Our tent is old. That's a good thing, I think. We've had it since we started this whole adventure thing, now almost exactly a decade ago. It's performed well during that time, and though I've often lusted after something GFC-ish, I can't say that the tent has ever let us down in any way that a much more expensive camper would have solved. In fact, there are really only three features I've found myself "missing" - if one can miss something they've never had - in well over 1,000 nights sleeping above the bed of the truck. A hardshell wedge…
I like to keep the cab of the Tacoma tidy. And, I'm not great at keeping the cab of the Tacoma tidy. Really, I think most folks would say that the inside of the Tacoma is amazingly clean-looking given all the adventuring I do, but to me it always feels dusty and a bit of a mess. I've added various containers in order to contain some of the chaos - largely in the extended cab area, with the 12v house battery box and some cardboard storage containers for our clothes - but one of the things I haven't ever done…
TL;DR - I found a compact, 65W USB A/C charger that can be used for my laptop, camera, drone, flashlight, phone, and just about anything else, and it charges faster than the dedicated chargers for those devices. Fantasticly amazing.There are more powerful chargers out there, but at least for now, this one seems perfect.
Having just installed a new ham radio setup to get APRS, I was keen to play with Kenwood TM-D710GA and Mobilinkd to track my location. So, on a few local trips, I turned everything on and waited. And waited and waited. Over the course of 30 minutes, I never got a single APRS beacon from another station. I knew something was wrong. And then I realized that the difference between my initial setup and my current situation was that the truck was on. Turning the truck off resulted in almost immediate APRS packets coming through. Crap, something is causing interference…
November 5, 2017 It wasn't all that long ago that I got my Ham radio license and installed an Icom-5100 in the truck. A great radio, it's gone now - because a great radio isn't all I need; I need a great radio that can also do APRS. What's APRS and why's it so important? Great question, let's start there! APRS is the "Automatic Packet Reporting System," a machine-parsable protocol used on a known frequency (144.390 in the US) to send all kinds of information from one ham radio to another. But the reason I care about it is that…
November 1, 2017. I've always hated the A-pillars in my truck. Actually, it's the trim I hate. And I've hated it since I first tried (and failed) to remove it several years ago to run the wire for a microphone from my head unit up to the rearview mirror. See, to remove the A-pillar trip, you also need to remove the grab handle. And for some reason, in 1997-2000 Tacoma's, the grab handle is attached with two M6 screws (no hex head) with a JIS head. That JIS head looks a lot like a Philips head, but it isn't, and…
Summer's here and we decided to go camping at our super-secret-undisclosed-location-that-you-have-to-rush-to-or-someone-else-will-get-there-first. While there, we had a great time, including an epic fire that was bigger than our daughter. But being four years old, and sitting in the back seat for three hours each direction, @mini.turbodb understandably got bored and started playing around (unbeknownst to us) with the back window in the truck, ultimately leaving it unlatched/unlocked. No biggie, except that when we got back, I parked the truck in the alley behind the house and left it overnight, where some young hooligan randomly happened to try the back window and…
