We Don't Need No Stinking Navigation

The Lexus navigation system doesn't let you enter new locations while driving. Safe if you're driving alone but why can't passengers enter locations? I think the guys that design these Lexus interfaces must buy Ford cars for themselves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Firmware update 320ABBF0 for ADATA AS511S3-120GM-C works (ADATA S511 Firmware Update)

Bought an ADATA S511 120GB SSD drive recently and I was going to return it because it was crashing my system about once every day. It required a full power cycle to get the drive back after the crash too. The good news is that the latest firmware from ADATA has fixed the problems. Since I had some trouble updating the firmware thought I'd post about what worked for me. First, you'll need to download the updates: http://adatausa.com/index.php? action=product_download&cid=3& piid=130 Get the ADATA firmware upgrade tool and the firmware for your drive. They've compressed using RAR (not sure why they didn't use ZIP) so you'll also need a program such as  7-zip  to extract the files. Plan on the firmware update as the first thing you do with the drive.  There is a possibility of data corruption using the old firmware. For peace of mind, you're better off installing the latest firmware right after you physically install the drive. When installing t...
Read more

2011 Lexus ES 350 Electronics Review

Image
My two year old Lexus LS is in the shop getting valve springs replaced as part of a recall. Apparently, a small percentage of these springs have impurities in the metals which may cause them to break apart. The job is going to take several days so I have a loaner ES 350. I've taken this opportunity to check out the new electronics in the ES 350. Lexus made several improvements to bluetooth support versus my system. First, they added a "phone" label to the "Info" button so that users can actually find the phone setup. This change alone probably saves new Lexus drivers thousands of minutes everyday. The on-screen menus are also improved so I was able to setup handsfree in just a few seconds. The phone power and signal meters are also accurate which isn't true with the LS screens. The LS often indicates incorrectly that the phone battery is near death or that I have signal when I don't. The biggest improvement is bluetooth audio support. Music can be stre...
Read more

Acer Aspire Revo 3700 and XBMC

Image
The latest piece of equipment for home theater puzzle is an  Acer AspireRevo AR3700 . It's a very small nettop PC that can easily be hooked up to a TV using HDMI. My plan was to load the amazing XBMC application  onto the device, point XBMC at my library of ripped movies, and then enjoy watching. I also wanted to keep Windows 7 installed in case I needed other Windows applications. By the way, for those who already know Google TV and Apple TV you can think of XBMC as a much better application for playing back content on your home network. Maybe someone will port it to Google TV one day. After cabling up the Revo 3700 I spent some time removing all the extra software Acer had loaded onto the system. Then I ran windows update and loaded XBMC. I configured XBMC to use files on an SMB server and started playing some video. It worked but the video stuttered quite a bit. I worried that the Revo did not have enough horsepower to play 1080p video so I put some video on a USB dri...
Read more