Toyota Landcruiser 100 Series ‘98-‘04 Temp Gauge Mod

April 5th, 2009

 

Centred

It’s fairly common knowledge that the OEM Toyota temperature gauge has a large “dead spot” in the centre of it’s range. This spot is deliberately engineered to reduce the apparent fluctuations and make the car appear to run at a constant temperature unless there is a significant problem. This works fine for most, but those of us that like to know what’s going on sooner rather than later demand a little more detail. Many people fit an aftermarket gauge somewhere in the car, I figure, if the factory gauge is already there and can be made better, do that.

Tuning and Understanding your Toyota Viscous Fan Clutch

March 31st, 2009

Landcruiser or Hilux overheating? Your factory fan clutch is probably under-filled and incorrectly set from factory. Fix this first and you may save a lot of time chasing issues.

P3280006 - Copy

The stock Toyota cooling system can sometimes be somewhat marginal. The suspicion for this falls on every component and modification in the system.

  • Radiator (Size / Efficiency)
  • Thermostat (Brand / Effectiveness)
  • Water Pump (Flow, Cavitation)
  • Radiator Cap (Quality, Pressure, Leaks, Recovery)
  • Coolant (Freezing / Boiling points, Specific heat, Anti-corrosion)
  • Hoses (Restriction)

Study on why ABS is good on a Motorcycle

February 4th, 2009

The link is below.

http://www.msf-usa.org/imsc/proceedings/a-Green-ComparisonofStoppingDistance.pdf

Most interesting. My next bike will have ABS methinks. I have no delusions about how good my riding is. If I can concentrate 5% more on traffic cause I don’t have to worry about braking, that’s a good thing.

bmw_r1200gs_abs_2007

My last significant off happened emergency braking into an intersection. As I braked and turned, the front wheel crossed the usual oily patch where cars drop oil on the centre of the wheel track. Presto – down she went, and I know how to cadence brake. I’m not good enough however to brake 100%, unlock for 0.5m and get fully back on again when trying 100% to avoid a car. ABS would have been fast enough. It wouldn’t have avoided the situation, but it may have been enough to keep the bike upright.

Rethink your Lid

January 21st, 2009

Buying motorcycle helmets used to be easy. Plastic was crap, Fibreglass was good, Kevlar / Carbon was best. If it was a Shoei, Arai or Bell it was good, everything else was only OK.

BUT – interestingly enough, every single helmet you could buy had passed the crash test standard, so the better / worse was opinion, nothing more. In Australia this is an Australian Standard (similar to the US DOT standard, and many others). Really, it’s a “minimum”, everything on the market is better than the standard, it’s just a question of how much.

Inergen is interesting

January 19th, 2009

I noticed something very strange with a new fire suppression system. There were no valve controls on the system, of the four bottles, only one was controlled. I had to look further into this.

One of the sites I work on had installed an Intergen Fire Suppression system. The basic idea is that in the event of a fire, enough oxygen is displaced from the room, that a fire cannot be sustained, but humans will remain conscious.

Combining Vista Media Centre & a Virtual Windows Home Server

December 4th, 2008

The time came to decommission the Home Server once I realised how much power it was pulling. My power meter debacle had concealed the 24/7 150w consumption, chewing into my solar feed in tariff at 44c in the daytime and my green power rate at 21c at night. This was costing me about $400/yr in power bills - it had to go.

I have toyed with various options, but the most obvious was using the other machine that was on 24/7 - the Vista Media Centre.

ANZ Tells me "Pay $0.00 - Or Else"

November 13th, 2008

I received a letter from ANZ a few weeks ago

"Please make immediate payment of $0.00"

Ahh yeah - great effort with the computers there guys….

 

scan0008

Maximising your Credit Card Interest Free period for Dummies

October 13th, 2008

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Here I am, 31 years old, and I only just got around to really understanding the optimum way to manage my credit card. (At least I hope I understand it now).

Now for those of you that don’t like reading, I’ll give you the short version. Very simply - you MUST pay off the “Closing Balance” as close to, but before the “Due Date” ON THAT STATEMENT - and you pay no interest. Make no other payments. Do NOT pay the “Outstanding Balance”. That’s it, nothing else you need to know. Do that religiously, and you can’t do any better.

WD External USB HDD’s do Spin Down

October 8th, 2008

I’ve been trying to reduce the power of my Home Server and Media Centre. Since my Power Meter debacle, I am now re-testing all the equipment and getting some rude shocks.

One of the positives out of this is that my 1TB Western Digital  My Book Essential and 300GB Western Digital My Passport Essential both spin down and save power. On USB, this is a nice feature, as many of the generic external cages don’t spin the drive down.

The WD’s spin down on XP, Vista and Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003. The timeout appears to be independent of the OS settings.

Lies, Damn Lies and Cheap Power Meters

October 6th, 2008

PA050027I have had and used an Electus power meter for about 12mths since they became available in Australia. I figured it was just like the American Kill-a-watt. Diligently collecting and comparing devices to see what they used and how much I was wasting with standby power. Dan did an early review on DansData.

ATA reported some accuracy concerns early on, and stopped selling them. The indication was this was only minor, and at low power settings.

I recently purchased the newer Solarinverters (SI) replacement from ATA and found some VERY large discrepancies between what I had seen before. Unsure as to which one to trust, I fired up the clamp meter to validate the results. The results shocked me.

The hurdles of setting up Vista Media Centre

September 18th, 2008

OK - it came time to rebuild the media centre.

Here are ALL the steps I went through to getting the software install right. A Vista Media Center Build Document.

The changing of hardware, testing codecs, utilites, guides and apps had led to some long running config and stability issues that I couldn’t resolve. Application errors, crashes, codecs, screen sizes, resolutions and audio were all problematic.

After round one a while ago, I had managed to stabilise and expand the system somewhat. The stable hardware config now is

My digital home just isn’t quite there yet

August 26th, 2008

I’ve been trying to have the whole digital home experience for a while now. I’ve reviewed Vista Media Centre, Home Server, Wireless N before, the experiences there are documented.

The impossible dream I am thinking of consists of seamless integration between:

  • Home Server
  • Media Centre
  • Extenders
  • Game Consoles
  • Digital Picture Frames
  • Media Players
  • Wireless
  • Broadband
  • VOIP vs VOIP vs VOIP
  • Desktop PC’s
  • Cloud Services
    • So lets look at the current state of play for these things.

    Live (Passport) is Not Live - it’s down (again)

    August 12th, 2008

    C’mon guys - no logins for Technet subscriptions - if you can’t keep your directory up maybe you should consider OpenID.

    Jesper had a similar problem last week.

    image

    Here’s a AD DNS Screwup I have seen firsthand

    August 11th, 2008

    This is why I learnt a long time ago - if you have an AD problem - it’s probably DNS.

    Creating an empty DNS zone with the same name as your internal zone can lead too all sorts of frustration - especially with the multiple locations in AD that it can end up in. You’ll find yourself knee-deep in ADSI Edit faster than you would ever want to be.

    I love DNS, but it’s gotta be right, and it’s easy to get wrong.

    Brisbane Translink Go Card Charges in Pounds Sterling

    August 8th, 2008

    Sheesh - at the exchange rate - no wonder public transport is expensive! Pounds Sterling - what next - Euro’s?

    image

    image

    This is of course on top of what would have to the  slowest proximity readers on the planet, displays that are impossible to read, an arcane array of “beep” codes, and an “Auto Top Up” function - that doesn’t.

    Great system guys, matches your train network perfectly.

    Winch Mount Testing and Breaking Rope

    August 6th, 2008

    I decided that my home made winch mount IMG_3804needed to be tested so I could trust it somewhat. I see from some of the conversations I am not the only one with doubts. The mount performed perfectly, although he synthetic winch rope broke.

    The tests were all done on the first layer of the drum to give maximum tension. This also places additional load on the mount due to the increased height adding leverage.

    Test 1 - Drag Car on Dirt (Wheels Locked)- Passed

    Test 2 - Drag Car on Dirt Up Hill (Wheels Locked) - Passed

    4WD Winch without the Weight

    August 5th, 2008

    I wanted to fit a winch P4260063to my ‘98 HZJ105 without wearing a huge  weight penalty, or spending too much money. That ruled out walking into ARB and handing over the Credit Card for a new Bullbar and Warn. It meant I had to DIY this little exercise.

    I wanted to keep the weight down, so decided a 9500lb was smaller and lighter than a 12,000lb. If I needed more pulling power, I would use a pulley block.

    Windows Home Server & PP1 - I’m impressed

    August 3rd, 2008

    When I first heard about Windows Home Simageerver (WHS) - I was pretty reluctant to bother. I was happily running Server 2003 with a 1.5TB software RAID 5 array and am not a fan of NAS, so didn’t get the point.

    With the release of Power Pack 1 (PP1), and support for external USB backups, I decided to take another look. I have not looked back.

    OK - at it’s simplest WHS does three things

    My Cheapo Greywater Irrigation System

    July 29th, 2008

    Like many people concerned with water use and reducing the impact of my excessive capitalist wasteful bourgeois lifestyle I decided to put my greywater to better use. It’s easier than putting my greymatter to better use, and arguably a more valuable resource.

    Water Spike

    I had a few ideas I wanted to stick to, as well as keeping it within reason from council approval. You’ll have to read up on your own council approvals for greywater. I’m basing mine on the “I won’t tell them and they won’t care” legal principle.

    The main principles I wanted were

    Diving for the Dead - Searching the Lucinda for bodies in PNG

    July 23rd, 2008

    Lihir Island 5 PLantsite

    The Lihir Gold Mine is a large open pit mine in the middle what remains of the one of the volcano calderas that make up Niolam (Lihir) island. Lihir is located in a highly active seismic and geothermal area. Half of the caldera is missing, disappeared into the ocean several thousand years ago, brining the seashore right up to the edge of mining operations. If you add in 4000mm of rain each year and an unstable soil you get a less than ideal situation for landslides.