Editorial blog #8 – Bluetooth retrofits, shadow drops and MiniDV troubles

In edition #8, Hayte tries to get Bluetooth working in his somewhat old car, Jurian reflects on the tension between small game developers and 'shadowdrops' and Niels delves into the rabbit hole of old MiniDV cameras .

Bluetooth in your old car

Hayte Hugo
News editor

Cars nowadays have at least one touchscreen and can be linked to your services in various ways, such as Spotify. You can log in to the Spotify app, you can connect your phone to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, or you can stream music via Bluetooth. My own car, a turn-of-the-century Jaguar, can do none of those things.

And that disappoints me. Because especially on a long drive, I love being able to listen to my own music. I don't always find my taste on the radio (Decibel could sometimes be fun, although Kink also turns out to be an excellent alternative) and as far as I'm concerned, nothing beats your own choice. There is a CD changer in the trunk, but buying CDs especially for my car seems like a bit of a stretch. I can play cassette tapes in the car itself, but yes, they were actually outdated twenty years ago.

That cassette player turned out to be the answer to my problems. Nowadays you can buy Bluetooth cassettes that, as the name suggests, let you connect your phone to your car. It sounded like the simple solution I needed, although in practice the solution turned out to mainly cause problems and frustration.

For example, it turned out that my Jaguar did not have a 'dumb' cassette player, but had a 'cassette player' in it. When one side of the cassette has finished playing, the player switches to the other side of the cassette. When it is finished, the player ejects the cassette.

That was probably ideal twenty years ago, but with those Bluetooth cassettes it is far from it. The cassette player thinks that the cassette has finished playing, throws it out, after which you have to push it back in. After ten (or more) attempts, the player suddenly decides to activate the cassette and you can listen to your music. However, the cassette uses a battery that runs out after a symbolic five minutes of playing, after which the entire cassette has to be removed to charge it, after which you have to repeat the whole process to get it back in.

That Bluetooth cassette didn't work for me, and I didn't even mention that the audio quality was not great and was largely on one channel, which meant I was constantly fiddling with the radio's settings. The result was that I only used the cassette for 'emergencies': when I really felt like listening to a specific artist.