TheITGuy

Having a lovely home cooked Sunday roast dinner with my wife (with a bottle of wine) to celebrate having paid off our mortgage this week, 6 years early. Plus having it seemed, finally sorted a rattle in my Seat Ateca that has been driving me mad for months 🙂

Only £76? I've just paid £144 to renew Audi Connect for my A4 😁

On the M6 today I had a few cars that would be determined to overtake me using lane 3 (I'm in the middle lane doing an indicated 75 mph passing slower traffic in lane 1) to then pull in front of me and immediately slow down to 70 mph. Ho hum. Plus the driver when leaving a 30 mph limit going into a 40 mph limit actually slowed down from 30 mph to 25 mph 🙂

Hi Wilfred. I have a Seat Ateca with the same infotainment system as your Karoq and I too have been suffering from random selection of tracks when listening, in my case, to MP3 audio book files on USB. I can use the same files in another VAG car (a 2016 Audi A4) and never have an issue but with the Ateca, once it finished the current track, and after returning to the car to continue a journey, it would select track 1 from a different book from the same author or track 1 from a book by a different author. I can't tell you the amount of times it started playing the first track of "Blue Moon" by Lee Child! Most of my audio book MP3 files had been created by using an audio CD to MP3 converter program but that didn't add all the MP3 tag information so I spent much time using a MP3 tagging program to create unique track names, file names, add in the author, the correct title etc. I then used another program to create a playlist file and it is this that I select when listing to a story, rather than navigating to the folder for story and selecting the first track. As a result of doing this it does seem to be behaving better, although earlier this week when listening to an audio book ("The Sentinel" by Lee Child) it then jumped about 15 files (but at least it didn't start playing disk 1 of "Blue Moon" :-)) I did also find the unit struggled with 128 GB USB sticks so I repartitioned them down to 32 GB and that seems to be better. Having said that, one of the USB sticks will start playing then won't play anything when I next use the car, reporting that there are no readable files. I have reformatted the USB stick to no avail so have just ordered 3 more. Best of luck with getting this working - I've been trying now for almost 18 months.... Glen

I certainly wouldn't want their donated brain.....

Yet another cyclist riding on a busy road, in the dark, dressed in dark clothes and absolutely no lights or rear reflector. Do these people have a death wish?

This is more an annoyance with myself because I should have known this would happen.... My wife and I visited my elderly mother on Boxing day. A soon as I arrived I was given a list of jobs - some of which I knew about in advance, others not. Mum wouldn't relax and open her presents until said jobs were done, so eventually the three of us sat down, Mum opened her presents and we had a really nice time. As my wife and I were about to leave several hours later, I remembered that she had mentioned that the shower need adjusting as it was too cold for her. I nipped up to the bathroom, switched the shower on and spent a few minutes adjusting it until it seemed perfect to me. Move forward to today. My regular phone call with Mum..... shower is running far too hot. Darn. I live 50 miles away, my brother (who lives 15 minutes away) is away on holiday at the moment and Mum refuses to allow me to ask her grandson-in-law (who lives 5 minutes away) to pop round and sort. I should have insisted Mum checked the shower temperature after I adjusted it. Doh..... Luckily, Mum reckons she can manage with it until Saturday when my brother is back from holiday and can pop in to sort.

I've spoken to so many people that have hearing aids (either bought privately or through the NHS) that don't wear them because when they first put them on they can't cope with the increase in noise volume. I've been wearing hearing aids for the past year and know the secret is to persist with them - after a while the brain does a wonderful job of filtering out the inconsequential background sounds that don't "need" to be heard. I spoke to mum on the phone today and did so at a normal voice level and she heard every word! Now, if only I could sort out her eyesight and mobility issues.....

Moment of joy in my day today......took my 84 year old Mum to have a new hearing aid fitted. The result? I no longer have to keep shouting at her! Thank you Specsavers.

Today I completed the construction of the 7 panels for the allotment compost bin made from recycled pallet wood. Next time I'm just buying the wood - it took longer to reclaim usable bits of wood from the pallets for the project (without breaking them) than it did to build the panels 🙂

I've been battling with this issue with my MIB3 system on my Seat Ateca for the past few months. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and most have been converted from audio CDs to MP3 format using some free converter software. I create a folder on the USB stick for the author, then subfolders for each book by that author and in most cases, there are subfolders for each disk. All my previous vehicles have coped with this layout fine, but not the Ateca. It would come to the end of the current track/chapter then start playing chapter one from a completely different story, sometimes by the same author, sometimes the first story on the USB stick. I conducted various research and concluded that the files were missing the MP3 tag information so I have used the mp3tag software to apply tags to each track to ensure each filename and track name were unique. This didn't solve the issue, so I then ensured that the title, artist and album artist were all correct. This has helped - I then found that one story I was listening to skipped from track 12 to track 22 when it reached the end of track 12 after restarting my journey (the system remembers where I get to when I switch the engine off and will continue where it left off upon restarting the engine but typically jump to a different track when it gets to the end of the current track). At the end of track 22 it jumped to track 32. Further investigation revealed that the story was divided into Disk 1, Disk 2, Disk 3, etc. and track 22 was the first track on disk 2 and track 32 was the first track on disk 3. I therefore moved all tracks into the main folder for the story and used the Oplisker program to create playlists for each story. The USB stick is back in the car and I have just selected the playlist for a Disk Francis story - I'll see what happens over the next couple of days!

Yes, I am based in the UK If it is deemed I have been misleading and inaccurate that certainly wasn't my intention. I wasn't aware of differing methods of delivering TMC live traffic updates, so if my system is different to the one being discussed, my bad.

I have a 2016 Audi A4 with Sat Nav and Audi Connect and TMC was working fine today. It's the first time I've driven the car in a couple of weeks but the live traffic was online throughout my journey today.

Now there's an idea.......

Sadly, the airfield is devoid of landing lights, although the occasional light aircraft does land there.

As AnnoyingPentium has mentioned, if it doesn't already have an SSD then that would be my first improvement. Budget about £25 for an Amazon cheapie or £30 - £50 for an established brand. I find a SSD can transform the performance of a computer. Also, if the laptop only has 4 GB of memory (RAM) consider adding an extra 4 GB (if the laptop will support 8 GB in total), cost around £30. Glen, aka TheITGuy

Spending 5 hours (from 8 AM to 1 PM) waiting at a client's office for a BT Open Reach engineer to turn up, to fix their fibre Internet which has been down since last Friday, only to find out at 1.15 PM that the engineer won't be coming today as a) he couldn't find the building and b) when they rang the office theygot an answerphone. This despite a) being told twice during the morning the engineer was on their way and to expect them imminently, b) three Open Reach vans managed to find the building yesterday (but none of the three engineers actually fixed the problem) and c) the building is an old WWII airfield control tower, so not easy to miss! Guess where I'll be from 8 AM tomorrow.....

My 83 year mum has rheumatoid arthritis, macular degeneration in both eyes (dry in the left, wet in the right). Her eyesight is almost non-existent. She has no hearing at all in one ear and little hearing in the other. Her mobility is almost non-existent and she has just had half of her right lung removed due to cancer and has a tumour in the left lung that will need attention. For the last couple of years mum has relied on myself or my brother to take her to her many medical appointments, take her shopping, etc. but her surgery had arranged home visits from the district nursing team for blood tests, to change wound dressings, etc. Last week her doctor's surgery rang in the morning needing to see her that afternoon. Rather than drag myself or my brother home from work (which for me would be at least a 90 minute drive) to take her, mum just about managed to get a taxi to the surgery and the taxi driver very kindly led mum to the front door. As a result, the nurse who saw her has informed her that she no longer qualifies for home visits as she is clearly mobile! My mum is very cross about this, so by proxy I'm cross too 🙂

If it was me, I would arrange with the dealer to take a 1.0 Karoq on an extended test drive on a variety of roads to see how you get on with it. What sort of annual mileage do you do and how much of this is likely to be motorway runs? Reading various forums it seems many people have been pleasantly surprised with how capable the 1.0 petrol engine is, although I guess if you regularly drive with 3 passengers and a boot full of luggage and travel in hilly areas, you may find it underpowered.

Travelling back to East Anglia from the West Midlands this morning on the M6 and A14 in absolutely diabolical weather conditions (very heavy rain, standing water, spray and visibility less than 200m in places), there were some cars that had no lights on. Unbelievable.

A year ago today, my father (who was 92) passed away. Rest in peace Dad. You are missed by us all x

I recently took delivery of a new Seat Ateca Xperience with the 1.5 petrol engine mated to the 7 speed DSG and it is great - no signs of kangarooing (unlike a MK III Octavia I bought in 2017 with the 1.5 petrol engine and manual gearbox). The transmission is smooth and responsive and so far, fuel economy has exceeded my expectations.

Hi Baz9 When you do your test drive, make sure it's with a cold engine as the kangarooing only tended to be present when the engine was cold and could clear within a short space of time. I had a MK III Octavia with this engine and despite a software update the problem remained until I got rid of the car after 15 months of ownership. Glen

Sitting in my little summerhouse (aka The Posh Shed) with my lovely wife curled up asleep beside me. Evening sun coming into the garden, birds singing away. Perfect....

I do know what you mean - I can often predict which of a group of cars they will declare the winner before even reading the article. I also was a bit mystified that a Tesla scored 5/5 over all when in every category it never scored more than a 4/5 and in some categories only 3/5.