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Snowdens Secret posted:Your satnav probably takes a USB cable for power. Hook a cig lighter adapter to a discreet USB hub and run USB lines to satnav and camera. I did try that the first time I thought about this, but it turns out that Garmin act funny with USB cable: if it isn't the original car adaptor, plugging in a USB power cable will cause it to charge, but not let you navigate. I suppose it is just something simple like shorted pins in the cable, so perhaps I should look into it.
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Oct 11, 2013 09:56
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Mooseykins posted:BlackVue is what you're after then, i believe it does all of those things. It's what i'm going to buy for my car, one for the front and one for the rear. Still kind of big. I'm thinking something like this, but not awful: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FULL-HD-1080P-Portable-Surveillance-DVR-2-5-Inch-LCD-Button-Camera-Free-shipping/567103889.html
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Oct 11, 2013 15:16
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For me, getting into dashcams would be a slippery slope to having 4 fisheye cams (one for each side) and just way too much giving a poo poo about commute-driving when it can be stressful enough sometimes as it is. I figure eventually there'll be a nearly transparent solution that you clip onto the rim of your doors/hood/trunklid that you won't ever have to think about. That, or cars'll eventually just have them from the factory. That Blackvue looks awesome what with the shock sensor and parking monitoring.
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Oct 11, 2013 15:43
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There are phone apps that do the dash cam thing, but it's not necessarily a dedicated device, and the field of view on the camera isn't that wide. But it works well enough.
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Oct 11, 2013 15:53
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I work nights at a car parts retail shop, and I had the realization last night that so many of our customers come in reeking of alcohol. I don't mean "guy just sat down and had a drink then wife came home needing a headlight so I can kinda sorta smell maybe a whiff of alcohol" kind of smelling of alcohol. I'm talking "been drinking since sunrise and haven't stopped" levels of functional alcoholism. I can smell them when they walk in the store. Basically, it's kind of scary how many drunk drivers there are out there.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:01
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Those ones never seem to get caught either.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:06
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spog posted:However, my cigarette lighter socket is taken up with the satnav and I really dislike those huge 2-1 adaptors so I keep putting it off until I can work out how to do it nicely. I've been thinking about breaking open the plug and hardwiring it into the loom somewhere - but I never get beyond thinking about it. Get one of these, find a fuse that turns on and off with the key and use it to wire up a cigarette lighter socket. Bury everything under the dash and run the dashcam's charger wire through a panel gap somewhere on the dashboard and everything is kept out of sight.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:09
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Jared592 posted:Those ones never seem to get caught either. Functional alcoholics can do some pretty unbelievable poo poo, if you take unbelievable to mean "You shouldn't be physically capable of doing this in your state." One of my first jobs was as a shop assistant (read: bitch)/counter person for a local Harley shop that did some custom bikes as well, so naturally we got the usual mix of wealthy business guys with $60,000 custom bikes as well as some real scummy bikes that I wouldn't pay $100 for. That being said, I was always astounded at how many customers drove their bikes or truck to our shop completely smashed on liquor. I wouldn't even let some of them stand too close to me 'cause they reeked so bad I couldn't breath from the mix of high-proof and BO.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:28
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spog posted:I did try that the first time I thought about this, but it turns out that Garmin act funny with USB cable: if it isn't the original car adaptor, plugging in a USB power cable will cause it to charge, but not let you navigate. I don't know about that, but I do know that the traffic information receiver is in the cable, not the Garmin unit itself. So if you have a flat hard plastic section on the cable somewhere don't be surprised if your "lifetime traffic subscription" stops working.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:36
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During my 15-20 minute commute this morning, on THREE separate occasions I got stuck behind slow rear end vehicles doing 5 miles under the speed limit that managed to make the yellow light through an intersection, while I get stuck and stopped at the red. gently caress you people, hit the gas!!
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Oct 11, 2013 17:39
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The Midniter posted:During my 15-20 minute commute this morning, on THREE separate occasions I got stuck behind slow rear end vehicles doing 5 miles under the speed limit that managed to make the yellow light through an intersection, while I get stuck and stopped at the red. I loving hate this. The other day I got stuck at a light because this dude was leaving a loving double-trailer semi's worth of length in front of him and ever growing. He blatantly runs an orange and it's just like, hey buddy, we both would have been legal to go if you had been going with the flow of traffic.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:56
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Don't forget about the people who won't pull into an intersection when turning left.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:59
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The Midniter posted:During my 15-20 minute commute this morning, on THREE separate occasions I got stuck behind slow rear end vehicles doing 5 miles under the speed limit that managed to make the yellow light through an intersection, while I get stuck and stopped at the red. The best are the people that drive one speed and manage to pull this poo poo off. I've figured it out. It's 41 MPH. The car is always like a bashed up Alero or maybe a Windstar with no rear suspension. 55 MPH? Driving 41. Slows to 45? 41 MPH. 35 MPH speed limit? Forty-one miles per hour. Combine that with the "oh, this is a passing zone, this means I need to drag race this 5 series that's been trying to get around me" factor, and sometimes my daily country highway commute is hell. Better than rolling the dice on our interstate, though. e: I have a maybe-technical explanation for this, it seems like in most lovely passenger vehicles, top gear in the automatic kicks in right around 35-40, so I think they feel the shift and say "ok, going fast now."
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Oct 11, 2013 18:00
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SierraEchoBravo posted:Functional alcoholics can do some pretty unbelievable poo poo, if you take unbelievable to mean "You shouldn't be physically capable of doing this in your state." Growing up in London one of our neighbors was a leading urologist who regularly put away 1.5-2 bottles of wine a night and would often get called on in the middle of the night and would drive to the hospital and operate. By that point it was probably more normal for him than working sober. 
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Oct 11, 2013 18:09
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Lightbulb Out posted:Don't forget about the people who won't pull into an intersection when turning left. I've seen the opposite of this, too, where the guy in front of me kept pulling out until he got clipped by a car in the oncoming lane. This particular intersection has at least two accidents a month and it's not even a high volume intersection. It was a blue E46 too 
Macichne Leainig fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 18:26
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drgitlin posted:Growing up in London one of our neighbors was a leading urologist who regularly put away 1.5-2 bottles of wine a night and would often get called on in the middle of the night and would drive to the hospital and operate. By that point it was probably more normal for him than working sober. Not sure if things work the same way over there, but law enforcement in the US has something of an understanding with medical professionals; you never ticket someone who might some day work on you after being shot/stabbed (etc.) Doctors and nurses pretty much have a "get out of jail free card" as long as they're not caught doing 60 while chugging a bottle of everclear in the wrong lane, in a school zone.
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Oct 11, 2013 18:31
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Geoj posted:Not sure if things work the same way over there, but law enforcement in the US has something of an understanding with medical professionals; you never ticket someone who might some day work on you after being shot/stabbed (etc.) Doctors and nurses pretty much have a "get out of jail free card" as long as they're not caught doing 60 while chugging a bottle of everclear in the wrong lane, in a school zone. I see this a lot whenever I'm headed southbound into Boston on 93, or when I get into the Longwood district where a bunch of large hospitals are. Usually around Fenway. BMWs and Audis with Boston Children's or Dana Farber parking stickers hauling rear end, mostly during the (relatively) lighter traffic around early afternoon and later at night. Having spent a good amount of time with relatives in hospitals, as much as it irks me that they could be abusing their privilege I've personally met enough doctors that have gone way beyond the call of duty to be there when patients need them to be to know that in all likelihood they are responding to an emergency. People haul-rear end on 93 anyways though, its not uncommon for traffic in the right lanes to be cruising at 85+ during weekdays. With the kind of drivers we have around here, its like the physical manifestation of this thread. SierraEchoBravo fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 18:43
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Yesterday I was waiting at a major intersection when the left-turn lights went on, and someone in the lane next to me apparently didn't notice it was an arrow and went straight through, meaning a line of people turning left had to all panic stop to avoid getting t-boned. That's not the astonishing part, though: the bit that really got me was that two other people followed him out on the assumption that their light was green.
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Oct 11, 2013 19:02
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SierraEchoBravo posted:I see this a lot whenever I'm headed southbound into Boston on 93, or when I get into the Longwood district where a bunch of large hospitals are. Usually around Fenway. BMWs and Audis with Boston Children's or Dana Farber parking stickers hauling rear end, mostly during the (relatively) lighter traffic around early afternoon and later at night. Having spent a good amount of time with relatives in hospitals, as much as it irks me that they could be abusing their privilege I've personally met enough doctors that have gone way beyond the call of duty to be there when patients need them to be to know that in all likelihood they are responding to an emergency. I90, too. Which makes my 68 mile (each way) commute take under an hour if no one is retarded and wads it up across 3 lanes. Today I was going with the flow of traffic (that meant 85mph, at that moment) and had to get out of the way for a cop, who was probably doing at least 95 to 100. I saw him coming a good quarter to half mile behind me. No one even slowed down when he went by. On the other hand, have I already told the story about how I got finger-wagged by some bluehair in the right turn lane at an intersection with a "no right turn on red" sign and a green right turn arrow active after politely beeping to get her to check the light since she wasn't moving? I didn't even know how to respond. She waited till the straight ahead lanes had a green signal.
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Oct 11, 2013 19:08
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Protocol7 posted:He blatantly runs an orange and it's just like, hey buddy, we both would have been legal to go if you had been going with the flow of traffic. What the gently caress is an orange light? Hyperbole, or color blindness?  I've been strongly considering getting a dashcam for whenever I start driving regularly again. Nothing is quite as fun as an undocumented, unlit torn up highway in the middle of bumblefuck with uneven lanes. God forbid someone wasn't driving below the speed limit because it is pitch loving black out.
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Oct 11, 2013 21:05
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West SAAB Story posted:What the gently caress is an orange light? Hyperbole, or color blindness? Hyperbole. Basically the light was yellow well before he went into the intersection and turned red before he completed his turn. Urban Dictionary definition: quote:A traffic light that has been on yellow for so long it's about to turn red. Basically, the fucker went slow as balls and still managed to almost run a red light.
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Oct 11, 2013 21:37
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Jonny 290 posted:The best are the people that drive one speed and manage to pull this poo poo off. I've figured it out. It's 41 MPH. code:
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Oct 11, 2013 21:41
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Well this just happened directly in front of my apartment. The driver of the white truck with trailer was taken off in cuffs and was likely drunk. The black truck was parked about 30 feet back from where it is now and just out of frame to the left is a green car that he hit also. Most of the front drivers side suspension was ripped off when getting up on the ledge it is on. The speed limit there is 30mph but people drive anywhere from 25-40.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:31
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Dash cam chat. I picked up a Zentronix zDrive-HDi a while ago. It was more expensive than I wanted to spend, but had all the features I wanted including start recording on power-up, auto-overwrite oldest video first, and timestamp. It claims it's HD, which technically it is (1280x720), but it's a wide angle lens so looks like a movie it does not. Also, it captures at 24fps and not the claimed 30. That said, the wide field of vision which is great; on a regular road the video includes a good portion of the left and right so you clearly see side roads as you approach them. I have it wired into a accessory switched circuit so when I start the vehicle up, it starts recording. When I shut the vehicle off, it records for about 10 additional seconds and then shuts off; it's perfect. I have it mounted on the passenger side of my rear-view mirror so it's quite unobtrusive to my field of vision and the wire runs along the rear-view mirror and up into the head liner area; very stealthy. Overall I'm pleased with it and I primarily purchased it because based on the daily driving I see on my commute, it's only a matter of time before someone blasts through a stop sign or red light and plows into me.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:50
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 drunk while hauling
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Oct 11, 2013 23:51
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Das Volk posted:
Sadly it is pretty loving common out here with guys driving halfway across the state and having a "few" road beers.
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Oct 11, 2013 23:59
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Frankenstein posted:Dash cam chat. I picked up a Zentronix zDrive-HDi a while ago. It was more expensive than I wanted to spend, but had all the features I wanted including start recording on power-up, auto-overwrite oldest video first, and timestamp. It claims it's HD, which technically it is (1280x720), but it's a wide angle lens so looks like a movie it does not. Also, it captures at 24fps and not the claimed 30. That said, the wide field of vision which is great; on a regular road the video includes a good portion of the left and right so you clearly see side roads as you approach them. I have it wired into a accessory switched circuit so when I start the vehicle up, it starts recording. When I shut the vehicle off, it records for about 10 additional seconds and then shuts off; it's perfect. I have it mounted on the passenger side of my rear-view mirror so it's quite unobtrusive to my field of vision and the wire runs along the rear-view mirror and up into the head liner area; very stealthy. Overall I'm pleased with it and I primarily purchased it because based on the daily driving I see on my commute, it's only a matter of time before someone blasts through a stop sign or red light and plows into me. I want these features, but weatherproof so I could put one on each of my motorcycles, and one in the car. Seriously, I die just about every day due to the new influx of snowbirds into Phoenix (and also native Arizona drivers; I thought Idaho was bad but at least we can deal with inclement weather without sheer panic) and I think it would help greatly in my inevitable future court case.
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Oct 12, 2013 00:14
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Frankenstein posted:It claims it's HD, which technically it is (1280x720), but it's a wide angle lens so looks like a movie it does not. Also, it captures at 24fps and not the claimed 30. I don't really understand the obsession with  "Its not true HD because it doesn't capture 30 fps" or "it's 1280 x 960." As long as it has a high enough resolution that you can clearly make out details on a normal TV or computer monitor and license plates are legible you're fine - it's not like your accident footage that proves the guy who cut you off is a lying sack of poo poo is would have won an academy award, if only it had been shot in true HD. The dashcam review site posted earlier is full of that.
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Oct 12, 2013 00:41
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drgitlin posted:Growing up in London one of our neighbors was a leading urologist who regularly put away 1.5-2 bottles of wine a night and would often get called on in the middle of the night and would drive to the hospital and operate. By that point it was probably more normal for him than working sober. Atticus_1354 posted:Well this just happened directly in front of my apartment. The driver of the white truck with trailer was taken off in cuffs and was likely drunk. Geoj posted:I don't really understand the obsession with
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Oct 12, 2013 00:50
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I saw a bicycle accident today while I was riding home. If only I'd ordered that camera a while earlier. It wasn't very bad though, and the guy who's mostly at fault probably isn't legally at fault. Basically there were a few of us cyclists coming up on the right at about the speed of traffic. Most cars were giving us a few feet, but some guy in an Audi was driving super close to us. There was a parked car jutting out an extra two feet up ahead, so the cyclist in front of me pulled out into the street a bit, and took his time doing it / looking back at the Audi to make sure he wouldn't get hit. As he was looking back, the car in front of him slowed down and he crashed into it.
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Oct 12, 2013 02:18
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Is it a normal thing for some people to ride a bike down the side of the freeway like the guy I saw on my way to class this morning?
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Oct 12, 2013 02:28
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Opensourcepirate posted:I saw a bicycle accident today while I was riding home. If only I'd ordered that camera a while earlier. So who exactly do you think is 'mostly at fault' there?
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Oct 12, 2013 02:35
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Jonny 290 posted:The car is always like a bashed up Alero or maybe a Windstar with no rear suspension. 55 MPH? Driving 41. Slows to 45? 41 MPH. 35 MPH speed limit? Forty-one miles per hour. I live in a rural area and I too have experienced this, and it occurs at exactly 70km/h. I still laugh when they do 70 in an 80 zone and then continue to do 70 through a small town/school zone/around a school bus.
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Oct 12, 2013 02:39
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razorscooter posted:Is it a normal thing for some people to ride a bike down the side of the freeway like the guy I saw on my way to class this morning? Only in areas where there are no surface streets, so you pretty much have to take the freeway in order to not go a bunch of miles out of your way to get where you're going.
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Oct 12, 2013 04:53
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QuarkMartial posted:Basically, it's kind of scary how many drunk drivers there are out there. A city I used to live near ran a study (not sure how they got the data) and found that, on average at any time \ day of the week, one out of 11 drivers was legally drunk. Between about 1 AM and 6 AM the number was more like 1 in 3. This might've been back when the legal limit was .10 instead of .08. I think they were trying to generate some fear to scare up money for more checkpoints, but the sheer numbers and lack of daily Darwin-proving disasters indicated more that a hard BAC limit was a cruddy indicator of impairment. Driving five under up to a yellow and then brazenly running the red anyway is so common up here I wonder if driver's ed teaches it as correct.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:02
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Snowdens Secret posted:Driving five under up to a yellow and then brazenly running the red anyway is so common up here I wonder if driver's ed teaches it as correct. I was taught "don't speed to try to get through the light," which really just means only break one law at a time; but I think some people took it to mean that it's OK if you don't make it through, as long as you don't increase your speed at all. Or something. One other thing I've been wondering about : How much of a difference does it make that some speedos are farther off from reality than others? Perhaps the people going five under just have a more optimistic gauge. I happen to know approximately how far off mine is (about 10%), so I compensate, but perhaps others don't.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:06
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8ender posted:I live in a rural area and I too have experienced this, and it occurs at exactly 70km/h. I was going to post this. That behavior annoys the poo poo out of me. If you can't drive at the speed limit out on the big roads because your car is poo poo, you are poo poo or you are hauling poo poo, don't you dare make up for it where the low speed limit is there for a very good reason (i.e school, small town / community) and so on. On my usual road I go on when I go to the shops, the speeds go 80km/h, 50km/h then 90km/h. When coming back it's obviously reversed and I can't tell you how many bloody times I catch up with and pass someone on the 90 stretch because they are doing 73, just for them to keep going at that speed when we hit the 50 zone and catch up with me. They always seem annoyed as well because they ride up my rear end.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:44
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Lightbulb Out posted:Don't forget about the people who won't pull into an intersection when turning left. I am that guy. I will not drive into an intersection without being able to leave it legally. There are stop lines for a reason. Not only will I put myself at risk by driving into a busy intersection, I will put other drivers behind me in danger because they will not be able to see beyond my car. So honk at me all you want - I will not be an accessory to a potentially fatal T bone crash that kills my passenger.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:44
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TATPants posted:I am that guy. I will not drive into an intersection without being able to leave it legally. There are stop lines for a reason. Not only will I put myself at risk by driving into a busy intersection, I will put other drivers behind me in danger because they will not be able to see beyond my car. So honk at me all you want - I will not be an accessory to a potentially fatal T bone crash that kills my passenger. I agree with this. When people pull forward on certain intersections, they make it so I can't see the oncoming traffic. If they were to just stay at the line, everyone can see the gaps in the oncoming traffic and, I believe, more people could make the left before the change. All pulling forward does is ensure that the first guy, and only the first guy, gets through on many lights.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:52
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Well, Massachusetts state law says that cars have to keep a reasonable distance from cyclists. In a lot of states it specifically says 3 feet, but MA is "reasonable distance." When I wrote the post, I was thinking the Audi driver was at fault. Deciding whether the Audi or the biker is more at fault is rather subjective though. Almost all of the close calls I've had while driving have been the result of more than one little thing going wrong at the same time, rather than one big thing. Here it was A) Audi wasn't giving bikers the room he should have B) Car was parked poorly, and then because of those C) Cyclist looked back for too long. A lot of my close calls have been because people blow way past stop lines all the time. If they blow through far enough to scare me into the street too far, but don't actually come that close to hitting, are they more at fault or am I if someone hits me?
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Oct 12, 2013 08:00
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