.. I’d like to give the car a wash and remove the leaves that have been hiding up near the windscreen.
It stopped enough today but I took the time to get the radio working (only CDs were working, and one CD gets very repetitive day in, day out).
I pulled out the dash surround thinking I’d find he’s done something odd with the amp that he had hooked up (i.e. left the antenna unplugged or something). After isolating it as much as I could, there was still no reception on radio. Got out the multimeter, and checked continuity from the antenna to the plug.
So, I pulled out another head unit we had from China, and set it up, the wiring job for the previous Sony head unit was a bit messy, a electrical tape job which seemed to have loose wires – when I was removing it, the speakers were dropping in and out, and that wasn’t just the ground connection (which is simply a wire tied to the chassis).
So the best solution was to find the right wiring for the car and chopping the mess out, and then soldering and heat shrinking the connections to the connector we have. I pulled up Google and found the wiring diagram here. I checked that the colours matched and they do. I taped the connections together, the heat shrink I have is too small for the cables to fit into well.
The head unit has video support, USB, MP3, DVD and SD support – awesome set of features for a media player – but we need to get a video screen to use it’s video features. We don’t go on enough long trips and our kids are well enough behaved to not need it – but it’s USB support is nice to have for loading up music and updating it without having to burn CDs (and it can play them too).
It doesn’t have any fancy crap like bluetooth integration or navigation in it, not needed.
When it stops raining, I hope to get out the back and check on the passionfruit vines – they are exceeding the height of the trellis, so probably need to be given some direction and feeding. And the Cherry Tomato bush which has litterally outgrown the area it’s in will have to come out as it’s starting to show it’s finished with.
There are some more seedlings to go in, and hopefully, some more to harvest. The chickens need to have their home relocated away from the tree stump whilst we figure out the outcome for it. And with the fence next door nearing completion, it’s time to find out what style fence will go out the front, so we can tackle that.
One day, we will have the answer to our flooding back and front yard issues, our neighbours on one side are getting flooded out as well, and the townhouses on the other side are finally fixing their driveway. I’m not sure if it’ll sort out the run off into our yard, and the flooding or not. I hope it does, the elderly neighbours next door are pretty pissed off – I’m just annoyed I have to walk through sludge to get to the car. Council seem to be pretty slow at responding though – charge us two arms and a leg for rates and take 2 months or more to investigate a drainage issue.
It’s really only a problem when it rains though, no rain, the backyard is fine (unless your digging fence post holes, where you’ll find around 5L of water after a 600mm hole).
Hopefully next weekend the rain gives us a break, but then there’s a trip to the dump due then for some old crap that’s got to go (and hopefully the side fence makes that trip!).
And I still need new tyres.