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Updated 137 Days ago
Paranoid about mechanics?
If you're an expert on auto repair, you don't need to read any further. If you're like the rest of us, you always have a little bit of an uneasy feeling when you go in to get your car repaired.
The reason for this is a fear of the unknown, combined with the fact you know the unknown is about to cost you several hundred dollars.
That said, I bring you a very cool website. It's called RepairPal.com. Basically, you type in all the info on your car...make, model, and the problem you need repaired. Then you punch in your zip code, and it gives you a range on what the repair should cost. It also names off two or three places where you can get the work done. (This, I'm sure, is pay for play by the shops. A free site has to pay the bills somehow.)
Anyway, it's pretty cool. I have a tendency to stress over these things because I know nothing about cars. That little bit of knowledge will likely make the experience much more tolerable.
The one limitation I did find is that you have to choose from their list of repair needs, and not everything is there. Example; I have a broken tail light I need fixed on my car. There's a selection for a burned out bulb, but not a busted tail light lens. Thus, I get no answer.
Just the same, it's worth tucking into your bookmarks for a rainy day!
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Thanks for writing about our site. We're really excited to help people understand what is a fair price to pay for a repair as well as finding a great shop in their area and keeping track of their records online.
One correction to your article - When someone gets an estimate, the 3 shops displayed are picked based on the zip code and type of repair. This placement is not sponsored.
At some point we will have advertising on our site. We'll make it clear to users when they are seeing an advertisement.
Thanks again for the great write up!
Rob
The RepairPal Team
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.