My wife's driving

Not having the car for a couple of days didn't affect our day to day life much. We had bought all the groceries for the whole week during the last weekend and it's only a 20 minute walk to work. However, we were worried about one particular thing. My wife's drive test was scheduled for Friday morning!!!

I towed the car to Chadstone Toyota on Monday. Thursday was Australia day, which was a public holiday. So, if I didn't get the car by Wednesday, my wife wouldn't be able to practice driving on Thursday and we probably wouldn't be able to go for the test on Friday. (Friday was a holiday at work, although it went out of our annual leave.) My wife has never taken the bus or the train by herself, which is the reason why this was a problem in the first place. I have to take her to the test. The VicRoads test centre we picked was about 40km away from home, as the routes there were less complex. Besides, the instructor was more familiar with the test routes there.Luckily, we got the car back on Wednesday and my wife was able to practice driving on Thursday.

On Friday, we could go for the test as we planned, and by some miracle, she passed it!!! This particular Friday was a good day for the drive test because there were less cars on the road, because many people were taking the Friday off to make it a four-day long weekend. The schools were still in holidays until 1st of February.

I would like to talk a bit about the events that led to this day.

My wife had to start the journey to obtain the Victorian driving license from taking the road rules test at VicRoads which happened in September. After passing that test in the first attempt, she applied for a learner permit which allowed her to practice driving with a full license holder on the passenger seat. If you are on a permanent resident visa, you can drive up to 6 months in Victoria with your overseas license. The 6 months is calculated from the first point of entry, which happened in October 2015 for us. By the time my wife moved here in April 2016, her 6 months were already up, so she had to get the learner permit anyways. (I had a couple of months before mine expired as I arrived in February, so I could practise driving myself.) After getting the learner permit, she took the Hazard Perception Test and passed it in the first attempt as well. This brought her closer to obtaining the Victorian license. Only thing remained was passing the drive test. (It's much easier to get the full license for people who have a overseas full license, otherwise it is a lengthy process.) Since she had not driven a car in almost 5 years, we decided to take some driving lessons first. The driving school we decided to attend was a Sri Lankan one called Learning Pedals. The instructor assigned to my wife was a female, and at the beginning she came to pick my wife up. After a couple of lessons, we had to decide where we would take the test, and we had to practice on the test routes to familiarise about the tricky spots. We could take the test at Heatherton or Burwood, but the routes were known to be a bit complex. We were hoping to take the test before my parents returned to Sri Lanka on the boxing day. So the instructor recommended that we go to Pakenham for the test because the routes were simple and it was easy to pass in one go. Since Pakenham was about 40km from our place, I had to drive her there for the lessons on Sundays. We had to take our baby girl with us as well, because she would need a feed. We left our son with my parents.

Gave another shot at a mechanical keyboard

After that bad experience with my first mechanical keyboard purchase, I decided to buy another one from a local store. Luckily for me, there are many computer shops within a 5km radius. PC Case Gear, Scorptec, PLE, CentreCom, MSY and CPL to name a few. Furthermore, I wanted to buy a keyboard from a reputed brand name this time round. (I'm not saying Turtle Beach is not a reputed brand, just that it is not widely known.)

I kept a keen eye for deals for a couple of days on ozbargain, but none showed up. So I decided to visit the online store of those computer shops and searched for a decently priced keyboard.

The Logitech G610 and the Corsair STRAFE (non-RGB) were around $130. They were good products but I wanted to get the best bang for the buck. That's when I came across the Corsair K70 Lux (non-RGB) for $135 on CentreCom. This is better than both of those keyboards for just $5 more. Better than the G610 because it has dedicated media keys and better than the STRAFE because it has an aluminum construction compared to plastic. There were cheaper mechanical keyboard from reputed brands such as Ducky but they had some kind of a compromise - some had no backlighting, some had switches other than Cherry MX, some weren't in stock with no ETA and some didn't come with Cherry MX Brown switches. I was all set on the MX Browns, because I actually type more than I play games so I needed tactile feedback, at the same time I didn't want to noise MX Blue switches. Browns were the middle grounds, and middle grounds are better in life.

The only concern I had about the Corsair keyboards was their software suite and the keyboard requiring two USB ports.

But after some research, I came to know that you could do just fine without the software (you mainly lose the macro functionality and fancy lighting patterns) and you don't need to plug in both USB cables if you plug it into a USB 3.0 port. Honestly, I do have many unused USB ports on the back of my PC, so that 2nd point was not really a big issue; just something that I didn't like.

Car-less for three days after an engine oil leak

Last Sunday, we went for a driving lesson for my wife (her drive test is coming up shortly) and on the way we visited Costco to fill up the fuel tank and have pizza for lunch. The petrol (ULP 91) prices have hit 140c per litre everywhere, because of the high demand in the summer, yet as a Costco member, I could buy them at 118c, which was about 15% cheaper. We filled up the tank and came home.

After I reversed the car in the car port at my apartment, I noticed a trail of liquid on the driveway leading to the carport. After a while, I noticed there was a bit of an oil spill under the car. It was a little spill, and I had to rush to a birthday party in the evening, so I went there and came back. I could notice more oil where I parked the car as well. Worried, I smoothly drove home (I drive smoothly anyways) which was only a 5 minutes away. I was watching for the low oil pressure warning whole through the trip back home, but it never came on. I never could feel or heard anything out of the ordinary from the engine either.

Once I parked the car, there was a new oil trail close (parallel) to the old one. So it was still leaking. I called my father and asked what I can do and he told me to check the oil level immediately even though I had driven the car few minutes earlier and even though it was not a perfectly flat surface. The carport floor ramps slightly forward. I saw NOTHING on the dipstick. NOTHING! I initially thought all of the engine oil had leaked out. The oil spill under the engine was much bigger now as well.

So, I couldn't move the car. I talked to a mobile mechanic and he told me that there is a known issue with the Toyota Aurions prior to 2008 where the oil cooling hose which has a rubber midsection can get damaged over time and leak oil, and Toyota should replace it free of charge.

The update on the Turtle Beach Impact 700 keyboard purchase

In the previous post I mentioned that I placed the order for my first mechanical keyboard. It arrived a day earlier than the seller predicted. The postman was kind enough to deliver it to me just before I left for work. But I had to rush to work, so I decided to play with it when I returned home from work.

I unboxed the keyboard with my son sitting along side. It was way more fun for him than myself. I am not that amused by unmoving packages; I just want to to get it working asap. But I took some photos just to post here.

The keyboard has two USB ports. I think you can do with just one, because the second one is just for USB passthrough. But I connected both because I have ample USB ports on my PC.

To test the keyboard, I opened up notepad and started typing some words. I noticed that the spaces weren't registering between them. I hit the space bar several times and I wasn't dreaming: the spaces really weren't registering. I disconnected the keyboard and reconnected it to see if it was just a random Windows error. But the space bar still wasn't working. I connected the keyboard to two different ports on the back as well as the front. Same story. Then I tried it on the MacBook Air, and no change. The space bar was not working!!!

Yikes!

The keyboard doesn't have a companion software. That was one reason why I was happy to buy this keyboard in the first place. An additional software layer means more input lag. So this wasn't caused by me forgetting to install a companion software.

I went through the manual to see if I was doing something wrong. Honestly, what more should one do to get a keyboard working with a PC? Anyways, the manual did not mention anything special we had to do, nor any troubleshooting guides, so it wasn't a setup issue.

Conclusion: the keyboard was a DOA!!!

I have not had a DOA in a long time. The last one was a MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G which had one of its fans not working, but it wasn't totally DOA.

I wanted to see if the space bar was the only key that was not working. It was not. Several keys were not registering the key strokes. Namely, the Delete, down cursor, Num Lock, Num7, Num4 and Num1 weren't working. If I had to guess, all these keys were connected through the same electrical wiring to the controller.

I uploaded a video to YouTube showing the fault.

I went online to see if there were similar claims, but it seems I was the only (un)lucky one.

It was time to RMA the keyboard. I first messaged the store through eBay. I was told that they would most probably have to refund due to stock being exhausted. I asked how to proceed with it, but I did not received a reply back. It was late night anyways. I was lucky to have received the initial response in the first place.

Finally...placed an order for a mechanical keyboard

I had not bought anything "fun" for myself in almost a year and I finally had to do something about it. Today I received a $20 off coupon code from eBay and I thought this was my chance. I looked around for deals on Ozbargain because a great number of deals pop-up when there are discounts on offer from major retailers.

There were few for SSD and hard drive deals, but I was not in the market for either. Well, I am in the market for the 4TB hard drive, but I still haven't had time to go over the idea of strengthening my backup policy I discussed here. There were two deals for mechanical keyboards: one from JB Hi-Fi and one from eBay. The JB Hi-Fi offers weren't really cheap because you could find the products they have on sale for cheaper if you knew where to look. But the one on eBay (well, it wasn't directly from eBay but you could buy it from their eBay store as well) looked solid. A backlit mechanical gaming keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches for AUD 100. While it still sounded expensive, it was not as expensive as the AUD 150+ normal price for mechanical keyboards from well-known brands like Corsair and Razer. Hence I decided to take a look at reviews if this was my chance to own a mechanical keyboard for the first time in my life.

The keyboard on offer was a Turtle Beach Impact 700, which was unheard of. (Note: If you visit that link, you would know that there is a huge discount on offer on Turtle Beach's US store as well) If you are into gaming, you would know about the brand "Turtle Beach" mostly from their headset lineup. But I didn't know that they made keyboards until today.