I wasted most of yesterday morning fiddling with my GPS. It seems the car charger is knackered, or more accurately, the stupid centre-negative “pin-in-hole” socket I guess is iffy as sometimes the red charging LED comes on and sometimes the charging indicator comes on the screen but not the LED, that’s always breaking on these GPS’s, its such a stupid connection.

Anyway, luckily my GPS can also charge by its USB port so I can charge it via the PC, albeit rather slowly as the car adaptor is 6volts 1.5amps and USB is rated at 5v 0.5a, but I’ve ordered (from ebay!) a 5.5v 2a USB-to-cigarette socket charger so hopefully that will charge at least as fast as the car adaptor. I might order another car adaptor too, just in case its the adaptor not the socket.

Whilst I was playing around I thought I might as well upgrade the iGO 8.32 software and maps, well that’s where most of the time wasting came from! The latest software is build 96054 25th June, well that seems to work but is very flaky and crashes 50% of the time on startup. So I rolled back to 93112 8th June, which now works reliably, and is a fair bit more up-to-date than the 79297 2nd March version I was running. Then I tried to update the maps from Q3 2008 to Q1/Q2 2009, but neither the Navteq nor TeleAtlas maps will work for some reason, I think they’re too big or the files are corrupt as I kept getting out-of-memory errors and I/O errors, so for now I’m sticking with the older Navteq 2008 maps, although I did notice some missing roundabouts and such whilst driving around Limoges the other day, and the new N154 modifications aren’t on there either.

So I’ve backed up the 4Gb SDHC card to hard disk so I have a reliable disk image I know works and can even fit on my backup 2Gb SD card, as quite often the FAT16 filesystem goes screwy and you have to reformat.

The X-Factor is back, I had to laugh at Simon Cowell’s “we have changed the audition process to keep the idea fresh” bullshit, erm you’ve changed the auditions so you can charge entrance fees to audiences the size of Wembley for another month you lying bastard!

Update: I finally got some slightly newer Q1 2009 NavTeq maps working, I’m sticking with the 93112 build of the software though, having tried build 95797 24th June, which also didn’t work.