{"id":3931,"date":"2008-09-30T17:00:44","date_gmt":"2008-09-30T21:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=3931"},"modified":"2008-09-30T17:02:05","modified_gmt":"2008-09-30T21:02:05","slug":"half-assed-but-endearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/30\/half-assed-but-endearing\/","title":{"rendered":"half-assed, but endearing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3932\" title=\"bluetooth handsfree\" src=\"http:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/100005.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/100005.jpg 200w, https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/100005-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><br \/>\nSo I <a href=\"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/17\/kross-bluetooth-hands-free-cell-phone-car-kit-with-fm-transmitter\/\">bought<\/a> the <a href=\"http:\/\/canadacomputers.com\/index.php?do=ShowProduct&amp;cmd=pd&amp;pid=019787&amp;cid=MP.472\">Kross Bluetooth Hands Free Cell Phone Car Kit with FM Transmitter<\/a>. It has its good points, but it has some quirks and serious shortcomings.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s good:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s cheap (&lt; $40)<\/li>\n<li>It provides in-car Bluetooth speakerphone<\/li>\n<li>It plays MP3s from SD card, USB stick, or an line level source.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s not so good:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Playback quality is limited to finding an open FM frequency, which is hard in the GTA<\/li>\n<li>The transmitter is not very powerful, so nearby vehicles can swamp your signal (or, if you want to call it a feature, it&#8217;s a &#8220;random positional mashup&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>The phone mic is a tiny port on the unit, so sometimes the caller can&#8217;t hear you too well<\/li>\n<li>You need to have your radio on to answer your phone<\/li>\n<li>The USB port doesn&#8217;t provide enough charging current for a phone or GPS<\/li>\n<li>The remote isn&#8217;t very good<\/li>\n<li>Voice dialling doesn&#8217;t seem to work with my Blackberry<\/li>\n<li>The MP3 playback function usually remembers where you were when you start the car, but sometimes forgets, and needs the card ejected and reinserted<\/li>\n<li>It doesn&#8217;t know about ID3 tags<\/li>\n<li>Weirdest of all, it plays back files in the strict order they were written to the directory &#8211; 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 <code>tar<\/code> on a Mac or Linux is the way to go, as it writes in name order.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/kross_s-150_manual.pdf\">Kross S-150 Manual<\/a> (scanned PDF) is pretty terse, and has been of limited use to me. For all its faults, it&#8217;s kind of useful, but if I had a USB-capable stereo, I wouldn&#8217;t need this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s what&#8217;s good: It&#8217;s cheap (&lt; $40) It provides in-car Bluetooth speakerphone It plays MP3s from SD card, USB stick, or an line level source. Here&#8217;s what&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[1104,1378,85,45],"class_list":["post-3931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars-suck","tag-audio","tag-bluetooth","tag-car","tag-mp3"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-11p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3931"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3936,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3931\/revisions\/3936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}