MP3 Car/MP3 OS - Old News

MP3 Car/MP3 OS - Old News

News:

August 12th: Well, thanks to the tornado yesterday, I had time to work on my car. At 18:06 Mountain time (-7:00 GMT), I disconnected the extension cord, hooked the MP3 player up to the inverter and took a ride. The MP3 player is now complete. I burned the new system CD this morning ans drove into work listening to my MP3 player. Sounds pretty good!

August 12th: This server was down for about 12 hours due to a nasty power outage. If you watched the news yesterday or today, you might have heard that Salt Lake City had an F2 tornado rip through the north western part of town. Well, this server is located about 2 blocks for the Delta Center where the Utah Jazz plays, which was one of the buildings hit hard by the tornado. It also blew up a few sub stations. Well at least I had time to go home and work on my car.

August 10th: Wowsers it's been a long time since I did anything on the MP3 player, or updated the news to this page, I think I should move some of the older nes onto a seperate page, since it's getting so large! Here's the major news: I'm completely re-doing the softare and OS for my player, no I am using mainly MacAmp, it's up to par now and has a bigger cache so it doesn't skip like it used to. I also decided that MacOS 8.1 would fill the needs of my player with less system overhead, so that's being used as my OS now.

July 7th: Took some pictures of the stereo, they're on the "Pictures" page. Back to good news! I opened up my power inverter to see if I could fix it myself, maybe replace a capacitor or two. I discovered that the problem was simply a copper "wire" on the board that had heated up so much it had burnt the green stuff over it and melted in half. 3 minutes and some soldering later, the inverter is working again! I'm translating this site into Spanish.

July 5th: No real news, just that I wanted to mention that this site is being discussed on dealchat's discussion site (now if only MP3.com and Slashdot.org would link me!). I also upgraded the webserver to WebStar Server Suite 4.0

July 3rd: Well, good news and bad news. Good news: I finally bought a head unit that works with the MP3 player, it cost a lot more that I had hoped to spend, but MAN is it cool! It's a Panasonic CQ-DF88 (I should have bought it from this site and saved myself about $60!), silver colored and glows purple. I installed it along with the rest of the audio setup today. Not only does it have RCA jacks for the MP3 player, but also for a CD changer (the jacks I'm using are actually for a DVD unit). It also has front and back pre-amp output and subwoffer out jacks too. It rocks my world with a remote too (I'll try to get pictures up soon, with the stereo in the car). Bad news: I short circuited my inverter, so now I'm exploring the possiblity of building a DC power supply (like on this site) and using the inverter for a VCR once I have it fixed. So... The MP3 player isn't installed yet, but it will only be a 1 hour job once I have the power supply taken care of.

June 30th: My little Bro. took off today and I started the install. First order of business was running 2 20ft. 4AWG cables from the battery, under the car and into the trunk area to power the inverter. Went pretty good. I also bought a new head unit that accepts auxilary input, the only problem is that it just pipes the sound stright through, over the radio or CD and doesn't control the volume, it's useless! Looks like I'll have to return it and get a different one with a mini-plug on the front. That sucks cuz it means I'll have to unhook it every time I take off the face. Any suggestions from the listening audience? Email me!

June23rd: Been a while since I updated this page. 2 weeks ago, I hooked everything up to my car to see if the alternator could handle the load of the computer, stereo, and headlights without the help of the battery, it did! Just one more week until I can install the thing!

June 9th: Had to take down the live video feeds, the server plug-in was crashing my computer in the middle of important, un-saved, work. I finished the case, you can trow it in the air or turn it upside down and none of the components move an inch, they're all bolted down now.

June 2nd: Installed the Alarm into my Car, I'm trying to figure out where to put the Inverter, it's HUGE!. I also added a page that shows live video feeds from my computer.

May 29th: Even though I won't be installing the MP3 player into my car until June 30th, I did install some new speakers today, I bought 4 - 5.25" Clarion speakers and installed them into the factory speaker's holes. Sounds pretty good!

May 27th: I'm re-working the appearance of the site, adding images and such. I also updated the resource file on the "do it yourself" page.

May 26th: After burning the last 3 CD-R's of my 50 CD-R Kodak Spindle, I discovered that the play lists wouldn't recognise the CD'S ("Please insert the disc '80's Music'") Totally had me bugged, figgured out how to fix it, but I won't have a new 50 pack of CD-R's until the 28th

May 22nd: I bought the power inverter for the MP3 car from Heartland Online, I also bought a Car alarm. Later that day, I bought a 24x SCSI CD-ROM from Mad Mac Computers and changed around my entire Software set-up, now I boot off one CD and have my MP3's on interchangable CD-R's (I can also play normal CD's now)

May 14th: Sent a few e-mails to different places telling them about my web page, Macnn had a link on the home page and my server was putting out a constant 32KB/sec. for about 12 hours (it served 329MB of data or 9,481 hits)

May 13th: Set up mp3car.dorm.org to point directly to my /mp3car/ directory on my web server, COOL!

May 13th: Decided that I would switch Web servers to WebStar, 1st for the virtual hosting, and also because it gives better performance and logs than Appleshare IP

May 11th: Registered mp3car.dorm.org with dorm.org's free DNS services (I also have http://macquarium.dorm.org/, http://hotdam.dorm.org/, and http://oso.dorm.org/.

April 30th: Site launched, I started using Appleshare IP 6.1 as my web server, heck I was already using it for a file server for the windoze clients in the office, so why not?