Here in VA we’re able to get the occasional riding day through the depths of winter, so I never really ‘winterise’ my bikes, but there were a few points where I realised it had been weeks since I’d started the bike and so I dutifully wandered out to the garage to put on the battery tender until I next had a chance to…

Ugh, automatic shoulder harnesses were such an annoying thing (as you still had to clip in the lap belt, anyway!) I remember a friend’s car that had the passenger track break within five years of ownership, and so now you had to unclip two seatbelts to be able to use the shoulder harness.

I regularly have people ask me how old/what year mine is to hear surprise in their voice when I tell them it’s an ‘01. It was really polarising at the time (and a big part of that, if I remember correctly, was because it shared its frontend with the critically-lauded, but cheaper, boxster), but has aged really well.…

Right, keep the revs on the lower side to allow for everything to come up to temp. Perhaps “don’t beat on a cold engine” would be a more useful example.

Can’t wait for an unscrupulous owner to blame the rust on a renter.

“Bigger cars are safer”

Very likely. I think it’s why we’ve seen the push towards enabled features on all these cars: cheaper to just build them all to the same spec AND you get the bonus of nickel-and-diming your customers for everything they want.

Turns out preempting any sort of automatic action will be faster than waiting for the ‘proper input’, and in the case of use of full beams, it’s going to be much, much safer. All I can hope is this will prevent asshats from constantly blinding me because they don’t know what the blue glyph on their dashboard means.

It’s pretty much full controller support, to be honest. The only time I’ve reverted to keyboard was when I wanted to type something out in the pre-mission lobby.

That’s fine: I will continue to buy XBox games on PC, as always.

I’m excited to see a performance sedan instead of yet-another lozenge-shaped SUV. I hope it’s not too much of a pig with all that battery.

Weirdest one I’ve dealt with so far has been the triple-square bit, which I learned I needed when my door card was off the car and I was actively trying to remove the lock mechanism. I was lucky a local auto parts store had a set in stock.

I went back in time to the early 2000s with my most recent automotive purchase for a reason. I like maintaining things myself, and too much of what I see in more recent cars is replacing non-standardised consumer electronics, if the glitchy infotainment system in my partner’s 2017 car is anything to go by. (For real,…

Maxima, Altima, and Versa are all being phased out according to Automotive News, so I guess the Sentra lives!

The pair of jewellery pliers in my toolbox predate almost every other tool I own: they’re a great addition.

A good slideshow. I’d forgotten about a bunch of these, and had frankly never seen half of them!

I’ve had two friends in the last two years lose their cars because of rodent damage: it’s a pervasive problem.

Right? Every time HoYo announce or release a new game I wind up clicking on articles about it because the aesthetics, settings, and gameplay interest me, but then I see it’s gacha and close the browser window (or scroll down to the comment box, as I did this time).

It’s more of a Washington airport than Baltimore-Washington International; at least the Metro now goes all the way to Dulles.

20k is about right for a six-year-old VA-chassis WRX.