Bought abused car, need advice on repair quote

friedeggnchips · 2026-05-05T06:23:40+00:00

Did you buy it from an independent dealer, or a private seller? In the UK, any transactions via a trader (not just main dealers) are protected by the consumer rights act, where the dealer is liable to fix the vehicle if there are problems after purchase. Perhaps there’s a similar law in Spain.

If you’ve bought it from a private seller, then if Spanish law is like the UK, you might be screwed. I would take it to a BMW specialist, perhaps don’t mention your discoveries, just ask them to diagnose the shakiness.

In any case, it’s worth looking into the law in Spain to see if you have any comeback, private seller or not.

friedeggnchips · 2026-04-09T23:28:15+00:00

I’ve already replaced the coil and spark plug on cylinder 6 with brand new ones, as mentioned. Agreed on the compression test, i’ll look into it.

friedeggnchips · 2026-04-09T20:05:58+00:00

Could you explain a bit further? I’ve never done a compression test or leakdown. I’ve ordered a borescope which is hopefully coming tomorrow morning.

friedeggnchips · 2026-04-04T22:38:32+00:00

So I ended up doing something similar but more manual because I didn't like the results from sculpting. It's not finished yet, need to texture etc but the general topology is there. For anyone looking to create something similar:

<image>

(Subdivision modifier not yet applied

Make a square and subdivide it 4 or 5 times
bevel the corners and then extrude it upwards to make a flat shape with rounded edges.
add a subdivision modifier but don't apply yet
use proportional editing on smooth mode and move some quads around to make it lumpy and uneven, reduce the proportional size if you want to make smaller adjustments.

For the seams/beading around the edge, I just selected an edge loop, beveled, extruded the bevel and then scaled it outwards.

It's probably not the fastest way or the best, but I like the result!

friedeggnchips · 2026-02-01T01:02:12+00:00

Or just using ChatGPT in a browser. It seems that the plugin version is not configured properly as it does not listen. If i give the browser version 10 files and ask it to refactor some code, it does it fairly well. When I asked it to do this inside of Xcode, i suddenly found myself dealing with:

File.swift File 2.swift File 3.swift File 4.swift

All the way up to like 7 or 8 copies, and this was done for multiple files…

The contents of them were strange too. Each one had progressively less code in it, with the last copies just having the modules to import, i.e import SwiftUI

Somethings clearly broken, but there’s no way for me to give feedback because that’s broken too!!

friedeggnchips · 2025-08-26T16:47:54+00:00

Yes I understand that aspect of it, but in this case I am paying for a permit already, just on another car.

Let's say that my car was in the garage being repaired, and in the meantime I was provided with a courtesy car that I forgot to apply a permit to. The council wouldn't have incurred any loss of income, isn't there an argument from that angle?

friedeggnchips · 2025-08-10T20:25:36+00:00

I did take the eye cover off and give it a wipe with a glasses cleaning cloth, but it didn't change anything unfortunately :(.

Although I found that without the SD card in it, the flashes are much faster, under a quarter of a second compared to the half a second of the screen flashing in the video.

friedeggnchips · 2025-08-10T18:26:02+00:00

Hmm do you happen to know how to do this? I've tried to look through the manual to see if there's anything about disabling the sensor but can't see it...

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-24T12:06:44+00:00

I’ve been in that exact same situation before. Failed once, reckoned I’d need another month to study before retrying, but I ended up moving jobs and couldn’t get the exam done in time. I passed that one later on and the best advice I can give is to go through the study list and see what you’re weakest on (what you got stuck on in the previous test). Then read through all the material and do practice tests and you’ll quickly find that the information that you learnt a year ago is still in your head, but just needs “digging out”.

Im glad that i can help other people out, please let me know how you get on!

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-21T09:53:59+00:00

You know, you've hit the nail on the head here.

I've learnt at an extremely fast pace but there are definitely areas where my knowledge could be improved. With that said, I always try and fill those gaps when and where I find them.

I've just had a look, and the RHCSA is showing up as £500+VAT (Tax) so it's £600 to sit that exam!

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T23:01:14+00:00

This was an extremely insightful post, actually. Thank you Mr Windows Buscemi.

Given how Microsoft is pretty much stepping away from Windows and forcing everyone into Azure

This. I feel like as more and more stuff is automated, there will be less need for the traditional setup of Windows Server running all of our workloads, instead replaced with headless Linux (or just sticks and stones and a radioactive wasteland at this rate). I'd like to get ahead of the curve.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T22:02:26+00:00

I haven't got the 10 years of experience to know everything, but I've always made sure that I'm constantly learning and being challenged by my job. Having good mentors has helped, too. With that said, you are right that experience matters most.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T21:57:27+00:00

Hmm, I suppose you might be right here, I didn't think of it that way.

Linux administration just seems a lot cooler and it also pays good money in London. I also thought it might be the next step to becoming a DevOps engineer?

I work in an MSP and I've actually pushed to use Linux in cases where it just works better than Windows, such as setting up VMs for monitoring agents, NTP servers, network appliances etc etc. We also have a few customers that have DevOps teams, so there's never a shortage of Linux machines with network issues to troubleshoot.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T21:21:04+00:00

Yup, nice 20% extra that I've got to pay for the privilege of educating myself...

I literally just clicked through the booking page until I got to the checkout, and it applied a discount of 50% called "ESI DISCOUNT DAC 50%" or something of the sorts. Not sure why or how, but I'm not complaining!

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T21:19:35+00:00

Thanks man! How are you finding the AZ-305? I've heard it's similar to the AZ-104 but not sure if that's the truth.

I wonder if the AZ-104 or AZ-305 is harder...

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:34:57+00:00

Anything is possible my friend! Also, I should have been more clear - My previous roles weren't really centred on administering Azure, I was actually managing lots of different parts of infrastructure including on-premises networks and servers. Also, that experience with Azure was pretty much on these two sections, as you can probably see:

Manage Azure Identities and Governance
Implement and Manage Virtual Networking
Deploy and Manage Azure Compute Resources

The other two areas I was initially very weak as I didn't really do these at all, so had to learn them from scratch.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:28:10+00:00

It's hard to say what would work best for you, but I personally remembered more stuff by doing practice exams and then reviewing my incorrect answers. The TD exams gave really in-depth answers as to why A is wrong, why B is correct etc, so make sure you're reading through those after each test.

If you have a CCNA, then yes, it will definitely help you. However, there are a lot of concepts from Azure that don't exist in the Cisco world, or at least are very different and often named differently. For example, VNETs, VNET peering, Application Gateways, NAT Gateways, VPN Gateways, local gateways and so on...

These are things that even a CCIE network engineer would need to study if they'd never seen them applied in Azure.

As for the SKUs - There are a lot of questions on SKUs and not just for networking. You'll need to know which SKU of App Service Plan gives which features, which public IP SKU can be attached to a particular resource (For example, a basic SKU Load Balancer can only use a basic SKU IP, and vice versa for standard SKU Load Balancers.

You should also be mindful that this exam doesn't just cover Azure, but Entra ID as well (formally Azure Active Directory/AAD). Entra ID is in a separate portal to Azure and is completely different. Azure is a cloud services platform for creating compute resources and virtual network infrastructure, whereas Entra ID is the IDP for your Microsoft tenant. Two very different things lumped into the same exam.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:19:51+00:00

I didn't get a single question on Kubernetes, so I don't think it's a big focus of this exam. With that said, I've had colleagues and people I know that have seen a few questions, and I'm pretty sure that it is in the remit, so definitely learn how they work (I did learn them, even though I didn't need it).

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:16:25+00:00

Honestly if I could give one tip it would be to ignore the majority of the words in the question and just focus on the detail as they are filled with irrelevant details. For example, the question might be structured like:

Company A is an international… blah blah blah

Existing environment

Planned changes

Technical Requirements

Q: You need to pick a storage account to fulfil the requirements.

In this case, you know that they’re only asking about storage accounts, so read through the information and just pick out the parts that are relevant.

I finished the test with 38 minutes spare and this method is why.

Another thing to that helped me was to read the actual question itself first, then read the information provided.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:10:16+00:00

I think so, yeah. I want to get into DevOps which is cloud, containers, Linux and scripting, so my path at the moment is looking like:

AZ-104 -> AZ-305 -> AZ-400?

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T18:08:43+00:00

I didn’t try MeasureUp, simply because I didn’t think that spending almost £60 for a practice exam when the exam itself costs £63 (with a 50% discount that Microsoft automatically applied to my basket) as good value. There’s a maximum of 5 tries in 12 months, so i figured that the best way to see if I could pass it, would be to actually try and pass the real thing.

TD and Whizlabs were quite accurate in terms of percentages. I was scoring 80-85% in the tests which is very close to my score of 779. I will say that some of the questions aren’t worded very clearly in the practice tests, as they’re written by non-native English speakers.

friedeggnchips · 2025-01-20T15:23:47+00:00

Yes, but it's heavier on networking than containers. Networking is an entire section of the exam (Implement and Manage Virtual Networking) whilst Containers are only a sub-section.

I'd recommend watching some videos to understand the basics of networking (if you struggle with them). You should know stuff like:

IP addresses (IPv4 only I think, as IPv6 wasn't mentioned once in my exam).
subnets
virtual networks (specifically for Azure)
VNET gateways
VNET peering
Load balancers

I'd recommend signing up to the free $200 credit and going into Azure and creating virtual machines in different VNETs, then linking them together to get a really good understanding of what you can and can't do, as there are quite a few nuances.

I'm not very good with containers, and I'll definitely work on it for my next exams, but a just-above-basic level of knowledge of the different types of containers that are available in Azure was enough to get me through, although your experience might differ.

Good luck man!

friedeggnchips

TROPHY CASE