Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with throttle

Stick & Throttle

snuffleupagus — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:44:12 -0800

Sim pilots: help me join the 21st Century by sharing your opinions of the current crop of available controls. So, over the last couple years it seems like there's been a mini-renewal of compelling sim and sim-style titles that can support and benefit from the use of a full features HOTAS controller. e.g. the DCS sims, MechWarrior Online, etc. Other titles are nearing release, like Elite: Dangerous. With frugalsworld dead and gone, I'm hoping some of the veteran sim pilots here can steer me in the right direction on replacing my hopelessly worn out X-36/X-45 HOTAS.

I've heard conflicting things about the current Saitek gear. I've also heard that the CH gear is not what it used to be, which sort of leaves me scratching my head. Do I really need to pony up for the Thrustmaster Warthog? Is there a decent F-16 style set out there? The bulk of my experience is with Falcon, so that would be the most comfortable and familiar layout for me.

Death car, dumbass, or both?

Rallon — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:35:33 -0800

Did the guy who did my oil change break my car, or is this a fluke? I drive a 2001 Ford Focus SE. It was a great car up to about 65-70,000 miles but the past 10k has plagued me to no end.

I took it for what I thought was a little nothing of an oil change today. I just went to Valvoline, had them do it there. In, out, no problem, not even an attempt to upsell me on things I don't need. After that, I drove about 2 miles into town, stayed there about 4 hours, then headed back toward home (about 2 miles).

When I started backing out of my parking place, my check engine light went on. Nothing felt wrong, but I headed back to Valvoline to have them check the code and figure out what on earth they broke. I mean, come on, it's 2 miles since they changed the oil, it must be related, right?

Once I got there, they read a code that I didn't get to see, but told me it was a "bad mass" and had messed up my fuel/air mixture. I take it that they were referring to the "Mass Air Flow" sensor, doing some research - so the code was probably P0170 or P0171. Guesswork, here.

The guys there both insisted it was a fluke, wouldn't have had anything to do with the oil change, and I'd just have to take it to a mechanic. I'm skeptical.

To complicate matters, the car promptly stopped running well once I tried to leave. Stalled out 4-5 times just trying to shift into drive, and again several times on the road. Even when it wasn't stalled, it jerked all over the place - acceleration was about .5 seconds on, .5 seconds of nothing, over and over.

Suffice to say this car is the farthest thing from safe to drive, and I'm pretty sure it's their fault. For those who know enough about cars to say, is it possible (likely?) that they broke something, or is this really a fluke? If they broke it, what should I do?

tl;dr Can an oil change and general fluid checks/poking and prodding break a Mass Air Flow sensor?

Is my ISP slowing down YouTube?

mazniak — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:28:09 -0800

Is my ISP purposefully slowing down YouTube/Google’s traffic? Lately YouTube has been extremely slow (as in I can’t watch movies in realtime), but I just assumed it was YouTube sucking. However, I VPN’d into my university’s network to do some work, and I forgot to close the connection before I started my Metafilter/Reddit browsing session. Through my VPN connection, YouTube movies load roughly 3 times faster than a non-VPN’d connection. I tried this several times by connecting to through a VPN, loading a movie, timing how long it takes to load, and then repeating that process with the same movie without the VPN connection.

Granted, that wasn’t a scientific test, but my I believe that my ISP (Bright House in central Florida) might be throttling my connection. Are there any ways to prove this? If so, what can I do about that?

Also, I’ve tried this in two locations both serviced by Bright House. One in the Tampa area and one near Daytona Beach. YouTube sucks in both locations, and can be made better with a VPN (to a fast, non-Bright House site). Also also, the upstream connection is 10Mbps for the Daytona site (unsure what it is at the Tampa one but I’m fairly certain it is at least 3Mbps).

How do I restrict internet traffic?

LDL707 — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:53:23 -0800

Is there a way to limit download/uploads through my internet connection? My house has Comcast cable internet, and every month, we are very close to the 250 GB bandwidth cap. This is primarily due to my roommates running bittorrent and leaving it up all day.

I am running a Linksys router with Tomato firmware. Ideally, my goal would be to block bittorrent traffic once the total uploads and downloads equal about 7 gigs per day. That is, up to 7 gigs a day, the internet connection is undisturbed, and after that point, other internet functions like http would still work, but bittorrent would be disabled.

Is there a way to completely block traffic through a specific protocol with QoS, and is it possible to set up a rule so that this would only happen after the 7GB limit is reached?

Am I being throttled (by Grande in Texas?)

buzzbash — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:21:55 -0800

I'm in Texas and just started using Grande Communications as my internet service provider. The cable internet connection is fast (averaging 10 Mbps) but my torrent downloads are slow. Does Grande throttle? If they do throttle, is there any way to bypass the throttling?

How can I get an RSS feed to play nice with all the other feeds in the aggregator?

perpetualstroll — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:37:25 -0800

Is there a free service online that will allow me to aggregate RSS feeds, but will only show the last entry from each blog? (more details below) I am currently using a feed aggregator (feeddigest.com) to combine 15 feeds into a single one for integration into a website. However, one of the blogs has a tendency to update once an hour and is drowning out the rest of the blogs that only update once a day.

Is there a free service out there like feeddigest.com that has a function which will allow me to "throttle" the hyper-active blog and will only show the latest entry so that all the others have a chance to be seen?

Inherited car problems, fun for the whole family?

torpark — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 11:31:35 -0800

Inherited car problems, fun for the whole family? I was helping my mother with her car, which developed some problems. It is a late 80s Buick LeSabre, the official car of all grandmothers. I notice some issues and wonder if they are related or dependent.

First off, when the car is coasting, no throttle, it runs fine. When I very lightly touch on the accellerator, it violently vibrates, but if i push a little harder the vibration disappears.
Is this a air flow issue? I notice the exhaust smells rich.

When I look under the hood, i see sometimes the belt tensioner moves back and forth and clicks, perhaps a loose belt as well?

Another fine issue I notice is the engine is bogged down and the transmission shifts hard. I put on the gas and the engine works hard and sounds fine, but the car's excellaration is very poor. I have to let off the gas and wait for the transmission to shift before putting the gas back on.
Is this also related to the throttle,vibration issue?

Does anyone rent Ozone generators?

Thanks.

Jammed Throttle

Raybun — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:26:27 -0800

The throttle on my 2003 S10, V6 54K miles jammed open. Very fortunately it happen in a rural area where the driver was able get off the road and stall the engine by using both feet on the brakes. Has anyone on the list experienced runaway throttle on a S10 or any other car? I told the family member who had borrowed the truck to have it repaired locally. The culprit was the idle control valve motor that appeared to have become fouled with carbon. The service manager at my local Chevrolet dealer never heard of this problem before and could not offer any maintenance procedure that might prevent this from ever happening again. I called Chevrolet and spoke with two people that appeared to be reading from menus. They were of no help and were only able to tell me to bring the (repaired) truck over to the dealer that had never heard of this problem and could not give any suggestions on how to prevent it from happening again. They also said that I should have brought it to a dealer for diagnosis and repair. Fat chance of being able to find one on a weekend in rural Maine. Any ideas on how to prevent carbon buildup in the air/fuel system? I have found that this is not a S10 specific problem. Other cars that use similar idle controls on the fuel injection (BMW for one example.) I do not want to hear about zombie juice gas additives. How can I get the word out that there may be a serious safety problem here? How can I raise some hell? I could have lost a family member if this had happened in traffic. Many thanks

Throttling Windows

hoborg — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:24:09 -0800

I used to have this great Windows freeware that allowed you to pause and throttle copying and moving commands, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was called. Any ideas? Uh, that's pretty much it!