Tag Archives: warning

Check For Safety Recalls On Your Vehicle

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How do you know whether a safety recall has been issued for your US car/truck/van? You may think the manufacturer will notify you – but that may not happen in a timely fashion, especially if

  • you have moved since purchasing
  • you don’t get your vehicle serviced at a dealer
  • you bought the vehicle used

And even if you are correctly registered in the manufacturer’s database, how long will it take them to actually send you a notice?

Here’s my example of what can happen, and how you can check your own vehicle’s status:

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Quick Tip: The Computer In Your Car

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Starting around 1996, our automobiles entered the computer age. Sensors and microprocessors took up the task of monitoring, and in some cases adjusting, many of the functions of the engine, brakes, and other components that previously acted only as set by a manual tool and whose failure only became evident when the car stopped working.

This new electronic monitoring system also changed the way in which periodic state inspections for safety and emissions are done. Whereas previously the garage would stick a hose up the tailpipe to suck in fumes and analyse it for pollution, then visually inspect the lights, turn signals, etc., now much of that information can be transferred digitally from the car computer’s memory via a data port. With the right tool you can access much of this data yourself – for instance, I have a device from Automatic Labs that stays plugged into my car’s data port and communicates to my iPhone via Bluetooth!

All of this is great… until something happens to your car’s battery:
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How to Link to a Website Without Improving Its Search Engine Position

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You’ve heard the saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”? While not always true, it IS the case that any online mention of a website URL improves its “score” in search engines like Google and Bing.

This means that if you want to alert your web readers to a site that is promoting a scam, fraud, bad science, or other misinformation your very use of that site’s address will improve it’s “score” for searches on related keywords. For example, a site that claims global warming is a myth will appear closer to the top of searches on “global warming”.

So how do you discuss this site without giving it a search engine boost? Continue reading →

Beware the Facebook Event Time Bug!

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In most parts of the United States this weekend is the start of Daylight Saving Time – at 2:00AM this Sunday morning clocks are set to 3:00AM, until late next Fall.

Unfortunately, if you have created a Facebook event that is happening this Sunday and you are in a DST-using location, Facebook’s coding is going to mess mightily with the displayed event time, as it gets confused between you creating the event in Standard Time yet the event is in DST.

What happens is:

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