Elf Sternberg

How to pair your Google Pixel 2 phone to your Subaru Outback.

The Google Pixel is a lovely phone, but it's notoriously bad at connecting with Subaru cars. It was the one feature I missed from my previous Samsung, which always connected reliably and automatically to the car every time I started the engine. Since I have "unlimited" 4G and a Spotify account, I found this breakdown highly annoying. It is possible to connect the phone to the car, but often it takes two or three minutes of sitting there with the car running, pressing the "connect" button on the phone's Bluetooth app over and over until, mysteriously, it would finally connect.

I have gotten it to work, and now when I sit down in my Outback, the music that was playing in my headphones in the office automatically starts right back up, reliably and automatically.

So here's why it fails:

Most people, when they want to create a Bluetooth Pairing between the phone and the car, go to the car radio, press the "Menu" button, and go through the Bluetooth pairing dialogs from the radio's LCD display. And that's where the problem lies— that dialog is for pairing with the radio and is therefore looking for an audio source, but the phone isn't programmed to prioritize being paired as an audio device, it prioritizes being paired as a phone. Every time thereafter, the protocol mismatch causes the automatic connection to fail. I'm not sure why manual connection sometimes works, but it should work reliably.

Here's the solution:

If you've already paired your phone and your car, go to the car's dialogue and delete the phone from the car's list of Bluetooth connections. Likewise, go to your phone and delete the car from the phone's list.

On the steering wheel, there's a button with a voice label. This is the HandsFree Talk Button. With the car parked and the parking brake on (this is important, as the car will not let you do this otherwise), but the key turned far enough to turn on the radio, press the Talk Button.

A female voice will say, "Welcome to the Subaru HandsFree Control. Press the Talk Button and choose from the following menu items: Setup. Go Back."

Press the button and say "Setup."

"Press the Talk Button and choose from the following menu items." One will be "Pair Phone". Do as the nice lady says and say "Pair Phone."

"Searching for phone. Searching. Searching. A device has been found. The passkey is 1234." Now go through the dialog on the phone and type in the stupid passkey.

"Phone paired. Press the talk button and say the name of the phone."

Press the button. "My Phone"

"Pairing Complete. Press the button and choose from one of the following menu items: Setup. Go Back."

"Go Back."

"[Beep]"

And now the car will use the connect to phone protocol whenever you start it, and your phone will respond accordingly. In short, the quicker and more obvious interface on the car's radio dial will activate the wrong protocol, and you'll get the bug. The only way to pair the phone to the car correctly is through a really stupid voice control menu tree.

Keywords: palm, username, userid, restore, backup

I woke up half an hour late this morning. My Palm V, usually a reliable machine, had crashed hard. The LED was solid, the screen frozen, and I could not even get the box to warm reset. I had to do a cold reset, which means that I then had to go and restore from backup. Not too bad a problem: I make backups.

But the backup kept failing. Those programs that I had bought, rather than the GPLd ones, would not run. I tracked it down to the fact that the User-ID for the Palm had not been set-- and there is no way to set it from the Palm itself. You have to do it from a host computer.

The correct command to do this is install-user -p /dev/pilot -u "User Name". I'm just using this as yet another place to note that down.

Well, I bought a new hard drive to replace the one that died. It's hard to believe that the smallest hard drive commonly available is 100GB, and 200GB are only a little pricier. I did a pretty good re-install of GameOS and then overwrote the install with whatever was recoverable from the damaged drive.

I only lost a few things: An episode of MST3K, my Half-Life 2 saved games, and sob my BloodRayne saved games. Waaauugh!