Petrol and gasoline are the same thing, it’s just different terminology.

Better not let any clean freaks see this - they’ll have a cow!

The 9/11 attacks were significant here in Australia. It was all over the news for ages and also directly led to other major changes such as a real stepping up of our airport security measures, a swathe of legislation in the name of anti terrorism, and us getting dragged into the war in Afghanistan.

It’s reasonably acceptable I guess, what people would hate me for is making jokes about getting a gnu name…

A soft drink bottle seems a good choice - they’re designed to handle pressure.

Looks pretty thin to me:

The narrow point is about as wide as driving to my nearest beach and that’s a reasonable day trip distance.

I’m quite happy to not see emojis spammed everywhere, I can deal with an emoticon or two - more so if actually useful for setting tone - but much more than that and you’re pushing it.

I tend to associate posts peppered with emojis with either immaturity or those out of their depth when it comes to technology. I’m sure it’s not always true but it does seem to correlate well with either kids or those whose typing method includes just tapping on the emoji whenever their phone keyboard suggests it.

I have mine set to one of the tracks from Simcity 2000. I was a bit curious to see if anyone would recognise it but nobody has so far (though some people have said it sounded familiar).

Most calls I get however are through my work phone and that just stays on silent to the point I can’t even think of what the ringtone actually sounds like.

It’s very possible if you’re travelling at normal road speeds. If you ever gave yourself a carpet burn as a kid you’ll remember that sliding from simply falling over at a running pace on carpet generates enough heat to be painful - on a motorbike you’re generally hitting the ground with a lot more speed and therefore have a lot more energy to dump into whatever slows you down.

Note also that in the video he’s travelling quite slowly and therefore can slide noticeably further before high heat levels build up than one would in a crash at even at 50km/h let alone 100km/h.

Descent was one of the first games I had to play, I remember it fondly. It came bundled with my family’s first computer (along with Lemmings and Simcity 2000) so I spent a fair amount of time on it. The freedom of motion you had in Descent was impressive - albeit easy to confuse yourself with - and something I have rarely seen since.

People sign up to app intended to share personal information about others without their permission, end up having their own personal information shared without permission - the irony is impressive.

Presumably a reference to the town, or more specifically the road sign for it.

A broken wisdom tooth rubbing against a nerve - would not recommend.

That phrase tends to be much less literal when its said by those who are getting honked at regularly to move off from the lights.

If someone is telling you they get honked at all the time for no reason there usually is a reason (or several) and they just refuse to acknowledge what they’re doing.

Closest I’ve come in a truck is an annoyingly loud alert for everything the computer reckoned was an issue and that was painful enough. Every time I’d drive it it’d be blaring the alarm for some reason or another and if it had been a long term company truck instead of a rental I probably would have ended up removing the speaker.

For example the lane departure warning would fire off every time you moved over to not run into someone parked on the side of the road, the close distance warning would fire off regularly when people merged in front of you, and if it was windy it’d set off an alarm to let you know the truck was being blown around when driving. Could be useful if you’re mentally challenged or blind but that sort of thing is just going to annoy anyone who isn’t. You couldn’t even turn the alarms off properly - you could go through the deliberately prolonged procedure to turn them off temporarily but then they come back again every time you start the truck.

I’ve driven an SUV with lane keep assist and it would pull at the wheel trying to follow lane markings that were outdated or ones it just made up, I hope that particular bit of ‘safety’ tech doesn’t make it to any truck I have to drive.

There’s a pretty good chance that you can get a bit of wire or a fine pick and push the key through from the other side, I’d be trying that first.

Aside from that the next easiest solution is likely to just disassemble the lock and replace the cylinder as others have suggested.

Yes, you can. I guess I should have been more specific because I was thinking of a complete kit when I wrote that (so including helmet, boots, gloves, etc) and you do need to set your sights a bit lower to make the budget work for that.

A mid range set of motorbike gear (dirt or road) or a very cheap registrable motorbike.

Alternatively a number of interesting secondhand cameras/lenses, the number ranging from one to many depending on what exactly. I’ll admit I have actually spent near that much on two backs for my 1960s era Hasselblad so you don’t even necessarily get a whole camera…

I don’t think they were saying you shouldn’t ever look at the tacho, but that you should learn to be able to pick your shift points without having to look at the tacho.

As you say you do want to figure out what revs works best for a particular vehicle (having driven/ridden vehicles with redlines between 2500 and 19000rpm there I can say there is a little bit of variability to be found out there) but it shouldn’t take long to figure out what this sounds and feels like for regular use.

When you get the hang of driving stick, which you will pretty quickly, you can try matching revs on downshifts to smooth things out and then you can try heel toe with matching revs.

This I definitely do recommend once someone is comfortable with the basics, particularly the rev matching on downshifts. It both makes driving smoother and makes clutch wear once moving negligible so in the long run you save money too. I consider rev matching an early intermediate level skill - not something I’d trouble a raw beginner with due to information overload but something that should be learnt before they start thinking it’s too hard (because while it is not hard an unfortunate number of people will tell others it is).

Heel toe shifting can wait until people are comfortable with driving in general but I think is something one should learn if one enjoys driving - if only because it’s just plain satisfying to do. Again this is a technique made out to be difficult but it’s really not that hard (though how much foot manoeuvring is required does vary between vehicles).

When you get really good you can shift gears without engaging the clutch just by rev matching, but don’t try that til wayyyy later. Can mess up the gears.

This one however I recommend people keep in mind is possible (in case one ever loses clutch movement) but keep to a bare minimum on synchro boxes. Try it a couple of times to show yourself it works but you do have to be very familiar with the car to do this without putting wear on the synchros (keep in mind that if it didn’t slip in like butter you didn’t get it quite right and the synchros had to pick up the slack for you). It’s more easily done with a non-synchro box as these both give obvious auditory/tactile feedback when you’re doing it wrong and tend to have wider engagement points for the gear dogs to slip into. Motorbikes for example run non-synchronised gearboxes and are typically very easy to clutchless shift as long as you’re upshifting while accelerating and downshifting while decelerating.