Phil online

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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Carputer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.