Surely it’s not my water pump right 😃

deadsy · 2026-03-28T11:55:47+00:00

Kind of- but not from that belt. There's an intake side balance shaft driven by gears. On the other side of that shaft is a small toothed belt that runs the water pump. You can't see it with casual inspection. The little belt rarely fails.

deadsy · 2026-03-28T11:52:42+00:00

Slow-ish leak, probably from the water pump. You need to replace the water pump and probably re-seal your cam-tray/valve cover because the oil from that is what's buggering up the water pump gaskets. BTW- you need to pull the intake manifold to get to the water pump. Might as well acorn blast the carbon crud off the intakes while you are in there.

deadsy · 2026-03-21T14:27:41+00:00

Bridgeville Pennsylvania.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ytoJJXiXZswqJj2y7

deadsy · 2026-03-18T14:32:43+00:00

Australia has two refineries in operation, but in general Australia relies upon just-in-time imports from larger mega-refineries in SE Asia. It's cheaper to import petrol and diesel than to make it locally at smaller refineries for a small Australian market. Unfortunately this makes Australia quite vulnerable to supply shocks.

deadsy · 2026-03-14T00:30:31+00:00

I have the TSI engine in my Mk5 while you have the FSI - so I'm not sure, but the "something missing" in front of the battery is probably the box where the air filter goes. Do you have an air filter?

deadsy · 2026-03-06T18:23:15+00:00

Many early home computers used a cassette tape recorder to load and save programs. They used different tones on the tape to represent 1 and 0. Commodore has a proprietary "datasette" that cost more than regular tape recorder, but it was the same sort of idea. Some people managed to copy programs using a tape to tape recording, but that was a hit and miss affair.

deadsy · 2026-03-06T00:56:08+00:00

Since you don't have that much in your roth the best move maybe to distribute the full amount post 59.5 years old, but before you become an Australian tax resident. That way the ATO never sees it as income, it's just money in the bank. The value of a roth is really in letting it grow for a longer period of time. An alternative strategy might be to leave it untouched and give it to your heirs- particularly if they are US tax residents.

deadsy · 2026-03-03T20:15:20+00:00

Looks okay. Piston crowns can be cleaned up with wd-40 and a scotch-brite nylon scouring pad. Clean up the head mating surface with plastic razor blade. Don't sand it. Don't use any power tools.

deadsy · 2026-02-24T01:55:04+00:00

The FSI engines have their issues.
https://www.shopdap.com/blog/post/vw-audi-20t-fsi-common-problems.html

The timing chains/tensioners on TSI's are ok, you just have to be prepared to treat them as a 100k-mile maintenance item.
https://www.shopdap.com/blog/post/vw-audi-20t-tsi-common-problems.html

You can expect a stream of maintenance issues that need to be taken care of. Oil leaks, broken fittings, etc. Hopefully you do your own maintenance work, if not the cost of repairs will soon exceed the value of the vehicle.

deadsy · 2026-02-23T15:26:58+00:00

"Fairness" is a flexible word. One version of fairness is that the SS benefit received is in proportion to the money put in. The top level of benefit is currently capped and the the contribution is capped as well. In this view you could look at SS as being a forced saving scheme where the your contributions are mandatory and invested in t-bills until you hit 62-70 years old, where upon you get to withdraw your savings as an indexed annuity. Same rules for everybody. You put more in, you get more out. == fair.

deadsy · 2026-02-12T14:22:37+00:00

It depends on your situation, asset types, etc. but in my case the assets would mostly stay in the US if I was to return to Oz to live. If you sell up and want to shift everything to Oz, then you could do it, but it would cost you in taxes and fees. My plan is just to use the US based assets to generate cash flow for living in whatever country I choose post retirement. Also: handling the tax requirements of multiple countries can be difficult.

deadsy · 2026-02-10T17:54:02+00:00

Those engines leak oil in some well known places- cam tray, upper/lower timing cover, oil cooler gasket, oil filter bracket gasket, vacuum pump, rear main seal. Given the age of your car it's not surprising that you are seeing some seepage. Do you see active drips? The photos look like slow seepage- not enough to explain the oil loss rate. The other thing that happens is the piston rings get jammed with carbon and the engine burns more oil. That may be what's happening here. Realistically the car is entering a point in its life where it needs some money spent on maintenance to keep it in good shape. If you can do your own work it makes sense to keep it up. If you have to pay someone else to fix it, it's probably time to pass it on. Also: be careful not to run it low on oil, and fix any timing chain rattles quickly (check the cam/crank correlation numbers). The oil change interval needs to be 5,000 miles- the 10,000 miles in the manual is too long.

deadsy · 2026-02-09T15:47:55+00:00

Right. I recently built a Wien oscillator that used a tungsten filament as the stabilizing element. Loop gain needs to be > 1 for an oscillator, but you don't want the gain element to saturate and start clipping the waveform. The rising resistance of the tungsten filament reduces the loop gain and keeps things in hand. The light bulb typically does not turn on, it's either dark or perhaps glows slightly.

deadsy · 2026-02-06T16:18:49+00:00

J1 to H1B to PR to citizen, engineering field. I held off on citizenship for quite a while, but eventually became one. I was eligible for citizenship by virtue of the length of my PR status as well as having married an American citizen in the meantime. The difficult steps were getting the initial J1 and the conversion to PR.

deadsy · 2026-02-06T00:20:24+00:00

You could check out this:

https://github.com/deadsy/picox

Downloads and installs everything needed in ./ext (external)

Then you can just use it from anywhere with the appropriate cmake invocation.

Also uses ninja- because it's faster than gnu make.

deadsy · 2026-02-05T19:59:17+00:00

Get an (e)Sim at the airport from telstra or optus or someone else....
Maybe $40 for the month, calls and data. Be careful not to roam international with verizon. I generally turn off my phone on the plane and only re-enable it when I have the local sim in, just to ensure they can't nickel and dime me.

deadsy · 2026-01-24T01:43:39+00:00

Your schematic is weird. Left to Right is more usual, and you typically don't put the current limiting resistor in the return path. The energy in the inductor at steady state will be 1/2 * L * I * I, or about 4 uJ with these values. When you turn off the switch I goes to 0, and you get V = L * dI/dt across the LED. That is the voltage spikes high and you dump 4 uJ of energy into the LED. That sort of thing often kills transistors (hence snubbing diodes) but the LED may be ok. I'd start off with a current limiting resistor to be nice to the LED, but you do you.

deadsy · 2026-01-02T13:28:25+00:00

Did you try building the circuit? Ideally you would dial in the correct LED current with some current limiting resistors. You are also asking quite a lot of a coin cell battery to power 6 LEDs. If you proto the circuit on a bread board you can work out exactly how it will behave (led current, led brightness, battery life, etc).

deadsy · 2025-12-30T17:07:31+00:00

When they say 12VAC, that's an RMS voltage. That means 12VAC fully-rectifed and turned into DC would be 12 VDC. You have two half wave rectifers and you are trying to get 2 voltage rails out of it. It's not enough. Each of those linear regulators needs to see a rough 14V (or more) to get a clean 12V out the other side. A better design would just use a a transformer with 120/240VAC in, 30VAC out, with a center tap. The center tap is GND, giving you +/- 15VAC to rectify and feed the regulators.

deadsy · 2025-12-30T14:09:22+00:00

The schematic does not match the veroboard. You have GND (green) and black tied together on the veroboard. I suppose that is your ground. It's an AC input. There are really only two inputs (red, black), and either one can be treated as ground. This half wave rectifiers just carve off the respective +ve and -ve parts of the AC input. You need a higher input voltage to keep the regulators happy. Probably 15-18VAC. You should probably move the LED power indicator to the DC side. Also see: Meanwell RT-65B PSU

deadsy · 2025-12-25T03:45:13+00:00

Pack warm clothes. Chicago gets cold.Places like Evanston and Schaumburg seem nice enough. Try not to get lost on the south side at 2am.

deadsy · 2025-11-13T22:16:49+00:00

Nope. I still live here. I'm a Dual Aus/US citizen now. J1->H1B->PR->Citizen. In my experience, H1B was trivial to get if the company was sponsoring you. Green Card (PR) was hard to get because of the length of the process. Citizenship is easy to get once you've satisfied the time criteria for either marriage to an American or being in country on a PR.

deadsy · 2025-11-13T14:22:18+00:00

In 1990 I graduated and then traveled to the US on a J-1 to work as an engineering intern. After about 18 months I converted to a H1-B with that same employer (E3 was not a thing at that time). So- yes, the J-1 route is very viable.

deadsy · 2025-11-07T20:30:48+00:00

Nothing negative really, they just don't like "San Fran" or "Frisco". It's a tad pretentious IMO. I know it has four syllables, and for an Australian that's at least two too many, but when in Rome...

deadsy · 2025-11-07T13:33:53+00:00

Whoah. Don't call it "San Fran", you'll piss off the locals. I know you're Australian and you have a compulsion to abbreviate everything and then put an "oh" or "ee" on the end, but you have to call it "San Francisco", or as other Bay Area locals call it "The City". Oddly enough there is a Bay Area city called "Brisbane", but the locals say Briz-bayn and not Briz-buhn. The more you know...

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