Last night I spent most of the time trimming out windows services I didn't need to be running. I have my boot time down to about 8 seconds, which ironically enough, is faster than the warm-up time for my head unit. I installed a motherboard monitoring utility in the hopes of finding a way to integrate it into the frontend I'm probably going to run - Road Runner. I'm still connected to my home network via an ethernet cable, but plan to test the "mobileness" tonight when I get home by removing the cable and going over wifi. Hopefully it should just work if I've planned correctly. I installed a firewall and virus software, which I realize is counter-productive to trimming down the services, but I really don't want to have to worry about that sort of thing. I also tested out my remote desktop functionality and everything seems to work rather well. Now I can go back to working on my laptop in our family room while watching TV with the wife and kids. The WAF has immediately gone up because if this.
On the hardware side, I plan to start mounting everything tonight, at least in the case. If I have time, I'm going to start working on the placement in the car, but I have some other honey-do's in front of that, so the vehicle prep may not occur until the weekend. I expect to order my screen tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have this whole thing installed by next weekend! I sure will be one happy mofo if that is actually what happens.
One annoying thing I've noticed is that all the frontends have so many skins. I'm so
with what I thought would be a simple decision. Even once I had decided on which frontend to run, there are 62 different for that frontend. I realize some of them are just color changes, but I think the skin is essential to how it flows in the car. I just hope that once I get it installed with just the right skin, the layout will look good in the car. I don't want to develop yet another skin, but I may try to write some code to extend one of the existing skins and contribute that back if I can figure out how exactly to do it.
This whole carpc thing is definitely not for the faint of heart. I'm sure my wife looks at this just like every other hobby I have - expensive and pointless...
until she wants a pc in her car - then it will be the best thing I've ever learned how to do!
