Archive for June, 2010

Hyundai i30

Author: Striker

Jun 29

For the last week I’ve been driving dad’s Hyundai i30 turbo diesel around, and while it’s pretty boring to drive, it’s a nice car.

The car feels solid and well constructed all round, no flappy plastic-ey bits.

Performance is as can be expected from a diesel, boring, but it’s very fuel efficient, and on a shade under three quarters of a tank, I drove more than 500 kilometres. Dad says he regularly gets around 650-750 kilometres around town.

The suspension was firm, but not sporty. Cornering did not feel at all boat-like.

All up, if you’re looking for a cheap runabout that’s fantastic on fuel, this is a good car to consider.

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iOS4 – Do I, or don’t I?

Author: Striker

Jun 23

Since the release of iOS4 for the iPhone, all I’ve heard from people is that their stuff crashes.

Jason is having all sorts of issues with iOS4. Ranging from all the photos in his library being speckled, to his iPod app crashing.

The fact that over 60 security vulnerabilities have been fixed is great, but what’s the point, really?

Wallpapers:- I was already able to set the lock screen wallpaper, but the home screen is a new feature. Useful? Probably not for photos and the like, as the icons will cover up way too much of the photo. Perhaps some cool patterns?

Fast app switching:- Cute feature, but my 3GS already switches pretty quickly. The fact that these apps will be ‘running in the background’ bothers me greatly, because as anyone that talks to me about my iPhone knows, I’m such a heavy user that I get maybe 4-5 hours out of the battery life.

Save state:- In my opinion this is one of the most brilliant features. With a low tolerance for annoying things, almost bordering on OCD, one of the things I hate most is in the Facebook app. Every time I go to timeline, it shows me everything, and I manually have to switch to status updates only. Really people, I couldn’t care less about your farmville updates. You piss me off.

Save state will allow that particular view to be saved, as if I never exited the application. Now to hope that the facebook app gets updated with this ability.

Orientation lock:- Portrait mode only? That’s just slack, guys. How hard would it be to lock in whatever view you’re currently using?

Folders:- Good for hiding stuff I don’t use, and cant be bothered deleting.

Unified inbox:- I’m sure this is useful for some people, but I’m not really a fan of this feature.

Spell check:- with the ever-increasing number of people who simply couldn’t be bothered to learn the language they are speaking, or are simply too lazy to type properly, the additions to the way spell-check works will be a welcome change in my books (If you text me, or email me, take note. “Leet speak” makes you look like an under-educated douche-bag.

Time to download the update to my laptop. I’ll decide what to do with it later.

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XR6 – The bad news

Author: Striker

Jun 22

Yesterday was service time at CV Performance.

The service went without a hitch, as you could imagine. When the time came for them to replace my oil feed line for the turbo, they pulled out the old filter, and unfortunately it had already clogged up, and caused oil starvation to the turbo (evident by the hugely noisy turbo bearing..)

CV’s mechanic made a point to bring my attention to this, even though I already knew about it. Good job on his part, obviously. Can’t have blame falling where it doesn’t belong.

I had hoped that there wouldn’t be much damage, but it was simply too late to work on the issue. The bearing was already noisy when I bought the car, so I’m suspicious that it was already too late back then (seeing that they generally self destruct well before the 100,000 kilometre mark).

So, where to from here?

The car is fine to drive, but the turbo is not going to get any better. Now I need to find $3000 to get the turbo replaced, including labour.

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XR6 Turbo – oil feed issues

Author: Striker

Jun 18

With the BA (and possibly BF) series of turbo XR6 Falcons, there is an issue with the standard oil feed line running too close to the turbo.

The pipe comes in over the top of the turbo, over a high-heat area.

Ford have a replacement for the pipe these days, but most of the performance shops that I have spoken to recommend an alternative fix consisting of braided line.

With the high heat, when you turn off the car right after driving (with a hot turbo), the oil in there sits stagnant, bakes, and clogs up the feed pipe.
As you can imagine, this restricts the oil frlow to the turbo bearings, and can cause the turbo to self destruct.

I’ve heard of cases where the turbo breaks down after only 60,000 kilometres.
One way of minimising this effect is to keep the car running to allow the turbo to cool down, and perform regular oil changes with good oil.
This is certainly NOT a fix to the problem, however, and I highly recommend having your oil feed line replaced.

My XR6 Turbo is booked in on Monday to have the oil feed line replaced. Hopefully the turbo bearing will not get any noisier.
Being that it’s already noisy, I’m assuming that at some point, I’m going to need to replace the turbo, or at the least, have it rebuilt.

After Monday’s appointment I’ll know a lot more about the health of the turbo, and the health of the car in general. Hopefully the news is not too bad.

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Fire twirling – flower sticks

Author: Striker

Jun 17

Last night, while at the regular Fire twirling meet-up at Newtown, I had a set of flower sticks (like devil sticks, but no fire) made up for me by Rich Stix.

I borrowed Alex’s set of sticks to practice with at the beginning of the night, and got the tick-tock down, then started working on the helicopter.

These sticks are going to be a steep learning curve for me, by the look of it. I’ve got a lot of practising to do.

I was greatly surprised when Emily rocked up. Haven’t seen her in about five years, and it was great catching up. Later, at the CourtHouse, I also ran in to Meow (the three of us used to work together at OzeGoth).

I think it’s time to grab the flower sticks from the car, and spend a little time with them.

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RPX authentication

Author: Striker

Jun 10

After a chat with Jason Oakley, he suggested that I add RPX authentication to the site, so that people can authenticate through facebook/twitter to leave comments here with no mess, no fuss.

So here it is. Facebook and twitter authentication has been (theoretically) integrated. Now I need people to test it, and tell me if it works.

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Filed under: Tech news

Apple iPhone 4

Author: Striker

Jun 8

We’ve all known about the features of iOS4 (Who coined this, anyway? Doesn’t Cisco own the IOS name?

Limited multitasking ability may be great for some, but with my IM apps placing me in to “away” mode while I’m not in the application, I really don’t see the need for it.
Most satnav applications also have the ability to access the music library on the phone, so again, I’m not seeing the usefulness for me.
Don’t get me wrong, this has been one of the most whinged about “missing features” in the history of the iPhone, just for me personally, I don’t believe that I will find a use for it.

My double-push of the home button is well-suited to access my iPod controls – thankyou.

Sure, I have an iPhone 3GS, and the people with a 3G or earlier won’t share my point of view on this, but I can already exit an application, then enter a new one in a timely manner. Is the new “quick switching” going to do much for me? I don’t think so.
I digress, I seem to have started focusing on iOS4, not the iPhone itself.

New features:
- 5mega-pixel camera.
The camera upgrade is going to bring the iPhone one step closer to replacing the separate camera that you carry around in your other pocket. Five mega-pixels will be fairly decent, especially for anything that’s no more than a few meters away.

- Front facing camera.
Just what we all needed – easier access to myspace-angles for eleventy billion people.

- Video calling.
I had this a LONG time ago with “3″, when they first started out. The phone was big and bulky, but video calling (over the 3G network) worked.
After a few trials to see how it worked, I never used it again.
Now it’s making a comeback, but will only work over Wi-Fi? Seriously guys.

- HD video recording.
Again, another feature that I’m not going to use, but this time I can see how it would be useful to other people.n In my year with the iPhone 3GS, I’ve recorded one video, of my fish, just to see what video recording was like.

Wow.. This sounds like a whole hell of a lot of negativity so far.
I’m generally fairly enthused about Apple’s phone to end all phones, and reading above this point probably gives you the wrong idea about what I think of the new iPhone.

I’m keen to see this thing go to market, hell, I’m keen to buy one, but not for anything I’ve listed above.

I’m a heavy user of my 3GS, and the one thorn in my side is battery life.
Currently half my life is planned around the battery life of my iPhone. I have a charger beside my bed, a USB cable on my laptop for charging. I installed USB ports IN MY CAR, so that I could charge on the go.
Whenever I visit friends, shortly after the “Hi, how are you” is out of the way, the next question is “do you have an iPhone charger?”

The all glass front (and back) panels may hopefully help with the less-than-desirable reception these phones have, as will the quad-band.
Ok, so quad-band won’t actually help with reception, it will just mean greater 3G areas for those of us not on Telstra.

Apple’s A4 processor is also going to make this phone lightning quick. The step up to 1GHz is certainly going to please a lot of games developers.

LED flash. All I have to say on the matter is “It’s about bloody time”.

I’ve never been a fan of the volume button, or the mute switch on the 3GS, and without playing with the mute switch on the iPhone 4, I can’t really make comment there, but the volume buttons are just the way I’d like volume buttons to be. Separated.

What are your thoughts on Apple’s new iPhone 4?
If I happen to have some cash laying about, I’ll be buying the 32gb version. iPad can wait until the next hardware revision.

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XR6 Maintenance schedule

Author: Striker

Jun 7

Having just got the car through rego with nothing more than two rear tyres, I considered myself fairly lucky.

The car is developing a few nigglies, but nothing serious. Driver’s power window is slow. Bonnet release catch falls down. Warping of the material around the shifter.

It’s servicing time, and I’m not happy with the guy at the local service station who last serviced my car, so I’m going to somewhere that does it properly.

Today I stopped by CV Performance, and discussed a maintenance schedule with them.

First work is in two weeks, and consists mainly of a full service.
All filters (including fuel) will be replaced.
Also, the oil feed line to the turbo will be replaced. This is a very common problem in the BA XR6 Turbo, and if the car lives past 100,000 kilometres on the clock without the turbo self destructing, you’re a lucky man.
(I’m a lucky man.. Let’s hope the luck lasts another two weeks)

After the big service/maintenance stop, who knows where we’ll go next ;)

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Car registration time

Author: Striker

Jun 3

For the last two days, I’d noticed that the car had started pulling to the left slightly. Very un-usual, given this car drives absolutely perfectly.

Last night, as I came out of Cats (the musical), I noticed that the left rear tyre was almost flat. I stopped in at a BP to fill it, and heard the distinct sound of an air leak.

This morning when I got up, I found the tyre flat again, so I drove to the nearest service station (200 metres or so?), filled it, and drove straight to Bridgestone.

I had a bit of a discussion with the Bridgestone guys about my enthusiastic driving style, and it was decided that they would fit their highest performance tyres, the Bridgestone Adrenaline.

My choices were:
235/45/17 – $249 each.
245/40/17 – $395 each.

I took the cheaper option.

The tyres that came off the car also Bridgestone Adrenalines (completely bald), and anyone that’s spoken to me about these tyres knows that I don’t think much of them in the wet, but I was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt. They were on the car when I bought them, and I treated them with utter contempt.

After the tyres were fitted, the car passed it’s rego inspection with flying colours (I didn’t have any doubt that it would, I try to keep it in decent condition).

What do I make of Bridgestone’s top high-performance tyre so far?
In wet weather, it’s fucking useless.
The car does feel a little more stuck to the road around corners, but as soon as I hit the accelerator, it’s all over.

These tyres simply do not have the wet weather grip to put the power (or any power, really) to the ground.

If I drive like grandpa, they’re just like any other tyre, I guess, but that’s not exactly credit. From a standing start, if I try for anything more than light acceleration, they spin.
If I get rolling, and ease on the power, as soon as the boost comes on, they also start to spin.

I really hope that the dry weather performance makes up for what they lack in the wet.

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Cats – the wrap-up

Author: Striker

Jun 2

When a friend pulls out of a planned night out, and everything is already paid for, what do you do?

In my case, I whined about to to a bunch of friends.

BaSHPR0MPT was one of the friends I had a bit of a whine to, and while we were talking, the idea to hold a little competition came up.

He has a fairly large following on his networks, and thus an easy way to advertise something like this at a fairly short notice.

My personal reach is about 450 people. 370-ish on facebook, 60-something on twitter, and a few odds and ends here and there.
His is well over 16,000.

With the added help of my friends Tim and Pet0r, we all spammed the internet, and asked girls to send a short email to an address, include a picture, and tell me why they wanted to see Cats with me.

I tried to have conversations with most of the people who applied, just to get a slightly better idea of who they are, what kind of stuff they like, why they are interested, etc.

I’d set 2am today as the time at which I would sit down, filter through everything, and pick who I was going to take. I did pick a little earlier, but that’s neither here nor there, I believe.

It’s a shade after 2pm now, and other than showering I haven’t done much about getting ready.
The car has been freshly detailed, the new outfit is laid out on the bed.
Dinner plans are still a bit up in the air, and given the time constraints, I’m not even sure if dinner will be before or after the show.
Right now it’s looking like afterwards, as it’s a bit of a hike to Star City, and there isn’t going to be too much time.

It’s an interesting calm right now, considering that I have no idea who I’m going out with tonight. We’ve been emailing back and forth a bit today, and she seems to have a decent sense of humour.
Humour is the least someone needs to get on well with me, otherwise I’d probably drive them bat-shit crazy.

To-do:
Wash clothes.
Shave.
Deodorise.
Aftershave.
Change in to clothes for the occasion.
Find out where she lives/pick her up.
Clean my shoes (I can’t believe I left this so late).

Updates from this point (if I get the chance) will be twitter-only.
Follow me.

Wish me luck, peoples.

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