the first one. He’ll make new pictures tomorrow. And he described all the scratches on the car.

[View with PicLens]

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After years of fighting with washing schema and other tenants, it’s about time we got our own apparatus… We wanted to get one half a year ago or something, but I made a research project of it. As usual when I’m about to buy something that can be plugged into the wall. Great.

Anyway, we got the LG… , actually. It’s kinda pretty, very nice controls and buttons and stuff. Nice display too. And, of course, I don’t have an idea if it’ll wash our stuff at all. But it was one of the few washing machines on the market that is less than 60cm deep. This one is 45 or something.