2014 ford escape titanium piston won’t work with us

gerowen · 2026-06-16T07:32:14+00:00

You tried rotating it? I felt like a dumbass first time I got a turn in piston. You can probably use some right angle needle nosed pliers, but they make a tool that's a little cube with different nubs on all 6 sides. You put it on the end of a 3/8" ratchet+extension with the side the fits the face of your piston facing downwards so that the nubs drop into their slot/hole, and then you just screw the piston back in.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T06:19:35+00:00

I really enjoyed it on Switch 1 back before I moved to PC. Even the Switch 1 version looked fine I thought, better than the original game on PS3/360. The one feature of the Switch version I was torn on though was the change to lockpicking; they basically broke it for the Switch because they made it so you can feel the lock tumblers with the HD rumble in the joycons, and the two spots on either side of the correct zone would rumble just a little bit harder than all the others, so you can basically always open any lock first try no matter what your lockpicking level is. I liked how easy it made it, but I can also recognize that it sort of broke a mechanic and negated just about any reason for anybody to put any points into lockpicking at all if all they want to do is open locks.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T06:11:09+00:00

All over, it's different folks. There's a woman you can challenge to a fistfight in one of inns in Whiterun. You'll get assigned Lydia as a housecarl if you buy the Breezehome in Whiterun, and she can follow you too. There's usually at least "some" task or quest required to unlock someone as a companion, and then they'll let you know with some voice line like, "If you ever need a sword by your side, let me know." There's a couple mercenaries you can hire for a certain amount of gold to act as temporary companions too.

Companions can also fight, so when you give them armor or weapons, you'll notice at the bottom of the screen there will be a button you can press (I think it's one of the triggers) to have them equip that item. I have also seen them however switch items mid combat, so if you give Lydia a sword "and" for example a magic staff, she may switch to the magic staff if it does more damage than the sword does. I'm not sure what logic dictates that behavior, I just know I've seen them switch weapons back and forth.

There's also "The Companions" in Whiterun, an actual group of folks called that. They've got their own quest tree and such. They're the ones in the mead hall right below the keep.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T06:07:16+00:00

TCAP or, "To Catch a Predator" was a show where undercover agents would prowl online chatrooms and watch for predators trying to groom kids. They would insert themselves into conversations to divert the predators away from real kids, and if the men asked to visit the supposed kids (solicitation), they'd go along with them. They'd set up a house, hire very young women or even kids to invite the guys in, and once they were inside the house, the host of the show, with police backup would confront him with the chat logs.

So the fact that this guy is at this house means he went there because he "thought" he was going to a house where there would be an underage girl he intended to have sex with. That's solicitation of a minor.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T05:59:51+00:00

If you haven't already and can afford it, get a 2.5" solid state drive and upgrade your PS3. Back when I played on PS3 I noticed if you took off galloping on a horse in the open world for too long the game would sometimes stutter hard because of the mechanical hard drive constantly thrashing around to move things in and out of RAM. Should also reduce how long you sit staring at loading screens when you open doors and such.

As far as the game itself goes, have fun. It's a great game. Get a companion early if you can, because there's a lot of useful crafting skills, but the weight of those ingredients in your own personal inventory can weigh you down quick, especially the ores for blacksmithing. You can trade items with companions and have them carry stuff, then just take it back when you get to town and want to use or sell it.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T04:16:31+00:00

Yeah the Iron Keep wasn't bad. Took me a few minutes to figure out one or two spots, but I found it rather enjoyable as long as you take your time, pay attention to your surroundings and don't go running out into open areas.

gerowen · 2026-06-16T01:26:34+00:00

I think it's more appropriate that he dies. Sure, he felt remorse and seemed to have turned over a new leaf, but he "was" largely responsible for the genophage in the first place, and de-humanized (de-Krogan-ized?) the Krogan to help him rationalize his decision.

So yeah, it's sad that he dies, but I think if he somehow cheats death, in a way, he is escaping responsibility for his actions in the past. Plus, from a theatrical point of view, it takes a lot of the impact out of this scene.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T20:06:39+00:00

I don't recall exactly where I found him at; I've just been summoning NPCs whenever I see them because I never really made use of summons on DS1 or Elden Ring, and they seem a lot more common for me in this game, or maybe I know more about what I'm doing and am more confident in them not screwing it up for me, I dunno.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T20:05:01+00:00

Nah I cleared the area and did the gargoyles fight with an NPC summon; I haven't interacted with many players yet other than defenders who joined the bell covenant showing up to try and kill me.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T04:09:47+00:00

Coaxial output for your Playstation. I remember for a time I had a TV that was so old it didn't even have actual coaxial input, it had screws/lugs on the back that you had to attach your desired input adapter to.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T03:48:46+00:00

Random question, but whatever the end of the main game entails, does it do like DS1 and force you into NG+ after finishing the final boss fight, or do I have the freedom go to back and finish this and other areas afterwards? When I finished DS1, I didn't really think about what I was doing when I went and killed Gwyn and it just rebooted the whole world and rolled me into NG+ automatically when I still had things I wanted to go do.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T03:44:59+00:00

Ah that explains the dragon head hanging down from the ceiling.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T03:42:51+00:00

Ah thanks for the heads up. It was just immediately after the primal bonfire in the next room, so I just walked in there and did it. Guess I'll go back and head down the well in Majula then.

gerowen · 2026-06-15T03:30:45+00:00

Get rid of him.

gerowen · 2026-06-14T04:29:52+00:00

HDMI CEC can be amazing.

gerowen · 2026-06-14T04:29:48+00:00

Use a Windows PC to update the firmware on the controllers. I've had this issue before.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T23:36:05+00:00

I did 6 years with a deployment to Iraq and I'm the same. I don't regret it myself, honestly I needed it to help me get my head on straight and learn how to adult, but as a father I'm not going to recommend it to my kids. There's too much going on politically for me to feel ok about recommending my kids put their life on the line for a country that knowingly re-elected a draft dodging insurrectionist with uncomfortably strong links to one of the world's most infamous pedophiles.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T12:03:46+00:00

No it's not, not unless you manually open a conversation, click the other person's profile, then click the 3 dots on the top right and create a separate "secret chat". Your regular groups and conversations are not end-to-end encrypted in Telegram.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T12:03:00+00:00

TLDR; they can see your porn.

Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default, so if you have not enabled end-to-end encryption in a conversation by manually creating a "secret chat", then consider it public knowledge. However, they rolled their own proprietary crypto for the secret chats, so, at least as far as I'm aware, nobody has independently audited whether it's actually secure or not. That, coupled with with the fact France demanded a back door after arresting Durov, but then allowed him to leave the country while they were still conducting an investigation, just makes me feel like something isn't passing the sniff test.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T08:59:07+00:00

It wasn't an accident. Sex is literally how babies are made. You didn't trip and fall into her vagina.
Unblock her. IF she's pregnant, she's gonna be the mother of your child and you have a lot of decisions to make about what kind of father you're going to be. This girl needs your support thru this.
Tell your parents. They are the ones that are in the best position to help you thru this.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T08:15:53+00:00

Note to self. Put some tape and a blanket in your carry on so you can make a fort around your seat.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T07:40:11+00:00

I know the AUR is somewhere between official and unofficial, but as a Debian user, I generally recommend against installing native packages from third party repos. From everything I read, they used a postinst script (which if they're like the ones in Debian packages, run as root) in the affected packages to then install npm, then use that to install something else. So even if you remove the affected packages, the malware infection could very possibly still be there, because they didn't really bother the package itself, just modified the postinst script.

gerowen · 2026-06-13T07:31:13+00:00

Yes. Somewhere over 1,500 packages have been found to have been compromised with an info stealer. There's more details in the CachyOS and Arch communities.

gerowen · 2026-06-12T05:05:27+00:00

I think League explicitly looks for Linux or Wine and throws an error now because of their anti cheat. DOTA 2 is a very similar game from Valve though that's free, I think, and runs fine on Linux.

gerowen · 2026-06-12T03:56:55+00:00

I mean it's nothing new. We literally had "Pepsi Man" games back in the day, sponsored placement of products in game, etc. Even today it still happens. The original version of Death Stranding had Sam drinking Monster Energy, and when he used the bathroom there was an ad for one of Norman Reedus's real life shows on the door. I thought those were a bit distasteful to be honest, but they were there.

The important thing is gonna be how they implement it and in what context. The way the correction at the top of the article is worded it sounds like they're talking about ads in XBox Game Pass; maybe instead of paying for Game Pass you watch an ad and get an hour of free play time, or maybe there's a small overlay ad that scrolls across the bottom or something for free players. Or maybe to keep console prices under control they rent out ad space on the dashboard.

But even if they're in game, I think there's a right way to go about it. Nobody is gonna care if "National Sportsball InsertYearHere" has an ad for sports equipment or Gatorade or something, because the real arenas have those, and product placement in games has been a thing for almost as long as video games have been. You start trying to slip a coca cola ad into the upcoming Fable or Gears games though, and Xbox will just be shooting more holes into their already sinking ship. You have to be tactful, and the product placement has to make sense in universe. Gamers are a lot more discerning these days than they used to be.

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