harness

Wiring and installing your car stereo amplifier

Tuesday's video blog was all about wiring and hooking up an aftermarket head unit into your car stereo, but let's suppose you want to create a big, bumpin' system. In that case, you want to get yourself an amp. And if you want to see how to hook up an amp to your car stereo, you've come to the right place, as this Web clip is a practical demonstration on how to make it happen.

This instructional clip goes over some of the tools and materials you'll need to wire and install the amp, how to … Read more

How to install your head unit

Today's Web clip is a quick primer on how to install a new car stereo head unit into your vehicle. (This of course being that you already have or know how to uninstall your factory deck, but that's a different story for a different time). There's not a whole lot I can say here that isn't demonstrated in this video clip, but to give you an overview of what can be seen here, I'll give you the rundown: installation of the shell in which the deck fits, putting in the ISO connectors to the back … Read more

All about car stereo wiring

Recently I've been using this video blog to cover topics related to car audio, and on Thursday I presented a video that touched upon the importance of wiring in the implementation of any car stereo system. In today's video we get a broad overview of wiring your car stereo head unit for use in a new car audio system.

There are certain considerations involved in determining the wiring of your car stereo, and this video covers several of them. Among the considerations covered here are head unit involved, options (iPods, satellite, Bluetooth), making sure your aftermarket harness can … Read more

Format a drive for Mac OS X and Windows

Jonathan sent us an e-mail saying:

"I own a SimpleTech 320GB Black Cherry Hard Drive and needed it to run on both Mac and PC for school. I thought it would be pretty helpful if you made a video showing how to format a disc to run on all OS's using Mac OS X."

First, Here's why there's a difference. All data has to be put in a file format that the operating system can read off the hard drive. OS X uses a file format called HFS+ to write its data. Windows can't read or write HFS+ data natively. However, OS X and Windows both can read and write to a format called FAT32, which used to be used for Windows all the way back into the MS-DOS days. Most modern Windows systems use the NTFS file format, which OS X can read, but not write to.

So your best bet for compatibility is FAT32. Here's how to format a drive as FAT32. First, the Windows way and then the Mac way.… Read more

Don't be greedy for hard disk space

Are there things you can never have too much of? Sure. Money and closet space come to mind off the top of my head. What about hard disk space? You can, indeed, have too much hard disk space.

I know this seems ridiculous, but for Defensive Computing, large capacity hard disks are riskier than lower capacity ones. The reason is simple, cramming more bits in the same physical space means crowding them closer together. This is asking for trouble.

This came up on an old Security Now! podcast by Steve Gibson. Gibson is famous for security, but his day job … Read more