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Nice contradiction in the ad. It says it's not registered but then in the Q/A it says has rego and wof... so which is it?

And now for today's edition of @Karter16's Random Side-Quests. On my to do list is the radio/nav. I've spent a lot of times working through various options and they all make me sad to some degree as there just aren't any options out there that give me the combination of OE-like and modern functionality that I'm looking for. The current trend in the E46 M3 world seems to be towards minimalism which is fine, but for practicality reasons I want to swap to a touchscreen nav setup that I can run CarPlay on etc. Ideally this looks OE-like, however having said that I'm not a fan of the dated "screen with buttons around it" arrangement that the original E46 nav had. Times have moved on with technology and it's unnecessarily pokey (in my opinion). That said I don't particularly want a big slab of a tablet stuck on the dash either. I'm currently tilting towards something like this Xtrons unit: This in itself makes me sad, as I would like to steer well away from the cheap electronics, but that said none of the main manufacturer's offerings enthuse me either. I'm inclined at this point to give the Xtrons a go. If it's rubbish/not reliable then I'll try something else instead. I'm technically competent so don't mind some effort to get things working well, I just need them to be reliable once I've got them setup... Anyway, back to my morning cup of coffee quest... Regardless of what option I go with, I want to make it feel as OE as possible. One aspect of that is replicating the original boot/splash screen used on the OE Nav. Now of course the OE Nav is more than 20 years old at this point and the original image is low resolution: I had a decent search on trusty google but was unable to locate a high-res reproduction of this image, so I decided to make my own. I actually used Figma to do this, which is a bit of a random choice, but I'm very familiar with it and its capabilities are more than sufficient for this project. Secondly Figma is a vector image tool, so what I'm producing here is a vector-based image which I can then use to output whatever resolution I like with no loss of image quality. Upscaling images by hand, especially graphics/text is part math and part subjective tweaking. To start with I take the source image, resize it to a suitable scale to work with on the canvas (I chose 1280w, large enough to see detail, without being too large and unwieldy). I then started overlaying the text and graphic components. When doing text I tend to use a contrasting colour so that I can get the sizing, etc. approximately right and see what I'm doing: Often the challenge can be working out exactly what font has been used. BMW made this nice and easy for me in this instance as they use their own "BMW Helvetica" font for everything 🙂 Once I figured out the exact size to set the font to, which is trial and error, I was then able to roughly put in the bars with the linear fades on each side. Getting the proportions of the fade right is again just trial and error and viewing at different zoom levels to judge what's right. I squared everything up and had an image that looked pretty much like the original, but higher quality. The next step is make sure it replicates the original as closely as possible which is a lot of tweaking and pixel shuffling. I find that the best way to do this is to take the image you've just produced and output it at the same resolution as your original image. This gave the the following: Looks pretty good huh! Actually when we look at the original and the reproduction side by side (repro on top, original on bottom) we can see I haven't quite got it right. In the reproduction the BMW text is slightly to the right. This is because I centred the text in the image between the fade bars which I made of equal width on both sides. Doing that on the face of it makes sense, but there's a good reason why BMW tweaked it slightly. If we look at this side by side (repro on top, original on bottom): We can see that BMW actually made the fade bars on the right hand side slightly wider than those on the left, this is to account for the fact that only the top right edge of the W extends fully to the right of the bounding box for the text, whereas the B on the other side is hard up against it. Although in my image the text is dead centre and everything is symmetrical, the perception to the eye is that there is more whitespace (or blackspace in this case) after the W than there is before the B. To account for this BMW actually made the fade bars on the right hand side come across to the left just a little bit. So let's adjust it: Getting closer, just a bit more to go: Now we're looking pretty good! It was a number of iterations to get to this point, but now things are looking pretty similar between the two. I'm happy with this now. All of that work means that I how have a fairly faithful, high res, reproduction of the original image ready to go for when I need it. This is pretty niche so I can't imagine anyone else really having any use for this, but if you do you're more than welcome - SVG and PNG downloads below 🙂 SVG E46 BMW Nav Splash Screen Vector.svg 1280w png 2560w png

The idea is that your detector will pick up the officer as he's pinging other cars. It'd be pretty unlucky to be the only car on the road for miles. I'm picking that officers would generally pick busier roads so that they can keep as many people "safe" as possible. Radar jammer? I think you mean parking sensors 😉 On Saturday I drove the 80km/h road between Featherston and Greytown and decided I'd had enough. Absolute pisstake..

It's something that is a consideration, and Andy and I have spoken.

@gjm surely buy it back for your new commute??

At least it looks better than a Tesla!

09 Dec 2023. 187879kms I'd dusted off the e60 about a month ago, took it for a run to north wellington to give her a quick bath, and charge the battery. Certainly sparkled up, though wasn't so happy running (I am wondering if that was the fuel stabiliser it was taking exception to?). I knew we had a remaining code to address - for the variable intake manifold. The actuator is at the back of the manifold, and up against the firewall. New intake manifold gaskets, and a replacement Intake actuator were the order of the day. 1. Intake Manifold Actuator Replaced Begley Motor Works performed their magic, replacing the intake manifold actuator, 90km road test, it was running beautifully. I collected the car and had a very smooth trip back to Wellington. Man this car is good on the open road! I wondered what to do with it next? Didn't take long to figure that one out - I took it on a BMW Car Club run over to Cape Paliser and back. It ran beautifully there and back... after lunch it threw a CEL, and had some minor misfire. The CEL cleared itself next day, and car running brilliantly. I've checked the codes and cleared them (one thousand thank yous mate - you know who you are)... and the car is fabulous. A wash tomorrow and it's up for sale. Sad to see it go, though weighing up the cost of the garage I rent for it, and the use it gets, it'll be seeking a new loving home.

Kid at work just sold his Valentine after getting two tickets in quick succession. He wasn't aware of the instant on feature. Only chance against that is if you were not the one being targeted. Also my radar jammer is not reliable anymore. One guess as to how I found that out 😢