Ever since I got my EMPEG I've been possessed with ideas on how to upgrade it, consequently I'd like to share a few with people who actually care (since you have EMPEGs).

* I've heard a lot of developers complain that the EMPEG has little memory for user space progams and it does not have any swap space because of the problem of mounting hard drives read/write and becoming corrupted if power is lost unexpectedly. Here's a possible solution: A compactflash card with a CF->IDE converter. This could give the player a good bit of swap space for user space programs with no problems mounting r/w. Any comments on how useful this could be?

* What is that little tab on the back that says "Security"? It would be nice if there were a way to lock the empeg in the car mount, anyone know of a way to do this maybe using the security tab?

* Is there any GPS software out to just give some simple stats like Lat/Long and maybe your average speed or something like that for the EMPEG? I have yet to find any myself.

* Is there any GPS software out to just give some simple stats like Lat/Long and maybe your average speed or something like that for the EMPEG? I have yet to find any myself.
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Wouldn't you need the hardware first?

In reply to:

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What is that little tab on the back that says "Security"? It would be nice if there were a way to lock the empeg in the car mount, anyone know of a way to do this maybe using the security tab?

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It's the same hole you can find back in laptops, where you can secure your toy with a cable.
Very usefull when going on the way for demonstrations.

EiSl

Errr - that's a damn good idea, actually - SanDisk do an IDE CF drive of varying sizes. It could go onto the disk cable as a secondary/slave.

It wouldn't be much good if the kernel probed it and tried to use it as a second drive to stash music files on though; you'd have to sort out some way of stopping it being mounted at startup and used by the player, but still be able to mount it from some application that could use it. Hmm.

I'mg going to go and have a think about this 'cos I could use a rw mountable partition.

Hugo was saying in another thread that it is possible to upgrade the memory in an empeg but you need to be real brave with the soldering iron

I think you'd have to change the software too cuz the software only checks for hardware version and says "mk ii = 12mb. mkiia = 16mb" .... Hugo mentioned changing that process to a sort of "auto detect" for the actual ram count.

I just had another revelation re: voice recognition. I've read the FAQ and I know voice recognition is permantely on hold, but maybe the rio team was aiming too high with trying to find a VR system that could recognize whole sentences. Wouldn't a VR system that could recognize a single letter be infintely useful. I mean think about it: I have my playlists organized by artist so I want to go to an artist that starts with a R.. I click on the microphone and say "R", it then jumps to the playlists that start with R. This is infintely safer than clicking the next button several times while my eyes are off the road. Sure it's not "impress your friends" VR but it's something- and I can't imagine it would be hard to find a VR system that could recognize 26 letters, background noise or not. Comments?

I click on the microphone and say "R", it then jumps to the playlists that start with R.

I like that idea very much... but you would have to take it a step further and have it recognize certain keywords as well.

Just saying "R" wouldn't help the empeg unless it "knew" what you had in mind: Do you want to search? Do you want to change the volume? Do you want to skip to next track? Do you want to Tweak Order? And you would need a "master keyword" to turn on VR. Otherwise the first time someone says "Hey, how are you doing?" your playlist would jump to the "R"s. :-)

So, maybe with a limited VR capability you would say:

VR (turns on voice recognition mode)
SEARCH (Turns on Search mode)
INSERT (Sets to Insert rather than Append or Replace)
ARTIST (Sets search tree to Artist)
R (Goes to "R" in the artist tree)
U (Narrows down the search...)
S (By now it has probably found "Rush")

etc.

DO IT (Executes the search and turns off the VR mode.)

In other words, each voice command would mimic a single remote keypress. Hmmm... would it be a problem that the letters m,n,o (for example) are really "6" on the remote?

Y'know, this could work. There would probably have to be about 50 key words, chosen to not sound like single letters of the alphabet, and you would want to avoid anybody saying "Hi, how are you" while you are spelling things... but I like it.

It doesn't fulfill my dream of being able to say "Empeg. Play. Rush. Red Barchetta." and have Geddy Lee start singing about his Uncle's Ferrari... but it would be a lot better than nothing at all.

tanstaafl.

Instead of single letters, why not alpha, bravo, charlie etc.. We could sound like traffic cops running license plates.

Of course this might need two versions as us Brits use one version and over the pond there is another - but then again, if the empeg is just waiting for a sound object to represent a letter then it's fairly irrelevant, just have a short training session (maybe including a town and a motorway section to allow for the noise difference)

The technology isn't really the problem - it's a matter of resources. Hopefully we'll design some other product that needs voice recognition, and do some creative negotiating to get a licence for the legacy car player as well.

Rob

The ro disk problem would go away if the car player changed to a 2.4 kernel with ReiserFS, like a certain other product we just developed..

Rob