MG TF parts and accessories, MG TF 160 Sunstorm

Hal

New cars are nice aren’t they? Especially when they are yours… but the next best thing is when they are your partners! And double nice when your partner has the great good sense and fine taste to go for a new MG TF 160.

Yes, I admit it, I am a rag top man at heart. I used to drive an MG Midget many years ago (rubber bumpers, so not too long ago) and it was one of the great joys – particularly in the spring and summer months. If I couldn’t go on a motorbike, I would go in the midget… and what fun it was!

So I am hoping that there will be some kind of nostalgic return to those heady days over the coming year.

The big issue here is do you go out and get all of those lovely new bits for the car even though it has clocked just 40 miles from new? A case in point is the heater control knobs – all a bit plastic looking, and so easily replaced with brushed aluminium ones, and a windshield to add that extra comfort and protection when bombing along the open roads. But just where do you go for your extras these days? The MG owners’ club seems still to be servicing the needs of the older and original MGs, and a few places are selling parts for the Mk1 MG ‘F’ series. It takes a decent search on google to find a company selling bits for the MG TF though…

I found this one, which has exceptional service, I think – Mike Satur

I rang them on Friday afternoon to order some of the aforementioned heater controls as a special surprise gift for the new car (well, for Kara, actually), and expected them on Monday. They arrived early on Saturday morning, so I have had to hide them for a couple of days! The sentimental part of me thought they would make a good Valentine gift… don’t laugh – it isn’t too long ago that I decided the kitchen was no place for a motorbike engine!

Anyway, give Mike Satur a go if you are looking for TF parts…

Dension ICE>link – fitting an iPod into your car – Dension support forums

Hal

I can only really sing the praises of the ICE>Link product from Dension. My experience has been very positive and the installation into my Audi A3 was painless enough.

However, here it is less than two months later and Dension in their wisdom have closed the support forum at their site. The latest firmware version is 2.05 but I am working happily with v2.03.

But that’s not the point. The forum at Dension was generating a lot of good questions and answers – perhaps too many for the good folk at Dension to handle in such a public way, but now we find that a message placed on the forum (or rather, where the forum was) directs us to hackmycar.com. I don’t know about you, but this is hardly a professional, product centred name for the ICE>Link! In fact it feels as if fitting the product to your car is in fact some kind of grubby activity, hacking into an otherwise good car.

Of course, not all hacking is bad… but it feels as if Dension have abdicated responsibility for their own product – they do maintain a standard email based support system, however.

But hold on… what’s this we see… hackmycar.com is in fact a domain that is registered to Dension Audio Systems, specifically Bela Markaus himself. So what gives here?

Anyway, despite all of that, the ICE>Link is providing hours and hours of brilliant music in my car – I wouldn’t be without it (unless a better product that does a similar thing comes along).

Fitting the ICE>Link is simple – the hard part is getting the stereo out of the dashboard. Once clear of the dash you basically unplug a single connector and replace it with the Dension wiring loop. You then re-plug the original connector into the Dension wiring (which is now attached to your stereo head unit) and add the different pieces of the Dension equipment one at a time to the new bit of wiring.

The head unit connects to the link piece, the link piece connects to the cradle (feel a song coming on yet?) and the cradle gets put where you want it.

There is a stray black wire with no label on it on the model ICE>Link that I bought. This turns out to be an earth wire and just needs attaching to any metal part of the head unit. Until you do the ICE>Link won’t power up. As soon as you have got it installed and powered, put the stereo back in the dashboard, careful not to trap any wires, and get to your computer. You need to go to install.dension.com to download the correct file to load to the ICE>Link, identifying the type of head unit you have. In my case, despite the radio being a ‘Blaupunkt’ I used the ‘Audi’ installer file – the unit is in an Audi after all and will have Audi firmware in the radio.

The next thing to download is the latest firmware. There is an instruction .pdf to read too – essentially you load the car config file (which is an .mp3 file) into your ipod, then play that file as you plug the iPod into the cradle. This programs the ICE>Link to be in the right format for your car. You then follow the instructions for the firmware – again it is a set of .MP3 files which you load to your iPod. You find the ‘set up’.mp3 and play that, and the string of many small files will play one after the other. The counter goes up to 99 on your head unit, but there are many more files than that… wait until the iPod display gives you the message that the firmware update has been successful.

Then unplug the iPod from the cradle, turn off the ignition on the car and turn it back on again. You should find that the ICE>Link is now seen as your CD changer. Most CD changers hold 6 discs, but in this case discs 1-5 relate to the first five playlists on your iPod – set them up as you want! Disc 6, if selected, enters you into the Dension menu on the iPod where you get to set up some parameters. It is here that you can ask to use the iPod UI (User Interface) which I strongly recommend. Be aware that you move between the menu items using the buttons on your head unit, not the iPod (the iPod buttons will be disabled at the moment). Set it up as you want, and you should see a message telling you to remove the iPod from the cradle, or similar to that. When you place it back, it’s all done.

I use the iPod interface because I am familiar with it, but also because it lets me access ANY of the playlists I have, and also set up backlighting, etc which is handy when driving at night.

So, all in all I am still really pleased that I got this product – it is the best way to listen to iPod music in your car if you can get it all working. Shame on Dension for closing their support forums – it makes it look as if they don’t care or even wish to support their own product, but we’ll see how the new forums shape up.

HackMyCar.com… whatever next?!!

Project planning at Ultralab – using xTime Project

Hal

One of the projects that I work on involves setting up a website in partnership with the Design Council, as part of their work on the Schools’ Renaissance campaign. The website is a form of questionnaire for which we use the ‘Gearbox’ software developed by Nick and Alex at Ultralab.

The online metric project, as it is being called, is a fairly complex beast and for the first time at Ultralab I have started to use a piece of project planning software called xTime Project.

This is a simple project planning tool which allows me to add resources we will use (including people, hardware, software and time for holidays, etc) and cost these into a budget. The software allows me to link events in the project together so that we can see the flow of the work we are doing but more importantly than all of that it integrates nicely with iCal and can be exported to a web server as well.

This means that using iCal I can broadcast the entire project plan as a series of diary events to the Ultralab WebDAV server for anyone else to see and subscribe to. xTime also integrates with Address book so I cn easily add people and resources that way, and it keeps track of the budget for me, showing totals against events (events mean work done by people on the project) and I can even export this financial summary to Excel for the finance admin team to get to grips with.

All in all a cool piece of software, well worth the money ($129 for the standard version, but it is easily worth the $249 for the ‘Pro’ software, which we use), easy to use and very visual in what it does.

Skinning Drupal – changing the colour scheme for your blog with CSS Edit

Hal

I had a go at changing the look and feel of the blog tonight. I quite liked the original ‘X-template’ look, but wanted to have a go at changing the colours.

The obvious changes were to alter the header images – look in the themes folder and navigate to ‘pushbutton’ and all of the images used in the theme are here. However, much of the drupal site depends on cascading style sheets… and this needs opening in an application such as CSS Edit – there you will see a huge number of items to change, and by working through the source code for the page you will see what class or style is attached to each element. You can then locate that in CSS Edit pretty easily and alter the colour values.

I found the ‘Digital Colour Meter’ in the Utilities folder pretty useful here too! (That is the Apple Mac ‘Applications/Utilities’ folder… nothing to do with Drupal)

Any thoughts about colour schemes welcome – it shouldn’t take too much to alter again now I can see how it all hangs together!

Thanks to Matthew Eaves for the prompts on getting started with this!

DVD Editing and Authoring with MyDVDEdit and DVD Studio Pro – targeting the loop point

Hal

Using DVD Studio Pro 3 from Apple enables us to create some exciting DVDs for Ultralab. An example of this would be the latest SummerSchool DVD which was completed before Christmas and is full of extraordinary examples of young peoples’ creativity.

As good as DVD Studio Pro is, there are some limitations which mean some things can’t be done in the way you want. In order to enhance the work you can do, you need to use an editor which works on the files you create with DVDSP. Such an editor would be MyDVDEdit by Jerome Cabanis. This small app lets you ‘look’ inside the DVD structures and alter the scripting that DVDSP writes for you so that you can make your DVDs even more interactive.

One example of this is to target the loop point in a motion menu… currently in DVDSP you can’t return back to the point in an animated menu where the buttons appear after watching your footage. You either have to sit through the entire opening animation, or the DVD has to contain a second menu which is static and has the buttons on it. This, of course, takes extra space on your disc. However, with MyDVDEdit you can very easily open up the VIDEO_TS folder, locate the menu and add the necessary lines of code to add this functionality.

I have written a brief tutorial available from MyDVDEdit.com (originally hosted over at Editorsbin.com ) which explains exactly how to do this using MyDVDEdit. I should add that this application is not alone – there is a far more fully featured application (which is also licensed by the DVD Forum, by the way) called TFDVDEdit – both are Mac based apps.

MyDVDEdit is shareware, TFDVDEdit is a fully professional editor. I get the distinct feeling that MyDVDEdit will continue in rapid development and will be adding more and more features as time goes by. The fact that it isn’t licensed by the DVD Forum shouldn’t put you off using it, but the old rules apply… always make a back up of your VTS folder and work on that. Neither Jerome, nor I, can be held responsible for anything that you do to your projects!

Thanks go to Alex Alexzander for the editorsbin site, and to Jake Russell, who started the whole idea in my head! Jake is part of the TFDVDEdit community, and a lot of good work is done over there about this kind of post build editing. Ian Sheppard is a good example of someone who began to develop this particular technique. Jake posted the first article I saw about it, and mine simply follows his work.