Archive for April, 2008

All Installed

I spent a few hours yesterday installing an setting up my new system. I love doing harness work, all connections are soldered with Silver and then sealed with shrink tubes.

Kenwood Harness for Nissan 240sx with Premium Stereo Kenwood Harness for Nissan 240sx with Premium Stereo

Kenwood DNX5120 in a 1995 Nissan 240SX SE Kenwood DNX5120 in a 1995 Nissan 240SX SE

This unit is AWESOME and everything I wanted it to be. The navigation works fantastic, the picture quality is great and it sounds fantastic. All of the touch screen controls are easy to see and understand too.

I still have some stuff to finish up though, I need to find a more pertinent route for the GPS receiver module as right now it’s just running along the floor under the passenger’s floor mat. I need to get an antenna adapter so I use the regular radio, and I’ll probably want to bypass the factory amp in the trunk as right now it’s way too loud, and the sound quality will probably be better coming directly from this unit.

FedEx Works Fast

Order it Thursday night and I had a knock on my door this morning. Not only was this the cheapest price on all of the internet but the shipping was free too! I wasn’t expecting to get it this soon but, here it is. I neglected to pickup a harness adapter so I’ll have to hunt one down this weekend.

Kenwood DNX5120 GPS/DVD/CD/iPod/HD/Bluetooth/Sat

 

Keeping Busy

So I was in Chatsworth California all this week on business. LA is a weird place, it’s surreal. One of the most entertaining aspects for me is the weather, it’s nice all the time, but that has nothing to do with my entertainment. A side effect of the weather is the fact that all the cars there pretty much last until their engine gives out or they get in a major accident. Unlike the North East where everything rusts into oblivion after about a decade of winters, you’ll see cars in LA that are 10, 20, 30 years old and look like they just rolled off the show room floor. I do believe that as long as you wash and maintain your car out there it will pretty much last forever. It’s weird seeing cars from the 70s and 80s rolling down the street like they’re nothing special. Of course this is also contrasted with the fact that Porsches are pretty much the Honda Civic of that area too, and you can drive by the parking lot of a high class restaurant and see a few dozen Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Salines, among other even more rare marks.

Despite that I think I’d have a hard time living there. The sky, while perpetually blue, is several shades lighter in color, likely due to smog. Also the whole area just feels really scummy, if the expensive cars were odd enough they’re often rolling through run-down, graffiti ridden suburban areas. I mean every house has a tall chain link fence around the yard and some of them even have razor wire; even the company parking lot has a gate and 24 hour security personnel. In NH we don’t even have a single security guard, and most people leave their cars unlocked… it’s a long way from LA.

I went to a Dodgers game while I was out there and that was pretty cool, there was a drunk guy in the seat in front of us that proved to be more entertaining than the game. How entertaining? Lets just say he was literally carried out by security by the 6th inning. We also ate at the Player Club before the game which had a great view of the stadium, our seats were great too.

Dodger Stadium Player’s Club Dodger Stadium Player’s Club Dodger Stadium

I set out to clean my office this morning and I got it half done… literally you could draw a line down the center where one half is clean and the other half isn’t. I stopped because my brother stopped by and we went to dinner and then filmed a video which was pretty fun. We’re going to film a couple more tomorrow, I’ll be sure to post here once they’re edited and online.

I was going to play some games since I haven’t played in over a week at this point but I ended up starting on one of my new electronics projects. The first part was assembling this Velleman USB kit… it took me about 2 and a half hours but it was quite fun. As much as I like designing my own circuits, it’s always fun to just build something from instructions every once in a while.

Velleman USB

I’ll post more about what’s going on with that, once I have more to post about… now I sleep.

PGR3 Faceplate

I recently stumbled upon an eBay auction for a genuine PGR3 Faceplate with an abnormally low buy it now price. I’ve wanted one of these faceplates since they first appeared around the time of the Xbox 360′s launch. I had given up hope because these things are actually quite rare. AFAIK only between 700-1000 of them were made, and they were handed out at game conferences to certain developers.

 Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3) Faceplate for Xbox 360

Many of them popped up on ebay but they usually fetched prices between $200-$300 for one still in the package and as much as $150 for a “lose” one. I got mine for 1/10th of what I would have normally expected to pay. I had some worries that the low price indicated that it was spurious, but now that I have it in my hands I can attest that it is indeed genuine.

Now that I actually have one (and a black console to match) I’m not even sure I want to take it out of the package, it might be worth more re-selling or simply displaying.