Flavor Vortex

My mom's Rav 4 has for quite some time now had the odd problem of the driver side heaters blowing cold all the while the passenger side ones seem to blow hot, maybe hotter than they're supposed to, just fine. She refuses to take it in so I figured I'd see if the wisdom of the internet may be able to help me find a possibly easy solution that I might be able to fix for her.

The problem manifested oddly enough after she took the car in to have her tires rotated at a national chain. They kind of borked that particular repair which is another story entirely but needless to say I'm not entirely confident that they didn't mangle or tamper with some sort of sensor or what have you in the process.

Thoughts?

I'm about to take Amtrak's Lakeshore Limited to Boston next week. After doing some reading I find conflicting and generally dated reports of what to expect so here I am to pick your brains for useful and more current information.

My main concern in packing for this trip is available outlets in the coach seating. Some places say all seats have outlets due to a 'recent' (no clue when) upgrade to the cars, others say there are only a handful per car. Can anybody who has traveled this line recently comment on the availability of outlets?

Secondly I'm pretty excited about the idea of drinking/dining on the train. Do the dining cars usually fill up and stay full or is it reasonably possible that I could hang out in the bar for a few hours?

Aside from that if you have anything worth mentioning about train travel in general or useful tips about the Lakeshore Limited specifically I'd love to hear them.

I got a sound bar for Christmas and just got around to looking it over. It seems as though I don't have matching connections between my TV and sound bar but after looking over the manuals I'm thinking going with my digital coax out and using the L/R analog on the sound bar. I'm a complete audio noob but I was looking to put an order in for this converter...

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/s-pdif-or-coaxial-dig...

Before I run out and buy this I just wanted to double check with more experienced folks as to whether or not this will work, are there inherent problems to converting digital to analog, or if there is perhaps a better route to take entirely.

My TV is pretty low end and only has the coax out but the sound bar has the analog inputs as well as an SPDIF optical input if a better solution comes to mind.

I recently did a fresh XP SP2 install on a new computer. That went fine, so over the last couple of weeks I've been updating drivers and all that. As far as I can tell as soon as I updated to XP SP3, and subsequently installed the packaged IE, a banner will now randomly pop up on my desktop saying "A Tab Has Been Recovered." Each time it does this a new instance of the IE process opens in my active processes. If I actually then open IE after this has been going on for a while, a cascade of IE windows opens up for each process running.

After some reading it seems as though people had this problem in relation to IE add-ons which brings me to the heart of my problem. I don't use IE and I still get these annoying banners and background processes. Firefox is my default browser, I don't have any IE add-ons, my computer is totally fresh and virus free, and according to MS I can't uninstall IE without rolling back to SP2.

How do I stop this from continuing? Is there a way to manually remove IE from a SP3 XP install?

I'm attempting to recover some data from a dead Seagate Barracuda drive and after some reading believe my problem might be tied to a firmware failure. There is a firmware update available which I'd like to test but my drive is currently not being detected by my PC whether I set it up properly through a hard drive bay or use an external USB SATA dock.

Is there a way to apply the firmware update when I can't get the drive to be detected?

I'm thinking about hosting a WoW scavenger hunt for my guild just for giggles and perhaps as a continuing event. So long story short I'm asking the good folks here at YA for suggestions on possible objectives. What would make for good items, screenshots, clues, objectives....? I suppose the person with the best suggestions gets the 10 : ) Thanks for the help.

If it helps in formatting your suggestions I'd ideally like to make a somewhat challenging 1-2 hour event but I've also considered having a start time and leaving the end time indefinitely open ended. Ideally I'd like it to keep people in-game rather than just googling stuff.

I have a kinetic watch which has stopped working. I'm assuming it ran dry since it was sitting for a while and I don't wear watches for great lengths of time when I do wear them.

I've read that particular brands of kinetic watches can be restarted by shaking them quite a bit but is this true or all kinetic watches or is it a feature of specific brands? Just figured I'd check before I start flailing my watch around like a lunatic.

When going from one Arcade 360 to another Arcade 360 can I simply swap the harddrive I have?

I saw this on a Discovery program of something of that nature a while back. What I remember is that the guy built it by himself, possibly as a tribute to his dead wife, he spent the better part of his life building it, it incorporated sea shells in the design. Does anybody know what this place is called?

Is it worth picking up older movies on Blu-ray vs. DVD? I was thinking about getting Dune on Blu-ray but if there isn't much of a difference between that and the DVD version I might as well save a few bucks and grab the DVD. I guess I don't know if older film quality gets up-scaled when converted to Blu-ray or if it will never be 'true' HD due to the limitations of filming in that time period.

I'm looking for the caffeine content of cold brewed coffee _prior to dilution_ does anybody happen to have the gem of information?

I've been looking to upgrade from my launch non-HDMI 360 for quite some time now. I saw the FFXIII limited edition bundle which seems like a good enough choice since I can gut the game and extra controllers and probably come out on top with the deal.

So my question is this, how do I get my data and such off of my old arcade and move it to a new system?

Also with the 360 bundles are the included games usually in their original packaging or are they free floating discs?

Does anybody make a a decent digital SLR camera that looks and feels more like a classic range finder style camera? I suppose it's kind of a silly criteria to base a camera selection on but I would like to find something with analog adjustments and kind of that heft that older cameras have.

So I heard about Dr. Pepper's DLC promotion and that it was going to have some Mass Effect items. This weekend I went and grabbed a Dr. Pepper but found that my only options were for Sims 3, Battlefield Heroes, and something else that I can't remember.

Has anybody got any Mass Effect 2 DLC off of Dr. Pepper or has it not been released yet?

I've heard/read some pretty terrible reviews for Maaco's full car paint jobs but are they reliable for simple scrapes? I have a pretty shallow 8" scrape on my plastic wheel fender that I assume would just take a bit of sanding and some paint, do you think Maaco would work out for that or would it probably be better to avoid them even for that?

I'm trying to remember the name of a comedian that had a half hour Comedy Central special that was on quite a bit about 3-5 months ago.

One of the jokes I remember was about how he got in trouble climbing Mt. Everest for having sex with his sherpa's daughter.

The guy was kind of tall and lanky with a sort of rapist mustache and he had a really laid back delivery.

Any thoughts?

I've never understood this. If I just happen to buy a locked phone is unlocking it something I can do or is it something that is done on the manufacturer's end? I've been eye-balling the Motorola Droid but have AT&T service : (

I recently moved my computer room around and ever since I plugged everything back in I've been getting a low USB bandwidth alert which has in turn made some devices operate abnormally. This wasn't a problem before so I'm wondering where I went wrong in setting things back up.

I use the native USB ports on my motherboard as well as an external self-powered USB hub. Would it help if I moved as much as I could to the motherboard or would moving them to the hub actually work better?

Typically all I have plugged in are my keyboard, mouse, wired 360 controller, headset, and then the USB hub.

Can rollover minutes be cashed in towards phone upgrades?

I'm pretty skeptical but my sister who is much more keen to the whole cell phone scene told me this so I figured I'd bug Yahoo Answers before stopping in to the store and looking like a moron : )

I know the game was initially pretty buggy and sub-par but I've been hearing from various people that it was made pretty decent overall after some patches.

So yeah, how does the game hold up now? Worth $10 lol?