Toyota Sequoia Radio Installation

I drive a 2010 Toyota Sequoia that we got for towing our 26′ travel trailer. Not long after I got my ham license I decided that the thing to do was to put a mobile radio in it. I did a fair amount of research beforehand, and what follows is what I ended up doing.

I’ll start where most things start, under the hood at the battery:

PowerI got a spool of 10-gauge wire and began at the battery with screw-on connectors that lead to a pair of 50A fuses. I’d call them the fuses of last resort, since there’s more fusing downstream, so hopefully these will never blow. The wire goes first to an Anderson Power Pole connector for quick disconnect of everthing, should that ever be needed.

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How fast is Netflix? No, not streaming, I mean the DVD service.

A recent post on the (wonderful) “What If?” website entitled FedEx Bandwidth got me to thinking about a calculation I did some time ago, that for the life of me I can’t find, so I’ll have to re-generate. What’s the equivalent download bandwidth of a Netflix DVD subscription? You know, the option Netflix actually started … Read more

All My Base

I started in ham radio with a Wouxun HT (Handie-Talkie or handheld radio). It’s funny, because a) it seems like everyone starts with an HT of some sort, especially lately since there are several comparatively inexpensive models available, and b) so many of the more experienced hams say you shouldn’t start with an HT.

AntennaOh well.

I moved on, of course, to adding a Yaesu FR-8900R to my car (I should write up the install into my Sequoia), and most recently set things up to run that as a base station here at home. “Set things up” doesn’t quite cover the work involved, however.

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Borrowed Property

That soldering iron doesn’t really belong to me. Back in “the day” (1983, to be exact), when I joined Microsoft it was truly a small company. 360 people small. It was also not networked. Instead, each office was connected to shared servers by one or more RS-232 serial port connections – think dialup modem technology, … Read more

Helen’s Journey

Helen was a special dog, in more ways than most people imagine. Not long after birth in 1999 Helen was diagnosed as completely blind. As she grew that evaluation turned out not to be 100% accurate as her vision appeared to improve as she got a little older. In fact, as an adult most people … Read more

Y2K wasn’t going to be a problem, but …

Back in 1999 I was in Microsoft’s Developer Division, the folks who bring you developer tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and the like. Y2K was coming, but we weren’t particularly concerned. Most PC software would handle the “problem”, such as it was, just fine. It was really only older mainframe based software that really raised … Read more

The Ninth Year of “What the … ???”

August 10, 2012 marks the 9th anniversary of Ask Leo!. As is my tradition I give you a peek at some of the real, honest, unedited questions I get but could not answer – at least not on Ask Leo!. So: * This would be an exact, complete question or comment exactly as I got … Read more

On Gratitude … and Luck

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] couple of business-related things, ultimately inconsequential, conspired to have me decide that I needed to spend some time simply being thankful. A few days ago I devoted my morning’s meditation to gratitude, and the longer I thought the longer my list became. Then later in the day the topic of luck came up. It’s … Read more

A 9/11 thought…

The best way to honor those that lost their lives 10 years ago today is not to ruminate on the horrors, but rather perhaps pause briefly & remember … and then move forward; live a full and happy life, and every day be thankful that you are able to do so. I’ll probably avoid most … Read more

Fighting with Dragon

No, the title is correct, I’m not fighting with dragons I’m fighting with Dragon. Specifically I just had a nightmare scenario with Dragon NaturallySpeaking that I wanted to document.

I do want to be clear however that I think Dragon NaturallySpeaking is fantastic technology. Speech recognition dictation is just magical to me. In fact I’m using it right now to dictate this very post. (It’s not perfect, so do keep an eye out for speech recognition mistakes, I think I caught them all but very easy to miss. It is pretty darn accurate, though.)

The problem was getting here.

A couple of days ago I apparently started experiencing tendinitis in my left wrist. It was quite painful and after drugs and ice didn’t really help I decided to wrap my wrist in such a way that would prevent certain kinds of motion. That helped.

But of course it made typing next to impossible.

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Who do they think I am?

On the eighth(!) anniversary of [Ask Leo!](http://ask-leo.com) it’s time once again for “those questions” – the odd, bizarre and inexplicable that I get throughout the year.

Along with the answers I wish I could give.

As always, every question is a real question I’ve received via [Ask Leo!](http://ask-leo.com) within the last year, _presented exactly as I got it_ (except that any potentially identifying information will have been removed).

And as a reminder, [Ask Leo!](http://ask-leo.com) is a *tech* site where I answer *computer* questions. How or why these questions get asked I really have no idea…

So here they are, directly from my “WTF” folder as I collect ’em all year long:

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On Becoming a Programmer

I got this question the other day. I tried to respond to the sender but as you’ll see below I was unable to. I elected not to post this on Ask Leo!, for reasons I’ll explain below.

First, the question:

Im a 16 Year old, and I need information about how to become a computer programmer. I want to learn how to make games, then move on to actually programming the computer’s windows and stuff like that. the main stuff I need is what classes I should take and what I should learn to become a good programmer.

The answer that I sent back:

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DM – One Owners Perspective

This post was originally written and posted to Corgi-L on August 15, 2010. Since that time we find ourselves facing DM once again in our now oldest Corgi Helen. My thoughts haven’t changed.

I’ve been fairly quiet on the topic of DM (“Canine Degenerative Myelopathy“) since Guido passed away early last year. In part, it’s the grieving process, and in part it’s taken me that long to get my head around the issues and understand where I wanted to land. I actually wrote the majority of this months ago, deciding to let it sit to make sure my thoughts were clear and emotions reasonable.

My perspective is simply as a pet owner, and in particular as a pet owner who’s had a DM dog progress through the disease from start to finish, as well as having had other dogs over the years. And as a pet owner with enough science and engineering background to understand a few of the genetic issues as well.

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The TV Repair Man

I credit a friend of the family, a TV repair man, for setting in motion the sequence of events leading to my eventual career and subsequent success.

All this while I was somewhere between 9 and 16 years old.

Jim and his wife Tina were friends of my parents — Tina being of Dutch ancestry, she’d become friends with my parents and of course Jim did as well.

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Onward to WordPress

It’s time that I learn WordPress – I love MovableType, but it’s clear that WordPress has much more support and many more options. Things’ll be rough since I can see that the import of MT data didn’t preserve all the formatting.

Lucky Number 7

Once again on this 7th anniversary of Ask Leo!, it’s time for the annual wrap-up of the odd and the weird questions that show up in my question bin.

Given that I have seven years of these kinds of questions coming at me, you’d think I’d take it in stride. I guess in a way I do, but still … every so often I find myself just shaking my head and wondering … what were they thinking?

As always, every question is a real question I’ve received via Ask Leo! within the last year, presented exactly as I got it (except that any potentially identifying information will have been removed). Each “answer” is the answer that I’d be oh-so-tempted to give…

And as a reminder, Ask Leo! is a tech site where I answer computer questions. How these questions get asked I really have no idea…

So here they are, directly from my “WTF” folder as I collect ’em all year long:

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Coda: Some Random Observations

These are just some quite literally random observations – thing that we noted during or after our trip that we felt were worthy of a remark or two.

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Part 7: Auckland, Volcanos and The Marriage Survives!

Reminder:
More pictures at
LeosPictures.com

We finally arrived in Auckland in the late afternoon. Our hotel was lovely, if a bit unexpected. The Langham Hotel is veddy, veddy much in the old British style, stately and serene with butlers galore to take care of you. We heard that this is where former president Clinton stays when he visits Auckland, ostensibly for the fly-fishing. Our tour guide claimed it was because the red-light district is just a couple blocks away, and therefore most convenient for “Billy-boy”.

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Part 5: Queenstown to Christchurch … and onward to Rohan

Queenstown Harbor from Above

Our last full day in Queenstown was spent wandering around the city one last time. We went down to the beach and saw a lot of eye candy, which we both appreciated. Hey, just ’cause we’ve been married 30 years doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy looking! And then I saw something that made my eyes hurt. Let’s just say, the dude should not have been wearing a Speedo.

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