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So it turns out that my wife got me the factory subwoofer for my Scion xB for Christmas which is super cool. I’d love to do a custom install but I lack the time and the funds to accomplish it. Plus you can’t fight with the ease of integration to the existing head unit with a factory unit. Couple that with the fact that all I want is a little bump (this is just a baby haulin’ machine remember) and it’s low cost it was a no brainer for me.

So Jen got the sub-woofer but it didn’t come with any directions in the box. Turns out Bazooka has them on their website for you to download and print. Pretty much the directions are easy to follow but I will point out a few things that I came across that were either wrong or not mentioned:

1. There are two “remote option” wires on the wiring harness that are not mentioned anywhere. If you don’t connect them up the sub will not power up. For me with my stock head unit the wiring was red to blue. It’s weird that it’s not mentioned anywhere at all….

2. Before you do step 7f for the love of god put the right deck floor box (that you removed in 1d). There’s a claw on it that makes it impossible to reinstall if you install the sub-woofer.

3. This is more of an opinion but high level inputs, really Scion? There were two perfectly good RCA outs on the back of the head unit so I don’t really get why they wanted to tap off speaker inputs. Just seems weird but oh well.

4. Damn the bench back seat is a pain to take off (step 1f1). The white plastic tabs you have to get to release were a total pain. I had to use a screwdriver personally.

Since I linked to the directions above I’m not going to really go into much detail. I did take a few pictures in case anyone wants to see what it looks like in process. In the third pic you can see I just put the seat over to the side rather than mess around with undoing the seatbelt. The last pic is the 12mm bracket they want you to remove in 1f3.

Then I just took a picture of the back with the panel fully removed (don’t even try this without a panel remover tool) and then a couple of pictures of how I ran the wiring. There was plenty of room and the kit even came with the zip ties in it. The last picture was my “interpretation” of where and how to use the foam take the kit came with. Honestly I did not find the directions very clear on this part.

When your all said and done you get this:

Not to bad for about 5 hours of work. You can even still mostly use that side pocket and while it’s not stealth by any means it certainly doesn’t take up to much room. Played around with settings a bit and I’m pretty happy with it.

So I’ve had my 2011 Scion xB for almost 6 months and so far I haven’t had any reason to complain. For the price the car does everything so far I want and more. Plus the ability to take the kids with me (my old car only had two seats so no kids ever got to ride in it) has paid off big time with all the weekend activities they now have.

Of course that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been itching to take it apart. Honestly at this point I’m impressed enough with the head unit to not upgrade it yet. I don’t want to mess with the steering wheel buttons for volume/track (although you can make them work) and I know I could probably make the UBS port in the center console work…but again for my simple needs right now a new head unit is over kill. That and I’m poor.

So for my birthday I was able to snag a good deal on a pair of Alpine SPS-610C component 2-way speakers. I wasn’t able to dig up a whole ton of information online about people upgrading their Scion xB’s but after pulling the door off of my passenger side and doing some measuring I was confident I could make this work somehow.

Now the stock speakers are pretty decent. I mean they even come with integrated tweeters in the door sail panels. Most people probably wouldn’t bother to mess with them but since I can do all the work myself (and like too) for under $100 I couldn’t resist.

First step is to get the door off. There are two #2 phillips head screws on each of the front doors. The first one is located behind a plastic place right behind the door pull. In the first picture you can see I already removed the plastic vanity cover. The second screw is located in the door pocket that you pull the door closed with (you can see it in the first pic and also in the third where I’m lifting the control panel up….the screw was in that pocket). Once you have the two screws off you need to take the control panel out which just lifts up (third pictures). Next use your door pry tool (the silver tool in the second pic) to start at the bottom and pry out at the white plastic plugs gently. Pretty much you just pry off gently all along the bottom and sides and then the top ridge pulls right off towards you. Once you have the door off you’ll see that the pull mechanism is still connected to it. It’s really easy to just take a small flat screwdriver and pry it off the door panel, which you can see if you look at the last picture below.

So now that we have the door panel off you can see the stock speakers and the rivets that hold them in. Personally when I saw the rivets for the first time my reaction was WTF? but I guess that’s how they like to do it. So grab your drill, grab a drill bit (I used a 3/16″ but whatever you like will probably work) and go to town! Drilling out the three rivets is pretty self explanatory but I will say this TRACK ALL YOUR RIVET BITS. The last thing you want when all is done is to be driving down the road listening to rivet bits rattle in your door. I’m even including a picture of all the rivet bits so you can compare (last pic). Hell just grab your shop vac and stuff it down there when your done if you want to be super safe.

After all that now we have the stock door speaker out (remember tweeters are up in the sail panel) and here is where the fun really lies. The way Scion mounts its speakers is really weird to me and the adapter plates the speakers came with didn’t fit right. Now other places sell plastic adapter plates and wiring harnesses so you don’t have to cut the factory wiring. Some people have even made their own mounts out of 1/4″ plywood. I decided instead to gut the stock speakers and use their body/wiring harness for the new speakers. Now I actually had a hard time bringing myself to doing this but in the end I realized I wouldn’t be able to sell them for jack squat so why save them and spend more money on more parts.

After staring at it for awhile it became apparent that there was a plastic ring glued around used to connect the speaker cone to the main body. So all I had to do was figure out how to get it off to give me a platform to mount the new speakers to. The first three pics are just some side by side comparisons, a pic of the stock back and then lastly a pic of me de-soldering the current connections since I plan to reuse the wiring harness.

So without further adieu I present destruction and dremeling. Turns out the glue used to hold this thing together is mush weaker than I thought. Plus the sub level the ring sits on is hollow so all you have to do is notch a hole in the ring and then get under it and pry (see pic 1 and 2). Just keep prying all the way around and you’ll end up like the third pic a lot easier than you expected.

Next just suck it up and rip out the black speaker cone to expose the support struts underneath. You might want to just “hulk smash” and rip it out or use a razor blade to cut the yellow mesh, it’s up to you. Then all you do is take a dremel with a cutting wheel and go to town cutting the struts like like in the second (albeit blurry) pic below. In the third and fourth pic you can see me using a chisel and a box cutter to clean up the mess left behind (there’s like some paper layer). Take some time to make sure this platform is all nice and clean and free of the old glue and gook.

Then all you do is take your speaker and drop it in the base you just gutted. Drill 4 holes that are of a smaller diameter than your screws and bob’s your uncle. It’s deceptively simple honestly…although I have to admit I would have liked the screws to be a little longer but they seemed to grip enough to make me happy. In the last picture you can see I reused the copper wiring from the OEM harness on the new speakers….I like to reuse stuff when possible. You can do it anyway you want but I’m inherently cheap.

To mount the speakers back on the door (make sure you wire up your crossover first!) I played around with the idea of using pop rivets but in the end I went with the more approachable idea of just bolts. The first pic are the bolts I bought that have the screw, a lock washer, a normal washer and then the bolt. My hopes were that the lock washer would help hold it in place since I couldn’t really get to it from behind. It didn’t work out that slick of course but in the end it all came together. I just had to use pliers on the screw while tightening the bolt. I also chucked a little blue thread-lock on the bolts while I was there. Don’t want them coming loose ever.

Now that the door speaker is in place (and you remembered to wire up the end of the cross-over) it’s time for us to find a place to bury the cross over in the door. First I’ll mention that there is some sound dampening material (looks like carpet padding to me) and clear plastic adhered to the metal door frame via some black gook. Now if you are careful you can pull back the plastic in a way that will let you put it back and I actually ended up “cutting” the gook with a razor blade. When you go to put it back you can’t ever tell…the stuff re-adheres just fine.

So go ahead and grab the clear plastic and pull a good chunk of it back like I did in picture 1 below. If you feel like it now is a great time to put dynamat or some type of sound dampening in….alas I felt the weather was to cold and I didn’t have the budget for it yet. So in the second picture below you can see I just ran the crossover cable down behind the plastic along side some black split loom tubing. In the third pic you can then see I decided to zip tie the crossover to a white wiring harness. After that was done I just ran the other wiring end of the cross over up the black cable (for the power mirrors) and pushed the plastic with the black goo back together. Notice I left the tweeter connections just hanging in the wind, we’ll get to those next.

Now the first time I saw this it threw me for a loop honestly because I wasn’t expecting 4 wires. I got really worried that the head unit was doing some kind of funky 6 channel setup that would make this upgrade much more difficult but it turns out that the tweeter is just wired up as a pass through on a standard 4 channel setup. Long story short, we just need to cut the wires and connect the colors together. Then the signal just goes down to the door speaker and back up the cross over to the new tweeters. There’s probably a few ways to do it, this is just the way I decided at the time.

The first pic is just the wiring that goes to the tweeter with some black sheathing pulled back to show there is two colors. All I did was cut though it, solder the connections and then put some heat shrink tubing on it. Wrapped it a few times in electrical tape and then shoved the nub into the hole in the plastic it was poking through. That’s it.

The tweeters actually ended up being pretty easy. If you look at the first picture below you can see a pencil mark at the 6 o’clock mark of the tweeter hole. All you have to do is dremel/razor blade that nub off and your pretty much done at this point. The tweeter actually fits in there pretty well. Take a look at the fourth and fifth picture below and you can see that two of the three retention clips actually get a hold on. The third one (towards 6 o’clock) doesn’t really clip on a ridge so I made the decision to drop some hot glue all over the thing (not that it hurts). Normally I’d use some weatherstrip adhesive but I didn’t have any handy and the hot glue seems to work pretty good honestly.

The only thing left at this point is to use a dremel to remove some of the tweeter cover backing so there is enough clearance for it to go back on. Take your time and have a razor blade handy and there shouldn’t be any problems. I used an air compressor nozzle at a few places to make sure none of the holes were clogged but that’s just me being thorough. As you can see when your done nobody would know anything had been done to the car at all.

All that is left is to hook up the tweeters and reassemble the door. Then head over to the drivers side and do the same thing again. I’m not going to go through the whole steps again because really it’s just the same thing. The only difference is that the speaker wires are a different color and the rotation of the tweeter is mirrored to the placement of the other side. If that doesn’t make sense don’t worry it will when you shove it in there…plus I took a pic or two so you can always look at that.

Anyways some highlights of the driver side speaker install. In the second pic you can get a good look at the dremel bit I used to take off a lot of the tweeter cover plastic. Not saying it’s the best just that it’s what I used. The sixth and eight pic show the alignment I was referring to earlier and my love for using hot glue.

Lastly just pics of the wiring again.

Here’s a final picture of the door completely put together. You’d never know anything was done which is always a goal of mine.

The only thing left to do is turn on the car stereo and start playing with your treble/bass settings and a few other tweaks. Scion head units are pretty unique in a few ways that you should make sure you know about:
- Treble and Bass settings are unique to inputs. Which means CD is different than iPod/USB, don’t forget that.
- There is a setting for xB, xT, etc…the default is not xB so you should make sure the dealership remembered to set that (cause mine didn’t).
- Play around with the SSD button, I have mine set to “feel”.

That’s it. My next goal for this is to change out the back doors and install a stealth sub. Like I said I’m not looking at changing the head unit at this time since it has RCA outputs for a sub and I don’t wanna mess with the steering wheel controls and armrest USB port. Also I’m poor. Hope this helped if you were looking at doing this project…I love working on my cars audio anyways.

Somebody asked my wife about this recently so I thought I’d document this for anyone else curious. Short answer is yes. Keep reading for the long answer.

Back around 2008 or so I called up our township assessor’s office for our county and spoke to a really nice lady about challenging their appraisal of what our house was worth. I did this mostly because at the time I had been following the housing bubble (since it burst in 2006) and I knew their numbers were BS. I promptly did nothing after that because I foolishly though that since they based their prices off a three year average they would drop without need for any effort on my part.

I was so wrong.

Flash forward to 2010. We decided to refi our 30 year fixed mortgage because the rates were a full point lower (5.875 to 4.625) and to do that we had to get our house appraised to ensure we weren’t under water on our mortgage. The appraised value was 25k less than what we paid for it in 2005 but we weren’t underwater so our refi went though without a hitch and all as well. Flash forward to December of that year and we get our yearly “Property Assessment Notice” from the county and sure as shit it went up again. This time it was a full 50k higher than what our recent home appraisal said for our refi. I know they say it’s an average but in a market like this I don’t how they can say that with a straight face when all it does is go up. So I came to the conclusion that they figure they can keep milking us suckers and only have to worry about the people that complain. In other words they’re never going to magically tell you to stop giving them money.

So once again I called up my county’s assessor’s office and this time they directed me to an online PDF to download and fill out….which I did. For some unknown reason I had to fill it out and mail in quadruplicate copies….but other than that all the info I needed to fill it out was included in the home appraisal we had done for the refi (mostly info on comp’s in the area). After I mailed it in I got a confirmation for a “Notice of Hearing” for my complaint form and all I did was show up on that day, wait 10 minutes then get lead to a room full of 4 people with calculators. I sat while they looked at the forms I had mailed in and pretty much after 5 minutes of tapping on their calculators they agreed with me. That was it. No big hoopla or anything really, they just said “yup, your house is worth 50k less than we’ve been saying”.

So flash forward and I get an official Notice of Final Decision on 3/28/11 and nothing else until last month where we got back a check from our mortgage company for $1,100 due to the escrow account having to much in it.

Oh and the best part. We just got our 2011 Property assessment and they dropped our house’s value again…another 4k. So it might be true that the prices are equalizing but I just don’t believe they would have dropped it 54k unless I challenged it.

So if you want to do something you usually only have a fixed window of time (ours was 30 days) after the Property Assessments are mailed out. You also need to pop for a home appraisal. That’s it.

Complete and total unnecessary escalation of the issue by use of needless force. If I was an officer of the law I would be ashamed of myself after seeing this mockery.

About two months ago I spent my early Saturday morning hunched anxiously in front of our kitchen iMac drinking a giant cup of coffee and constantly moving through the 10 tabs I had open refreshing HP’s small business website trying to desperately get a 16gb Touchpad for $99.

I had tripped across the news a little later than most in the /geek section of Fark.com the night before and to this day I’m still not sure how I managed to get one but I did. Well….got one two months later at least. True to their word it arrived on 10/23 and after crossing my fingers to make sure it turned on I’ve been playing with it every since.

This is pretty much just going to be me rambling about thoughts on it.

Physical Aspects. This is a 10″ tablet that got slashed from $499 to $99 or something like that. The screen looks great and is a good size. I will say that due to it’s size it’s also heavy. If you plan on using this to read on the john or whatever you’ll be using two hands. Also as most people have already commented the screen is a fingerprint magnet. On my unit there’s also this annoying “flex” on the back where you can make the shell move and hear the adhesive try to stick to it. I can’t tell if that’s due to mine being one of the last made or if they’re all like that. Honestly with a case on I don’t care. Speaking of cases I picked up this cheapo one on Amazon and aside from having to flex the power button by pushing it with my finger I’ve been really happy with it. You need a case with this guy. I don’t do screen protectors though so I have no opinion on that.

The home button is a little small in my opinion. I like the way Apple does it by using a circle but I guess HP felt they had to be different and made theirs more oval than anything. My volume buttons also jiggle a bit…but again it’s in a case so I don’t care or notice now. The only other port on the device is at the bottom for charging and connecting to a usb port on your computer. There is no SD card…but again I don’t really care about that, some people seem to but it doesn’t bother me much. When you plug it into your computer it just acts like a giant flash drive anyways.

WebOS. So HP had their own OS called WebOS and for all intents and purposes it’s really slick. Out of the box the first thing I did was updated it to 3.0.4 (from 3.0.2) and gave it a go. It uses a system called “cards” where when you press the home button everything that is running shrinks down into little 3×5 cards you can shuffle through using sweeping motions with your hands.

Over all it’s very polished. If all you want to do is read some websites and maybe check your Facebook there’s no need to do anything more at this point. However if you want to get as much as you can out of this tablet then pretty much the first things you do are turn off a ton off debugging and bump that CPU up to 1.5ghz (from the under clocked 1.2ghz it comes set at). If you want to tweak it here is a link to the guide I used. Running WebOS I had no problems with Facebook (although the app is a little weird, it lets you add a second account but doesn’t let you log out of the first one), Pandora’s App, Skype works (although the camera is for shyt on this thing…almost as bad as my iPod Touch 4). I didn’t setup bluetooh at all but WiFi worked just fine and the range is excellent. The web browser supports flash but it’s limited. For example the Zynga games on Facebook (cafeworld, etc) crash.

TL;DR it’s a cool tablet and WebOS is a pretty slick polished experience. Everyday users will love it and it’ll meet 90% of your needs probably.

Now if you have no interest on stuffing Android on it you can stop reading here. Cause the rest of my discussion will be about that.

I did a lot of reading about people getting Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread on their touchpad. The reasons are really more for power users who want the ability to access the google market for apps (and Amazon apps too) and also do fancier things with it. To be blunt installing Android on the tablet is cake using this video’s directions.

I was really worried about bricking the system but it turned out to be super simple to do. Plus when you are booting the Touchpad up you can always choose to go back to WebOS (I’ve been hopping between them as I work out bugs) so there’s no risk. In essence you are dual booting OS’s.

So after following that video to install the second Alpha release of CM7 I pretty much booted up the Touchpad and sat there going “now what?” Turns out that CM7 can’t include the google market place so you have to go find that and install it. Here’s the simple steps on how to do it.

Ok so we have CM7 installed and Google Marketplace installed. How do we look? Well for an Alpha release CM7 is really great but it does have some bugs:
-Wifi vanishes after sleep mode occasionally
-No Flash support (although a new Firefox in a few months should fix that)
-Sleep of Death. Touchpad will go to sleep and not wake up (I seem to have worked around it by increasing the CPU per this site).
-Random reboots while in sleep mode and then the live wallpaper is suddenly glitchy and needs to be re-applied.

It took a few days but I find myself hopping into WebOS less and less. Google Market place has a huge offering and I was able to install all my apps from Amazon as well. Plants Vs. Zombies is a blast on a 10″ tablet I was also able to do one other really cool thing. I downloaded an app from the google marketplace and can now reach my FreeNAS via a program called ES File Explorer. I tried to make CifsManager work but had no luck at all. Oh yeah and don’t forget to re-over clock for the new OS to 1.5ghz oh and explore live wallpapers…I’ve become a live wallpaper whore.

As bad as this is it’s still better than the Zelda CD-I stuff.

This past week I have been in TX for training on a new platform I’ll be responsible for at my job. And unbeknownst to me the class let out early on the last day or more specifically the last day was a half day.

After hearing that I was thrilled because my original flight had been booked for 7pm that night and there were like 4 flights before that I could try to get on. Despite everybody telling me I didn’t stand a chance I knew I had to try (when I’m the most optimistic person in a room you know things are bad).

So I bust out my GPS app for my blackberry and high tail it to DFW. Made decent time, checked in and even found a security check point without body rapers (scanners). Got through and went to the first gate that had a 2:20pm flight and despite my best attempts at being nice (yes I can be nice) I was totally 100% shot down.

I didn’t give up though I went down the terminal a bit and tried a different gate. After waking up the agent there and attempting to get him to give a fuck he proceeded to tell me no also. Both of them told me the same spiel…that American Airlines (I usually fly United) had done away with standby a year ago. To which I asked “but what if there are empty seats?” and he just replied that they stay empty unless you pay to upgrade and had the feature to purchase standby on your ticket.

Now all my travel issues are booked via work. I don’t do anything but pick times and they handle it all. I also can’t just tack on $50 to my flight without probably getting in deep trouble so basically what this means is that I am currently sitting on my ass in DFW until 7pm tonight when my flight boards.

Now I’m not a big fan of traveling via airplane honestly but now it’s not just a matter of whizzing through the sky in a giant metal tube. You also have to deal with airlines nickle and diming you for everything they can think of. You’ve got the TSA devising new ways to probe and irradiate you and now you can’t even try to get on an earlier flight without them wanting an additional fee out of you.

I still think I’d rather have driven.

Enjoy our crazy rain