You never realize how well you have integrated technology into your life until you try to replace it. One thing I had down was my Treo 750 in my car. It had a suction mount, bluetooth GPS and charging. When I purchased my iPhone I hadn’t given a lot of thought as to how I would use it in the car. I already had an iPod kit for my Pioneer stereo using Pioneer’s CDIB100 iPod connection accessory. Unfortunately, Apple changed the charging method on the newest iPhones and iPods which left my car-kit able to play, but not charge. So began the project.
I thought I was pretty well set already having the iPod interface. Even the charging problem didn’t bother me, I mean, how hard is it to send 5v down the USB line instead of 12v down the firewire line. It turns out… very. Luckily Scosche had a simple solution in their charging adapter. Wait, what is that in the fine print? Doesn’t work with Pioneer iBus adapters including… mine?!
Well, that’s not going to stop me. After doing some pin-out investigation and having nightmares about letting the magic smoke out of my beautiful new iPhone 3G, I decided it was time to come up with something custom. My first stop was the forums on theiphoneblog.com and ilounge.com. They lead me to a great little company called ProClip that makes in-car mounting for any car and any device. I liked this modular design since it would allow me to move my iPhone into my Jeep Commander when I get it this summer. The price of the rotating clip was a little steep, $100, but I decided I liked the idea of being able to orient my iPhone either direction for future turn-by-turn applications for the iPhone so I bought it and the Jeep Cherokee adapter. This mount also has a very nice pass-through adapter so you don’t have to plug and un-plug your connection, it’s more of a dock and it works extremely well.
My next stop was audio and power connections. This is where you get screwed. Apple has the right cable,but it’s expensive to the tune of $50. That at least gets me audio out, now for charging. The XtremeMac InCharge Auto Charger for iPod/iPhone fits the ticket providing an Apple certified 5v USB connection for auto. Now everything is installed, clean and works great.
I accidently deleted all the pictures I took of the installation. Sorry guys and gals.
Microsoft is in trouble, Mac is using the Big Tobacco approach
March 13th, 2008 by Jim Shank No comments »My wife and I recently attended our kids 1st grade patriotic presentation. It was adorable and sweet, the kids all sang and gave speeches on American symbols like the flag and the statue of liberty. After the presentation we were taken back to the classroom and our kids got to show us the work they had done to prepare for the patriotic presentation including an individual multimedia CD. Being a tech geek myself I was very interested to see this presentation so we headed off to find a computer to view it on. There was a set of about 20 Mac laptops sitting on desks in the pod area, all in use by kids showing parents their presentation. The classroom computer was already in use. We headed off to the lab and found another 50 Mac’s in-use and not a single seat available. Next stop was the library. There were 15 Mac’s and 15 Dell PCs along the wall. Every single Mac was in use as well but the PCs sat untouched. My son looked up at me and said we would have to wait for a computer. I was in complete disbelief that my son, who had used a PC since he was 3 years old was completely PC illiterate. I told him to his surprise that we could watch his presentation on one of the available PCs. We sat down and I blew the dust off the keyboard and mouse and up came the Ctrl-Alt-Del login screen. I am not sure how a 6-year old is supposed to understand this screen and why the school would leave the corporate login screen active when it was just as easy to setup the more friendly Welcome screen up with fun icons to login with. I went ahead and gave the 3-finger salute and up came the username and password which, of course, my son had no idea what his login information was. The very sad part is that I work for the technology department for the school district and had to use my login to get to the desktop. » Read more: Microsoft is in trouble, Mac is using the Big Tobacco approach
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