I suppose I should have taken a picture of one of the four times I had the console of my Toyota dissembled to install my Ice>Link Plus cradle for my iPod. One side note … the entire center console in my car contains only a single screw behind the center fan dial. The whole console snaps together with plastic tabs.

FM transmitters are crap. I’ve owned two and even though the last one has an easy LCD display to change the channel easily, the sound is rotten, and every so often a travel alarm like tone appears for a few seconds. Crap.

I splurged for a cradle unit that takes advantage of the unused CD changer port on the back of my factory head unit. The cool thing is you can control the iPod via the stereo. Songs and tracks are even displayed on the radio. On a windy Irish road, driving manual transmission and scrolling through playlists on an iPod is a dangerous combination.

The saga finally ended after initially being sent the wrong unit. After installing the replacement, it would work for approximately 90 seconds and just stop, rendering all controls on the stereo useless. Finally, the the third time was a charm. (Just don’t tell Lisa how much it cost.)

It took me a few times to figure out how to scrobble my tracks from the iPod to Last.fm. I thought it was automatic using iScrobbler, but you must do it manually. Vive la musique!