Feeding The Long Tail With Two Gadget Facts

This week I was researching car stereo head units and my new Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner, and I uncovered two helpful facts that took a fair bit of legwork to track down. I’m sharing the two somewhat unrelated pieces of information here in case you find yourself on similar quests in the future.

For Car Stereo Seekers:

I’d like my car stereo head unit to handle Sirius radio itself, without the need for some other radio sitting on my dashboard. But when you go down this path, you find that it’s difficult to know before you install it what the display will actually look like. None of the demo units at your typical BestBuy will be wired for Sirius, and the demo videos and photos you see on Crutchfield.com and the manufacturers’ sites don’t show real photos of the display in its various modes. Your important gadget fact: Pioneer car stereos that claim to have 2-line displays, like the DEH-P6000UB, still only show one line of information when you are listening to Sirius. One line displays the word “Sirius” and the other displays song title. Crutchfield wasn’t sure about this, so I called Pioneer’s customer service line and they confirmed that none of their head units display more than one line of data from Sirius.

If you want better Sirius information displayed on the head unit, so far all signs are pointing to the Alpine decks, like the CDA-9886.

For Organization/Productivity/Wireless Office Nerds:

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M, which the greatest document scanner I’ve ever owned, can’t be mounted over a network via the Apple Airport Extreme base station’s USB port. This means you can’t have the scanner connected to your laptop wirelessly and locate it in some other part of your home or office. It’s a pain to have a highly portable laptop computer tethered to your scanner via USB cable all the time. And I hate having to reach for cables to connect things when I need them fairly regularly.

The good news is that in my research I uncovered that the Keyspan USB 2.0 Server does just that and does support the ScanSnap specifically. I have an email in to the company to confirm.

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