The console:

From the side

This seems like a good time to go over the various equipment in the car. Looking at the dash you can see quite a bit of it:

Everything

On the left side of the steering wheel is an indoor/outdoor thermometer and a set of accessory switches. Currently only two of the switches are in use, connected to a pair of lighter/accessory jacks in the trunk. I use those jacks for things like charging power tools on the go. The switch panel is made from the lid of a project box and mounted over a recess in the dash that I can only assume was for sunglasses.

Thermometer and accessory switches

On the right side of the steering wheel, I have quite a bit of stuff. From top to bottom, left to right:

• Voltage meter (on top of dash)
• Sirius satellite receiver
• JVC AM/FM/CD/MP3 head unit (plays MP3s from CDs)
• GPS power cord (hanging up to the right of the head unit) – has an ID badge retractor to keep the excess cable under control
• CB radio (first device in the console)
• Digital trunking scanner – set up to receive general and public safety traffic from Fairfax and Prince William Counties
• Trunking scanner – used for built-in highway patrol presets for all 50 states, I'll set it for whatever state I'm driving through
• Not shown: on the left side of the console (see the above side picture) is a holster for my blackberry and a mic holder for the CB

The equipment

Of course all those radios need antennas. From left to right: AM/FM, Digital trunking scanner, CB.

Antennas

I currently don't have another antenna and mount for the other scanner, so I use the suction-cup antenna that came with the scanner.

Inside scanner antenna

The CB antenna is mounted behind the left tail-light. This was the only place I could find a piece of metal to mount the bracket to that wasn't a nicely painted section of the body.

CB antenna mount

The scanner antenna is mounted with a trunk mount. It clamps to the lip of the trunk lid.

Scanner antenna base

The Sirius antenna is magnetic, and mounted just above the passenger doors. I was planning to move it to a more centered location once I tested it, but it works just fine where it is. If I had a newer car I would consider mounting it on the front dash where it can't scuff the paint.

Sirius antenna

And that's everything except for the accessory jacks in the trunk.

The plan is to replace the all of the stereo electronics with the PC, interface the existing buttons and display, and connect the dual-cassette deck to an audio input. The non-functional 3-disc CD changer will be replaced by a single CD-ROM drive or possibly a CD-RW drive. An LIRC-compatible infrared receiver will be used to provide remote control functionality. The whole system will have little hard-drive space, relying on a network server or streaming stations. Network connectivity will more than likely be wireless, I recently purchased a USB wireless network adapter. At some point I'd like to find a cheap PC-based FM tuner (PCI or USB) that is GNU/Linux compatible.

The most frustration problem with the board I'm using is that it with virtually no ports other than USB. External connections consist of 5x USB, VGA out, Line out, Line in, Mic, and Modem. Internally there are three audio headers (CD-ROM, Video and one other), and one RS-232 serial header. This leaves USB for keyboard (which will not normally be used), display/front-button interface, and network. The serial port will be used for the infrared receiver. The internal CD-ROM drive will connect to one audio header, the cassette deck to another, and an external audio input will possibly connect to the third.

From a software standpoint the system will run Zenwalk Linux, formerly MiniSlack Linux. I've used it before for a few different systems, including a automatic CD/DVD duplicator. All control will happen either over the network (whether through a web or other interface), or by infrared remote control.

The goal is to build a complete replacement for my ailing stereo, with additional functionality to integrate it into a networked environment. This goal can be met with the hardware I currently have, with two exceptions. Currently there will be no FM radio support and there will be no internal amplifier. I may be able to correct the second exception by either building a new amplifier out of the old components (outside of my expertise), or by including a small amplifier inside of the device (pulled from a set of PC speakers for instance).

The biggest obstacle currently is constructing a USB interface for the VFD display and the front-panel buttons. After some research and reverse-engineering I have determined that I will be able to control the VFD display with a custom controller. I talked to a friend who took a number of electronics classes and we have developed a rough plan and selected the needed hardware. Hopefully interface construction can begin next week.

This has a lot of potential to be a fun and extremely useful project. I'm hoping there will be no major setbacks with hardware compatibility or simply making it all fit in the existing case.

After sharing my script and swapping site URLs with another user in #utah (on Freenode) we discussed the idea of building a system to allow others to easilly share and stuff garbage data into phishing sites.

The idea is to design some sort of XML spec that could describe a phishing site. It would list the fields to be filled in, what type data goes in them, etc. Using a web interface, people could report the phishing sites they come across. Once reported, duplicates are thrown out, sites are checked to ensure that the system isn't being abused, and an XML description is generated. Remote clients for various platforms would be available to download the XML descriptions and periodically post data to the phishing sites. The more machines posting good-looking data at random intervals, the harder it will be to sort out the good and bad data.

At some point between job hunting and work I really need to work on this. I'm surprised I havn't found a group of people already doing this.

A big thanks to everyone on #twiki, without them I wouldn't have gotten this far.