How To Replace or Remove Car SpeakersHow To Replace or Remove Car Speakers

By Joshua Murphy

Before you begin, you’ll need to determine what size speakers you need. Try to replace the speakers in your car with speakers that are the same size. Speaker shapes are usually circles or ovals, and they are measured by the diameter in inches. Some car audio websites have guides to tell you what size speakers will fit the factory openings in your car. You may want to look at the guide at Crutchfield.

Taking off the panels covering the speaker can be a little tricky, but it gets much easier with a little practice. Here are some tips to help you through the process:

1. Door Mounted Speakers: Removing speakers in the front doors is a little different if you have manual windows because you have to remove the window crank, which is the handle that raises and lowers the window. Try this little trick. Use any old shop rag, t-shirt, or cloth to remove the U-shaped clip that holds the handle on the door. To do this, position the handle at the bottom of its arc. Then place the cloth under the handle and pull up while sawing side to side. The cloth with catch the edge of the U-shaped clip and remove it. The handle will then pull straight off.

The door panels are usually fastened to the car with a combination of screws and clips. You’ll need to remove any screws that hold the panel on. Then use a panel removal tool, a flat-head screwdriver, or any other thin object to pry the panel off. Be careful not to scratch, scrape or dent the car. This requires finesse as well as a little force, because you have to pull the panel from metal clips.

2. Dash Mounted Speakers: These are usually a little bit easier to replace. Simply remove the grill covering the speakers with a flat-head screwdriver. Then, unscrew the speakers from their mounts.

3. Rear/Trunk Mounted Speakers: Rear mounted speakers are usually mounted on the flat area behind the back seats and above the trunk. Depending on your car, they may be removed from either the top by prying off the grill above, or through the trunk by removed the mounting screws. Examine yours closely to determine which would work best for your car.

4. Install the replacement speakers: New speakers are packed with new foam gaskets as well as a few screws and washers. If you choose speakers that match the dimensions of the factory speakers, your work will be quick and simple. Connect the two wires to the back of the speaker. Then place the gasket on the back of the speaker and place it in the opening. Reuse the factory screws to fasten it to the metal of the car.

5. Other size speakers: If you choose to install replacement speakers that are larger than the original openings, you will have to widen the holes to match the size of the speaker. Then drill pilot holes to mount the speakers. If you are installing speakers that are smaller than the orginal opening, you may be able to find adapters that you can mount to the speakers so that they will fit the existing holes.

How To Speed-Read the Net

The invention of the Web browser added pictures to the Internet, but all those images still haven’t made reading online a pleasant experience. If you’re someone who uses the Web as your main source of news, you probably have 60 bookmarks that you never use, or you open 30 browser windows simultaneously to keep track of the articles you want to read—but you never get around to all of them. Never mind the killjoy, even on a fast connection, of waiting for some Web pages to load. Surfing within one well-designed site isn’t so bad, but when you hop from site to site, there’s nothing that replicates the appeal of scanning your local magazine rack or that pile of magazines splayed across your coffee table.

But there’s a way to keep track of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Talkingpointsmemo.com, Wonkette—most major newspapers and nearly all blogs—in a lightweight, speed-readable format that lets you scan dozens, even hundreds, of fresh headlines a day without the time-wasting tedium of opening one Web site after another. All you need to do is download and install an RSS reader, which is no harder than installing Netscape’s browser was in 1994. You can then scroll through cleanly organized headlines and story summaries. The result is an executive summary of what’s new on the Net today. When you see a story you want to read, you click on it. One screenshot is worth a thousand words: Click here to see an RSS reader in action.

RSS (”Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary,” depending on whom you ask) has three distinct advantages over Web browsing and e-mail, the two most popular ways to read news online. First, no ads or graphics clutter the headlines and article summaries. True, most news sites make you click through to the full Web page to read the whole story, but scanning an RSS reader is still more efficient than looking at, say, the front page of the New York Times online. And bloggers, who don’t depend on ads for survival, usually stuff their entire posts into RSS.

Second, an RSS reader automatically updates itself with the latest items from the sites you tell it to watch, so it’s always fresh. You don’t have to hop from site to site, or constantly click “refresh,” to know what’s been published by the sites you frequent most. Lastly, you can include customized RSS “feeds” that cull material from multiple news sources into a single data stream. For example, John Kerry’s staff provides an RSS feed on his blog to funnel the latest coverage and endorsements to RSS-using supporters.

How do you get started? The first step is to install an RSS reader (also known, somewhat clumsily, as an “RSS aggregator”). For PC users, my techie friends and the editors at PC World recommend SharpReader. It’s free, although the developer welcomes donations from happy users. If you get error messages when you try to start it (such as, “The application failed to initialize properly” or, “The dynamic library mscoree.dll could not be found”), go to the Windows Update site. There, find and install the Microsoft.NET Framework. Reboot, and you should be able to launch SharpReader. (I’m on a Mac, so I use Shrook.)

Once you’ve installed a reader, go back to your browser and open your favorite site. Most sites have a link that says “RSS” or an orange button that says “XML.” Some sites have multiple links, one for each section of the publication. Cut and paste these URLs into your reader to read the site in RSS. Sorry, there’s no one-click or “click here” method for this yet. After a few seconds, a list of headlines should appear. Click on SharpReader’s “Subscribe” button if you want to add the feed to your reading list.

There is a neat shortcut that often works in lieu of the above mouse dance. Just type the site’s main URL into SharpReader’s URL window (e.g., “www.wonkette.com”). SharpReader will go to the site and look for an RSS feed for you. If it finds one, it will automatically load it. I find this trick usually works with blogs but not with newspaper sites.

One nuisance is that some sites, including the New York Times, don’t list their feeds on their home pages, even though the Times provides feeds for nearly 20 sections. Even more confusing, some newspapers’ feeds are only available through a third-party site such as NewsIsFree, which can prove impossible to search. To find those feeds, use the Syndic8 search engine. (The search box is hard to find; it’s halfway down the site’s home page, on the left.) If your favorite site doesn’t have an RSS feed, odds are it will soon: Slate launched its feed today, and Amazon just added RSS feeds to let shoppers speed-browse its inventory.

To make RSS live up to its “really simple” moniker, I’ve compiled the feeds for some favorite reads—everything from Slate to the “Today’s Papers” newspapers to some major blogs—on this page. Just right-click on the link, save it to your desktop, then import the file to your RSS reader. To do that in SharpReader, click File, then Import Subscriptions.

Most RSS programs have a Preferences option that lets you tell the program how often to check sites for updates. Once you’ve subscribed to a feed, SharpReader will update it every hour. You can fiddle with the Preferences menu to speed that up to as little as 15 minutes.

For advanced info junkies, there are more extreme ways to dose yourself. Feedster searches the content of thousands of RSS feeds and returns the newest posts first. It’s sort of the Google News for RSS, but you can find stuff posted an hour ago that won’t show up on Google for days. NewsGator is a program that works with Microsoft Outlook so you can sync incoming news and blogs to your PDA.

No need to begin by going off the deep end, though. Start with SharpReader, cut and paste the RSS links from five or 10 of your favorite sites, and you’ll instantly be rewarded with faster, less frustrating Net reading.

By Paul Boutin

How To Fund Your Retirement

Make Sure You Have Enough Funds to Retire With

By Mini Guruswamy

One of the benefits of old age is being able to retire. But how to do you fund your retirement? After all, you don’t want to worry about anything as mundane as insufficient money in your retirement. So, how do you make sure you have a prosperous retirement?

1. Work for a company that has a pension plan. In my opinion, the number one way to fund your retirement is to work for a company that has a pension plan. Do your research and find a company that has a pension plan.

1. Max out your 401(k). Put in the maximum amount you can each year. These funds will help you retire in comfort. I recommend buying index funds – domestic and foreign.

1. Set up either a Roth IRA or IRA. These funds will come in handy during retirement.

1. Buy a home, and keep it for thirty years. When you are ready to retire, you can sell your house, or take out a reverse mortgage.

1. Try and collect Social Security. Not sure if social security will be around when you retire, but if it is – try and collect it. I doubt this will be sufficient, but every bit counts.

1. Buy stocks and mutual funds. Compound interest and time can work wonders. Buy good quality stock and bonds, and stock them away for 30 years. When you are ready to retire, your stocks and bonds will hopefully have grown as an acorn grows into a tree.

1. You could continue to work. Hey, retirement was a concept from forty years ago, when people died young. Now people live a lot longer. Your mind is active, and so is your body. You can just continue working; this way you don’t have to worry about your standard of living declining.

1. Buy an annuities or insurance plan. This assumes that you have money now, with which to buy – or you have a large income. If you do, remember to research annuities and insurance plans before buying.

1. Inherit some money. This means you have to have affluent relatives who remember you in their will. If you don’t have accommodating relatives, consider marrying someone who does; you can still inherit as the spouse. This is a difficult road to travel and I caution the faint of heart from doing this. Marrying for money is hard work. Be prepared to be called a gold digger if you go this route.

1. Live off your investment income. Accumulate a large portfolio of stocks and bonds worth several million dollars and live off the interest. This takes a lot of discipline, if you don’t inherit any money to begin with, but it can be done.

There are just a few of the things you can do to retire in comfort. Each of you needs to think about which method or methods will work best for you. We are all individuals and our idea of retirement is different for each of us. So, there isn’t a cut and dried method to use.

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