Can anyone recommend a place I can send my two iPod Shuffles to have the battery replaced? Preferably someplace that won't freak out about shipping to Mexico?

Can anyone recommend a BlueTooth audiobook player? The absolute non-negotiable requirement is that it will resume playing at exactly where it left off when powered down. Bonus for variable speed playback, FF/REW, ruggedness, and some small amount of water resistance, i.e. I don't have to be paranoid if it is raining and my pockets are damp. Display doesn't matter at all. Sound quality is not high priority. 6+ hours of play time on one charge, at least 40 hours of 128 kbps storage.

Can anyone recommend a good dash camera setup for my Honda CR-V? Front & rear, intuitive operation (push one button to save a clip, automatic recording when the car is running, etc.), high enough resolution to be able to read license plate numbers.

Any input will be appreciated.

tanstaafl.

I absolutely would highly recommend Viofo for dashcams. Really nicely built.

That's still a tough area for dashcams. It's not the resolution so much as the lens. It's still important to get a high rez (4k at least) dashcam, but even then, the lens and the lighting still don't pick up the license plates clearly until the offending car is right next to you.

Dash cameras, by necessity, are going to have trouble reading digits because they are:
- Permanently focused at infinity
- Permanently set to a wide-angle view
- Have small lens assemblies and small image sensors
- Have optics and electronics which are optimized for rugged use (high temperatures, vibration, etc) rather than highest quality.

Sometimes I like to watch the clips on these dashcam youtube channels. Watching the dashcam accidents on those channels, I think, helps me as a driver. It reminds me of situations that I should be prepared to avoid. After watching these videos, I find myself doing things like, carefully watching a car that's getting ready to pull out of a parking lot, so that I can swerve if it blindly pulls out in front of me.
- RR&BD Driving School
- Mega Driving School

When I decided I wanted to get a dashcam for myself, one thing I did was to look at the logo bugs on the corners of those videos (the videos sometimes have the brand name of the camera in the corner). The highest quality clips were the brands of camera that I investigated. I'm aware that data compression (and generational re-compression loss) is often responsible for low image quality on youtube videos, so I took that into account.

I ended up buying a Blackvue DR900X-2CH a few years ago. I'm happy with its image quality and ruggedness, but I find its software/firmware to be problematic. It has many features but it feels primitive. In particular, I find the following things to be a problem with the Blackvue:
- Despite containing a GPS, the Blackvue lacks a feature which turns DST on and off automatically in the spring and fall. I can only turn DST on and off from its configuration screen. Since I can't be bothered, this means that, several months out of the year, the camera bakes a timestamp onto the image that's an hour off from reality.
- The videos are stored as thousands of individual clips of about a minute each. This means that you can't view a video of a "time range", instead you have to sift through the thousands of individual clips and retrieve the specific one that you want. The clips do have timestamps (and "saved" clips are specially flagged), so if you remember when the incident occurred (and if the camera's clock was set correctly, heh) you should be able to locate the clip you need. But you can't "scrub" through a time range as if it were a security camera. I have no idea which other brands of camera are better in this regard, but this feels like caveman-level software to me.
- The process of connecting the camera to the phone's wifi is onerous. You need to connect to it if you want to change its settings, update its firmware, or to retrieve video clips. For example if I were on the side of the road after an accident and wanted to retrieve the images from the camera onto my phone, it would be too problematic; it would be much easier just to yank the SD card (or the whole camera) and bring it home with me, where I can use the computer to retrieve what I need. Thankfully I haven't been in an accident since getting the dashcam.
- This Blackvue camera model requires that I unplug its power cable and remove a plastic cover, to be able to yank the SD card. Blech.
- Sometimes when I update its firmware, it will erase all the saved clips on the SD card. More caveman shit.

Other than that, the camera works well, has good image quality, and has lots of other good features.




All dashcams have those features already. Some don't even require pressing a button to save a clip. Mine has two ways of saving a clip:
- Reach your hand up near the camera, and its proximity sensor will notice your hand there. It goes beep, flags the clip as special, and saves it permanently. This is nice, so that you don't have to fumble for a button while you're driving.
- G-sensor built into the camera detects anything that seems like an impact. It automatically beeps and saves the clip. This is a nice idea, but it doesn't work well in practice. It sometimes false-alarms and saves clips after I drive over a pothole or a bump in the road. The settings screen lets me configure the G-sensitivity in both the X and Y axis (and crucially allows for different sensitivities in driving mode vs parked mode) but I can't remove the false alarms entirely. I have turned the sensitivity down so far that I'm now no longer sure if it would even trigger in the event of a real accident.

Other features you should be looking for in a dashcam:

- Resolution and frame rate? Though the lens and the image sensor's overall quality are more important for getting license numbers, higher resolutions will help get you more chances to track down the perp. Newest cameras should be doing 4k rez at least, maybe 8k. These days, 1080p is the cheapo bare minimum, look for better than that. The frame rate is the other side of the resolution coin, a faster frame rate means less motion blur, and thus more chances to see the license plate number. However frame rate is a tradeoff with resolution: Many cameras must be configured for a different frame rate depending on the recording resolution (example: "can record 1080p at 60fps, or 4k at 30fps"). If you can find any which record both high resolution and high frame rate (such as 4k at 60fps), then you're getting a better chance at nailing the bad guy. But all of the above is useless if it's attached to a crappy lens that gets inherently blurry 4k images; just because a camera is 4k doesn't mean it's high quality.

- How good are the images when you're driving at night? That's something I paid attention to when I was looking at the youtube videos of various dashcams. As always, low-light recording is tough for small digital cameras, and quality inevitably goes way down at night. But some will be better than others.

- Do you want the dashcam to stay vigilant even when your car is parked? For example to see who hit your car while you were in the grocery store. Dashcams usually have a configurable "parking mode". Mine has the option to either record while parked, or to jump into recording mode only if it senses an impact. It can even be configured to sense the voltage on the accessory wire, and shut itself down if it seems like it's starting to drain your car battery. Unfortunately mine uses enough power that it drains the battery quite quickly if the engine isn't running, so my parking mode only lasts about a minute after I shut off the ignition. You can, if you like, get a special secondary backup battery for the camera (either third party or OEM), but this makes the wiring and installation much more complicated. Also I don't like the idea of having a big lithium battery cooking away under my dashboard in the summer.

- Secondary camera inputs? Mine came with a secondary rear-facing camera for the car's back window. It made the installation more complicated but it's useful if you want to get a recording of the guy who rear-ended you. You can even shell out for side facing cameras too, though I didn't.

- Cellular service and/or cloud service? Some will let you pay for connecting to the cloud and automatically storing the clips, alleviating the need to manually connect to the camera or yank its SD card. I did not spring for this feature, it seems like it would be an unnecessary monthly expense. Usually the cloud services will add additional data compression to the images, which makes it even harder to look for license plate numbers. But this feature could potentially be useful for some folks.

- SD card storage? These things usually have a micro-SD card slot for storing the data. Make sure to get a high quality, high capacity, high speed, name brand SD card to put in the thing. The camera will likely come with a cheap low-capacity card. A bigger SD card will store more days' worth of clips before it starts overwriting the old clips. Also, look for ones where the SD card is relatively easy to yank out.

- LCD Screen? Some dashcams have a little LCD screen and a little user interface with buttons for controlling its settings. I chose one without that crap, because I think that's superfluous and it makes the form factor much too large. I also wonder if it would make the dashcam a bigger theft target. I prefer the smaller form factor of the one I've got. It's just a tiny little tube, a bit larger than a lipstick. This lets me mount it on the windshield behind my rear-view mirror, entirely out of my line of sight. It's so compact that it looks almost like an OEM part of the car.

Related: I've noticed that more cars are coming with various dashcams, indoor cams, and other such things as factory-installed options. This seems like an enormous privacy violation, if done poorly (the EFF has had a bit to say about this), but conversely offers the possibility for higher quality cameras with better coverage, so perhaps a better chance of catching a good shot of a license plate.

The only examples I've seen of built-in dashcams are YouTube videos from Tesla cameras. They are all lower-quality video than the third party cameras. Unsurprising that their cars keep getting in accidents when they try to use those cameras for self-driving mode.

Some performance cars come with built-in cameras, but i don't know if they could really be classified as a dash cam. I'm thinking things like that Corvette/Camaro Performance Data Recorder. You need to manually activate that one. It also overlays a bunch of stuff you might not want in a regular dash cam, since it is supposed to be used for track performance evaluation (speed, RPM, g-forces, gear, steering angle, throttle position, and brake pressure).

BMW also has built in dash cams in some models (and the more disturbing passenger cam). It auto saves a clip when it detects an impact (20 secs before the impact or something). Other than that, you have to manually save and it grabs +/-20 secs from hitting the button.

Yeah, I was thinking about the BMW version. I assume it's just a matter of time before it's a common feature everywhere. Any car that has lots of cameras for things like the synthetic overhead view (to help navigate tight parking situations) could add dashcam-like functionality without too much extra engineering effort.