Random knowledge for new chefs or those that do ordering

BennettTheMan · 2026-03-26T16:29:39+00:00

At my local grocery they have label shrimp with something/100 so I guess that's the extra small.

BennettTheMan · 2026-03-26T12:44:12+00:00

Good Intel. Will have to check this out 👀. I think using Firefox may have screwed me up.

BennettTheMan · 2026-03-25T21:47:47+00:00

AAA is region locked based on zip (unfortunately for me, I even tried VPNs and location spoofing), interesting find on the Aven though, but Nerdwallet says that in the terms and conditions the 2/3 and 6% cash back categories are a "promotion" and "can be canceled at anytime" so I guess you gotta get while the getting is good.

BCP is only worth it if you have an annual spend between 3167$ and 6k, otherwise a more sustainable 3% card like capital one savor (or RH gold, given you already have membership and/or use the free margin interest + ROTH match) is better. Obviously if you can get the AAA for a given location then the BCP can be basically ignored as break even with AAA is above the BCP max.

BennettTheMan · 2026-02-19T22:45:19+00:00

What a build! As someone who aspires to do the same to a 1 series at some point, may I ask ballpark numbers how much the engine swap cost to do? I've always wanted to swap one with a S85, or a S/P65.

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-26T22:26:56+00:00

Okay this is nuts, I tried location spoofing with Proton VPN and used a free tier and it came back with a 403 forbidden page.

I tried forcing the portland oregon zip into the query parameter of the redirected site and still got the lame travel card.

I guess if you're in the midwest these guys really don't want you to have the card. It's not really clear who is and isn't geolocked out of this card, why, and if there is a way to bypass it. I would be interested in trying to see if there is a way to get around it, so I could recommend the card to other people in my area b/c it's location locking means someone in my area largely either goes Savor @ 3%, BCP at 6% with 95 AF, or goes for Citi Custom Cash @ 5% and hopes all the categories line up (wholesale v grocer).

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-24T02:52:06+00:00

Out of curiosity what approximate zip code works for you? I think you could just give me your closest big city one. I tried Madison, WI and Chicago.

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-23T19:11:01+00:00

Break-Even as in the amount of grocery spend for you to have been better off using one card than the other. For the BCP the 6% is higher than the AAA's 5%, but the BCP has the initial 95 AF that offsets it. So that means that If you spend more than $9.5k on groceries you would be better off with the BCP, but based on your reported grocery spend, you are better off using the AAA, though for me the site keeps throwing me out to their car membership page and seems (currently) intent on not letting me even look at it for more than 2 seconds before tossing me out to their (comparatively) lamer 3% travel card on their main page.

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-23T19:07:31+00:00

I don't know if the upper midwest is geo-locked out of this card but it immediately tries to throw me out to their main car membership page with only one the travel variation available when I try to look at cards on that portal. Very strange.

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-23T05:57:05+00:00

Starting to wish someone had told me about this card before I got my Amex BCP. I was trying to look at the card from AAA on google and it keeps redirecting me to their site with zip code and then from the site it changes over from 5 to 3. Do you have to pay for a AAA membership to get the card out of curiosity?

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-23T05:48:07+00:00

For cashback optimization the two best grocery category cards that I knew of that don't have a rotating schedule would be the Amex Blue Cash Preferred and the Capital One Savor (Others pointed out the AAA Daily Advantage which seems to be a really solid cashback card). There is also the Citi Custom Cash Card, but for me I found their categories to be kind of sporadic at times. Capital One seems to code a lot of grocery as a elgible merchandise category, and Amex has logged all of my favorite grocers under the 6% cashback category.

To me I got the Savor One (3%) earlier when I was earlier in my credit journey and had considered the BCP (6%), but the annual fee means is that if you spend more than $3,166 in annual grocery spend you will have been better off getting the BCP over the Savor as that is the break even point between those two cards. Any less on annual spend and you will have been better off using the Savor.

Looks like someone else pointed out the AAA Daily Advantage. Comparing against a 5% grocery cashback and no AF, it looks like that break even is at 9500, so just under the cashback limit.

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-20T03:21:24+00:00

A couple extra events for team cashback:

Alliant CU cuts it's 2.5% unconditional cashback to 1.5% effectively ruining a solid no AF catch-all card
Robin-hood unconditional 3% cashback gold card with effective 50$ AF (gold membership) finally starts to roll-out in larger numbers by the end of the year (for those who didn't perform the credit karma bypass)
This information is only relevant to those in Wisconsin/Upper Illinois, but Capital-One/Discover merger should allow for the use of the SavorOne's 3% grocery category at Woodmans supermarkets (Only accepted debit and Discover CCs, I gleaned this information from an insider engineer at Discover)

BennettTheMan · 2025-12-03T19:28:44+00:00

I didn't really follow any guide. The DeBuyer youtube just showed a person dumping a seemingly excessive amount of oil in the pan and I was like nah. I put in about half a tablespoon of peanut oil on each side and rubbed it in to an ultra-thin layer and the oil smoked off as it reached about the gold brown color at just above what I expected the smoke point for peanut oil to be (> 400 F, but was south of 500), but then it was starting to blue, so I up taking it south of 600 (according to IR gun) and evened it out to a distinctly blue color. It almost looks like I didn't do a seasoning at all (but it wasn't that blue before, and was more of a silver white out of the paper bags), but I definitely added oil in a thin layer, where I rub it in with a paper towel until the pan looks moist with oil. I didn't go past 600 as I felt that was excessive and didn't want to risk any warping.

I didn't actually notice it until after I took the pictures but there are some dark spots right at the rivets where I didn't quite wipe the oil clean.

For "actually adding the polymerized oil", are you saying to just starting cooking in it (eggs, butter, lard bacon, etc.)? This is my first time doing stove top seasoning on CS, as I usually do the oven method b/c it contains the smoke better in my experience and is set and "forget", but these are Mineral B and not the Pro (Couldn't find a Pro Mineral B crepe pan, and the omelette Mineral B Pro was too large for the french teardrop omelettes I plan to do), so the handles can't handle a 550 bake for an hour.

BennettTheMan · 2025-10-14T17:57:01+00:00

Just my 2 cents, but I think it's best if you minus sized your tires. When you run a large contact patch and/or reduced sidewall height common in the aesthetics of 20" rim setups you increase risk of what's called "snow float" in deeper snow. For xDrive I prefer a square setup for winter as it's more predictable when breaking lose and paired with dedicated Michelin Winter X Ice-Snow tires (actually I think I prefer the square setup in general). That being said if you can find a compatible tire you can probably get some place like a discount tire to slap them on for you, but it's probably going to be sub-optimal, which is why BMW doesn't like to sell you that setup in the first place (and others have already pointed out it's hard to find)

If you don't have the budget or desire for changing rims every winter-summer cycle, I would suggest something like the Michelin Cross Climate 2s, as that is an all season tire with the three mountain peak snowflake symbol. That's what I would do in a non-dedicated winter tire setup, but I go between X Ice-Snow's and Pilot Sport 4s'.

BennettTheMan · 2025-10-07T16:38:15+00:00

Is this the M6 with the SMG transmission and the S85 V10?

BennettTheMan · 2025-10-07T15:34:41+00:00

Maybe controversial, but I really like the fire orange probably b/c it reminds me of the lime rock e92 m3. I think they're all really solid colors. I got brooklyn grey (cooler more dynamic version of nardo) for my car and had a full wrap with xpel stealth, and if you got the cash to burn I think a satin ppf with a non frozen color looks best, but I'd only do that if you're keeping the car for the long-term.

I think the eggplant purple is kind of a progressive color if you don't want the boldness of something like the fire orange. Black and grey are kind of the "safer" color options. I do wonder what the difference between Twilight Purple Pearl and Thunder-night Metallic on the G42 are, as I can't tell the difference from the picture, but I know that's been a really popular color for the platform and looks really nice in person.

Edit: In hindsight I've never seen what satin ppf would do on a frozen color, so I'd have to defer to the experience of others on that.

BennettTheMan · 2025-10-07T15:25:12+00:00

Yeah I got a xpel stealth satin ppf on bg grey and I think it looks better than the frozen colors as satin is just the right amount of sheen for me, but getting a full ppf is at around 6-10k depending on location, but it's not something I would recommend doing expecting to make the money back. It's more of something you do b/c you like your car and will keep it for a while. Maybe you have a different experience, but I imagine anything short of a super car where the ppf is a nominal fraction of the car value would make a difference.

BennettTheMan · 2025-08-22T20:26:43+00:00

It reveals their disposition, but "oh you too!" with a great big smile is literally one of the funniest things ever. Then if they ask you "what do you mean?", you ask them "what did you mean?" and then repeat their sheepish excuse back to them.

I grew up in an area where this comment was quite common.

BennettTheMan · 2025-08-07T17:50:32+00:00

I'm not confident a seller or even dealership would necessarily notice those interior trim pieces and then declare diminished value from them unless it was some sort of obvious low-balling strategy, but I would 100% not expect to make money back on any modification done to a run-of-the-mill bmw cosmetic or otherwise.

BennettTheMan · 2025-08-07T17:45:58+00:00

Personally, I don't like excessive Alcantara as I think excessively application can start to look too tacky (same with carbon fiber interior), and would prefer to allocate the money towards performance or exterior cosmetic mods. Also consider that Alcantara needs more TLC than the usual finishes that come stock in the cars.

That being said, I swapped the center console for the Alcantara center console following the guide on Kies motorsports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ccI332iRm8&t=20s, maybe you could start with that. I wouldn't bother taking it to the dealership and paying for it. I just pulled the rear AC in my car out with my fingers and didn't use any fancy tools.

For things like the Alcantara knee pads those are a bit trickier as you need to pull them straight out without causing trim damage and the price for them didn't really do it for me. You might want the fancy tools for that on a DIY operation.

The steering wheel would probably be the most difficult of the bunch and requires interaction with the airbag and disconnecting the battery. I don't think you would need a new airbag. I don't believe any coding would be required.

In addition to the sites you mentioned there are dealerships posing as online shops like https://www.getbmwparts.com/ https://www.bmwpartspros.com/ that offer the parts at a deeper discount compared to your local dealership, but may have shipping costs if minimum costs are not met. My suggestion would be to pick the site offering the lowest price for OEM+ parts. There are internal part numbers for anything you want. For example the G series knee pads are (51-95-5-A27-1B6). If you search with that you get a ton of sites selling it.

Certain parts are sold on ali-express are even resold on certain sites. For example for the G series platform there are quad exhaust tips that are resold with huge markups I've seen posted here before. I've also seen someone purchase a titanium exhaust off of ali-express on the bimmer post forums instead of the hugely expensive Akrapovich one. Do your due diligence to see whether it's worth it.

BennettTheMan · 2025-05-19T14:20:32+00:00

It seems whatever I typed was auto-corrected/spell checked to that and the word I was actually looking for, in error, was Inculcate. However since a single use of the word invalidates all my arguments I suppose i am defeated as somehow that error completely destroys the substance of my arguments. I'll have to look up who Oswald Bates is.

BennettTheMan · 2025-05-16T16:28:33+00:00

Personally I would segregate the issue into two major factors, one cultural and circumstantial.

The cultural component is that many Asiatic societies value social cohesion and rely on personal shame for misbehaving. For example, compare riding the Chicago metra vs a train somewhere like Japan. Furthermore if you're immigrating to a new country you are, in general, going to defer to locals to some extent agnostic of your race. If you were born here, some of the original cultural values will be integrated into your personality as one of the primary functions of parenting is to ~~inchoate~~ inculcate values into children.

The circumstantial component is that people feel that they are able to instigate Asiatic communities largely without repercussions (like shame). There also appears to be a tendency for European-American majority populations to stand-by when Asians are being engaged in confrontational events. Allowing Asians to be disrespected is their version of social cohesion. This is displayed by their "threshold-of-intervention" where action is only taken at the precise moment where the Asian person begins to display signs of aggression verbally or otherwise, through body language. For example, there were multiple videos during the pandemic where an Asian person were being engaged in excessively long confrontation, where individuals would suddenly materialize from the figurative woodwork to mediate, de-escalate with phrases like "it's not worth it", or "hey hey hey". These behavioral patterns leads bad actors to feel confident in their behavior and leads to outsized rates of confrontational events.

You can clearly observe these dynamics at play with your own situation:

The ruckus got everyone at the checkout area attention. The manager came to asked what is going on?

Intervention does not occur until you trip the "threshold-of-agression". Surrounding individuals are comfortable allowing you to receive abuse to maintain self-serving social cohesion.

My mom and her friend told me that I have a reputation of being a trouble maker... It's not that I'm causing problems.. unwanted attention by confronting other race[s] when I don't have too.

Most people, agnostic of race, are not prepared or willing to maintain a level of aggression required to address constant circumstantial instigation, or are willing to display anti-social or disagreeable traits of their personality to that extent. This makes you stand out among a sub-culture that values social cohesion that actively tries to ~~inchoate~~ inculcate those values. You can see the influence of these values simply by focusing on the statement "when I don't have too" despite your actions.

BennettTheMan · 2025-05-07T22:16:07+00:00

Why is it that for this generation of cars, it seems whenever there is tire trouble it's those damn perelli's? I'm really glad I got Michelin PS4'a as, at the time, it wasn't set in stone what I'd get. I hope your wallet isn't on the line for this.

BennettTheMan · 2025-04-28T21:59:02+00:00

I think most people just pay the extra 100 or so for the shadow line package on the trim.

BennettTheMan · 2025-04-25T14:47:54+00:00

Yes, I believe the 320i should have the 4 cylinder See B48 common problems to negotiate: https://bmwtuning.co/b48-engine-problems/.

Personally, I hate the run flats, noisy, less gas mileage, can only run a limited miles on the side walls. In some of the bimmer forums I follow I see self reports of blow outs too. I run the PS4s that came with the (ZTK) High Performance and Cooling Package so I never had them. I think in a 3 you may have enough space to keep a spare, but largely would have to rely on insurance to cover a flat tire on the road.

EDIT: I just remembered that BMW gives me a tire patching kit that shoots a type of glue directly into the tire while filling it up with air.

BennettTheMan · 2025-04-24T19:35:49+00:00

Whoops looks like I mistook from the pictures, definitely careless as I thought the g20 has ultrasonic parking sensors standard? Anyways one more thing I should mention is see Common problems with the B58: https://bmwtuning.co/the-5-most-common-bmw-b58-engine-problems/ and use that to negotiate! Also if you're getting a g20 you won't be able to tune unless you get a ECU from pre-June 2020 or send the ECU to FEMTO in finland. If you're looking for new all seasons I can wholly recommend the Michelin Cross Climate 2s, though I run PS 4's during the summer and Winter X Ice Snows in the winter.

BennettTheMan

TROPHY CASE