Everything Else

Short post, but I saw this video from one of my YouTube faves, Veritasium, where they hack a retro Mattel instant messaging toy for little girls, called IM me, to open garages when they don’t use rolling code tech. Interesting, nerdy, and a little disconcerting but not THAT easy to pull-off. …

We’ve got an old metal garage door on a house we’re flipping and wanted to spruce it up without replacing the whole thing. Painting it would be an obvious solution, but I was searching for something a bit more unique. In doing so, I found a start-up from a few …

One of the channels we follow on YouTube, Global Leaks, posted this video a while back of what they claim to be the first ever dashcam recording. The recording is allegedly from early 1906 and takes us on a brief journey down what is also alleged to be Market Street in …

Pretty much every new car today has some level of digital display built into the dash—radios, cameras, AC, navigation. The problem with so many of these systems is they’re trying to do everything in one or two screens, which makes for a horrible, frustrating, and even dangerous user experience. And …

I’m going to either replace or restore the 16-year-old metal garage door at our new-to-us home pretty soon. And in doing so, I set out to do some research around polishing vs. painting, metal vs. wood, and so forth. Garage doors aren’t cheap, so I’m leaning towards a restoration job. …

There are a gazillion cell phone and sunglasses mounts/clips/hangers for your car or truck. Some of them use sticky tape to attach to the dash, others clip onto visors and air vents. Few are versatile, as they’re generally made for a single purpose, and few are all that affordable. That’s …

Back in my day (say that in an old man’s voice), car alarms weren’t OEM accessories. Aftermarket alarms and installations were big business, and hearing an alarm in a parking lot was something most people actually paid attention to. Today, we call the driver an idiot when his or her alarm …

I admit, I very rarely read instructions, labels or anything else that tells me what to do. It drives my wife absolutely nuts. It’s not so much an ego thing as it is a lazy thing. Even when I do read instructions, I usually don’t follow them to the letter. …

The National Highway Safety Transportation Agency (NHTSA) announced a new rule back in 2014 that will require vehicles built from May 1, 2018 forward to have an integrated backup camera. The rule applies to all road-legal vehicles under 10,000 pounds. For those with older vehicles, there are lots of aftermarket …

If you’ve got a Kamado-style cooker, you’ve probably heard the term, chasing temps. This is where people become almost obsessed with achieving and maintaining the perfect temperature in their Kamado. And it can suck some of the fun out of the whole experience. One start-up, IOT Controls, seems to have …