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The Renault Espace is a lovely car. I particularly like the spaceship dashboard, although this does create a slight problem – the Radio/CD is in the back. Right in the rear of the car, which makes it a pain to connect a phone for playing MP3s or Spotify from your phone.

You can buy kits to add bluetooth connectivity, but these are around £75. My solution costs around £20 and works with the 6CD multichanger type radio in the back. There are other kinds, YMMV.

You will need (updated December 2020) –

  1. Bluetooth audio receiver
  2. A length of 3.5mm jack cable
  3. A CD audio cable from a PC (No longer available. Check ebay)

You will also need to use the remote control for the Radio/CD to enable AUX input.

Plug the Bluetooth receiver into one of the three 12v sockets, then plug the 3.5mm jack cable into it. If you watch this video you can see how to use the CD audio cable to connect the jack cable to the CD changer.

Another top tip – on my android phone I’ve installed Bluetooth connect and play. This is a handy little app that will automatically open your music player (spotify, goole music etc) and start playing when the bluetooth device connects. it also closes the music app when blueooth disconnects and doesn’t seem to impact the phone battery life. I recommend putting a 10 second delay in the app settings as it messes up when the Bluetooth adapter loses power temporarily as the engine starts.

All this means I can get in the car and start playing music without taking the phone out of my pocket or messing around with anything.

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It’s been a while since my last post, I think 7 months is a personal record. In my defence I have got a full time job and three young kids.

Back to the titular subject, picking a distro.

For a long time I’ve had a dislike for Linux Mint, I’m not even sure why. After much experimenting with Ubuntu, Linux Deepin, Peppermint and a variety of other Ubuntu flavours I finally tried the newly released Mint 17 cinnamon – I’ve got no love for KDE or the Gnome 2.x throwback that is MATE. I was pleasantly surprised. Everything looks good, and most importantly my laptop hibernates without any fiddling around and crossing fingers.

The single best thing about Mint is its increased adherence to Fitt’s law: the program launch menu is bottom left, Chrome/Chromium browser tabs are at the very top edge, close window is top right and I can even (after a slight customisation) control the volume by scrolling on the bottom right. As pretty and fully functional as Ubuntu is, I find its program launcher and browser tab location a complete pain.

So, Mint: it’s as pretty as Ubuntu and it doesn’t make me swear.

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My previous post on laptop fan speed worked for me, although wordpress buggered the quotes in the code. My only slight problem was that the screen brightness got reset to full after resuming from sleep. It’s taken me 6 months, but I finally got around to sorting it out.

The solution lay in reading the screen brightness from /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness, storing it in a variable then resetting it after the fan speeds have been reset.


sudo touch /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo nano /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh

In the file paste (ctrl+shift+v) this:

#!/bin/sh
# Stop fan in HP2510p after resuming from sleep
value=`cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness`
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device1/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device2/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device3/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device5/cur_state
/bin/echo "0" >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device6/cur_state
/bin/echo "$value" >/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
exit 0

You may need to edit this according to the number of cooling device entries under /sys/class/thermal/