2010 Volkswagen CC VR6 4Motion Review

Thursday, 16 February 2012 19:12

I bought my 2010 VW brand new off the lot, and now that it has 30,000KM on it I think I've experienced enough driving with it to write a decent review. This was my first experience with a non-US manufacturer, so I can't really speak to how it compares to a BMW or Audi (though Audi is part of the Volkswagen-Audi Group anyways). First things first: My version of the car is the VR6 4Motion. In 2010 the VR6 was available as an automatic; the alternative motor option was the 2.0L turbo which came with both automatic and manual transmission. Also the VR6 is all wheel drive which is a great option for winter driving. However the additional cost for the VR6 was approximately $9,000... a cost that is rarely re-covered when it comes to resale. I bought my CC VR6 at $54,000 CAD "out the door" cost, and just had it appraised at $30,000 CAD. In a little over two years this is a $24,000 dollar depreciation on a vehicle with absolutely no cosmetic damage, mechanical flaws, and very low mileage on the car. Obviously this is the cost of ownership, but sometimes re-sale and depreciation factors into buying decisions - so prepare yourself for similar results! As a side-note, likely one of the most anti-depreciating vehicles in the VW lineup has been the R32. Even the 2004 and 2005 versions still go for over 20 grand! I do not foresee much further price decrease; and if anything the price may go up as the collectible value on this model is huge!

Website Monitoring Tool

Tuesday, 28 September 2010 22:59

Watchdog The Website Monitor Tool allows you to check a website for a matching (regular) expression on a nightly basis.

An example of a good use of this tool is the monitoring of a big box store for the release of a particular product. i.e. The product may have a page on the store, but it is not on sale. Convention of the store has been that when it does go on sale the phrase "On Sale Now!" is put somewhere on the page - perhaps near the price.

Other good usages

Monitor Price of Stock (Stock Watcher)
Monitor Score of Sports Game
Monitor Listing of eBay or AutoTrader Item
Monitor Removal of an Item From a Website

VBA Check if Executable is Found by Cmd Shell

Wednesday, 29 July 2009 21:51

I have found that quite often I write a piece of VBA code and will end up calling third-party software from within VBA. Naturally this poses a problem if the VBA code is taken to a different machine and the software being called is not installed or can't be found by Windows. As kind of a sanity check I show below a small VBA function that tries to look for the tools "ls", "grep", and "awk" on a Windows machine (obviously these are Windows-ported GNU tools!), determines if they are callable from the command-line, and will exit the VBA code execution if any executable cannot be called.

Tvix 4100SH Extended Functionality With Linux

Monday, 20 September 2010 22:05

The Tvix 4100SH is a pretty old model now, but the following tutorial should apply to the newer Tvix line too. As it stands, the major setback to the Tvix media-box is the limited two-way client-server communication options. That is to say, there really exists no callback mechanism for retrieving nfs server information via the Tvix interface. The following tutorial will try to address this by exploiting the "Copy" file function that is part of the Tvix firmware.

Slackware Wireless Tutorial

Thursday, 28 May 2009 16:41

In this tutorial I will give some guidelines to getting wireless up and running in Slackware (in my case, version 12.2).

I say "guidelines" because I don't entirely understand the Slackware system and are more familiar with Debian; but wanted to try something new!

My particular card is an Engenius EPI-3601S and it uses the Atheros 5001X+ chipset (chip number AR5211). A particularly nice feature of this card is its 600mW power rating, which is far beyond that of big-box store cards by manufacturers like Linksys, D-Link, etc.

The driver for this chipset is actively developed by the Mad-WiFi Project and is known as the 'ath5k' driver.

2010 Volkswagen CC VR6 4Motion Review

Website Monitoring Tool

VBA Check if Executable is Found by Cmd Shell

Tvix 4100SH Extended Functionality With Linux

Slackware Wireless Tutorial

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