Illusory Follies

Firefox has a feature in the newer versions which it calls “Live Bookmarks”. Basically it’s just a very simplistic RSS feed reader that creates a folder in your bookmarks area with the current RSS feed items. This is kind nifty… I usually don’t like to have to load up another application to handle RSS feeds and lightweight RSS feed readers like Sage are just a little more complex than I would I like them to be…

But… even better — if you use del.icio.us for managing bookmarks (which I do since it’s fast to save, easy to organize, and available on any Internet connected computer) you can combine both of these features. Del.icio.us provides RSS feeds for all of your bookmarks or for specific tags. So, if you have a bunch of links for the tag “work” you can just grab the RSS feed for “work” into a Live Bookmark and voila, you have your bookmarks stored on a centralized (and reliable) computer as well as being easily accessible.

Great stuff…

Well… Everything was moving along just great until I realized that something’s wrong with some of the hardware on my system. I believe it has something to do with my hard drive which was salvaged from an IBM ThinkPad. I can boot into Windows (the operating system installation that was installed on the hard disk before) but it
just reboots silently at a certain point. My first thought was that this was a problem with some hardware that Windows expected to see since the last time it started up it was running on a different hardware platform. So… I stick the WinXP installation disk in and…! yeah, it reboots again part way through the Setup process. So I’m not sure… It’s not something that’s terribly easy to diagnose,
so I’ll see what happens. I may try my Fedora Core 3 install CD and see if that crashes as well. If so, it’s most likely the stupid hard drive.

Who knows… I have a 3.5″ hard drive that I can test it with and see if that works any better. If that works, I’ll assume it’s the IBM hard drive and maybe order another one.

I’ve been busy with a lot of other things so I may put some of this on hold for a little bit until I can sort it out. Any ideas for why this is happening are welcome. You can respond using the Comments feature on this site.

Here’s the empty case mounted nicely…

Here’s the storage compartment that used to be in my Corolla. This storage compartment used to fit where the aluminum case in the picture above now fits.

Here’s the 8 inch Lilliput touchscreen display.

I worked a bit more on the car computer this weekend… Everything seemed to work alright except that my hard drive wasn’t mounted very firmly (mainly the cable connection in the back). It was sort of popping in and out once I crammed the case shut (which causes all sorts of problems…
I *think* that everything else is working. I’ve powered it on and hit the Windows loading screen so I’m happy. Also, I finally wired the car stuff and confirmed that the sequencer works. Now I need to do some initial installation stuff (still haven’t decided whether I’ll use Linux or Windows). The USB ports seem to not be working as expected but hopefully that’s just a BIOS setting or something. I got a nicer 4 pin plug (very similar to the hard drive power plugs) from RadioShack and wired that in so that I can easily plug the whole system in without worrying about individual wires in the back. I also picked up a toggle switch that I’m going to use for manually overriding the power to the system (in case I don’t want it to run all the time when
the car’s on). For fun, I also got a cooler looking blue LED to use for the power indicator on the front panel. I also ended up getting those round IDE cables since the ribbon ones were being a huge pain.

I cheated on the wiring… the cigarette lighter input is ignition controlled… So, what I did was just tapped both the battery 12V+ and the ignition 12V+ into the cigarette lighter slot. This works when you start it up, but it also completely kills the computer when you take the key out (instead of gracefully shutting down using the car battery like it should). I’ll probably fix that when I feel like taking more of the dash out and finding what wire has a 12V+ signal when the car’s off…

Anyway — that’s my progress so far…

Well, I got all the parts (finally) and I assembled it all together (finally). I have pictures — really I do — that I’ll be posting soon. Overall I’m pretty pleased… The storage area in my vehicle that I yanked out of the dash to make room for this was EXACTLY the same size (7×7x4). So all I needed to do was drill some holes in the
two aluminum cases that I got, screw them firmly into the metal bracket that used to hold the storage area on my dash, and it’s a perfect fit. I even retained the cup holder unit on the bottom (see the upcoming pictures for more detail on that).

Now… I have just a few issues:
1) Connecting the wiring into the vehicle… I am NOT excited about this since I barely know what I’m doing.
2) Making the face plate. This should be fun… it’s just cosmetic so I can take my time and it’s not really a big deal. Hopefully it works as expected.

Anyhow — I’ve got some wiring diagrams and I’ll be figuring out the wiring as soon as I have time this weekend. I’ll try to get those pictures up too!

Until then….