I discovered the engine oil thing in the past two years.
In the US, I’ve always heard something like every 3 months or 3,000 to 5,000 miles. The cars even warn you in that timeframe.
In Europe, a mechanic was very confused when I talked about an oil change when one was done the prior year. He said it’s more every 2 years or 20,000 to 25,000 kilometers. Once again the cars were set up to warn at that distance.
I’d love to get to the bottom of it. Why such a difference? I can understand the garages wanting the extra business, but why would the car manufacturers go with it?
In this case I think the times have changed but old advice has stuck. From my understanding, cars until the 80s or so did need their oil changed this often, but newer cars with EFI and especially if you use synthetic, its no longer necessary to do so. Its been many years since I bought a new car, but IIRC even the mid 2000s you were supposed to get an oil change relatively soon after getting a car as fine particles that weren't entirely machined off should have been worked off in the first thousand miles or so and you were told to get an oil change then.
There is also the case of changing oil for hot and cold seasons- getting thinner oil in the winter and thicker in warmer weather to adjust. I think thats more or less a thing of the past as well, my Honda does not specify/recommend this in the owners manual but perhaps some cars do?
Old adages sometimes stick around forever though- especially when there is money to be made in keeping them alive.
Remember that the manufacturers recommendations are designed around keeping the car operational through whatever warranty period they sell the car with. It's not some sort of ideal program and some benefit exists from changing fluids more often than specified.
Specifically, transmission fluid is often considered 'lifetime' fluid that doesn't need to be changed, and, if you follow that advice, you end up replacing the transmission, an expensive endeavor, whereas if you don't, you can typically double its usable lifetime.
You also have to be careful about engine oil, because the margin of error is very small. Most modern cars have an oil minder, and those work well provided the oil itself is in spec.
Free oil changes from dealers are often offered on new cars. Getting you in to the dealer more often may benefit them in some ways:
1) Opportunity to upsell other services,
2) Some people (quite a lot, actually) have alien-to-me car buying habits and might be convinced to trade in their new car after only a year or two and buy another new one if you can just get them into the dealer at the right time.
FWIW, every time I've had my oil changed at the dealership (dozens of times, but only 3 different dealers, so take it with a grain of salt) it's always been done by the service department, with no interaction from sales at all, and therefore no upselling or discussion about trading.
Modern Toyota engines require regular oil changes because their tolerances and oil are very thin. You certainly can run them with far less but they won't last nearly as long
Those extremely long intervals will only work for cars that travel long distances, where the engine has a chance to warm-up and burn off any residual gasoline that gets in the oil during cold starts. If said car spends most of its life in a city, doing short trips, the oil gets rapidly dilluted and loses the ability to lubricate the engine properly.
Most modern cars will take all this into account when trying to determine when the next oil change is due. Also, manufacturers nowadays usually specify shorter intervals (6 months or 7500km) for modern direct injection engines that only drive in a city.
Thought I'd share again since I needed it, found it and thought it was a perfectly simple and efficient tool. I liked that I could download the ePub directly instead of figuring out how to allow KTool to send files to my Kindle when I could do it easily myself.
I put this in a different comment but you can also have a single automation that toggles the setting for those apps on open and close. This way you have a single list of apps to maintain.
You can also have a Shortcut that toggles the setting when you open and close specific apps.
I just did it and it’s very simple:
- in the Shortcuts app, go to Automations
- add a new one and pick “App” as the trigger
- choose the apps you want color in and pick “run immediately” and on open and close
- on the next screen pick “new blank automation”
- in the new shortcut add “Set Color Filters” and set to toggle
You can also make different automations for open and close, but toggle works as long as you toggle the effects manually. But in this case you can just toggle it back manually.
Ah that’s a great point! Yes, I was really talking about the presentation aspect only. And indeed how to get to experiment with it in the cheapest way.
I now realize the term I was looking for was “desktop environment”. Somehow it completely skipped my mind.
I do the same. It's what prompted the question: it's annoying that all these links include some tracking, and it feels (to me) that there can't possibly be enough money to be made to make that annoyance worthwhile. Evidently I'm wrong, but I don't really understand the scale at which it becomes valuable.
I feel like most of the replies to your comment talk about the technical aspect of it.
What’s stopping me is that I don’t have a mental model of the management of the passkeys for the whole lifecycle of my account. Can I use it cross platform? Can I allow someone else to use the same account? What happens if I lose or don’t have access to my phone or laptop? What if I die, can my spouse log in my accounts?
With username/password, it’s very clear what I need. I could write it on paper and give it to someone and it’d work. I feel more at risk of losing access to my accounts if I were to switch to passkeys, because I don’t fully grasp their long term lifecycle.
> I feel more at risk of losing access to my accounts if I were to switch to passkeys, because I don’t fully grasp their long term lifecycle.
It's my understanding that you can't switch password managers without generating a new passkey for each individual service you use (I'm not an expert here, so someone feel free to correct me). That's already enough for me to not switch.
This is why, for me, the problem is not the passkey model per se as much as it is the inability to export/backup/convert my iCloud Keychain database to another account or platform. Apple could arbitrarily delete my data or lock me out of my own account. Or it could just randomly break with no solution besides deleting the database and starting fresh. And according to the author, this has already been occurring!
>Externally there are other issues. Apple Keychain has personally wiped out all my Passkeys on three separate occasions. There are external reports we have recieved of other users who's Keychain Passkeys have been wiped just like mine.
