Foggylog

Stuttering 1.3L Fiesta

I recently left my 1.3l V Reg (1999) Ford Fiesta in a damp field overnight (I was taking part in a bike race!) and that night it rained a lot. The next morning I was driving home and discovered the car had developed a stutter / kangaroo / judder (or whatever you want to call it) at low to medium rev's when you accelerated.

Research pointed towards the fuel filter, spark plugs and HT leads. The fuel filter was the cheapest item at under £5, so I replaced that first. The fuel filter is located on the passenger side just in front of the rear wheel. The pipes just unclip and there is one screw holding it in place. Advice from a ford mechanic was "change it quick and then you don't get too much fuel over the floor". So it was pretty easy to replace, however unfortuanely it didn't solve the problem.

Therefore next thing to replace was the plugs and leads. These cost £30 and were easy enough to replace with the aid of my dad's ramps (as it's easiest to unplug them from underneath the car). The assistance of second person is a good idea when changing the HT leads due to the location of the distributor on the back of the engine. Anyway changing the plugs and leads solved the problem, and now the car is running perfectly again.

Glad I didn't have to take it to a garage as they wanted £85+VAT just to diagnose the problem!

Blast from the past

This one is quite funny as well... we must have made an impression!

Viewing Acrobat Documents on Dual Screens

Acrobat is annoying as you can't view two documents side by side on dual monitors (without much window resizing and faffing)... I've finally found the solution.

Open Windows Explorer. Click Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types. Find the PDF entry and click "Advanced". Edit the Open Action and change "Application used to perfom action:" from your equivalent of:

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" "%1"

"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" /n "%1"

Then each acobat document will open in a new instance of Acrobat reader. Probably has a nasty effect on RAM usage, but never mind...

Wobbly Thule 561 Outride Bike Carrier

If your bike wobbles when it's on a Thule 561 Cycle carrier then it's because the fork clamp mechanism is not done up tight enough. To resolve this try putting a bit of lubricating grease on the sliding plastic/metal interface. This will enable you to do the clamp up much tighter and eliminate the wobble!

Note - don't forget to always do the key lock up whenever your bike is on the carrier, as the greese will also make it easier for the clamp to come undone accidentally!

PHP4 upgrade to PHP5 breaks PHP_AUTH_USER / PHP_AUTH_PW

Since Purplecloud kicked me off for getting too much spam, I've been using Streamline.net for my hosting. Recently they upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5 and suddenly the HTTP Authorisation for one of my sites stopped working. The authorisation is handled by PHP which is quite useful (as using a .htaccess password seems to upset Streamline's server for some unknown reason).

In the end I found a nice complicated solution here. Why it works I've not really thought about, however it does work and I'm glad I don't have to think any further!