Archive for the ‘cars suck’ Category
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
I accidentally dropped and broke my car mp3 player, so had to come up with another music solution. I caved and bought an iTrip for my iPod Nano. It sounds pretty good.
What’s good about it is that it allows you to charge your iPod from a standard USB Mini-B. What’s not so good is that it doesn’t have full USB pass-through, so you can’t sync your iPod, and have to stick with that stupid dock cable.
(and don’t get me started on the really annoying connector on my work cell phone …)
Tags: audio, car, ipod, itrip, mp3, phone, usb
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Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
This was advertised in the Globe & Mail on the day I was born:

My mum bought a second-hand Viva estate. We thought it was huge.
The image is via the archive at Toronto Public Library. More cool stuff there than ever. (via)
Tags: car, globeandmail, library, toronto, viva
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Friday, March 6th, 2009

Yes, really – a Suzuki monster truck. Oh dear.
Tags: car, monster, tiny, truck
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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Tags: go_transit
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Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Thank you, I’m here all week …
Tags: 404, dvp, feeble, joke, toronto, web
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Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

So I bought the Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter. It has its good points, but it has some quirks and serious shortcomings.
Here’s what’s good:
- It’s cheap (< $40)
- It provides in-car Bluetooth speakerphone
- It plays MP3s from SD card, USB stick, or an line level source.
Here’s what’s not so good:
- Playback quality is limited to finding an open FM frequency, which is hard in the GTA
- The transmitter is not very powerful, so nearby vehicles can swamp your signal (or, if you want to call it a feature, it’s a “random positional mashup”)
- The phone mic is a tiny port on the unit, so sometimes the caller can’t hear you too well
- You need to have your radio on to answer your phone
- The USB port doesn’t provide enough charging current for a phone or GPS
- The remote isn’t very good
- Voice dialling doesn’t seem to work with my Blackberry
- The MP3 playback function usually remembers where you were when you start the car, but sometimes forgets, and needs the card ejected and reinserted
- It doesn’t know about ID3 tags
- Weirdest of all, it plays back files in the strict order they were written to the directory – not ordered by file name. It seems that, under Microsoft operating systems, files are copied in name order, but under Unix, they are (winging it here) copied by inode. Using
tar on a Mac or Linux is the way to go, as it writes in name order.
The Kross S-150 Manual (scanned PDF) is pretty terse, and has been of limited use to me. For all its faults, it’s kind of useful, but if I had a USB-capable stereo, I wouldn’t need this.
Tags: audio, bluetooth, car, mp3
Posted in cars suck | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
Tags: audio, bluetooth, car, usb
Posted in cars suck | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
I wish the Toronto Star would stop giving me their Saturday edition. I already get the newspaper, so the Star is recycled unread every week. If it wasn’t 50% car section, I might take a glance.
Tags: paper, recycling
Posted in WAGDAIYF, cars suck | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
Tags: scion, stupid, ugly
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Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
Jeremy Clarkson thought it would be a good idea to publish his bank details to show that the whole thing about identity theft was hooey. Not such a good idea.
Tags: clarkson, idiot
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Feed Article | Business
U.S. crude fell 44 cents to $99.18 a barrel by 2:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT) after hitting a peak of $100.09 earlier in the day.
Tags: $100, oil
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Saturday, December 29th, 2007
Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?
Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.
Tags: arkansas, gps, maps, missouri
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Friday, December 28th, 2007
Tags: lx2, parking
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Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
This is a small posting of thanks to the folks on the OCTranspo 95 Orleans bus who put up with my cluelessness and large luggage on the very busy rush hour transit. I got to Ottawa station quicker than any taxi, and for only $3. I’m a fairly seasoned TTC rider, and you wouldn’t see that kind of friendliness at this time of day in Toronto.
Tags: bus, ottawa, train
Posted in cars suck, o canada | 1 Comment »
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
One of the side effects of Catherine’s Library Quest is that she digs through the sale books. She’s found a library getting rid of National Geographics for 25¢. September 1969’s issue, published when I was less than a season old, has a great and hilariously dated article The Coming Revolution in Transportation. It’s all hovercraft and personal transport pods (though none less than the Federal Highways Administration’s The Rambler cautions don’t blame the future when we read this article).
My favourite prognosis from the article is this one, on electric cars:
Electric cars should be common within a decade. They will be “pure” electrics, if batteries become lighter, more powerful, and longer lasting; otherwise, “dual-mode” vehicles—battery-powered in town but propelled by gasoline engines on cross-country trips.
It took just a little longer than this, and it sure wasn’t GM who brought the first ones to market, despite this picture of a hybrid Opel from 1969:

Tags: 1969, gm, hybrid, national_geographic
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Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
I don’t believe this … Green Car .com has named the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid 2008 Green Car of the Year.This gargantuan obesemobile has a 6 litre engine which gets a dismal 21 mpg (about 11 l/100 km in real money). But it’s okay, because it’s a hybrid! Well, bravo Chevrolet! Your greed and stupidity is killing us all.
Tags: chevrolet, green_car, stupid
Posted in WAGDAIYF, cars suck | 3 Comments »
Monday, November 12th, 2007
Winter tires.
They are fitted now, but it happened to be chucking it down when I was changing them. No fun.
Tags: homophone, tires, tyres, winter
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Monday, November 5th, 2007
I had assumed that an admin here at work liked obscure Shakespeare plays when they called our server cressida. But I found the real reason when I noticed that the Richmond server is called rav4 …
Tags: bah, toyota, windows
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Friday, September 28th, 2007
Around Toronto today, I saw three Lamborghinis and five Ferraris. I think I saw fewer SmartCars, so as usual, smarts are in shorter supply than muscle.
Tags: car, dumb, smart, toronto
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Friday, September 21st, 2007
I was looking to perhaps rent a hybrid for a longish business trip. My company’s preferred supplier, National, doesn’t do them in Canada, but does in the US:

Why do they get them, and we don’t? Don’t say there’s no demand; I‘d rent one …
Tags: canada, car, hybrid, national, rental
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