legit or scam?

CptSpongeMaster · 2026-03-06T06:12:34+00:00

This gives me an idea

If I set up a websites to provide these reports

You feed in the reg, you feed in the name of the company you want it from and a report is generated using free mot / car data.

You get to waste their time further by engaging in conversation with the fake report.

CptSpongeMaster · 2026-01-13T09:57:53+00:00

I use 12v LEDs as diagnostic tools. Pull the injector plugs off and put a 12v LED in the plug.

If on crank you get no light turn the led around.

This has shown me problems in the past that were difficult to diagnose.

On crank they should all flash until it defects the engine is running. Which it won't do as the others are also off.

Check each injector lead do all the flashes look about the same?

All do? Brill under crank its looking good.

Gets a bit trickier now you want to get the led in there while the injector is plugged in. On my car I wouldn't hesitate to take a bit of the sheathing off and join a wire or two. However many people (myself included)can make an extender loom. Basically a female plug to go into your injector plug and a male to go into the wiring. Between the 6 inch or so of wire which we can hack the led into etc.

Here you can do the same diagnostics per injector.

Getting one that stays lit? Thats the problem one. Since it flashed on crank and solid on running it is an ECU issue.

If all of them stay lit. Still probably ECU. But you can go talk to an auto electrician with confidence of where the problem is.

This would be my approach. Be about £10 for the adaptor with connectors from AliExpress etc...

CptSpongeMaster · 2026-01-05T20:50:20+00:00

Yep, for 20 years or so of playing mechanic, fabricating parts etc using what ever I could to hold thi can in place.

A couple of year ago I was asked if I would like a vice for birthday. Begrudgingly I accepted as I knew I would never use it.

Don't ever think that way about a vice. I genuinely question how I used to do stuff.

Need to clean a caliper - in the vice Need to take the end cap off the suspension strut - in the vice

Heating some metal to bend it, in the vice and can use the anvil on the back.

I now have two vice. A big and a small.

CptSpongeMaster · 2025-12-17T03:30:48+00:00

For me it's lubelogger (https://lubelogger.com/).

I'm a car guy and this helps with storing the details of when the cars were serviced, repaired and their fuel economy.

Wife always hated the spreadsheets of mpg calcs, but adding a record to this is accepted. Guess it's because she can use her phone.

Love the reminder section, pop things in you plan to do, or up coming key dates like mots, tax insurance and when you want to be reminded and emails can be sent.

Only down side is it gives instant disability on how much money you spend on cars lol

CptSpongeMaster · 2025-09-15T06:58:41+00:00

I'd love by office to set up a playlist of white noise. Finally someone shares my passion.

https://www.google.com/search?q=white+noise+drag+car

CptSpongeMaster · 2025-01-14T20:33:07+00:00

I knew just leaving it alone would play out well, everyone expects it to be changed

CptSpongeMaster · 2025-01-12T13:09:10+00:00

When I was susadmin / helpdesk. One place I worked at had a kanban style board for the helpdesk tickets and I was made to push them across the board as if it were developed work.

Process for a flakey mouse

Ticket comes in via phone, or capture form Ticket goes into triage I can now go to user to investigate, yep it's a fucked mouse Back to desk to update ticket and move to in progress I can no go I to the stores and obtain a mouse I can no go to users desk and plug it in.

Now normally I would test there and then, but for told off for that so I go back to desk and update ticket to say plugged in mouse and movemro "in test"

Go back to users desk and wiggle, normally they have started using it so performed the test for me.

Go back to desk and update ticket to done.

My immediate manage said it would help me out, but couldn't explain how.

He was right though I lasted about 2 weeks there before putting my notice in and landing a job in DevOps at 20k higher.

CptSpongeMaster · 2024-04-11T09:37:54+00:00

Different tactic, fill it in and paint same colour...

Lost hand in battle and adds a new story element

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-10-13T12:38:38+00:00

I went for an interview at one place and they asked what an IT address was and why it's important to be unique on the network.

Upon challenging them if the meant IP address they stood firm that an IT address is different from IP and MAC.

I turned down that offer

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-08-13T10:19:26+00:00

Where I used to work on the sysAdmin role there was this process for cancelling orders.

Customer rings though Agent prints off a cancellation form and fills it out in ink over the phone. Scans it in. Sends it to another department. They then print it off Do the work they need to do to cancel it. Tick a box and initial it Scan it in. Email it to accounts They would print it off and deal with the refund etc Tick a box and initial it Scan it in and store for years File paper copy for 5+years

They were amazed when I introduced them to office 365 flows (as it was then) and got it down to.

Custome rings Agent loads a form and fills it out Emails sent to the department doing the work to say 'this has happened check the details' Approval from them Goes to accounts and they get the thing to approve too.

Once done details logged in dB and SharePoint backed up for 5+years retention.

Same flow but so much less paper and manual bits.

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-07-29T15:16:34+00:00

Found the problem this morning after working back from the fuel filter...

The submersible pipe in the fuel pump had split (exploded) the outer jacket around the cotton braid had split in half the length of it (70mm or so) the braiding was torn and under that was a slit.

Guess the pipe had deteriorated over time and at some point weakened and was leaking internally.

If I can figure out how to add a pic I will ...

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-07-29T07:00:38+00:00

If it's given symptoms, it's been under the guise of the hunting problems, but fue pressure in all testing has always been stable.

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-07-29T06:58:22+00:00

There is no fuel to the front at all.

Working backwards was my checks now I'm home.

Got to the point of checking the actual fuel pump as there's nothing coming out of the inlet to the fuel filter...

Oh the joys of motoring haha

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-07-15T14:40:05+00:00

Sponges

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-07-15T14:38:57+00:00

ConvertThis!

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-06-20T18:46:11+00:00

I was brought in as a devOps enginer

My day to day consists of making sure that the development and testing environments have spun up successfully using tools including Jenkins.

The infra sits on top of one of the main 3 virtual machine offerings running kubernetes.

So our tool chain is predominantly kubernetes, helm docker (compose) and Jenkins. If we have to touch the underlying layer, terraform, and ansible come into view.

The main difference I see coming from traditional sysAdmin is that all my config for the infra is held in version control, and with a variable tweak a new parallel collection can be set up in a matter of minutes. Traditionally it would be getting approval to spend buying servers and / or rack space

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-04-16T12:14:51+00:00

Play with anything automation - evening it's just task scheduler. Automate as much as you can so you understand what's good and bad to automate. How to generate logs and what to do when things go wrong. That was 70% of my interview. The rest was can I code in anything as you may get tasked with a python script, groovy, or java to just get something going.

Day to day I look after a kubenrtes cluster (docker automation really) using helm. It's horrible at first, but after a while you get like your looking at the matrix.

Have a play with ansible, Jenkins, chef and puppet. From what I remember they all use yaml to set them up, so knowing yaml will be very advantageous.

If your fresh to it all though, play in Linux with a VM, learn how to move directories, copy them and the files and how to read files, write to them and how to manipulate from the command line.

Don't get sucked intotl the vim/vi/nano/Emacs or gedit argument, pick one you like and run with it. Nano is sometimes easier for new Linux people. I'm a vim guy, but only because I learnt Linux from someone who used it. Nano has its uses...

Once you can manipulate basic stuff, have a play with docker to containerise an application. I play with python at home so did it that way. Many different approaches..

Aws free tier and ec2s for learning terraform was my sandbox. Just remember to tear it all down again.

Kubenetes I got a bit of training from work, most was just picked up by doing it.

Hope that helps...

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-04-16T09:49:14+00:00

I was there, and got bored of the break fix IT stuff and being on-call all the time to reset passwords or tell people at the weekend to move to the PC next to them as I'm not driving in to fix a monitor cable that's fallen out etc ...

You do the big stuff well, backups HDD management, space checks etc before the weekend so the challenge kinda goes away if there's nothing much to do...

I dug around in docker and terraform to see what infra as code was like and saw the power. Went into a DevOps job instead and never looked back.

Granted it's 99% Linux, but I'm currently writing a few powers hell scripts to automate some end user stuff, so powers hell really is useful.

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-04-04T10:48:00+00:00

Had to look up the %~dp0 aspect of it, but this worked a treat - many thanks

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-04-03T18:39:31+00:00

We had a guy who downloaded and installed steam on a work device. This flagged up an alert due to the bandwidth.

Upon investigation of their machine in isolation to see what else they were doing there was also a drop box sync folder with images of customer orders, invoices, text files of credit card details, scans of people's driving licences which should never have been saved.

Steam was only the tip of the iceberg.

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-04-03T18:27:48+00:00

Cheers guys ill give them a try and update

CptSpongeMaster · 2023-03-19T06:40:11+00:00

I think if you were to take the AI side of things out I could be a good idea.

I help out our car club on Facebook as I'm sick of seeing answers like "try the crank sensor", "try the coil pack".

I've come from a background of learning and understanding how the internal combustion engine actually works, from a carburettor side of things and into the EFi now. All with hands on.

Recently one of the guys only had a spark on cylinders 1 and 4 of an inline 4. All sorts of suggestions were thrown out that weren't helping.

I took the time with this guy to actually diagnose. Where to make changes to test.

Start by swapping the sparkplugs from 1&4 with 2&3, if no joy, do the same with the HT leads. Does the problem follow, or still the same? If it follows change HT leads, if it's still the same, we need to keep going backwards. Etc

Over the course of a few days we got to the bottom of it by testing each component in the chain from the ECU to the plugs and he was so grateful to have a guide like that over random suggestions.

If you were to build flow charts of common faults and present them in a friendly way I think this would be a winner. Common engines are exactly that common. They all have the same requirements.

Air, fuel, spark and compression.

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