The Audi A5 Cabriolet and S5 Cabriolet come with everything needed to support the voice recognition system (a.k.a. “voice command” or “voice control”) present in other Audis, but it’s disabled by default. I guess Audi thinks it won’t work well enough with the top down or something. That doesn’t seem like a good reason to leave it disabled with the top is up, but who am I to say? In any case, it is possible to enable it, and in my testing it works just fine (in fact, it works better than the older generation of voice recognition in our 2007 Audi A6). I did this on my 2011 S5 — it should work on any A5/S5 Cab with the same MMI system, but I make no guarantees. Obviously, any change you do like this is done at your own risk.

This information is on most of the forums, but I thought it was tricky to wade through all of the threads and find the simple, reliable way to do it (many of the posts explain an unnecessarily convoluted method involving enabling the hidden menu, changing languages, leaving the car to sit overnight, etc. — you don’t need to do any of that). If you have access to the VAG-COM VCDS software, this is very easy to do. If you don’t have access to VAG-COM, I highly recommend getting it either by buying your own cable or finding someone who does. It’s useful for many, many things.

Here’s what you do:

1. Connect the computer to the car and fire up the VAG-COM software.
2. Select the Electronics 2 tab, then Module 5F.
3. Bring up the Long Coding Helper and change byte 16 from “01” to “00” (the last 5 digits of the entire code should be “10000” instead of “10100” when you’re done).
4. Click “Do It!”
5. Exit the software.
6. Reboot the MMI by simultaneously pressing “Setup” the knob center “joystick” button and the upper right button.

That’s it. Once the MMI is done rebooting, the voice recognition button on the steering wheel should work. Again, do this at your own risk, and be careful poking around in VAG-COM — it is possible to mess things up. Don’t blame me ;)

BTW, the VAG-COM software is Windows-only, but I run it just fine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro.

I bought my previous car new in 2000. It’s been great (and is still in awesome shape), but I was ready for a change. I got a 2011 Audi S5 Cabriolet, and it’s a blast! The colors are Deep Sea Blue and Tuscan Brown. Here are a few photos (there are a bunch more on SmugMug if you’re really curious).

BTW, thanks to Achtuning for setting me up with the wheels (the 19” wheels and summer tires the car comes with aren’t great for our current weather) and Northwest Auto Salon for a great detail/prep job and VentureShield installation.

As always, we had our cards printed as press printed greeting cards by WHCC. They do an excellent job, and the turnaround time is amazing (we had the cards two business days after submitting the order).

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The food at The Herbfarm is of course fantastic, but the real reason we go is so we can feed the pigs.

Everything here is running on Amazon Web Services. The web server is an EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux distribution (I’d have preferred FreeBSD, but it doesn’t seem to be a viable option right now). The data is stored in SimpleDB and S3. The images and videos are served by CloudFront. These days, it looks like AWS is a solid platform for personal web hosting, especially since they launched the incredibly cheap “Micro” instances. If you’re considering VPS hosting, I think it’s an option worth considering.

The biggest thing I like about this whole solution is that it’s much more scalable than my previous setup (shared hosting on Dreamhost with a MySQL database behind it). My blog gets almost no traffic. Even when CNN linked to me, it was really tiny. Sad, even. I’m not likely to get Fireballed any time soon. So, scalability doesn’t really matter in practical terms. But if I’m going to do something, I want it to be scalable. It’s in my blood. Anything less makes it hard for me to sleep at night. So, here we are. The AWS data backends scale well (even though the latency is higher than I could get from MySQL), the performance of each instance is pretty good and I can trivially add more instances if necessary. I can also now run Memcached and do whatever config tweaks I want to make things run fast, which can be hard in a shared hosting environment. I’m truly drunk with scalable power. Bring it on, Gruber.

There are, of course downsides. The massive one, the proverbial elephant in the room, is the sysadmin workload. I have been a sysadmin. For systems much more interesting and complicated than this one. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about those jobs. But it’s not the kind of thing I want to do when I get home from work at night. No, taking on the sysadmin tasks for my personal web hosting is not something I really wanted to do. But in this case, I decided to give it a try and see if it could be an acceptable tradeoff for the benefits. I’m a pretty experienced SA, so I can usually get things taken care of quickly and without a lot of fuss, and so far it hasn’t been bad. If you’re not an experienced sysadmin, you should think carefully before using a hosting setup like this. If you want to learn and are willing to put in the work, great — just be aware of what you’re signing up for.

AWS prices are really reasonable, and it’s a pay-as-you-go setup, so you don’t end up having to pay for anything you don’t use. The downside to that is that the costs aren’t as predictable as those in a flat rate hosting arrangement. If you get an unexpected huge amount of traffic, your costs can be a lot higher than you expected. On the other hand, you at least have a very good opportunity to be able to actually service all of that traffic, unlike what might happen if you’re hosting elsewhere. When you’re looking at AWS prices, remember that the EC2 hourly price isn’t all you’ll be paying for. At a minimum, you have to pay for the storage and i/o for your boot volume (assuming you’re using an EBS image, which I think most people would for web hosting) and data transfer in and out. For tiny sites like mine, those costs are minuscule (less than $4 so far this month), they shouldn’t be forgotten.

Finally, if you use the new tantalizingly cheap Micro instances, remember that they have CPU throttling. That makes performance under load a lot less predictable. I hit one of my instances with JMeter and it was cranking along handling a very impressive amount of traffic until the CPU throttling kicked in. Then I started having responses take 60 seconds or more. Ouch! I’ve also discovered that it’s a horrible idea to compile or do anything else CPU-intensive on a Micro instance, especially if it’s one that’s serving live web traffic. I’ve taken to firing up a separate small instance to do builds and stuff. It’s also easy to temporarily make a Micro instance into a Small, but it does require a reboot.

I’m really happy with how this migration has worked out. It’s fun to play with new technology, and having the freedom to configure things exactly how I like them is something I’ve really missed in the years I was on shared hosting. Time will tell if the sysadmin grind gets to me and pushes me to another solution. For now, I’m content.

This place is on I-5 between Portland and Seattle. Good burgers.

The chapel at Grand Wailea, from our December 2008 trip to Maui.

From Camp last weekend. This is an iPhone photo; not great, but not too bad.