Big PC Geek Tech Blog

Recently I decided to add a double din GPS unit to my 2004 Dodge Ram. This is not normally a hard thing to do but the 2004 Dodge Ram is only made to fit a single din. Follow these steps at your own risk. I assume no responsibility. Do your own research and you know what you will be getting into.

What you will need:

Dremel
Replacement Bezel (not required)
Bondo
Rough to fine sandpaper
Spray paint
Plummer’s Floss

I wont go into the particular unit I installed in the truck or how to wire it because it is pretty easy to figure out. The first thing I suggest, although not required, is to buy a replacement bezel incase you ruin yours. I found one for $50 on ebay. If you ruin yours, you should be able to buy a replacement from the dealer but it will be pricey.

The first step, is to buy your double din stereo and see if it will fit in the area where your stereo goes. I think a 1 and 1/2 din unit will fit with no modification to your truck. If it fits, no modification is necessary to the dash. If however, your double din does not fit, you will have to cut away some excess plastic so it will fit with your Dremel.

As soon as you can snugly fit your stereo in place, you will want to use plummer’s floss or some sort of bracket to mount your unit in place. As soon as you know you can get your unit in the place you want, go ahead and wire it up if you want to. My suggestion would be to buy a $5 wire harness adapter so you don’t have to cut your truck’s factory plug and can easily plug or un-plug your unit.

Now it is time to measure or eyeball if you are me, and cut out space for your unit. I held my plastic bezel over the unit about 10 times cutting and shaving off plastic a little bit at a time making sure not to cut too much with your Dremel. You might want to tape off where you need to cut.

Once you are satisfied you have cut enough plastic or cut too much, it is time to get messy with Bondo. You may have noticed there is some spare space on the left and right side of the unit with the bezel installed. Before moving to the Bondo, I cut away some plastic and used plastic resin to glue them into the sides.

Ok now Bondo. Just get some Bondo at your local Lowe’s or Home Depot and get ready to have some patience. If you have never experienced Bondo before, you must know you have to act quick and it will probably take you many applications to get the shape you want. You may even get to the point where you think you are finished, sand it, and find you have to add more because of a bubble. As long as you mix it correctly, (instructions are on the box) the Bondo will harden really quickly. If you have to add a lot of Bondo to one area and it wont stay in place before hardening, you can tape cardboard in place to hold it.

Once you feel you have the desired shape, time to get sanding. I would first cut away any access Bondo, sand the excess, and make sure it fits. If you don’t like the shape, add more Bondo making sure all dust is gone before applying it. As you can see, this took me many times before I got it where I wanted it. I also could have kept going to perfect it more but I got to a certain point where I was satisfied.

When you are ready for final Sanding I suggest this is where you put your effort. I did not mention this earlier but it is important to make sure your Bondo is dried and hard before sanding. Start with rough paper and move to very fine. My final sanding ended up with a sponge.

Once you have finished sanding, time to paint. At first, I decided to go with a glossy color but my horrible sanding stood out so I decided to go with a flat black. You also may have to paint the whole bezel in case you nicked a part or sanded an un-intended area.

The original Gray I decided to use looked great when painting but from the driver’s seat, some minor imperfections showed up and I went with a flat black which turned out much better. If you want to go with a glossy color, make sure your sanding is good. Finally, the finished product is below (not flat black) I’ll add that picture later.

Tell me what you think.

Greg

****Update 02/15/2010. I decided to paint the whole thing flat black. I found there were much less visual defects you could see with my bad sanding this way.

Recently after two really cheap electric shavers broke, I decided to invest a little more money in a better quality system. The Braun 8585 self-cleaning electric shaver was my solution.

I must say, this is the best electric shaver I have ever owned. The unit comes with a harness that serves as the washing machine to clean your razor while it also charges it. Yes, of coarse it is cordless too! The cord comes is detachable and the shaver comes with a case so you can take it with you while you travel. When you travel, you leave the docking station home because you will definitely spill out the cleaning fluid. The shaver has something like 20 different angled groves to capture hair and an adjustable trimmer for sideburns.

If you are interested, as usual, I got mine at amazon.com

With identity theft on the rise and more parts of our lives moving to the computer, it is becoming increasingly important to protect our data. Most people are familiar with encryption and the idea of an encrypted file means that someone without the password cant tell what the encrypted file is, but few know that there are still ways to tell what is in those encrypted files.

If you have a hidden encrypted file but then un-encrypt it to view or change it, Windows will load the file in Ram memory, but if you are out of Ram, the file will be written to the hard drive. Swap file and paging files are some of the few ways Windows saves files and although you may think the file is not there, it is until it is overwritten. This is one way how forensic computer science works, it can be tedious but with proper tools, recovering secret files on computers is pretty easy for someone who knows what they are doing.

Telling people this is a double edged sword, I want the people who have a legit reason to hide their personal info to know this but I don’t want predators and thieves to know this. Windows Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise as well as the newest version of TrueCrypt offer what is known as full drive encryption. Full drive encryption means your whole C system drive is encrypted when you turn your computer on and off and everything within the drive is encrypted on the fly. Assuming you have a good password, someone looking anywhere on your C drive will see a blog of data with no apparent pattern. Windows Vista calls this BitLocker Drive Encryption which requires a new type of motherboard with TPM which saves a file on it or requires a USB key to boot your computer. TrueCrypt makes you create a CD. This makes any attempt of data recovery on your hard drive useless unless you create too simple of a password.

In order to keep your encrypted drive from being unlocked, you must come up with a strong password that cant be guess and when looked at appears to be random characters. The best way to do this is create your own algorithm that you will remember. Something like remember a long word or phrase but swap every other letter with a number and add 5 on one, multiply by 5 on the next, divide by 5, subtract 5 and so forth. You could do this for the letters too, when you want to spell "a" in a phrase, add 5 letters which is "f." When doing it for the number part, when you need the letter "a" and if it is at the beginning of the phrase, start at 0 and add 5, so you would put the number 5. Try not to do things like add 5 every other password because 5,a,10,b,15 is a pretty easy repetition. You could do something like add 3 and multiply by 2 every time which will give you different numbers every time with less of a pattern. Can you tell I am passionate about the subject? Sorry for rambling on…

If you have Windows Vista Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise, you have a cool feature called "Complete PC Backup and Restore" which allows you to create a full image of your system drive for backup or if you have a hardware failure. Unfortunately, if you have Vista Home Basic or Premium, this feature is not available to you. This is a really cool feature because it allows you to put your full Windows OS, installed programs, and data on another drive without having to do the usual restore and installation of all that software you have added since your first install. The time it will take to do this will be considerable faster than a full reinstall of Windows. You can use this to backup your hard drive or even use it to upgrade your hard disk to a bigger one.

Here is what you need to have if you have a defective disk or want to upgrade: 3 hard drives and your OS disc or 2 hard drives and a heck of a lot of DVD’s and time and your OS disc. (Don’t waste your time trying to backup your computer on 20 DVD’s, it is not worth your time.)

1. The first drive, the drive Vista is installed on has no use other than being the system disk.

2. The second drive will be the backup which you will need to have backed up prior to your OS drive failing. Don’t risk it, make a backup before you have an issue. This is the easy part, go into the Backup and Restore Center via the Control Panel and hit Back up Computer. The rest should be self explanatory.

3. The Scenario: Lets say at this point your OS system hard disk has failed or you want to upgrade your current drive to a bigger one. You will want to take out the failed drive or current working drive out of your computer. You will no longer need your OS drive.

4. Connect the new drive, make sure the drive with the backup on it is connected, and finally boot your computer with your system disc (Windows Vista install DVD). I should make a point that you cannot use any controller cards for this, all drives must be connected directly to the motherboard. You may also have to change the boot settings in your bios to boot from the Rom drive.

5. Windows Vista will now boot into the same screen that you see when you are going to install Vista, don’t worry. The first step is to click next when it asks what language you want, then select REPAIR WINDOWS! Do not select install Windows. Click next on the next step and click Restore Entire computer. Vista will then search for the backup you created on the drive, click next and Vista will install the image on your new drive.

You computer should now be the same as it was. A few more things you should know: If you put a bigger drive to replace the old one, you will have to expand it with Vista’s drive utility. If you have an OEM version of Windows, you technically are not supposed to change the system hard disk and it will say your copy of Vista is already in use. If you ask me, this is a crock and I would follow the steps to activate over the phone and talk the Microsoft about activating your OS. Retail version of Vista should be able to work with a new hard drive. If not, I don’t know why Vista would even have this feature. Really, this feature is amazing but it makes no sense to have available if you have a OEM version. If you build your own computer, you know what OEM means, if you buy your computer with Vista on it, you have OEM. Non OEM is when you buy Vista by itself in retail packaging in a retail store. I had an OEM version and was unable to activate my OS just after changing the hard drive. I promptly called Microsoft while following the steps to activate over the phone and answer all the questions they ask you honestly. I did this and they activated my copy.