I seem to have an unnatural fear of subscribing to anything which requires payments to keep it running, so instead of trying out TomTom's own traffic information service - which costs €40 a year plus the cost of data over your mobile phone from TomTom - I've picked up an RDS-TMC aerial which is supposed to pick up traffic status information encoded in FM radio broadcasts, which the TomTom will then use to warn you about incidents on your route. It cost £70 but I shouldn't have to pay anything more to use the service.

According to the ITIS website - which is one of the two providers of traffic info for the UK - there's 95% coverage of traffic info, according to their map... (© ITIS of course):

Unfortunately, that 95% only refers to how many people can receive traffic info - the actual coverage of traffic monitoring seems to be much, much lower, but I haven't found any figures on that yet. 

TomTom's own website mentions that the RDS-TMC information is less comprehensive than TomTom's own (paid-for) service, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of people who have complained how poor the information seems to be across the UK. At the moment I'm making my way through this 12-page forum discussion by other people with the same setup, and it's not looking good so far (at page 5), but I'm holding out some hope yet...

Unfortunately, I've had to ditch the iPod controller (which lets me play my iPod through the TomTom, but can't be used alongside the RDS-TMC receiver), so I'll need a new head unit for the car which can do iPod-related stuff.

I have too many toys; coming soon - my kidneys on eBay... 

No, no, don't all rush to argue with me on this point: my resolve is steadfast. No longer am I prepared to stand idly by while the world fails to notice my greatness (in being stupid, that is).

Y'see, I've just worked out why my Media Center (made from old PC parts, empty toilet rolls and requiring occasional servicing with a large hammer...) was saying there's no TV guide information available after I rebuilt it last night following the power supply blowing up - quite spectacularly - almost two months ago to the day.

Of course, four hours of Googling took place between my noticing the problem and my having fixed it, just a few minutes ago (and if you spot the posting time, Steve, this will be why I'm not going to be in work this morning... ;o). I even went for a drive to try and clear my head because this problem was bugging me so much that I couldn't sleep.

Normally, Windows Media Center is pretty much trouble-free. It's kinda like Sky+ or TiVo in that you can record TV shows, a whole series of shows, etc,with just a couple of clicks on the funky back-lit Microsoft remote.

In fact, it was such an integral part of my life (such was my incurable need to catch up on re-runs of The Bill on UKTV Gold... Why are you staring at me??) that my sleep patterns were - possible irreparably - damaged when it blew up last October, forcing me to crawl out of bed at 9am regardless of how much - or (more commonly) - how little sleep I'd enjoyed.

So, having finally got round to picking up a Shiny New Case™ for it from Novatech yesterday (I love those guys... Sometimes...), I rushed home full of joyous abandon... Ok, I wandered home via. Pizza Hut - and revived my televisual crutch back into life.

I hope this explanation means you can understand my absolute frustration when I realised it wasn't showing any TV listings at all - channel after channel said "No program guide available" and, although I could watch and record TV fine, I couldn't schedule anything because I didn't know what was on.

Anyhoo, as I mentioned, 4 hours of Googling followed by a sprint up the motorway (which, err, might also have been to test out my new TomTom... No wonder I'm always broke and surrounded by electricity bills which would make Blackpool's Illuminations department envious) didn't provide any answers, so I decided to take a look in the error logs.

"That's odd" quoth I, munching a pink & sprinkled doughnut and slurping on a cup of unhealthily sweet tea. "That date's in the wrong format - it should be 01/09/2007 and it says 09/01/2007." To cut this increasingly long-winded, but painfully boring, story short, it turned out I'd mistaken Americanese date formats for English and set the date on the Media Center to September 1st 2007 (01/09/07) instead of today's date (09/01/07). Result? Media Center was trying to download TV listings for 9 months' time. Since they haven't even been written yet, guess what? No listings found... Duh...

Common sense: 0, Idiocy: 1. So I guess that means that I win then! 

Little update - it looks like I won't need to name and shame the high street retailer who sold me a used TomTom GO 510 as "new": they replaced it and I upgraded (for an extra £40) to the 710 as they "didn't have any more 510s in stock" (uh huh? Riiight...).

The not-connecting thing seems to have been resolved by installing the TomTom Home software in an administrative account, but I'm still having the problem with settings being deleted every time I dock the TomTom on the Mac. I'm going to give the PC version a try, but I don't know for sure if my Windows box has any USB 2 ports on it (I've never needed them as it's only a file server).

Another problem on the OS X version of the TomTom Home software: I can't use the "My TomTom GO 710" option to plan routes (or do anything at all) on - it just says something along the lines of "A required component is not available...". :(

The Bluetooth problems I was having - where I could only connect to my Motorola once and then the TomTom wouldn't connect again - seem to have been fixed by installing an app from the TomTom support site called "Clear Flash".

Still, on the plus side, the iPod control works brilliantly, and I now have an extra carry case and home dock.Hell, I think it will even navigate me to places using this new-fangled GPS technology I keep seeing mentioned...

/al - happier bunny...

I've just re-packaged up the TomTom Go 510 I bought this afternoon from a well-known high street retailer. The first thing I noticed when I got it home was that the seal on the memory card's container - which you have to break to use the TomTom - was already broken. Someone had already been there, and like finding one's toilet seat still warm when you go to use it, there's a certain associated feeling which isn't entirely nice. Of course, things just went downhill from there...

Starting up the TomTom, the last known location was just half a mile up the road from the shop I bought it from, and a route had already been planned to Southampton University. Very curious...

The fun really started when I connected it to the Macbook - first I found that just lightly touching the TomTom while it was in its dock cradle was enough to disconnect it from the computer, interrupting the USB connection. Of course, I only noticed this when my laptop told me a device hadn't been properly removed, and the TomTom software - which had already crashed twice before then - decided to crash again.

Not wanting to feel left out, when I connected my phone to the TomTom ('cos it you can use the TomTom as a hands free kit. Apparently...), my phone promptly decided to join in the party by crashing as well. TomTom: 2, The Consumer: nil.

Then, after connecting once to the laptop, the TomTom decided it wasn't going to play any more and stopped showing up when I plugged in its USB cable. Knowing Apple's notorious inability to explain a problem when it sees one, I tried plugging it into Windows, which gave me an error saying that "the device you have plugged in has malfunctioned or is faulty. If unplugging and plugging the device back in does not fix this problem, replace the device".

Oh, right then. The old "replace the device" message.

Bugger.

So, tomorrow morning it's off back to the shop. I haven't named them here because I want to give them a fair chance to correct this problem, and if they don't play nicely, I'll name and shame them. Oh happy days...

This has been an angry greyhead broadcast. Thanks for reading ;o)