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Quest for cheap radios has ended

Monday, October 6th, 2008

In an earlier post, I talked about how I was going to get a nice cheap radio setup for the race car. Well, after turning on the Midland GPRS radios from Bass Pro shops that sat around for a while, I figured out they were busted. Crapola. So I decided to get “real” radios instead. After messing around on Ebay and finding some Chinese knockoffs, a friend suggested I call Sampson Racing and see if they had any used gear. They hooked me up with a set of Vertex radios, crew chief headset, and a PTT button, all demo gear out of the owner’s race car. Sweet! Cameron at Conover Motorsports is going to build me a badass antenna, and I will still have my “cheap-er” radio system.

  • Vertex 5-watt – $160
  • Crew Chief headset – $90
  • PTT + free car harness – $25
  • Driver helmet gear – $140
  • Badass Conover antenna – $50
  • Misc adapters (headset to radio, car harness to radio) – $25

In the end, I’ve spend $500 and ended up with around an $800 system. My cheap ass is happy :) Looking forward to being able to hear my crew at the ARRC

Posted in All, Racing | No Comments »

How to make a MacBook Pro hibernate

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Since I’ve had the MacBook Pro I’ve been wanting it to “hibernate” instead of “sleep” when I close the lid. There are times when I’ve shut the lid, stuck it into my backpack, just to not look at it again for 3 days over a long weekend. During that time, even in regular sleep mode, the battery dies as the laptop is not all the way off. My Thinkpad on the other hand can fully hibernate, in which it turns itself all the way off and stores its current state to the hdd.

Turns out that the MacBooks have the same mode, but its not an option in the menu. After a little digging, I’ve found a site that tells you what to do. I’ve outlined the steps below for “mac noobs” such as myself.

  • Go to Finder, Utilities, Terminal
  • type pmset -g | grep hibernate
  • You should see that your hibernate is set for mode 3. This means when it sleeps, your items are saved to the RAM and power stays on. What you want is to set that to mode 5 which will function just like windows hibernate, and actually turn your laptop all the way off while saving where your state to the hdd.
  • Create two aliases, one to enable mode 5, and another to set back to 3 if you want.
  • Type alias hibernateon=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5″
  • Type alias hibernateoff=”sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3″
  • Now when you type hibernateon, it will set that mode to 5. Once you do that, type pmset -g | grep hibernate again to confirm that you are on mode 5
  • Your laptop is now set to hibernate like windows when you close the lid. If you ever want to revert back, run terminal again and type hibernateoff

Posted in All, General | 5 Comments »

How to make iPhone ringtones from MP3s

Friday, September 19th, 2008

This is easy as pie. With the below steps, you can take any MP3 and make it into a ringtone for your iPhone.

  • Grab the MP3 you want to turn into a ringtone and using Audacity turn it into an MP3 that is less then 30 seconds in length.
  • Drag the newly shortened file into iTunes
  • Find it in iTunes, right click on it and choose “Convert to AAC”. It will make another version of the song.
  • Find that song in your iTunes folder library (probably c:/…./My Documents/My Music/iTunes) and rename if from .m4a to m4r. In iTunes, delete the m4a that you made.
  • In iTunes, go to “file” then “add file to library” and select the newly renamed m4r that you made in the step above
  • Now you can sync with your iPhone and you will have a new ringtone to select.

Posted in All, General | 2 Comments »

The Quest for cheap racing radios

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

In car radios are a very “nice to have” in our amateur racing world. The crappy this is, that a nice radio setup is just south of $1k, while the bottom of the line systems are $600. I had a chance to spend that kind of cash on the race car earlier this year, and correctly opted for the data acquisition package. Having data in the car has allowed me to very quickly pick up time at new race tracks, and also find more time at my home track. Frankly, I don’t see a point in even doing practice or test days w/o data.

Back to radios though. I had to buy a helmet headset for a few endurance races I’ve done, and also my codrives with Lyman last year. With that, I had a small but expensive chunk of the system out of the way. I decided to put together a cheapo system with the rest of the components, and we’ll see how it works out

Below are the pieces one needs and how I got them, and for how much.

  • Radios – I found Sampson Racing uses Midland 5 watt radios in their “cheap” radio package. Found mine at Bass Pro Shops for $50 for the pair on closeout. Sweet.
  • Driver – Headset/headphones I had to buy before. $140, no way to get around that one. Any cheaper/crappy mic or headphones and the crew chief cannot hear the driver.
  • Car – Two components needed. The car harness, and PTT. Car harness connects from the driver to the PTT button and to the Radio. I picked this up for $0 since Lyman had a busted connector on his and just bought a new one. Connector needs some re-wiring. We’ll see if it works. PTT is $40 from Sampson Racing.
  • Crew Chief – Need a fancy crew chief headset. This needs to be noise cancelling in order to work trackside while cars are going by. Most of the time these are right around $180 or so. I found some on ebay for $100 new. We’ll see if that works, but it seems to be the same stuff as the more expensive one.

The above system should work for some of the parts of the race tracks. To have full track coverage, you need nicer (read: $$$$) radios with an external antenna. Depending on finding some used ones, I will do that later, but for right now, I’ll settle with having radio communications for the front half of Road Atlanta.

My total outlay so far is $330. Same components, but 1/2 of the price of the bottom of the barrel system, and 1/3 the price of a middle of the road system. We’ll see how it works in November at the ARRC

Posted in All, Racing | No Comments »

Get Parameter from Querystring via Javascript (getParam)

Friday, September 5th, 2008

A while back I posted a method to grab all the querystrings out of a URL and parse them into arrays. While that is very useful sometimes, its overkill for other situations, when you have 1 or 2 variables in the querystring and you know their names already. For those times, I like to use a function “getParam”. It takes in the variable name and returns you its value from the querystring.

function getParam(name) {
  var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
  var regex = new RegExp( regexS );
  var tmpURL = window.location.href;
  var results = regex.exec( tmpURL );
  if( results == null )
    return "";
  else
    return results[1];
}

Posted in All, Javascript | 1 Comment »

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