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DesperateDan posted:Normal car gps units are pretty obsolete now it seems, my old unit is getting crash prone and laggy and i cant update the maps without paying a shitload so I looked for a replacement and the prices were insanely high compared with the function offered for essentially free on google maps. Google Maps on your phone, in navigation mode, in a suction-cup or vent-clip phone holder?
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Sep 2, 2017 18:55
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Out of cities, my Garmin does a much better job, but in cities, Gmaps owns so much harder. I tend to use them both.
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Sep 2, 2017 19:01
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dont be mean to me posted:Google Maps on your phone, in navigation mode, in a suction-cup or vent-clip phone holder? Magnetic holders are the way to go.
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Sep 2, 2017 20:38
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The only utility for a dedicated unit is if you don't expect to have service where you're going, but even then you can preload maps onto some phone apps.
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Sep 2, 2017 20:58
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Waze is seriously the greatest thing ever. I've had a ton of occasions where it took me in directions that seemed really off, but I haven't had a single trip where it steered me wrong and I've discovered some really excellent/cool/scenic routes because of it that only add a few minutes to a multi-hour drive.
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Sep 2, 2017 21:09
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There was all the talk about cdroms and install times a while back. I used to have several of the kenwood drives that split the beam and were fast as hell. They would usually be able to keep up with your hard drive and it felt like installations would just fly. They were prone to just dying though. I don’t think I ever had one last 18 months.  http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=1
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Sep 2, 2017 22:41
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mystes posted:This is like when plug and play pci cards started coming out but they were actually a complete nightmare when you tried to combine them with ISA cards that used dip switches to set the irqs. I'm glad I skipped like five generations of PCs.
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Sep 2, 2017 22:54
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I dunno how or why, but I got my first IRQ error hard crash in like 20 years a couple weeks ago by unplugging one of my MIDI controllers while I had Ableton open 
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Sep 3, 2017 02:23
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empty baggie posted:Knobs are definitely superior, but the one on my last stereo wore out and stopped letting me turn the volume up, so for the past two years I've had to use the lovely little remote that came with the stereo to adjust the volume, which really sucked when I would drop the remote between the seats during a long car ride. Agreeing about Pioneer head units. I used to be way too into car audio poo poo. I had tons of Alpine and Kenwood stuff. Head units, amps and speakers. At some point I ended up with a middle of the road Pioneer. That thing sounded better and outlived some way more expensive gear. Last Pioneer head unit I had was one of the "modular" ones. It was a double din touch screen. No Bluetooth, nav or sat radio. But pioneer sold modules for all of that. If you bought all of the extra stuff you'd have been better off just buying the top range model that had it all built in to begin with. That's gotta be obsolete tech by now, having to buy extra poo poo to enable functions that should have been standard.
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Sep 3, 2017 04:17
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My first choice with an aftermarket stereo is Kenwood. After that is Pioneer, and then JVC. People diss on JVC but they make short media-only headunits with pretty beefy transistors and heatsinks on their amps, and they've never let me down. Plus a lot of JVC units don't look like nightclubs.
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Sep 3, 2017 04:24
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I had way too much Kenwood stuff die young to ever buy any of their stuff again. I always thought JVC stuff was way too disco looking but I can't say anything about quality. Right now I've got a Subaru with the factory 6 CD changer, Kicker door speakers, a Pioneer 12" sub with a poo poo brand amp. It all sounds decent considering that it's mostly junk. If I did get a new head unit it'd be a pioneer. Unfortunately my car has auto climate control which means I'd have to buy a JDM dash install kit for something like $300. It sounds nice enough that I can live with it.
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Sep 3, 2017 04:34
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:That's gotta be obsolete tech by now, having to buy extra poo poo to enable functions that should have been standard.  licenses.
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Sep 3, 2017 07:40
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To tie my last like ten posts about laser toner printers and their lack of breaking (well, until all printers do: the night before an essay is due) along with the recent licensed/gated funtionality: I just unlocked the 550-page tray on my printer (extra addon, screws into the bottom, and has never worked since I picked it up from goodwill) by...installing Dell's "open" printer drivers for Windows 10. With all previous drivers, including the ones I installed in 2015, that extra functionality required an extra payment or a business license. Today I farted around for a few hours and discovered that their Open/Free driver package they released in June of this year unlocked the 2-sided printing and the extra paper tray. I've only been lugging around that duplexer and tray addon since I bought the printer for $25 at Goodwill since...2013.
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Sep 3, 2017 08:22
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dont be mean to me posted:Google Maps on your phone, in navigation mode, in a suction-cup or vent-clip phone holder? I can, but it then means I can't use it for viewing the cars data using torque my boost gauge Current plan is get a tablet and suffer the mild inconvenience of booting it up and running maps every time, if I can't find an older model one new somewhere.
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Sep 3, 2017 18:02
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DesperateDan posted:I can, but it then means I can't use it for viewing the cars data using torque
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Sep 3, 2017 18:07
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DesperateDan posted:I can, but it then means I can't use it for viewing the cars data using torque Do you have split screen support on your phone? I'm mostly kidding, this actually looks somewhat workable though. e; my screenshot seems to have broken. sirbeefalot has a new favorite as of 20:19 on Sep 3, 2017 |
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Sep 3, 2017 18:41
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mystes posted:Unless you're going to get a tablet with data, you're better of using your phone for the map, so you should probably just get the cheapest thing you can find to run torque. Can't they split the difference? Use the phone for the maps and the tablet for the boost gauge, and music and such?
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Sep 3, 2017 20:01
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There are GPS apps you can preload the map data into that then operate like a standalone unit. If you're already dedicating a device to the task space isn't even an issue (as the maps are not small)
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Sep 3, 2017 23:20
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If you have to use both your phone and a tablet anyway, you might as well use your phone for maps, since then you can just use google maps which will always be up to date. I guess you could try to just use a tablet with a spit-screen view, though, although you might have trouble finding a mount that can handle a vertical tablet.
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Sep 3, 2017 23:30
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Google Maps offline is decent. If I had to choose between an offline tablet or an online phone, I’d use the tablet with offline maps for unfamiliar areas and the phone for any route I’d driven before.
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Sep 3, 2017 23:52
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How about tethering the tablet to your smartphone for data?
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Sep 4, 2017 00:22
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Lurking Haro posted:How about tethering the tablet to your smartphone for data? That's the plan at the moment, I just get annoyed at the few extra steps above "plug it in, stick to windscreen, a few seconds later a map shows up with where I am on it". I rarely use one for directions, I just love having a map for easy viewing and exploring. Is there a way to rig android to just boot right into a program?
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Sep 4, 2017 14:27
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DesperateDan posted:Is there a way to rig android to just boot right into a program? http://www.androidauthority.com/nfc-trigger-tasker-409686/
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Sep 4, 2017 14:39
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Collateral Damage posted:If your phone supports NFC you can put an adhesive RF tag in your phone holder and set the phone to perform tasks when it detects the tag, like unlock, connect to the phone's hotspot and launch Google Maps. I think you can set it to do stuff when it connects to a Bluetooth device too, like my phone launches the driving app when it connects to my car speaker
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Sep 4, 2017 15:34
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JnnyThndrs posted:I wish I'd have known about that back in the day, would have been slick. I just wish aftermarket car stereos - or at least some of them - didn't look like Tokyo at night and had knobs and buttons which made sense, rather than endless blinking lights and minuscule buttons of uncertain function. Almost all aftermarket single-DIN stereos are hideous, and in the rare case you find one which is not hideous it's usually pathetically low spec and outrageously priced. Some of the touchscreen double DIN units are nice looking, until you see the interface which always looks like the most garbage WinAmp skin from 1999.
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Sep 4, 2017 18:19
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Horace posted:Almost all aftermarket single-DIN stereos are hideous, and in the rare case you find one which is not hideous it's usually pathetically low spec and outrageously priced. Yeah, I'm not a fan of touchscreen interfaces for automobile functions even if they were a 'good' design. I mean, CarPlay' s ok, but still could be a lot better, and there was a ton of work put into it. I'm just thinking of the double-DIN stereo in my old Cadillac. It had great big knobs and large buttons and you could do anything while never taking your eyes off the road. I can understand that a lot of people who upgrade their stereo want 'technology' and blinking lights appeal to them, but there's gotta be a market for simple, elegant, good-quality car stereos for people who just want something that plays from BT, 1/8" aux-in and USB sticks.
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Sep 4, 2017 18:54
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Collateral Damage posted:If your phone supports NFC you can put an adhesive RF tag in your phone holder and set the phone to perform tasks when it detects the tag, like unlock, connect to the phone's hotspot and launch Google Maps. That looks workable, thanks 
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Sep 4, 2017 19:35
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JnnyThndrs posted:Yeah, I'm not a fan of touchscreen interfaces for automobile functions even if they were a 'good' design. I mean, CarPlay' s ok, but still could be a lot better, and there was a ton of work put into it. Yeah those are young techie professionals, you sell them the stereo attached to a $3000 option attached to a $25000 car attached to lucrative financing
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Sep 4, 2017 21:49
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Printers themselves aren't the horror. The thing that blows me away is how the peripheral bits have remained absolutely horrible since pretty much ever. The Windows print queue is still a pile of garbage. Right click, cancel job, maybe it will actually clear that job in 5 minutes or so. Or how printing systems still just have a mind of their own about how to scale something to fit a page. At work we print a lot of stuff from a task management system, and half the time it just decides "Oh, let's scale this to fit on 4 sheets of paper" We have a little portable printer to run off price tickets and shelf labels as well, and that thing is staggeringly crap. It has about a 30 second bootup time for some reason and likes to power-saver itself off after about 2 minutes of not using it. A good chunk of the time it can't even align to the price tickets and prints all over them, or amusingly prints a vomit of XML code onto 12 inches of tickets instead of a barcode. It's like everything involving printing has just been stuck in 1980s era lovely quality forever.
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Sep 4, 2017 22:10
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Enos Shenk posted:It's like everything involving printing has just been stuck in 1980s era lovely quality forever. Printer manufacturers have seen that people (organizations mostly) will pay top dollar for absolute dogshit. They have no incentive to improve.
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Sep 5, 2017 02:20
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I have been half tempted to put something like this in a bat file on my desktop. Somehow, stopping the spooler service, deleting the queue files, and restarting it works out as much faster than trying to delete a job the "correct" way.
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Sep 5, 2017 11:09
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I bought a laserjet printer for $40, and it hit me that I still needed some sort of scanner. But there aren't cheap small flatbed scanners anymore. Scratch that, there are. But they're attached to really crappy printers which is what I wanted to get away from by buying the laserjet printer on sale. I'm also putting a GPS back into my car. A 10-year-old one. It turns out a new battery is under 10 dollars and there are open source maps online for free. You'd think there wouldn't be problems with a phone GPS in suburban so-cal with no mountains in sight and clear skies but cell phones continue to surprise me...
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Sep 5, 2017 11:35
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RandomPauI posted:I bought a laserjet printer for $40, and it hit me that I still needed some sort of scanner. But there aren't cheap small flatbed scanners anymore. Scratch that, there are. But they're attached to really crappy printers which is what I wanted to get away from by buying the laserjet printer on sale. You can get one of those thin Canon Lide scanners for pretty cheap on eBay, they scan pictures and single documents fine and don't take up much room. I think I paid $35 w/shipping and it's been humming along for years.
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Sep 5, 2017 13:10
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Enos Shenk posted:Printers themselves aren't the horror. The thing that blows me away is how the peripheral bits have remained absolutely horrible since pretty much ever. The Windows print queue is still a pile of garbage. Right click, cancel job, maybe it will actually clear that job in 5 minutes or so. But that never happened in the 1980s. RandomPauI posted:I bought a laserjet printer for $40, and it hit me that I still needed some sort of scanner. But there aren't cheap small flatbed scanners anymore. Scratch that, there are. But they're attached to really crappy printers which is what I wanted to get away from by buying the laserjet printer on sale. I see scanners all the time at flea markets around here for like 10-20€ because people buy those combo pieces of poo poo and sell their old scanner. A lot of the time they're in great nick because, ultimately, very few people actually use their scanners after the first three or four things they bought the drat thing for. 3D Megadoodoo has a new favorite as of 13:16 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Sep 5, 2017 13:14
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Jerry Cotton posted:But that never happened in the 1980s. Someone never had to deal with an Epson printer in elementary school. I don't really need a printer, the two times a year I need a couple pages printed, I just load up a USB, and head on over to
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Sep 5, 2017 13:21
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Iron Crowned posted:Someone never had to deal with an Epson printer in elementary school. I didn't have to deal with printers at all in elementary school.
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Sep 5, 2017 13:28
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Jerry Cotton posted:I didn't have to deal with printers at all in elementary school. I was good at making that stupid Epson printer work  I apparently have a way with the machine spirits.
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Sep 5, 2017 13:37
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Jerry Cotton posted:I didn't have to deal with printers at all in elementary school. If you got something printed at my highschool you'd get those purple sheets that smelled awesome.
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Sep 5, 2017 13:41
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Gromit posted:If you got something printed at my highschool you'd get those purple sheets that smelled awesome. How does it feel to be ancient?
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Sep 5, 2017 13:44
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Gromit posted:If you got something printed at my highschool you'd get those purple sheets that smelled awesome. You could always smell a test was a-coming. Also, the smell is alcohol.
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Sep 5, 2017 13:54
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