Author Archive
In car digital music without the wires
July 8, 2011 | 
Author Having just bought a car that actually has a radio and cd player I was wondering how best to actually listen to my music. Carting round cds didn’t appeal as judging by the state of the one that was in the player it doesn’t do them any good. My next thought was changing the fitted radio for a new one that will play mp3s, aacs etc and that will let you either plug in ipod dock or a usb flash drive. The trouble with this is that you have to take your ipod with you and you’d have to keep plugging and unplugging it from the car. Ditto a usb flash drive. Also I thought the usb flash drive would be a nuisance as it would stick out of the front and potentially get in the way during gear changes.
The old style cassette deck and jack system worked ok with cassette deck enabled cars but with only a cd slot and a desire for having no trailing wires that wasn’t going to be a solution.
Then I had a brainwave! My phone has an FM transmitter in it so that any music on the phone can be tuned by the built in FM radio. It works over a short distance, within 2 metres, so shouldn’t interfere with other radios too much. Handily there is a cubby just where it is a good place to stash the phone not too far from the rear of the car for good reception. Radio also seems to have RDS so it shows up as ‘Nokia’ so you know you have it tuned easily.
Works quite well and has just saved me £200 for a new radio and another few quid for another flash drive to put music on. No need for trailing wires around the car. No need to plugin and unplug things into the radio. No need to carry ipod everywhere either.
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WPBook – make your blog appear on Facebook!
Do you want to increase the readership of your blog? Finding a way to promote within Facebook and your current network is a good way of doing just this. There is a great plugin called WPBook which allows you to connect your normal wordpress blog in such a way that it appears as regular Facebook content so you can easily share it with friends and gain fans. The adage in social media at the moment is ‘go where the people are’ and virtually everyone is on Facebook. Twitter is ok for blog promotion but it is great to find a way of having your blog appear to be within your network rather than external to it.
To set it up, the best way is to follow the ‘detailed’ instructions available with the plugin. In essence you want to create an application with Facebook first. Then you fill in the API keys and page name of the application within the plugin settings. Then you have to allow the plugin access to your profile and the application. This is the trickier bit. If you don’t get the right page name and profile id it won’t work. If you have the initial settings incorrect then the granting permissions part will not work properly so you won’t be able to find out the information you need as Facebook tends to throw you back a blank page. Some diagnostics would be useful here as if you are new to this then you are going to be scratching around trying to work out just where you have made a mistake.
It took me an hour or two after installing the plugin. Had I noticed the link to the ‘detailed’ instructions first I think I would have managed it much more quickly. But I played around with a few settings and found out several ways it wouldn’t work 
Considering I had never built a Facebook application before this evening or even registered as a Developer it is quite amazing what you can do with only a small amount of knowledge.
Tags: Amazon Universal Wish List Button
This is a recent and cool feature from Amazon – the universal wish list button. You go to their page and just drag the button onto your browser bookmark bar. Simples!
