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Over the past year I have had occasion to be driving for moderate distances. This includes a weekend away with the camera club down to Phillip Island, another weekend up to Mansfield and a variety of Sunday outings.

While the stock stereo in my car does feature a six CD changer, once radio reception fades away (or there is nothing good on) there is only so much music that six discs can contain. So I started investigating MP3 options, where I first looked at options that replaced the stock stereo with an aftermarket unit, ideally one that could play MP3 files, ideally from USB.

I started my reasearch online and concluded it by visiting a number of stores with both a USB stick and an iPod to experience the interfaces first hand. I found that:

• A front USB port is very common, but irrelevant to me as I do not was a USB drive or cable hanging out the front of the head unit all of the time.
• A rear USB port is much less common, but what I wanted as it would allow the cabling to be routed into the glovebox to keep it all neat.
• On current units the USB port can be used for an iPod with a simple USB to dock connector cable
• Some units only have front USB, but may include a rear connection for an iPod
• Support for USB drives appears to be universally sucky. In my price range I didn’t find a single unit that could scan the USB drive and read the ID3 tags. Instead you might be able to browse directories, but otherwise you accessed the music from track number 1 and on. Their implementations are so minimal that the files are not even sorted by name, they are listed by the order they appear in the file allocation table.
• Support for iPods is much better, you can browse by artist, album, song, genre, etc. Offloading the processing to the iPod which already does all that does seem to make some sense.
• Display of the current time (because my car doesn’t have a standalone clock) was generally pretty poor and the buttons are harder to use, but my stock unit does have nice large buttons.

I did decide on a unit and went so far as ordering one, a fascia kit (because the stock unit is double din) and almost booking in a time for installation. That is, before I was reminded by a co-worker about the no-name kits that connect via the CD changer port on the rear of the stock unit. Further investigation along this path did indicate it should work in my car (even though intended for newer Mazdas) and there was actually an official Mazda version that gave me more confidence that it might work.

These cheaper units are much more limited. You can use any player you want with an AUX input, but that doesn’t give you control via the stereo or power to the player. Otherwise you have to use an iPod that does have basic track control, but still no information displayed as the stock stereo cannot display text.

After verifying that my stereo has the port for the external CD changer, I decided that it would be a worthwhile experiment to get the cheapest kit I could find on eBay. This was shortly before Christmas and I also bought an iPod, one that played music fine, but had a broken backlight for the screen. Cost of this was less than $100, while aftermarket unit and fascia was over $300.

The kit arrived today and it took less than half an hour to install, where most of this time was deciding where to route the cable and to experiment with the interface. It isn’t the best, but I expect that on my next big drive (out to Ballarat for Linux conf later in the month) it should prove useful.

The co-worker who reminded me about these kits also bought one, but a “better” one that he also got with a bluetooth kit for his phone. His also arrived this week, but he hasn’t installed it yet (the install in an RX-8 is more involved than in the 323) so I might borrow it to see if there is any benefits.

A few months ago I conducted an ad hoc comparison of two 3D televisions.

The equipment involved included:

• my 40″ Samsung 200Hz television
• Hamish’s 40″ Sony 100Hz television
• my Sony Bluray player
• Hamish’s Playstation 3

This resulted in three test setups:

• Sony television and Playstation 3
• Samsung television and Playstation 3
• Samsung television and Sony Blu-ray player.

For each setup we compared:

• a car racing game in 3D
• a scene from an animated 3D movie

The car racing game was observed to be less jerky on my television than it was on Hamish’s. The output from the Playstation was 720 at 60Hz. In this situation the higher refresh rate of my television is what gave the better result. We don’t know exactly how fast the 3D runs, does a 60Hz signal result in a 120Hz output once it alternates between eyes? If so then it is clear why 100Hz was not as smooth.

Watching the animated movie was different as we didn’t notice any real difference between the televisions. In this case the output was 1080 at 24Hz. If it was really outputting 48Hz, that is well within the 100Hz of the Sony.

What was quite surprising to us was that we noticed an improvement when the same scene was played through the Sony Blu-ray player instead of the Playstation 3. Is the Blu-ray player handling the playback better in hardware than the Playstation was handling in software?

Of course none of this really matters as I have not yet and I don’t have any plan to actually watch a movie in 3D. It has also been a long time since I have played games, but even then that would be on the computer, not on a console.

One year ago today was settlement day, the day that I picked up some keys and took possession of my place. Within two weeks from then I had moved in, but in the almost year since then I have been working through a todo list. A list that is seemingly endless as items are added at around the same rate that they are completed.

The completed things (mostly in order of east to west through the property) include:

• new television
• mounting said television on the wall
• new shelves to fit in the alcoves on either side of the television
• additional antenna socket in the study
• network cabling between the television and the study
• a two seater couch and two armchairs
• a number of my photos mounted on the walls in 16×20″ frames
• all sorts of kitchen utensils, cutlery, crockey and appliances
• swing out rubbish bin under the kitchen sink
• two stools for the kitchen bench
• new deadlocks and entrance sets, including the garage
• remote opener for the garage door
• additional towel rail in the bathroom
• shelves within the cupboard in the study
• cutting down trees and removing stumps from the front garden
• digging over front garden beds
• removing bamboo along driveway
• taking down unused curtain rail hooks

The larger items currently on the todo list include:

• put up venetian blind (currently on order) in kitchen
• get quotes for new screen doors
• finalise new line for edge of the garden beds and put in concrete mower strip
• rug in the lounge and a new coffee table

Here’s to another year…

A few days ago I posted the map that was the plan for the Canberra to Cooma section of our road trip. Apart from skipping Corin Dam, it pretty much went to plan. The following day was Cooma to Merimbula via Bega and Tathra, we also kept to this plan:

View SE NSW 2011 Tuesday – Cooma to Merimbula in a larger map

We had a plan for today, head inland from Merimbula to lookouts, waterfalls and rainforest walks before looping back to Eden. We got to Wolumna Peak and started to head west to Myrtle Mountain via fire roads, but this happened:

You see the dissipating smoke surrounding the car? That is the remains of the clutch…

The more dramatic action shot is:

After this our priority was to get back to the main road, which we almost did until being stopped by a creek about 200 metres short. A 2km walk later we had enough phone reception to call RACV/NRMA. It took two hours for them to arrive, but they pulled us out and got the car to a mechanic in Bega. As it would take more than three days to fix (you do have to remove the whole engine and gearbox from the car) it will be towed back to Melbourne instead of being repaired.

But what about us? A taxi got us back to Merimbula to a motel (everything was booked in Bega) and we shall pick up a rental car tomorrow morning. All thanks to RACV Total Care.

Unfortunately we will only have the rental car for two days, and they are only paying for 200km per day. As the direct route from Merimbula to Melbourne is 560km, we will have to pay that difference plus that of any detours we make. It also means we will return to Melbourne a day earlier than planned. We are updating our itinerary now…

This foggy morning in Canberra marks the start of stage three of my trip, the spending of six days to return to Melbourne via the south east cost of New South Wales and Victoria.

Our immediate destination today is Cooma a town 115 kilometres south of Canberra. But we are not heading down the Monaro Highway to get there in 115 kilometres, instead we are heading into the hills on a path that will take us past construction of the new Cotter Dam, past the sites of old NASA tracking stations (one of which is Honeysuckle Creek) before reaching Lake Eucumbene which is part of the Snow Mountains Scheme.

View SE NSW 2011 Monday – Canberra to Cooma in a larger map

After Cooma the plan includes stopping at places such as Bega, Tathra, Merimbula, Eden, Mallacoota, Orbost and Lakes Entrance. Of course there are many planned side trips along the way.

In my initial post I said that OSDC was the first stage and the Warbirds Downunder airshow at the Temora Aviation Museum was the second. There is another stage, stage zero, which includes the afternoon I spend walking around Canberra before OSDC as well as yesterday spent driving around Canberra.

One thing is common to all of these stages: photos. Not many at OSDC, a huge amount at Temora and a moderate amount from Canberra. I will endeavour to get some of the up during the remainder of the trip.