Just pirate the books and read them now if you want to read them but don’t want to give him money. Don’t feel like you need to pass a purity test when it comes to your reading list, even more so when it comes to books he only co wrote like Good Omens.

Signalised lead ins are helpful to solve flow issues caused by an imbalance in traffic direction at certain times of day. When you get too much traffic building up that can’t enter the roundabout due to no gaps you activate the red light before the entrance dominating traffic flow to give a period where the other directions can move through. The actual roundabout works as per normal and you don’t have to deal with lights during non-peak periods.

Lights on a roundabout make it not really a roundabout but an unholy mishmash of intersection design. I’ve got one near me and the only thing going for it was that converting a roundabout was significantly cheaper than the flyover intersection it really should be made into.

One of the work trucks used to have one that said “Go straight through the roundabout”. It was pretty tempting sometimes to take it at its word…

Depends on the type of cable but some do - all but the lowest of the bottom end of USB-C cables for example will have some sort of chip in them to negotiate charging rate, and those that support fancier things like Thunderbolt will have a more complicated chip.

If you’re setting out to install more potentially nefarious things on a cable it’s definitely possible to make them fit in - see this cable sold for pen testing for example.

The Japanese brands are generally a safer bet for reliability. Toyota is one of the best reputation wise but that comes with an increased price due to that reputation.

A manual transmission is best for reliability IMO, but if for some reason you really must have a automatic look for one with a standard auto transmission rather than a dual clutch box or a CVT. Run away from VW dry clutched dual clutch and Ford Powershift transmissions.

Ideally you would have proof of regular servicing, though a completely good record is harder to get on a low budget. Not only do you want it to have the engine oil changed at the service intervals (depends on the vehicle but often ~10k km) but also the other regular stuff that often gets ignored - e.g. brake fluid, coolant, transmission/diff oils, brake pads/rotors. Keep an eye out for big ticket maintenance items such as timing belt changes (typically due around every 100-150k kms) as these are expensive so are often ignored at the risk of major failure.

If you’re not confident in spotting issues try and bring along a friend or acquaintance who is more familiar with cars to look it over.

Since you’re in Canada where I believe road salt is common check for rust under the car and in places like wheel wells where moisture is likely to be trapped. It’s hard to avoid some rust in such an environment but you don’t want rust holes anywhere or large sections of flaking rust.

How does it handle the heat of being in a car? The mirror housings I made for my dirt bike got a bit soft just being outside in summer sun (until I annealed them), and inside a car can get pretty toasty. My mirrors were PLA though, if you’re printing with higher temperature material it might not be an issue.

Apparently the reason they have that odd shape is so that when it’s raining, water can’t make a continuous trickle between the wire and the pylon

That and also to increase the distance any charge has to travel across the surface of the insulator.

The hunter gatherer lifestyle works nicely until you get injured, have teeth problems, get sick, or get pregnant. It also helps to be male and both physically and mentally able, so if you aren’t good luck with that.

As someone who’s had wisdom teeth issues I’m quite happy to have modern medicine rather than being in the stone age and just having to deal with a broken tooth section rubbing against a nerve…

Barn doors on the back is a good sign, but I have to wonder how seriously they’re taking the cargo van part with that weird stepped floor at the rear - I’m not sure you’d even get a Euro pallet in that gap and a standard Australian pallet definitely would not sit on the floor (might awkwardly sit on the step between the floor and wheel arch, but you lose height that way).

The height looks a bit tight for my recreational use too - I didn’t see an door height measurement but to get a dirt bike in the back I like close on 1300mm to work with. They should have been able to make a pretty low floor though with an electric design so it might just squeak in. Not that I’m going to be looking for an electric van to replace my Transporter any time soon (way too expensive to justify) but it’d be nice to have options in 10 years or so when the secondhand market might be affordable.

My brain first interpreted SQL as ‘squirrel’ and that now refuses to relinquish its claim as default pronunciation in my mind.

Context dependent - i.e. walking up to a group and saying ‘hey guys’ is gender neutral, but saying ‘I saw a guy the other day’ generally implies you saw a man.

I think a wombat would be cool to have around the place, assuming domestication allowed for some level of trainability.

One of my old uni lecturers was very keen on the idea of domesticating the spotted quoll. He reckoned they would make a great pet for those who would otherwise get a cat (a convincing argument actually).

The number of people who would even know how to change a tyre is unfortunately decreasing. Manufacturers therefore have less reason to include something that requires allocating space, carrying extra weight, and a small extra cost for each car, because they know not enough people are going to care about the loss of a spare to make a difference to sales. I’d wager this is particularly true for EVs as they seem to attract a lot of people who are scared of basic maintenance. It’s pretty poor of a company to not include a spare on something that’s advertised for use on dirt though, even if the model in question doesn’t actually seem like something that its buyers will actually take off the tar.

I personally would want a proper full sized spare in any of my vehicles, though I’m prepared to make an exception for my motorbikes due to the obvious logistical problems. Space savers are better than nothing but then you have to deal with speed restrictions and having to change wheels twice if you get a flat on the front. It’s rare for me to get a puncture but it’s nice to know that I can just quickly change wheels and carry on even if I somehow managed to put a big gash in a tyre or bend a rim. Even for just a basic puncture in town I can’t imagine wanting to faff around on the side of a road for ages waiting for roadside assistance to come and fix something I could have done myself and been back on the road in 15 minutes.

My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that’s a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.

It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it’s always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it’s even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I’d even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the ‘usable with one hand’ criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.

I’d also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that’s a pretty niche thing to be after.

The only time I’ve resorted to the screwdriver technique (due to not having enough room to tighten and then turn a strap/chain wrench) the screwdriver shank just tore through the filter when I tried to turn it, a broader tool like a wide chisel might have a better chance of success.

What I ended up using that time was an air hammer with a broad headed chisel (pushing on the side where the impact would unscrew the filter). The angles wouldn’t work well for this in OPs case but if you have enough side access to get the air hammer through it’s a decent last resort.

My primary school bought one of these, I thought it was a pretty cool camera back then. It wasn’t the best image quality available even at the time and writing to the floppy was slow but being able to swap to other disks easily was a big thing (a stack of floppies was a lot cheaper than memory cards) and being able to just stick the floppy in any computer and see the images was a real game changer compared to dealing with camera drivers to download images.

The societal reaction though would be very different and in favour of the woman. For an example a few months ago some English tourist was in Sydney, got annoyed at some guy waving a flag around her, sucker punched the guy in the head from behind, and received one punch back plus a free broken jaw as her prize.

Now check out how it was reported - it’s all about how bad it was for the man to punch a woman and the pretty important fact of her assaulting the man before getting said punch is mentioned once in passing (and it being a punch from behind with the man not aware is not mentioned at all, which is relevant because this is normally highlighted as a ‘coward punch’ in Australian media).

Because men are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes.

So you’re saying it’s ok to make negative statements about a subset of people as long as they are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes?

That’s pretty rough - one breaking that quickly is annoying but could just be unlucky, two breaking quickly should definitely not happen considering they’re not cheap tools.

What part(s) broke on yours? Did they replace the second one as well? I’d hope so, though I could understand only wanting a replacement to sell and get some money back at that point.

I like a properly fast boot time, but a couple of minutes is tolerable. Much more than that and it feels annoyingly slow.

What is truly annoying though is when I have to do something that should be quick but requires booting a computer on my work’s network. I got back into the office once and literally had to wait 20 minutes when all I wanted to do was to print out one jolly document and go home - I guarantee you I cared about boot time that day…