5punk

I'm after two pieces of rather unrelated advice.

1. Can one of you tecchie types reccomend me a book on VBA. Particularly reference lists of functions and function trees but mostly just general how-to really (teaching myself at work, trying to at least)

2. Any advice on DIY connection of an i-pod to a car stereo? my stereo has connectors for a 10disc CD, and I guess I could wire an aux-in to that, but not sure how / what terminals to connect to. And I'm a spazz

bomberesque wrote:I'm after two pieces of rather unrelated advice.

2. Any advice on DIY connection of an i-pod to a car stereo? my stereo has connectors for a 10disc CD, and I guess I could wire an aux-in to that, but not sure how / what terminals to connect to. And I'm a spazz

Have you tried switching it off and back on again? How about shouting and/or swearing at it loudly

sorry. i have no clue on either, im just being a 5perm whore

1) Fuck knows

2) Unless you're dead set on it being a wired connection for your pod, why not go for a radio transmitter or something? iTrips I believe they're called in the world of pod. Any transmitter should work though - at least you'd think so.

I got one of those iTrips recently and it's pretty good. The sounds quality is not quite as good as you'd get with a wired connection but it's enough for in-car. The one I got has a cigarette lighter connection so it charges as well as plays the music.

bomberesque wrote:I'm after two pieces of rather unrelated advice.

1. Can one of you tecchie types reccomend me a book on VBA. Particularly reference lists of functions and function trees but mostly just general how-to really (teaching myself at work, trying to at least)

I like the O'Reilly books personally. The Nutshell is probably a good general book to start with, provided that you're at least somewhat familiar with programming.

bomberesque wrote:2. Any advice on DIY connection of an i-pod to a car stereo? my stereo has connectors for a 10disc CD, and I guess I could wire an aux-in to that, but not sure how / what terminals to connect to. And I'm a spazz

If you aren't sure how to wire an aux in (and you're a spazzcoordinationally challenged person), then an iTrip et cetera sounds like the best idea.

fabyak wrote:
Have you tried switching it off and back on again? How about shouting and/or swearing at it loudly

sorry. i have no clue on either, im just being a 5perm whore

Yes. Yes you are.

And so am I

O'Reilly's Nutshell books are good reference tomes and don't make you look like a spazzer like the For Dummies books when someone sees it on your shelf. I've probably got the e-book version of it somewhere if you Gaz me when I'm at work.

My pikey car's only got a tape player, so I got one of these from Tesco, works well enough.

[img size=200]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a115/ ... ette-x.jpg[/img]

FatherJack wrote:My pikey car's only got a tape player, so I got one of these from Tesco, works well enough.

[img size=200]http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a115/ ... ette-x.jpg[/img]

I was using one of those until it broke. Sound quality was pretty crappy though, a significantly worse than the iTrip.

OK

1. Ta, I'll look up the O'reilly books

2. I have had 3 Itrip thingies from different manufacturers over the years and they don't work for me. trying to find a gap in the wavelengths then Retuning the itrip 3 times in a 1 hour trip while doing 100 on the motorway for the firey crashey loss. I gave up with them.

right, now I have a 650 page book on VB/VBA to digest... should keep me busy for a while, ta FJ!

About the car stereo / ipod thing, I found this blog hack advice thingy;

http://www.mattgilbert.net/carstereoauxinput/

basically an enthusiastic amateur took his car stereo out and fiddled with the connections until it worked. I'm gonna try the same, hopefully avoiding accidental airbag deployment / death in the process.

I've had 2 itrip[s, one for my old 3G ipid which was great and one for my current 5G ipod which is less good.

The new one seems to have a weaker signal, so it is very easily overcome by any other signal in the area, plus if you go somewhere there are a lot of other signals, near london for example, it's impossible to find a free station.

I would suggest that you go into halfords or something similar to that. They do a couple of gadgets for hooking up ipods to car stereos, as well as some car stereos that come with an ipod cable. I got a sony stereo for my car (before i wrote it off) that had an ipod cable which allowed you to control the ipod from the stereos controls which was nifty. Think it cost me about £180

I've used the cassette thing and the radio transmitter thing. I personally found the sound quality of the cassette thing to be much better (especially if you're travelling quite large distances as the iTrips thingy needs retuning), however if you've not got a cassette player it's not much good.

Roman Totale wrote:I've used the cassette thing and the radio transmitter thing. I personally found the sound quality of the cassette thing to be much better (especially if you're travelling quite large distances as the iTrips thingy needs retuning), however if you've not got a cassette player it's not much good.

It probably depends on the quality of both devices. The cassette thing I used was quite cheap and the iTrip was £50 and powerful enough to overcome most radio signals. But on a trip into London last week I found I had to retune it once or put up with some crackling.

the cassette things are always a bit ropey, afaik. I don't have a cassette player anyway, so no dice there.

The radio things (itrip etc) do seem to vary; basically I am a bit tired laying out cash trying to find a good one (I've had 3)

I'm going to try and hardwire it as per that guy's website thing which is basically;

Put a bypass switch inline on the 4 sound signal cables from the CD -> Head unit
Connect a 3.5mm stereo jack to the other side of the bypass switch
Press play on the headunit, to play CD
Switch the bypass
I-pod signal replaces the incoming from the CD unit
Bob = your uncle

I don't live in the UK (Belgium) and we are not blessed with Halfords. We do have Auto5, which is sorta similar, but I've hunted in there and found nothing.

bomberesque wrote:I don't live in the UK (Belgium) and we are not blessed with Halfords.

Halfords is not a blessing.