Well obviously that was going to happen. Yup, I absolutley slipped and missed a month. Still, time is meaningless, and it’s still March 2020, right? ;-)

RealWorldDriving
Big F in chat to pay respects for my car. Or I should probably say former car. The gearbox was slowly on its way out, and after speaking to a gearbox specialist who relayed the news that “oh yes, those Ford auto boxes tend to wear out at about 150K miles, and it’ll probably be X pounds to fix it”, the engine then started to play up, giving me limp mode and then stalling out. It was probably something to do witht he mass airflow sensor, or an actuator arm around the air intake system, but a lack of driveway to do proper diagnosis and repair, on top of the gearbox problems, and the upcoming ULEZ expansion, it was time to call a nice man with a flatbed to take it away and scrap it. Onwards and upwards, he says, having spent pennies on a Lacetti estate with broken air-con…

PretendyDriving
Yup, there was more Nurburgring, with a couple of the four hour endurance championship races. There was also the Indy 500, six hours of Watkins Glen, and a twelve hour race at Hockenheimring, which, thanks to a good week racing in the Radical bringing my irating up to just above 1500, had us racing in the second split, with GT4 class strength of field of 2222. I think there were possibly three drivers across all of the classes with lower iratings than me, so, yes, I was definitely one of the slower GT4 cars on track. We survived, made it to the end, finishing sixth in class (of eighteen), in front of drivers with three times as much irating as me. I’m happy with that. Now to start practicing for the 24 hours of Le Mans…

New Toys
I jumped onboard the Raspberry Pi Pico train, and combined it with a cheap footswitch and a browser extension, made myself a google meet hands free mute toggle. And ordered more random parts from AliExpress to add to the solutions drawer, in the hope that one day the problems will present themselves. I mean, erm, to complete already in-progress projects. Yes, definitely. Ahem.

UPS Still Suck UPS charged me £125ish to deliver my laptop after Apple returned it from their repair centre without doing any work. This was import fees, which obviously should not have been charged, and UPS still have not responded to my email of the 26th February, so I’m going to attempt to do a chargeback against them, but also call them thieves, and try not to order from places which use UPS for their shipping.

Random Link Someone called Stephen Holdaway made an actual Physical Boot Switch for his PC, to toggle which operating system is loaded when the PC is powered on, and I am 100% going to borrow inspiration from his project at some point. By which I absolutely mean totally copy it. It reminds me of the olden days dual-boot hack where someone had a small form factor PC inside a linux box, and when they slid a windows box over the top, it toggled a switch to change the boot OS to windows. Physical controls for software things are great, and the world needs more of them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the internet to look for some knife switches for no good reason ;-)