I have Google Alerts set up for key words that could alert me to news stories for VIA Arena. One of them, not surprisingly, is EPIA. Google alerts don't just find words used on professional sites, but blogs as well. Today I got a link to someone's Live Journal post about their Car PC project which they have named Grease Monkey. The creator is very enthusiastic. Reading the blog, I feel like it's the year 2002 again, when Mini-ITX boards first came to market. It's lovely that new people are still using EPIA boards for mods like car PCs - but where are the pre=assembled car PCs? Using the small footprint of Mini-ITX to put PCs where they couldn't go before - like cars - was one of the obvious evolutionary paths that we all saw back in 2002. I had expected to be able to buy a complete car PC at any well known car accessory store by now. But it seems you still have to build them yourself.

I think security is a big factor in why car PCs haven't taken off. I've heard the comment many times before that unless your DVD player is built into the dash, with the screens built into the seats, you're just asking for a thief to rip it all out. Apparently, when screens are built into headrests, thieves just take the whole headrest.  For entertaining kids in the back seat on a long journey, UMPCs are a good solution, because when the journey has come to an end, you don't leave any of the equipment in the car for thieves. Furthermore, you can use for other things as well, out of the car.

Another back-up plan was to film a video of our eldest daughter playing kid games on the OQO. She's pretty excited about it. I have put Chuzzle on it, which runs great at 800x480 and looks gorgeous. I also thought we'd demonstrate a "girly" game and a game targetted at boys. With three girls in the house we have a pretty impressive collection of Barbie games but, ironically, the only Barbie game we don't have is the only one that we can find a no CD key for. For a "boy's" game, similarly, we are having great trouble in finding no CD cracks for car racing games. John bought a pack of Atari style games but it requires 800x600 resolution, so you can't see the options and menu properly.

Late last week we received the double capacity battery for the OQO model 02, a digital pen and the hard carry case. But a video of me, or John, or both of us just holding up each item would be boring. So I thought I would set up the unit and film it next to the stop watch playing media files - using the slim line standard battery and then the double capacity battery. I would then speed up the video (even though I've never done that before - but I'd figure it out), set it to music and report on the real capacity of each battery. Good plan. Not so good is not checking that the video camera battery is fully charged. I don't know when it stopped filming but the double capacity OQO battery lasted for 3 hours and 8 minutes - the digital video camera battery didn't. I am afraid we are just novice film makers here, with a whole lot of other taks as well. Speaking of which ... it's weekly report time. Maybe we'll get two videos out next week.