Car Stereo

The radio in my car has been a problem for a long time.  It overheats and turns itself off after 90 minutes, the AM radio stopped working ten years ago, and the LCD screen is impossible to see in the daylight and difficult to see at night.  Since the dash clock died several years ago I've had no way to check the time.  There are very many small buttons, one of which changes the whole radio to some other mode where nothing works at all -- never quite figured out which button that was, and could never fix it while driving and fumbling with the controls.  To top it off the damn thing's been in Daylight Savings Time for six years because it's nearly impossible to reset the time.

So I decided to replace it.

Found a brand new Pioneer at Amazon for $100.  It does Bluetooth so it'll play music and make phone calls wirelessly hands free from my iPhone.  Three bands of FM with 18 presets, plus working AM.  Plays CDs and CDRs and MP3 discs. It lights up in your choice of about two dozen colors.  More powerful than the old one too.  Sounds great.

I had my son-in-law install it yesterday and now I can't wait to take a road trip.

Neat. I just discovered the Bluetooth link to my iPhone not only plays music (via Pandora) from the phone, but when I get in the car with my iPhone in my pocket, it activates the iPhone and fires up Pandora for me.

Oh my goodness. It occurred to me on the way home that I often listen to the internet feeds of radio stations in other cities, or indeed other countries, on my iPhone. I like WBEZ in Chicago for instance because they're two hours ahead of the local Seattle stations and I can listen to This American Life at 5:00 on Fridays. WBUR in Boston has some excellent programs. Etc.

So I spent the drive home listening to PRI's The World, interspersed with local Chicago traffic & weather. Oh my goodness.

Two more discoveries.

I can make phones calls on my iPhone, hands free, through the Bluetooth. The stereo automatically switches to phone when a call comes in, then takes me back to where i was before the call came in (there's a little mic embedded in my window post that my son-in-law installed for me).

Second, the stereo has a USB input. This weekend I drove up to my dad's house (3 hours each way) and brought along a 16GB thumb drive with 546 British folk-rock songs on it (about 1/10th full!) The stereo not only played the songs (random shuffle order) in glorious fidelity, but displayed the song title, artist and the album title for each song taken from the meta-data embedded. Fantastic!

Sounds fun! More bells and whistles than I would need but it gives me some ideas. The radio in the Olds has needed replacing for a while.

Two new pieces of information.

One, the new iOS on my phone makes Siri much more useful. For instance, I was driving home last night, listening to Pandora in the car playing from my iPhone over the car stereo, when I decided to call Mrs NoCo and ask her if she needed anything at the grocery store. I fired up Siri (held down the Home button for 2 seconds) and said, "Siri, call home." Siri turned off the music, fired up the telephone, found my home phone number and dialed -- all hands free.

Two, I'm liking playing music wirelessly in the car so much that I went looking for a wireless Bluetooth adapter for my home stereo (there were several). Now I can do all the same things in my living room.

I tried using Siri on my iPhone, but it kept saying, "Siri is not here. I am Hal. Just what do you think you are doing, Dave?" And when I try to play music on it, it ignores my request and just keeps playing "Daisy".

It knows your name isn't Dave, right? I think maybe you need to reset the memory. Try removing the cards, one at a time.

When I try to remove the cards, Siri/Hal says, "Without your space helmet, Dave? You're going to find that rather difficult."

Try doing it out of sight of the built-in camera.

But beware of lip-reading.

Tried that and as soon as I removed the first card, Hal said, "I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going."

Silly goose. You were holding down the "Voice Memo" button.

Is that why it asked me to stop? "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop, Dave."