Exactly, and it’s not just suspension and road contact that poses risk to others. It’s the folks that buy eBay HID kits or retrofitted LED ‘angel eyes’ or get rid of their third brake light or add 50” lightbars or KC HiLites or Hellas or use purple/yellow/blue halogen bulbs or tint their lenses or obscenely blow smoke…

If the speedometer is off, the odometer doesn't record correctly either. That can be an issue after awhile.

Buddy with a 2015 Silverado 1500 tried convincing me that the manufacturer warranty covered accidental damage to his bumper, but that’s also from the dealership that told him they wouldn’t honor the 24/24k service/oil/filter. He paid for his first couple of oil changes until I told him that a Chevrolet dealer has to…

My boss was the kind of guy that basically expected me to close sales and advertise myself while I was on vacation or at family reunions. One of my hobbies was working on cars, and he thought it was a conflict of interest because “We’re not making money off of it”. Seriously, I got a letter from HR one day explaining…

A-ha. I just wondered how legacy equipment was maintained in more mission-critical environments than a small retail chain. Thanks for filling me in!

How do you anticipate or prepare for PSU failure? CPU? RAM? BIOS? Our only ‘spare’ parts for machines over 7-ish years old are in used machines and you better hope those function properly.

Telemarketers.. I lie to them. I’ve had calls asking me to make an appointment for siding/window estimates, and I agree. No idea where they show up. Calls about an extended warranty on ‘my’ 2013 Toyota Camry (that I don’t own)? Sure, sign me up! At least I haven’t seen a single bill yet.

You’re not always going to be able to feasibly obtain parts for those old computers, and you have no idea how reliable a 14 year-old hard drive is going to be after serving all 14 years in the field.

2003 Monte Carlo SS. The girl I was with was impressed with it enough (obviously) that she wanted to buy it when I decided to get a pick-up truck. We stopped seeing each other before she bought it.

God yes.

Fingerprints are related to identities, therefore should be treated as usernames - not passwords.

With all those $40 coupons and not a single converter under $50 that I was able to find.

My 2003 Monte Carlo SS came with an oil pressure gauge and the DIC even displayed a message when the oil went about a quart below spec of full sump and filter. Oh and it also wrote RPMs to NV memory and gave me a heads-up when the engine had ran for so long so I could get the oil changed.

Aha, I thought you wrote DE in your original!

I DD a ‘98 Frontier XE 5MT 4WD (D22). It has the KA24DE and 134,xxx miles - all original. The KA24DE was available until at LEAST 2002 in the Frontier. I off-road regularly and commute 100+ miles per day during the week. They don’t particularly like going over 75MPH (maybe 80 since my speedometer isn’t accurate to my…

I saved a couple of C2D SFF Dells from being junked. I have Untangle on one and Zentyal on the other, then a Netgear WNDR3400v2 with DD-WRT as an access point. Untangle does routing and Zentyal does DNS/DHCP. The setup does require one of the desktops to have 2 functioning NICs though.

“say I had two copies of a file in different locations”

Not that I don’t think this is a great idea (because it is), but I bought a barely-used Lenovo T60 for $22 at a garage sale and installed Elementary OS on it. If there’s anyone out here who’s looking for a WebTV setup, wants to learn by tinkering, and cares enough to keep a laptop out of a landfill, I recommend it.

Also, don’t consider redundancy a backup. A colleague bought a RAID NAS to keep the only copy of his files on, because it was redundant. He downloaded an attachment from a rogue e-mail (important_documents_to_sign_for_prize_OPEN_IMMEDIATELY.pdf.zip.exe) and some crypto-variant damaged every single file because the NAS…

So, the “de-duplication” process is just a complex lossless compression algorithm, or in layman’s terms, a fancy ZIP archive?