u/shadrach103

I dragged my feet for nearly a year before buying a dashcam for the RS3. My wife wanted a cheap-o Walmart camera but I didn't want anything hanging from the window looking goofy and obstructing my view. I had my eye on the FitcamX for a while but there were so many comments about a painful install, average video quality, or a buggy app so I just kept kicking the can down the road.

My only reasoning for wanting one is to have video evidence to show fault in the event of an accident. As long as license plates can be read and it records automatically I didn't need any other bells and whistles. You can easily pop out the microSD card to view videos on a computer, so in-car app performance was not important to me either.

When I saw it was on sale in June with free shipping I just went for it. Took a while to arrive from China (showed up Friday) so I tackled the job this morning. Shortly after ordering I receive an email request asking to send photos of my rearview mirror from inside and outside the car. I knew I needed the Type A model for my RS3 and that's what I ordered, but I appreciate them double-checking to make sure they were sending the correct unit.

Install was a snap (pun intended) and I was seriously overstressing it. As long as you are patient, don't force anything, and keep even pressure on the plastic pieces without twisting them or pulling at an angle nothing should break. The box comes with a decent plastic tool and that's all I needed to use to get under and behind the trim pieces to carefully pop them out.

1. To remove the large flat panel pry the side down from the top against the glass using the tool near the 4 clips circled in blue. Make sure all 4 are clear and then pry the front down evenly to pop out the long plastic clips in red.

2. Move to the cover against the windshield and pry along the vertical seam between it and the middle piece. It helped to squeeze the piece some to get the tool in. Once the retaining loop on the center piece was free I stuck a penny in there so it wouldn't re-seat when I did unhooked the other side.

3. Pull the front plastic piece straight down while prying in the same vertical gap a little lower than on the previous step. Once the lower clips are unhooked it'll slide straight down towards the dash. The center piece will be free now and can be carefully removed over the top of the mirror.

4. Most videos showed twisting and removing the mirror itself from the mount. I tried this and it did not want to budge. I skipped this step as I was able to get to the power plug at the top with a small prying tool and then plug the new connector in that slot. You can push the lower connector (the fatter one with more wires) down and out of the way.

5. Install the new camera by sliding it up on to the mount and then connect the wires as shown in the instructions. I slide the center peice back on the same way it came off and snapped it down, then forward. The bulk of the extra wire can be tucked up in front of the existing silver electronic module just above that.

I tested the camera at this point and everything worked fine. Snapped in the final cover piece which goes back on very easily. Using the app is annoying as my phone constantly wants to revert back to the Audi Wi-Fi which I expected. But now that I've got it setup I don't think I'll mess with it much. I just pulled the microSD card out and use my computer to view the video.

Default settings where at 1440p recording in 1 minute files. I dropped it down to 1080p to test and you can still read license plates directly in front. At 5 minutes it'll record a 250MB file meaning I'll get ~21 hours of recording on the included 64 GB microSD card. The image quality is not awesome but it's much better than expected it to be.

For now I've set it all the way up to 4K at 3 minute clips to get some recordings and see what the quality is like. There's a button at the bottom you can press and it'll move whatever the currently recording file is into a read-only folder on the memory card to protect it from being overwritten if the card fills and starts rolling over old recordings. There's a shock sensor option to auto-save as well, but I don't plan on testing that out.

The last image is a screen capture from a 1080p video clip, which is the lowest resolution. I selected this frame as it has both bright sun an dark shadows and shows the license plate of the vehicle in front it too far away to read it. (It's perfectly clear once I've pulled up and parked behind them at the light.)

All in all there are much better cameras out there when it comes to features, image quality, or app performance and experience but nothing this stealth that simply looks like OEM. From inside the car you have no idea it's there, and from outside you might not even notice the lens or if you do, mistake it for a rain sensor or a speed sign camera.

Stopped in Harbor Freight recently to grab some Hyper Wash and noticed they had two different bottles in the same spot, marked at the same price. Based on Meguiar's website they are supposedly the exact same product, simply stating it's the "Same Great Product - In Updated Packaging". But, the original label (on the left) has never said anything about a Watermelon scent so that appears to be new as well. Also it's hard to tell from the photo but in person the new soap is slightly darker in color.

I compared the ingredient lists, which upon first glance looked quite different:

Original Label:

>Water (7732-18-5)
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (68585-47-7)
Sodium C14-16 Olefin Sulfonate (68439-57-6)
Sodium Laureth Sulfate (68585-34-2)
Cocamidoproply Betaine (61789-40-0)
Sodium C10-16 Alkylbenzenesulfonate (68081-81-2)
Sodium Chloride (7647-14-5)
Lauramine Oxide (1643-20-5)
Sodium Xylene Sulfonate (1300-72-7)

New Label:

>Water (7732-18-5)
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (68585-47-7)
Sodium Chloride (7647-14-5)
Sodium Xylene Sulfonate (1300-72-7)
Lauramine Oxide (1643-20-5)
Cocamidoproply Betaine (61789-40-0)
Sodium C10-16 Alkylbenzenesulfonate (68081-81-2)
Sodium C14-16 Olefin Sulfonate (68439-57-6)
Sodium Laureth Sulfate (68585-34-2)
Benzyl Benzoate (120-51-4)
Terpineol (98-55-5)
Linalool (78-70-6)
Benzyl Alcohol (100-51-6)

On closer inspection though the nine core ingredients are identical, but are just listed in a different order. From what I could find ingredient lists on industrial chemicals are not required to follow any order of amounts like food is in the US, so the different order is likely meaningless; probably just how someone in product marketing typed them in.

The final four ingredients in the list are all new, and from some basic searching it appears they are all common organic compounds that were used to add the Watermelon scent to the soap.

>Terpineol, Linalool - naturally occuring alcohols commonly used for floral (and watermelon) scents
Benzyl Benzoate - organic compound stabilizer and solvent in cosmetics
Benzyl Alcohol - aromatic liquid naturally found in many essential oils and fruits

Anyways, I did the research out of curiosity and figured I'd share my findings in case anyone else was concerned that Meguiars might have changed a popular product for the worse.

I've been running a lot of Descent for a couple weeks now specifically to get this blueprint. Now I just need to wait for the next piece of Yaahl gear to show up at a vendor; I missed out on the last one.

Moved away from Illinois not quite a decade ago, but visit at least once a year. Recently flew back for a weekend of Hum shows at the Aragon and made sure to have some old favorites in Daisycutter, Anti-Hero, and Charlatan. Visited Half Acre twice given its proximity to the Aragon and got to try Benthic for the first time.

I also checked out a couple newer breweries that both make some great farmhouse style beers: Is/Was in Ravenswood and Sundial in downtown Barrington.

Before heading home I made sure to crack open a vintage BCBS variant and also scored some Deth's Tar from Binny's and didn't forget that it was lemon cake season at Portillos.

Couldn't post a photo edit or reply to my previous post, so here's the final tally for all 6 shows.

Everything from Inlet was played at least once, all of YPAA except for Very Old Man and Songs of Farewell and Departure, only half the songs from DIH, and just the one from Electra.

As someone who's seen them many times in the past I had no complaints about the selection and I loved hearing nearly the entirety of Inlet across both nights in Chicago.

They really switched it up last night in LA as the opening shows in both NYC and Chicago were identical. The second nights were nearly the same except they dropped Comin' Home for Robins in Chicago. (I went to both Chicago shows and it almost sounded like we were not going to get In the Den on Saturday's encore because they did the same long outro on I Hate it Too.)

Based on the songs they've played at least once in each city and the songs they have always played both nights, the assumed songs for tonight are those in the blue cell fill. I won't even attempt to guess the order.

Interestingly though because they have started playing 13 songs since the second Chicago show if they do that again tonight then they might pull out a new song that hasn't been played this tour, otherwise you'll get another repeat of something from last night. Y'all may be in for a treat tonight. Enjoy :)

I recorded everything that dropped from the 500 Sakura Gear Caches I've opened thus far. The results were as expected based the datamined drop percentages shared at the start of the event.

tl;dr: Keep opening those caches and you'll get that Lexington or Quickstep eventually. And maybe an all-red Investor.

The individual pool chances are about spot-on and stayed consistent pretty much throughout. Specific individual drops went through droughts and runs though, so if you aren't getting what you want stop opening caches for a bit and come back later to try your luck.

For each cache that is opened there is:

• 33% chance of getting a legendary Special Named item
• 28% chance of getting a legendary Seasonal Named item
• 25% chance of an exotic from a curated list
• 12% chance of getting a legendary First Bloom
• 1% chance of getting a Prototype First Bloom
• 0.5% chance of getting a Prototype Seasonal Named item
• 0.5% chance of getting a random Prototype Gear Set item

Those percentages all add up to 100%, covering all the possible buckets it can pull from. From there the chances of a specific item depend on how many are in that pool, which creates a two-stage "stacked" set of probabilities. While there are 36 unique items in the cache (counting the random Gear Set reward as 1) there is not a straight 2.78% chance of getting any one item; it's higher for some and much, much lower for others.

For example, the overall odds of getting a Lexington are 4.71%. There's a 1:3 chance a drop will be a Special Named item, but there are still 7 items from that group it could end up being. And I got like 9 Handbaskets before seeing a Lexington. Yay RNG.

Some observations:

These are not the place to be looking for Prototype weapons. My RNG sucked big time as I got 2 Sleighers, and they dropped literally back to back.

You're going to get a LOT of regular First Blooms as there's a 12% chance overall of getting that item, higher than any other individual item by three times.

The legendary Bell Ringer was mistakenly left out of the pool so those cannot drop, only the prototype version is available and has the worst odds at 2000:1.

RNG is a real thing, but given enough data everything tends to level out. It look just over 50 caches to get my first Lexington, but by 150 caches I had accumulated 6 of them. After 23 Investors I still didn't get an all red drop. Keep every Lexington you get, they do not use up inventory space in your stash.