Buying a Car with Cinch - Not So Great . . .

 

Cinch: Slick Interface, Shady Service? My 30-Year Auto Trader Streak Ends in a "Faff"

For nearly 30 years, I’ve used Auto Trader to buy my cars. It’s always been a reasonably straightforward process, even if the quality of the cars has varied dramatically. There’s something grounded about supporting a local small business—even if it means turning up to a scrap of industrial land on the outskirts of town to drink instant coffee while poring over old service records.

This time, with my current car broken and my travel options limited, I needed something local. I set my criteria to a 50-mile radius and found what looked like a great deal: a car advertised just 16 miles away. The purchase started through a company called Cinch using a "slick and easy" online interface. You fill out the paperwork in the comfort of your own home instead of a dingy porter cabin.

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The 240-Mile "Local" Car

The "slick" process hit a wall the moment the paperwork was done. Suddenly, I discovered the car wasn't 16 miles away in Taunton; it was actually in Corby, 240 miles away. To make matters worse, they wanted to charge an extra £300 to pick it up from where they said it was in the first place.

"This is all starting to sound a bit fishy... but you can't really pull out because if you're buying with finance, you've already run your credit check and you can't run lots of those and expect to keep getting approvals."

I spoke to a representative who admitted the 16-mile advertisement was "a bit misleading" and suggested I just buy the car and they would refund the transfer fee. Spoiler alert: they eventually refused to refund that money, which I believe is a breach of consumer law and advertising guidelines.

A "Luxury" Dacia and a Missing History

I eventually went to Avonmouth to pick up the car. Despite receiving numerous emails saying it was ready, it was actually locked in a compound they didn't have control over. I had to wait around for quite a while just to get my hands on it. This wasn't the staff's fault at Avonmouth they worked really hard to correct cinch's mistake. 

The car itself—a Dacia—actually feels like "absolute luxury" compared to my old Skoda. It’s smooth as butter, but it came with zero service history. For the most expensive car I've ever bought, I was miffed to find nothing but a vague piece of paper from a BAC fleet solution company with unchecked boxes for oil levels and tire torque.

When I challenged customer service, the representative constantly talked over me, claiming their status as an "online retailer" meant they couldn't possibly put accurate locations on Auto Trader because they use regional hubs. It’s warped logic.

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The Verdict: Would I recommend Cinch?

No. While I think I got lucky with a decent car, their quality checks feel "mythical" or creative at best, and their sales practices are deceptive. I feel like I’ve betrayed the genuine local sellers who actually provide information when asked. Next time, I’m going back to the local guys.

It not just me that has had this experience. Check out there google maps listing at their head office. 

A Note on the Legal Bits

The practice of advertising a product's location falsely to entice a lead, then charging to move it to that advertised location, likely violates the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 regarding "misleading actions." It also goes against ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) guidelines regarding "bait advertising" and the transparent disclosure of delivery charges.

Lux Contour Plan 

Can You Solder a Network Cable?

 

Can You Solder a Network Cable? 

Every DIY tech project starts with a simple goal. Mine was a 100-metre run of Cat6 cable to connect my office to the router. On paper, it’s a standard job. In reality, it became a week-long masterclass in why "the right way" isn't always the best way for your specific setup.

The "Illegal" Win: Soldering Ethernet

When the open reach team chopped the factory fitted ned off of my cable, I didn't reach for a crimping tool. I reached for a soldering iron. To any network engineer, soldering a twisted-pair data cable is heresy. They’ll tell you about signal reflections, impedance mismatches, and cross-talk. An AI query informed me that the solder was a "brick wall" to the signal. 

But here is the fact: It worked. With a steady hand and some insulation tape, that soldered "bodge" delivered a stable 300 Mbps. For my needs, it was a total victory. I had a working solution that respected my existing skills and got the job done.

The Perfection Trap

Then came the trap we all fall into: The "Proper" Fix. The internet (and helpful AI assistants) will tell you that you are "leaving performance on the table" if you don't use standard RJ45 crimps. So, I cut my beautiful solder joints. I spent hours wrestling with stiff, solid-core copper wire, lining up microscopic strands into clear plastic plugs.

The result? The tester showed all green lights, but the actual performance collapsed. The connection became slower and less reliable than the solder joint it replaced.

Lesson learned: Value doesn't come from hitting a theoretical maximum; it comes from utility. If a 300 Mbps "bodge" does everything you need, chasing 900 Mbps at the cost of your sanity is a bad trade.

The Final Verdict: For a 100m run on solid-core cable, save yourself the hours of crimping. If you want a "proper" fix that actually works for novices, use a Punch-Down Junction Box. It’s the middle ground between the "shunned" solder and the "fiddly" crimp.

Sometimes, the best solution isn't the one that's "best" on a datasheet—it's the one that lets you get back to work.

Flood Risk Assessment London 

AI Queries Causing System to Hang

 

AI Queries Causing System to Hang: How I Tamed My Workstation's Audio Pops

If you're like me, running a beloved, powerful, but aging workstation – in my case, an HP xw8400 with dual Intel Xeon E5345 CPUs and dual NVIDIA NVS 300 graphics cards on Windows 7 – you know the struggle. This machine is a beast for certain tasks, but it has its quirks, especially when it comes to real-time audio.

Recently, I hit a wall: every time I performed an AI query in my browser (Supermium, in this case), my audio would suffer from frustrating clicks and pops. It felt like the system was "hanging" for a split second, causing those dreaded buffer underruns. This wasn't just annoying; it was crippling my ability to work efficiently.

The Problem: LatencyMon Revealed the Culprit

My first step was to fire up LatencyMon, the go-to tool for diagnosing audio dropouts. The results were stark:

• Massive DPC Latency Spikes: nvlddmkm.sys (the NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver) was consistently hitting peaks of 30,000 microseconds (µs) during AI queries. Anything over 1,000-2,000 µs is problematic for audio, so 30,000 µs was a red flag the size of a billboard.

• Hard Pagefaults: My system was also drowning in 22,000 hard pagefaults, indicating that the system was constantly scrambling for data on the slow hard drive. This was primarily caused by psanhost.exe (Panda Antivirus), which I quickly realised was simply too heavy for my setup.

The Journey: Initial Tweaks (and Why They Didn't Fully Work)

I started with the usual suspects, guided by some excellent advice:

1. NVIDIA Control Panel - Usage Mode: Graphics Only: This was a good first step, preventing the GPUs from trying to act as compute devices. It helped, but the massive spikes remained.

2. Disabled Hardware Acceleration in Browser: Ensured Supermium wasn't trying to offload too much to the GPU. Again, helpful, but not the silver bullet.

3. Power Options: High Performance: Kept my Xeons running at full speed.

4. Task Scheduler & Services Cleanup: Removed any lurking NVIDIA background tasks.

5. Disabled NVIDIA HD Audio: Prevented audio conflicts.

6. Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: Clamp: Reduced unnecessary GPU sharpening.

7. Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single Display Performance Mode: Simplified how the driver handled my four monitors.

8. Threaded Optimisation: Off: Stopped the driver from scattering work across my 8 CPU cores.

While these steps collectively improved the system's responsiveness and reduced some background noise, the crucial nvlddmkm.sys DPC spikes during those AI queries persisted. The 30,000 µs monster was still there.

The Breakthrough: Maximum Pre-rendered Frames to "1"

After all those tweaks, the final, most impactful change came down to a single setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel:

Maximum Pre-rendered Frames: Set to 1

This seemingly small adjustment was the key to unlocking real-time performance on my vintage workstation.

Why "Maximum Pre-rendered Frames = 1" Fixed It:

• Stopping the CPU from "Looking Ahead": By default, the NVIDIA driver tries to prepare multiple frames (often 3 or more) in advance to ensure smooth visuals. On a modern system, this is fine. On my xw8400, feeding two NVS 300 cards from a Front Side Bus (FSB), this "pre-rendering" was causing the CPU to get utterly swamped with graphics tasks. It was constantly buffering frames, delaying critical audio data.

• Clearing the System Bus: When an AI query rapidly streams text and updates the screen, it demands a continuous flow of new frames. With a buffer of 3, the CPU was frantically trying to keep up, creating a massive traffic jam on the system bus. Setting it to 1 forces the CPU to prepare just one frame at a time, send it, and immediately move on. This dramatically reduces the amount of time nvlddmkm.sys holds onto the CPU, allowing the audio stream to flow uninterrupted.

• The AI Query Trigger: The dynamic, text-streaming nature of AI interfaces specifically exposed this bottleneck. Each word appearing on screen triggered the intensive frame pre-rendering, leading directly to the clicks.

The Result: Silence at Last

After applying this change, the difference was immediate and profound. AI queries now run smoothly, the text streams without a hitch, and most importantly, the audio clicks and pops are gone! LatencyMon now shows nvlddmkm.sys behaving itself, with peak DPC times well within acceptable limits.

It turns out, for legacy hardware like the HP xw8400, the less "smart" your graphics driver tries to be with buffering and multi-threading, the better for real-time audio. Sometimes, the simplest solution is the most effective.

If you're battling similar audio latency issues on your older workstation, especially with NVIDIA cards, give that Maximum Pre-rendered Frames = 1 setting a try. It might just save your sanity!

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Sustain Hold Pedal Not Working Behringer Pro VS Mini

 Here are some notes that took down while diagnosing why the sustain pedal was not working when controlling my Behringer Pro VS Mini with a Edirol PC-50. 

So firstly I had to check it was not the Edirol PC-50. It is quite old. And maybe someone who owned it before me plugged something i and fried it somehow. 

But my using MIDI-OX on windows 7 and a long chat with Google Gemini:

https://g.co/gemini/share/f3112cfd08a2 

I was able to figure out that the problem lies with the Behringer Pro VS Mini. 

What the PC-50 Does

This is what you get from the PC-50 when the DP-2 pedal is pressed. Which according to Gemini is correct. 

 TIMESTAMP IN PORT STATUS DATA1 DATA2 CHAN NOTE EVENT               

 0000365B   1  --     B0    40    7F    1  ---  CC: Pedal (Sustain)   

 0000378B   1  --     B0    40    00    1  ---  CC: Pedal (Sustain)   

What the Pro VS Mini is Listening for?

So does Pro VS Mini use Standard MIDI CC? - Yes - Controller operates key, and pitch bend etc. 

Does Pro VS Mini use Standard MIDI CC for Hold ? - No it doesn't.

How to make a hold pedal work with Pro VS Mini?

I am not sure if I can be bothered. 

Response from Music Tribe Support 

Dear Dorky Thorpy 

 

This is in relation to CAS-872176-S2C3C7 

 

Product: Behringer PRO VS MINI 

 

Serial: 123456789 

 

Thank you for contacting Music Tribe.

I am sorry for the issue you are facing.

Please be informed that PRO VS MINI does not support MIDI for the sustain pedal.

Please refer to the attached picture of the MIDI supported by PRO VS MINI.

If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind Regards,

 

Arthur Ross , Behringer Support

What does it support: 

Weird supports so much but not sustain / hold !!