Notable

GM, CarPlay and iPhones

A bit of a follow up on a previous post regarding GM's decision to drop CarPlay.

I talked about when the 3rd generation of CarPlay was announced at last year's WWDC and John Gruber nailed it:

I wonder how much of a factor it is that Apple has spent the last decade not-so-secretly working on creating its own line of cars? There's no way GM would ever integrate a software system from, say, Ford or Honda. But so why integrate CarPlay, which comes from a company that seemingly wants to compete with existing automakers? Apple's own car ambitions make CarPlay integration, to some extent, seem like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Posted 19th Apr 2023 @ 12:05

The perfect Lego Nintendo Game Boy doesn't exist...

I couldn't agree more, Sean.

Please, Lego, make this set.

Posted 16th Apr 2023 @ 20:22

Floor 796

By 0x00

Floor796 is an ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station! The goal of the project is to create as huge animation as possible, with many references to movies, games, anime and memes.

Already so much to see, some squares are interactive and you can click and share direct links to animations.

Posted 12th Apr 2023 @ 08:15

General Motors to phase out Apple CarPlay starting this year in EV transition

For EVs only, but I don't get why you would do this. No one needs another device to sign in to for their media consumption.

Maybe this is in response to Apple's own plans to use CarPlay to take over the not only the infotainment system but to become the car's interface. I don't see how that plays out positively for Apple. Why would manufacturers give their data away to Apple? CarPlay is currently pretty good. Instrument clusters are being digitised, they're not always great, but that feels like something that should be up to the car to deal with and not your phone.

More on the topic from John Gruber.

I'll go out on a limb here and say this is a less of a setback for Apple than it is a setback for GM, whose decision makers seem to be utter dolts.

Posted 4th Apr 2023 @ 15:12

How autonomous vehicles "see" the world around them

Interesting infographic from Axios showing the various sensors cars have and how the club together to create autonomy.

We have some of these on our our newest cars and I can say with certainty that even with them, cars are dumb. I wouldn't trust any car enough to just let it drive on its own.

Biggest issue I run into with the automation available:

  • overly sensitive, which can make you overly aware of the surroundings but not necessarily the right part
  • inconsistent with distance detection, if there's a variation in the road or the pavement when parking then you need to be focusing 100% on the task the car is performing
  • collision detection makes a lot of assumptions, we sometimes hear it beep as the car in front turns while we continue forward and there was never a risk of collision but the car didn't know the one in front was turning

It's a lot of fun to make the car park itself but you have to pay so much attention that it's almost not worth it.

Posted 30th Mar 2023 @ 10:54

< Older   Newer >