Looking back at 12 years of blog posts, photographs and tech articles, today I’m pulling up some of my favorite photos from years past.
Photo descriptions include a link to the story where it originally appeared.
It’s been a very active month of wildlife visitors. Occasionally I get lucky enough to grab the camera and snap off some shots before they see me and scamper off.
Here are a few of the last pics:
There have been a few visitors already this week, to the Mountain Home.
These two came by today for a short visit:
Even a little interesting reptile life…
Earlier another buck made an appearance:
Another decided that some of the plants on our hillside were not to it’s liking, and proceeded to rip them out of the ground.
Snapped these three pics outside our home off Branciforte, at 10:45 AM.
Over the last couple of days we’ve had some daytime visitors along the hillside above us.
We know there are a number of predator cats in the area. I don’t often see bobcats so it was a rare treat to get a glimpse of one outside my office window:
Coyotes are much more commonly sighted around here. I often catch them on the infrared wildlife camera. Seeing them during the daytime is a little less common but it does happen, as it did this morning:
A few days ago, I posted the first test video shot using 30 second exposures with a GoPro3 camera, located at our home in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
For my next test series I set the GoPro3 Camera, to fire the photos at 10 second intervals. The number of photos captured before the battery expired was almost 1100, netting a much longer and smoother looking video.
The wildlife camera experiment continues.
A few nights ago it captured a coyote walking right up to our front door.
The camera only fired a few times that night, and unfortunately none of the still were usable.
With the required repairs to make it run complete, now the work on mods to get it from a former runner of illegal immigrants, to functional (if not nice) micro toy-hauler can begin.
After doing some research at the San Jose International Car Show, I’m now more convinced the flooring found in the van is a factory original. As such, I’ve decided to re-use it.
Next to the flooring are two rolls of recycled industrial No-VOC carpets (6’x9′) that are enough to carpet the floor of the van, probably all the way to the firewall if I decided to go that far with it.
Having used the existing stereo briefly, I quickly found it’s navigation horribly complicated and it’s general performance underwhelming. Plus, it has a CD player in it.. might as well have an 8-track too. So that was removed, and a new (and very INexpensive Kenwood head with built-in Blutooth, and both Apple and Android music interface capabilities.
Having found the unit jammed in there fairly tightly, I ended up going a little medieval on the dash:
Having pulled all these parts off ended up making it MUCH simpler to route the Blutooth microphone (required for drivers making phone calls here in Nanny-State Kalifornica). I also noticed that the framework under the dash was painted a bright yellow, not at all like the read the rest of the van is painted.
Instructions for mounting the microphone were not at all clear, in fact there was only a single small diagram showing it mounted on top of the steering column. Huh? Screw that I said.. and ripped the left side A pillar cover off and mounted the microphone up at the top of the window, pointing at the driver. I hope that was not a big mistake. I’m sure I’ll test this soon and find out!
Running wires down the A-pillar and through the dash was easy enough, but getting from the lower section of the dash up to the top was not exactly obvious. Using a tool not at all designed for the job, often makes things simpler. 🙂 Here I used it to fish the microphone wire up and over the pedal box and long another wire loom, eventually appearing under the HVAC environmental controls.
One there, the wrong tool was once again used to fish the wire up to the top section of the dash (removing the cover around the dash vents makes like a lot easier). Viola… easy as cake.
Not being a fan of rattles, and especially in the dash area, the wire loom was tightly bundled, and once inserted into the dash, the head unit’s rear section was zip-tied to the dash structure as seen. Probably should have used grey or black wraps but…. I’m going to call this a design test.. yeah, that’s the ticket.. This radio is much tighter in the dash that the other install, and that’s OK by me.
This is nearly complete. There are patches of left over adhesive I need to remove, but the nasty and ugly decals (save a couple that I just might leave) are GONE!! Thank you Magic Eraser!!
With some help from the family, we removed A LOT of USPS shipping tape stuck to the ceiling of the truck. Purpose? WHO KNOWS!??! but it was all over the place and Debby just couldn’t stand it.
So while she was busy peeling the tape, A.J. and I unscrewed all of the interior panels and removed them from the van. Once able to inspect the the bodywork from the inside, I’m even more convinced that a diamond in the rough is what I have here. No signs of rust or any type of body work / repairs. If it wasn’t so loud, I’d be tempted to just leave the interior just like this!
One of the features of the head unit, is iPhone (and Android) integration. This I wanted to test out. Thankfully it just worked. One press of the button to change input to USB, about 60 seconds to sync with the phone and store it’s ID, and bang.. music starts playing.
Here I have WAZE up and running on the screen while the music app drops the bass.
That was enough for one day… many more days of work on this to come.
Some video motoring around in Santa Cruz, CA. during our first real rain storm in years.
Sands blowing around at Santa Cruz Harbor.
Video action along West Cliff Drive that same morning.
Finally some rainfall upon our parched earth.
Posting a couple of photos taken on 11-DEC-2014 at of Walton Light, Santa Cruz Harbor, California.
Extreme wind and surf hit the West Coast of California for nearly 3 straight days, making for some amazing photographic opportunities.
