Phil online

A man showed up at my doorstep last weekend. He had a framed photo of my house taken from a helicopter in the fall. It seems they have a company that does this. He had a map of about 100 other houses he had yet to visit.

The photo was a bit expensive, but it was so cool. So I bought it. Framed. And the CD scan of the negative. (The CD had to be ordered and scanned. It arrived about 4 days later. Nice!)

Interestingly, the photo was taken about a month before I ever saw this house. It was shot in September and we first saw the house ourselves in October. I didn’t buy it until February, so it was just lucky (for him) that this guy showed up a few weeks later.

Pete Miser is a hip hop (”rap”) artist from New York (via Portland, OR) whom I’ve never heard of before. Probably you’ve never heard of him either. But his style is very clean and polished, and his music is so full of life and character that it sounds effortless in spite of its complexity. (more…)

I received my upgraded and hacked Tivo via Fedex yesterday. It’s not “illegally” hacked, as far as I can tell. Everything seems on the up and up. It has a bigger hard disk, the 4.x software, some extra third-party stuff installed, and the USB/WiFi enabled. I bought it on eBay. I probably overpaid for it, but I (more…)

I have had DirecTV service for about 9 years, Tivo for 6 years and Vonage for 2. I love them all dearly, but they don’t all work well together.

Well, DirecTV doesn’t like Vonage. It won’t complete its calls to the mother ship. Apparently this isn’t required for long-term service, though, as I haven’t completed a call in years, to my knowledge.

Tivo’s modem works just fine on Vonage. I really need Tivo to make its daily call, so I’m glad I don’t have any hoop-jumping to worry with there.
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I’ve had my carputer in active use now for several weeks. It’s been great. But here comes the first real challenge — I’m driving 10 hours for Thanksgiving holiday. I have 20 movies stored on the hard disk, but the kids have seen them all recently — in the car. They have their Game Cube to hook into the system, too, so that will help. I should rip more MP3’s onto the disk, but I have no time left. But I do have the daVinci Code audiobook handy. If only the kids won’t be listening.

This will be another test of iGuidance. I expect good results. I’ll try to report back after the trip.

Update:

The carputer saved the day! And it had some hiccups.

• 30 miles south of Nashville all traffic on I-24 came to a standstill. There was no way off the highway. We crept along for 2 hours before reaching an exit. Traffic was being slowly detoured down a small highway. We decided to take different roads on the other side of the highway which the carputer found for us using the internal maps and GPS. My luddite wife even said “Yay, carputer!”
• On the way home, we had a similar problem in Chatanooga. This time we were able to take an exit early on and avoid most of the snarl.
• I got to show off the carputer on the trip to many relatives. All were impressed.
• We did manage to get some more movies ripped to the hard drive, but it was close. It takes about 4 hours per movie right now. That will improve when I get the DVD-ROM drive installed.
• I actually forgot to upload all the states’ maps into iGuidance before we left. I was able to hook up an ad-hoc wireless network and copy them over from my laptop for the trip back home, but we made the trip up using StreetAtlas instead. Not bad, but not ideal.
• iGuidance locked up on me three or four times on this trip. It didn’t crash so much as completely stop responding to user input. I had to reboot the computer to get it back (since I don’t have a keyboard for Ctrl-Alt-Del.) I need to install a reset button for the carputer.
• iGuidance did find breakfast and lunch for us. It doesn’t have a great Restaurant-finder, but it did take us off the touristy-areas near the interstates. And I mean that in a Good Way.
• We listened to lots of radio shows I recorded with ReplayRadio. I like this application, but it still needs some work, mostly with the audio drivers.
• I used my brand-new 40GB MP3 player (Creative Zen Xtra) to carry some video content to the car. I figured I’d transfer it on the road. I had some trouble installing the drivers on the carputer, and when we got on the road, I found out they weren’t working at all. Damn! Later it occurred to me to try to download new drivers from the internet on my cell phone. I did, and it worked! It took about 20 minutes, but once the drivers and app were installed, I was able to copy the movies onto the carputer for our travelling pleasure. Sweet!

Here’s the next feature I need to add: Voice control. You say “Surf the web” and the computer brings up internet explorer. Way cool!

In particular, this app will voice-automate FrodoPlayer and iGuidance (navigation system). That’s what I need. I hope there’s not too much road noise in the car to be useable.

Some people don’t want to build their own carputer. Heck — I didn’t want to build my own carputer. But I knew that what was available didn’t do everything I wanted it to.

Well, that may be changing. (more…)

Hot damn! Someone told me about this but I couldn’t believe it was this easy. I don’t need to do enough mobile web surfing to have to pay for it. I mean, all the data plans available on my old carrier were like $20 per month for some limited connectivity. No thanks.

But on Verizon it turns out that you can use your (more…)

Someone’s developing a tool that tracks location and speed on the GPS constantly. It generates track files that you can later use to generate maps from www.gpsvisualizer.com.

Looks like I might need ComFoolery to make it work in tandem with the nav software. Maybe I can get the Nav software to always save a track instead…?

There’s another interesting looking GPS navigation package called Destinator. It has some advantages over iGuidance, foremost of which is an SDK which allows third-party frontends. Some have already been written for carputer installs. It also invites customization be letting you replace the voice prompts. And it has support for lots of countries, if you plan on taking your car international.

But it’s a bit more expensive than iGuidance, and the map displays have more detail on them — possibly in a Bad Way. I mean, I like detail if I’m trying to figure out how to get somewhere manually, but not so much if I’m counting on the software to do it for me. (Aside: check out the lawyer-bait on their site where it says, “driver-safe daytime and nighttime colors “)

Also, they seem to have abandoned the PC platform and are focusing only on Pocket PC and smart phones. Probably a smart move, but it makes the current version useless for me.

Maybe someone will send me a demo of the old version I can try out. Or maybe iGuidance will let me down and I’ll feel a need to switch. Until then I’ll just keep this on my potential options list.

I got fed up with Street Atlas‘ user interface. I mean, I’ve always hated it, but I didn’t know how bad it could be until I tried it on a touchscreen. I considered getting their new version (which claims to be easier for in-car nav) but it looks like their two big features are these: bigger fonts, and one button is bigger. Whoop-tee-doo.

So I bought iGuidance. The whole issue for me is useability, right? It has to be able to navigate (more…)

I fixed my touchscreen last night. There were so many places it could have been broken: inside the USB pigtail, inside the VGA/USB attachment cable, inside the multiple-input hydra cable, inside the monitor itself, or even the touchscreen control board. It turned out to be inside the (more…)

Eek! My touchscreen died. Someone tripped over the cable, so I think maybe it broke a wire. I’m trying to get the cable replaced, but it’s not going well so far. I’m in a race to see if I can get a new cable or repair the old one first.

The cable in question is for the Lilliput 8″ monitor. I guess it’s the (more…)

For my carputer install, I wanted a primary control monitor up front with a touchscreen. This would hopefully solve the need for a mouse, a keyboard, and a display all in one unit. I’m still trying to wean myself off the keyboard, but I have run the entire (more…)

I really wanted to run Linux on my carputer. Really. I was even willing to try to get my luddite wife to accept it. (It is her car, after all.) I could find a nice gui for it, I’m sure. But one thing help me back: GPS.

One primary function of the carputer is GPS navigation. And the map companies (more…)

This carputer is wireless. On the internet, anyway. I have a WiFi antenna mounted under the dash where it gets a remarkably good signal in my garage.

It also gets pretty good reception at coffe bars, restaurants and hotels that offer free internet. (more…)

I managed to pull power from the PSU on one of the hard drive connectors for the GPS antenna power. It takes 4-AA batteries, or it can be powered via Pin 9 on the serial cable. I ran 5 volts to pin nine on a patched serial cable, and it worked!

Now I want to do the same for the video monitors. (more…)

Running the wires around the car turned out to be easier than I thought. First of all, most of them are under the dash. The carputer is installed there right below the radio, the GPS receiver is velcroed up under the dashboard plastic, and so on. The only complicated bits — the rear monitor and the rear video inputs — turned out to be (more…)

GPS Navigation! One the primary features of the carputer is live GPS maps and routing. I use Street Atlas — Road Warrior Edition, circa 2000. It works fine, but it has the most gawd-afwul user interface I’ve ever seen on a commercial product, bar none. Double that when all you have is a dinky touchscreen to control it. (more…)

My music collection is a mish-mash of formats. I have RealAudio files from 6+ years ago, Windows Media files, MP3 files, and some other oddities. Most players will only play a subset of these. (more…)