NSFW

Must rant now.

After spending the last few days downloading and checking out various CarPC front ends, I think I'm only going to use my CarPC for navigation and data logging. I had high hopes for putting all of my music onto the CarPC, but I don't think I can stomach the user interface. I just want a music player with UI that is simple and efficient. Does anything like that exist?

I never realized how tedious it would be to deal with such a large music collection using a touch-screen UI. Having 6 MP3 CDs (aka "playlists") directly accessible with 6 buttons really makes the factory stereo pretty attractive.

RoadRunner has a bug or something, it will show lists of bands and albums (the directories), but it wont show the names of the songs. It all shows up just fine in WinAmp though. Go figure.

Done ranting.

http://img485.imageshack.us/img485/4512/namnamnamfr6.jpg

(poached from nasioc)

i want roof rail on my sedan

OK, let's trade roofs.

The guys at mp3car.com have put together a way to enable EWF on Windows XP. EWF (Enhanced write filter) prevents Windows from writing back to the drive.

That would be sweet. I thought that code wasn't even in XP. Do you have a link? I just spent 15 minutes browsing search results for "EWF" over there and only found stuff about XPe, not straight XP.

If I were going to do this, I'd really want to try and do a solid-state (no moving parts) storage system. A couple of 4GB or 8GB CFII cards might work. I think I've seen somebody do it somewhere on the Interweb. Extreme temperatures will wreak havoc on spinning disks with a few microns separating head from platter. That concerns me.

I'm told (though not from an authoritative source) that booting XP does a large number of small disk writes, which will wear out flash memory within a fairly small number of boot cycles. I don't know if "small" is on the order of 5, 50, 500, or 5000, but the guy I talked to said not to bother.

XP-Embedded has a feature called "enhanced write filter" that was added specifically to address this problem. Much as I like the idea of running without disks, I'm going to wait for XPe first.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/WA-539.svg/600px-WA-539.svg.png

http://www.e-snowboard.info/img/misty%20flip%20540.jpg

Can anyone point me to some open-source dashboard software?

The closest things I know of are Enginuity and EcuExplorer, but both are made for general purpose logging, neither are really suited for dashboard use.

This snowboard is 203cm.

You kinda gotta take my word for it...

Special bonus image!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/Lovetocount.jpg

http://www.lordsutch.com/roads/photos/2002-06/ms145-signs.jpg

http://www.feminin.ch/kids/pokemon/evolution/145.jpg

Pray not for tasks equal to your ability, but for ability equal to your tasks.

- Bishop Philip Brooks, in the late 1800s

(approximately)