Clean middle drain hole in Rover 75 (ECU flooding in non-UK models)

Credit where it’s due: I started off with this thread, where the tutorial is for UK models (supposedly it’s easier to access the middle hole from there). My Rover is a non-UK model, with steering wheel on the left (I live in Italy after all), so I had to follow a little more steps to [...]

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Rover 75 water leakage

Until now I have experienced two kinds of water leakage in my Rover 75. One of them is (supposedly) causing a failure of the fuel pump power output, so 99% of the times the fuel pumps (both under bonnet and in tank) receive no power and the car isn’t able to start; this leakage is [...]

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Virtualbox bridged network adapter driver slows down LAN speed

When I upgraded from WiFi to a physical CAT5E cable running between my router in the other room and this desktop, I jumped from 2-3MB/s tops (1MB/s usually, sometimes less) to 11-12MB/s speeds during file transfers from my home server. Lately I was checking that the speed to download some fansubs off the server got [...]

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MySQL query with ORDER BY,GROUP BY to remove duplicate rows after ordering

Apparently this is a widely discussed issue with MySQL; many newbies (like me) wanting to SELECT rows from a table, where they know there are duplicates of some field ‘a’ which they want unique, but making sure that the selected row has the field ‘b’ with the lower, highest, longest or shortest (whatever) value among [...]

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Inverted search in MySQL database: check if keywords in field match some text

Usually, “searching a database” means looking for rows that contain a “document” in a field that matches a certain keywords set (mostly using the MATCH AGAINST construct); let’s say you want to do the opposite instead, that is finding those rows that have a field containing keywords, or a phrase, that matches to a text [...]

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MySQL SELECT query with more WHERE conditions runs faster

For some reason I wanted to add more redundant conditions to a WHERE clause in a MySQL SELECT query, but I feared that, being redundant conditions, I may end up slowing up the query. Shortly, there is this classifieds site, where each item’s table has the town_id, province_id and region_id rows. If you know the [...]

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Enable force feedback of Logitech Driving Force Wheel under windows

I got a Playstation 2 wheel controller for free off Freecycle sometime ago (thanks again Claudia), I read it was compatible with the PC, and in fact it sports a USB port, and Windows 7 recognizres it correctly; I wasn’t expecting full support for all the functions, but it did work as a game controller, [...]

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BCU rattle on passenger airbag and dash/fascia in Rover 75

Vibrating noises while I am driving drive me nuts. It’s as simple as that. I got my Rover 75 less than a year ago, and the excitement of driving an elegant classy car somehow made me ignore at first the abundant rattles I heard everywhere while I drove (especially behing the passenger airbag), yet I [...]

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Extract string between two tokens inside a text in bash shell scripting

The other day, as a total newbye, I was writing a script in bash to process an HTML page, look for a URL inside it, and then download the content at that URL, recursively for a series of pages; I had it already done in AutoHotKey language, but since I don’t keep my Windows workstation [...]

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reCAPTCHA fails to deliver, bypassed or cracked, spam still comes through

I like(d)  the idea behind reCAPTCHA, blocking spam while helping scanning books is cool, and let’s be honest, reCAPCHA images are more readable to the human eye than the random deformed alphanumeric combinations the usual antispam codes produce. Anyway, even if I have Akismet plugin installed, being the comments captcha’ed I expected almost no spam [...]

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