Wow, this is highly informative, thanks for taking the time to put that much effort into your reply!

I expect the drums are probably fine as the squeaking only started very recently and only occurs at the very end of coming to a complete stop (it does not happen during otherwise normal brake usage).

The cost effectiveness that you have noted for a few different maintenance items really affirms my interest in this. My auto-dealer gives me free oil changes, but only under the condition that I stay with their service schedule. I know how easy and cheap it is to change out oil so while that might sound appealing to other people, it really is not for me because as you have shown, I could be saving much more money if I learned how to do the other kinds of maintenance myself.

I guess I can use whatever the dealer has on their service schedule as something to orient myself on what items I should go learn how to do, but I think something that would be handy in that regard would be to first learn how to diagnose what should be getting replaced or fixed.

As you noted, I can use calipers to check the brake drums to make a determination on replacement there, and the fact that I can hear the brakes beginning to squeak implies that the pads should be changed.

I wonder if there is a resource somewhere which has information on this specifically - just how to make these checks to make that determination on what should be done. Surely I know a few others. I know how to check if the oil is low, or the washer fluid etc, but would be really interested in other items like this, because for me I think it would be a really great jumping-off point.

Thanks!

Thank you, this is really informative!

Thanks for the recommendation!

Oh this is great! My vehicle is in there as well, thanks a lot!

True enough, thanks.

Thanks!

I can replace a flat fine, I understand how to use a jack and a torque wrench and have tangential knowledge regarding a little bit of mechanical engineering from a previous job.

The feeling I get is that auto work goes much much deeper though, and I am interested in resources that offer that knowledge.

Today on my win11 work system, the windows menu stopped producing output when I typed into it and webpages stopped loading. Had to perform a full system restart to get it to work again.

Maybe the answer is not to flash some obscure on life support operating system on your Google pixel but rather… maybe the answer is to work within the system and simply adjust privacy controls as allotted?

And when those controls are removed because most people went along with it and they were determined as a waste of development time by a corporate or government entity because people also give up on that then what? This is not an answer to anything, it’s complacency that will just erode privacy more and make the problem worse.

þ

Can I ask why you used this in place of “th” mostly but not always?

Three actually I think.

Oh haha, Gee whiz neighbor, I wish I could say different but I’m quite certain I would eat the lips clean off your head if I had to.

That’s not to say I would never consider doing that with some friends though.

When you have a new PC, put it on the old one too. You could run a Jellyfin server off it it or use it as a NAS device or something.

Is that a starship prompt? How do you style that divider above the prompt that way? It looks really good.

edit: I’ve read up a bunch on starship and now understand, very nice.

Serious crimes like not having a license to watch TV, porn, or god forbid having thoughts that don’t align with what the government wants.

Perhaps consider a SOCKS5 reverse proxy. If done over SSH, the client systems networking would act as though they are on the server itself, traffic would be secure, and it would walk around most firewall rules that probably exist.

Using key based authentication would also make it such that it is more secure and easier for the researchers to log in - they wouldn’t even have to remember a password, they would just need some SSH client/configs.

Specifically, read up on “bastion hosts”.

This kid is going to have a career.

Make good connections with people you trust internationally. If it really comes down to it, between friends, people who care could work together to set up SOCKS5 tunnels or some such to walk around it pretty cleanly, but you would really have to trust whoever you give credentials to since they would be using your internet connection for whatever. Could also straight up just install the OpenVPN server for this.

Once or twice I have opened a tunnel to friends on one of my servers through a bastion host - any outgoing traffic from the server goes through my own VPN, so it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t access a VPN in their country.

For anyone who doesn’t care to learn, which in my experience is the vast majority of all people, not much can be done. Even the people I meet who say they do feel that they care deeply mainly just like to be loud about that, but never actually put in the work to learn how to do something as simple as use ssh -D, let alone learn how a proxy actually functions.

I suppose the best those in the know can do is to make it clear that they do know. Should friends actually begin to care, then they will know who to go to for possible solutions.

You are absolutely right, this is the video. I think I did not recognize it when I had gone looking because he had updated the title at that time which misdirected me.

Thanks for finding it!

Might be Panon?