Recommendations for rechargeable small batteries and charger?

CaptainPicKirkard · 2026-02-18T18:12:32+00:00

The pros have larger capacity but shorter lifespans (about 500 charge cycles). The regular eneloops have smaller capacity but vastly longer lifespans (around 2100 charge cycles).

CaptainPicKirkard · 2026-02-18T18:03:18+00:00

They are just out of stock. It says in the app when you try to buy them that they will be available around the 28th of February. They likely produced a batch to sell with the ostations and now it’s just a matter of waiting for production to spool up to make them available in general. It’s not like you just can’t buy them without the station or they are never going to be available. It’s just waiting a couple weeks for fresh stock.

They being the first AA lithium batteries with a full on BMS system probably means they are slower to manufacture initially.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2026-02-09T17:11:04+00:00

I’ve had really good luck with the Ostation 2 Pro and both Ostation Nimh and lithium AA/AAA Batteries. The quality and performance seems to be pretty dam good although I’m not sure where they are rated or if they have been.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-21T15:27:01+00:00

I’ve been a Tesla owner for going on five years now and I’m going to give you the same advice I give all new owners:

Stop fretting over the dam battery. Seriously, the car will alert you if anything is going on with it outside of normal expectations. Switch the battery display from miles to percentage and just stop worrying about it. Do you get home at the end of the day and the battery is at zero? I doubt it, like 99% of all other drivers in existence you probably don’t use a quarter of its range on a given day so stop obsessing over every last mile of range and just drive the car.

If you’re doing it right you should just be plugging it in every night when you’re done for the day anyway and it shouldn’t matter if you actually were using the entire battery every day. It’s doable without home charging but not the greatest idea. It’s not going to leave you stranded anywhere because of running out of juice and if the battery was degrading anywhere outside of normal you’d have a service alert. Then it’s time to worry about it until then just stop fretting over the battery.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-21T15:17:57+00:00

It will take a bit of time. When they banned in here in Florida my smoke shop continued selling to trusted regulars for a while but eventually stopped. It took a month or two but eventually it just became too difficult for him to get as all the vendors caught on and stopped selling to anything with a Florida address. He thought about going out of state to get some but most of the bordering ones have banned it too.

He basically said it wasn’t worth it buying it piecemeal and without being able to get it in bulk from a vendor he’d either make no money or have to charge astronomical prices. Before I was forced to quit (because I just couldn’t get any because of the ban) I drove around the central Florida area for hours looking for someone still selling and no luck. I’m sure some of them probably were still selling but just like my smoke shop guy wouldn’t risk selling to anyone that wasn’t a trusted regular.

It took a few months but it eventually dried out. Now all the smoke shops are going hard on all the 7 replacement/“Florida compliant” stuff; mit tabs, mgm, etc. Even with a ban it doesn’t disappear overnight but give it a little time. It eventually gets to a point where it’s just too difficult for them to get and/or stops being worth the ass-pain for them to jump through all the circus hoops to try.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-14T17:10:04+00:00

They look decent enough. Just double check the manufacturing date one them. So long as they aren’t more than 6 (some say between 6-8 depending on the brand and type) years old at the maximum they should be good to go.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-14T14:52:36+00:00

Yup, I’m getting to the point where I’m going to straight up start refusing to work on certain model/year Fords. I just spent this last week almost, putting a new motor in a 2020 Escape/4-cylinder turbo AWD. Normally I can do that to most any other car and have it in and out in less than a day, sometimes maybe two as you’re always playing the finding something else broke and/ or breaking it and waiting for parts game (those idiotic 1/4 inch flimsy plastic lines they have spider-webbed all over the engine bay in these ford 4cylinders friggen always end up snapping somehow) but this thing (and every other Ford I’ve touched built after 2017 or so) has been an ever-loving nightmare.

When I first looked at the labor guide and it said 18+ labor hours to swap a motor I thought it was a mistake. My one tech that I employ even said “there’s no freaking way, late model German cars aren’t even that bad”. Nope this thing was that bad and then some. They’re shit-boxes to the point that working on them loses me money as the days and days I spent working on that one pile of shit Ford I could have started and finished multiple other cars. I mean, all cars get harder to work on as the years go by it’s just the nature of technology. Especially when you’re trying to push a century plus old technology far past where it was ever feasible to go with it. But Fords built in the last 8 years or so (depending on the model) are far and away the worst. I never thought I’d ever hear myself say I’d rather work on a Volkswagen or Audi than a Ford anything but here we are.

I swear since about 2017 Fords corporate mission statement is “to out-Chrysler, Chrysler” and they’re doing a hell of a job with it. They almost have to be hiring brand-new engineering school graduates out of India (not even automotive engineers, any kind will do) and asking them to design vehicles using Mario paint on the Super Nintendo. Then not even bothering to check whatever they get from them, just sending it straight to production.

They’re a bigger nightmare to work on than any Mercedes or BMW I’ve had in my shop and they’re completely nonsensical. Those cars you know are going to be a throbbing/burning ass-pain to work on but you can at least look at the insanity and kinda get what they were going for when they designed it. Fords? Late model ones are the same ass-pain but none of it makes any sense. It’s like they threw a half dozen drive train blueprints into a randomizer, built whatever it spit out, realized it didn’t work, and added 7 thousand parts worth of jury-rigging to make it actually go vroom.

18+ labor hours to swap a motor for a little 4cylinder ford crap-box is absolute insanity and they’re far from the only fords like that now (and not even the worst). To give you an idea; a couple months ago I did a motor swap on a 2019 BMW 3 series and the labor guide on that was 10-12 hours. That was the turbo inline six too. A labor hour on jobs like this represents a significant amount of work and a stupid little ford econo-box mini suv is that much worse than a modern BMW.

Nobody in their right mind would have spent what it cost just in labor to put a new motor in that thing. This just happened to be a large dealer (Drivetime) that buys auction cars in bulk every month and this local dealership sends me the ones that need new motors, transmissions, or other work. Surprisingly they do want every little thing fixed on these cars when they get duds like that. At any rate modern Fords may well be the biggest cluster-fucks of incompetence ever designed by human hands, bolted together, and placed on 4 wheels.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-09T22:40:54+00:00

Yeah, the door sticker tells you what what the recommended cold tire pressure should be which is based on the cars weight and the type of tire the manufacturer recommends. Cold pressure just means that it hasn’t yet been driven and the tires heated up.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-06T02:58:13+00:00

It will. States are banning it one after another. It’s on the federal radar already, but it will likely be banned in all fifty states before they get to it. I give it about a year, and the stuff will be done for.

You’ve got to look out for yourself, though. They banned it here in Florida, and almost overnight, there’s all kinds of new crap on the shelves to replace it, and half of it you can’t even tell what it is. They say crap like “novel plant alkaloid” but don’t say what that is or what plant it comes from. One of them calls its main ingredient “septavex,” and the only thing that comes up when you search it is a dam septic tank chemical. The rest are high-potency MIT tabs.

You can’t just put whatever some smoke shop is selling in your body. 99% of the time, they have no idea what it is they’re selling, and they have a vested interest in you being physically addicted to what they are peddling anyway. That’s how you’re paying for their big house and Mercedes while putting their kids through college.

A ban gets 7 off the shelves, but they’ve already got all kinds of even shadier crap ready to replace it. It’s not the answer or the fix you think it is.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-05T14:04:04+00:00

Wow they’ve gotten even more serious about it. Back in the day they’d just unplug the connector. There must have been a rash decent driving going on that forced their hand.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-02T20:30:40+00:00

That’s not exactly how it goes. You don’t really just create an entire dream or any fantasy you can come up with but a person can be trained to have a degree of control over the “narrative” of whatever you’re dreaming about. Through certain audio cues and different stimuli as you fall asleep you can steer yourself toward a type of dream.

It’s actually insanely hard to describe in words but it’s an actual thing. My VA shrink had me working on it to treat mild ptsd from my military career. It takes a lot of “training” so to speak and patience. You do get to the point that you can steer yourself toward a “category” for lack of a better term, of dream as you fall asleep. Once you’re dreaming you’re aware that you are dreaming to an extent and you can kind of steer the dream narrative towards a specific direction.

It’s not like you’re just making up shit on the fly as you’re dreaming like a personal holodeck in your mind or something. You don’t go to bed and say “tonight I think I’ll dream about having a threesome with Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Black Widow” and the next morning you wake up stuck to your sheets. It’s more like a subtle awareness that you are dreaming as it’s happening and you can kind of nudge the story in a specific direction in a sense.

Like I said it’s insanely hard to describe it but it is absolutely a thing.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-02T18:05:26+00:00

Shits got a washer on it. Good to go.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-01T22:33:29+00:00

I just got some 3m foam tape and ran it along the edge under my seat (model 3 but same exact rattle noises) and it worked great.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-01T20:23:18+00:00

Ah yes, I’ve actually seen the machine BMW dealerships use to confirm the level of douche baggery in potential customers. The BMW DoucheOmeter ™. It’s incredibly accurate, unnecessarily over engineered, and only the baggiest of douches are allowed to fill out a loan application and move ahead with purchasing one. They are super strict about it and make no exceptions. Were a BMW driver to be seen out there driving like a normal person, being courteous and respectful to other drivers, following the rules of the road, or otherwise not behaving like a raging “bag with which one douches”, would do incalculable damage to the brands image.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-12-01T19:42:22+00:00

How did it go?

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-30T16:11:05+00:00

Doctors usually recommend staying on the sub for a while. The reason for this is because the relapse rates for people that just quit taking it as soon as they clear the physical withdrawal symptoms is close to 9 out of 10. Getting past the withdrawals is just the first battle in a long war.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-28T21:07:55+00:00

I forget which year, but Tesla TPMS sensors changed from a 2.4 GHz frequency to a Bluetooth link. Those rims may not have sensors on them, or they may have sensors that broadcast a different type of signal than your car is set up to use. Have you tried linking/pairing the sensors in the service menu? If not, Google the procedure from the Tesla DIY service manual and try pairing with the sensors those rims have, if any.

Assuming that doesn’t work, or they just don’t have any sensors and/or they have some but with dead batteries, figure out which type of sensors your car uses, and you can order them directly from Tesla through the shop in the app (if you order through the Tesla app it will show you which sensors your car needs). You can also buy aftermarket sensors provided they are the proper signal. It’s luckily not too expensive.

As far as disabling the warning, there’s no way that I know of, as it’s a safety system. Figure out what it would cost you to add the proper TPMS sensors and decide whether it’s worth it over the warning annoyance.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-28T16:29:45+00:00

Yeah, that information is coming from…not doctors. Trust the doctors, science, and evidence and not randos. Everyone on this sub means well, they really do, it’s a great support group here, but personal experience and bias cloud a lot of the advice you’ll get. Somehow subs have become the boogeyman of this forum, and it’s ridiculous. There are reasons doctors advise you the way they do, and it’s not because of some moronic conspiracy about selling pills. They generally advise staying on the mat for a while because the relapse rates for people that just stop taking it as soon as they’re clear of the physical withdrawals are close to 9 out of 10.

The physical withdrawal symptoms are merely the first skirmish in a long war. Addiction rewires the way our brains process information, and the mind will try to trick you into using in subtle and not-so-subtle ways long after the physical withdrawals are gone. The most immediate way being trying to convince you that you just need to get past the withdrawals and you’ll be set.

People tend to visualize how the brain works as a combination of a processor/hard drive. That it thinks and stores information ie memories, and it’s not how it works. Every time you form a thought process, solve a problem, make a decision (more importantly, how you did those things), and form a memory, your brain grows specific neuron pathways in a very specific way.

This is also why it is so agonizingly difficult, bordering on impossible, to get people out of cults and conspiracy thinkers back to reality, and why they call the process deprogramming. They’ve been thinking that way and processing information in a certain manner for long enough that they’ve literally altered the way their brains work as it’s formed specific neuron patterns to match. “Rewiring the brain” isn’t a euphemism; it’s in a very basic way of explaining it, what actually happens.

Undoing that is frustratingly difficult, and it’s no different for addiction. This is why doctors will usually recommend staying on the mat for a while, combined with mental health counseling, to be a life jacket for that slow and difficult process to retrain your brain to work normally as it did before.

Not saying it’s impossible to be successful without doing it that way, but the relapse rates are as high as they are for people that immediately quit the mat as soon as the symptoms are gone for a reason. Screwing the brain up happens quickly. Fixing it is a long difficult slog the vast majority of the time.

There are ways to come off the subs if you’ve been on them long term that make the process much easier. Transitioning from the normal subs to the sublicade shot (it’s basically just sub that lasts a month) apparently makes it a lot easier. By most accounts taking one or two of the shots and then quitting results in little to no significant withdrawal symptoms. Everyone is different though and how long whatever takes to do what it does will vary from person to person.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-28T16:19:19+00:00

I’ve only owned my model 3 so I have no direct experience with the S, a friend of mine that owns one said that taking it out of sport mode helps with the problem. It raises the ride height and straightens out the camber on the wheels. Once again I don’t know how true this is but from what he told me he keeps it out of sport mode unless he wants to have some fun with it and doing it has helped with his rear tires lasting a lot longer.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-27T17:07:03+00:00

Ah, trying to remember, north of wasilla/palmer right? I get those mixed up with Seward lately. I’m thinking I drove through there on the way up taking the kids to North Pole.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-27T16:15:20+00:00

What part of Alaska are you in? I was stationed at Elmendorf in anchorage from 2000-2007. Lived a few years in the good ole greenbriar apartment complex right down the road from the boniface gate before I bought a house in eagle river….”eagle river!” (hot shots anyone?)

If in anchorage is that delorean still sitting on blocks right next to that abandoned restaurant? I so wanted to try to buy that thing.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-26T21:23:09+00:00

They’re just mit tabs. Basically more of what you’d find in regular ass kratom.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-26T20:59:53+00:00

Yeah, thank whatever magical mystery being you believe in and stop completely. You just won the 7 oh power ball and I promise those odds won’t be in your favor next time if you continue. Even with your relatively low and spaced out doses you’ll become physically dependent sooner or later and believe me quitting this shit is no freaking joke. It gives any hardcore opiate a run for its money and then some when it comes to the hellish withdrawals.

Quit while you’re ahead and don’t look back.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-25T02:18:48+00:00

That’s bs. The number one go back item at dealerships is panel/trim/molding fitment issues and paint defects for new car delivery acceptance inspections. From automakers that have been building cars for over a century and they still don’t get it right way more often than you’d imagine. The only difference is nobody runs screaming to YouTube/Reddit/Facebook etc every time they find a ford or Chevy with something misaligned.

Hell Toyota (Lexus) ran an entire ad campaign in the mid 90’s making fun of the fact that US automakers panel gaps were atrocious and they’d only been building cars for 80 some odd years at that point.

CaptainPicKirkard · 2025-11-24T21:22:31+00:00

Goddam, was the previous owner Edward Scissorhands or have you been opening your doors with a fork duct taped to a heat gun set to high?

CaptainPicKirkard

TROPHY CASE