Goin' wireless in Terry's FJ Cruiser Car Computer

I'm gonna be honest here.

I've probably received more visits to my blog from searches on an earlier post I made about Boulder entrepreneur Terry Gold's Toyota FJ Cruiser Car Computer Project than anything I've written.

But recently, I got the chance to see Terry's setup firsthand, and he gave me a short tour before we headed out for lunch.

I've know Terry for several years here in Boulder, and this guy loves tech gadgets. I think he tells his wife its all part of his job as CEO of Gold Systems, but, hey, he's a guy, right? Terry is the only person I ever met who, when the first Palm Pilots came out, he learned that weird Palm shorthand that you could write into them.

But back to the car computer.

If you really want to know lots more and keep track of it all, go to Terry's own blog, where he fills everyone in to the details. One thing Terry tells me is he doesn't use all this stuff while he's driving, although he'll probably have the Infill 73 computer on, feeding him anything from the best gas prices around Boulder to pumping out favored Bluegrass tunes from the Internet.

As I took some photos of his setup, he explained how I could use the media reader in the glovebox to download my photos and e-mail them back to my office if I wanted.

Terry's FJ essentially is its own wireless hotspot, using a Kyocera KR1 Broadband EVDO Router with WiFi. I have no idea if I got that right, but I hope I did. Terry also has a small wireless keyboard he can use if he needs to type something into e-mail or actually pretend he's doing some work when his wife checks up on him messin' around with all this stuff ...

Right now Terry is pretty much an all-Microsoft kinda guy because his company is developing some really amazing voice recognition applications for Bill Gate's little enterprise, so he also has a Zune that he can plug in if he tires of Internet music channels.

I told Terry I recently bought a MacBook Pro laptop, and he did confess that one day he might have to check out Apple a little closer to see what all the fuss is about. Just think Terry, maybe Steve Jobs needs some help getting his car computer running, too.

Comments

[Verna Wilder]

I would love for Terry to get Mac fever, and then I would have a techno-geek friend who can help me do cool stuff on my PowerBook. Steve Jobs would SO love Terry!