I remember back in high school when my starter solenoid went bad, and I had to live with it for a week before I could afford a new starter. Had to break out the trusty hammer to start the car every time!

There were some really valuable subreddits that will be going away because of this. Namely the ones that save me thousands on my college text books...

From the JPay site:

Just got to have some fun in the mud with my Subaru this weekend. Not by choice though. About 50 cars were all parked in a low lying field when it began to pour. Although I did feel a little smug when my plucky little Impreza Wagon was able to skate around a marooned Excursion.

I guess the lesson learned for low…

The devices don’t have wifi. and you have to pay for digital “stamps” for emails. The only way to send/receive anything is by plugging your tablet into a central kiosk. So it’s very easy to keep track of the emails that go in and out.

Yeah, but there’s money to be made here! JPay is the only company who really does this, so they basically have no competition. Inmates have to pay for their media, they have to pay to send emails, and the prices are pretty outrageous too. The devices don’t even have wifi. you plug it into a kiosk to download what you…

what happens when you roll it and are trapped inside because of those gull wing doors?

No license is directly necessary. But you might want to get an AMA membership, which will help insure you if you lose control and plow the plane into something expensive, or into a crowd of people. Depending on the radio systems you use, and the power levels of them, you technically need a HAM technician license. Both…

That’s because those gearboxes are usually a 117:1 gear reduction ratio for lots of torque. You can’t add too much power to them since it’s only nylon gears inside.

Well it’s because it directly competes with the Xbox One’s TV features. I have a projector and home theater system and didn’t feel like paying comcrap for a HDMI box. So I have a headless PC running Windows 7 w/ WMC, and an xbox 360 hooked up to the projector. An HDHomeRun Prime gives me all the HD live TV I wanted,…

NTAuthority, isn’t he the guy who did a lot of work on AlterIWnet?

The funny thing is that there’s not much special about that robot arm. Just like a CNC machine, these arms are built for millimetric precision. For instance, I have one that’s 10 years old in my basement rated for a repeatability of +/- 0.05mm with a 3 kg payload. With these you can use a training pendant or the…

Another factor that makes powerless planes hard to land is that any large commercial plane has lots of hydraulics that are needed to operate everything. These commercial jets do have a turbine fan that pops out and can power the hydraulics so that the pilots can have manual control, but as the plane slows down and…

With R/C helicopters, you can achieve the same thing, but to an even more dramatic effect, since you can invoke as much negative pitch as you can positive pitch on the blades, and they usually have a much higher thrust to weight ratio to a real helicopter. In fact, autorotation competitions are very common around the…

I don’t see the detection system being able to do anything other than tell if it is a bone stock DJI Phantom or not... The amount of noise a drone makes and the way it sounds largely depends on the propellers it’s spinning. Different airfoils, different prop pitches, different lengths, and different materials will all…

The funny thing is that most cars are incredibly reliable, and way more reliable than cars of even just 5 years ago. The problem is that the car only stays reliable when you properly maintain it. I know many people who never change their oil, let alone do any other work to it. It’d be interesting to see how the…

As a student, welcome to my life. Not only is this seen in the “regular” internet, but from my own experience, the same is true for academic databases that schools and students pay big money for.

Back in high school, the passenger would nonchalantly bump the floor shifter into neutral when the driver was stopped at a red light. If you did it right, the driver wouldn’t realize for a few seconds why their car wasn’t moving, and get honked at by the people stuck behind them. Dangerous? Yes. Hilarious? Also yes.…

This is true. I know a few people who live on a winding single lane county road that it's far too easy to speed on. Almost once a month an officer will come and knock on their door, asking if they can catch speeders from their driveway.