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28 March 2005

Long time, no update!
It's been quite a while since my last update, due to a recent re-organisation in my life. I've managed to achieve many things with my life so far. I've secured myself a stable and interesting job, a car of my own and a nice house, all without racking up any debts (apart from a morgage!). Whilst doing all this I've maintained and developed a website and built up my own carputer over the last few years.

Fairly recently all this concentrated work finally caught up with me and made me realise I have to take things easier and not spent every waking hour working. So in recent weeks, I've swaped carputer development and debug time with sitting in from of the TV playing on my new X-Box.
All work and no play makes Jack go crazy!

But fear not, after all these years of work and development, I'm not about to let my carputer project rot away!
Although my carputer work of late has run into a few problems..

I recently spent an afternoon enhancing the software that runs on my carputer, developing additional refinements on my two main pieces of carputer software.

• CarPlay my voice activated music playback application.
  Through using the software, I found myself generally listening to a handful of songs, rather than trying out all the lesser known music I had stored.
  To combat this I've designed a DJ mode which randomally picks and plays a song, without asking the user. Then once the song has finished playing, it randomally picks and plays another song.
  With this enchancement, I hope to find myself listening to more new music.
• CarNav my GPS tracking software.
  To be quite honest, I'm not 100% of the enhancements I made to this software :) But I believe it was a few tweaks to the interface, to make it easier to read at a glance. I also tweaked the map update and draw times, as the map updating too often can make it flicker somewhat.

After developing these improvements, I went to load them onto my carputer only to find that the motherboard had failed!
I spent hours trying to coax it back to life, clearing the CMOS, disconnecting everything, checking for short-curcuits and anything else I could think of. However nothing worked.

Rather than buy a new 800MHz Eden board, I decided to extract the 1GHz ITX board from my PVR (Which is now redudent, as I decided to purchase Sky+ as part of my new more relaxed life style).
However this new motherboard needed a different power regulation board, so I went ahead of bought one.