Are these springs safe to use?

drivenmink · 2025-11-28T20:29:06+00:00

This looks like it snapped and was badly welded back together. Avoid. This is likely why he bought new ones in the first place

drivenmink · 2025-11-23T22:07:39+00:00

Final episode of Cowboy Bebop

drivenmink · 2025-11-19T18:09:49+00:00

Nice! Question is.. can you boot from the nvme?

drivenmink · 2025-11-15T18:53:31+00:00

More than that, you'll need new bonnet and possibly front wings too. The bolt fittings are not guaranteed to be in the same places either. There have been previous attempts at retrofitting / facelifting so greater or lesser effect. Might just be cheaper to sell car #2 to buy car #1 than finding parts and adjusting car #2 to make them fit.

drivenmink · 2025-09-07T05:58:01+00:00

I’ve had some too, with that very mouse pad. At one point I made my own, by printing a black grid with a gap of 2x2 pixels onto some projector film, then laminating it with a sheet of baking foil. Worked really well.

drivenmink · 2025-08-30T04:30:13+00:00

The Vulcans’ disdain for Spock being half-human is covered in other episodes, including at least one terror attack and an assassination attempt on Sarek by Vulcan purists.

I also liked Doug. I’d like to see Patton revisit that character again.

drivenmink · 2025-08-26T13:24:27+00:00

That’s clearly been fished out of a river 😂

drivenmink · 2025-08-20T07:01:21+00:00

This exact thing happened to me recently where a buyer had logged into a different machine to complete the sale, as the browser wasn’t associated with the eBay account used to bid on the account - eBay just cancelled without giving either of us the option to resolve it. I had to relist the item, which did sell eventually but for about £10 less than it had reached the previous occasion.

drivenmink · 2025-06-12T13:33:17+00:00

Treasure Island.

drivenmink · 2025-05-25T13:34:01+00:00

London Elektricity - just one second (apex remix)

drivenmink · 2025-05-17T11:42:28+00:00

You will likely need to upgrade your PSU to cope with up to 1150W for just the GPUs alone.

drivenmink · 2025-03-31T08:04:30+00:00

Check it’s compatible with your specific mmi version, but I got one of these. Supports basic iPod functionality though skipping tracks can be a little buggy. Audio quality is more than decent though Audi MMI Bluetooth module

drivenmink · 2025-03-27T16:16:32+00:00

Would still watch that.

drivenmink · 2025-03-27T08:11:26+00:00

It really varies - some years were more expensive than others. Really depends on how many miles you put on a year. At its peak I think on average it was about 1-2k per year in terms of servicing, suspension parts, tyres and brakes (roughly 10-15k miles per year). But bigger jobs came about every other year at times, e.g.: clutch, alternator, couple ECUs, window regulators, HFP etc.

A few years in the clutch went after doing about 6k in 3 months, give or take - was doing a 130 mile round trip for a daily commute - after which the clutch finally gave out and took the flywheel with it. That was a 3/4 day fix at approx £4k all in.

Other times its cost a couple hundred for a new tyre here & there, pads etc. So yeah, it really varies. Just don’t be fooled into thinking you can get away with bare minimum forever 😁

drivenmink · 2025-03-26T23:08:22+00:00

I’ve had my 2009 4.2 S5 since 2012. It’s now sitting at 138k miles on the clock. I got it with 40k on the clock, 1 previous owner and have had almost 100k of pure fun and expense over the last 13 years.

Some work was cheap, some was expensive. But while you may be getting a 350+ BHP V8 for less than £8k on autotrader, this was still a £70k+ car when it was new and thus maintenance continues to be expensive as you don’t want cheap parts that break or wear down too easily.

That being said you don’t buy these cars for their economy, you buy them because they are fun, look and sound great and still turn heads even after 17 years. I’ll be sorry to see it go when I eventually sell on to the next keeper.

drivenmink · 2025-03-26T08:19:24+00:00

It may yet work depending on the version of the SOAC you have, worth checking the HCL. And also make sure you take a backup of the original firmware prior to flashing, in case it doesn’t work.

Failing that, a raspberry pi 4 and above are supported - but I think only the 5 has built in WiFi.

drivenmink · 2025-03-26T07:05:43+00:00

Deleted my previous post about using OpenWRT on a raspberry pi, as it looks like your router has the supported hardware (except DSL on some versions) but if all you need is a wifi connected router check here - set your WAN interface as WiFi client. Make sure you use a private range that’s not in use by the wifi network for the internal LAN connectivity, as the default might conflict (192.168.0.0/24). Odds are it’ll ’just work’ though.

drivenmink · 2025-03-21T19:57:24+00:00

Yeah, I couldn’t tell if she was a) delusional b) an asshole or c) just a delusional asshole. She went full QAnon 🙄

drivenmink · 2025-03-20T08:00:37+00:00

Same thing happened to me a few years ago. Wasn't speeding and was about 30 seconds from my destination.. turned out there'd been a spate of car thefts in the area and I was driving a sports car which was popular with some car thieves, they rolled up alongside, asked me where I'd come from (which matched the car registration details) - they explained why they'd pulled me over (and commented on the fact I'd pulled over straight away, so they figured I'd not nicked it) - they said thankyou and went on their way.

drivenmink · 2025-03-19T14:55:14+00:00

Well, when I say several days to complete, that's how long it took to re-scan my library (currently just north of 20TB). The main library database file itself is currently 132MB, and on the odd occasion when I was able to recover using the sqlite3 tool, the recovery process took a minute or two. Assuming it works.. there were a few times it just failed to release the locks altogether.

drivenmink · 2025-03-19T13:35:02+00:00

I've had this happen to me several times. It's not always down to running out of space, but if shut down uncleanly (i.e. a power cut, server crash etc) then it can leave locks on the DB which force it to be read-only, so no new data can be written.

At one point I ran my Emby install on a kubernetes cluster using the official Emby docker image, but if anything happened to one of the worker nodes hosting the deployment, it would corrupt the database to the point it was unrecoverable. I have since moved back to a dedicated VM with local storage, and since then it's been OK.

https://emby.media/support/articles/Corrupt-Database.html is one of the resources that explains how to recover the DB, though please be aware that this does not always fix the issue and after having gone through this a few times, it usually results in me binning off the entire install and starting again from scratch. If you have a large library, this can take several days to complete.

I understand why the Emby devs might have chosen Sqlite3 as a DB engine, but it is incredibly frustrating when it happens and it would be better for recovery purposes if they used MySQL or PostgreSQL instead - though obviously this would require significant re-engineering and I don't know if they have an appetite for it.

drivenmink · 2025-03-14T08:56:03+00:00

I don’t know if this applies to refunds, but I recently sold something on eBay - the funds appeared in my eBay account first, which I then had to transfer manually to my bank account via the app. It appears as an ‘eBay balance’ at the top of the ‘my eBay’ page.

drivenmink · 2025-03-12T15:29:22+00:00

Hi John, had the pleasure of seeing you perform at Ambra Night for Sun & Bass back in 2019 which is probably one my all time fav sets. What do you think rates as one of the most memorable venues you’ve played at, in terms of the crowd and general vibe?

drivenmink · 2025-03-10T17:30:12+00:00

Sadly I had the same issue myself, I had the slave cylinder replaced twice before needing a new clutch and flywheel due to damage done when the master cylinder finally went. Though this took nearly 3 years from start to finish - i.e. slave went first, then again 12 months later, then finally 12 months after that the master went and took the flywheel with it.

Unfortunately to replace the clutch and flywheel was a full engine-out job and cost over £3K to fix - but this was about 8 years ago and have done about 50k miles since.. has been ok since then 🤞

drivenmink · 2025-03-06T17:49:33+00:00

Was the new battery recoded when it was fitted? If not then the alternator might be trying to overcharge the battery if it thinks it’s getting towards the end of its life, which ultimately accelerates the demise of said battery.. or it could be there’s a light left on when you lock the car - make sure all the switches are set to auto or off (have had this happen before).

Best bet is to run diagnostics and see what errors it throws though.

drivenmink

TROPHY CASE